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Thanks to the many of you who watched the live feed last month of BEYOND: Two Souls at the Tribeca Film Festival. This was just a very small teaser of what we have to show in the months leading up to launch in October.
Today we can also confirm that the game will be available as both a Standard Edition and Special Edition, with the Special Edition available via pre-order only.
The Special Edition will of course include bonus content, most notably an additional 30 minute playable scene, details of which we’ll be revealing in the near future.
The full breakdown of what will be included on the Special Edition are as follows:
Exclusive steel book premium packaging
Additional playable scene (30 mins gameplay)
Behind the scenes videos
Game soundtrack
PS3 Dynamic Theme
PSN Avatar Bundle
Check with your local retailers to preorder BEYOND: Two Souls now. Any questions, please add them below. |
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You know who I am talking about! Those emotionally draining people that when they have a problem, everyone has a problem, and it is NEVER their fault. These are people that expect you to hear them out but if it is you that has a problem they are not the least bit interested in what you have to say. You always “owe them” in some way. They remember everything they have ever done for you and will bring it up (Even if years have passed) to guilt you into doing something for them. I call them “Emotional Vampires”
Most people with chronic illnesses are highly sensitive people and we also have a hard time saying “No!” because we are type A personalities and people pleasers. When we come into contact with an emotional vampire it is physically and mentally exhausting because it is all about them and there is no room for how you feel or any advise you give them. If at anytime you try to talk about what is going on in your life. The conversation quickly is turned back to the subject of them. They have no time to deal with anyone else but themselves. When in the presence of these emotional vampires we slowly feel our life-force energy draining away. Emotional vampires are narcissist and very manipulative, having mastered the art of manipulation. They know how to suck us into their distorted reality and keep us there like pray.
Their motto is “Me first.” Everything is all about them. They have a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement, hog attention and crave admiration. They’re dangerous because they lack empathy and have a limited capacity for unconditional love. If you don’t do things their way, they become punishing, withholding or cold.
~Judith Orloff, M.D
So how do we deal with emotional vampires? When we come to the understanding that we can not change anyone else and we can only change how we react to people it is much easier to deal with people like this. If you have the belief that if you love them enough or are patient enough they will change it is just a vicious cycle and a lie to yourself. Emotional vampires are very emotionally abusive and if you show any weakness around them they will make you their next victim. It is your choice if you let this happen or not! Don’t invite them in! If you don’t invite them in, they are unable to enter. What does that mean? People teach people how to treat them. When someone is using you up, it is often because at some point you opened the door to it. Once a Emotional vampire is in, it is difficult to get them out. At some point, you may just have to say “STOP!” You can also “wake them up.” Say for instance the emotional vampire is a coworker that always wants you to drop everything you are doing to help them without any consideration for your time. They see the pile of papers on your desk but once again it is all about them and their problem. If they continually interrupt you can say. “What project would you like me to drop right now so I can help you?” Let them know your time is valuable. If the emotional vampire is a neighbor, friend, or family member that you have to stay in contact with and they are not respecting your time and going on and on and on and on….. You need to set boundaries. Explain to them that you would be happy to sit down and talk to them for about 10 or 15 mins but you have other things to do today. They normally do not care what you have to do or your boundaries so you have to be very firm with them when you set those boundaries. When that time is up it is up!
These type of people are very difficult to deal with and it is best if you just don’t deal with them at all. I know there are times we have to but you have to weigh the the negative consequences of emotionally draining people. Is it worth your emotional well being to continue to connect with this person? Is it worth the physical pain you will endure for the stress and manipulation this person will cause. There is one thing that is for sure! They are not going to be the one that changes! The changes will have to come from you! |
The Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus) is an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).
Discovery [ edit ]
The brilliant stars in the Tarantula Nebula are unleashing a torrent of ultraviolet light and stellar winds that are etching away at the hydrogen gas cloud in which the stars were born.
The Tarantula Nebula was observed by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille during an expedition to the Cape of Good Hope between 1751 and 1753. He catalogued it as the second of the "Nebulae of the First Class", "Nebulosities not accompanied by any star visible in the telescope of two feet". It was described as a diffuse nebula 20' across.[5]
Johann Bode included the Tarantula in his 1801 Uranographia star atlas and listed it in the accompanying Allgemeine Beschreibung und Nachweisung der Gestirne catalogue as number 30 in the constellation "Xiphias or Dorado". Instead of being given a stellar magnitude, it was noted to be nebulous.[6]
The name Tarantula Nebula arose the mid 20th century from the appearance in deep photographic exposures.[7]
30 Doradus has often been treated as the designation of a star,[8][9] or of the central star cluster NGC 2070,[10] but is now generally treated as referring to the whole nebula area of the Tarantula Nebula.[11][12]
Properties [ edit ]
The Tarantula Nebula has an apparent magnitude of 8. Considering its distance of about 49 kpc[2] (160,000 light-years), this is an extremely luminous non-stellar object. Its luminosity is so great that if it were as close to Earth as the Orion Nebula, the Tarantula Nebula would cast visible shadows.[13] In fact it is the most active starburst region known in the Local Group of galaxies. It is also one of the largest H II regions in the Local Group with an estimated diameter around 200 to 570 pc,[2][3] and also because of its very large size, it is sometimes described as the largest although other H II regions such as NGC 604 which is in the Triangulum Galaxy could be larger.[3] The nebula resides on the leading edge of the LMC where ram pressure stripping, and the compression of the interstellar medium likely resulting from this, is at a maximum.
NGC 2070 [ edit ]
30 Doradus has at its centre the star cluster NGC 2070 which includes the compact concentration of stars known as R136[14] that produces most of the energy that makes the nebula visible. The estimated mass of the cluster is 450,000 solar masses, suggesting it will likely become a globular cluster in the future.[15] In addition to NGC 2070, the Tarantula Nebula contains a number of other star clusters including the much older Hodge 301. The most massive stars of Hodge 301 have already exploded in supernovae.[16]
Supernova 1987A [ edit ]
The closest supernova observed since the invention of the telescope,[17] Supernova 1987A, occurred in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula.[18] There is a prominent supernova remnant enclosing the open cluster NGC 2060, but the remnants of many other supernovae are difficult to detect in the complex nebulosity.[19]
Image gallery [ edit ] |
This video is no longer available
This video was hosted on Vidme, which is no longer in operation. However, you might find this video at one of these links:
Video title:
Amazing Dog Transformation
Upload date:
November 11 2017
Uploaded by:
pawsoncuracao
Video description:
On May 17th 2017 Jules had been found by 2 of our volunteers, walking over the "Queen Juliana Bridge" in Curacao. He had been totally underweight and had scabies all over his body. There wasn’t a single spot on his body that had not been infected. The first step had been the check up at the vet. Jules had been underweight of course, and his blood test results were not very positive. On top of that he appeared to have a dislocated hip, probably caused by an old traffic accident. Obviously he had never been treated for this, and had been walking around with a lot of pain for years. According to the Vet he should be approximately 9 years old. Jules' teeth were damaged and some of them even were gone, probably caused by chewing on a chain or eating little stones. We had left the vet that day with a bunch of medicines, and that was the beginning of a long recovery. I still remember the smell in our car…it was caused by his scabies and was really horrible. Poor Jules was so afraid of what was coming next. When we got home, Jules met our other dog "Wolf". Though they accepted each other, they would never be friends. It was obviously Jules had lost his trust in humans and pets. We couldn't blame him for that. Those first days at home showed no improvement what so ever in regards to Jules’ condition. The thought crossed our minds that Jules would not make it, since he was in a really bad shape. However out of the blue a miracle occurred and Jules started to eat..and eat.. and eat. Yet unfortunately Jules didn't put on weight in the next week and his blood was far from OK. Nevertheless, he needed the surgery to fix his hip. It took a couple of weeks for Jules' blood to stabilize, in order for him to be able to get anesthesia for his surgery. Sadly, the hip trauma was so severe that 3 vets couldn't manage to put his hip back into place. So with even more medicine we left the vet again. Jules needed to become strong enough for a surgery. The days that followed afterwards showed improvement and Jules was doing great under the circumstances. He started to put on more weight and developed more fur day by day. So little by little his condition got better, which meant that he was finally allowed to have the surgery. The operation was tough but Jules did a great job. The whole intention of the surgery, was to free Jules of the terrible pain he had been suffering for years. Yet the recovery and physiotherapy eventually cost him a lot of pain. I had to cool his wound 3 times a day, move his hip and leg so that the muscles around the hip would get strong again. Jules hated physiotherapy, but I found a way for us both to make it fun and easier. We swam every day and I saw Jules' paw getting muscular each day. He developed his social skills more and more. In the beginning he obviously had an issue against men, but now he let them pet him as well. And I can tell he loves the attention. He is also friendlier when he meets other dogs now, primarily because he feels good and isn't in pain anymore. Jules has turned into a lovely, beautiful dog. And if you gain his trust he will be the most loyal and dedicated dog for the rest of his life. He deserves a good home and a new loving owner who cares for him. So we are in search for a forever home for Jules. Please consider a donation to "Rescue Paws Curacao": https://www.paypal.me/rescuepawscuracao Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RescuePawsCuracaoFoundation/ Website: http://rescuepawscuracao.com/ Music Credits: Music Credits: Artist: Whitesand Track: Your Voice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Bf7J2SvV8 #vidmeexclusive #Vidmecommunity #dogs #animals #rescue #pets
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Shares in US banks have surged since Donald Trump won the presidential election. It's partly in expectation of his proposed bonfire of what he believes are rules and regulations that hamper business. But of course a lot of those rules were put in place after the last financial crisis, and their purpose was to stop banks ever again needing a bailout from the taxpayer. One man whose thinking may be in line with Mr Trump is Neel Kashkari, the head of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. He wants to see a lot of the regulations that govern banks replaced by a huge increase in the cash they are obliged to hold in case everything goes wrong at once. The BBC's Alex Ritson found out more from Mr Kashkari.
(Picture: Neel Kashkari. Picture credit: Getty Images.) |
Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller has an interesting article about two immigrant groups from "unknown countries " batting it out in the streets of Fargo, North Dakota.
A manhunt is underway in Fargo, N.D. after two separate groups of immigrants from unknown countries began waging what is being described as a “street war” against each other earlier this week. According to Valley News Live, police are currently searching for Luke Goodrich and Isaac Nyemah for their involvement in an alleged armed home invasion that took place Wednesday morning. ‘Immigrant Groups’ Are Battling It Out In The Streets Of Fargo, June 11, 2015
It is unclear how, but the two men are allegedly involved in trouble that began Sunday at a birthday party in a Fargo park. A group of 70 people were gathered when an altercation of some sort ensued. Men affiliated with one immigrant group smashed out the window of a car with a crowbar. The same men vandalized another vehicle shortly after. Police were initially called to the park because a DJ had been hired and party-goers were drinking alcohol, in violation of park rules. According to Valley News, while police have acknowledged that two immigrant groups are involved, they said that it is “not relevant” what country they hail from. Fargo, which has a population of around 110,000 people, has seen 4,000 refugees from 35 nations come to the city over the past decade. “You know when you get different new American groups from different ethnic backgrounds from different areas, sometimes they come here with those cultural disputes between the groups, and likely that’s what we are seeing here,” Lt. Michael Mitchell of the Fargo Police Department told Valley News. [Emphases added]
The "unknown countries" isn't willful ignorance on Ross's part—the local authorities themselves aren't saying.What Ross doesn't have is pictures of the two men at the top, Goodridge and Nyemah, which shows that both are Africans. I would say at a venture that both are Liberians, Nyemah being from an original African Liberian family, and Goodridge being descended from one of the 19th Century African-American settlers who were aided by the US in colonizing Liberia after the Civil War . I know that Goodridge and Nyemah are names known in Liberia, and there were Goodridges among the freed slaves in America.
Why am I having to do this research? Because local authorities think it's "not relevant." It's very relevant, as Ann Coulter was writing earlier.
There was a link to the Fargo Police Department Facebook page in the Daily Caller story, but it's down, possibly because the Fargo PD was tired of people yelling at them "What hell do you mean by saying 'not relevant'?" Email Fargo Chief of Police David Todd and ask him what's going on. |
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” ― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
I watched the documentary EARTHLINGS which arrived from AUSTRALIA today, and now I'll never be the same. I care even more than I did already about even-ing up the score on behalf of all of those species so much in need of help from the human species! Thanks, Roy, for sending the film and for seeing to it that I got my eyes opened up even more than they are already!THIS DOCUMENTARY IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING, and I highly recommend that the earthlings who call themselves/ourselves "humans" view this important film before any more time passes. You'll rediscover your heart with this entry which should be required viewing. We must all change; we must all care; we must all stop the madness and the denial and make this world right. Now!I am still reeling from the importance of the film and am sorry that I waited so long to watch what all of us need to witness - young and old, the compassionate and the callous. I am totally disenchanted with the human race: why are people so insanely cruel, why has society failed to evolve? We should hang our heads in shame. We shall none of us be pleased with ourselves for allowing this disrespect for life to continue - as we advance into what must become the "civilized" 21st century - and for looking the other way and for failing to speak up no matter what the consequences of activist caring might be.(Oh, begone, you nasties who hurt and murder all species! I am so ready to take on that world and round those creeps up, starting in my own hometown. Those sexed up church goers making money hand over fist on animal slaughter? Some of our "finest" citizens.)Required viewing, especially for those who are young enough to attempt to reverse the damage humans have wrought, throughout the ages, due to ignorance and thoughtlessness and greed and certainly an insatiable appetite for unbridled cruelty. I highly recommend that we finally begin to educate young minds to seek to be kind.As they say, "a must see" - no more looking away. Our looking at/seeing/seeking the truth cannot compare to the pain and suffering we inflict upon every other species second by second by second. Enough...enough. No more denial from any one of us.________________________Susan Carpenter: "I saved this to bookmarks to view at some point today. Thanks in advance for the post and for tirelessly holding up the mirror so that people can really see what their actions are doing and the negative impact this is having on society as a whole."Thank you, dear friend Susan - you made my day! Sometimes I feel like I have not even begun to fight the good fight. I know you know how that is! You are terrific!!Still haunted and wanting to sob...or better yet DO something to stop the hatred for and the annihilation of earth, nature, and all species. Oh,how I envy those other nations who are not headed to parties, or playing at "sports" or lounging in recliners, or purchasing fast food, or running about on highways and through the skies due to sheer boredom with their own monotonous, self-serving existences. Those other beautiful, organized nations from whom we could learn to adapt, to display loyalty and acceptance, to enjoy each day and season, to LIVE out lives in a peaceable kingdom.As evidence of what I mean, the Hoosier state has gone all nasty once again in record time. Please read and thanks for contacting perhaps some kind legislators? if there are any benevolent senators and representatives left who are not being bought off.We are fast becoming either the laughing stock OR the business model for the rest of this nutsoid nation. Rachel Maddow needs to feature Hoosierland NOW. We are crazier than Mississippi or Oregon. A few Hoosiers getting very rich and calling the "shots" while attending the churches on the corner. Disgusting...obvious...murderous and greedy as all get out!________________________________________________Read about movies and nostalgia, animal issues and sociopolitical concerns all discussed in my book Secrets of an Old Typewriter and its follow-up Misunderstood Gargoyles and Overrated Angels - print and ebook versions of both are available on Amazon (click the title).The books are also carried by these fine retailers: Ann Arbor's Bookbound and Common Language ; Columbia City's North Side Grille and Whitley County Historical Museum ; and Fort Wayne's The Bookmark And you can download from iTunes Meet other like-minded souls at my facebook fan page Visit my author website at www.susieduncansexton.com Join a great group of animal advocates Squawk Back: Helping animals when others can't ... Or Won't |
This is a review of the book Java EE 7 Performance Tuning and Optimization
What is this book about?
As the title clearly suggests, this book deals with Performance Tuning. It focuses on tuning, monitoring and optimizing the performance of Java EE applications in particular.
It starts off with basics of Performance Tuning and gives us an insight into the various kinds of performance related issues which one might face in the context of enterprise grade, distributed web (Java EE) applications. The book provides a quick fire tour of Java EE 7, familiarizes the reader with the basics of JVM (memory model, garbage collection. concurrency) and dives into the nitty-gritty of Performance Testing in Java.
The author guides us through some common performance issues and their symptoms along with a detailed insight of Java monitoring and profiling tools (in the JDK, IDEs etc). Topics like CPU, Memory and Thread Profiling have dedicated chapters and have been covered in great detail. The book delves into the topics of Tuning a Java EE application and its various facets (JVM, App Server, Web Server, the OS) along with a primer on Designing High performance Java EE applications. Last but not the least, the reader can dig into some Performance Tuning Tips (EJB, JPA, Servlets, JSF, Java SE) and apply the knowledge gained from the book in tuning a sample Java EE application hands-on!
Who has written this book?
The book has been authored by Osama Oransa. More about him here
What does the book cover?
The book is well organized and divided into twelve chapters. Let’s take a peek and see what each one has to offer.
Chapter 1 – Getting Started With Performance Tuning
This chapter introduces us to the world of Java EE performance tuning.
Classifies different types of performance related issues based on phases of discovery.
It goes on to differentiate typical application modes (standalone, thick and thin) along with a brief summary
Provides a quick peek into the all the components/layers of web applications and their properties which are critical from a performance standpoint – from the client end right down to the DB server
All in all, this lesson does a great job of getting things rolling and setting up the reader for what’s coming next. This is of great value for someone who is relatively new to the concept of Performance tuning and monitoring and allows her to get a decent head start.
Chapter 2 – Understanding Java Fundamentals
It lays a strong emphasis on strengthening the fundamentals associated with the Java Platform which are directly related to performance. Two primary topics which are covered are the JVM fundamentals and Java EE 7 (yes!)
Discussion of the JVM memory structure (as laid out by the JVM specification) and details around the Java HotSpot VM.
Exploration of the JVM Garbage Collector and its policies
Provides a brief overview of Java EE 7 – its specifications and features
Delves into some of the concurrency constructs available in Java EE – Async invocations, Singleton beans, non blocking I/O etc
Chapter 3- Getting Familiar with Performance Testing
Chapters 1 and 2 provided a good foundation and this chapter builds upon it. It deals with Performance Testing on a whole
It explores different facets of performance testing like types, components, tools, benchmarking etc along with an explanation of common testing terminologies and a discussion around performance testing in a Cloud environment.
The rest of the chapter deals with Apache JMeter and thoroughly covers web service, web application and database scripts with the help of succinct examples.
Chapter 4 – Monitoring Java Applications
This chapter deals with in depth coverage of the tools associated with performance monitoring and profiling in depth.
Starts off with an overview of the JDK monitoring and profiling tools landscape
It delves into details of these tools – memory map and heap analysis tools, JVisual VM and Oracle Java Mission Control
The NetBeans and Eclipse are covered as a part of the section which deals with IDE capabilities for JVM monitoring and profiling.
The chapter ends with a tour of JProfiler with a focus on the offline profiling mode.
Chapter 5 – Recognizing Common Performance Issues
This chapter builds on the performance issues overview provided in Chapter 1. It brings into focus, some of the frequently occurring performance issues and briefly looks at each of them
Explores Threading and deadlock related issues
Discusses performance issues which can be attributed to to memory (leakage), improper use of remote calls, database performance etc
The chapter also explores client side issues related to (JavaScript, CSS etc) and looks at some browser integrated dev tools (Chrome, IE, Firefox) which can help track such problems.
Chapter 6 – CPU Time Profiling
This chapter deals takes up one of the key aspects in Java profiling – CPU Time profiling
Discusses three profilers – NetBeans native profiler, the Java Mission Control and JProfiler
Explains how to interpret and make sense of the results obtained from the profiler tools
Delves into pin pointing and identification of performance issues (algorithm related, caching, threading etc) and provides a recipe/strategy for fixing them.
Chapter 7 – Thread Profiling
The deep dive into Java profiling continues. This time, the focus is one Thread profiling and its related nuances
As was the case with CPU Time profiling, the thread profiling options are explored with the help of NetBeans, Java Mission Control as well as JProfiler
Explains how to extract thread dumps with the help of JDK, application server and various profiler tools
Deals with interpretation of thread profiling results and analyzing thread dumps
Deep dive into exploration of threading related issues such as deadlock, blocked threads, unmanaged threads etc and builds on the recipe for fixing such issues (from the previous lesson)
Chapter 8 – Memory Profiling
This chapter marks the last section of the in-depth coverage of the types of profiling and deals with the all important area of memory profiling
How to use the NetBeans profiler and the JProfiler for memory profiling
Explains the process of heap dump extraction using a variety of tools such as jmap, JVisual VM, Eclipse MAT, JProfiler etc
Guides us through the process of heap dump analysis using visual tools as well as via he OQL (Object Query Language)
Analyses the potential issues emerging from memory related roots
Chapter 9 – Tuning an Application’s Environment
After all the discussion and exploration about potential performance related issues, related profiling tools and possible remediation, the focus now shifts to Tuning. This chapter deals with application environment tuning is specific which is divided into distinct categories
Detailed exploration of JVM tuning including both HotSpot and JRockit
Deep dive into application server tuning with GlassFish and Oracle Weblogic being the prime examples. Talks about tuning components such as EJB and Web containers, JDBC pools, thread pools etc
Exploration of HTTP server tuning with the help of Apache and Oracle HTTP server
Discusses tuning and optimization of operating system and hardware (capacity planning) related components
Chapter 10 – Designing High-performance Enterprise Applications
As the name clearly suggests, the chapter looks at the design aspects of enterprise applications. After having discussed different facets of performance tuning/monitoring/profiling, it makes sense to try and understand how to put certain best practices to practical use.
Explores different set of design decisions (app layer, security, framework etc) and their probable impact and introduces some common anti-patterns as well
Provides good insight/analysis of SOA and ROA based architectures and their performance aspects
Discusses the impact of data caching on performance in details and looks at topics like concurrency, data caching levels, how to assess caching performance etc
The chapter ends with an absorbing discussion on performance considerations from a Cloud deployment perspective
Chapter 11 – Performance Tuning Tips
This lesson provides general performance tuning tips, tricks and recipes for a variety of scenarios and use cases related to Java EE as well as SE
Deals with Java EE component specific performance secrets – EJB, JSF, JPA, web services etc
Explores general performance related topics from the Java SE space – I/O, Collections framework, synchronization etc and also peeks into the javap tool available in the JDK
The chapter ends with a discussion aobut database related performance tips ranging from choice of ORM library to executing bulk uploads in an optimized manner.
Chapter 12 – Tuning a Sample Application
This lesson is all about getting our hands dirty and applying the concepts learnt in the book in order to tune a real-world application
Introduces the sample application, and sets up an assessment plan
Guides us through the profiling process using previously described techniques such as CPU Time, memory profile etc
Deep dive into analysis of performance issues detected by the profiling process and resolution of each of those issues
Coverage of the testing process to assert performance improvements post issue resolutions
Highlights
Performance Tuning is not an easy topic to discuss or write a book about. Although it is based upon reasoning and science, more often than not, it is triggered due to unprecedented scenarios.
The author covers a vast landscape in general – from depths of the Java Platform basics, JVM to app server tuning, Databases and straight on to the Cloud !
In general, the book is applicable to wide variety of audience, but the day-to-day/ traditional Java developers stand to reap maximum benefit out of this book
The sample application tuning exercise is a great addition to the book. Again, performance tuning is not an easy thing to discuss and convey and setting up a application for hands on practice needs is indeed priceless
is a great addition to the book. Again, performance tuning is not an easy thing to discuss and convey and setting up a application for hands on practice needs is indeed priceless Leverages sample code, examples and pictorial representations in an effective manner.
Note: While most of the aspects of the book are great, but there are certain areas in the book where the grammar and overall English could have been better. Personally, it did not prove to be a hindrance for me, but can be improved.
Where can you grab the book?
A book this versatile and multi-faceted should not be missed – especially when it deals with Performance Tuning !
Visit the PacktPub web site to get your copy!!
Happy Reading 🙂 |
Last week we asked readers on Twitter what their favorite sci-fi/fantasy book of 2016 has been so far, and found an excellent mix between high fantasy, space opera, sci-fi, character dramas, and urban adventure. Check out the responses below and add your own in the comments!
Alliance of Equals by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Beset by the angry remnants of the Department of the Interior, challenged at every turn by opportunists on their new homeworld of Surebleak, and somewhat low on funds, Clan Korval desperately needs to reestablish its position as one of the top trading clans in known space. To this end, Master Trader Shan yos’Galan, aboard Korval’s premier trade ship, Dutiful Passage, is on a mission to establish new business associations and to build a strong primary route that links well with existing Loops and secondary routes. Traveling with Dutiful Passage on this unsettling journey is Padi yos’Galan, the master trader’s heir and his apprentice, who has a secret so intense that her coming of age, and perhaps her very life, is threatened by it.
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead are both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who’s working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world’s magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world’s every-growing ailments. Read the first 4 chapters here.
An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows
When Saffron Coulter stumbles through a hole in reality, she finds herself trapped in Kena, a magical realm on the brink of civil war. Pursued by Emperor Leoden and aided by the Shavaktiin, a secretive order of storytellers and mystics, can she—an accidental worldwalker—really be the key to saving Kena? Or will she just die trying?
Breath of Earth by Beth Cato
In an alternate 1906, the United States and Japan have forged a powerful confederation—the Unified Pacific—in an attempt to dominate the world.In San Francisco, headstrong secretary Ingrid Carmichael is assisting a group of powerful geomancer wardens who have no idea of the depth of her own talent.When assassins kill the wardens, Ingrid is forced on the run. In the process of which, she discovers that her already considerable magic has grown even more fearsome… and she may be the fulcrum on which the balance of world power rests.
Dark Run by Mike Brooks
The Keiko is a ship of smugglers, soldiers of fortune, and adventurers traveling Earth’s colony planets searching for the next job. And they never talk about their past—until now. Captain Ichabod Drift is being blackmailed. He has to deliver a special cargo to Earth, and no one can know they’re there. It’s what they call a dark run…And it may be their last. Read an excerpt here!
The Devourers by Indra Das
On a cool evening in Kolkata, India, beneath a full moon, as the whirling rhythms of traveling musicians fill the night, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story. Alok agrees, at the stranger’s behest, to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins. From these documents spills the chronicle of a race of people at once more than human yet kin to beasts, ruled by instincts and desires blood-deep and ages-old. With every passing chapter Alok’s interest in the stranger grows and evolves into something darker and more urgent. Read an excerpt here!
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
Magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children. Nancy tumbled once, and now she’s back. The things she’s experienced… they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. But Nancy’s arrival marks a change at the Home. There’s a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it’s up to Nancy and her new-found schoolmates to get to the heart of things. Read an excerpt and check out a series of illustrated scenes from Rovina Cai!
In the Labyrinth of Drakes (Memoirs of Lady Trent #4) by Marie Brennan
In this, the fourth volume of her memoirs, Lady Trent relates how she acquired her position with the Royal Scirling Army; how foreign saboteurs imperiled both her work and her well-being; and how her determined pursuit of knowledge took her into the deepest reaches of the Labyrinth of Drakes, where the chance action of a dragon set the stage for her greatest achievement yet.
Read an excerpt here, and check out Todd Lockwood’s cover art for the fifth book in the Lady Trent series!
The Last Mortal Bond (Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne #3) by Brian Staveley
The ancient csestriim are back to finish their purge of humanity; armies march against the capital; leaches, solitary beings who draw power from the natural world to fuel their extraordinary abilities, maneuver on all sides to affect the outcome of the war; and capricious gods walk the earth in human guise with agendas of their own. Read an excerpt here!
Double Down (Lois Lane #2) by Gwenda Bond
Lois Lane has settled in to her new school. She has friends, for maybe the first time in her life. She has a job that challenges her. And her friendship is growing with SmallvilleGuy, her online maybe-more-than-a-friend. But when her friend Maddy’s twin collapses in a part of town she never should’ve been in, Lois finds herself embroiled in a dangerous mystery that brings her closer to the dirty underbelly of Metropolis.
Mechanical Failure by Joe Zieja
The two hundred years’ (and counting) peace is a time of tranquility that hasn’t been seen since…well, never. Mankind in the Galactic Age had finally conquered war, so what was left for the military to do but drink and barbecue? That’s the kind of military that Sergeant R. Wilson Rogers lived in before he left the fleet to become a smuggler. When he gets caught and forced back into military service again, this time, they’re preparing for war.
Midnight Taxi Tango (Bone Street Rumba #2) by Daniel José Older
Carlos Delacruz straddles the line between the living and the not-so alive. As an agent for the Council of the Dead, he eliminates New York’s ghostlier problems. This time it’s a string of gruesome paranormal accidents in Brooklyn’s Von King Park that has already taken the lives of several locals—and is bound to take more. Read an excerpt here!
Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones
He was born an outsider, like the rest of his family. Poor yet resilient, he lives in the shadows with his aunt Libby and uncle Darren, folk who stubbornly make their way in a society that does not understand or want them. They are mongrels, mixed blood, neither this nor that. The boy at the center of Mongrels must decide if he belongs on the road with his aunt and uncle, or if he fits with the people on the other side of the tracks. Read our review here.
Morning Star (Red Rising Series #3) by Pierce Brown
Darrow would have lived in peace, but his enemies brought him war. The Gold overlords demanded his obedience, hanged his wife, and enslaved his people. But Darrow is determined to fight back. Risking everything to transform himself and breach Gold society, Darrow has battled to survive the cutthroat rivalries that breed Society’s mightiest warriors, climbed the ranks, and waited patiently to unleash the revolution that will tear the hierarchy apart from within.
On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis
January 29, 2035. That’s the day the comet is scheduled to hit—the big one. Denise and her mother and sister, Iris, have been assigned to a temporary shelter outside their hometown of Amsterdam to wait out the blast, but Iris is nowhere to be found, and at the rate Denise’s drug-addicted mother is going, they’ll never reach the shelter in time. Word gets out of a generation ship, but everyone on the ship has been chosen because of their usefulness. Denise is autistic and fears that she’ll never be allowed to stay.
Stiletto by Daniel O’Malley
When secret organizations are forced to merge after years of enmity and bloodshed, only one person has the fearsome powers—and the bureaucratic finesse—to get the job done. Facing her greatest challenge yet, Rook Myfanwy Thomas must broker a deal between two bitter adversaries. But as bizarre attacks sweep London, threatening to sabotage negotiations, old hatreds flare. Surrounded by spies, only the Rook and two women who absolutely hate each other, can seek out the culprits before they trigger a devastating otherworldly war.
United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas
Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. No one believes that Japan’s conduct in war was anything but exemplary, except for a group of rebel freedom fighters called the George Washingtons. Their latest tactic is to distribute an illegal video game that asks players to imagine what the world might be like if the United States had won the war instead. Captain Beniko Ishimura’s job is to censor video games, and he’s tasked with getting to the bottom of this disturbing new development. But the George Washingtons case is more complicated than it seems. Read an excerpt here, and check out Tieryas’ take on 5 other books with deadly games.
Version Control by Dexter Palmer
Rebecca Wright has reclaimed her life, finding her way out of her grief and depression following a personal tragedy years ago. But she has a strange, persistent sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter. Meanwhile, her husband’s decade-long dedication to his invention, the causality violation device (time-machine) has effectively stalled his career and made him a laughingstock in the physics community. But he may be closer to success than either of them knows or can possibly imagine. |
Just look at those pleats, courtesy of Permanent Style. If you show this to any mainstream fashion guy, he’d recoil immediately. Flat-front pants have been the way to go for the past few years. Favoring the clean look, the mainstream #menswear community has renounced all ties to the dreadful 1990s business look. But classic enthusiasts in the community have always favored pleats and have still had them in their trousers without looking terrible! Here, we look at the brief history of pleats and how they have evolved through menswear. Hopefully you’ll agree that pleats are, and always have been, cool.
What are Pleats?
Having a line down the center of your pant leg doesn’t mean you have a pleat. That’s a crease, which can be formed or removed through ironing.
Pleats are simply folds of excess fabric, held by stitches to the top or side. When applied to pants, they are used to add more room in the thigh/crotch area for comfort, with the first pleat folding into the center crease of the pant leg. Think of it as form of “simple technology” in clothing.
There are two main styles of pleated pants: single and double pleat. Double pleats either have the opening go toward the fly (forward) or away (reverse). Flat front pants, lack pleats and have a “flat front”.
Pleats in Menswear
Most people assume that pleats are required for a “vintage look”, which just isn’t true. In the 1920s, many men favored flat front pants, just like today!
In the 1930s and early 1940s, men had pleats included in their trousers, but only single pleats to emphasize the crease and “straight line” of the leg. However, some fashion forward collegiate styles embraced pleats with wild abandon. Note that all of the pants are hemmed perfectly, without any breaks. Yes, they are wider than most pants today but they are not baggy.
Pleats were fully embraced in the late 1940s and 1950s, before leaving in the 1960s.
It’s very important to note that while everything was wider in those times, all of the pants are high-waisted, sitting at or near your belly button. This was disregarded when pleats came back in the 1980s and 1990s.
These pleated pants in the “time of excess” were still roomy like before, but most guys wore them at the hips, leading into an extremely baggy look and making their hips appear wider than they are. This is the main reason why most “fashion-forward” men prefer the flatfront look; they want to avoid the unkempt business looks of their fathers.
While most men out there are refusing to even look at pleats, there is a small pocket of men that still rock them. They aren’t the guys who model for GQ or constantly promoting their sprezzabox ambassadorship. Rather, these are the guys who appreciate old-school tailoring, who know how to rock pleats the classic way: high rise, with no breaks. When you rock them this way, they’re as versatile as any flat front trouser in your closet! In fact, the fantastic menswear blog Put This On has always favored the pleats.
Our Vintage Examples
As classical tailoring enthusiasts, a majority of the pleats we wear are vintage. Here are a few examples from our archives that show you the way men wore them back in the 1930s-1940s.
Great Modern Exampes
Now let’s look at some modern versions of the pleated trouser. These gentlemen wear the pleatswell; They don’t look like struggling businessmen, constantly pulling their pants up. No, these men know how to look good and appreciate the classical art of tailoring; some of them have always had pleats in their wardrobe. I’m sure these gentlemen are enjoying the added room in their thighs, thanks to their pleats. Who said you can’t have both comfort and style?
The key to pulling off pleated pants is TAILORING. Every single one of these good examples are high rise, straight/slim legs, and have little or no break. Anything else will look terrible. It may not look like much, but having this old school detail is a great way to stand out.
You’ll look cool as your pleats open as you walk or place your hand in your pocket, much to the chagrin of the sheep-minded #menswear community. Much like the high-waist and the double breasted jacket, pleats are cool and have always been cool.
Where To Get Them?
Unfortunately, pleated pants are difficult to acquire due to the fact that it isn’t mainstream to have them. Just like the DB and high rise, the real way to get them is by going bespoke (custom made) or going vintage. Either option can be expensive or hard to find.
Put This On has a great list of people great list of people (Suit Supply included) who offer high-rise pleated pants but many of these are out of the price range of the common man (my self included). If you have the money, I’d personally go for Epaulet over Suit Supply, since the Gable trouser has an actual high-rise (Suit Supply has more medium rise).
If you’ve got the money, I highly suggest getting Ambrosi trousers. Salvatore Ambrosi is the best dedicated trouser maker I’ve seen, and a majority of the pictures above are credited to his handiwork. You’re lucky if you live in NY; he makes frequent trunk shows the The Armoury NYC!
Whatever you do, please don’t just buy any pleated pants off the internet and hope that they’ll look as good as the pictures.
Conclusion
Pleats have a functional purpose, using its excess fabric fold to allow more room in the pant area. While most men fear them, due to the fact that makes your hips look wider when they flare out, classical style enthusiasts have never forgotten them. Instead of constantly condemning the old, these men look to the past and understand that some things aren’t bad as long as they are tailored correctly.
If you decide to make the jump backward in fashion, make sure that you follow the cardinal rules for pulling of pleats:
Keeping it tailored and classic,
Ethan W.
Street x Sprezza
Images are not owned by Street x Sprezza
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After successfully expelling visa overstayers over the past decade, Japan is now shifting its immigration control focus to a new target: people in the country on bogus visas.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government has submitted a bill to revise the immigration control law that will stiffen the crackdown on individuals it views as an emerging threat to public safety.
While it is unclear whether the bill will be passed during the current Diet session that ends in late September, lawyers and activists warn it is intended to give authorities leeway to weed out foreigners they consider “undesirable.”
Not only that, the envisaged law is so broadly defined that its impact could in reality extend to any foreigners who have mishandled their paperwork in applying for visas, they said, adding it even risks stoking xenophobia among the Japanese public.
The revision takes aim at what the government tentatively calls bogus visa holders, or giso taizai-sha (those staying under false visa status). The government has no official definition for them, but the term typically refers to foreigners whose activity is out of keeping with their visa status.
“The tricky thing about them is that they are outwardly legal,” immigration official Tomoatsu Koarai said, adding they possess a legitimate visa status and therefore are registered on a government database as legal non-Japanese residents.
Examples include “spouses” of Japanese nationals married under sham marriages, “engineers” whose job has nothing to do with engineering, and “exchange students” who no longer engage in academic activities after facing expulsion, the Justice Ministry said. Unlike visa overstayers, whose illegal status is clear-cut, these bogus visa holders theoretically remain legal until they are apprehended and have their visas revoked.
The ministry cracked down on about 280 such cases in 2014, but officials estimate the real tally is much higher.
“Compared with overstayers, these bogus immigrants are much harder to detect,” Koarai said, adding their tactics of deception have grown increasingly cunning in recent years.
Spotting overstayers is easy, he said, as all immigration has to do is consult its database and check up on the expiration date of a person’s visa. But to prove someone is actively deceiving a set visa status, an exhaustive investigation into each individual is necessary. The process, Koarai said, is “really time-consuming.”
Under the current framework, bogus immigrants are stripped of their visa if apprehended, but they face no criminal penalty, although they will either be deported immediately or instructed to return home within a month, depending on the circumstances.
The law, if enacted, will subject those who obtained or renewed visas through “forgery and other unjust measures” to criminal penalties, including up to three years’ imprisonment and/or a maximum fine of ¥3 million. The ministry believes imposing criminal penalties will serve as a deterrent.
The envisaged law will also expand the scope of foreigners subject to visa revocation.
Currently, foreign residents are allowed to retain their visa for three months after stopping their permitted activities. The bill calls for scrapping this three-month rule and ensuring that foreigners who discontinue their activities forfeit their residency status the instant they are caught engaging in something different or “planning to do so.”
The Abe government characterized in 2013 the stiffer crackdown on the bogus visa holders as part of its drive to make Japan the “world’s safest nation.”
Immigration official Koarai agrees, saying it disrupts Japan’s immigration control.
“If we failed to crackdown on those spurious immigrants, it would send out the (wrong) message that foreigners are free to flout immigration rules. We tolerate no rule-breakers,” he said.
Coming on the heels of Japan’s strenuous crackdown on visa overstayers, the bill represents a shift in its target, according to Eriko Suzuki, a professor of immigration and labor policies at Kokushikan University.
As is represented by the government’s five-year initiative started in 2004 to “halve” the number of illegal immigrants, Japan has over the years successfully repatriated visa overstayers, who totaled 60,007 as of Jan. 1, nearly a fifth of the peak in 1993.
The bill reflects Japan’s renewed push to banish non-Japanese it deems as “undesirable” and gives authorities greater discretionary power to this end, Suzuki said.
As Japan braces for an inevitable increase in foreigners — with its domestic workforce rapidly shrinking and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics approaching — a law like this is just what immigration needs to tighten control over incoming foreigners, she added.
“Setting forth these criminal penalties puts authorities at ease, because it grants them the legal basis on which to crack down on unwelcome individuals,” she said.
A stepped-up measure like this risks making Japan a more controlling society, putting foreign residents in general, including valid visa holders, under stricter surveillance by the government and the public, she warned.
Suzuki is far from alone in voicing skepticism over the bill. Concerns are growing among critics over its fundamentally vague phraseology and possible ripple effects.
Several human rights organizations, including the Japan Federation of Bar Associations and Solidarity Network with Migrants in Japan, separately issued statements against the bill.
Lawyer Koji Yamawaki, for one, pointed out that requirements for criminal penalties were too broad.
Similar court rulings in the past suggest the phrase “forgery and other unjust measures” does not just refer to cases involving obvious deception and mendacity, he said. It could also include simple missteps on the part of foreigners in filling out application forms, such as failing to notify immigration beforehand of some minor facts concerning their life in Japan, he said.
“For example, it’s often the case foreigners applying for a working visa don’t inform immigration of the fact they live together with someone they are not legally married to, because they thought the information was not relevant. But the reality is many of these omissions have been deemed by immigration serious enough to revoke one’s visa,” Yamawaki said.
What’s worse, after the law’s enactment, these minor lapses could not only cost foreigners their residency status, but hold them criminally liable.
“The point is, under the intended law, even if you’re not being actively deceitful, you could still be prosecuted for simply not mentioning facts that immigration wanted to be aware of — no matter how irrelevant and trivial they may be. The law is that broad,” the lawyer said.
Yamawaki also pointed that out it’s not just foreigners who could be held accountable for such slip-ups. Their lawyers, employers or anybody involved in helping fill out their forms could also take the blame — at least theoretically — on the grounds that they partook or aided in their alleged attempt to obtain visas illegally, he said.
Should such a law be enacted, Yamawaki warned, it could instill the public with the misguided notion that foreign residents are troublemakers and contribute to breeding a xenophobic atmosphere.
“I’d dare say this is an extremely dangerous legislation the likes of which have seldom been seen in recent years,” he said.
Tokyo-based lawyer Shogo Watanabe, meanwhile, said the government was pursuing the impossible. Its expected crackdown on the tiniest missteps in a person’s paperwork, Watanabe said, ran counter to what he called the fundamentally “shady” way migration works worldwide. Human migration, he said, was not as perfectly clean as Japanese authorities apparently want it to be.
Illegal as they are, brokers, for example, now play an “indispensable” role in facilitating people’s movement in today’s world, while many migrants feel compelled to omit or understate certain facts that they fear may erode their chance of a successful application.
“That’s the reality of how migration works. No matter how hard Japanese authorities may try, they simply can’t make it completely crime-free,” Watanabe said. “Rather, picking at every single omission committed by foreigners sounds to me as tantamount to excessively interfering with people’s movements.”
Although those who intentionally feign marriage or occupation perhaps should be penalized, the law could in theory put in danger the vulnerable who should in fact be protected, not punished, human rights activists say.
One such example is technical interns who work under a state-backed foreign traineeship program called the Technical Intern Training Program.
Under the discredited initiative, allegations are rife that interns have been underpaid, forcedly overworked and abused sexually and verbally by unscrupulous employers. Fed up with subpar wage standards, a record 4,851 interns fled their workplaces in 2014, according to Justice Ministry data.
As the ministry acknowledges, these “runaways” will be considered in violation of the envisaged law once it takes effect, too, because — technically speaking — they no longer are fulfilling their duties as “technical interns” as per their visas.
“To think the law aims to crackdown on those interns who were fortunate enough to be able to escape their workplaces . . . this is unbelievable,” Ippei Torii, secretary-general of the Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan, said.
“The government completely lacks the understanding that these people are in fact victims who need to be protected.” |
“This may give the administration even more authority than people thought,” said David Kris, a former senior Justice Department lawyer in the Bush and Clinton administrations and a co-author of “National Security Investigation and Prosecutions,” a new book on surveillance law.
Several legal experts said that by redefining the meaning of “electronic surveillance,” the new law narrows the types of communications covered in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, by indirectly giving the government the power to use intelligence collection methods far beyond wiretapping that previously required court approval if conducted inside the United States.
These new powers include the collection of business records, physical searches and so-called “trap and trace” operations, analyzing specific calling patterns.
For instance, the legislation would allow the government, under certain circumstances, to demand the business records of an American in Chicago without a warrant if it asserts that the search concerns its surveillance of a person who is in Paris, experts said.
It is possible that some of the changes were the unintended consequences of the rushed legislative process just before this month’s Congressional recess, rather than a purposeful effort by the administration to enhance its ability to spy on Americans.
“We did not cover ourselves in glory,” said one Democratic aide, referring to how the bill was compiled.
But a senior intelligence official who has been involved in the discussions on behalf of the administration said that the legislation was seen solely as a way to speed access to the communications of foreign targets, not to sweep up the communications of Americans by claiming to focus on foreigners.
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“I don’t think it’s a fair reading,” the official said. “The intent here was pure: if you’re targeting someone outside the country, the fact that you’re doing the collection inside the country, that shouldn’t matter.” Democratic leaders have said they plan to push for a revision of the legislation as soon as September. “It was a legislative over-reach, limited in time,” said one Congressional Democratic aide. “But Democrats feel like they can regroup.”
Some civil rights advocates said they suspected that the administration made the language of the bill intentionally vague to allow it even broader discretion over wiretapping decisions. Whether intentional or not, the end result — according to top Democratic aides and other experts on national security law — is that the legislation may grant the government the right to collect a range of information on American citizens inside the United States without warrants, as long as the administration asserts that the spying concerns the monitoring of a person believed to be overseas.
In effect, they say, the legislation significantly relaxes the restrictions on how the government can conduct spying operations aimed at foreigners at the same time that it allows authorities to sweep up information about Americans.
These new powers are considered overly broad and troubling by some Congressional Democrats who raised their concerns with administration officials in private meetings this week.
“This shows why it is so risky to change the law by changing the definition” of something as basic as the meaning of electronic surveillance, said Suzanne Spaulding, a former Congressional staff member who is now a national security legal expert. “You end up with a broad range of consequences that you might not realize.”
The senior intelligence official acknowledged that Congressional staff members had raised concerns about the law in the meetings this week, and that ambiguities in the bill’s wording may have led to some confusion. “I’m sure there will be discussions about how and whether it should be fixed,” the official said.
Vanee Vines, a spokeswoman for the office of the director of national intelligence, said the concerns raised by Congressional officials about the wide scope of the new legislation were “speculative.” But she declined to discuss specific aspects of how the legislation would be enacted. The legislation gives the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales broad discretion in enacting the new procedures and approving the way surveillance is conducted.
Bush administration officials said the new legislation, which amends FISA, was critical to fill an “intelligence gap” that had left the United States vulnerable to attack.
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The legislation “restores FISA to its original and appropriate focus — protecting the privacy of Americans,” said Brian Roehrkasse, Justice Department spokesman. “The act makes clear that we do not need a court order to target for foreign intelligence collection persons located outside the United States, but it also retains FISA’s fundamental requirement of court orders when the target is in the United States.”
The measure, which President Bush signed into law on Aug. 5, was written and pushed through both the House and Senate so quickly that few in Congress had time to absorb its full impact, some Congressional aides say.
Though many Democratic leaders opposed the final version of the legislation, they did not work forcefully to block its passage, largely out of fear that they would be criticized by President Bush and Republican leaders during the August recess as being soft on terrorism.
Yet Bush administration officials have already signaled that, in their view, the president retains his constitutional authority to do whatever it takes to protect the country, regardless of any action Congress takes. At a tense meeting last week with lawyers from a range of private groups active in the wiretapping issue, senior Justice Department officials refused to commit the administration to adhering to the limits laid out in the new legislation and left open the possibility that the president could once again use what they have said in other instances is his constitutional authority to act outside the regulations set by Congress.
At the meeting, Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, along with other critics of the legislation, pressed Justice Department officials repeatedly for an assurance that the administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by Congress. The Justice Department, led by Ken Wainstein, the assistant attorney general for national security, refused to do so, according to three participants in the meeting. That stance angered Mr. Fein and others. It sent the message, Mr. Fein said in an interview, that the new legislation, though it is already broadly worded, “is just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do. They have not changed their position that the president’s Article II powers trump any ability by Congress to regulate the collection of foreign intelligence.”
Brian Walsh, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation who attended the same private meeting with Justice Department officials, acknowledged that the meeting — intended by the administration to solicit recommendations on the wiretapping legislation — became quite heated at times. But he said he thought the administration’s stance on the president’s commander-in-chief powers was “a wise course.”
“They were careful not to concede any authority that they believe they have under Article II,” Mr. Walsh said. “If they think they have the constitutional authority, it wouldn’t make sense to commit to not using it.”
Asked whether the administration considered the new legislation legally binding, Ms. Vines, the national intelligence office spokeswoman, said: “We’re going to follow the law and carry it out as it’s been passed.”
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Mr. Bush issued a so-called signing statement about the legislation when he signed it into law, but the statement did not assert his presidential authority to override the legislative limits.
At the Justice Department session, critics of the legislation also complained to administration officials about the diminished role of the FISA court, which is limited to determining whether the procedures set up by the executive administration for intercepting foreign intelligence are “clearly erroneous” or not.
That limitation sets a high bar to set off any court intervention, argued Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who also attended the Justice Department meeting.
“You’ve turned the court into a spectator,” Mr. Rotenberg said. |
Certain files on a UNIX-like system, such as /etc/passwd and /etc/sudoers , are integral for managing login and authentication, and it’s thus necessary to be very careful while editing them using sudo not to accidentally leave them in a corrupted state, or to allow others to edit them at the same time as you. In the worst case scenario it’s possible to lock yourself out of a system or out of root privileges in doing this, and things can only be fixed via physical access to the server or someone who knows the actual root password, which you may not necessarily know as a sudo user.
You should therefore never edit /etc/passwd , /etc/group , or /etc/sudoers by simply invoking them in your editor of choice. A set of simple utilities exist to help you make these edits safely.
vipw and vigr
If you want to safely edit the /etc/passwd file, for which you’ll need to have root privileges, you should use the vipw tool. It doesn’t require an argument.
# vipw
This will load a temporary copy of the file into your $EDITOR , and allow you to make changes. If all is well after you save and quit, you’ll see a message like:
You have modified /etc/passwd. You may need to modify /etc/shadow for consistency. Please use the command 'vipw -s' to do so.
If you’ve made changes which might require changing something in the /etc/shadow file, you should follow these instructions too.
The command to edit groups, vigr , works in much the same way:
# vigr
visudo
The analogous tool for editing the /etc/sudoers file is visudo . This file not only does the necessary lock and file corruption checking as vipw does, it also does some basic checking of the syntax of the file after you save it.
# visudo
If the changes you make to this file work correctly, you’ll simply be returned to your prompt. However, if you’ve made some sort of edit that means sudo won’t be able to correctly parse the file, you’ll get warned and prompted for an appropriate action:
visudo: >>> /etc/sudoers: syntax error near line 28 <<< visudo: >>> /etc/sudoers: syntax error near line 29 <<< visudo: >>> /etc/sudoers: syntax error near line 29 <<< What now?
If you press ? here and then Enter, you’ll get a list of the actions you can take:
Options are: (e)dit sudoers file again e(x)it without saving changes to sudoers file (Q)uit and save changes to sudoers file (DANGER!)
You’ll probably want the first one, to edit your changes again and make them work properly, but you may want to hose them and start again via the second option. You should only choose the third if you absolutely know what you’re doing.
sudoedit
In general, you can edit root-owned files using sudoedit , or sudo -e , which will operate on temporary copies of the file and overwrite the original if changes are detected:
$ sudo -e /etc/network/interfaces |
The Muslim Brotherhood has been active in Sweden for decades. The openly Islamist organization has enjoyed secular support and is actively seeking to Islamize Sweden, a government report found, stirring a major controversy. Politically correct researchers and politicians hurried to dismiss the uncomfortable findings as "racist" and "prejudiced".
© REUTERS / Anders Wiklund/TT News Agency Jihadi 'Veterans' Return to Sweden, Establish Islamist Extremist Networks
In a fresh report by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was found to be secretly leading Islamists in building a parallel society in Sweden by infiltrating organizations and political parties across the country. The Islamist network has been gradually established as a consequence of immigration, the report noted.
The report specifically stated that the Muslim Brotherhood was trying to Islamize Sweden, with its ultimate goal set as becoming a state based on sharia law. Additionally, numerous Muslim organizations across Sweden were found to be mobilizing their forces in a nationwide Islamic campaign, seeing the spread of Islam as their moral duty.
Perhaps most notably, though, the MB was found to enjoy secular support from government institutions, as well as the Left and the Green Party, which were identified as "uncritically viewing Muslims as victims of Islamophobia."
"Over the years, the MB managed to establish a dominant position in the Muslim part of the state-sponsored civil society though aid from a plethora of organizations. Many millions of kronor were channeled from Swedish tax-payers into the world's largest Islamic organization's Swedish branch," the report stated, identifying the Swedish Commission for Government Support to Faith Communities (SST) and the Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society (MUCF) as major grant givers.
The report sparked outrage among Swedish academia and security officials, as well as members of the burgeoning Muslim community. A blog post signed by 22 Swedish researchers specializing in religious studies dismissed the report as "almost conspiracy-theory-like," lacking sources and resting conclusions on personal views rather than evidence.
According to Swedish journalist and left-wing foundation Expo activist Bilan Osman, theories of Muslim infiltration risk may fuel anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.
"It is regrettable that the authorities issued such a report based on racist conspiracy theories. That we should be part of a secret global network trying to infiltrate Swedish politics while building parallel societies is both absurd and constitutes very serious allegations," Rashid Musa, President of the Swedish Young Muslims told Swedish national broadcaster SVT.
However, the Swedish Young Muslims have been criticized for having links to the Muslim Brotherhood before and had support from MUCF terminated due to "actions incompatible with the ideals of democracy."
Magnus Norell, the man behind the report, responded brusquely to the politically correct criticism.
"Had they smoked something before reading the report? You just need to read it. If someone doesn't accept this, there's not much I can do about it. It's proven!" a fuming Norell told SVT. MSB made it clear that it was not going to disown the report despite criticism.
© AFP 2018 / JONATHAN NACKSTRAND Multicultural Sweden Siphons Millions to Stifle Xenophobia
Magnus Norell completed his PhD degree at the Stockholm University and worked at the Swedish Defense Agency (FOI), the Sweden National Defense College (FHS), the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO) and the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Service (MUST). In 2015, Norell published the book "Caliphate's Return: Causes and Consequences," which by his own admission Swedish publishers refused to print.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization formed in Egypt in 1928. The group is currently active in about 70 countries and presents itself as a democratic force, yet is banned in several countries including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Russia, as terrorist organization.
A 2014 report by the US State Department estimated the number of Muslims in Sweden at 600,000 (or 6 percent of the Swedish population of 10 million). However, the percentage of Muslims is expected to have risen further following the influx of migrants from predominantly Muslim countries.
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The powerhouse brewers behind San Diego’s newest brewery are churning out gold.
A crack team of brewers has assembled in San Diego, and they call themselves Modern Times. The brewery’s the brainchild of Jacob McKean (left), a longtime homebrewer and Stone Brewing’s former social media guru, who’s joined by a top-notch crew including Matt Walsh, former head brewer at Lost Coast; Derek Freese, the recent head brewer at Monkey Paw; and ex-Ballast Point brewer Alex Tweet. Consultant Michael Tonsmeire, a well-known homebrewer and author of The Mad Fermentationist blog, took a sabbatical to launch the brewery’s wild yeast beers. Modern Times’ “fermentorium” now churns out four core brews, four seasonals and a never-ending line of here-and-gone batches focusing on wild Brettanomyces yeast. The brewery (like all of its beers) is named after a 19th- century utopian community in Long Island. In classic utopian fashion, the recipes are available online, so everyone can enjoy the Modern Times movement.
Blazing World: “I call it an amber-IPA hybrid. It was inspired by Tröegs Nugget Nectar, although it’s really different. I wanted to make something that was an homage to their great work, but with our own spin: We use Nelson Sauvin, Mosaic and Simcoe, which are very dank, fruity hops.”
Fortunate Islands: “Our 4.8%-ABV hoppy wheat beer was kind of inspired by Three Floyds Gumballhead, which I fell in love with in Chicago. I wanted this to focus on Citra hops to get that tropical mango and pineapple aroma, and there’s also a fairly nutty, wheaty malt body.”
Black House: “We’re one of the only breweries in the world that roasts our own coffee beans in-house, which allows us to roast them exactly how we want. We wanted to make an oatmeal coffee stout that kind of tastes like a chocolate- covered espresso bean and bursts with a coffee aroma.”
Lomaland: “This is a 5.5%-ABV saison with malt, wheat, flaked corn and a blend of Saison Dupont and Westmalle yeast. It’s traditional in style, but I really wanted to make a more sessionable saison that was also complex and yeast-driven. It’s very earthy, haylike and delicious.” |
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(from The CW's press release, January 2019) The CW Network has given early renewals to ten of its primetime series for the 2019-2020 season, it was announced today by Mark Pedowitz, President, The CW, during the network's session at the Television Critics Association Press Tour in Pasadena. "This season, we expanded our primetime schedule to six nights with the addition of Sunday -- which has been an unqualified success for the network, our affiliates and our advertisers. In addition to growing our schedule across the week, we also continue to add more year-round programming. The early renewal of these signature CW series gives us a head start on laying out the 2019-2020 season, and this is just the beginning," said Pedowitz. "These shows provide a strong foundation for our multiplatform programming strategy, and we look forward to building on this with even more returning and new shows as we approach the May upfront." The series being ordered for the 2019-2020 broadcast year include second seasons of The CW's freshman hits CHARMED and LEGACIES, as well as new seasons of ARROW (Season 8), BLACK LIGHTNING (Season 3), DC'S LEGENDS OF TOMORROW (Season 5), DYNASTY (Season 3), THE FLASH (Season 6), RIVERDALE (Season 4), SUPERGIRL (Season 5), and SUPERNATURAL (Season 15). Specific premiere dates for each series will be announced at a later time. |
The Datapoint 2200 was a mass-produced programmable terminal, designed by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) founders Phil Ray and Gus Roche[2] and announced by CTC in June 1970 (with units shipping in 1971). It was presented by CTC simply as a versatile and cost-efficient terminal for connecting to a wide variety of mainframes by loading various terminal emulations from tape rather than being hardwired as most contemporary terminals, including their earlier Datapoint 3300. However, enterprising users in the business sector (including Pillsbury Foods) realized that this so-called "programmable terminal" was equipped to perform any task a simple computer could and exploited this fact by using their 2200s as standalone computer systems. Its industrial designer John "Jack" Frassanito has later claimed that Ray and Roche always intended the Datapoint 2200 to be a full-blown personal computer, but that they chose to keep quiet about this so as not to concern investors and others.[2][3] Also significant is the fact that the terminal's multi-chip CPU (processor) became the basis of the x86 architecture used in the original IBM PC and its descendants.
Technical description [ edit ]
The Datapoint 2200 had a built-in full-travel keyboard, a built-in 12-line, 80-column green screen monitor, and two 47 character-per-inch cassette tape drives each with 130 kB capacity. Its size, 9 5⁄ 8 in × 18 1⁄ 2 in × 19 5⁄ 8 in (24 cm × 47 cm × 50 cm), and shape—a box with protruding keyboard—approximated that of an IBM Selectric typewriter.[4] Initially, a Diablo 2.5 MB 2315-type removable cartridge hard disk drive was available, along with modems, several types of serial interface, parallel interface, printers and a punched card reader. Later, an 8-inch floppy disk drive was also made available, along with other, larger hard disk drives. An industry-compatible 7/9-track (user selectable) magnetic tape drive was available by 1975. In late 1977, Datapoint introduced ARCnet local area networking. The original Type 1 2200 shipped with 2 kilobytes of serial shift register main memory, expandable to 8K. The Type 2 2200 used denser 1 kbit RAM chips, giving it a default 4K of memory, expandable to 16K. Its starting price was around US $5,000 (equivalent to $31,000 in 2018), and a full 16K Type 2 2200 had a list price of just over $14,000.
The 2200 models were succeeded by the 5500, 1100, 6600, 3800/1800, 8800, etc.
The seed of the x86 architecture [ edit ]
The original design called for a single-chip 8-bit microprocessor for the CPU, rather than a processor built from discrete TTL modules as was conventional at the time. In 1969, CTC contracted two companies, Intel and Texas Instruments, to make the chip. TI was unable to make a reliable part and dropped out. Intel was unable to make CTC's deadline. Intel and CTC renegotiated their contract, ending up with CTC keeping its money and Intel keeping the eventually completed processor.[2]
CTC released the Datapoint 2200 using about 100 TTL components (SSI/MSI chips) instead of a microprocessor, while Intel's single-chip design, eventually designated the Intel 8008, was finally released in April 1972.[5]
Even though the Datapoint 2200 operated one bit at a time as a serial computer, the DataPoint 2200 performed faster than the 8008 chip.[6]
Possibly because of their speed advantages compared to MOS circuits, Datapoint continued to build processors out of TTL chips until the early 1980s.[6]
Nonetheless the 8008 was to have a seminal importance. It was the basis of Intel's line of 8-bit CPUs, which was followed by their assembly language compatible 16-bit CPUs — the first members of the x86 family, as the instruction set was later to be known. Already successful and widely used, the x86 architecture's further rise after the success in 1981 of the original IBM Personal Computer with an Intel 8088 CPU means that most desktop, laptop and server computers in use today have a CPU instruction set directly based on the work of CTC's engineers. The instruction set of the highly successful Zilog Z80 microprocessor can also be traced back to the Datapoint 2200 as the Z80 was backwards-compatible with the Intel 8080. More immediately, the Intel 8008 was adopted by very early microcomputers including the SCELBI, MCM/70 and Micral N.
Credits [ edit ]
The original instruction set architecture was developed by Victor Poor and Harry Pyle.[7] The TTL design they ended up using was made by Gary Asbell. Industrial design (how the box's exterior looked, including the company's logo) was done by Jack Frassanito.[8]
Specifications [ edit ]
Main unit
CPU: 8-bit, made from standard TTL components. The Intel 8008 was a nearly 100% compatible LSI implementation.
RAM: 2K, expandable to 16K
Display: Text only, 80×12 characters
Storage: 2 tape drives, optional 8-inch Shugart floppy drive
Peripherals
Users of the 2200 and succeeding terminals eventually had several optional units to choose from. Among these were |
× Expand The old City Hall ca. 1905, designed by Detroit architect Elijah Myers and completed in 1894. Today it is used for state offices. (Photo courtesy of the Cook Collection at the Valentine)
Back in the bad old days of the mid-1990s, I attended a conference organized by the Richmond Regional Planning District Commission and was among the other earnests there to discuss “regional cooperation.”
These were times when Richmond’s murder rate stood at about 150 corpses per annum, when City Council was embroiled either in scandal or attempting to avoid arrest from said scandal, and the center city had cratered from both the loss of retail and the ham-fisted efforts to shock the place back to life. During the ensuing discussion, an older man (seemed older to me, as I was at the time quite younger than now), rose from the bleachers burning from a three-alarm ire. He announced that Richmond, incapable of governing itself, should turn in the ancient city charter and submit to the better administrations of Chesterfield and/or Henrico counties.
I wondered about the practicalities.
Would our City of Monumental Juxtapositions get divvied up like Vienna, Austria, after World War II and patrolled by police forces of the three municipalities? Would it require state-approved letters of transit by those seeking to get in and out? I imagined desperate characters gathered at a shabby café on Belt Boulevard to await their turn on the bus to Skinquarter and Varina, and wrenching scenes of families crossing the Falling Creek Reservoir in overloaded skiffs. I’d written about how the counties wanted no truck with Richmond’s lame and infirm, nor its poor and huddled masses — most of whom were not white, though nobody actually said so — yearning to breathe free air conditioning. When talking about, for example, extending bus service into the counties, I heard about not wanting “an urban element” disturbing the comity of the cul-de-sac archipelago.
If some things haven’t changed since that meeting, others have. Poverty has taken root in the inner-ring suburbs, while the city is growing again, energized by younger professionals with disposable incomes.
These new residents, often from larger cities, have reasonable expectations of proper schooling for their progeny, good roads, trash collection, and wise stewardship of public spaces and access ways.
Lately, we’ve experienced some engine trouble.
In public forums today, there is caviling and wailing about the disastrous past seven years since the citizenry started directly electing its mayor. We indulge ourselves in pangs of past glories both real and imagined because they provide odd comfort. As we enter the next mayoral campaign season, it’s useful to examine just how we got here.
Let’s begin with Adon Allen Yoder. He would tell you governance of Richmond has never been pretty.
Yoder, a “radical revolutionist tho’ conservative” socialist (strong on women’s rights, weak on black civil liberties) lambasted Richmond’s city government a little more than a century ago as a “botched and bunglesome machine.”
A Lynchburg native, Yoder was the fourth of seven children of Mennonite educator Jacob E. Yoder, who founded that city’s African-American schools. His father’s causes made Adon a target for insults and worse, but he, too, grew up seeking to rectify social injustices.
After a brief and disappointing stint in the Baptist ministry, Adon Yoder became a proto-blogger from 1909 to 1911, printing his weekly pamphlet “The Idea.” He gained modest support in Richmond by “saying in public what others say in private.”
He named names of municipal malefactors, printed city commissioners’ gambling winnings, showed cracks in the foundations of new schools, described the houses of prostitution in Shockoe Valley — and implied that some members of the police commission earned rent from the bordellos. He expressed exasperation about the city engineer’s incompetence and showed that in Richmond, public business was rife with corruption. For his trouble, Yoder was beaten, incarcerated and sued.
Richmond’s government structure at the time imitated the state and federal levels: a two-house city legislature formed of a Common Council and Board of Aldermen and brokered by a popularly elected mayor. Some 56 chummy white men ran Richmond. They oversaw a byzantine arrangement of commissions and committees. Even the city’s own leaders realized the futility of the mess.
Yoder left town in March 1911 to seek treatment for his tubercular wife. As if to spite him, the Common Council Special Joint Committee released a report eight months later calling for a “radical” restructuring of city government. The next year, the city underwent reduction from eight council wards to four. An administrative board of five members elected at-large for four-year terms assumed the major responsibilities of prior committees. The board oversaw the city works, utilities and the engineer’s office. Council retained control of the purse strings and the lawmaking.
That was the first of three charter changes Richmond would undergo before reaching its present mayor-at-large over a nine-member council.
Put another way, every other generation, we revise or completely overhaul our system of governance. And each time, we stand on the precipice, frustrated by the administration and a decided lack of leadership, transparency and accountability. How does this happen? What is the underpinning reason for these repeated failures? What’s wrong with Richmond?
We’ll enter this skin-pricking thicket next month in Part the Second. |
The case against Independent deputies Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, alleging they entered a restricted area at Shannon Airport and climbed the perimeter fence, has opened at Ennis District court.
Mr Wallace and Ms Daly are contesting the charges, and say they were making a political statement about the use of Shannon by the US military.
The court heard that Mr Wallace will be conducting his own defence and will be leading witnesses in their evidence.
The court was shown CCTV footage of deputies Wallace and Daly inside the perimeter at Shannon Airport at an area known as Taxi Way 11 on 22 July 2014.
They were noticed by airport police and walking in an area where there was live aircraft activity, the court was told.
There were two US military aircraft in the area at the time being guarded by members of the Irish Army and gardaí.
When questioned by airport police both deputies said they wanted to inspect the aircraft.
They had no identification and no permission to be there, the court heard.
Arresting Garda Sgt Noel O'Rourke informed deputies Wallace and Daly that being in the area without a permit may have been a criminal offence.
Deputy Wallace replied they had entered the airport in order to make a political statement regarding the use of Shannon for military purposes.
He said they wanted to bring this to the attention of the minister.
Sgt O'Rourke also noticed that Deputy Daly had a cut on her eye and injuries to her fingers and she informed him it had happened when she got over the fence.
A rope ladder found beside the perimeter of the fence was also shown to the court, and Deputy Wallace asked if he could have it back.
A security analyst, Dr Tom Clonan, who has written articles for the Irish Times on international security matters, gave evidence on behalf of the defence.
He said he got permission to board a US civilian aircraft at Shannon in 2006, in which he observed US troops putting pistols in the overhead bins.
He said and they also had automatic weapons at their feet.
Defence witness Roberto Zamora from Costa Rica, an international legal expert told the court the use of Shannon by US military aircraft is a violation of Irish neutrality and International law.
The case had been adjourned until 10 March for further evidence and Judge Patrick Durkin has indicated he will be reserving his judgement. |
I've had my fill of some things around here. The one I've reached my wits end on in the QB conversation. I can't take anymore of this Peyton Manning and Matt Cassel talk. I'm going to go through and dismantle the arguments in favor of these guys.
Then I'll show why The Chiefs cannot afford to not afford RG3 this April. Enjoy the ride.
First, put Peyton Manning out of your heads. Bringing him in is terribly short-sighted and foolhardy for a number of reasons. Among them are his age, health, expense, and opportunity cost. At 36, Manning is in the twilight of his career. At best we would hope to wring 3 years out of him. At the end of that period we're sitting in 1995 again, wondering what to do with our QB vacancy and likely no jewelry to show for it. Also consider than Peyton's neck may never be truly right again. It'd feel pretty shitty to have the most expensive man in football riding our bench because his neck has been aggravated by hits from DL escorted to him by Barry Richardson. Even if he stays healthy, the cost is not worth it twofold. Pioli has played the salary cap pretty well thus far, keeping us in position to be able to retain players we develop (Hali, DJ, Bowe, Carr). Maybe we get an uncertainty discount on Manning but he's still going to be expensive enough to obliterate our cap space. "But we have to spend it all anyway!" Right, so spend it on players who can contribute long term. Thus is the opportunity cost. We could spend in on, I don't know, a QBoTF prospect instead.
As for Cassel and the rest of our QBs, they're a platoon of mediocrity. I feel generous calling Cassel average and likewise I think the term discounts Orton a little. Either way neither stray appreciably far from the mean. The point I want to slam home here is that average, or even above average, just isn't good enough. If the best one can say of your (non rookie) QB is that "he's above average" then you should be moving mountains to find a replacement. Average QBs can and do make the playoffs with regularity. My definition of a successful season for the Chiefs is winning a playoff game. I've seen us get there enough, but I'm not old enough to have seen a win. As far as the franchise goes, lets talk about who has won playoff games here.
The last time the Cheifs won a playoff game, Joe Montana was at the helm. Of the playoff games the Cheifs/Texans have won, either Montana or Len Dawson was the QB for 7 of the 8. These two men, Dawson and Montana, are the only two QBs in Chiefs history anyone would even consider using the word elite to describe. Outside of them there are only two other QBs the Chiefs have fielded that I would consider better than average by a significant margin. They are Trent Green and Steve DeBerg(debatable, I know). As for that outlier in the 7 of 8 number, it was won by Mr. DeBerg in 1991.
Maybe the Chiefs have just had a spurt of bad luck for the last half century or so. To judge this, let's look at what kind of QBs typically make it to the superbow. I went through every SuperBowl since 2000 and rated all 26 QBs on a 1-5 scale. 5= great 4=well above average 3= roughly average 2= well below average 1= awful. Of those who appeared, here they are by rating:
5: P. Manning, Brees, Brady, Roethlisberger, Warner, Rogers
4: E. Manning, McNabb, Delhomme, Gannon, Collins, McNair
3: B. Johnson, T. Dilfer, Hasselbeck,
2: Grossman
I know some of you could quibble with some of those but keep in mind it's rough, and I gave primacy to the year of play. Some notes about what my crude rating scale shows: The average SB QB comes in at 4.4, or very good. On only three occasions do I have the inferior QB prevailing: E. Manning def. Brady, T. Dilfer def. Collins, and B. Johnson def. Gannon. Recall that in 2002 the Buc's coach was John Gruden, who knew the opposing Raiders inside and out, having been their coach the year before. No 5 rated QB lost a SB without also having won one. The only non-5 to appear in more than one SB is E. Manning. Of the 26 SB appearances, 65% were by 5s. 85% were by a 5 or 4. The point here is that unless you have a top end QB, your chances of getting to a SB are tiny. Said another way: if you want a SB ring, you need at least a very good QB.
via static6.businessinsider.com
This April, the biggest thing in Quarterbacking since Peyton Manning is going to be on the board. He'll go to IND, ironically, to succeed Manning. There is, however, a nice consolation prize for a team willing be be aggressive in the QB market. Robert Griffin would be the high prize in any other draft. He's a brilliant guy, has exceptional accuracy, and luminal speed to boot. A good decision maker with an accurate arm is rarely any worse than "good." He's got "franchise QB" written all over him. The Chiefs MUST be aggressive in trying to acquire him through the draft. St. Louis bought all their stock in Sam Bradford, so they'll be looking to deal 2 overall to a QB hungry team. A team that has won fewer playoff games in the last half century than chance should permit should certianly be that team. It doesn't matter what it would take to move up to 2 to get him; give St Louis whatever bounty they ask. If we get a franchise QB out of the deal no one will look back and think "man, just wasn't worth it." The skeptic could argue that he's just a prospect, and we have no way of knowing how good he'll be in the NFL. That's only true because it's true of every player ever drafted. Fact is that the draft is where NFL players come from, so that's where you're going to make (or break) your team. This team has very few holes in it. RT, maybe ILB could use an upgrade, but QB is the crater in the team. It's outsized importance mandates that we be aggressive in fixing it. It is therefore imperative that we move up in the draft and select Robert Griffin. Maybe the experiment fails, but we're already failing by not trying. |
The hulking machines of "Transformers" are no longer box-office behemoths in North America. But they're still big in China.
Michael Bay's "Transformers: The Last Knight," the fifth installment in the Hasbro series, scored a franchise-low domestic debut with an estimated $43.5 million in ticket sales over the weekend and a five-day total of $69.1 million since opening Wednesday. All previous "Transformers" sequels opened with $97 million-plus.
But Paramount Pictures' "The Last Knight," the second "Transformers" movie to star Mark Wahlberg, still showed its might overseas. It took in $196.2 million internationally, including an impressive $123.4 million in China.
Future business will tell whether those grosses are enough to cover a hugely expensive movie: $217 million to make, plus nearly as much to market. Studios reap a smaller percentage of ticket sales from Chinese theaters. And reviews -- though never much of a factor in "Transformers" land -- were worse for "The Last Knight" than the earlier films. Audiences gave this one a B-plus CinemaScore.
Yet "Transformers" has been increasingly skewing international. The previous film, 2014's "Age of Extinction," made $858.6 million of its $1.1 billion global haul abroad.
"Transformers' is built for a global audience," said Kyle Davies, president of distribution for Paramount. "You really have to consider how we did in the overall and it was really strong overseas and in China. That's how we treat `Transformers': It's a global property. So we're hopeful that we're going to get to a good place."
"Wonder Woman" and "Cars 3" tied for second place, both with $25.2 million. Nearly a month after opening, Patty Jenkins' "Wonder Woman" continues to be a major draw. In four weeks, it has surpassed $300 million domestically. And at $652.9 million globally, it's the highest grossing film directed by a woman, not accounting for inflation.
In limited release Kumail Nanjiani's acclaimed romantic comedy "The Big Sick" landed the best per-screen average of the year. It opened in five theaters, grossing an average of $87,000 from each. Amazon plunked down $12 million for the Judd Apatow-produced Sundance Film Festival hit. Lionsgate is handling the theatrical release.
Sofia Coppola's "The Beguiled" wasn't far behind. In four theaters, it earned a per-screen average of $60,136. The Focus Features release, starring Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Colin Farrell, is a remake of Don Siegel's 1972 Civil War-era gothic thriller about a wounded Union soldier taken in by a Southern all-girls school. At the Cannes Film Festival last month, Coppola won best director, becoming only the second woman to do so.
Both "The Big Sick" and "The Beguiled" expand nationwide in the coming weeks.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to comScore. Where available, the latest international numbers also are included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. "Transformers: The Last Knight," $ 45.3 million ($196.2 million international).
2. (Tie) "Wonder Woman," $25.2 million.
2. (Tie) "Cars 3," $25.2 million.
4. "47 Meters Down," $7.4 million.
5. "All Eyez On Me," $5.9 million.
6. "The Mummy," $5.8 million.
7. "Pirates of the Caribbean," $5.2 million
8. "Rough Night," $4.7 million.
9. "Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie," $4.3 million.
10. "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2," $3 million. |
caption Peter Smith. source Screenshot via YouTube
A GOP donor and opposition researcher who said he tried to work with Russian hackers to retrieve deleted emails from a private server used by Hillary Clinton, has died in a suicide, according to public records cited in a Chicago Tribune report.
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Peter Smith killed himself days after an interview with The Wall Street Journal in which he said he sought out Russian hackers to try to retrieve some 33,000 deleted Clinton emails and pass them to Michael Flynn, then a campaign adviser to Donald Trump.
Death records from Minnesota show that Smith, 81, died in a hotel of "asphyxiation due to displacement of oxygen in confined space with helium" on May 14. Smith was found with a note that said there was "NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER" regarding his death.
Smith also apologized to the authorities for his death and attributed his final decision to a "recent bad turn in health," according to the records cited by the Tribune, which reported that he also said his $5 million life insurance policy was close to expiring.
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The Mayo Clinic located near the hotel in Rochester, Minnesota, declined to confirm whether Smith was a patient, the Tribune said. Smith's former associates reportedly said he was suffering from health issues and frequently complained of heart problems.
Smith gave his interview to The Journal 10 days before his death. He said he had assembled a group seeking to obtain emails Clinton deleted from the private server she used during her tenure as secretary of state. Smith implied that, when reaching out to several hacking groups, he was working with Flynn. Details on whether Flynn was involved in Smith's mission are not known. Smith told The Journal he knew Flynn but did not say whether Flynn was involved.
Smith's account is consistent with the findings from US investigators examining Russia's involvement in the 2016 US presidential election, according to sources cited by The Journal. Reports compiled by intelligence agencies say Russian hackers discussed ways to acquire emails from Clinton's server and give them to Flynn through an intermediary.
Clinton's emails were a major talking point for Trump and his surrogates during the 2016 presidential campaign, one that only escalated after the FBI recommended that prosecutors not bring charges against Clinton. |
When it comes to Alzheimer’s disease, scientists usually look to the brain as their first centre of attention. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) say that early clues regarding the progression of the disease can be found in the brain’s metabolism.
In very early stages of the disease, before any symptoms appear, metabolic processes are already beginning to change in the brain, says PhD candidate Shiri Stempler of TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine. Working with Professors Eytan Ruppin and Lior Wolf of TAU’s Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Stempler has developed predictor models that use metabolic information to pinpoint the progression of Alzheimer’s. These models were 90% accurate in predicting the stage of the disease.
Published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, the research is the first step towards identifying biomarkers that may ensure better detection and analysis of the disease at an early stage, all with a simple blood test. It could also lead to novel therapies.
“We hope that by studying metabolism, and the alterations to metabolism that occur in the very early stages of the disease, we can find new therapeutic strategies,” said Stempler.
Metabolism describes a set of chemical reactions in cells which sustain life by controlling processes such as growth and reproduction. It is also responsible for providing energy to the body. To delve deeper into the connection between metabolism, brain functioning and Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers used data collected from the hippocampus region of the brain. Controlling memory and learning, this region of the brain is damaged as Alzheimer’s progresses.
Based on the number of metabolic genes found in the neurons and surrounding tissue, they built a predictive model which relates abnormalities in these genes to the progression of the disease. Out of almost 1500 genes, the researchers were able to select 50 genes that were the most predictive of Alzheimer’s, says Stempler, noting that in Alzheimer’s patients these genes are either over- or under-expressed, meaning that there are either too many or too few.
When they compared the findings from these 50 genes among Alzheimer’s patients, healthy patients and primates, the researchers discovered that in all but the Alzheimer’s group, the number of the specific genes was tightly limited, with little difference in their number between individuals among each of the species. This implies that these genes are significant to normal brain functioning and their strict regulation in healthy patients is compromised by Alzheimer’s disease.
“The correlation between metabolic gene expression and cognitive score in Alzheimer’s patients is even higher than the correlation we see in medical literature between beta amyloid plaques - found in deposits in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients - and cognitive score, pointing to a strong association between cognitive decline and an altered metabolism,” Stempler said.
Next the researchers will try to identify biomarkers in the blood that are associated with these metabolic changes. They may lead to detection and information about the disease’s progression with an easy and non-invasive blood test. As their work advances, Stempler hopes to develop therapeutic strategies that are based around these alterations in the metabolic network to help Alzheimer’s patients, such as medications that can reintroduce strict regulation over gene expression. |
Share. A not-so-jolly green giant. A not-so-jolly green giant.
What's big, green, and pink? If you said XCOM 2's revamped Muton solider, you're correct! (We would also have accepted "a watermelon.")
According to the XCOM blog, the new Muton has also received the same dose of human DNA the Sectoid got. However, where an injection of mulched-up human made the Sectoid bigger and stronger, it seems to have made the already-buff Muton smarter. We're not clear on how being smarter will work in combat, but we do know that the 2035 version of the Muton is a strong melee combatant who can not only smack your troops down with his bayonet-equipped plasma gun, but has a chance to resist all melee damage and counter attack with a melee strike of his own. So you probably won't want to send your Ranger into close quarters with one of these guys, especially since XCOM 2's aliens are said to be treated more like minibosses than fodder. Note the smaller breathing implant, sleeker armor, and bigger neck.
XCOM 2 Muton 3 IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 03 Note the Gears of War-style bayonet. 01 OF 03 Note the Gears of War-style bayonet. XCOM 2 Muton Download Image Captions ESC
A little background: in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Mutons serve as the third tier of alien soldier after Sectiods and Thin Men. Their heavier armor, bigger plasma weapons, and alien grenades make them a major threat. Like their descendants in XCOM 2, the EU Muton has a suppression fire ability, plus Blood Call (a stat boost to nearby Muton allies) and Intimidate, which has a chance to panic any XCOM soldier who attacks him. There's a good chance we'll see some variation of Blood Call and Intimidate in the new generation as well.
Above: The XCOM: Enemy Unknown Muton.
Below: The original 1994 Muton says hello.
If you're keeping track, the current alien unit roster for XCOM 2 is:
Advent Trooper
Advent Captain
Advent Mech
Advent Turret
Sectoid
Viper
Berserker
Muton
And of course, here's everything you need to know about XCOM 2 from our month of IGN First coverage.
Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear all about how awesome PC gaming is, plus a healthy dose of random Simpsons references. |
It’s not April first is it? Oh, it’s actually May first. I wonder if that means that this news from Uber is real. Regardless, it’s absolutely hilarious.
Car rental service Uber is now letting you order a party on-demand with the press of a button and $100 spent. Once you order your party, an Uber SUV packed with a Mariachi band will show up at your doorstep. I’m not joking, this is real.
Here’s what Uber had to say about the May (Cindo de Mayo) promotion:
On Friday, May 4th we’ll have three SUVs in San Francisco transporting the Bay area’s premiere Mariachi bands along with Tres Agaves margarita mix and piñatas. Requesting your own fiesta is smoother than the most expensive Añejo – all you have to do is press the “Let’s Party” button. Consider this the ultimate Cinco de Mayo pre-game
Sorry folks, it’s in San Francisco only.
Along with the party, you’ll get a pinata and a bottle of margarita mix.
I can imagine a lot of people doing this just for the fun factor, and to see if the mariachi band will actually show up as advertised. Here’s a video to get you excited for ordering your party on-demand from Uber.
I could see this turning into a new business model for the company.
Read next: If DuckDuckGo has anything to say about it, the future of search will be hackable |
Here is our list of space policy-related events for the week of November 2 – 8, 2014 and any insight we can offer about them. Congress returns on November 12.
During the Week
News can be expected throughout the week on the October 28 Antares launch failure and the October 31 SpaceShipTwo (SS2) accident. Orbital Sciences Corporation is leading the Antares investigation and has been posting regular updates on its website. The National Transportation Safety Board (NSTB) is leading the SS2 investigation, where one of the two pilots died and the other is hospitalized. NTSB held two briefings yesterday (at 9:00 am and 8:00 pm Pacific Time), and a third is scheduled for tonight (Sunday) at 8:00 pm PT (11:00 pm ET). We will post information on any briefings that we learn about during the week on the calendar.
On the national scene, the biggest news in the coming week will be, of course, Tuesday’s mid-term elections. Republicans are expected to retain control of the House and could win control of the Senate as well, although some races are very close, legal challenges may by filed against some state voter registration laws or processes, and there is a chance there could be as many as four Independents in the Senate (there are two now), which could sway the balance of power depending on which party they choose to caucus with (the two incumbent Independents caucus with the Democrats). All of that makes prognostication especially difficult and could mean that the issue of which party controls the Senate may not be settled on Tuesday.
The most important thing is for EVERY ELIGIBLE VOTER TO GET OUT AND VOTE! YOUR VOTE DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
Lots of other interesting events are on tap, too. Certainly the most intriguing one is a panel discussion sponsored by the American Chemical Society and American University on Thursday on “The First and Final Frontiers: The Overlapping Technology Policies of Farming and Space Exploration.” The Washington Space Business Roundtable’s luncheon later that day also should be particularly interesting. Mark Sirangelo of Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) is the speaker. Between SNC’s lawsuit against the government over the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCAP) contract awards and this past week’s commercial space setbacks (though they did not involve SNC), Sirangelo’s take on the present and future of commercial space should be thought provoking. It’s a busy day. The ACS/AU event is from 10:00-11:00 am ET, NASA is having a briefing at KSC (watch on NASA TV) at 11:00 on the planned December launch of the Orion capsule on its Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), and the WSBR luncheon starts at 11:30.
On Saturday, NASA, in partnership with the University of Arizona, will hold the first of two “citizen forums” on the Asteroid Initiative. This first one is in Phoenix. The second, on November 15, is in Boston. People had to apply to participate in person and that process is closed; those chosen are being paid $100. Anyone else can participate online (no stipend), but must register.
Sunday, November 2
Monday, November 3
Monday-Tuesday, November 3-4
Tuesday, November 4
ELECTION DAY — DON’T FORGET TO VOTE
Wednesday-Thursday, November 5-6
NRC Space Studies Board, Beckman Center, Irvine, CA (some sessions are closed)
Thursday, November 6
Saturday, November 8 |
The Google Assistant is the one truly unique feature that Allo — one of Google’s many chat apps — has going for it, and today Google is making the feature even more prominent.
In an update to Allo for Android today, Google is placing a button to access the Assistant right in the little box where you type out a message. Previously, you had to type “@google” in order to call up the Assistant. Pressing the button has basically the same effect, but it’ll save time and, perhaps more importantly, highlight the feature for people who may not know it exists.
Also new: GIF search and animated emoji
The new button is meant for bringing the Google Assistant into chats with other people, where it’s able to do a number of different things, including looking up sports scores, finding nearby restaurants, pulling up maps, and just generally accessing information that Google is already really good at highlighting. The Assistant itself isn’t getting any new features today — just easier access in chats with other people.
Alongside the Assistant button, Google is adding two other new features to Allo today. One is the ability to search for GIFs, which you can do by pulling up Allo’s emoji suggestion box and swiping all the way to the end of it. Google recently added the ability to type “@lucky” followed by a search term to automatically pull up a GIF, but, speaking from experiencing with Slack’s Giphy search tool, inserting GIFs without previewing them can be a bad idea, so maybe use this new method instead.
Allo is also getting some giant animated emoji today that spring to life when you enlarge them with the app’s “shout” feature. It looks like just a handful are animated so far (some of the commonly used faces), but giant stickers and sticker-like-things are the best part of any chat app, so any new animation sounds fun.
The updates begin rolling out on Android today and are supposed to come to iOS “soon.” |
Consider me seriously and hopelessly addicted.
And please consider these bars an apology for my absence over here last week, too! It’s been an incredibly busy fortnight, what with a new kitten-shaped addition to the household (who I’m utterly obsessed with – follow me on Instagram if you want to see some of his antics!), lots of exciting recipes to come, and fun new projects I’m working on at the moment! I thought these delicious salted caramel maple pecan pie bars with their soft, buttery pecan shortbread base with a gorgeously tender crumb, the nutty, fudgy, crunchy mixture stacked precociously on top, and the crisp, crackled, caramelised salted caramel sauce the pecans are slathered in might just make up for it, right?!
I keep going back and forth about which part is my favourite…
Hint: it’s everything.
And if you’re ever in need of salted-caramel-covered pecans within five minutes (who isn’t?!), just make the filling recipe and leave it at that… it’s so addictive I could’ve (and might well have) eaten it by the spoonful straight from the pan! Side effects may include dreaming about them for days on end afterwards, but when it comes to said salted-caramel-covered pecans, I’d gladly take that risk…
This recipe makes twelve small, bite-sized bars for your (and your waistline’s!) sake, but feel free to double the recipe below, cut the bars into bigger pieces, or take them to a party or share them with friends.. if you have them lying about you might just (read: will) eat them all in a matter of minutes!
salted caramel maple pecan pie bars by Alessandra Peters Prep Time: 10 minutes Cook Time: 20 minutes 6067090 Ingredients (12 bars) For the Shortbread Crust 3/4 cup pecans
2 tbsp + 1 tsp coconut flour
1/4 cup arrowroot starch
pinch salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
3 tbsp coconut oil, melted
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp maple syrup For the Salted Caramel Pecan Filling 1 1/2 cups pecans, roughly chopped
2 tbsp full-fat coconut milk
1/2 tsp coarse sea salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/3 cup coconut oil
3/4 cup coconut palm sugar
1 tsp arrowroot starch
3 tbsp maple syrup
Instructions 1. Preheat the oven to 325F/160C. 2. To make the shortbread dough, place the pecans in a food processor and process until very fine, 60-90 seconds. The result should look like almond flour. Add in the remaining ingredients and pulse to combine. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and place in the fridge for 15-20 minutes, until firm. 3. Roll the dough out between two pieces of plastic wrap until it is 1/4 inch thick. Trim until it measures 5×5 inches, then transfer it to a lined 5×5 inch baking dish. Bake for 15 minutes, until golden. While it cools, make the filling. 4. To make the filling, spread the pecans on a baking tray and toast in the oven for 8 minutes, until fragrant. Remove from the oven, then place the remaining ingredients in a small saucepan over medium-high heat and whisk constantly for 3-4 minutes, until the sauce is thick, smooth, and golden. Fold in the pecan chunks, then pour the mixture over the shortbread crust. 5. Bake for another 15 minutes, then let cool for at least half an hour before cutting up into bars and enjoying! Store leftovers in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days. Powered by Recipage |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Palestinian protesters and Israeli police clash in the West Bank
More than 1,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails ended a mass hunger strike against detention conditions.
Israeli officials said the move - at the start of the holy month of Ramadan - came after an agreement to allow two family visits per month, not just one.
The action was led by Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader jailed by Israel for life for five murders.
Barghouti has been touted as a possible future successor to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Some 1,187 detainees observed the strike, according to Israel's prison service.
It began on 17 April, the annual Palestinian Prisoners Day, when Palestinians remember detained friends and relatives.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Barghouti (pictured in the poster) is among 7,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails
The issue of Palestinians held in Israeli jails is an ongoing source of tension between the two sides.
Palestinians regard the detainees as political prisoners. Many have been convicted of attacks against Israelis and other offences.
Others are detained under so-called Administrative Detention, which allows suspects to be held without charge for six-month intervals.
There were about 7,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails by the end of last year, according to Palestinian prisoners' groups. |
With the NBA offseason reaching a conclusion it's time to start thinking about next season. Vegas has released the Over/Under odds for every NBA team. Certain teams like the Warriors are obviously expected to win the most games. However, there's a few surprises mixed in that will create some interesting narratives to follow this season.
The Celtics are expected to lead the East in wins with an Over/Under set at 56.5 and the Cavaliers closely behind them at 53.5. The Spurs, Rockets, and Thunder are all expected to win 50 games this season and the 76ers are projected to take a major step forward in the weakened East. All odds are via the WestGate SportsBook
2017-18 NBA reg season wins
Atl 25.5
Bos 56.5
Brk 28.5
Cha 42.5
Chi 21.5
Cle 53.5
Dal 35.5
Den 45.5
Det 38.5
GS 67.5
Hou 55.5
Ind 31.5 — Jeff Sherman (@golfodds) August 29, 2017
2017-18 NBA reg season wins
LAC 43.5
LAL 33.5
Mem 37.5
Mia 43.5
Mil 47.5
Min 48.5
NO 39.5
NY 30.5
OKC 51.5
Orl 33.5
Phi 42.5
Phx 28.5 — Jeff Sherman (@golfodds) August 29, 2017
The biggest surprises are obviously Boston at 56.5 and Philadelphia at 42.5. The Celtics did finish last season with the most wins in the East, but that was at 53 wins. Next season, if the Kyrie Irving trade doesn't end up being rescinded, will be an entirely different team with only four returning players. 56 wins are high expectations for a group that's going to need some time to gel together.
The Sixers are a surprise, because teams don't typically go from a 20 win season to a 40 win. However, considering the weakened state of the East, and all the potential that exists on Philadelphia, there are certainly more dangerous odds on here such as the Heat at 43.5 and Thunder at 51.5. Those two are right around the range of where they finish and anybody going over or under on those two is likely going to be sweating it out to the very end of the year. |
Welcome to the 2016 edition of “Top Shelf Prospects”. As we go through the Summer of 2016 I will be featuring a team-by-team look at the top prospects in the NHL. I will follow the order of the first round of the NHL draft (as if there were no trades). You can find all the articles here. Since we had an extensive NHL Draft preview, I will not be reviewing the players who were drafted this year. There have been no games since then, and my reports on them will not have changed.
What I will be doing is linking you to those articles, as well as taking a look at prospects that were acquired before this year’s draft; their progress, and their chances of making the 2016-17 roster. I will also bring you one sleeper pick – a player who was either drafted in the 4th-round or later; or an undrafted free agent signing who I pick as my darkhorse to make the NHL. The cut-off for what is or isn’t a prospect is typically about 50 NHL games played or being 25 years old. These are not hard or fast rules though, and I may make some exceptions depending on the circumstances.
Ranking The Top NHL Affiliated Prospects: Part 1 (100-76)
With all thirty NHL teams reviewed its time to wrap up the series. In order to do this we will be releasing a number of wrap up pieces this week. Stay tuned for our organizational rankings, looking at the deepest and best prospect systems in the NHL, as well as our top 10 Calder Contenders. How are the Calder contenders different from the top prospects you ask? Well, our top 30 prospects are who we are picking to have the best careers, a Calder contender will be a prediction of who is going to have the best rookie season. NHL readiness, the situation inherited (linemates and opportunities) and the fact that the Calder is typically a very difficult award for a defenceman to win in recent years all play into this.
As for today, we bring you our selection for top NHL Prospects.
Rankings 100-76
Note that by clicking on the player name you will get a full report.
#100 Ian McCoshen, Florida Panthers
McCoshen is done with Boston College and moving to the pro game. While he is mainly a defensive defenceman, he has shown some signs of untapped offense, and potential two-way game.
#99 J.T. Compher, Colorado Avalanche
Compher had a massive season. He captained the Michigan Wolverines to the Big 10 title, and was a finalist for the Hobey Baker Award as the top player in college hockey. He also played for Team USA at the World Championships. He’s also headed to the pros this year.
#98 Madison Bowey, Washington Capitals
Bowey is an excellent puck mover with the ability to rush the puck or to make a strong first pass. He also has a cannon of a slap shot from the point. While he’s very good offensively, its the combination of that along with Bowey’s defensive abilities that make him a top quality prospect.
#97 Travis Dermott, Toronto Maple Leafs
Dermott’s biggest asset is his hockey sense. His positioning at both ends of the ice is extremely strong. He reads the play well, and picks the right times to pinch in at the blue line, to join the rush, or to look to step up and make a hit.
#96 Evgeni Svechnikov, Detroit Red Wings
Svechnikov has good size at 6’3″. He shows off an outstanding wrist shot and release. He also has an impressive snap shot and a very hard one-timer. When it comes to his shooting arsenal, Svechnikov has pro-ready skills. He needs to work on skating and his defensive game.
#95 Nikita Scherbak, Montreal Canadiens
Scherbak suffered an ankle injury in training camp last year, that really marred the start of his first pro season. When he finally did get in the lineup; he struggled with his skating. When healthy, Scherbak is a good skater, and very good stick handler who is able to make a wide variety of moves at top speed. He also has the ability to show some power in his game.
#94 Riley Tufte, Dallas Stars
The Stars first round pick, Tufte can become a valuable weapon in time, with a shot at being a top six forward. His size, skating, and skill with the puck are an intriguing combination for any team. Tufte has an excellent wrist shot and quick release. He also has a good snap shot and slap shot.
#93 Joel Eriksson-Ek, Minnesota Wild
Eriksson-Ek is a pure sniper with a tremendous wrist shot, and impressive snap shot. He is strong in the cycle game and extremely hard to knock off the puck. He is not afraid to battle in the corners and often comes out with loose pucks. Eriksson-Ek’s defensive game is also well developed.
#92 Ville Pokka, Chicago Blackhawks
Pokka plays a simple, but very effective game. He has great vision and hockey IQ which help him to quarterback the power play. A very good passer, Pokka can make effective tape to tape passes to teammates both from the blue line in the offensive zone and in his own zone to start the breakout.
#91 Sam Morin, Philadelphia Flyers
Listed at 6’7″, Morin is an imposing physical specimen at the back end. He plays a strong defensive game, using his size and physicality in his own zone. He may never be a huge scorer in the NHL, but there is some offence, and perhaps the potential to be one the second unit of the power play.
#90 Brady Skjei, New York Rangers
Skjei is a very good skater. He possesses excellent edge work and agility for a big man. He has very good mobility, balance, and makes quick pivots. This gives him the ability to play a strong two-way game.
#89 Hunter Shinkaruk, Calgary Flames
Shinkaruk is a quick and shifty skater. He has very good edge work, and strong lateral agility. He has a tremendous wrist shot and excellent release, particularly when coming in on a rush off the left wing. Not just a one trick pony, Shinkaruk also has very good play making skill and vision which makes him very difficult to defend.
#88 Justin Bailey, Buffalo Sabres
Bailey has the type of ideal size that NHL teams long for. He also has a tremendous arsenal of shots. His snap shot and wrist shot are both lethal and feature the type of hair trigger release that drives goalies nuts. His slap shot and one-timer are accurate and powerful. He has all the makings of a sniper. Bailey is also strong on the puck, and his good puck protection, balance, and ability to win board battles makes him strong in the cycle game.
#87 Domik Masin, Tampa Bay Lightning
Masin’s game has come a long way. Always known for his defensive skills, he has gotten better offensively each year. Masin was once only a defensive defender, but now makes strong, heads up passes, both out of his own end to start the rush and in the offensive zone as well. He has become more poised and confident with the puck on his stick as well. Masin has improved in these areas, but remains strong offensively.
#86 Jon Gillies, Calgary Flames
Injuries limited Jon Gillies in his first year as a professional. He played in just seven games for the AHL Stockton Heat. He was very good when he got on the ice, putting up a 2.31 goals against average and .920 save percentage. This follows a very good college career, including leading the Providence Friars to the 2014-15 National Championship and being named Frozen Four MVP. He is a big goalie who plays the butterfly style.
#85 German Rubtsov, Philadelphia Flyers
Rubtsov plays a strong two-way game, highlighted by his strong hockey sense. Offensively he makes smart plays with the puck, showing off good vision, and excellent anticipation of where his teammates will be. This makes him a very good playmaker. Rubtsov shows a real commitment to playing defensive hockey. He is often used as the Russian U18 Team’s top shot down centre, playing against other team’s top lines.
#84 Adrian Kempe, Los Angeles Kings
Kempe plays the game like a bull in a china shop. He drives the net hard, not caring who he has to bulldoze to get to the areas he wants to go. He is first in on the fore check, and just loves to punish defenders in the corners. Given his age and a need to fill out his frame, he is still remarkably effective in winning board battles at the AHL level.
#83 Nick Schmaltz, Chicago Blackhawks
Schmaltz was part of the “CBS line” that led the University of North Dakota to the National Championship this season. He put up 11 goals and 35 assists for 46 points in just 37 games. Schmaltz’s best assets are his hockey sense and ability to read the play. He seems to be one step ahead of other players on this ice. Couple this with with his great vision and play making skills in the offensive zone and it is easy to see how he has become an elite play maker in the NCAA. He’s now ready to start his pro career.
#82 Brendan Perlin, Arizona Coyotes
In the offensive zone, Perlini possesses very good hockey sense, good creativity and excellent vision to be a dynamic play maker with the puck on his stick. He has good stick handling, and the puck protection skills needed to extend plays and give his linemates time to get open. He is also very good in the cycle game, protecting the puck down low. While Perlini has great height, he could stand to put on more muscle and play a more physical game going forward.
#81 Kieffer Bellows, New York Islanders
Like his father, Kieffer Bellows is a pure sniper. He has a tremendous wrist shot and release, as well as an excellent one-timer. His arsenal also features a heavy snap-shot, and good back hand. Bellows also has the soft hands, and quick reflexes, to get deflections and to pounce on rebounds and score in tight. He is not afraid to get his nose dirty, battling for space in front of the net. Bellows is more of a physically punishing forward than his father was, as he is more than willing to throw big hits when he gets in on the forecheck.
#80 Nikolay Goldobin, San Jose Sharks
Goldobin has outstanding offensive skill; there is no doubt about that. He knows how to put up points, and has all the tools to do so. He can stickhandle in a phone booth. His wide array of moves can leave defenders spinning. He also has a killer wrist shot, and an outstanding release. Goldobin also has a very effective one-timer. Add to all of this great hockey sense and the ability to find holes in the defense. However, Goldobin needs to add strength. He can be knocked off the puck by bigger and stronger players. He must also round out his defensive game.
#79 Daniel Sprong, Pittsburgh Penguins
Sprong is a pure sniper. He is dangerous every time he touches the puck, and loves to shoot. In fact there are times when he might get too focused on taking the shot instead of looking for a teammate. Don’t get the wrong impression though, Sprong also has excellent passing ability and can thread the needle and play the role of playmaker if a linemate has an opportunity. He just needs to work on doing it a little more often. Sprong must get stronger to win board battles. He has high hockey IQ and the ability to find open spots in the defence to set himself up to unleash that wrist shot or a strong one-timer.
#78 Luke Kunin, Minnesota Wild
Kunin’s release is quick and his shot is heavy, fooling goaltenders. He can also score goals in front of the net, with quick hands to pounce on rebounds, and the hand-eye co-ordination to tip-in shots. Kunin shows the stick handling ability to protect the puck, extend plays and work in the cycle game. Kunin also has the vision and passing skills to set up others, making tape-to-tape passes when he finds a linemate open. He plays an intense game getting involved in board battles and in front of the net. He could stand to improve his strength, and add muscle to his frame, this would make him more effective in the cycle game, in board battles, and give even more power to his shot. Kunin has the versatility to play both centre and on the wing.
#77 Travis Konecny, Philadelphia Flyers
Travis Konecny has excellent speed, and tremendous acceleration. He utilizes it both on the rush, and to be a cannonball on the fore check. He has good balance and is strong on his skates. This helps him to to grind in the corners, work in the cycle game, or fight through checks to get to the front of the net. His speed must be respected. He takes defenders wide and cut to the net. This gives him the ability to slow up quickly and create shooting or passing lanes. Add to this great vision and passing ability and Konecny is the type of player who can make his linemates better.
#76 Julien Gauthier, Carolina Hurricanes
At 6’4″, Julien Gauthier is a power forward prospect with the size and the strength to dominate the game down low. Gauthier throws big hits on the forecheck, protects the puck on the cycle, takes the puck to the front of the net, and wins battles with opposing defenders. Gauthier is a great skater for a big man with very good top end speed as well as the power to fight through checks, or bowl over a defender on the way to the net. He can score goals in a variety of ways, whether that be in tight to the net, or with an excellent shot. His defensive game is surprisingly good for his age.
Check Out Prospects Ranked 75-51.
Main Photo: |
If you listen closely, you’ll find that the earth is full of sounds. Some are things that you hear every day, some are truly remarkable and some sounds hail from origins completely unknown. What follows here is a list of “sonic mysteries” for your pleasure – many of them include audio.
1. The Bloop
At various times during the summer of 1997, an ultra-low frequency sound that rose rapidly in frequency over about one minute was detected at 50 degrees S, 100 degrees W. The sound was detected by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array (which was U.S. Navy equipment originally designed to detect Soviet submarines), and was loud enough to be heard on multiple sensors, up to 5000km apart.
Scientists dubbed it the “Bloop” (not to be confused with the “Boing”.)
Although the sound matches the profile of a living animal, it is much louder than any known creature can produce. Any creature that could produce such a sound would have to be many times larger than the largest whale.
You can hear a very short recording of the bloop sound here. The recording is short because it’s been sped up 16x to make it audible to you and I.
Some people link the Bloop to Cthulhu, a mythical creature from an H.P. Lovecraft story as the noise originated from an area near the mythical sunken city of R’lyeh from the same story.
The Bloop also makes an appearance in the game promoting the movie Cloverfield, and was also seen in the movie “The Loch”, coming from a giant eel.
A 2001 album by Dntel (“Life is full of possibilities”) uses the bloop as a repeating sample through the piece.
The actual origination of the sound is not known and remains a mystery to this day although it is suspected to be biological in origin.
2. The Hum
The hum is the name of a phenomenon that is generally given to mysterious low frequency humming or rumbling. It is typically heard by many people at a time (but not others), and can come and go or it can be constant. There are many famous Hums, most notably the Taos Hum and the Bristol Hum.
The Hum is usually difficult to record, and it’s often difficult to localize the source of the hum (perhaps due to the low frequency, as low frequency sounds are harder to localize).
Hums have been detected (or reported) all over the world, but most appear in Europe and South America. The Hum is more often heard indoors, and some people hear it more faintly than others. Here is a recording of the Auckland Hum (UPDATE: file no longer available).
The Taos Hum has been featured on the X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries. The source of some Hums have been identified – for example, a pair of fans in a cooling tower at a DaimlerChrysler casting plant was emitting a 36 Hz tone that caused a Hum over the entire city of Kokomo, Indiana. Other Hums remain a mystery. Some possible explanations Include geological events, pulsed microwaves and electromagnetic waves from meteors. Tinnitus might explain some cases as well.
A creditable scientific hypothesis from 2005 suggests the Hum is caused by the tensor tympani muscle (a muscle in the inner ear) trembling in the eardrums of individuals. on the eardrums of affected individuals by the tensor tympani muscle trembling. There is a website by the “Interest Group for Research of the Hum Nuisance” (unfortunately in German) describing this theory.
3.The Hell Hole
You can decide for yourself on this one. More than forty years ago, researchers in the Soviet Union began an ambitious drilling project whose goal was to penetrate the Earth’s upper crust and sample the warm, mysterious area where the crust and mantle intermingle the Mohorovic discontinuity, or “Moho.”
This type of drilling was completely new and the technology didn’t exist to go that deep, so the Russians had to invent a completely new way of drilling to be able to do it. Unfortunately, the Russians never reached their goal, and many of the Earth’s secrets were left undiscovered, however The Kola Superdeep Borehole is still a scientifically useful site, and research there is ongoing.
When drilling stopped in 1994, the hole was over seven miles deep, making it by far the deepest hole ever drilled by humans. The last of the cores to be plucked from from the borehole was dated to be about 2.7 billion years old. Although the Kona hole was the deepest hole ever drilled, seven miles was still very short of the 20-80 km required to penetrate the earth’s crust.
Like all newfangled science stories, some Genesis freaks have decided that the intent of the project was not real scientific research as they were told – rather this simple experiment was actually an attempt to drill to hell – and that they were successful! The story has, and still does, made its rounds on Christian circles via tracts, preaching and radio broadcasts.
The story varies, but here are the basics:
1. After going only a few miles down, the drill began to spin wildly.
2. A Doctor Azzacov is quoted as stating authoritatively that it has been shown that the earth is hollow.
3. Immensely high temperatures were experienced, much higher than expected at that depth. Usually 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,100 degrees Celsius is quoted.
4. Microphones were lowered into the hole (to listen to the earth’s movement). Human screams were heard hordes of tortured souls.
5. Many of the scientists have quit the project in fear and/or have become total nervous wrecks.
Of course, these “facts” are not quite true:
a) If the earth was largely hollow, it would clearly be evident from seismic studies, as well as from orbital/gravitational considerations, but this is not the case.
b) Far from being a fiery inferno, the temperature increased by one degree Celsius every 100 meters to 3,000 meters, then by 2.5 degrees every 100 meters thereafter. At 10,000 meters, it was only 180 degrees.
The story of course is based on a factual borehole, and creation geologists have had a field day with the shaky “facts” – using the story to prove that yes, hell exists and they’ve been right all along.
Here’s the “quote” that has been making it’s way through evangelical circles:
We lowered a microphone, designed to detect the sounds of plate movements down the shaft. But instead of plate movements we heard a human voice screaming in pain! At first we thought the sound was coming from our own equipment. But when we made adjustments our worst suspicions were confirmed. The screams weren’t those of a single human, they were the screams of millions of humans!
Oh, you wanted to HEAR the screams from hell? But of course! Listen to it here:
4. Mistpouffers
[audio:http://www.noiseaddicts.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/hellscreams.mp3|titles=sounds]
In some places in the world, people have reported long successions of enormously loud booming noises. They are called different things in different areas of the world – Guns of the Seneca (near Seneca Lake in New York), Barisal guns (in Bangladesh), uminari (in Japan), fog guns, lake guns, and many other terms. These terms all describe a sound or sounds that resemble distant cannon fire, and are usually heard near large bodies of water. Often times they are accompanied by a long rumble that is strong enough to shake plates and pictures.
There have been many proposed theories about where these sounds come from, however most are not very satisfying. Since these sounds have been reported for centuries means that the most obvious explanation, artillery tests, are pretty much ruled out. Earthquakes and volcanoes could produce these sounds and rumbles, however the sounds have not been directly connected to any seismic activity, which is fairly well measured.
Some have speculated that undersea activity (perhaps seismic) creates great bubbles of released gas which floats to the surface and creates huge “ocean farts”, however it is a stretch to think that these bubbles could produce a sound strong enough to create the distant-gunfire sound of Mistpouffers. Meteorite impacts have also been bandied about as a possible explanation (see here for actual meteor sounds) as have tidal waves.
It has also been speculated that these noises happen everywhere and that ambient noise from communities simply make them harder to hear. Sound travels farther over water than over land, and so the sounds are more easily heard in remote, quiet areas close to bodies of water.
Of course the latest theory is rather boring – that the sounds are made by thunder or other explosions very far away, and the sounds simply travels a very, very long way because atmospheric and topographic conditions happen to be “just so”. This would explain why no storms or other activity are present in the area and yet the sounds are still heard.
Some people still believe that the sounds are made from alien spacecraft, God, or Thor’s hammer banging on nails while trying to fix the roof over the heavens. However there is another theory:
A Web page describing the many tourist attractions of the Cayuga Lake area mentions the Guns of the Seneca it also says. At the southern end, you’ll find the booming city of Ithacaa Well, that it. What people are hearing is obviously the sound of Ithaca booming.
5. Slow Down
Slow down was recorded in the Pacific Ocean on May 19,1997. It was recorded by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration located around 15 degrees S 115, degrees W.
It is called the Slow Down because the sound slowly decreases in frequency over the span of about 7 minutes. It was detected using the same hydrophone array as the Bloop, and was loud enough to be detected on multiple sensors 2000km apart.
Here is a recording of the sound, sped up by 16 times. Source: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/sounds/noise97139.wav
Some people believe that this sound has been made by a giant squid or other large sea creature, however this theory doesn’t stand up to scientific reason, as squids likely not have the capability of producing these sounds.
The real source of the Slow Down sound remains completely unknown. This signal and anything like it has not been heard before or since.
6. The WOW!
No discussion of mysterious sounds would be complete without this one, although it’s not a sound from earth – it’s from space. You can also debate whether or not it’s actually technically a sound at all, but I’m presenting it here just because it’s interesting.
On August 15, 1977 a SETI scientist working at the Big Ear radio telescope of the Ohio State University noticed a very strong signal that lasted for 72 seconds. The type of signal resembled signals that are non-terrestrial and non-solar system in origin.
Because the signal was so remarkable, The scientists circled the data on the computer printout and wrote the word “WOW!” beside it. Ever since then, it’s been called the “Wow!” signal.
Since the signal was discovered, scientists from all over have tried to locate it again, however it has never been seen since.
It has been theorized by some people that the signal may have come from extraterrestrial life, however others remain skeptical.
More information on the Wow can be found here by the person who discovered it.
So that’s it for earth sounds.
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A cursory listen to Arular makes one wonder how it could generate so much heated, in-depth talk, as it did well before its official release. This is very direct and physical party music, with lots of slang-filled phrasings that might not have any more meaning than "The roof is on fire!" or "Dizzouble dizzutch!" to Americans. It's music that is conducive to dancing or doing other carefree things in the sunshine, rather than what you should hear most often through feeble computer speakers in dimly lit rooms. So why bother discussing it at all? Well, below the surface is a lot more than anyone's basic idea of a good time. The blend of styles -- a dense, often chaotic collage of garage from the U.K., dancehall from Jamaica, crunk from the Dirty South, electro and hardcore rap from New York, and glints of a few others -- is unique enough to baffle anyone who dares categorize it. Beats crack concrete in whomping blasts and scramble senses in exotic patterns; flurries of percussive noise, synthetic handclaps, and synth jabs add chaos; exuberant vocals are delivered in a manner that will be frequently unintelligible to a lot of ears. More importantly, once all the layers of rhythm and accents are peeled away, you'll hear that Maya Arulpragasam -- the London-based woman of Sri Lankan origin who, along with a host of fellow producers, is behind the album -- has a lot more on her mind and in her past than fun, even when she's only alluding to the violence and strife her people have endured. The images that adorn the cover of the album aren't present merely for the sake of design, either; the tanks aren't a nod to the No Limit label. (Enter 10,000-word history of pre-tsunami Sri Lanka here.) The one key definite about Arular is that it's the best kind of pop album imaginable. It can be enjoyed on a purely physical level, and it also carries the potential to adjust your world view. |
Support for the UK Independence Party remains steady despite many having previously claimed that Nigel Farage’s party would fall back to smaller support levels on the run up to the UK General Election.
But nine months away from the vote, UKIP’s support is scarcely ebbing back to pre-2012 levels. Instead, according to academic Matthew Goodwin, author of Revolt on the Right, UKIP’s vote is holding up at around 12 percent. This is likely to increase again as the election draws closer.
Writing on his blog yesterday, Goodwin said:
“Earlier in the year one of the popular assumptions in the Westminster village was that support for Ukip would crash immediately after the European Parliament elections. Ukip is a modern day poujadist movement, many argued; it is nothing more than a flash-in-the-pan. “I have long argued that it is not. And there is now mounting evidence to suggest that the picture might indeed be far more complex. For example, we have already drawn on some new data from the British Election Study to show how a majority of those who voted for Ukip at the recent European Parliament elections intend to stay loyal to the party at the 2015 general election. But now a similar picture can be seen in YouGov’s latest update to their domestic election voting intention tracker. “This came out today and can be accessed right here . The headline message is clear: Nigel Farage and UKIP averaged 12% in the first three months of 2014, then 13% in April, 14% in May and June, and 12% in July. Far from crashing, support has actually only dropped by two points to return to the (then-record) levels of support in the pre-European election period; and 12% is more than enough for this insurgent party to do damage in 2015.
And Goodwin isn’t the only one to realise what damage UKIP could do to the Conservative Party’s chances. Earlier this week Labour insiders claimed that if Farage’s party gets over 9 percent of the vote next May, it could ensure Labour’s Ed Miliband the keys to 10 Downing Street.
The Tories are evidently rattled, as the Prime Minister recently shuffled key proponents of European institutions out of his Cabinet, and has become increasingly concerned by the topic of immigration – one of UKIP’s strongest cards. |
The most affordable 2015 WRX money can buy costs $26,295 without taking into account the $795 destination charges ($945 in Alaska). The hotter 2015 WRX STI starts at $34,495 while a limited-run WRX STI Launch Edition kicks off at 37,395 USD and will be produced in only 1,000 examples. The latter is distinguished by a WR Blue Pearl exterior paint, blue cabin highlights, standard keyless access & start system, along with an STI short-throw shifter for the 6-speed manual gearbox.
To refresh your memory, the Subaru WRX is powered by a 4-cylinder, 2.0-liter turbo boxer engine rated at 268 bhp (200 kW) and 258 lb-ft (349 Nm) of torque. It works with a standard 6-speed manual gearbox or an optional Sport Lineartronic CVT. Pay more for the STI version and Subaru rewards you with a larger 4-cylinder, 2.5-liter turbocharged boxer engine outputting 305 bhp (227 kW) and 290 lb-ft (393 Nm). It should be specified the more potent version comes only with a six-speed manual 'box.
Both the 2015 WRX and WRX STI along with the Launch Edition will arrive in Subaru's dealerships this April.
Further details and full pricing info can be obtained by accessing the press release area below. |
On the afternoon of September 18, 1915, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States and a widower, wrote a brief note that he knew might change the rest of his life. The note, sent by messenger, was for Edith Boiling Galt, to whom he was secretly engaged. The President asked her to cancel her plans to have dinner that evening at the White House, and to allow him the unusual liberty of coming to her home to discuss a matter of grave importance. Wilson had decided he must tell her, at whatever cost to their relationship, about a love affair with another woman.
During the eight years that spanned his presidency of Princeton University, his governorship of New Jersey, and a part of his first term as President of the United States, Wilson had written more than two hundred intimate letters to this woman. During seven of those years he was a married man. Her name was Mary Allen Hulbert; she was beautiful, witty and engaging, and her replies to Wilson’s frequent outpourings were apparently so incriminating that most of them were destroyed or have otherwise disappeared. Who may have destroyed them continues to be a subject of speculation among Wilson scholars. Did Wilson himself dispose of them before his marriage to Edith Galt? Or did they disappear after the decidedly possessive Edith Wilson, sole executor of her husband’s estate, took charge of Wilson’s personal papers at his death in 1924? The few extant Hulbert-to-Wilson letters and most of his to her are now being published for the first time in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson .
In any case, Wilson began writing to Mary Hulbert in February, 1907, when he first met her at the end of a midwinter vacation that he spent without his wife in Bermuda. She was forty-four and he fifty years of age. In January, 1908, resting again alone for a month in Bermuda, Wilson found Mary Hulbert Peck (her legal name at that time) to be a constant and delightful companion. During the second Bermuda vacation he started a note to her, in shorthand, that begins, “My precious one, my beloved Mary.” If, indeed, Wilson completed that letter, it may have been among those of his that allegedly were destroyed.
After 1908, the friendship deepened, becoming most intense during the period of his bitter academic controversy at Princeton University. Wilson had served as an exceedingly popular college president from 1902 to 1906; the next, and last four, years as Princeton’s head were marked by continual acrimony that culminated in the submission of his resignation to the board of trustees in October, 1910. In that year his letters to Mary were particularly frequent and intimate; they often began, “Dearest Friend,” and closed “with infinite tenderness.”
Mary Hulbert came into Wilson’s life at a time not only of professional unrest but of personal anguish. His wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, entered a period of marked depression lasting from 1906 to about 1910. Ellen’s youngest brother, Edward Axson, who was close to being the son that she and Woodrow never had, was drowned with his wife and infant son in a freak carriage accident in 1905. Another brother, Stockton Axson, a professor of English at Princeton University, was incapacitated most of that academic year with a nervous breakdown, and in May, 1906, Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke. As Ellen’s world collapsed around her, she encouraged her husband’s friendship with Mary Hulbert, a woman who was able to divert and entertain.
While Wilson’s life in the academic world was being uprooted, Mary Hulbert was experiencing traumas of her own. Late in 1909, with moral support and encouragement from Wilson, she separated from her second husband, an affluent New England woolen manufacturer, Thomas Dowse Peck, and moved from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to New York City. She shared an apartment with her mother and her son, Allen Schoolcraft Hulbert. Allen was the only child of Mary’s first marriage, a happy one that had ended when Mary’s husband, mining engineer Thomas Harbach Hulbert, died as a result of an accident. In December, 1890, perhaps overpersuaded by relatives, she had married Peck more as a matter of expediency than affection. Bermuda had been a winter haven for her since 1892.
Now that Mary Hulbert was in New York, Wilson saw and telephoned her frequently. He and Ellen sometimes joined Mary at some event, such as an Isadora Duncan recital they attended together. For reasons not apparent, but perhaps legal or financial, Mary was unable to go to Bermuda in the winter of 1910. Wilson went for a third time by himself in February to what he now regarded as his magic island. Aboard the S.S. Oceana after he had just seen Mary in New York, he wrote her that “Here I am—sad, lonely, homesick, friendsick.… God Bless You!”
Thus began a series of exchanges that are unique in that both sides of the correspondence have survived.
Mary wrote after getting his shipboard note: “Before I write another word, I want to tell you—best beloved—of a small habit you have, which may cause you to be misjudged. You will laugh when you hear it. Do not leave your spoon in your cup when you drink your tea. It’s a crime in the eyes of some, no less. You do not mind my telling you? I would not care if you lapped it up with your tongue. The king can do no wrong. … Write me—write me—I miss you and am your devoted friend.”
The letters flew back and forth every few days. “I did not know how unhappy the attacks upon me by the Princeton men had made me till I got off by myself,” he wrote on his arrival in Hamilton. “I am quite ashamed to find how much it has affected me. But I shall be all right before I write again—when I have got used to this friendless island and have ceased to be made unhappy by its haunting associations.… The place is infinitely bright and sweet and attractive … and at every turn I am reminded of things unspeakably sweet and reassuring. … It is a dear place! I shall love it all my life—as one of the places for me enchanted, filled with poetry and the eager pulses of life.…”
Wilson asked in a letter four days later, “Why have you taken such complete possession of Bermuda?” He said that he could not disassociate any part of it from her, that he met some memory of her at every turn, and that he was lonely wherever he went because she was not there. “You really must come down to relieve me,” he pleaded.
He made a sentimental journey to Shoreby (Mary’s home in Bermuda) and took tea with her friends the Parrishes, who were living in her house. Wilson sat, keeping a gay front, yet sad at heart. “Mrs. P. sat in your hammock,” he wrote. “I sat and thought one thing and said another. It was ghastly. I came away exhausted. …” He hoped he did not make Mary sad with his down-hearted letter, for it was really a way, a very deep, genuine way, of speaking his affection for an absent friend whose “beauty, charm, companionship, sympathy, quick comprehension and largesse of affection will always be the chief and most perfect thing that Bermuda stands for in my thought.… I am, with infinite tenderness.…”
On the same day Mary was thinking of him and writing:
“I know what it is to walk to the South Shore alone—but did you not know I was with you all the way? You see—I natter myself—and think you desired no other companion. Does the bougainvillia fling itself over the cottage as of old? Why, why can I not be there—to fling myself where I would!
“Of course , you feel the hurt of things said and done and you may have more to bear, but you have not that hardest thing—regret at having been untrue to yourself and to your ideals.… You are an adorable person—and I count it the greatest honor and happiness and privilege of my life that you call me friend.… I miss you horribly —woefully. And it’s even worse than I feared to have you so far away. Enjoy Bermuda for us both. Rest, and come back as soon as you can—to this hateful place. I hope you will meet and enjoy my friends there, but please, do not be too nice to the lady who dislikes me because of you. I’m jealous!”
Wilson wrote that he had found “the lady” (Mrs. Charles Massy Mathew) beautiful and charming, but what he enjoyed most was the part of their conversation about Mary.
A day later, the steamer was in and brought another letter from Mary for which Wilson blessed her. “Your affection seems in some way to restore my tone, to set the courses of my blood straight again, and give me a strange mastery of myself in the midst of distressing circumstances. God was very good to me to send me such a friend, so perfectly satisfying and delightful, so delectable .…” In return, he hoped she would accept “as much as you are willing to take from your devoted friend, Woodrow Wilson.”
He succeeded in making Mary terribly homesick for “the sweet airs, the blue sea, the bright skies, the life I love —and with you there.” She was glad he missed her, but more glad that he was amused and entertained so he could forget Princeton. She was entertaining frequently in New York, and evenings found her tired. “I give so much of myself to people who love me,” she reminded him. “I can never learn indifference or restraint.”
Wilson was saddened that he had made his “dearest, sweetest friend” homesick for the island. If he could only make her realize that there were people there who loved her. “Admiration does not satisfy or give happiness, but love does. … You are a great person, and whatever anyone feels about you they feel deeply and intensely,” he assured her. As for his missing her, he had a sense of loneliness from morning to night because she was not there.
She responded, reiterating what a comfort he was and what a warm, beautiful glow the thought of him brought to her heart. She was glad that the lovely Mrs. M. could not crowd her out of his heart. But she did envy the lady two things—the sight of Wilson, and her youth. But she would not be willing to turn the clock back, she said, nor to give up the knowledge gained in her hard fight (for freedom). Without it, she might not have found Wilson. She was busy every moment, but nothing seemed to matter much because he was not there. At a Boston Symphony concert in Carnegie Hall, she had heard one thing so exquisite that it was hardly of this earth—Rachmaninoff’s The Isle of Death .… “It gives one thrills and a lump in the throat, then a wonderful calm and peace—like the stars at night,” she wrote. It was as if one were enfolded by strong tender arms—and lifted above all the petty fret and jangle of the day. She could hardly bear it that she was not there in Bermuda with him. She had not suspected how hard it would be, but the worst was now over.
Wilson wrote on February 28 that he was coming home on the next steamer. “Heaven send the good old Bermudian [to] get me in at such time as will enable me to see my dear, dear friend before I must start for Princeton. It would be heartbreaking to have to wait still longer, when my thought has been waiting, waiting, waiting for the happy moment when I should be in your presence again and have one of the hours with you that mean so much to me!”
Just the night before, he wrote, he had had dinner in the little cottage with the bougainvillia. … All his “pulses throbbed” as he entered and lingered. “It seemed to me a mere romance to be in it, after all the thoughts I had had of it, and the peculiar associations. If you could have been there it would have been perfect.…” In a sense he had been with her ever since he had set foot on “these delectable isles,” which to him “contain nothing, nobody but you. I am with you in imagination all the time, and it is beyond measure delightful: the real loneliness of it is sweet as well as sad. God bless you and keep you, and give you as much happiness as you have given me!”
He sailed on March 5, but the day before leaving he penned a few more lines, describing the “eagerness that fairly bounds within me to see my beloved Friend.”
Whether or not he satisfied his bounding eagerness to see Mary on his return is unknown, but many subsequent meetings are documented. Often he was in New York, but Mary also made several visits to Princeton, and later to Trenton and Sea Girt (the summer gubernatorial residence) during Wilson’s term as New Jersey governor. Shortly after one of her journeys to Princeton, Wilson wrote to her on her forty-eighth birthday:
“Princeton, New Jersey, 26 May, 1910
Dearest Friend,
Many, many happy—very happy-returns of this day! May you be as glad that it happened as those are who have been privileged to know and love you. It is a very happy circumstance for them that you were born into this workaday world, with all your wit and charm and vivacious sense.… You brought a sort of vivid life with you that is of the rarest kind, because it is communicable: other people partake of it when they are with you, and feel the lack of it when you are away—and never lose the consciousness of you as a delightful fact—a force of which they are always conscious—in their lives. If you are not happy and grateful on your birth-day, they are: if you forget what luck and good fun it was that you should be born into the world, they do not. You are a person , and there are very few real persons in the world. … I imagine I must have felt in some way on the twenty-sixth of May in my sixth year that the day was a specially delightful one, when a youngster must be very gay, and that day, if no other, must have made those about me notice and love me—and ask ‘What makes the child so gay?’ Intimations, not of immortality, but of something immortal that was to come into my life some day in a soft southern isle! Thank you for coming and for looking me up in your forty-fifth year! I shall never cease to be your debtor and
Your devoted friend,
Woodrow Wilson.”
Through turmoil and travels, and despite unending personal and political demands, Wilson’s letters to Mary poured out. He shared with her long, subjective revelations of his reaction to people and political events; he wrote of family activities and of his own future aspirations, often worrying through various issues with her. Again and again he repeated how he missed her, how constantly he thought of her, and he pleaded for fuller and more frequent letters. When Wilson had moments of self-doubt, Mary’s reassurance helped to sustain him—and he did the same for her. She thanked God for making him “so fine—so brave—so true,” and if he did not win his various moral and political battles (in New Jersey) it was but “a way… to greater things.” And later she wrote Wilson, “You are more wonderful to me every day, so wonderful as to seem not quite human.” All of these aspects of the relationship were compelling; but none more so than the fact that with Mary, Wilson could always laugh and relax—”feel freed.”
Rumors linking Wilson with Mary circulated during the 1912 presidential campaign, and when Mary sued Thomas Peck for divorce late in 1911, the item was reported on the front page of the New York Times . Perhaps to calm the gossip, Ellen Wilson wrote Mary a charming note soon after the inauguration in March, 1913, inviting her to be one of their first White House guests. As Chief Executive, Wilson still managed to find time for almost weekly letters to his Dearest Friend even up until the time of Ellen Axson Wilson’s death (from Bright’s disease) on August 6, 1914. On that day he wrote Mary, “Of course you know what has happened to me; but I wanted you to know direct from me. God has stricken me beyond what I can bear.”
Mary’s note to him was already en route: “It seems incredible,” she wrote, “that this terrible thing has come to you now , when you need that sweet love to help you in this terrible time.”
The next few months were a period of deep despair in Wilson’s life: he virtually lost his will to live. Irrespective of his effusive relationship with Mary Hulbert, Ellen had always had first claim on his affections. He found some consolation in continued correspondence with Mary and in helping her prepare articles on domestic matters for the Ladies’ Home Journal . After rewriting one of her manuscripts, he offered to have it typed at the White House. (She declined.) In response to her then precarious financial situation, he lent her six hundred dollars which by his own choice he never collected. In early September, 1915, as a way of further help, he purchased mortgages on some Bronx property that she owned, sending her a check for seventy-five hundred dollars. Meanwhile, in July, 1915, Mary had gone to California to live with her son. Thereafter, while her letters went with regularity to the President, he fell silent, except for a brief message accompanying the check.
Mary Hulbert had no inkling, of course, that Wilson had met (probably March 20, 1915) and fallen head over heels in love with a well-bred Washington widow and former Virginian, Edith Boiling Galt, sixteen years Wilson’s junior. When a note from Wilson reached Mary early in October, 1915, telling her of his engagement “before the public announcement is made,” she had already read about it in the California papers. (That she was offended by the engagement for both Ellen’s sake and her own is suggested by a note she wrote on the envelope containing this letter: “How could he so soon?”) She summoned the courage to answer him:
(ca. Oct. 11, 1915)
“Dearest Friend,
I have kissed the cross. We are very glad you have found happiness and that you had time to think of us in the midst of it. I need not tell you again that you have been the greatest, most enobling [sic] influence in my life. You helped me to keep my soul alive and I am grateful. I hope you will have the happiness that I have missed. I can not wish you greater. We are well, and both working at the business that your friendly purchase of the mortgages made it possible for us to embark upon. … She is very beautiful and sometime perhaps I may meet her. I wish you had told me before, for your letter was only mailed the 4th and the newspapers had already published the fact. The cold peace of utter renunciation is about me, and the shell that is M.A.H. still functions. It is rather lonely, not even an acquaintanceship to make the air vibrate with the coming warmth, perhaps of friendship. God alone knows—and you—partly, the real woman Mary Hulbert, all her hopes and joys, and fears, and mistakes. I shall not write you again this intimately but must this once.… Write me sometime, the brotherly letters that will make my pathway a bit brighter. And believe me ever
Your friend,
Mary Allen Hulbert.”
She added a postscript: “This is rather a whine but it is the best I can do—now. God bless you!”
Edith Galt and Woodrow Wilson were married on December 18, 1915, at her Washington home. To an excited public and press and to Mary Hulbert as well the romance had all the appearance of an ideal and orderly development. Behind the scenes, however, Wilson’s friendship and correspondence with Mary Hulbert had given rise to a false story that almost caused Mrs. Galt to break the engagement. The story (that Mary was showing Wilson’s letters and “doing him much harm”) was concocted among his political allies who feared that an engagement, and most certainly a marriage, so soon after Ellen Wilson’s death, would undermine Wilson’s chances at re-election in 1916. When the story reached Wilson (through his son-in-law, William G. McAdoo) he still trusted Mary Hulbert, but he was worried about the gossipmongers. Rather than risk the possibility of insidious rumors reaching Edith Galt, he decided to tell her all about “Woodrow Wilson and Mary Hulbert.”
On Saturday afternoon, September 18, 1915, when Edith received Wilson’s note asking that he be allowed to come to her home to discuss an important matter, she was disturbed that any new problem should be weighing heavily on the President. Wanting only to listen and be helpful, she was prepared for almost anything except what Wilson told her: that he had something in his past which he now regarded as a brief period of madness, an episode of foolishness on his part that he had since despised and regretted. He confessed that he felt he was coming to her tarnished and unworthy.
That his confession was wrenchingly emotional we know because of the torrent of letters exchanged between them during the next week. But by Edith Wilson’s express stipulation-made many years later when she turned over her husband’s papers to the Library of Congress—these letters may not be quoted directly until they are published in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson in l980 or l981.
Edith long since had lost her heart to Wilson. She had seen him as almost godlike, feeling that the air around him was charged with a purity that made her a better person for having breathed it. His confession of September 18 abruptly shattered the idol.
As she listened that evening she was stunned and hurt, as she wrote him later. Nevertheless, she collected herself sufficiently to assure Wilson of her love before he returned to the White House at 11:00 P.M. Yet she still needed time to weigh her choices. She spent the rest of the night sitting by her window wrestling not only with her own future but with that of the President of the United States. At dawn she wrote a letter to him that probably was delivered while Wilson was attending worship at the Central Presbyterian Church. At 7:20 that same morning he had been at his desk writing to her of his night of turmoil.
Edith, a woman of strong emotions and strong mind, had tested the quality of her love for Woodrow Wilson and had found it equal to the blow. She wrote him that she would forget the idol and superman created by her blind adoration; that she could and would love trustingly, and with understanding, Wilson the tender human being. For the brief time that she had faltered, had even considered deserting him, Edith begged his forgiveness.
The President was unspeakably happy. Not only was Edith’s love invincible, but he explained in reply that he had unburdened himself of a secret that had caused him to be dominated by fear of discovery. Now he had been set free. The matter had also been resolved for Wilson the Calvinist: he had sinned, and there is evidence that he felt he had been punished by Ellen Wilson’s death. He had repented; he had implored forgiveness in like measure to his punishment; the gift of Edith was overwhelming proof of God’s forgiveness. Moreover, he told Edith that he had tried to make amends for this brief folly through disinterested service, pointing out to her that a far greater portion of his life had been spent dutifully. It is clear that Wilson regarded her acceptance of his love as redemption from everything in his past except the bitterness of having disappointed her.
Edith’s hurt continued to smolder for several days, but the overall effect of his confession was to seal their relationship against all else that might threaten it. The political scheming had served to hasten rather than to postpone their marriage.
Wilson was narrowly re-elected in November, 1916, but the rumormongers had a field day during the campaign. In fact, Wilson’s biographer, Arthur S. Link, states that “Republicans conducted against Woodrow Wilson in 1916 what must have been one of the dirtiest whispering campaigns in American history.” Gossips said that Ellen Axson Wilson had really died of a broken heart because of Wilson’s affair with Mary Hulbert; that Mrs. Hulbert had prepared to institute breach-of-promise proceedings against the President; and that Louis Brandeis, Wilson’s go-between, had purchased Mrs. Hulbert’s silence for seventy-five thousand dollars.
Money was indeed dangled before Mary, but the overtures came from the President’s enemies, not from his friends. She was offered bribes by Wilson’s adversaries that ranged from fur coats and limousines to provisions for extensive travel if she would hand over Wilson’s letters. Her indignant refusals eventually led to an offer of half a million dollars for the correspondence, but her loyalty to Wilson was not for sale. Where Wilson’s political enemies failed, representatives from the Department of Justice, acting to protect his interests, tried diligently to succeed. Mary Hulbert was plagued by covert attempts to get possession of the letters, until her son requested—and received—an appointment with Wilson. Allen vowed to the President of the United States that if the Department of Justice did not let his mother alone he would kill the next man who came. Wilson moved with dispatch to ensure that the annoyance ceased.
Although Mary Hulbert was not the kind of woman who would betray an intimate friendship, she was unable to stay out of financial difficulty. By her own admission, she had “no money sense.” One possible source of funds was to try to publish carefully chosen excerpts from Wilson’s letters to her, an idea she sold to George H. Doran & Company. With a ten-thousand-dollar advance, Mary provided Doran with an exceedingly circumspect, chatty manuscript (now in the archives at Princeton University) making the whole correspondence sound like that of an affectionate brother writing to his favorite sister. During the eight years that Wilson had known Mary Hulbert, and called her “Dearest Friend,” he would have done almost anything for her, but this time, the necessary publication rights to Doran were understandably denied.
The letters remained in Mary Hulbert’s possession until after Wilson’s death in February, 1924. At the end of that year, she relied upon them to some extent to write for Liberty magazine ten equally circumspect articles that appeared from December 20, 1924, through February 21,1925. In the midst of this series, announcement was made in the press that Ray Stannard Baker had been chosen as Woodrow Wilson’s authorized biographer.
A Midwesterner of impeccable character, Baker had served in 1919 as director of the press bureau of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace at Paris. He had published in 1922 a three-volume study, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement—A History of the Peace Conference , that had pleased the President. Edith Wilson admired Baker, not a trivial consideration in that she was to read and evaluate every sentence he composed for the eight-volume biography.
Edith offered her full cooperation to Baker, urging him “to see everybody—both friends and enemies; because only in this way can you get the whole picture before you.…” Assisted by her bachelor brother, Randolph Boiling, she sent sixty-seven cases of papers from the White House to Baker’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he was to do his research and writing. After describing the shipment, Edith noted that “there are still the personal letters in Mr. Wilson’s own desk that I have not been able to go over, and which I will send you if they seem of interest. …”
Were the Hulbert letters to Wilson among the “personal letters”? Whether or not Edith or Randolph disposed of many of these, Baker was determined to acquire, or gain access to, the other side of the correspondence. In early March, 1925, he wrote to Mary Hulbert, now residing with Allen at 49 West Forty-fourth Street in New York City, and asked for an interview. Baker explained that he sought “every possible source of knowledge upon Wilson’s career and without bias.” (He had written to a colleague that “I am going to print everything I have or can find out that I believe to be true regardless of whom it hits.”)
Mary courteously responded, giving Baker an appointment; but she would not part with the letters, allow him to use them, or, apparently, even let him read them. On hearing this, Edith Wilson was disturbed. The letters represented a sizable portion of her husband’s personal correspondence that was virtually out of her control. Mary Hulbert’s articles in Liberty magazine had not served to endear Wilson’s former confidante to Edith.
As the months went by, Baker began to devise a more realistic approach to acquiring the Wilson letters from Mary Hulbert. He knew that they had considerable value on the manuscript market, and that she hoped for and expected appropriate remuneration. When he had met Mary in 1925, Baker, somewhat to his surprise, had liked her very much. Whatever plan he proposed must be equitable. But how to obtain funds of this magnitude? Perhaps Bernard Baruch could help. Not only was he wealthy, but he was also a staunch and loyal admirer of both the President and Mrs. Wilson.
Baker’s idea most probably was broached by Edith to Baruch, who agreed at least to consider the matter. Baruch’s initial response to Baker was tentative. Meanwhile, Edith suggested to Baker that he consult former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who had written in 1924 a brief, laudatory Wilson biography. Purportedly, Daniels had read all of the letters, which he had circumspectly described to Edith Wilson as “only those of one warm friend to another.” Rather than use the actual letters, Edith suggested to Baker, he could merely quote what Daniels had said about them.
Baker was too exacting a biographer to settle for twice-removed quotations, but he did write to Daniels asking for a frank opinion of the letters. Daniels dodged, replying that he hardly knew how to write down his impressions, and he would rather talk with Baker sometime. When Edith Wilson learned of this, she was manifestly unhappy with Daniels.
Three years now had passed since Baker had first talked with Mary Hulbert. Despite Edith’s view that it would be a fruitless quest, he decided that he must make another appeal to both Mary and Baruch. The first volume of the Wilson biography already had been published, and if he were to use the correpondence as resource material, he must see it soon.
Baker wrote at length to Baruch, explaining: ”… I think you know how vitally interested I am in this matter and how much it means to my work. It will add immensely to the completeness of the biography. I know that the sum involved is large, but I have wondered whether you would be willing to go further with it? It is a collection wholly unique and ought not to be broken up and especially bartered about the country. I should hate dreadfully to see that happen. Won’t you kindly let me hear from you?”
This time, knowing that it would please Edith Wilson, Baruch replied affirmatively, adding that he would rather have the letters in friendly hands than unfriendly ones. He urged the utmost discretion about his being identified as part of the transaction.
Having a firm commitment for funding now in hand, Baker went to Mary Hulbert. Their conversation was frank and not without some distress to both of them. He asked her why she had written the Liberty articles, and she confessed in a subsequent letter that “it was the tone of your kind voice reflecting your decent attitude of mind that makes me tell you again how terrible it was to me—all the suffering of the martyrs. The only comfort afterwards is that the money gave us roof and food while my son was so ill—and that the articles contained the truth.”
Negotiations for the letters now proceeded through Mary’s agent/appraiser and her son in New York. When his opening bid was rejected, Baker chafed. He was determined on this occasion that the collection would not slip through his fingers. Shooting off another appeal to Baruch, he explained once more why the material was so valuable. “It is undoubtedly true,” he wrote, “that Mr. Hulbert [Allen], if he put up the material at auction, could get considerably more than we offered.” Baruch recognized that the decisive moment was approaching, but this did not blur his sense of prudence. The agent had offered by way of compromise a fresh appraisal and somewhat decreased estimate based on an inventory showing how many of Wilson’s letters had been handwritten, how many typed. Baruch informed Baker that when such a report was forthcoming, he would be glad to renew the negotiations, but he saw no way of increasing his bid until he knew what the agent had in mind. Although he would be glad to get the material, Baruch wrote a little petulantly, “I don’t know what disposition I should finally make of them.”
On June 5, 1928, a contract of sale was signed stating a purchase price of $31,500, paid by Ray Stannard Baker to Mary Allen Hulbert. Baruch accepted his clandestine ownership somewhat uneasily. Morally, he felt, the letters were Edith Wilson’s, but he regarded it as his gentlemanly duty to protect her. He specified to Baker that all of the originals and, of course, all of the copies be sent to him, stating that “in no instance are any of them to be kept.” Baker complied in sending the originals, assuring Baruch that as soon as he had finished his studies of the period to which the letters referred, he would send all the copies. This he eventually did. (Baruch later sent the letters to the Library of Congress, their use restricted until after Edith Wilson’s death.)
Several months after she had parted with the Wilson letters, Mary Hulbert wrote Baker (with whom she corresponded intermittently for the next decade): “You understand that the loss of those documents leaves me bereaved. I hated selling them. I wanted to give them. I am satisfied however that they have found their safe and right honors. … I am grateful for your beautiful and delicate handling of the friendship.”
Edith Wilson was also gratified by Baker’s treatment of the Wilson-Hulbert relationship. Baker had achieved a miracle.
In 1935, two years after Mary Hulbert had published her own highly discreet memoirs, The Story of Mrs. Peck: An Autobiography , she wrote Baker that she would like to show him, if he cared to see them, “some excerpts from letters long since destroyed.” She was trying, she said, to “put my little house of this life in better order.” Baker was interested and planned to call on her in New York City within the next few days. No further reference to the excerpts appears in the Baker-Hulbert correspondence nor in Baker’s general correspondence. If Mary, herself, had destroyed some of Wilson’s letters—for obvious reasons—then she had dissembled with Baker earlier. In a warm but brief message written to Allen after Mary Hulbert’s death in December, 1939, Baker wrote that “I was always glad I knew your mother and in some degree to have had her confidence [emphasis added].”
The excerpts which Mary mentioned were left among her personal effects, and are probably one and the same as a manuscript (in Mary’s inimitable hand) given recently to the Papers of Woodrow Wilson by Rebecca Hulbert, Allen’s widow. The eleven undated pages contain a lavish and repetitive catalogue of the charms Wilson found in Mary. That she attributed the words to Wilson is not proof of their authenticity, but the style is highly suggestive: ”… My dear Mary, you are the dearest chum, the most rewarding companion and confidant, the frankest, dearest, most engaging playmate—the smartest woman compact of many charms. … Your delightful self-revelations [are] seasoned with so much delectable gayety, a queen who does not take herself too seriously, a queenly beauty and charm … so pervasive that no man or woman can fail to be captivated by it. You are the wonderful lady I knew the moment I looked into your beautiful eyes, and some of the best powers of my life I take from you [emphasis added]. I found in my friend… the loving power of a great woman, a fearless natural integrity-purity without prudery, rectitude and sincerity without convention, perfect wholesomeness and genuineness, as of a nature without morbidness; … a certain noble greatness that would prompt a man to trust her in every smallest point of honor as he would trust another man, and withal, a sweet, frank companionableness that made every moment of intercourse vital. … God bless and keep you and bring you peace, peace.”
What seems important historically is not that Wilson’s affair with Mary Hulbert took place, but that he had “some of the best powers of [his] life” restored by her when his need was crucial. Mary herself commented in the same compilation that she had “liberated powers in him he did not know himself that he possessed.… He was freed in a sense by my frank gaity and, to him, daring freedom of speech—and action.”
Had he not met Edith Galt, and had he been defeated for re-election in 1916, Wilson might conceivably have married Mary Hulbert. But for a presidential candidate to have acknowledged any serious intentions toward her, a divorcee and already a cause of gossip, would have been, by post-Victorian standards, social and political suicide.
Edith Wilson may never have read the letters her husband had written to Mary Hulbert. In her last years she told Wilson scholars Arthur S. Link and David W. Hirst that there probably wasn’t much of anything in them. For the rest of her life Edith was dedicated above all else to the preservation of her husband’s image of greatness. Yet she must have instinctively realized that Wilson’s secret romance had been restorative and life enhancing to him and that, she, too, owed a debt of gratitude to Mary Hulbert. |
This deep into the information age, it's hard to imagine living without Internet access. But what if you had no choice?
Many people in Canada and around the world simply can't afford access, creating a "digital divide" that is preventing low-income Canadians and their children from escaping the poverty trap.
But one Toronto-based charity is trying to fix that.
reBOOT Canada, established back in 1995, focuses on "sustainable access to low-cost technology solutions." That effort includes recycling and refurbishing donated computers that would otherwise be headed to the landfill, reducing electronics waste while increasing hardware access.
But even distributing 200,000 pieces of equipment to non-profits and individuals over the past two decades hasn't solved the issue of affordability when it comes to actually getting everyone online.
So reBOOT has launched a one-year free Wi-Fi pilot project in Parkdale, one of Toronto's low-income (albeit gentrifying) downtown neighbourhoods, in collaboration with Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre and Parkdale Community Legal Services which are hosting the initial hotspots for the reBOOT reLAY Neighbourhood Network.
A child walks through Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood.
"The hot spots are intended to provide Internet access to individuals for whom data plans and cable at home are not affordable and to create awareness of the organizations we have partnered with to provide the service," reBOOT's executive director Francisco Rota tells The Huffington Post Canada.
"Our goal this year is to be able to show the positive impact that free Wi-Fi has on a community – it will be measured in terms of gigabytes transferred, increased traffic to partner sites, interviews in the community and sustainability of the network," he said.
"We feel that if we can show the social benefit of free Wi-Fi – in addition to the well-known commercial and tourist benefits – it could stimulate the appetite in city hall to have a concrete plan to make the Internet and basic technology a public [service]."
While Fredericton, N.B. and London, Ont. have pulled off free community Wi-Fi, Toronto only enjoyed such a service in the downtown core for six glorious months back in 2006 thanks to then-city-owned Toronto Hydro Telecom putting wireless hubs on streetlights. But according to a recent Toronto Star report, the One Zone service collapsed after they began charging $30 a month, $10 a day or $5 an hour.
"Our goal this year is to be able to show the positive impact that free Wi-Fi has on a community."
However, the Star also reported that the city is once again looking into how to improve public Wi-Fi access, including Councillor Josh Matlow's efforts to bring the service to city parks and community housing. Though part of his push is to attract tech start-ups, he told the Star that he also wants to "combat the digital divide."
"If you want to apply for jobs or study for exams, it’s your connection to the world. Some people have it, some do not. That’s not right," Matlow told the paper.
Another, albeit currently limited, Internet access project is being run through the Toronto Public Library in partnership with Google Canada and Telus. Low-income residents can sign out Wi-Fi hotspots from six branches in priority communities, but can only use 10 gigabytes a month after which the device will turn itself off until the next month. This allows for email and online forms but not watching video or most downloads.
ReBOOT's 24/7 free Wi-Fi project will initially run along Queen Street West between Dufferin Street and Sorauren Avenue, though they would like to expand it further into Parkdale and, depending on the data they collect, inspire similar projects elsewhere to help those priced out of traditional access.
"Our hope is that the network of community-facing organizations and social services within a neighbourhood could collaborate with businesses and charities like reBOOT Canada, sharing costs and expertise to provide free Internet access to economically vulnerable communities across the country," said Rota.
Also on HuffPost |
If you watch CBS news, maybe you caught anchorman Russ Mitchell's recent interview with investor and economist Jim Awad, managing director of the investment firm Zephyr Management. While Awad acknowledged the United States is in serious debt, he stressed the problem can be fixed if the government gets going on it right away.
TUTORIAL: Bond Basics
Yes, fixing the debt is a Herculean task that will probably take years. In addition to the obvious, such as hiking certain taxes and reducing government spending, it could include a combination of interventions like any or all of the following.
1. Opening Our Borders
This would be highly controversial considering the border-control debate that has raged on and off for years. However, it has been argued that opening our borders to willing workers from all over the world would accelerate the creation of businesses that pay taxes desperately needed to reduce the debt. (For related reading, see How Countries Deal With Debt.)
2. Raising the Retirement Age
Having Americans retire a lot later, perhaps in their 70s instead of their 60s, could help fix the national debt by increasing the amount of time people pay income taxes and shortening their reliance on Social Security.
Think about it, Social Security started when a lot more people had physical jobs like mining and factory work, which wear you out a lot quicker. Not as many Americans do those sorts of things anymore, so most should be able to work and pay taxes longer and draw on Social Security for less time. (For related reading, see A Look At Government Bonds And National Debt.)
3. Easing Off On Regulations
According to the Center for Fiscal Accountability, the regulation of businesses damages the economy to the tune of $1 trillion a year by increasing costs and inefficiency. Government spending to enforce regulations is $61 billion annually and rising, the Center warns. Thus, many economists and politicians advocate reducing regulation to help shrink the national debt. We could see regulations pared in many areas such as the environment, financial services and food production, to name just a few.
4. Revamping the Tax Code
This is one proposal of a group of six Democratic and Republican senators dubbed "the gang of six" by the media.
To reduce the national debt and jump-start the economy, these senators have suggested things like lowering income tax rates, abolishing about $1 trillion in popular tax breaks for individuals and corporations and raising the gas tax. They also advocate raising the payroll tax on high earners, as well as cutting defense and other types of government spending and raising the retirement age. (For more, see Making Sense Of The Tax Code.)
5. Taking Cues from Abroad
Lots of other countries have found ways to reduce debt, and some of their methods could help America. In Canada, for example, there's a 5% national sales tax - a consumption levy many economists prefer to higher taxes on income or investments since those discourage work and saving.
TUTORIAL: Advanced Bond Concepts
Harvard Business School economist Matthew Weinzierl has said that Australia is smart because it varies income tax rates by age. Down under, people pay less tax when they're younger and more when they're older and typically better able to pay higher taxes. |
Joe Scarborough advised Megyn Kelly this week to be careful about leaving Fox News and ending up like Glenn Beck, so Beck fired back at Scarborough––very indirectly––in an open letter to Kelly.
Kelly has publicly broached the prospect of leaving Fox News in the near future, and whether she’s serious or it was just her negotiating her contract in public, Scarborough said it may not be the best move for her career. Why? He pointed to Beck, who has been running a respectable media empire over at The Blaze for the past few years, and said leaving Fox made him far less relevant.
Beck wrote an open letter to Kelly on Medium last night praising the hell out of Kelly and saying that working at Fox is a “remarkable experience” and far preferable to, say, “a morning show you don’t own, on a network that no one watches, where your opinion is controlled and dismissed.”
Gee, wonder who he’s talking about there…
Here’s another hint:
Imagine if when you walked the halls people would whisper that you were only there as a ‘token’ to provide a ‘balanced’ perspective but not because you had any talent?… I am an incredibly imperfect messenger, but at least I don’t have to become a “supporter” of a candidate for ratings as they shower me with inauthentic praise and promises. Or, even worse, pretend to support a candidate (while pretending I don’t), just to keep the candidate coming on my show to inch (literally) up my ratings.
Yes, there is so much shade being thrown at Scarborough and Morning Joe throughout Beck’s entire piece that it’s actually kind of amazing.
Beck almost broke the trend with this observation:
It is almost as if I was only using this opportunity to transparently and indirectly address someone or something that had nothing whatsoever to do with you or your career. Could you imagine how sad it would be to feel compelled, of your own volition, or by someone else’s, to use a topical story as cover to take shots at someone who your own mother loves?
And yes, in case you’re wondering, Scarborough admitted his mother was a fan of Beck’s and Beck happily sent over an autographed picture a few years ago.
[h/t The Blaze]
[image via screengrab]
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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] |
Mysticism and rationalism in the Middle Ages: The teaching of St. Gregory Palamas
His Eminence Hierotheos, Metropolitan of Nafpaktos and St. Vlassios (1999)
SUMMARY
In man’s effort to obtain the knowledge of God and attain union with Him, various theological movements have appeared in the West and in the East. The West developed the so-called scholasticism, while the East developed mysticism.
Scholasticism (11th-13th century AD), which originated from the Schools of the 9th century, is based mostly on reason (“ratio”) and this is why it is called rationalism. Its central position is that there is a single knowledge for the creation and for God, and a single methodology for the acquisition of this knowledge of the created world and the uncreated God. This means that the investigation of the created world and the acquisition of the knowledge of God are both achieved through reason.
Mysticism, expressed mainly by neoplatonism (2nd-6th century AD) and other related systems, has as its basis the principle of ideology, the view that the soul pre-existed in the world of ideas and that, through various ways, it must be distanced from the body and return to the unborn world of ideas.
Opposite to these two traditions, coming from West and East, is the neptic theology of the Orthodox Church, which accepts neither scholasticism nor mysticism. It argues that man has a noetic and a rational energy, and that he understands the creation with his rational energy and obtains the knowledge of God with his noetic energy. It also argues that man is sanctified in his fullness, soul and body, by the uncreated Grace and energy of God.
St. Gregory Palamas, who lived in the 14th century and debated with the scholastic Barlaam, expressed the neptic theology of the Church and codified the whole theology of the Church with respect to man’s knowledge and union with God.
The value of the neptic-hesychastic orthodox theology is of great importance for our times and answers all major problems arising out of both western scholasticism and eastern mysticism.
I would like to thank the University of Seattle for this honoring invitation to me to come and speak in front of such a distinguished audience, composed of renowned scholars, as well as students and distinguished guests.
I owe gratitude to Dean Theodore Kaltsounis who is my compatriot and a most kind person and I have many reasons to appreciate his character and personality. I also thank out of my heart for their presence Mr Stamatelopoulos and Mr Panayotides who are highly respected in this University and whom I respect very much, too.
My topic is: “Mysticism and rationalism in the Middle Ages: The views of St. Gregory Palamas”.
As an introductory remark we should underline that in the 14th century, first in Thessaloniki and then in Constantinople, an important debate between St. Gregory Palamas and Barlaam took place. The debate started with the theological difference between East and West on the procession of the Holy Spirit (Filioque) and extended to many other theological and anthropological issues which have always occupied man’s spirit, such as the distinction of essence and energy in God, the value of the human body, the usefulness and the limits of human education and wisdom, the noetic prayer of the heart, the value of the noetic hesychia (stillness), the uncreated Light, etc..
What is significant and should be emphasized at this point is that Barlaam, who was a Uniat monk from Calabria in Italy and came to the East, first to Thessaloniki and then to Constantinople, expressed a tradition prevailing in the West, after various developments which had taken place there. By contrast, St. Gregory Palamas grew up in Constantinople, in the palace, received a traditional education, as this had been formed by the great Fathers of the Church, and then practised this theology in the Holy Mountain. So, with what he said and wrote he expressed the orthodox theology of the Roman Empire, which is known under the name “Byzantine Empire”. This is why what was discussed in this debate, as well as later with Barlaam’s successors (Akindynos and Gregoras), is very important and remarkable for our age too, because it demonstrates clearly the difference between the two civilizations and traditions, the eastern and the western.
In what follows I will attempt to stress the basic points in a concise manner and in the discussion that will follow we will have the opportunity to analyze them further or provide additional clarifications.
1. Rationalism and mysticism
By rationalism we mean the trend which is based on reason as the key for the explanation of all events and all phenomena. Of course, no one accuses reason, but there are concerns when reason becomes autonomous from the rest of man’s existence or better when it is deified and not only the creation but even God Himself is interpreted through this inflated word-reason. Descartes’ phrase is well-known: “I think, therefore I exist”.
More specifically we may say that from an epistemological point of view rationalism is a theory according to which the foundation of knowledge lies in ratio, in reason. Thus rationalism derives all human knowledge from superior rational principles. The Pythagoreans, the Eleates, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, etc. were rationalists. In fact, Plato argued that philosophical knowledge is a remembrance of the knowledge the soul used to have in its preexistence, in the unborn world of the ideas. The term rationalism in the philosophy of religion and in morality derives from this epistemological theory, since ratio, reason are perceived as the center of man’s existence and of knowledge, and all other axioms and all other knowledge are based on this rationality [1].
It is known that rationalism began with the ancient Greek philosophers, continued with the philosophy and theology of the Middle Ages and reached to the modern philosophers Descartes, Spinosa, Fichte, etc.. From the point of view of theology the term rationalism is identified and associated with the term scholasticism.
The scholastics are the medieval theologians in the western part of Europe from the 11th to the 13th century who studied God and everything related to Him, as well as the world, through a single epistemological methodology. This means that they studied the creatures and developed science by reason, and also studied God by reason. Thus they viewed God through the framework of the creation, and identified or associated creation with God. This caused tremendous problems to the relation between theology and science, as vividly manifested during the Renaissance and above all during the Enlightenment.
It should be stated that in the 11th-13th century the term scholasticism was a synonym for University. What we now call University students or Professors used to be called Scholastic students and Professors, and university theology was called scholastic theology. There were various philosophical-theological schools and students got the name, as well as the mentality of the school they were enrolled in.
I think a brief account of the pre-history and the atmosphere of rationalism-scholasticism is necessary in order to understand its difference with the neptic theology of the Orthodox Church.
As analyzed at great length by Jacques Le Goff in a relevant book, from the 6th century on, various Germanic tribes descended to the western part of the single Roman Empire, which was conquered by the Franks, a germanic tribe, in the 8th century. The Franks were illiterate, but adopted the orthodox faith. Since they wanted to distance themselves from the Roman Empire and create their own Empire, as it happened indeed, they used the theories of holy Augustine, a Latin theologian, which were different from the theological positions of the Fathers of the Church.
Augustine (354-430) had been very much influenced by neoplatonism, which had blended the views of Plato with the views of the gnostics on ideas, effusion (aporroe), etc.. Augustine’s basic views were the priority of reason over faith, a legalistic view of spiritual life, the view that death is punishment by God, the theological view of absolute predestination, etc..
The platonic belief about ideas in God and the theory of absolute predestination, which were Augustine’s basic positions, were used by the Franks for the establishment of a specific social system, called feudalism, according to which there are by nature distinct classes in society, namely there are by nature nobles and by nature slaves.
Feudal society influenced deeply the theological mentality of scholastic theologians. Thus, Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) used the image of the feudal system to create the theory of the satisfaction of divine justice, according to which God was insulted by Adam’s sin and therefore there was a need to satisfy the insulted divine justice. After Anselm, Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) shaped the whole model of the universe of the medieval world. Thomas Aquinas tries to harmonize the theories of previous scholastics with the theories of Aristotle, without rejecting Plato, since he accepts Plato’s theory about the ideas.
Therefore, the theories of holy Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas influenced the thought of medieval theologians and of all scholastic theologians of that time. Barlaam, who was a scholastic theologian, grew up in this environment and this is why he could not comprehend the mentality of the theologians of the Roman Empire, that is, of Byzantium.
Barlaam’s main view is that the noblest element in man’s existence is intelligence. Only through intelligence man is able to comprehend God, not through the Revelation, as we see in the Prophets of the Old Testament, the Apostles and the Saints. Because of this, he considered the philosophers to be superior to the Prophets and the Apostles and that the knowledge which comes from intelligence is superior to the knowledge coming from the Revelation, because the former lies within man while the latter, he thought, was provided by external symbolic acts. Therefore, according to Barlaam, Plato, Aristotle and all philosophers are superior to the Prophets, Apostles and Saints. He believed that the vision of God attained by the Prophets and all the deified ones in general was a demonic state because it originated from outside man. Within this framework, he rejected the noetic prayer of the heart, the distinction between essence and energy in God, he argued that the study of human education and knowledge offers us also the knowledge of God.
After analyzing the terms rationalism-scholasticism, let us now turn to the conceptual meaning of mysticism.
By mysticism we mean a specific movement observed since antiquity regarding man’s union with God. It consists of an attempt to make the intellect, man’s word, inactive, to develop the emotion, and to deliver the soul from any bond to matter, which is considered bad. In this way, man comes to an ecstasy and is completely absorbed by God [2].
A basic principle of the system of mysticism is that man’s soul belonged to the eternal world of ideas in the past, fell from it and as a punishment was enclosed in the body. However, during its residence in the body it maintains the memory of the world of the unborn ideas and wants to return to it, getting rid of the body. The knowledge of the world of ideas is called illumination of the nous. The return of the soul to the eternal and unborn world of ideas is called eros. Thus a soul noted for eros expresses a weakness, because it feels it is away from its own real world. Therefore, the basic notions in mysticism are the existence of a world of ideas, where the soul used to belong to, and that the body is bad and has to be expelled with a special method so that the soul may return to this eternal and unborn world of the ideas.
Mysticism was mainly expressed with neoplatonism, a system which appeared in the 2nd century AD and lasted until the 6th century AD, and was a reaction to Christianity. Ammonios Sakkas (172-242) is considered its founder and it was to a large extent elaborated by his student Plotinus (204-270) who worked in Rome and had a philosophical school there.
Neoplatonism is a revival of platonism, adjusted to the conditions of that era. There are three main differences between platonism and neoplatonism.
First, on the issue of God. According to Plato, there is a multitude of ideas in God, with the idea of Good having the top priority. Neoplatonists taught that the beginning and source of the world is the One, which is the absolute self-principle.
A second difference is that while Plato taught that the world is a copy of the ideas, the neoplatonists taught the theory of effusion, according to which the world originates from the substance of God, through emission or projection. Like the sun emits its heat without losing its substance, similarly the absolute being emits the beings without wanting it and without aiming at it. The world deriving from the absolute being by effusion is not single, there is a hierarchy. On a first level there is the Nous which corresponds to Plato’s noetic world consisting of the ideas. On the second effusion of the One there is the soul of everything. There is a relation between the cosmic and the individual soul, and is described in a way reminiscent of the Brahman and the Atman of the indian teaching. That is, the soul of the world lies in every individual soul and each individual soul carries in it the whole universe. The third effusion are the individual souls which exist between the cosmic soul and matter. And the fourth effusion, a very distant and incomplete manifestation of the One, is matter which is something bad and dark.
A third position of neoplatonism is its so-called asceticism, which is explicitly mystical, according to which the soul has to get rid of the body and this is called purification . Thus the soul had to return and unite with the divine essence whence it originated, and this is achieved with its purification, ecstasy and mystical contact with the essence of God. The asceticism of the neoplatonists is similar to that of Plato, with a slight difference. For example, despite his view of the body as the prison of the soul, Plato never loses an aesthetic perception of the body, and this is why the beautiful dominates in Plato, while Plotinus feels disgust for the body [4].
These are the basic principles of mysticism, as found in neoplatonism, the eastern religions and the philosophy of the Middle Ages (Baader and Schelling).
2. The neptic theology of the Orthodox Church
The theology of theOrthodoxx Church is not related at all to rationalism and mysticism. Its views on God, man, and man’s salvation are on a different level, they differ radically from the views of rationalism and mysticism.
Orthodox theology is not rational or mystical but neptic and mystic.
In the Orthodox church the dominant teaching is that of the holy Apostles, the Fathers, as expressed by the Three Hierarchs – St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian and St. John Chrysostom – as well as by St. Maximus the Confessor, St. John of Damascus, St. Symeon the New Theologian. This is the theology that St. Gregory Palamas had in mind. And we might say that the great Fathers of the Church studied the ancient Greek philosophers very well, they knew the questions posed by them but gave different answers based on the theology of revelation.
Thus, St. Gregory Palamas, when he was a student in Constantinople, knew Aristotle’s philosophy very well, but through the guidance of experienced spiritual fathers, mostly from the Holy Mountain, he lived the whole neptic tradition of the Church, with fasting, prayer, mourning according to God and the vision of the divine Light. He lived these in particular when he went to the Holy Mountain as a monk. He attained a high level of sainthood and grace.
Before turning to the main positions of St. Gregory Palamas’ teaching and their differentiation from the theological positions of Barlaam and all the scholastic theologians, as well as from those of mysticism, I think it is worthwhile examining briefly the terms neptic and mystic theology.
The word neptic derives from the greek word nepsis, which means watchfulness, alertness. Christ said: “watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation” (Matt.26, 41). St. Peter recommends to the Christians: “be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5, 8). Therefore, man watches his inner world, so as to avoid the entry of a thought that will become a desire. This is called neptic life.
According to the platonic division of the soul, the soul has three faculties: the intelligent, the appetitive, and the incensive. The appetitive and incensive are called the passible part of the soul, because it there that the passions dominate, when man desires and then wants to fulfil the desires. The Fathers of the Church accept this platonic division of the soul and in fact teach that the thoughts which dominate in the soul, through the senses and fantasy, must remain there and not proceed to the passible part of the soul to become desire and action. The effort to prevent the thoughts from becoming desire, a bad desire, is called neptic theology and constitutes the core of the science of theology.
The term mystic theology is the experience and knowledge obtained by man through his whole existence and not just through his intellect. In fact, modern science too says that there is another world beyond intelligence, not controlled by it, because man’s existence is not exhausted in intelligence, intelligence is but a part of man’s existence. As we will see below, man, through a special method, acquires a personal knowledge of personal God in the heart, and then intelligence articulates this experience. That is, intelligence is not overlooked but rather placed in its actual position.
The so-called mystic theology should not be confused with mysticism. Mystic theology and mysticism are two different things.
3. The teaching of St. Gregory Palamas
After the analysis of the main views-positions of rationalism and mysticism, we should see briefly the main positions of St. Gregory Palamas, which express the neptic theology of our Church.
First. God is neither an abstract idea nor the sum of unborn, impersonal ideas, but a person. In fact God is Triune, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God was not discovered by man with his intelligence, He revealed Himself. The Son and Word of God was revealed to the Prophets of the Old Testament and then, in due time, incarnated and assumed the human nature.
Second. There is a distinction between essence and energy in God. There is an essence and energy in God, just as there is in the whole created world. The only difference is that the world is created, while God is uncreated. This means that God’s essence and energy are uncreated , while the essence and energy of the creation are created. Man actually partakes of the energy of God, not of His essence. This way both pantheism and agnosticism are avoided. The uncreated energy of God is everywhere in nature and is called words of beings.
Third. The world was not created by effusion, it is not a copy of the ideas, and the body is not an outcome of God’s revengeful disposition, punishing man’s soul for falling from the world of the ideas. And of course, the soul is not unborn and did not belong to the eternal world of the ideas where it wants to return to for a blissful and blessed life. St. Gregory Palamas, and all the holy Fathers, teach that the world is a positive creation by God, that the soul is not eternal by nature, but was created together with the body, that is, it did not pre-exist, and the body is not the prison of the soul but the temple of the Holy Spirit. For this reason, salvation does not consist of the departure of the soul from the body, but of the deification of the whole man, that is, there is a deification of both soul and body.
Fourth. There is a distinction between nous and word. Man’s soul has two parallel energies, the noetic and the intelligent energy. Through the noetic energy man acquires the knowledge of God, through the intelligent energy he is in relationship with the creation. When St. Gregory speaks about the nous, he means the most subtle attention, which differs, of course, from intelligence. St. John of Damascus calls the noetic energy the noetic eye, the eye of the soul. We know from the Orthodox Tradition that before Adam’s fall the nous was fully open to God and received the knowledge of God, but after the fall the nous was darkened and was identified with intelligence. Thus in the fallen man, the noetic energy is not clearly distinguishable, because it is confused with intelligence, passions and the conditions of the environment.
Fifth. Man’s entire effort in the Orthodox Church, with the sacraments and ascetic life, does not consist of delivering the nous from the body and the world, but of liberating it from the fleshly and worldly mentality, that is, of delivering it from the influence of intelligence and the passions to acquire the experience of the illuminating and deifying energy of God, so that the whole man (soul-body) is transformed.
Sixth. St. Gregory Palamas, expressing the whole neptic theology of the Church, talks about a dual, not a single methodology. While Barlaam, the scholastics, the philosophers, as we have seen, employed a single method, the same method for the knowledge of God and of the world, having intelligence at its center in both cases, St. Gregory Palamas introduces a dual methodology implying that we acquire the knowledge of God with the nous and the knowledge of the world with the word-intelligence.
The method of the knowledge of God, and therefore man’s salvation, is related to the cleansing of the nous-heart, the illumination of the nous and the deification of man. Cleansing is not the mortification of the passible part of the soul, but its transformation; the illumination of the nous is not the knowledge of the archetypes of beings but its illumination by the Grace of God. This means that the nous has to be freed from the domination of intelligence and this is achieved with repentance, obedience, asceticism and this is called and is the cleansing of the nous. When the nous is cleansed it is illumined, it receives the illuminating energy of God and this is expressed in the noetic prayer of the heart. Then man has an unceasing memory of God, without the other faculties of the soul becoming inactive, annihilated, since the intelligence is conscious of the environment and the other faculties of the soul (appetitive and incensive) turn to God and are offered to Him completely. And some, like the Prophets, the three Disciples on Thabor, St. Paul on the way to Damascus, St. Stephen the first martyr and many other saints were granted to see the deifying energy of God, that is to see God in the uncreated Light.
Seventh. The noetic prayer, in particular, was studied and elaborated in depth by St. Gregory Palamas. He interpreted Christ commandment “but thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly” (Matthew 6, 6). He interprets this way the well-known parable of the Publican and the Pharisee, and in particular the way the Publican prayed. He bowed and smote upon his breast and said little, but: “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke, 18, 13). When freed from the tyranny of the intelligence, the nous enters the heart and from there ascends to God. This method is found in all Fathers of the Church. It is analyzed by St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. John Chrysostom, St. Maximus the Confessor, etc. The vision of God can be found in all the works of St. Symeon the New Theologian. And of course all these which constitute the most secret mysteries of the neptic theology are encountered in the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas.
By contrast, in Barlaam’s theology these distinctions are not found, because the essence is identified with the energy of God, the nous is identified and confused with reason, and the method of knowledge of God and the world is single, it uses reason.
4. The value of neptic theology
After what we have said it becomes clear that neptic theology has a great value for our times. Let me stress four points.
First. With neptic theology we make a correct distinction between theology and science, that is between faith to God and human knowledge. There is no confusion between these two realities, because theology is a fruit of the experience of nous, and its center is the heart, while science is a product and result of a rational process. Theology knows how to prepare men for the knowledge of God, while science knows how to prepare men for the knowledge of the created world. A theologian may be a scientist, and a scientist may be a theologian, but he does not confuse these two distinct methodologies, that is a theologian becomes a scientist by studying human science, and a scientist becomes a theologian by cleansing, illumination and theosis.
The clash between science and theology took place in Europe under the influence of scholastic philosophers, because, as we have seen, they identified the two methods. And this is what happened with metaphysics. Metaphysics held that there is a relationship between the world of ideas and the perceptible world, and everything that exists in the world is a copy or a fall from the world of ideas. The view that there is a harmony between the ideas and the whole creation is an outcome of metaphysics. However, the Fathers of the Church do not believe in such metaphysics, because there can be no proof of the existence of these ideas. On this point, too, the holy Fathers are modern, their word can be accepted by modern science. Orthodox theology is anti-metaphysical, because it is not a philosophy but medicine which heals the spiritual illnesses of men.
Second. With the neptic orthodox theology we avoid the temptation of the eastern religions which are mostly related to mysticism. Eastern practices presuppose an impersonal and without hypostasis God, they talk about man’s salvation consisting of the mortification of the passible part of the soul and soul’s departure from the body, which is considered bad and a dress of the soul, they talk about the depersonalization of man, because man is not viewed as a person but as an individual, whose individual Atman is united and merged with the universal Brahman, they employ the method of meditation to reach the nirvana and avoid the samsara, etc..
The Orthodox neptic tradition, though, as expressed in the teaching and life of the saints, talks about man’s real personal union and communion with God, about a transformation and not a mortification of the passible part of the soul, the salvation of the whole man who consists of soul and body and his union with God. When an ascetic has noetic prayer, then he has a clear awareness of the entire world, because noetic prayer can take place even in the street and in the crowd, since with noetic prayer the Holy Spirit prays within man’s heart, which means that man accepts the energy of the Holy Spirit, which activates man’s noetic energy.
Third. The cure of man is achieved through neptic theology. The soul receives the Grace of God, man finds meaning in his life, the Grace of God is carried from the nous to the body and this means cure. Man acquires unselfish love for God and man, gets away from self-love and individual love for God and man, is cured of self-love and individual happiness. The center of his life is God and he views the whole world through this perspective. Self-love is changed to love of God and love of others.
Thus, man becomes social, because he loves people and the whole creation. He solves all ontological, existential, anthropological, social and ecological problems. He loves the whole world and even nature itself, in which he sees the energies of God. He has meaning in his life, defeats death itself, which is the most tormenting problem he faces ever since he is born, because all the successive crises he passes through in his life are related to the mortality and corruptibility of his existence.
Therefore, a cured man loves the personal God and has great respect for nature, which he does not violate. This restoration of man’s relations with God, other people and the creation, is what the contemporary man greatly needs; otherwise he remains sick, because he does not know God, is possessed by the fear of death and feels that everyone approaching him is a threat to his own existence.
M y d e a r,
Rationalism creates many problems to man today. It is actually a fragmentation of human existence. The limits of reason are quite restricted, so a man based on it is wounded, weak, unable, sick. Mysticism of either the neoplatonic or the eastern type also splits man, because it undervalues his body and leads him to a loss of his personal and social character.
We need the Orthodox neptic and mystic theology which takes us out of the deadlocks of our life. St. Gregory Palamas expresses this theology and we must read him with a lot of attention and interest, because he has a lot to offer. This explains why there is a great turn toward the study of his work.
A theology outside the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas is a secularized theology which cannot help the wounded, unhealed and disappointed man. We feel a great gratitude for the existence of such a great saint.
Recently I read Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, his greatest work, which played a key role in the formation of the modern world. I felt that if God was as described by Thomas Aquinas, imposing discipline, with man being forced to accept Him, then it is better for man to live without God, because such a God is tough, unrelenting, he demands justice and punishes harshly. By contrast, God as described by St. Gregory Palamas is a God of love, eros, lovable, who cures man so that he unites with Him. He is a God who seeks personal communion with man and wants to lead him not only to Adam’s life before the fall but even higher.
This is the God we search for, and this is why we love St. Gregory Palamas who theologized on how to acquire the correct method to attain communion with Him. In the theology of St. Gregory Palamas we see who the true God is and who the true man is. And this double knowledge helps us solve all the problems torturing us.
ENDNOTES
1. Christos Androutsos, “Dictionary of Philosophy”, publ. Rigopoulos, p.262.
2. ibid., p.247.
3. Socrates Gikas in “Religious and Moral Encyclopedia”, vol. 10, pp.450-452.
4. ibid. |
Image copyright Kellie Leigh Image caption Six-year-old Australian shepherd, Badger, is being trained to track koala scent
Koalas are considered at-risk across much of Australia. Researchers are turning to sniffer dogs to help locate and protect these iconic marsupials.
The Greater Blue Mountains area, inland from Sydney, is a vast wilderness of dense eucalypt forests and sandstone escarpments of about 10,000 square km (3,861 sq miles).
Two years ago, as large tracts of the forests were ravaged by bushfires, there were several rare sightings of koalas seeking refuge, including the first in the upper Blue Mountains since the 1940s.
It was an encouraging sign for the iconic marsupial, which is now listed as vulnerable in the states of New South Wales and Queensland, and in the Australian Capital Territory.
"Before these fires, we weren't sure that koalas existed in many of these areas," says conservation biologist Kellie Leigh, founder of a not-for-profit organisation called Science for Wildlife.
Rare sightings
Ms Leigh, whose research career began tracking wild dogs in Zambia, is now working to locate the surviving koala populations, and has collected 50 sightings since November.
Image copyright Kellie Leigh Image caption It is not easy spotting koalas, which are usually well-hidden in eucalyptus foliage
But in the remote and rugged terrain that makes up this Unesco World Heritage site, traditional surveying methods such as looking for scats on the ground and counting koalas in plain view are largely ineffective.
"The trees are up to 20 metres (65.6ft) tall with thick canopies, which means the koalas can hide themselves really well," says Ms Leigh, adding that high rainfall degrades scat.
Her secret weapon is a six-year-old Australian shepherd named Badger, who is being trained to track the fresh scent of koalas from fur swabs.
As they climb trees, koalas leave scent trails on bark, and odour molecules, which are heavier than air, can fall to the ground or travel downwind, getting caught in vegetation.
Dogs can detect these scents at concentrations down to parts per trillion, which in volume terms, is about the equivalent of a teaspoon inside two Olympic-size swimming pools.
The nose knows
Structures inside the nose that transmit smell signals to the brain are much bigger in dogs than in humans, says Rebecca Dunlop, a physiologist at the University of Queensland's School of Veterinary Science.
Their wet snouts capture more odour molecules than humans, and they also have 40 times the number of smell receptors in their brains to analyse the scent, Ms Dunlop says.
Long used to detect drugs and explosives, dogs have also been shown to reliably detect early stage cancers and are increasingly being used for conservation and bio security.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Dogs are used to sniff out everything from elicit drugs to invasive species such as the cane toad
In the US, sniffer dogs are tracking threatened species, ranging from wolverines to iguanas, and have even been used to sniff-out whale scat underwater.
In Australia, meanwhile, detection dogs are locating the endangered marsupial, the quoll, and are working to prevent the spread of cane toads.
Ms Leigh recently demonstrated that detection dogs had a greater than 80% success rate in locating scats across diverse Australian habitats.
Few limits
Her results were published in the journal Methods of Ecology and Evolution.
"If they're trained the right way, the limitations of dogs are very few," she says.
Luke Edwards trains the Otway Conservation Dogs in Victoria that search for tiger quolls.
Image copyright Kellie Leigh Image caption When a sniffer dog finds the source of a smell, such as animal fur, it is rewarded with play
While breed doesn't necessarily matter, he says you need to choose "a dog with high motivation for food or playing with a tennis ball".
Dogs are taught to associate a reward with the source of an odour, and to perform a "passive alert" when they find the source by sitting down or repeatedly touching their nose to the ground.
"If they're alerting properly, we move them into thicker bush and environments where we know we'll find the animals," says Mr Edwards.
Handlers also play an important role: they have to be physically fit, capable orienteers, and able to read the body language of their dogs to know when they have picked up a scent.
GPS devices
Once he is ready, Ms Leigh will take Badger into the parklands off-leash to systematically search for koalas, starting in areas where there have been sightings.
Image copyright Jennifer Tobey Image caption Koala populations across Australia are under threat from habitat destruction
Science for Wildlife is also training a second dog with its partner organisation, K9 Centre Australia, in Queensland.
Ms Leigh and her team will conduct detailed ecological studies of any koalas they find to determine possible distribution patterns throughout the rest of the region, and will collar the animals with GPS devices to track their movements.
She says this information will be shared with land managers, rural fire services and community groups in the region, and will feed into conservation plans to protect koalas from bushfires and encroaching development.
Myles Gough is a Sydney-based science writer. |
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Apparently Robin Hood steals from tech stores to give to himself.
A 33-year-old St. Paul man, whose legal name is Robin Hood, allegedly stole two computers from a St. Louis Park store and has been charged with one count of theft over $1,000 and one count of possession of burglary or theft tools.
According to the criminal complaint filed in Hennepin County, Hood stole a $700 desktop computer on June 7 from Micro Center in St. Louis Park.
The complaint states that on June 15, Hood left Micro Center with a $500 desktop computer without paying. After being confronted in the parking lot by a store employee, Hood said he must have dropped the receipt at the register.
Police said Hood then entered Micro Center’s bathroom, tossed his grey shirt in the garbage to reveal his red shirt underneath and put on a baseball hat.
Hood then made a small purchase and left the store before being detained by St. Louis Park police in the parking lot, the complaint states.
Police found a demagnetizing tool clipped to Hood’s belt, a device that thwarts security sensors commonly found on high-dollar items. |
NEW DELHI: China on Monday justified as "goodwill" gesture its policy of issuance of stapled visas to residents of Arunachal Pradesh, saying such policy does not "undermine" the positions of both India and China which have disputes over big parts of that area."China has resorted to a special arrangement of issuance of stapled visa to address the need for travel of local people. This gesture is out of goodwill and flexibility and if we do not do that we will not be able to address the concern of outbound and overseas travel of these people," visiting Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said.Wang further said "if this is acceptable to Indian side, it could be continued in the future as it does not undermine or compromise our respective positions on the border question and we will be able to address the question of these people".Visiting Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi (L), sits with Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R), during their meeting in New Delhi on Monday. (AP photo)However, Wang, who was addressing a press conference at the end of his two-day visit to India during which he called on President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and held talks with his counterpart Sushma Swaraj, said there can be further discussion on the stapled visa issue during consultation between the consular officials and pitched for a simpler visa regime to enable more people-to-people contact.President Pranab Mukherjee (R) speaks with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi during their meeting at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi on Monday. (Reuters photo)China has been issuing stapled visas to residents of Arunachal Pradesh, which India has been protesting maintaining that it does not recognise such visas. |
A man was arrested this week for allegedly trying to run a baggie of cocaine through security at the Mendocino County courthouse in Ukiah, according to the local sheriff’s office.
Pablo Reyes-Sanchez, 24, of Willits pulled the baggie from his pants pocket at the entrance checkpoint at about 8:20 a.m. Wednesday, said sheriff’s Capt. Gregory Van Patten.
“When you come up to the security checkpoint, there is an x-ray machine and you’re supposed to empty the contents of your pockets and anything metal into a tray that goes through a scanning machine,” Van Patten said. “When he went to empty the contents of his pocket, out came this baggie of cocaine.”
The baggie allegedly held about half a gram of the drug, a small amount but enough to catch the attention of the courthouse security detail. When deputies questioned Reyes-Sanchez about the drugs, “He used the ‘These aren’t my pants’ defense,” according to Van Patten.
“He said it wasn’t even his cocaine and that the pants weren’t even his,” said the captain, “but he wouldn’t elaborate on why he was wearing somebody else’s pants.”
Sheriff deputies discovered that Reyes-Sanchez was wanted on a felony warrant for allegedly making criminal threats, and booked him into county jail on the warrant and also on suspicion of drug possession. He has since been released on $70,000 bail. Van Patten said he didn’t know why Reyes-Sanchez was visiting the courthouse in the first place. |
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with news that the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The group, known as ICAN, is a coalition of nongovernmental organizations in more than a hundred countries. This is the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen.
BERIT REISS-ANDERSEN: Good morning, everybody. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN. The organization is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition on such weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: After the announcement at the news conference, reporters questioned the head of the Nobel Committee about the message the committee is trying to send with its award this year.
REPORTER 1: Yes. Has the risk that Iranian nuclear deal could unravel been a factor in your considerations? Thank you.
REPORTER 2: There has been an American diplomatic pressure on countries like Sweden to prevent them from signing the ICAN treatment. So, is this prize, in a way, a kick in the leg, as one of your predecessors said, to the American president, Donald Trump?
REPORTER 3: The carefully monitored elimination of nuclear weapons by the five original states, would that help to prevent proliferation among states like North Korea?
AMY GOODMAN: Some of the reporters’ questions at the news conference after the Nobel Committee announced that the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons had won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
ICAN was founded in 2007. It helped organize a landmark victory: the world’s first legally binding treaty banning nuclear weapons. The treaty was adopted by 122 U.N. member states in July, signed by 51 countries during the U.N. General Assembly Week in September. The treaty prohibits the development, testing and possession of nuclear weapons, as well as using or threatening to use these weapons. It was adopted and signed by dozens of countries, despite the fierce opposition of the United States and other nuclear-armed nations. This is the executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Beatrice Fihn, speaking in Geneva.
BEATRICE FIHN: We’re working very hard on trying to make nuclear weapons illegal. They are not yet prohibited by a treaty—nuclear weapons—and I think that we’re trying to change people’s minds. People have been accepting nuclear weapons as legitimate tools for providing security for, you know, 70 years now, and we’re trying to change the mindset, really, that it’s not acceptable to threaten to level an entire city, just to keep yourself secure.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Democracy Now! video stream from Melbourne, Australia, Tim Wright, Asia-Pacific director of ICAN, the Nobel Prize-winning organization.
First of all, Tim, congratulations.
TIM WRIGHT: Thanks very much, Amy. It’s a huge honor.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you hear?
TIM WRIGHT: We received the news about 10 minutes before it was broadcast. There was a live stream on the Nobel Peace Prize website that we were following. We knew that we had been nominated, but we really didn’t expect to receive it. So it came as a huge surprise, and we’re really thrilled.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we were all monitoring it here, New York time. It was 5:00 in the morning as the announcement was made. Talk about what ICAN does and what message you think the Nobel Committee is sending by awarding you the Nobel Peace Prize.
TIM WRIGHT: Well, we were awarded the prize for our role in securing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted earlier this year. And there are many countries, of course, that don’t support this treaty. And so, I think that the prize will help us to put pressure on them to sign and to ratify it. It’s not just the nuclear-armed states, but also some of their allies, that claim protection from U.S. nuclear weapons, for example. We really need to bring them on board and join the two-thirds of the international community that support a nuclear weapon-free world and who’ve voted in favor of this treaty.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to some of the questions that were asked at the news conference after the Nobel Peace Prize was announced for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons? You heard the issue of, well, the announcement that President Trump wants to decertify the nuclear deal, which will be made next week, apparently, and also the question of what kind of message is being sent to the countries that did not sign, including the United States, this treaty, this groundbreaking treaty.
TIM WRIGHT: Yeah, well, this award has been given at a time of great global tension. We’ve heard threats from President Trump that he’ll totally destroy North Korea. The developments in North Korea are incredibly frightening. And the treaty that’s been adopted offers an alternative pathway forward.
In terms of the Iran deal, it makes no sense whatsoever that the United States would want to withdraw from that. This is a deal that is designed to stop another country from acquiring nuclear weapons. Why would President Trump be opposed to that deal?
But the treaty that we’ve been involved in creating goes much further than just trying to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. It’s about getting rid of the 15,000 nuclear weapons that already exist. And around 7,000 of those are in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about what happened in the signing of the treaty and then the ratifying of it, what exactly this does? And what does it mean that the United States and the other nuclear powers would not sign on?
TIM WRIGHT: Well, this is a treaty principally intended to stigmatize nuclear weapons and establish a pathway to their elimination. Now, we never expected that the nuclear-armed nations would join the treaty at the outset, but they do have that option of joining at some point in the future. And the more countries that do get on board with this treaty, the more effective it will be in putting pressure on them to do the right thing and to join the international majority on this issue. It’s simply unacceptable, from our point of view, to have weapons that are designed to kill civilians indiscriminately and on a massive scale. And there are prohibitions on chemical weapons, biological weapons, landmines and cluster munitions. It’s only logical that there’s now a prohibition globally on nuclear weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: And in this time, when President Trump threatens to obliterate the entire nation of North Korea—25 million people—what about the question the reporter asked: If nuclear countries signed on to this nuclear ban, would that give an incentive to countries like North Korea to disarm?
TIM WRIGHT: Yes, absolutely. And I think that the spread of nuclear weapons has much to do with the failure of countries like the United States to honor their disarmament obligations. If they were serious about disarmament, if the original nuclear-armed nations were actually committed to that, then we wouldn’t see other countries seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. So, this new treaty establishes the same standard for all countries. It says that North Korea cannot have nuclear weapons, and the United States cannot have nuclear weapons, because they’re weapons with catastrophic consequences.
AMY GOODMAN: There was a very frightening moment for many when President Trump, standing with military officials yesterday, said this is “the calm before the storm.” And when pressed by reporters, “What storm?” he said, “You’ll see.”
TIM WRIGHT: Yeah, it is really frightening. And it’s easy to see how this situation could spiral out of control. And the consequences could be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, people’s lives lost as a result. So we need to take action now. And the most responsible thing for countries to do is to sign and ratify this treaty and to clearly display their opposition to these worst weapons of mass destruction.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end by asking you, Tim Wright, about the role of survivors. The only two atomic weapons dropped in the world were on Japan in World War II, August 6th and 9th of 1945. Hibakusha, the survivors of that bomb—of those bombs, have spoken around the world. What kind of work has the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons done with them?
TIM WRIGHT: Well, we’ve worked very closely with survivors from those two cities, as well as survivors of nuclear testing around the world, whose testimonies to diplomats at the U.N. have been really a really powerful motivating force. And when you hear what these people have gone through, you know, to defend these weapons just becomes immoral. And they really helped us get this treaty over the line.
And the treaty and the prize that we’ve now been awarded is really a tribute to the thousands of people around the world who have spoken out against nuclear weapons, who have protested at nuclear weapon facilities. And we need more of that. We need people to take their money out of banks that are investing in nuclear weapon companies. We need people to be putting pressure on their politicians. Every bit, every action that is taken will have a positive impact on making sure that this treaty fulfills its objectives.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Abacca Anjain-Maddison and end with her words. She’s from the Marshall Islands, spoke on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons at the U.N. Conference for the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons earlier this year.
ABACCA ANJAIN-MADDISON: For years, my home, the Marshall Islands, my home, the Marshall Islands, was used as testing ground for nuclear bombs, which contaminated our beautiful and pristine atolls for all time. Today, we carry in our bodies the legacy of these dreadful experiments. The cancer rate in the Marshall Islands is among the highest in the world. They treated us as guinea pigs. They told us it was for the good of mankind. The adoption of this landmark agreement today fills us with hope that the mistakes of the past will never be repeated.
AMY GOODMAN: Again, that was Abacca Anjain-Maddison from the Marshall Islands, speaking on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the organization, ICAN, that has just won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. It will actually be awarded in Oslo on International Human Rights Day, December 10th.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll talk about President Trump’s reported decertifying the Iran nuclear deal, despite the fact that the Trump administration has certified that Iran has complied. Stay with us. |
UK Entertainment Industry: Fair Use Hurts Economic Growth
from the are-these-guys-serious? dept
‘…exceptions deliver economic growth...’
Wrong. Exceptions remove the core asset value of the creative work and so reduce incentives for creators for greater economic activity. An exception may benefit the public sector, but that has to be weighed against the loss of revenue to the creative sector of the economy. Far better for the Government to examine ways of modernising copyright licensing that incentivise digital businesses and creators together, so that consumers pay a fair price and creators receive a fair reward and incentive.
Just as we're seeing increased recognition about the importance of exceptions to copyright law in making sure that creativity can thrive, you have a bunch of the biggest copyright trade organizations in the UK putting out a document that completely trashes the notion of copyright exceptions . In a list of "myths about copyright" the most stunning one is:This shows a rather stunning, and near total, misunderstanding of culture, creativity and economics, all in one brief paragraph. That's impressive! First of all, exceptions do not "removed the core asset" of the creative work. The core asset of the creative work. And that remains in place. All it does is allow for a few specific uses that, for the most part,interfere with the economic prospects of the work, and can often increase the value of the work itself.Second, claiming that exceptions "reduce incentives for creators" is flat out ridiculous. The US has had fair use rules in place for decades (the UK does not, and that's part of what they're arguing against), and it's widely recognized how useful fair use has been in creating incentives for creators to create without having to be bogged down with asking permission and paying tolls. Imagine where hugely successful TV shows likewould be if it couldn't make fair use of news clips?Next, it's a bizarre statement to note that an exception may benefit the public sector... and then to diminish that becauseis to benefit the public sector. This suggests, ridiculously, that the industry associations that signed this letter actually believe having artists get paid and "the public benefit" are in eternal conflict -- what's good for one must be bad for the other. That's ridiculous. There's a situation where the public benefit is maximized, and it's the same point at which content creators are creating good works for them that are accessible. Finally, if we want to "weigh" the losses from copyright exceptions, that's great, but that's never what the industry does. It most certainly doesn't seem to want to look at all of thefrom fair use as well. The fact that more people can create by building on the works of others without having to pay, and without having to get permission, is a huge boon for creativity, including the creativity of new works. And, often, that will drive commercial benefit to the works used that way. Just as an anecdotal example, I've been listening to a bunch of mashups lately, and some of the really good ones created massive new interest from me for artists that I'd never even known about before. And that's only happening because of the "exceptions" to copyright law.The statement by the industries is so out of touch both with economics and the realities of the creative industries, that if I were a creative person represented by one of these organizations, I'd be horrified.
Filed Under: copyright, economic growth, entertainment industry, exceptions, fair use, uk |
Saumya Vaishampayan/MarketWatch
\”I\’ll buy $796. $797. $798!\”
So yelled a man in a bow tie from his perch above a sea of bitcoin enthusiasts ready to buy and sell the virtual currency on Monday night. The action took place in the newly created Bitcoin Center NYC on Broad St., just steps from the New York Stock Exchange.
Richie Hecker stood at the edge of the trading hub clutching a $100 bill. “I’m going to buy $100 of bitcoin tonight. The question is at what price,” he said.
Hecker pushed through the crowd to get closer to the men yelling buy-and-sell orders, which took place under distinctive blue lights. He motioned with his $100 bill when he heard a price he liked, in the early $800s, but was eclipsed by a man who jumped ahead of him. That man was Nick Spanos, who co-founded the Bitcoin Center NYC.
The frantic trading was part of Satoshi Square, the informal meet-up that allows people to buy or sell bitcoin for cash. It emerged as a source of local liquidity for bitcoin enthusiasts in New York, who often gathered in Union Square or the midtown bar EVR owned by bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem, and soon spread to other cities and countries. The event’s ascent to a building near the New York Stock Exchange is just the latest indication of the interest and funding behind bitcoin, which saw its price soar in 2013 from $13 to more than $1,000.
Saumya Vaishampayan/MarketWatch Richie Hecker tries to buy bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a virtual currency that has also been described as a way to revolutionize the transmission of money around the world. Unlike the U.S. dollar or Japanese yen, bitcoin isn\’t controlled by a central authority. It is created through a process called mining that pits computers against each other in a race to solve cryptographic problems and earn blocks of bitcoin. The process also verifies bitcoin transactions.
The active bitcoin trading scene wasn\’t the only attraction for participants. Sabrina Slattery, who works as a photographer, fashion designer and filmmaker, attended on the snowy Monday night to learn more about bitcoin. Slattery said she recently heard about bitcoin for the first time and has since been seeing and hearing references to the virtual currency everywhere.
Slattery set up a bitcoin wallet on Monday night and said she would probably accept bitcoin when she builds her website.
Hecker, who co-founded the company Traction + Scale LLC, didn’t end up acquiring bitcoin on the trading floor. Instead, he bought 0.1236 bitcoin for $100 from his friend on the edge of the trading pit. He previously owned a few dollars’ worth of bitcoin. Traction + Scale is an active value investor in public and private markets that is currently working on three bitcoin-related investments, said Hecker in a follow-up interview.
And the action wasn\’t limited to just one virtual currency; people traded dogecoin by a table with an image of a Shiba Inu.
Saumya Vaishampayan/MarketWatch A dogecoin trade takes place.
–Saumya Vaishampayan
Follow Saumya @saumvaish
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Read more about bitcoin on MarketWatch:
Here\’s what could happen to bitcoin in 2014
Bitcoin poker wins online after U.S. shuts cash sites
Winklevoss twins, other bitcoin investors push for light-touch regulation |
America's failing powerhouse Michael Lind traces our rise to economic dominance, and why we need more government involvement to revive it
The American economy has been driven by waves of technological change and the successful adoption of ideas from elsewhere. Michael Lind, the author of "Land of Promise," tells us how it happened, and what history teaches us about the way ahead.
Your latest book is a sweeping economic history of America. In a nutshell, how did America become such an economic powerhouse?
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Well, it did so as a result of collaboration between the government and the private sector and, increasingly in the 20th century, the nonprofit, academic research sector. It’s quite a different story in reality from the tale that is sometimes told of how capitalism grew up without controls in the United States, and then with the New Deal it came under regulation. In fact, the government both at the federal and the state level was deeply involved with projects for promoting the industrialization of the United States and the creation of a capitalist market from the administration of George Washington onward.
One of the ways it did so was through investing in infrastructure. We’ve had a series of ambitious infrastructure projects – the early canal system and then the transcontinental railroads that were funded by the Lincoln administration and Congress at the beginning of the Civil War, through to the interstate highway system. But government contribution to economic growth wasn’t just limited to that – it included funding basic research. For example, Congress gave a grant to Samuel Morse, who developed Morse code and the first American telegraph [in the 1840s], and the government role in R&D [research and development] became central in World War II. This continued after 1945, with Department of Defense procurement and the National Institutes of Health and other forms of basic federal R&D.
One of the things I argue in my new book is that American economic growth has not been continuous – it’s been very discontinuous and even cataclysmic. Here I follow the school of economists known as Schumpeterians, after Joseph Schumpeter – the Austrian-American economist who in the 1930s identified waves of technological change and successive techno-economic paradigms. With other historians of the U.S. economy, I argue that we’ve had three successive industrial revolutions. The first one began in the late 18th century and was based on steam power and produced the locomotive and steam-powered factories. In the second industrial revolution the key transformative technology was the internal combustion engine, which gave us automobiles, airplanes and electricity. The third industrial revolution, of which we are still in the early phases, is the information or the computer revolution. Each one of these has transformed the economy, while at the same time, the political institutions that were designed for a different stage of economic and technological development have grown increasingly anachronistic. The basic argument of my book is that periodically there are cataclysms like the Civil War and reconstruction like the Great Depression and World War II, and I believe today’s Great Recession is the beginning of another historic change. In these periods you get waves of reform in which the political and social institutions of the country are remodeled to catch up with the economic structures that have already been transformed by technology.
You’ve touched on an issue that I was going to ask you about – the extent to which history offers a route out of the current economic malaise. You talk about reforms, but where are the reforms going to come from today? Three years into the Obama presidency, not much has changed.
I think you have to get the timing right. The Civil War started in 1860-61, and the period of reform came to a conclusion in 1877 with the end of Reconstruction, so it came about over a 15-year period. It’s the same with the New Deal. Most of the New Deal reforms came in the late 1930s, and in some ways the Great Society reforms of the 1960s were simply the finishing touches to the New Deal, so there you had a 15- to 30-year reform period. A lot of people thought that when Barack Obama assumed the presidency he would be in the position of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. But, arguably, he was more like [President Herbert] Hoover. In other words, the real wave of reform will come after him. I may be mistaken about this, but I think that no matter who wins the next election – even if the Republicans recapture the White House and control both houses of Congress – their stated program simply will fail. Even an all-Republican government will have no alternative than to undertake some alternatives to this program of tax cuts for everybody. It helps them when they’re out of power, but once they’re in power it is not a governing program.
One of the arguments of my book is that during these periods of reform, the reform tends to be bipartisan. So, for example, if you look after the Civil War when the Democrats captured both the White House and Congress at the time of President Cleveland, they did not reverse all the reforms of the Civil War; they ratified them. The same is true with the New Deal. Under Eisenhower and Nixon, who were the Republicans in the 40-year New Deal era, they did not attempt to overturn the New Deal. So it’s not a matter of left or right particularly, but of political paradigms which become dominant in a particular era. I may be mistaken, but I think that we are toward the end of this period of neo-liberalism, which began arguably with Jimmy Carter rather than Ronald Reagan, and has included Democrats like Bill Clinton and Obama in his first term as well as Republicans.
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You say that politically it’s not a matter of left or right, but the role of government in the economy seems to be one of the key issues that divide Democrats and Republicans.
That’s particularly true at the national level. However, the vast majority of Republican Party politicians before they get to Washington have served in state legislatures or they have been governors. So they’ve spent 20 or 30 years essentially engaged in a fairly nonpartisan project, because what most state governors and state legislators do is simply fund infrastructure and promote business investment within their state. They have routinely engaged in collaboration between government, business and sometimes the state universities in the interest of economic development. So I agree, it’s paradoxical that these same Republicans who have spent 20 or 30 years taking for granted the role of government in kick-starting economic growth, then arrive in Washington and suddenly government is terrible and can’t do anything.
To some degree that’s been the same throughout history. It has to do with regionalism and localism in the United States. There’s a Jeffersonian tradition which is extremely localist, and it’s willing for state and local government to do all kinds of things which allegedly become tyrannical when they are done by the federal government. That explains the seeming paradox that the same conservatives who will unthinkingly vote for bonds for local roads in their own states, will denounce the whole idea of a national infrastructure bank that will use bond financing for programs of national significance. So that is a built-in tension in the United States.
In fact, one of my arguments is that through all of these waves of change, the two big traditions are not liberalism and conservatism – which are loose phrases that change their meaning in different periods – it’s the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian traditions. These two views go back to Alexander Hamilton, who was the first secretary of the Treasury and to some degree was prime minister for George Washington during his administration, and Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton’s bitter enemy. Around these two figures, from the very early years of the republic, coalesced two views of the proper role of government in the economy. Neither view is laissez-faire. Both the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians are willing to use government for their particular purposes, but their purposes differ.
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The Hamiltonians are nationalist – they see the nation as more important than the states and the cities, which are just components. Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, through even to Eisenhower and Nixon, want government, business and banking to collaborate often on a very large scale for national economic development. And in different periods they are denounced by the left or the right or the center – so this isn’t a liberal or conservative thing.
The Jeffersonian vision is not a vision of an unregulated free market; it’s a vision of local communities made up of small banks, small businesses and small government. And so the Jeffersonians, a category which includes William Jennings Bryan in the late 19th century and a lot of populist conservatives today, are perfectly willing to have the government intervene to protect small businesses and small banks against big businesses and big banks. One of the major forms of protectionism and privilege throughout American history – which continues today – is the popularity of special privileges for small businesses, even though they may be very inefficient from a Hamiltonian point of view in terms of the national economy.
This links nicely to your first recommended book, "The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America," which takes us back to the years immediately after the Declaration of Independence and examines the Founding Fathers’ attempts to reconcile their republican ideals with economic growth and development. Please tell us more.
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Drew McCoy is a brilliant writer, and this is a period that is absolutely essential to understand if you want to grasp the Jeffersonian tradition, which continues to shape our values on everything from aid to farms, to support for housing and small businesses today. You really cannot understand the thought of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and the other opponents of Hamilton and his successors, in these early years of the republic, without realizing they did not understand that the industrial revolution would radically transform everything. For them, a factory was a sweatshop. What were called manufactories in the 18th century were sweatshops where the most miserable of the urban poor who had lost their land – or the children of farm families that had too many mouths to feed – would go and and mostly make luxuries for the European upper class. So American republicans like Madison and Jefferson, even though they were slave holders, essentially did have genuine republican values – this vision of a society of independent freeholders. They could not conceive of a democratic republic in which the majority was not independent farmers, because the wage-earning working class of their day was destitute and miserable. They were simply wrong. Now, thanks to technology, less than 2 percent of the American population works directly in agriculture.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean the nightmare of Jefferson has come true and that we all are destitute, landless proletarians – although there are problems with the increasing polarization of incomes, and the U.S. does have a disgracefully large population of poor people. What happened was that we shifted as a result of productivity growth in agriculture from having most jobs in agriculture to having most jobs in wage-earning sectors without having the proletarianization that Jefferson and his contemporaries feared on the basis of pre-modern history. So agrarian republicanism turned out to be wrong, but even though it was wrong in its very pessimistic view of the future, which McCoy describes brilliantly, nevertheless these legacies continue to shape American values. So, for example, in the United States the term “big” is a pejorative word. “Big” business, “big” government, “big “ labor – there is something sinister about it. I’m a progressive myself in my politics, but it does amuse me when progressives go after “big oil” and “big pharma” – the oil and pharmaceutical industries are, by their nature, capital-intensive industries with increasing returns to scale. I have no idea what “small pharma” is. But it’s because of this Jeffersonian legacy that “big” is just a swear word in the United States.
Can you tell us more about McCoy’s treatment of this period in his book?
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This book is the best guide to one of the two traditions in American history, the Jeffersonian tradition in its early phases. It’s a very close reading of the thoughts of Jefferson and also of Madison – his close ally – about political economy. It goes beyond the usual notions that they were in favor of decentralization against centralization and in favor of small business against big business. They actually had very sophisticated views about demography and the demographic future of the U.S., which, as I have said, turned out to be wrong. But they were quite brilliant men, and it’s fascinating to read this book.
Your next book is "From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932," by David Hounshell. The term “mass production” entered popular vocabulary in the 1920s and is very much associated with Henry Ford and car production. Can you tell us more about it and how it differed from the “American System” of manufacturing that predated it?
The United States was famous in the 19th century in Britain and Europe for something called the “American System,” which predated the mass production of the 1910s and 1920s, and which is associated with Henry Ford and the introduction of conveyor belts and electrified factory production. The American System involved the assembly of manufactured goods – originally rifles and muskets – using interchangeable parts, which led to an enormous increase in efficiency and productivity. Before then factories were essentially sweatshops or common spaces where individual craftsmen sat and assembled each item piece by piece completely from scratch, which was enormously time and resource consuming. So, even before you had electrified conveyor belts and the modern idea of mass production, there was this vision of simply having this pile of parts and you could take any of those parts and assemble it into a single device. This seems easy, but it was not. You had to have machine tools which were capable of cutting the individual parts so that each one could fit into any product. The irony, as David Hounshell points out, was that the American System was invented in France. The French military in the 18th century, like most European countries, manufactured their own weapons, and some generals came up with this idea and they experimented with it with some success. Thomas Jefferson, while he was America’s ambassador to Paris, was given a demonstration, and he encouraged the development of this later on in the United States.
From that point, all the way up to the Civil War, federal arsenals pioneered this kind of assembly, based on interchangeable parts, which became known as the American System. And again, this goes against the idea that the government should just stay out of the economy. In fact, the federal arsenals were the leading sector in American technology and the innovations that they came up with at taxpayers’ expense were then diffused throughout the private sector, as some of the same craftsmen and contractors that they used would then go off and start their own private shops. So in the same way that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in the present-day Defense Department, spun off the Internet and computers and so on in the late 20th century, these federal arsenals diffused this highly efficient new technique of manufacturing.
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It was superseded in turn by what we know as mass production. Essentially, it’s having a moving conveyor belt and people in different stations working on part of an object. This required electricity to power the conveyor belt and the tools used by the workers. So the American System developed in the steam era. The next wave of technological innovation based on electricity made possible the system of mass production.
Why is this book so important in helping us understand all this?
It’s of historic importance in the field. It is the most thorough scholarly study. It’s very heavy going, so scholars may find it more readable than general readers, but it is the basis of all subsequent research since it was published a few decades ago. It’s based on very extensive primary research. It’s also a great work of intellectual synthesis, covering everything from the late 18th century up until the age of the Model T. So it’s a masterpiece of scholarship.
Tell us about your next pick, "Technology and American Society," which looks at the impact of technology in the United States.
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I chose this book because it’s really useful. All the basic information is here. There are only a small number of books on the history of technology in the United States that look at the impact of technology on society – for example, on how electricity transformed the household. This is one of the big revolutions that has been overlooked. We focus on these big things like the canals, railroads and mass production, but domestic life has been transformed radically by technology in living memory in all the industrial countries. In 1900 you had to lug water into the house, and most toilets were outside. Simply having water piped into the home had enormous effects on sanitation but also on convenience. Then you look at what electrification did. Women in particular were liberated from the drudgery of spending most of the day washing, cooking and cleaning by the modern miracles of the dishwasher, refrigerator and the washer-dryer, which we tend to take for granted. But, if anything, these things were just as revolutionary and important to the transformation of society as some of the more dramatic ones.
The American economy has always seemed to be very inventive when it comes to technology. Manufacturing might have moved elsewhere, but companies such as Apple and Facebook seem to show America is still the leader when it comes to technological innovation. Would you agree?
Throughout most of American history we were not that inventive. In the first and second industrial revolutions – the steam era and the electricity era – all of the major technologies were invented in Britain, Germany and France, for the most part. For example, steam engines were invented in Britain, as was the locomotive. Electricity and electrical motors were developed primarily in Europe. Thomas Edison and others adapted the technology and made their own incremental improvements on it, but essentially it was European technology. The automobile was invented in Germany and then was perfected in France. What the United States did all the way up to World War II was that it took foreign-invented technology and then applied it on a massive scale, in the same way that China is now doing with technology invented in the United States.
The other point I would like to make is that not only is the period of American R&D leading the world fairly recent – it only goes back to World War II and the 1950s – but that it was consciously modeled on the research venture capital system of imperial Germany, of all places. In the Kaiser’s Germany before World War I, the government began funding research institutes as distinct from universities. You also had in Germany the development of research universities. Americans were inspired by this to create new institutions like MIT, which was devised on the German model. If you look at MIT and Stanford – these two German-inspired research universities – they’ve contributed disproportionately to America and world inventiveness. So just as the American System started out as the French system of manufacturing with interchangeable parts, we essentially took the German idea of the research university and we integrated it with government and venture capital funding in a highly successful way, and it continues to be the most successful part of the innovation ecosystem in the U.S. But it doesn’t mean that we can be content with that alone. The idea grew up during the tech bubble that we could invent things and then outsource all the manufacturing. That may have worked in consumer electronics and a few other things, but in the long term, most innovation actually comes from the factory floor or people closely working with it. You cannot specialize in invention alone. There’s a circular flow between manufacturing and invention, and you really need both.
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That takes us neatly to your next book choice, "The Past and Future of America’s Economy," which talks about the need to develop an inclusive economy that doesn’t leave any section of society behind as new technology develops.
Yes, that’s right. Robert Atkinson is one of the leading scholars of what is sometimes called evolutionary economics or sometimes the neo-Schumpeterian school. He goes back to Joseph Schumpeter, who emphasized the role of technology in transforming the economy. And Schumpeter was the one who coined the phrase “creative destruction” back in the 1940s. It’s one of those phrases that’s thrown around by people who have no idea what it means – they say it’s just ordinary market operations when some businesses go bust and others are formed. That is not what Schumpeter meant. What he meant by creative destruction was what he elsewhere referred to as “industrial mutation” – that is, the entire replacement of one kind of technology and all the businesses built on it by a radically destructive new technology. So, for example, canals did not evolve into railroads – they were just completely wiped out and replaced. Railroads have largely been wiped out by trucking and automobile travel. The telegraph was wiped out by the telephone.
Robert Atkinson, through his books and his think-tank, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, has been waging a battle against neoclassical economics, which says the ordinary state of the economy is one of equilibrium and if you leave it alone there is a self-regulating, harmonious economy of lots of small producers. Atkinson argues that this completely ignores the central fact of economic life, which is disruptive technological innovation. The economy is never in a condition of equilibrium. It’s been constantly rocked from one side to another by the invention of some new machine or some new technique. His book is a polemical argument about the kind of economics that is appropriate in the 21st century. I’m not an economist myself, but I definitely think there’s more to this technology-based Schumpeterian tradition than there is to these academic models that pay very little attention to technology, except as an afterthought. To those debates among economists, Robert Atkinson’s book is a very good guide.
On to your final book now, "Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism," which accuses Western countries of hypocrisy when it comes to promoting economic growth in the developing world.
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The three leading countries of industrial capitalism – the United States, Germany and Japan – developed by using techniques, as Ha-Joon Chang points out, that are the opposite of what are supposed to work. There are endless bestselling books about how the West developed and how it became rich. It’s a genre that says that if you just have democracy and government acts as an umpire and doesn’t interfere in the market, factories and aerospace industries will somehow just spring out of nowhere. That is not how the industrial world actually developed. Germany in many ways led the world economically before 1945 and it was an authoritarian state for most of that period. The same is true for Japan. China today is an authoritarian state and it’s catching up economically much more quickly than democracies like India.
I think we should be in favor of democracy for its own sake, whether or not it promotes economic growth. But you certainly can’t make the argument from history that democracy is the source of economic growth. The other thing that is part of the conventional wisdom is that government can only fail if it engages in protectionism. The problem is, Germany, Japan and the United States, and also Britain before the 1840s, became the leading economic powers in the world by means of naked protectionism. They used tariffs and subsidies, and they kept out foreign products and privileged their own producers. All of these things that are supposed to lead to ruin actually succeeded in the case of the four or five leading powers, including the United States. The United States was the most protectionist country in the world from the Civil War up until World War II. During that period it had the most rapid growth and the greatest industrial success of any society in history.
This does not mean that protectionism works at every level. As Chang points out, protectionism can be very useful for a country like the United States in the 19th century or Britain in the 18th century or various developing countries today that want to catch up, but once they have caught up it tends to become counterproductive. If you have world-class industries and are no longer worried about foreign competition killing off your own factories, then you want to expand your market. At that point – and it happened with Britain in the 1840s and the United States by the middle of the 20th century – the leading industrial power wants to open up foreign markets so that in addition to its own consumers, it can have access to consumers in other countries for its superior industries.
The truly radical thing about Ha-Joon Chang’s approach, which I think is quite right, is that he’s saying there is no one-size-fits-all policy for all economies at all times in history. The set of rules which would benefit the U.S. in 2012 may not be the ones that would help Brazil to catch up. If you go down that road, you come to the conclusion that the project of having a single set of rules in trade and finance that all countries must agree on is profoundly misguided.
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The Edgar Allan Poe Museum of Richmond, Virginia aims to raise $60,000 to publish a coffee table style book of James Carling's illustrations that depict Edgar Allan Poe's poem, The Raven.
The drawings were selected this year as one of Virginia’s Top 10 Most Endangered Artifacts by the Virginia Association of Museums.
The money raised will conserve each illustration and each will be given an individual archival acid-free mat. The amount of conservation will vary from piece to piece. They will be professionally photographed and placed into a gallery frame for inclusion in a traveling exhibition.
A large part of the money will be used to prepare and publish the book which will contain all 43 original illustrations. The small staff of the museum will also be working on writing all 43 catalog entries for inclusion in the book. You will receive updates along the way with photographs sharing our progress. This project will take a year to complete because of all of the smaller projects involved.
Anyone who makes a contribution to the Kickstarter campaign will have the opportunity to pre-order and purchase this book at a slightly discounted rate. Please leave us a comment and let us know if you would like to take advantage of this opportunity. |
In his first appearance since lying to the public on Saturday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer was unapologetic, disputing what constitutes facts and ranting about “demoralizing” media coverage of President Donald Trump.
“I believe that we have to be honest with the American people, but I think sometimes we can disagree with the facts,” Spicer told reporters Monday in his first press briefing under Trump.
“Our intention is never to lie to you,” he added.
On Saturday, Spicer called a press conference at the White House, where he proceeded to accuse the media of being dishonest about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration and then refused to take questions.
He doubled down Monday on claims about the inauguration crowd, saying “it’s unquestionable” that Trump’s inauguration was the most-watched in history, despite evidence that the event drew a smaller physical crowd and lower television viewership than past inaugurations.
Spicer went on to complain about coverage of Trump, saying that when the media reports facts about the Trump administration, it’s always “demoralizing.”
“It’s not about one tweet. It’s not about one picture. It’s about a constant theme. It’s about sitting here every time and being told no. ‘Well, we don’t think he can do that. He’ll never accomplish that. He can’t win that. It won’t be the biggest. It’s not going to be that good. The crowds aren’t that big.’ The narrative, the default narrative, is always negative. And it’s demoralizing, and I think that when you sit here and you realize the sacrifices the guy made of leaving a very, very successful business because he really cares about this country and he wants to, despite your partisan differences, he cares about making this country better for everybody, he wants to make it safer for everybody. And so when you wake up every day, and that’s what you’re seeing over and over again, and you’re not seeing stories about the cabinet folks that he’s putting up or the success that he’s having trying to keep American jobs here, yeah, it is a little disappointing.”
Spicer also continued his criticism of Time reporter Zeke Miller, who incorrectly reported that the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office. Miller quickly corrected his false report and has apologized for the mistake several times.
On Monday, Spicer asked where Miller’s apology was for the incorrect report, despite having accepted Miller’s apology on Jan. 20.
Aside from debating what constitutes a fact, Spicer took several questions on policy issues. The Huffington Post pointed out that 2016 was the hottest year on record and asked how Trump plans to address the fact that scientists say climate change is close to harming human civilization.
“He’s going to meet with his team and figure out what policies are best for the environment,” said Spicer. “One of the things he talked about during the campaign is there’s a balance, and he’s trying to make sure we use our resources appropriately, that we maximize things to make sure that we don’t do so at the detriment of economic growth and job creation.”
His response didn’t clarify much, but it’s worth noting that Trump previously called climate change a hoax created by China, and that his team is composed of people divided on how much human activity contributes to the greenhouse gases heating up the planet. Ninety-seven percent of published scientific studies conclude that human activity is the biggest driver of climate change.
Spicer was also vague on the status of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem ― something Trump pledged to do in his campaign, which would mean bucking 20 years of precedent by past presidents.
“We’re in the beginning stages of this decision-making process,” Spicer said. “His team is going to continue to consult with stakeholders to see if we get there.”
He also demurred when asked if he could say unequivocally that Trump won’t send more U.S. troops into Iraq to, as Trump has put it, “take the oil.” |
Sony Releases Matrix Online Scrapbook By Pete Haas Random Article Blend The Matrix Online was shut down for good this summer, leaving former players with nothing but memories. To assist your reminiscing, Sony Online Entertainment compiled a Matrix Online Memory Book.
The Memory Book is available MxO players, pictures of the pre-shutdown party, and other similar nostalgia items.
The Matrix Online, a direct continuation of the Matrix films, first went live in March 2005. Considering the last movie was released in 2003, it's pretty impressive the game lasted that long. was shut down for good this summer, leaving former players with nothing but memories. To assist your reminiscing, Sony Online Entertainment compiled aMemory Book.The Memory Book is available here in both "Red Pill" (flashy visuals) and "Blue Pill" (printer friendly) formats. It contains a summary of the game's storyline, which managed to get quite convoluted over the game's four year run. Also included are recollections written byplayers, pictures of the pre-shutdown party, and other similar nostalgia items., a direct continuation of thefilms, first went live in March 2005. Considering the last movie was released in 2003, it's pretty impressive the game lasted that long. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
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The Blender Institute's sixth film project, codenamed Gooseberry, is in deep into the most open production from the Blender Institute yet. If you've been following the project so far, then you already have a sense of what Blender means by an "open production"—lots of sharing.
Artists and developers share raw layout animations, art in development, and the files they're using to make the film, and also host weekly Google Hangouts for fans and followers (every Friday at 6 p.m. Amsterdam time) to show their progress. However, to Blender founder and Gooseberry producer Ton Roosendaal—and to the wider filmmaking world—the open production is about a lot more than just sharing the project's developments. So what does being an "open production" mean, exactly? And what does it mean for the wider animation community? Not only is it an opportunity to improve Blender's software and educate animation fans and would-be animators around the world, but it's also a chance to show the movie-making powers that be that there's a fairer, better way to do business.
Cosmos Laundromat
Gooseberry is the code name for animated pilot short (and planned feature film or series) "Cosmos Laundromat." The story follows a suicidal sheep named Franck, who gets the chance to live many different lives in many different worlds. Along the way, he meets two people who might just be able to save him (and themselves): Victor, a mysterious man with a magic timer, and Tara, an energetic and enigmatic female adventurer. The screenplay is a collaboration between screenwriter Esther Wouda, known to Blender fans as the screenwriter of Sintel, and director Mathieu Auvray, from the Parisian studio Autour de Minuit. The movie was initially planned as a feature film, with 12 different studios from around the world each creating one of the worlds Franck visits to reflect their studio's style and culture. The many-worlds concept was concocted to efficiently incorporate all these different styles into one film. However, as full-length animated films are very expensive to produce, "Cosmos Laundromat" will first be released this summer as a 10-minute pilot short covering Franck's first meeting with Victor and discovery of one of the new worlds.
Building films and software side-by-side
Ton produced his first (and likely the world's first) open movie in 2006: "Elephants Dream." The idea was to not only show off the capabilities of the Blender open source 3D software, but also to push its capabilities. Each project since has focused on specific software improvements that complement the film being made. This time, the goals include an improved pipeline, a more interactive cloud, better internal rendering, and more realistic hair and cloth systems—so it's no surprise that developers are put in the spotlight in the Gooseberry production process. The other project heroes? The animators and artists.
Educating animation fans
For most Gooseberry fans, the open production means an open education—at all levels. Beginners and less knowledgeable animation enthusiasts are learning about all the different stages of animation, from storyboarding and modeling to rigging and sculpting to lip syncing, grooming, and editing. Those with some knowledge of and experience in the overall animation process, and Blender in particular, glean even more from the information shared, down to very technical tips and tricks to optimize their own projects and achieve specific effects. In addition to their work on the film, all the artists and developers are expected to contribute regular tips, demos, and how-tos to the blog and the cloud (more on that in a moment) and answer fans and followers' questions about their work, as in the rigging AMA on the BlenderNation forum.
This isn't Hollywood
Each week, the team of 10+ artists and developers expose their works in progress to the world through blog posts, YouTube videos, and weekly presentations. It can be uncomfortable for the artists especially to expose themselves by posting rough animations and other raw work, which will inevitably be compared with the very polished final images people are used to seeing from large studios like Pixar and DreamWorks; but, by sharing this unfinished content, they're showing everyone watching just how much work goes into each shot—much of it invisible in the final film.
There's no barrier between the actual film makers and the audience, and the makers become the stars of the production and owners of the final result, which is held in trust by the Blender Foundation for the public at large (under a Creative Commons license). This is definitely not how it works in Hollywood, but under the leadership of Ton the team is determined to prove that this is a feasible model for sustainable filmmaking. We want to show the world that a transparent/open production can actually cover its costs while allowing a wider fan base to both participate and learn.
Funding feasibility
Animation of the caliber the Blender Institute wants to achieve is not a cheap prospect. First of all, all these artists and developers deserve fair compensation for their computer wizardry. Unlike the armies of animators found at the major studios, the Blender Institute can only afford to hire a handful. More animators means more of the movie gets made better and faster. Also, unlike "regular" Blender software development, development that takes place as part of the animation project is done through the Blender Institute, Blender's business arm. That means the project does not receive any of the Blender Foundation's Development Fund and needs to find other ways to support itself.
So, how is the project funded? Aside from a few EU and local subsidies, financial support for the project comes a little via the Blender Store (which offers DVDs of previous open movies, tutorials, books, and some Blender gear), a little through one-off donations, and the rest through crowdfunding via the Blender Cloud. The Cloud supplements the blog with a lot more content: all the films, tutorials, and extras found on the DVDs, plus the script, animatics, rigs, models, textures, and other assets from the current project. All of it is freely licensed for use in other projects, of course. Loyal Cloud subscribers are also offered pilot and feature film credits. An entry-level three-month cloud subscription costs €45, and then €10/month thereafter. Eight or more months of support, or an equivalent donation, earns a credit in the pilot film, and 18 or more months earns a feature film credit. Improving the Cloud's offering and capabilities has been one of the major focuses for the software side of the project. During the making of Sintel, Blender collaborated with supporters in a massively successful "modeling sprint" that produced a wealth of assets to use in the film. The goal is to, like all the other open aspects of this production, take that concept a step further.
What's next
As Blender moves toward what will hopefully become its first feature-length production, Blender Cloud will become more and more collaborative. The goal is to eventually allow subscribers to post to the cloud as well, even submitting their own versions of designs and animations, which might actually end up being used in the film. For now, the pilot production is in progress, focusing first on the opening scene of the film, with any additional funding that comes in going toward more artists to make more of the film. A new trailer will premiere in May, and a version of the pilot should be ready to show at Siggraph, the LA-based computer graphics conference attended by all the big VFX names, in August.
Based on the reception of the pilot here and in the wider animation industry, the support for the project in the community, and feedback from the team, Ton will decide what the next step for Gooseberry is. Will it become a feature film? A series? Will it be sponsored by a big name? Will there be further crowdfunding? And what will the logistics be of coordinating 12 international teams?
Whatever the answers to those questions turn out to be, two things are certain: Blender Cloud will remain and continue to become more and more interactive, and Cosmos Laundromat aside, there will (also) be other projects—perhaps another sequel to an existing series and/or a commercial production based on a famous Dutch character. Stay tuned!
Whatever is next, it's certain the production will be "open" and supported by Blender Cloud! |
After Rutgers' season ended on Nov. 28, redshirt junior linebacker Steve Longa was faced with a decision.
Coming off his third straight 100-plus tackle season, Longa was contemplating leaving for the NFL or returning to Rutgers for his senior year. Longa gathered information from as many resources as possible and then took a step back.
After taking three weeks to weigh his options, Longa has decided that he's ready for the NFL.
MORE: LB now major concern for Rutgers
"I feel like it's time," Longa said in an exclusive interview with NJ Advance Media. "I'm prepared. I had a very good season and I looked back after the season and I saw what I've accomplished throughout my career at Rutgers and I asked myself the question: Am I ready for the NFL? Is this the right time? I had to answer that question myself, not anybody else. And I felt like I was ready so that's why I made the decision to leave."
The 6-foot-1, 225-pound former Saddle Brook High star is one of the most prolific tacklers in Rutgers history. Playing middle and weak side linebacker, Longa led the Scarlet Knights in tackles in each of his three seasons, and his 342 career tackles ranks eighth in school history.
"I had 100-plus tackles for the three years that I played," said Longa, who started 37-of-38 career games. "I was able to become a leader in that defense, I learned the system and then I played at a very high level every Saturday. I asked myself the question if I'm ready to go to the next level. Am I ready to play with those grown men in the NFL? And I feel very confident that I'm ready."
Longa, 21, has received feedback about his draft projection, but he declined to share that information.
"It doesn't really matter what round I go in. It really doesn't," Longa said. "First, second or undrafted free agent, that doesn't matter because at the end of the day you have to strap your helmet up and go play football. And I know I can play football. You see all the time that people get drafted first, second, third round, but then a year or two years later you don't hear about them anymore. Why? Are they just happy that they made it or were they not as good as people thought they were? But I know I can play football."
Longa, who hasn't signed with an agent yet, will train for the draft at Parabolic Performance & Rehab in Farmingdale. Renowned trainer Brian Martin will lead Longa's draft preparation with positional instruction from former NFL linebackers Al Singleton and Bart Scott.
"I think Steven has tremendous upside. I think he has an incredible motor, he's an obvious tackling machine," said Martin, who has trained more than 200 NFL players over the past 23 years. "We're going to help him with his hand fighting and hand techniques as a pass rusher in addition to being a tackling machine. I believe this kid has the ability to be a Bart Scott-type player."
A labor studies and employment relations major, Longa said he is two semesters shy of earning his degree. While he will put school on hold to prepare for the draft this spring, he plans to return to earn his degree.
"Getting a degree means a lot to me so I'm going to keep taking classes -- if it's one or two per semester -- until I get my degree," Longa said.
A three-star prospect in Rutgers' acclaimed 2012 recruiting class, Longa played his entire career for former head coach Kyle Flood, who was fired on Nov. 29. Longa spoke with new coach Chris Ash about his decision last week.
"I had a great time at Rutgers," Longa said. "I wouldn't change my experience for anything. I wouldn't want to go to any other place. Rutgers was the perfect fit for me."
Growing up in Cameroon, Longa didn't dream of being in this position. He moved to the United States in 2007 and didn't play football until his freshman year of high school.
"It never was a dream when I was growing up," Longa said of playing in the NFL. "But God put me on this earth for a reason and whatever reason that is, I don't question it. If it's doing good or touching people's hearts or helping people through football, I'm willing to do that. I am also very grateful for the opportunity football has given me -- going to college, getting an education for free. A lot of people don't have that opportunity ... Is this a dream come true? Right now, it is a dream come true. If you play college football, your dream is to make it to the NFL. Until I make it, which I know I am, then I'm going to answer that question."
Dan Duggan may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @DDuggan21. Find NJ.com Rutgers Football on Facebook. |
Health experts have dismissed a Nevada legislator’s new age water company as junk science. But now one of his former employees says the company is a gateway drug for the Church of Scientology.
Grecia Echevarria-Hernandez, a former employee at the Las Vegas-based Affinity Lifestyles, is suing the company for alleged religious discrimination. A practicing Catholic, Echevarria-Hernandez says she was pressured to complete Scientology video courses at work, and was denied pay, ostracized, and eventually fired when she refused to watch the videos.
When Affinity hired Echevarria-Hernandez as a brand ambassador in March 2015, the company made her watch Scientology videos, she alleges in an April lawsuit. For each Scientology “self-betterment course” Echevarria-Hernandez completed, she would receive a pay raise of 25 cents per hour, she says. When she skipped the videos, her coworkers and superiors turned “hostile,” firing her after just seven months with the company she says.
This is not Affinity Lifestyles’ first time in the headlines. The company’s CEO is Brent Jones, a Scientologist and member of Nevada’s state assembly. Affinity and its subsidiary Real Alkalized Water, where Echevarria-Hernandez worked, sell so-called alkalized water, a product whose purported health benefits have been met with skepticism from the scientific community.
“Real Water is a premium, drinking water with an alkalized pH of 8.0 that utilizes the proprietary E2 Technology™, making it the only drinking water on the market that can maintain a stable negative (-) ionization,” the Real Alkalized Water website reads. The supposedly premium water promises to “Unleash the power of negative ions!”
But the science behind alkalized water is soft, at best, and a scam at worst. In a 2011 article , that conceded that “there are too many dubious scientific claims to cover in one post,” the Guardian debunked most of Real Alkalized Water’s junk science selling points. Real Alkalized Water claims that normal drinking water is dangerously acidic (untrue), that normal drinking water contains dangerous “free radicals” (untrue), and that Real Alkalized Water “adds hundreds of millions of free electrons” to its beverages (highly unlikely).
The company also sells a product called “Real Pain Be Gone,” a product that claims to use “essential oils” for pain relief, and does not list any of its active ingredients. But one of Real Alkalized Water’s business partnerships might be more dubious than its product.
“Real Water proudly supports a variety of community charities each year,” the company proclaims on its website. One of these supported charities is the “Citizens Commission on Human Rights,” a Scientology-backed anti-psychiatry organization that has published a paper claiming terrorism is “manufactured by psychiatry.” (PDF)
A water company and a Scientology-supported organization might make strange allies. But Affinity Lifestyles CEO and Nevada Assemblyman Jones has spoken openly of his membership in the Church of Scientology.
“I was in the parking lot outside Carl’s Jr., eating my lunch in the car, and a lady came by and tapped on the window,” Jones told the Las Vegas Review-Journal of his introduction to Scientology. “I rolled the window down and talked to her, and she sold me a book, ‘Dianetics.’”
Jones has also faced scrutiny for his involvement with the Church of Scientology before, when he allegedly convinced a mentally handicapped Scientology practitioner to spend $30,000 on two ostrich eggs several years ago, as part of an ostrich-breeding scheme. According to a report in the the New Times Los Angeles, published in late 2000, Jones allegedly told the man that he had purchased the eggs, but that the ostriches had died. When a now-defunct website called RealBrentJones.com publicized the alleged ostrich fraud during Jones’s Nevada assembly run, he sued the website’s owners for defamation, eventually settling the case out of court.
Jones’s involvement in day-to-day operations at Affinity Lifestyles is unclear. He did not respond to a voicemail or an email sent to his Nevada assembly address. Reached by phone, Affinity Lifestyles immediately hung up without answering any questions.
Grecia Echevarria-Hernandez, meanwhile, says she was fired for poor job performance, even though she completed her work “admirably.” The “workplace environment became extremely unpleasant,” she said in her suit. |
The FBI has obtained a warrant to start reviewing emails found on a laptop used by top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband Anthony Weiner, according to reports from US media.
The Wall Street Journal says the number of emails could total 650,000 - though not all of them are expected to be relevant to the Clinton investigation.
This comes after Friday's bombshell that the FBI was again reviewing emails related to the Democratic presidential candidate's private server.
:: Latest US polling and swing state information
In a letter to Congress, the agency's director, James Comey, said new information had prompted an additional review of the case that ended in July.
Trump: FBI has found the mother lode
Former Congressman Mr Weiner is being investigated separately after claims he exchanged illicit text messages with a teenager.
The FBI conducted a months-long investigation into whether Mrs Clinton had broken the law by using a private email server during her time as US Secretary of State, by allowing sensitive information to be discussed outside a secure government account.
The FBI concluded that while Mrs Clinton had been "extremely careless" she had not committed a crime.
Mr Comey's disclosure has sent shockwaves through the final days of the presidential race.
Democrats have come out fighting, insisting Mr Comey should have investigated further before making the announcement so close to the 8 November election.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid says Comey may have broken the law by making the disclosure at this stage of the campaign.
He claims the FBI director appears to be aiding one political party over another - a move that may violate the Hatch Act, which bars government officials from using their position to influence an election.
Hillary goes Lo at campaign concert
Donald Trump, however, is seizing a moment that puts his opponent in the spotlight.
:: Donald Trump whips up 'ugly' frenzy against reporters
He told a rally in New Mexico on Sunday that the FBI had found the "mother lode".
"How do you have that many emails? What do you do, sit down all day and just keep typing?" he asked.
"No wonder nothing gets done in our country."
He added: "This is the single biggest scandal since Watergate."
The Republican has been on the back foot for weeks following a hot mic recording of him boasting about sexual assault which prompted 12 women to come forward and accuse him of groping or kissing them without consent.
Earlier, he told an energised crowd in Las Vegas that the only way to put a check on Mrs Clinton's corruption was to use the "power of the vote".
A new Washington Post-ABC poll found that just over three in 10 voters said the news made them less likely to support Mrs Clinton. About two thirds of those voters were Republican or Republican leaning.
More than six in 10 likely voters said the FBI's announcement would make no difference in their vote.
The true impact of this latest revelation may not be truly reflected until the middle of this week.
:: Watch America Decides, a special programme on the US election at midnight on Monday. |
Former World Wrestling Entertainment star Gertrude "Luna" Vachon died Friday morning in Florida at age 48.
Article continues below ...
The cause of death has not been determined. She was found dead at her mother’s home, Vachon’s friends and family reportedly told the website Canadian Online Explorer (CANOE). She was living with her mother because her home was damaged in a fire.
"World Wrestling Entertainment has been made aware of the passing of Gertrude (Luna) Vachon. WWE extends its deepest condolences to the Vachon family," WWE said in a statement.
"Ms. Vachon was under contract with WWE at various times from 1993 through 2000, and performed under the name ‘Luna’ Vachon. She last performed for WWE in early 2000."
Vachon, born in 1962, is part of a legendary Canadian pro wrestling family. Her father Paul "Butcher" Vachon, uncle Maurice "Mad Dog" Vachon and aunt Vivian Vachon were all successful wrestlers.
Luna Vachon, nicknamed the "Daughter of Darkness," started her career in 1986 and was often known for her intimidating look — which often included shaving part of her head and wearing face paint — and her intense wrestling style. She retired from wrestling in 2007 and worked as a tow truck operator, according to CANOE.
Vachon had two sons and two granddaughters, according to the website. |
Iraq’s prime minister said this week that a teenage “jihadi bride” who traveled to the country from Germany could face the death penalty for collaborating with the Islamic State (ISIS).
Linda Wenzel, a German 16-year-old whom Iraqi forces found hiding in a Mosul basement after she fled Germany to join ISIS, is now at the mercy of Iraq’s judicial process, according to the Independent.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said, “You know teenagers under certain laws, they are accountable for their actions especially if the act is a criminal activity when it amounts to killing innocent people.”
Wenzel reportedly spent a year in Iraq with ISIS before she was captured. She could face death by hanging if she is convicted by an Iraqi court, but if she is tried in Germany, she is likely to face a prison term of less than ten years, the Independent reports.
The teenager was 15 when she fled Germany and is currently being held in a Baghdad prison along with other women linked to ISIS who are suspected of carrying out attacks, officials told the outlet.
However, Wenzel did receive a ray of hope from the Iraqi prime minister, who said in the AP interview that while Iraq has repatriated very few of the foreigners who traveled to Iraq to fight, “it is not in [their] interest to keep families and children inside [Iraq] when their countries are prepared to take them.”
In July, Wenzel told local outlets that she regretted what she had done and just wanted to return to Germany.
“I just want to get away from here,” she reportedly said. “I want to get away from the war, from the many weapons, from the noise.”
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics and U.N. reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY. |
Katie Holmes may not be heading back to the creek anytime soon. The former WB star, 36, said in a new interview with Yahoo! Style that there are no plans for a Dawson's Creek reunion, but it's not because of her fellow famous costars.
"I don't know, does it work today?" Holmes told fashion editor Joe Zee. "I don't want them to grow up. You know, it's kind of like your parents — they never get out of their fifties, that's where they are."
PHOTOS: Dawson's Creek Cast: Then & Now
The Ray Donovan star wrapped her run as Joey Potter on Dawson's Creek in 2003 after six seasons. The gang of Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek), Jen Lindley (Michelle Williams), Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson), and Jack McPhee (Kerr Smith), among others, spent much of the final season in college, fast-forwarding to their mid-20s for the series finale.
Holmes left her character Joey in May 2003, completing the story with the young woman living in New York City as a book editor and finally choosing Pacey over Dawson.
PHOTOS: Katie Holmes' Red Carpet Evolution
"We just did it, we all enjoyed it," Holmes said of the five years she and her castmates spent on the show. "It was of a certain time, it was pre-Internet. There was an innocence there."
The mother of Suri, 9, added that she keeps in touch with the crew from the creek, regularly walking the same red carpets as Jackson and his girlfriend Diane Kruger, and bumping into Williams out and about.
PHOTOS: Costars Reunited!
"Every now and then…. I just saw Michelle, I just saw her in Cabaret, she was amazing," Holmes said. "So we all run into each other now and then."
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I don't hate snowboarders. I hate snowboarding. This is not because I think they go too fast or make loud noises as they scrape snow off the ski runs or even because a few snowboarders cuss and smoke cigarettes in lift lines.
For me, it's simpler than that; I think snowboarding set the evolution of winter sports back about three decades, and now I don't think I will live to see simple adventurers snatch skiing back from wine sippers.
I came to this conclusion through experience at the time snowboarding was gaining fast popularity and the experts predicted it was going to revolutionize the snow-sport industry. A friend of mine, who was an instructor, gave me a free invite to participate in a three-day clinic that was guaranteed to "blow my mind."
In the first hour of the clinic, I was admittedly an uncoordinated mess and could barely figure out which end of the board went in front. By noon, I discovered that the front and back of the board were completely irrelevant. By the third day, I was a bona-fide expert and I knew with certainty that I had gotten all I was ever going to get out of the sport.
I outlasted the sport. Yes, I may be old, but snowboarding is dead. How do I know? You don't see kids riding them anymore. Snowboards may have been the first snow-carving tool, but modern skis came along and do it much better with far more versatility. Ask any 7-year-old which is better and you will instantly appreciate the stubbornness of the last of the snowboarders you see riding out into their looming midlife crises.
OK, you see a few tourist kids now and then on them, but you can blame that on the parents who told them that it was the cool thing to do and who garnered this information from watching the X Games on TV and still think that three-day infomercial during a mid-winter lull in the real sports world is a harbinger of hip trends. The main reason kids show up at the venue anymore is for the concerts after the events.
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When snowboards were predicted to be the salvation of the ski industry, skiing was dying. Skier days had been flat since the 1970s. People in the business were panicked. Snowboarding was new, came with a cool surfer-ish attitude and people with braided pony tails were into it. It was sure to reconnect young people to sliding around on snow.
Twenty years later, skiing is still flatlining, but not because it isn't any fun. The experts severely miscalculated what was wrong with skiing. They thought people were bored with it. They should have actually tried it before deciding that. The truth is that skiing was, is, and probably will continue to be one of the most exciting forms of recreation since saber-tooth tiger wrestling.
The only problem with skiing is that it became too dang expensive for all but the most spoiled children to get a taste of. Ask any drug dealer; you can't get anyone hooked on something they can't afford to try. With skiing, the people who are addicted are too old to do it much longer. Young people are into financially healthier alternatives.
Let's get back to the history, though. With everyone all in about snowboarding being the surefire salvation to bring youth back into the sport, euphoric confidence about the future caused the ski industry to keep raising prices, which only exasperated the one problem skiing ever really had.
To push a bad situation into the worst possible outcome, as the industry glowered so effusively about the gnarliness of snowboarding, they inadvertently, but securely associated skiing with have-been old fogies of yesteryear. In the mind of the young, skiing now ranks right up there with polo and America Cup sailing as the activities of choice for rich geezers who need a break from milling around their vineyards.
OK, I've been a little harsh on snowboarders here and I apologize. As I said in the beginning, I have no hard feelings about them. If that's how you get your cold weather jollies, I am thrilled for you getting out there and doing it. I am happy to share the slopes and consider us cousins on the quest for wintertime thrills. If my angst seems to be aimed at you, be sure that I had the industry experts in my sights. I think they went for a fakie backside grab and let the golden goose slip out of their grip.
Roger Marolt will grow a ponytail before he rides a snowboard again. Email at [email protected] |
Story highlights Trump spoke Thursday at the Faith & Freedom Coalition
Not once did Trump mention Comey's testimony
Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump, speaking Thursday at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, said he would never let the evangelical community down, saying that "we are under siege" but that "we will come out bigger and better and stronger than ever."
The speech to a fawning audience, which came as fired FBI Director James Comey testified about Trump before the Senate, provided the President with positive feedback on what otherwise was a politically trying day.
"You didn't let me down and I will never, ever let you down, you know that," Trump said to applause.
"We will always support our evangelical community and defend your right and the right of all Americans to follow and to live by the teachings of their faith," he said. "And as you know, we are under siege. You understand that. But we will come out bigger and better and stronger than ever, you watch."
The withering criticism facing Trump around Washington was nowhere to be found during his speech, where the President received sustained applause every time he trumpeted one of his achievements. Like he did during the campaign, Trump left the podium multiple times to bathe in the applause he was receiving.
Read More |
What is the Dodd–Frank Act?
The correct answer is “a financial regulations law,” passed and signed last summer.
Does President Obama control the Federal Reserve?
The correct answer is “no.” The Federal Reserve is an independent bank — although the president appoints its board members, a fact most of the “yes” respondents emphasized.
Who is the chairman of the Federal Reserve?
The correct answer is “Ben Bernanke.”
Is the U.S. economy currently experiencing inflation or deflation?
The correct answer is “inflation.”
Who is Elizabeth Warren?
The correct answer is “professor, Massachusetts senatorial candidate, and financial reformer.”
What is the “S.E.C.”?
The correct answer is “Securities and Exchange Commission,” which regulates financial securities.
What is the top marginal income tax rate for the richest 1 percent?
A tough question, but the correct answer is 35%.
But many wealthy filers pay only 15 percent on qualified dividends and long-term capital gains. What should it be?
The correct answer is up for debate.
What does the government spend more on? Health care and pensions, education, or the military?
The correct answer is “health care and pensions,” which accounted for 43 percent of government outlays in 2010. Defense accounted for 20 percent. |
San Francisco 49ers icon Joe Montana connected with former team owner Eddie DeBartolo for the game-winning touchdown as the Niners rallied to down the All-Stars, 45-40, in the Legends of Candlestick flag football game on Saturday night at Candlestick Park.
"It's a dream come true to get everybody back here," DeBartolo told the San Francisco Chronicle. "And have a fitting end to this stadium. It's a special place that has great, great memories for us that will last forever."
Montana had three touchdown passes while Steve Young rushed for a score. Jeff Garcia added two touchdowns, with one going to Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice.
The All-Stars, led by former Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, got a strong defensive effort from former Vikings safety Robert Griffith, who intercepted Young twice in the first half, returning both for scores.
But it wasn't enough as Montana brought the team back from a 40-32 deficit in the fourth quarter. Ronnie Lott, who reuinted with Montana Saturday, waxed nostalgic and praised the event the following afternoon:
One final time at Candlestick yesterday. Amazing seeing so many great @49ers and @NFL friends. Thanks to the fans! pic.twitter.com/nMGoB9NWwP â Ronnie Lott (@RonnieLottHOF) July 13, 2014
Approximately 25,000 fans attended the game, which benefited the San Francisco Police Foundation and the San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation, according to the Chronicle.
The 49ers will play at state-of-the-art Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara this season.
DeBartolo reflected on the team's home since 1971.
"This stadium may have had some issues and quirks, but it had character and personality," DeBartolo said. "There will never be another Candlestick Park." |
Judeo-Christian “Values” of Western Civilisation
You have seen it far too often whenever Christian nutjobs face Islamofascists, they would be very quick to claim that the Western civilisation is based upon Judeo-Christian “values” and hence is incompatible with Islam. I shall try to demonstrate the staggering absurdity of two assumptions that are hidden behind such claim. First of all such argument suggest that the Judeo-Christian “values” have contributed to the Western civilisation and have acted as a positive influence behind its advancement. Secondly it also assumes that Judeo-Christian “values” are significantly different from, if not in opposition with, Islamic teachings. Both these assumptions are plain wrong.
Hegel’s philosophy of history does provide us with a widely accepted explanation of the way civilisations evolve and compare to each other . Hegel basically argues that civilisations advance as individuals who form them become more self-aware. As the result of this increase in self-awareness, the individual would become aware of the fact that they are free beings and would act accordingly. The Judeo-Christian teachings want nothing but absolute submission to a higher power, who demands worship at all times ,and seems to be frankly too insecure about not being worshiped to the extent that he has dedicated almost half of his Ten Commandments to ensure that he is going to be worshipped, praised and obeyed. Such a control freak maniac would never want the freedom of anyone who believes in him. Friedrich Nietzsche said once: ‘I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.’ The God of the Old Testament, as well as the new one, demands submission and full obedience , this would leave no room for the individual development. The individuals really don’t matter, what matters in here is full submission to the super natural and its alleged appointed representatives. This also has another unpleasant consequence.
Friedrich Nietzsche in his “Human, All too Human” argues that what binds a society together is a set of common values and beliefs, which are very often unspoken but yet present and influential. Such bond is a source for unity and strength of the society. However there are from time to time heretics who would challenge, undermine and finally alter such values. This , Nietzsche explains, can result in the weakness of a community but eventually it would help the society to evolve into a more enlightened state. The society would come out of it stronger for good and evil. Religion from the very first day made it clear that it’s teachings are unalterable and the holy words of god cannot be challenged. Religion has always been the biggest barrier towards change in traditions and has always wanted to preserve ancient dogmas. If monotheistic death cults allowed change and reformation in their fundamental doctrines, they wouldn’t be called monotheistic religions by definition in the first place. Western civilisation is superior to other civilisations not because it’s been influenced by Judeo-Christian “values”, but because, mainly, it managed to overcome and oppress the vicious, wicked and immoral dogmas of Abrahamic faith.
Christianity can be given the credit for not being as pathetic as its closest cousin, Islam. However it shares more in common with Islam than most members of either faith would like to admit. They both seem to be very fond of eternal punishment and torment for people who disagree with them. They both have profound anti-Semitism present in them. They both have rules that govern individual’s most trivial aspects of life, especially one’s sexual life. Both of them are plagiarisms of Judaism. Both intend to oppress one’s faculty of reasoning and would punish anyone who dares to point out to the contradictions in them. Both attempt to punish one for heretical thought, that is to say to offend Abrahamic dogma you really don’t have to engage in an act of heresy, entertaining a thought that is dimmed to be heretical in the privacy of your own skull should do the job in qualifying you for eternal sufferings and torment.
Neither Islam nor Christianity can be a force behind enlightenment. It’s disappointing how people despite their lack of belief in religion, still give it the credit for being a positive source for unity and enlightenment. None of the members of the triangle of evil (i.e. Judaism, Christianity and Islam) deserve such credit. They indeed have been one of the greatest barriers in any progress that our civilisations have made. They are against enlightenment, reason, self-awareness, freedom and justice. Theistic dogma is as despotic as any ideology can get. The most disturbing indicator of such revolting despotism is the possibility of being convicted for thought crime under both Christianity and Islam.
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People who use cocaine ‘recreationally’ may be closer to becoming a drug addict than they think
People who use cocaine “recreationally” may be closer to becoming addicted than they think, a study has warned.
Even among non-dependent cocaine users, visual cues associated with consumption of the illicit drug lead to dopamine release in an area of the brain responsible for cravings, according to research published in the medical journal Scientific Reports.
Dopamine is a chemical that causes people to seek pleasurable activities, and researchers have known for years that cocaine use triggers the release of the neurotransmitter.
The research suggests that using cocaine just once may cause an addiction.
NRL plunged into cocaine scandal during representative round Read more
“The study provides evidence that some of the characteristic brain signals in people who have developed addictions are also present much earlier than most of us would have imagined,” said Prof Marco Leyton, an expert on the neurobiology of drug use and addictions at McGill university in Montreal, Canada.
In people with addictions, visual cues – such as seeing someone using cocaine – are often enough to trigger dopamine release.
This cue-induced release of dopamine shifts to the dorsal striatum, a structure deep inside the brain thought to be particularly important for when people start to lose control of their reward-seeking behaviours.
To better understand how soon this effect might be seen, Leyton’s team used positron emission tomography (Pet) scans to look at what happens in the dorsal striatum of recreational cocaine users.
The scientists created highly personalised cues by filming participants ingesting cocaine in the laboratory with a friend with whom they had used the drug before.
During a later session, subjects underwent a Pet scan while watching the video of their friend taking cocaine.
Exposure to the cocaine-related cues increased both craving and dopamine release in the dorsal striatum.
“An accumulation of these brain triggers might bring people closer to the edge than they had realised,” said Prof Leyton.
The findings also underscored the importance of providing help early to avoid the severe effects of dependency, he said. |
The FIA is taking steps to ensure there is no repeat of the failures seen at Silverstone © Getty Images Enlarge Related Links Race:
German Grand Prix
Pirelli has asked the FIA to ensure that the teams use their tyres under certain conditions at this weekend's German Grand Prix.
Following the tyre failures at the British Grand Prix, Pirelli issued a statement highlighting a list causes, with low pressures, aggressive cambers and swapping tyres from side-to-side among them.
Ahead of FP1 at the Nurburgring, the FIA issued a not to the teams which said it must satisfy technical delegate Charlie Whiting that their cars comply with a set of conditions. The conditions include minimum starting pressures and stabilised running pressures, maximum cambers and a banning of swapping tyres from side-to-side.
On Thursday Lewis Hamilton said he had "been swapping tyres since I started Formula One, so it's been done for many years", but the practice has now been banned by the FIA.
The decision from the FIA to enforce the guidelines on tyre operating procedures comes after the Grand Prix Drivers' Association threatened to boycott the race if there was a repeat of the problems seen at Silverstone.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd. |
NEW YORK – THUNDER BAY – SPORTS — The World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) and Major League Baseball (MLB) today announced a global professional players agreement for the WBSC U-18 Baseball World Cup 2017, which will be staged 1-10 September in Thunder Bay, Canada.
As part of the new MLB-WBSC U-18 Baseball World Cup partnership, MLB affiliated players (born 1999-2001) are eligible to participate with their respective National Teams.
Twelve nations — Australia, Canada, Chinese Taipei, Cuba, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Nicaragua, South Africa and the United States — will be competing in the official junior baseball world championship, and the respective national governing bodies will have until 27 August to finalize their rosters for the U-18 Baseball World Cup.
“This landmark agreement further raises baseball’s international profile, particularly following the unprecedented success and popularity of this year’s World Baseball Classic,” said WBSC President Riccardo Fraccari. “The National Team is intended to be a representation of a country’s best players, and together with Major League Baseball’s shared vision, the top young baseball players in the world will be able to wear their nations’ jerseys in Thunder Bay.”
“We are pleased to work with the WBSC to give our young affiliated players the opportunity to play on this international platform,” said MLB Chief Baseball Officer, Joe Torre. “MLB remains committed to our youth all over the world and playing against the best competition in their age group will only enhance their development. As I had the honor of doing at the World Baseball Classic, there is no greater feeling than that of representing your country on the ball field.”
“Major League Baseball continues to be a great partner in targeting youth, in evolving the culture of our sport and in building the National Team brand, which is resonating with fans and players at unprecedented levels,” said President Fraccari.
Tickets for the XXVIII WBSC U-18 Baseball World Cup can be purchased at www.thunderbay2017.com. |
About This Game
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Toy Soldiers
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The award-winning smash hit returns withBring your toys back to life with the originaland, now bundled together with all DLC packs:and. That's bothgames and all DLC in one $45-value bundle!One of the top 10 best-selling Xbox LIVE® Arcade games of all time, Toy Soldiers is a unique, action-packed strategy-based game in which players command antique WWI toy soldiers vying for control of the trench-filled battlefields of Europe. Deploy an exciting arsenal that includes tanks, cavalry, biplanes, and flamethrowers in vintage WWI toy dioramas.Position your defenses and take direct control of your artillery to bomb the enemy positions, pilot your bi-plane against the enemy trench, or maneuver your tanks across No-Man’s Land and lead your Toy Soldiers to victory!Enjoy all new French inspired content with THE KAISER'S BATTLE! Enter the fray as the French Army and battle into the midnight hours in new multiplayer and Survival Mode maps. Take on the new experimental boss, the fearsome K-Wagen!The British are bringing brand new secret weapons of tiny toy mayhem in 'Invasion!,' the second add-on to Toy Soldiers from Signal Studios!Put on your Kaiser’s helmet and command the German Army against a mad menagerie of new antagonistic toys, including flying saucers, chivalrous knights, and the “Rolls Royce of the Sky,” the WWII Mustang.Defend Germany in a new Mini-campaign topped by the most calculating, head-strong boss of all (batteries not included)! Raise your saber, soldier, and lead the charge against… is that a spaceman? The Invasion has begun!The Cold War ignites when '80s era action toys come alive and wage war! Toy Soldiers: Cold War delivers hours of intense combat combined with addictive action strategy gameplay.Superpowers collide in this playful homage to '80s action toys and films. Command the powerful Cold War arsenals of the USA or USSR armies! Control base turrets, modern combat vehicles, fighter jets, attack helicopters, and commando action figures. Whether lighting up the Toy Box alone or jumping into the fray with your friends, battle in campaign, co-op, or competitive modes.Fight for the high score in the addictive mini-games, and while you're at it, don't forget to BLOW EVERYTHING UP!It’s time to step into the boots of our Russian comrades and fight back as the Evil Empire! Deploy turrets, modern combat vehicles, attack helicopters and a slew of new tricks to destroy your capitalist foes—all while enjoying expanded single player, online co-op, and online competitive modes.Eager to return to your freedom-fighting American army? Turn up the heat and invade a harsh new world in the jungle-themed Napalm; the final expansion for Toy Soldiers: Cold War.With challenges focused on torching your enemies, additional weapons at your disposal, a brand-new vehicle, and expanded single-player, online co-op, and online competitive modes, Napalm is sure to set a new standard for startling authenticity and intense action. |
Search resumes for man swept away in Brisbane River while retrieving remote-controlled boat
Updated
A major search is underway for a man swept away in the Brisbane River when he tried to retrieve a remote-controlled boat.
The 44-year-old was caught in a strong current when he went into the river to retrieve his boat at the Brisbane Corso about 4:30pm on Saturday.
His partner followed him along the river bank for about 200 metres until he disappeared near the Indooroopilly Golf Club.
Acting Police Inspector Andrew Dupere said the man could not be found despite hours of searching by land, air and sea.
"We all got here quickly but the current was flowing fast and he has gone downstream pretty quickly," he said.
The search was suspended about midnight.
Acting Inspector Todd Sucic said there were grave fears for the 44-year-old's safety.
"We will resume searching for him today with water police, the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service and the SES, so hopefully we will be able to locate him sooner rather than later," he said.
He said a command post at the Somerville House Water Sports Centre at Yeronga is coordinating the operation.
Topics: missing-person, police, emergency-incidents, brisbane-4000
First posted |
Lex the police dog from central Illinois is far from top dog in drug-sniffing skills.
That's the core finding of a potentially influential new ruling from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which considered the question of how much police should rely on their K-9 partners to justify searches when a dog's own competence, as in Lex's case, is itself suspect.
The opinion stems from an appeal by Larry Bentley Jr, a St. Louis man serving 20 years in prison for drug possession. He argued the 20 kilograms of cocaine Bloomington police found in his car during a 2010 traffic stop derived from an illegal search triggered by Lex.
While the court upheld the conviction, it disparaged Lex and suggested it might have considered tossing Bentley's conviction if police had relied solely on Lex's nose.
"Lex is lucky the Canine Training Institute doesn't calculate class rank," a 15-page opinion said. "If it did, Lex would have been at the bottom of his class."
Lex's trainer at the Bloomington-based dog school staunchly defended the 10-year-old Belgian Malinois on Wednesday, a day after the court's decision.
"The opinion is unfair and very one-sided," Michael Bieser said in a phone interview. He added about Lex, who remains on the job, "He's is a very, very good dog."
As a consequence of the decision, he added, some effective drug-sniffing dogs could be kept out of service for fear their performance records will be similarly misconstrued by courts.
Tuesday's ruling pointed to records showing Lex nearly always signals drugs are present — 93 percent of the time. And it cited other figures that indicated he is frequently wrong — more than 40 percent of the time.
"Lex's overall accuracy rate ... is not much better than a coin flip," the ruling says.
Bieser argued Lex's alert and false-positive rates on the street are misleading because they don't factor in times he detects drug residue or larger quantities police simply fail to find. Lex's success rates in controlled tests required for certification have been over 90 percent, he said.
He conceded Lex did fail one controlled test during the evidence-gathering stage of Bentley's case, calling it an anomaly. As a result, Lex was pulled from service for a two-week refresher course.
The court said it upheld Bentley's conviction in part because other indications at the traffic stop, including his contradictory statements, may have separately justified a search. It added that Lex's overall performance likely rose just above minimally acceptable levels according to criteria laid out by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But the judges make clear their concern that dogs that almost always signal for drugs could potentially provide police with a "pretext" to search anyone's car.
They also highlighted the practice of Lex's police handlers giving him a reward — a toy hose stuffed with a sock — each time he alerts, whether he's right or wrong about drugs, saying that "seems like a terrible way to promote accurate detection."
Lex's trainer says the institute doesn't instruct police to reward dogs after each alert. But dogs are so eager to please, he went on, they perceive pats or even encouraging tones of voice as a reward, so whether they get a toy reward is irrelevant.
Still, he says the Bentley case has forced the institute to alter one recommendation to police: From now on, while dogs are out on a job, never offer them a reward.
"We didn't do it because we agree rewards confuse dogs," he said. "But they will use the practice against us in court."
Associated Press |
Punctuation Style [ edit ]
When punctuating quoted passages, I believe punctuation can belong inside or outside the quotation marks, depending on the meaning, even though the British style calls for them to be always within the quotation marks.
As an American, I have never quite accepted the idea that punctuation should go inside the quotes as often as style manuals seems to insist. I'm not clear what the British alternative is, however. Are there any links here, or could someone provide a brief set of examples? --Ryguasu
Example added. Ortolan88
Thanks. How about punctuation for As John Doe points out, "The man with the most cheese molds the least." Americans would obsessively put the period inside the quotation marks. Is this true for British folks as well? --Ryguasu
Um, there's no obsession about it. If it is a complete sentence, the punctuation goes inside in both countries. The MOS has always said that. Ortolan88
Ortolan88 is right. If you were to be perfectly logical about it, you would write
As John Doe points out, "The man with the most cheese molds the least.".
because there the quotation is a complete sentence (requiring a period) while it sits at the end of another complete sentence (requiring its own period). I will often use just this style, since I'm a hyperlogical person, but most people regard it as too ugly, so the usual style convention is to keep only the period inside the quotation marks. (It might just as easily have gone the other way, however.) What distinguishes the two countries' systems is:
John Doe called him "the man with the most cheese".
Here the quotation is not a complete sentence (thus requiring no period), so the style above is the one demanded by pedantic logic. Since this style is not ugly, we can use it in ordinary writing, and the British do; the Americans, however, move the period inside the quotation marks, because ... I dunno why, they just do. — Toby 09:14 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)
As I understand it, it is a prejudice of American printers that little bits like periods look "bad" hanging outside the "quotes". I don't agree and I have to catch myself when I'm writing commercially to do it the American way, but in everything I write for myself I do it British style and I was delighted to note when I was working up the Manual of Style that British was already the convention in Wikipedia. Ortolan88
On quotations and punctuation marks [ edit ]
Right now our official policy is to put punctuation marks inside quotation marks if it is a full quotation, but outside the quotation marks if it is a partial quotation. I've been looking at many encyclopedias and found that this is uncommon even in British publications. does anybody else feel that the current policy is needlessly confusing... or am I simply being an Ugly American here? I'd like to change it to have a uniform "punctuation goes inside quotation marks" style, but I really don't want to step on anyone's toes – just looking for a few comments on the issue. ;) [[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (talk)]] 16:52, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC)
The present official policy is in agreement with what is done in many (most? all?) other languages. You should consider the fact that many contributors here do not have English as their first language and have in fact learnt in school/university that the punctuation only goes inside the quotation marks if it actually belongs there in the first place. The only reason to do otherwise is, I guess, typographical, and I don't really find it much of an aesthetic improvement to get the empty space in one place rather than in an other./Tupsharru 17:19, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
The rule has been in there since the first draft. I believe it is clearer that way. There were many examples of this usage in the Wikipedia already. I tried to make the first draft reflect what was already "best practice" in Wikipedia. Ortolan88 22:21, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC) Personally, I can never remember what the policy is, so I generally just fake it. (I've read enough British authors over the years that my sense of such things is confused. In other words, my gut instinct is unreliable.) There would be something to be said for a system that is entirely consistent (and therefore easier to remember). However, at the moment there is so much inconsistency with regard to punctuation that I almost wonder if it is worth the effort to have a rule. (Trying to enforce any change would be very difficult. Not that the current "rule" is enforced.)--[[User:Aranel|Aranel
("Sarah")]] 22:30, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Like the rest of the Manual of Style, none of the rules here are enforced, but when someone who loves copy-editing comes along to tend to an article, maybe quite an old one, they can look in the Manual of Style for guidance on consistency. Not that the rule is all that hard to remember: If the punctuation is part of what is being quoted, put it inside the quotes, and if it is not part of what is being quoted, leave it out. That is, the quotation marks contain only what is being quoted. Ortolan88 22:57, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
The current Wikipedia policy is often called "logical quotation". I far prefer it, despite what I was taught in school, and always use it when not prevented. Proponents of "typographical quotation" claimed it "looks better". Too often, I believed, it did not look better. It looked stupid. This is especially so in lists of words and meanings. For example, using logical punctuation: Three French words with related meanings are maison 'house', domaine 'estate, property', and château 'castle'. This seems to be me to be more understandable and better looking than: Three French words with related meanings are maison 'house,' domaine, 'estate, property,' and château 'castle.' (The use of single quotation marks here rather than double quotation marks is standard linguistics usage when indicating a meaning of a previous word or phrase regardless of whether in the article as a whole double quotation marks or singlular quotation marks are used for top level quoting. I use it in Wikipedia since I prefer it and guideliness currently don't specify and the convention has spread to technical writing outside of linguistics. But using double quotation marks wouldn't change the point.) Now if you aren't at all concerned with meaning, it is possible that at some level of abstract design that always putting a small base-line punctuation mark before a small high punctuation mark is aesthetically better, if there is an absolute in asethetics. But in parsing a sentence we are concerned with meaning. This is only my personal feeling, not binding on anyone. If the Wikipedia Style Guide specifications had specified typographical quotation, I would bend to its whims. But considering that logical punctuation is specified in prestigious British style guides and in some general technical style guides, it is doubtful that such a rule would have stayed fixed in Wikipedia. The only reasonable choices are between letting the editor choose and logical quotation everywhere. From The Canadian Web Magazine for the Writing Trade: Placement of Punctuation and Quotation Marks: In a literary work, we recommend the American style of always placing periods and commas inside the quotation marks. In a technical or legal work, where accuracy is essential, we recommend the British practice of placing periods and commas within quotation marks only when they are part of the quoted material. I take Wikipedia as more technical than literary and this recommendation to come from noting increased use of logical punctuation in academic and technical writing outside of Britain. Jallan 00:17, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Various observations: The comma and period inside the quotes "look better" only when true typography is used to place the quote over the punctuation, so that's not really an argument for doing it. My arguments for doing it come from Chicago and many other American style guides, but most acknowledge the historic reasons for the punctuation order. In technical style guides here, it is not the general case for punctuation to go outside the quotes, only when what's inside the quotes is an exact value (as in: type this URL into the field: "http://www.foo.com".). However, I have no problem using the Wikipedia style guide and editing according to that. Elf | Talk 15:52, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Quotation marks: New policy proposal [ edit ]
With quotation marks, we have no rigid rule. Some users prefer using one style (punctuation goes outside the quotation marks when quoting only part of a sentence, but inside when quoting a compete sentence), while other prefer another style (punctuation always goes inside quotation marks).
I prefer the "rigid rule" that is presently in place, not because it is a rigid rule, but because it gives guidance to editors, that is, if the punctuation is part of the quote, quote it, if not part of the quote, don't quote it. Keep in mind, that which is frequently forgotten in these discussions, the purpose of any manual of style is consistency. This proposal will result in inconsistency and gives no guidance to editors. Contributors in general don't pay much attention to the Manual of Style so far as I can tell. This is good, because a lot of the Manual of Style is intimidating to people not accustomed to editorial markup.
If I am reading correctly, this "no rigid rule" paragraph is the only part of this proposed policy that is actually new, the rest is pretty much as it already is in the Manual of Style. Ortolan88 03:24, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC) PS -- I should state my bias. I wrote the first draft of the Manual of Style, basing it on what I found in the Wikipedia at that time, and the rule about "logical quotes" was in that first draft because many carefully written articles, including mine, already used it. Ortolan88 Have to agree. Seems like we should just pick one system and move on. (Also, it seems like we already have, so lets.) Chuck 04:17, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC) Punctuation should go inside quotes because every legit style manual says to do it this way. It makes Wikipedia look unprofessional to allow otherwise. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.44.144.59 talk ) 15:13, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
Keep in mind that if you're quoting several paragraphs, there should be quotes at the beginning of each paragraph, but only at the end of the last paragraph. For longer quotations, an indented style may be better. Since quotations are already marked by quotation marks or indentations, they need not be italicized.
It is probably best to use the "double quotes" for most quotations, as they are easier to read on the screen. Use 'single quotes' for "quotations 'within' quotations," or to mark words for attribution.
Note that if a word appears in an article with single quotes, such as 'abcd', the Wikipedia:Searching facility will find it only if you search for the word with quotes (when trying this out with the example mentioned, remember that this article is in the Wikipedia namespace). Since this is rarely desirable, this problem is an additional reason to use double quotes, for which this problem does not arise. It may even be a reason to use double quotes for quotations within quotations as well.
For uniformity and to avoid complications use straight quotation marks and apostrophes, not curved (smart) ones or grave accents: Correct: ' " Incorrect: ‘ ’ “ ” `
If you are pasting text from Microsoft Word, remember to turn off the smart quotes feature by unmarking this feature in AutoEdit and "AutoEdit during typing"! [1]. Many other modern word processors have a smart quotes setting - please read the appropriate documentation for your editor.
The grave accent (`) is also used as a diacritical mark to indicate a glottal stop; however, the straight quote should be used for this purpose instead (e.g., Hawai'i, not Hawai`i).
I'm planning on adding this revised policy in a week if there are no objections. Comments? [[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (talk)]] 03:07, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)
Except for the punctuation issue (addressed above) I'm fine except for the Hawaii example. Why are we even addressing a rare character here. My understanding of that character, also used for other Hawaiian words, is that the preference of character use is (i) the Unicode character (there is a specific unicode character defined), (ii) opening left apostrophe, (iii) grave accent, (iv) straight apostrophe. Straight apostrophe might be the most cross-platform, but is the least accurate. Anyway, is this really the right way to open up the rare character can-of-worms. There are plenty of other characters and diacritic marks we would need to address as well. We can start a section to address such characters, but it doesn't belong with quotes. Chuck 04:17, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I don't see what this change would improve. Maurreen 04:33, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)
The only real change here is removal of long-standing Wikipedia preference for logical quotation. But editors have long time been writing articles by this standard and correcting articles to fit this standard. As with any change here, consensus is needed. And I don't see that occurring. I agree with Chuck on the Hawai'i issue, which is controversial and not clear and also not altogether folllowed. Does this mean that when referring to Hawaiian names in an English context one should use the straight quotation rather than the grave, or that even when quoting Hawai'ian forms natively one should do the same? I don't think the latter is intended, or at least would not be understood now as being a reasonable rule. That should be made clear. There is an increasing tendency in general for use of rarer Unicode characters to appear throughout Wikipedia as fonts increasingly support them. I have seen use of the ‘ character in Hawaiian names and the only objector I've seen to it backed down at once when the user made an issue of it, even saying that if the editor wanted to persist in using it against the standard, he'd support the user. It is hard to remember that even as short a time as three years is was considered rather daring on the web to display even common characters outside of ISO Latin-1 without special downloadable fonts and how a few cranks were still raving away on usenet claiming that Unicode couldn't work and that no-one was using it. That no-one is generally addressing the matter of rare characters may indicate that there is no problem to be addressed, that is, that those using rare characters are largely doing so with reasonable restraint and issues raised are being solved reasonably by individual discussions. Jallan 17:32, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
The manual recommends British-style punctuation on US topics??!?! [ edit ]
Where on Earth did people writing the style manual come up with the idea that all articles should use British-standards of punctuation, even on explicitly U.S. topics? I refer here to the sections on quotation marks and serial commas. We follow the spellings of the country of the topic, but not the punctuation? That makes no sense at all. I would strongly encourage that we standardize on the rules used by the appropriate country for topics about that country, both for fairness reasons and for not teaching our readers bad habits. OH,and not to mention that following these rules would mean every US-article would always have major errors for anyone reading it: US readers would see screwed up punctuation and International English readers would see nonstandard spelling. A style decision that guarantees an article is going to be wrong for everyone who reads it is just plain useless. DreamGuy 22:50, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)
DreamGuy, please see my proposal above, which, if implemented, would get rid of this problem in its most general form. Perhaps you would like to add your support/constructive comments, jguk 23:22, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Consider these my supportive/constructive comments. But then if the above says that articles about US topics written erroneously using British rules because someone British first started the article, or vice versa with a British topic using US rules, that part is nonsense. It should conform to the country of that topic when thetopic is clear. I did a lot of edits to Jack the Ripper, for instance, and when someone came and said that that's not how they use certain words and punctuation there, I said, fine, I don't know how you were taught, change it to that. If I had insisted that it stay with American rules I would be imposing my rules on another country, which is wrong. DreamGuy 23:41, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)
jguk, I don't follow how it addresses this. the MoS has only one set of punctuation rules. It has two (or so) sets of spelling rules (US and British/International ones), and a set of "meta-rules" (topics specifics to a given country, generally acceptable usages, first major contributor, etc) as to which to use. Aren't you proposing to change the latter set of (meta-)rules? If you plan on expanding the scope to include things, that there's a unitary rule for at the moment, you should say so explicitly. (I suppose these are all strictly speaking "guidelines", if none of the MoS is policy as such.) Alai 00:01, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Punctuation and quoting style is just that: style. There are common conventions that are often followed in the US or UK, but they're not universal, and using a different convention isn't an error. I don't feel strongly about it, but it seems to me that the UK convention is more explicit, requires fewer exceptions for special cases, and is closer to how programmers and computer people often write, anyway. —Michael Z. 2005-03-14 00:44 Z
Ugh, the US punctuation rules are rules, not mild suggestions that people feel free to violate. If you write a paper for school or write a book, like, say, an encyclopedia, and you do it any other way, it's wrong. It is an error. The fact that computer programmers are notoriously bad at grammar and spelling should not be used as an indication that an encyclopedia should start following their style. If that were the case we should just give up and require everyone to make plurals out of everything by adding an apostrophe and an s and go with L33tspeak spellings. The "computer people" can make contributions all they want, but they ought to let the people who understand spelling and grammar to clean up after them instead of arguing with them. DreamGuy 01:40, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
Far be it for the likes of us to argue with you and your dreadfully impressive understanding. It's just too bad that some incompetent rule-breakers like George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, and Gertrude Stein didn't have you to clean up after them, too. —Michael Z. 2005-03-14 06:27 Z
Non-contemporary UK authors using non-contemporary British rules wouldn't be breaking their rules, so that argument makes no sense. I'm sorry, you aren't even trying to support your side with logical reasons, you are just assuming British rules are better than the US ones in general and being rude about it on top of it. That's not support for your side, that's evidence that your opinion is based solely on bias. DreamGuy 06:49, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
Those are examples of famous British and American authors who broke a lot of their their contemporaries' "rules" of punctuation, including ones that are still conventional. I'm not assuming any rules are better than others; I'm saying your assertion that they must be followed slavishly is wrong, and I'm sure most writers would disagree with you.
Sorry for my tone, but I thought your highbrowed implication that computer programmers and technical writers were illiterate was rude. In many contexts there are good stylistic and practical reasons to diverge from convention. To do so is not automatically an error. For example, from Quotation mark:
In some subject areas (such as software documentation and chemistry), it is conventional to include only what is part of the quoted phrase within the quotes, for clarity:
Enter the URL as “www.wikipedia.org”, the name as “Wikipedia”, and click "OK".
Publishers adopt style guides that are appropriate to their publications. It makes sense for Wikipedia to do so, and there's nothing wrong with using essentially British punctuation conventions when they are easy for volunteer editors to apply and will avoid confusion in thousands of technical articles. —Michael Z. 2005-03-17 19:37 Z
Re "British-style punctuation". Up until 28 December of last year, the MoS described its guideline as "splitting the difference" between UK and US usages: punctuation inside or outside according to sense (per British rules), but preferring "double" quotation marks to 'single' ones (per American practice). Sounds like the original framers were trying to strike a compromise between the two, and it's a shame that language was lost from the Manual. –Hajor 04:15, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The WP-mandated serial comma is also something of an Americanism, if we're keeping score. (Though also popular with Lynne Truss, Oxfordians, and other pedants. Well, some pedants, as I don't personally care for it...) Alai 05:51, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Two points: first, the current MoS says that spelling and "usage" of a country should be used in articles "specific to" that country. That ought to include punctuation. The MoS is just a bit inconsistent here. Second, the MoS is a guideline, not policy, so no one should be changing people's commas or quotation marks. Even though when I last looked the MoS advocated the use of the serial comma, I never add serial commas to British-related articles (although the serial comma is used in the UK, there are lots of British writers who don't like them). It's best to use commonsense and be sensitive to the views of the editors who've spent most time on the page, as well as to the topic. SlimVirgin 06:58, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
I don't think "usage" covers punctuation. It may not be terribly consistent per se, but it says what it says, and says it fairly clearly. Your interpretation of "not policy" seems to be in essence to ignore it entirely. Aren't the guidelines guidance for among other things, copy-editting? If it's not a good idea to edit text to make it conform better (well, more, at least) to the MoS, why have it at all? Bin the whole thing and just have "holding the ring" policies for the on-going edit-warring between US and non-US copy? (I suppose that the latter is probably a practical necessity anyway, on the evidence.) Sensitivity to both of those things is certainly a good idea, but some clarity about what's an ultimately desirable goal would be very useful. Alai 07:41, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Further to the comment above by Hajor, I agree that the "splitting the difference" explanation should be retained. Was it removed on substantive grounds, or simply to make the passage shorter? JamesMLane 09:18, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I'm not sure why it was removed. Statement of intent: I plan to put it back shortly, unless I'm loudly shouted at and convinced otherwise in this thread. –Hajor 14:57, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Alai, I do follow the MoS. It says: "Writers are not required to follow all or any of these rules ..." SlimVirgin 09:23, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
Yes, but it does not say: "don't copy-edit to conform to this style", as you suggest. Nor does it say "vigorously revert such edits if they displease you", which seems to be a practice that gets justified by this same "it's not policy" argument. (On occasion justifying this in terms of the "first major contributor" or the "national variety of English" rules... to be found in the very same non-policy document.) Alai 09:28, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
That's right. It's not policy. People shouldn't be going around changing commas from one style to another. It leads to revert wars over trivia. We shouldn't be pedants and I assume you're not arguing in favor of pedantry. All that has happened because of the pedantry of a very small number is that the MoS has fallen into disrepute. Someone lost an adminship nomination recently in part because of his habit of going around changing articles to conform with the MoS, which he was doing on a large scale and insensitively. Sensitivity and commonsense are the keys here. SlimVirgin 09:42, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
Over the past twenty-odd years I've taught countless students from around the world, including hundreds of visiting U.S. students from different universities. The only constant with regard to punctuation and style is theat there's no constant. Some of the more pugnacious ones insist that they're using 'U.S. punctuation' because that's what they were taught at school, but they're at odds with others, equally pugnacious, who were taught differently at different schools. For example, I've recently had a rash of U.S. students putting footnote numbers inside quotation marks — because that's what they were told to do at High School; some of them would be prepare to argue the case (on 'U.S.–U.K.' grounds), but their U.S. fellow-students are able to point out that it's not in fact a matter of geography or culture, but some ill-educated High-School teachers. (I might add that I don't have that problem with British students, because they're not taught anything at school any more.) The point is that there are three issues regarding punctuation: tradition/rules, matching to speech patterns, and logic. Some variations are irrelevant to the last two, in which case they rarely matter at all. Because speech patterns (especially the places where people pause in sentences) vary widely, there's little point arguing about that either. Logic's a different matter. For example, putting the footnote number inside quotation marks is daft, because the number isn't part of the quotation. The same goes for other punctuation marks: if the original text didn't end with a full stop, then it can be misleading to put one inside the quotation marks. The serial comma is the same; some people seem to have an emotional response to it (which I don't understand), but its omission can and often does lead to momentary puzzlement or worse, whereas creating examples where its inclusion causes problems is an exercise in surrealism. Why not forget this silly (and mostly bogus) business about U.S. versus U.K. punctuation, and concentrate on clear and unambiguous communication? Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης ) 10:58, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hear, hear! Clarity is this Manual's purpose, not nationalistic chest-beating. James F. (talk) 11:56, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Seconded. SlimVirgin 12:04, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
OMG ME TOO!!! Seriously, I agree. The way the MOS deals with punctuation and quotes just makes sense. --SPUI (talk) 12:29, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
And I agree also. Maurreen 02:22, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The manual recommends US style headers Start the first word and any proper nouns in headings with a capital letter, but leave the rest of the heading lower case. Personally I have no problem with this because it is within the range of what is acceptable in Commonwealth/International English and although it is not a universal rule in C/I. E., it helps to give Wikipedia a more standard look. I would hope that A.E. practitioners can accept that the looser C/I English punctuation if they come across it in an article. Spelling is another matter because spelling color and colour does not really lend its self to a literate compromise. Angels dancing on a pinheads come to mind over this discussion. Philip Baird Shearer 13:35, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
But in what sense is this U.S. style for headings? Any publishing house or journal has a house style, and the variety of such styles is dizzying. I'd be very surprised if the Wikipedia style of headings weren't at least as common in the U.K. as in the U.S. (I've done a quick and unscientific bit of research, and in fact the Wikipedia style proved to be by far the most common in the U.K.-published books at which I looked, including those from C.U.P., Routledge, Blackwell, and Pan; only O.U.P. used all initial capitals, though that style was used by many U.S.-published books, including those from Open Court, Duke U.P., Prentice-Hall, and Paragon House.) Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης ) 14:01, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Quotation marks [ edit ]
This section is all messed up, IMO.
here called the "logical" style and the "aesthetic" style
Why don't you just come out and declare the one you don't like "illogical"?
The aesthetic style, which is only really now used in North America, was developed as early typesetters thought it was more aesthetic to present punctuation that way.
Modern typesetters say that too. Commas and periods go inside or else you normally get a horrible gap on the bottom of the line, unless you are going to a press that adjusts those things. Website text soes not adjust those things.
In the aesthetic style, the punctuation goes within the quotation marks
Not always true. In fact, the example you give earlier for "logical" style (putting the exclamation mark inside of the quotation mark only if it relates to the item inside the quotes) is the standard for North America too for things like exclamation marks and, especially, question marks.
This section needs to be updated to be less POVvy and more accurate. DreamGuy 01:02, Mar 18, 2005 (UTC)
I have to agree here. I had to read the section three times to figure out what the difference was. The etymology of the terms is irrelevant (and their global dispersion is secondary); focus on describing what the two styles are. —Wahoofive | Talk 06:01, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Quotation marks, splitting the difference [ edit ]
My understanding is that no one objected when Hajor stated an intention to reinsert into the style guide the material on splitting the difference for style on quotation marks. My understanding is also that there was no discussion to remove that material, either originally or recently.
Hajor's reinsertion was reverted. I am going to restore it. If anyone disagrees, I ask that you discuss it here and get consensus first. Maurreen 04:43, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Personally, I agree with it, and with the "compromise style" it rationalises. Indeed, one might make a similar comment about the entire punctuation issue. However right at the moment, re-introducing it might be seen as advocacy against Jguk's "vive la difference" proposal, so I'd personally be cautious about doing so unless there was some evidence of a consensus to do so. Alai 23:54, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I disagree with the current phrasing. As a foreigner I read "we split the difference between American and British usage" and had no clue what it meant. I had to read the discussion to understand. First, the fact: "Wikipedia uses the American quotation symbol (") and the British punctuation rules." Second, the rationale: "These are the best choices for reasons of symbol visibility and sentence logic." So finally the "split the difference" comment is not the fact, not the rationale, just a happy consequence. If you want it, then it should come third after the fact and rationale which are more important.--67.124.149.4 21:51, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I just found out about the reinsertion of that crazy "splitting the difference" rule because I first read the Manual of Style in February and had no idea it had changed until right now (because a BE contributor reverted changes I had made to the Supreme Court of the United States) page to bring it into proper AE style. Just for the record, I preferred the previous rule (which I understood as where contributors simply keyed in their additions in their native dialect and generally refrained from editing each other's dialect peculiarities). The current compromise rule is simply insane, because as some people have pointed out in the archived talk pages, the result looks equally ridiculous to English writers everywhere. --Coolcaesar 00:10, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As I understand it, the actual rule was at no point deleted, at no point reinserted. What I was keen to see reinstated was the description of that rule as "splitting the difference" (which was deleted). Why? Basically, to head off further threads of the The manual recommends British-style punctuation on US topics??!?! kind. –Hajor 01:53, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This manual of style requires some British English usage on pages which are dominated by American English, and some American English usage on pages which are dominated by British English. This is but one example of this. This does give a ridiculous result, as Coolcaesar notes - and the Manual regularly gets ignored (for obvious reasons) by many WPians.
Unfortunately all attempts to permit articles to be fully consistent with one standard form of English have met with rebuffs by those unwilling to give up their pet likes. It's a shame, and it means this Manual does not reflect WP practice - but until those users decide to stop dictate their individual preferred styles to others, it's not going to change, jguk 07:22, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Quotation Mark Rule - A Hopeless Muddle? [ edit ]
I'm of the opinion that the Wikirule on quotation marks is a hopeless muddle. Does anyone else share this opinion? In sum, it starts out by saying "we'll generally follow the American rule, but then we'll really follow something more of the English rule but with some American bits thrown in." So the rule is no rule. I can understand either: 1) entirely following the British rule or 2) entirely following the American rule. But this messy hybrid means it's not right to anyone. I've read quite a few articles here on Wiki that are not following any rule -- Brit, Amer, or Wiki -- and it's just a muddle. Some parts are following one, and then other parts follow the other, while still others follow nothing or are a jumble of everything. What think ye others? David Hoag 03:43, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
I think our style on quotation marks is OK. Any muddling in articles is not necessarily because of the style guide. Maurreen 03:58, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
Maureen, what are your thoughts about making usage consistent within a single article itself, e.g. either "all English" or "all American"? I see this done somewhat in articles with the consistency of spelling, e.g. "color" and "colour" are not used within the same article. David Hoag 04:32, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
I think consistency within an article is both more important and more achievable than consistency throughout the entirety of Wikipedia. I believe the debate about UK versus American spellings reached the same conclusion. — HorsePunchKid → 龜 04:46, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
Making text more consistent within an article is usually a good idea and supported by the style guide. But just in case you haven't run into this yet, some people are very sensitive, for lack of better words, about their national version of English ... or maybe just whatever they are used to, even in the same country. Maurreen 04:54, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
It's more the fact that many seem to have had "correct" English drummed into them by their teachers, and don't realise that English really has many, many different forms and usages throughout the world, or even that English is a dynamic changing language. We are the victims of dogmatic and misguided teachers:( jguk 07:21, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
I think the current guideline's fine. I can see your concern, but in my opinion this kind of middle point will work fine for an encyclopedia that is neither British nor American. Though having said that, the style on the manual now is (for the msot part) the one I always use in all my writing (before I came to Wikipedia). Neonumbers 11:42, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
Quotation marks and punctuation [ edit ]
Concerning the following from this style guide:
When punctuating quoted passages include the mark of punctuation inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the mark of punctuation is part of the quotation. This is the style used in Australia, New Zealand, and Britain, for example. (A fuller treatment of the recommendations given here can be found in Fowler's Modern English Usage and other style guides for these countries, some of which vary in fine details.) "Stop!", for example, has the punctuation inside the quotation marks because the word "stop" is said with emphasis. When using "scare quotes", however, the comma goes outside.
Other examples:
Arthur said the situation was "deplorable". (The full stop (period) is not part of the quotation.) Arthur said, "The situation is deplorable." (The full sentence is quoted; the period is part of the quotation.) Arthur said that the situation "was the most deplorable he had seen in years." (Although the full sentence is not quoted, the sense of finality conveyed by the period is part of the quotation.)
Please note that the above rules reflect British conventions and are generally not followed by American publishers. For example, the Associated Press Stylebook has the following under its guidelines about "quotation marks":
PLACEMENT WITH OTHER PUNCTUATION: Follow these long-established printers' rules: The period and the comma always within the quotation marks. The dash, the semicolon, the question mark and the exclamation point go within the quotation marks when they apply to the quoted matter only. They go outside when they apply to the whole sentence.
Using commas and periods with Quotations, Song Titles, Article Titles, including in a Series [ edit ]
I have recently noticed a British contributor going on a punctuation crusade through articles, including some I have edited and researched, to change all commas or periods placed inside quotation marks to be outside the quotation marks. He cites "logical quotation" and points to our Manual of Style: Quotation as though that is an authority on the subject of punctuating a sentence listing several song titles, as in the sentence he changed. (I wish he had been as interested in content research, but some people mostly care about going in to articles just to change the locations of commas. At least his fixation on this topic has brought it to my attention so I can ask here about it.)
Please explain how "logical quoting" relates to a list of song titles that are punctuated with quotation marks. I understand a quotation to be something different from a list of song titles that use quotation marks for punctuation. Listing four song titles in a sentence and placing the commas outside the quotation marks punctuating the song titles makes the resulting changed text appear to my eyes like some sort of programming language, rather than English. My reaction may be caused by my eyes becoming used to American editing style manuals from my work outside Wikipedia for the past 20 years. Trying to edit differently here than I do elsewhere, as though Wikipedia began as a British publication (which it did not), is going to become confusing for me.
I'm also trying to understand if Wikipedia style has settled without dispute on using British logical quoting for quotations, when that happened, and why British style should dominate Wikipedia. (I had visited the style manual many times before and did not notice this before.) No American style guide that I know of used by professional editors adopts the placing of commas and periods outside quotation marks. Here is the only archive I've found so far of Wikipedia discussions on the subject, merely noting a small handful of contributor attitudes on the subject: Quotes talk archive. I didn't find that discussion to have clearly come to a conclusion.
I want to get everything straight about what's correct form so that I can be consistent, correct any errors I have made myself, and so that I won't, worse yet, accidentally mis-edit someone else's work in the future. Until now, I had been adhering to styles I thought Wikipedia's style guide was based on (particularly for References citation style), such as Chicago Manual of Style, APA, and AP. I had thought at one point in the past some part of the Wikipedia style guide had said to use American style on American topics and British style on British topics, but I now doubt that memory was true (or it might have been in a citation style discussion, but I don't remember). Once I'm clear on how to handle this in the future, I will consistently apply whatever is the approved style to use, assuming it doesn't keep changing. --Emerman 18:14, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
The logical quoting style is preferred because it preserves exactly what is quoted; there is no ambiguity as to whether the punctuation is as in the original. This does tend to be pretty consistantly followed, even in AE style articles by editors from the U.S., as I am. --Jonathunder 18:43, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
No, it is not "preferred" in the U.S. On the contrary, I just listed for you a number of style manuals commonly followed, including in arts and entertainment fields if that is what you mean by "AE style," that don't put commas outside the quotation marks, so it couldn't be "consistently" followed in the United States. As for arts and entertainment, a simple look at any and all articles in All Music Guide (allmusic.com — random example: [2]) and Rolling Stone magazine (rollingstone.com — random example of song titles with commas/periods inside quote marks: [3] and [4]) reveals they follow Associated Press style, not "logical quotation" style for song titles in a series or for quotations, for that matter. Please provide specific and precise examples of other U.S. publications that place commas and periods inside quotation marks, particularly with song titles as in the case of the UK person who erroneously adjusted an article I worked on, if you are going to make claims of that nature in the future without citing your sources.
I continue to hope someone will explain the relationship of "logical quoting" style to a series of song titles separated by commas and using quotation marks, which is what led me to write this question, rather than have this part of the question be confused with punctuation of a quoted passage. A series of song titles listed in a sentence is not a "quotation." (Was the immediately preceding sentence supposed to end with the period outside the quotation marks in "logical quotation" style, by the way? Same with the comma I put with the phrase "AE style" in the above paragraph? Changing either to have the punctuation outside the quote mark would be awkward looking.) Why did a person changing the commas in a Wikipedia article I'd written separating song titles with commas refer to his edit as "logical quoting"? There is nothing being "quoted" in the case of a series of song titles punctuated with quotation marks. Also, as to your quotation logic comment, I have never had any ambiguity about when to use the comma or period inside a quotation; it is simply not an issue. The logical quoting style tries to make it an issue, but it is not one necessary to consider if you simply always put the period or comma inside the quotation. Whether the punctuation was in the original or not is irrelevant. --Emerman 19:45, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
My comment above is in the context of Wikipedia, where logical quoting does tend to be the general practice and has been for a long time, even for Wikipedia articles in AE style. I think this reflects the influence of computer culture, where, due to the importance of giving a string of text literally, this has become more common, even in the U.S. --Jonathunder 20:15, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply. Could you please clarify if you mean "arts and entertainment" by your use of the term "AE"? Yes, I did mention the style looked like a programming language rather than English, re: your comment about computer culture. I have not been using the logical quote style you mention as being widespread in Wikipedia in my editing. I notice it in some articles but didn't think it was widespread in Wikipedia. I think it looks horrible. It makes perfect sense in computer text strings though. My work background includes both technical editing and journalism, by the way, so I'm familiar with computer and internet-oriented styles too. The journals and magazines I read online are not using the style someone has convinced people is fine for Wikipedia. I don't understand how this happened; you seem to indicate it's a techie trend, perhaps among bloggers, but it's not the trend in online magazines. --Emerman 21:01, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
I think Jonathunder's explanation is probably more-or-less correct. Most Britishisms make me cringe and it takes a good deal of willpower not to correct them, but for whatever reason "logical quoting" seems perfectly natural and correct to me, and that sentiment seems to be fairly widespread on Wikipedia. This is in fact one of the oldest parts of the MoS and it has rarely been questioned. For your particular example, anything that appears in quote marks is ipso facto a quotation, so the rule applies to them. The following has standard Wikipedia punctuation for a sentence containing a list of song titles: "Some of Burt Bacharach's most famous songs are "The Look Of Love", "(They Long To Be) Close To You", "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head", and "I Say A Little Prayer"." --Nohat 20:39, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
I appreciate your reply. Yet I find that example looks horrid. The fact someone got their opinion to scoot past everyone, not considering other style guides, doesn't mean it ought to necessarily stay that way, hence this talk page. You're indicating it's an old style here, but a year ago, I did not think that was in the style guide or else I just missed it. Now I've got a year of editing one way behind me that I have to go back and change in edits under this name and my IPs, if I'm to assume all my edits using common American style book style were wrong. --Emerman 21:01, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
OK, I went to a British arts and entertainment publication, NME, to see their way of doing this, although "AE" isn't the issue here — I come from a tech writer background, not just an AE background and am interested in editing other topics than music sometimes. NME appears to use this style you mention (example: third sentence of [5] and third to last sentence of [6], although they use single quote marks and the standard is double quote marks for song titles — I wonder why they used single ones?). If "logical quotation" style is definitively what I'm always supposed to do, and I'm always supposed to put commas and periods outside song titles, then I'll try to go back and correct my past mistakes in the future. Will use double quotation marks for signifying a song title or article title unless I learn even that old punctuation rule has changed. --Emerman 21:35, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
I think it's not that someone scooted their opinion past anyone— it's just that probably the majority of people on Wikipedia so far who care about the issue agree with the style. This is the first time I've seen it questioned. I don't mean to deflate your balloon too much and I'm sorry you think this style looks "horrid", but I think this style is pretty universally well-liked on Wikipedia, even by anti-consistency chaos hawks such as myself. However, given that, you have no obligation to go back and fix your previous edits. You are of course welcomed and encouraged to, but you should definitely not feel like you have to. You should contribute in whatever way brings you the most pleasure. If "fixing" punctuation to a format that you don't personally like that much is something that doesn't interest you, you should definitely work on something else instead. Someone else will fix it. On the other hand, if the thought that there is content you contributed that violates the MoS makes your stomach churn and you won't be able to sleep until it's fixed, then I guess you'll have to fix it. In that case, however, you have no one to blame the unpleasantness on other than yourself for being an anally-retentive perfectionist. :-) You can, however, take solace in the fact that much of the rest of us are the same. One could research in the history how long it's been in the Manual of Style, but I know for certain it's been there as long as I've been editing Wikipedia articles (mid-2003) because it was one of the first things I looked up. You must have overlooked it before. --Nohat 21:44, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
It was there for a long time, then it disappeared around New Year's (between 2004 and 2005) and then was reinserted in March 2005. The problem is that a lot of contributors (myself included) who started editing Wikipedia during the winter of 2004 were not aware of that crazy rule since it was not in the MoS during that period. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive12 for more information about the debate that resulted. Furthermore, I continue to disagree with the rule in its current state as an insane compromise that satisfies no one. I personally use American English punctuation when editing pages that are purely or almost completely about American subjects (especially American law, where proper punctuation is extremely important). Of course, as a matter of basic courtesy, when editing pages about topics that are not specific to the United States, I do preserve the British usage when I come across it. Furthermore, I should point out that if you review the English language article, you will notice that American English speakers currently constitute a supermajority (two-thirds) of all native English speakers. --Coolcaesar 01:47, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
The "logical quote style" means that punctation goes inside the quotation marks if and only if it is part of the content being quoted. In the case of a song title, if a comma is part of a song title, it goes inside the quote marks, otherwise it does not. I have long (for years before the creation of wikipedia) used this style exclusively in my writing, adn i live and have always lived in the US. Therfore would write a list of song titles as (for example "Raindrops keep Falling on my Head", "Yesterday", "When I'm in Town, I call on You", "Reaching Out...", and "Only You". This makes it clear which punctuation is and which is not part of the title. I understand this to be the agreed and most commonly used style on wikipedia. It would have been my choice had I been polled on the issue. --DES (talk) 02:42, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
Since you mention American law, Coolcaesar--can you cite any bill-drafting style guide, for the U.S. Congress or any state legislature, which does not follow the "logical" formatting? The bills I've seen, and a couple of bill-drafting guides I've seen, are pretty much like the Wikipedia rules. Gene Nygaard 08:23, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
California, for example. If you look up California Civil Code Section 1749.60 [7], or any other code section that happens to put quote marks around something (like Financial Code section 23000), you will notice that the California Legislature consistently puts periods and commas inside quotation marks. As for judge-made law, both the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court continue to adhere to the American convention of placing periods and commas inside quotation marks. I just pulled slip opinions from both courts' Web sites to be absolutely sure (Powerine Oil Co. v. Superior Court, decided 8/29/05 by Cal., and IBP, Inc. v. Alvarez., decided 11/8/05 by U.S.). Also, the American style is the style implicitly prescribed by the Bluebook, as indicated by the examples for Rules 5.1 and 5.2. --Coolcaesar 03:11, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
You are missing the point completely. I'm not talking about the laws; I'm talking about bills. That's where they say we're going to amend the existing law which says "such and such", and replace that wording with something else saying "this and that". In those bills, punctuation is inside the quotation marks if the punction is contained in the original or replacement language; it is outside the quotation marks if it is not. No strange, illogical rules always placing periods and the like inside quotation marks. Gene Nygaard 05:59, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
If you had bothered to look at the California Legislative Info site [8], you would realize that California bills never indicate what text is being removed by an amendment to an existing code section. They simply state something like "Section 1654 of the Civil Code is amended to read:" and then the new section starts right away on the next line, without any quotation marks preceding or following it. There is no need to indicate the difference between the old and new sections because any lawyer who cares about a bill can look up the current version on LexisNexis or in the law library, and compare it to the new version proposed by the bill.
When West or LexisNexis modifies their annotated versions of the California Codes (West's California Codes Annotated or Deering's Annotated California Codes) after the Governor signs the bill, they will add in a note saying that the 2005 amendment deleted or added specific phrases (and these notations are always punctuated in American style).
Even where bills themselves are amended during the committee process, quotation marks are not used. Rather, the deleted text is indicated with strikethroughs and the inserted text is indicated in italics. This has always been the tradition in the printed versions published by the Legislature, and has been continued on the Legislature's Web site.
In case you're wondering, I did just look up Thomas and the United States Code, and I am now aware that Congress does use logical punctuation in both its bills and the U.S.C. But that's simply one branch of the federal government. Both the judiciary and the executive continue to use traditional American punctuation, respectively, in their opinions and in the Code of Federal Regulations. The Constitution, of course, also uses American punctuation as well — I am referring to the President's oath in Article II.
Finally, I fail to see what the point of your point is, because very few bills are so notable that they need to be parsed phrase by phrase on Wikipedia (especially before they are signed into law).--Coolcaesar 20:17, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
I think that the problem on quote marks is that the technicalities are not understood, and not appreciated as important by the average person (indeed, the fact that there are two systems which can be interpreted as ok by readers suggests that there is not a big issue here). I think that in the history of this, there are two different systems being considered, reported speech and quotations and historically they have different rules, but (like the quotation mark article itself, this subtlety is lost- its just stuff in quotes for the average reader. In my more pedantic moments I'd like to see an authoritative statement on the acedemic view of correct usage, in all dialects, I think there is too much personal experience being thrown into the pot. Anyway, trying to fix a style based on correct usage when that usage is not understood seems a lost cause. Perhaps the pragmatic approach is to state that it is a Wiki style and not based on correct usage due to the differences in usage. --Spenny 11:38, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
There is some truth to that, but i also think you will find that there is no authoritative, academicaly approved style for all dialects of english, any more than there is a fully authoritative single spelling of "color/colour". --DES (talk) 18:16, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
(smile) I think you should be shot at dawn for suggesting that there is not a correct spelling of colour, just because the upstarts on the other side of the pond choose to spell it differently! Seriously, it is a different case, there are clear, correct spellings, they just differ according to dialect. Punctuation is a different problem, in that its correct usage is not well understood, or perhaps even well defined. In Britain, there has been a popular book, Eats Shoots and Leaves, which attempts to deal with the more glaring issues, though I am not sure it managed to weave its way through the detail of punctuating quotes or the spoken word. So as far as Wiki goes, we know we will be offending some readers with wrong spelling, it is less clear whether our punctuation will cause the same offence. --Spenny 17:07, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
Let me see if I have got this straight. Some people are suggesting that instead of writing
Some of Burt Bacharach's most famous songs are "The Look Of Love", "(They Long To Be) Close To You", "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head", and "I Say A Little Prayer".
we should write
Some of Burt Bacharach's most famous songs are "The Look Of Love," "(They Long To Be) Close To You," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," and "I Say A Little Prayer."
Is this really what is being said? The second formulation is absurd. Not only is it logically wrong (because the commas are not part of the song title), it looks completely wrong too, with the quotes separated only by spaces. Possibly I have got confused about what is being said. Matt 11:54, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
No, Matt, that's about the size of it and I'll agree with you it does look completely wrong too ... to me ... but I'm biased. The thing is that one can't help but be biased. Emerman says this style is "awkward looking" and that it "looks horrible" but admits that his "reaction may be caused by [his] eyes becoming used to American editing style manuals ..." (P.S. it should be "... eyes' becoming ...").
Well, Emerman, the American style looks awkward and horrible to me so we're even. Yes, a lot of it just depends on what you're used to so raising the point of how it looks isn't going to get either side very far.
Let's therefore examine the merits of the two systems in terms of logic. The American system defies all logic ... and for what? Just to look nicer ... and in my eyes it fails at that but, as I say, this is only a matter of taste. What people are calling the British system makes perfect logical sense and is unambiguous.
Note that I write "What people are calling the British system": its use is not restricted to British English but is pretty much universal (even outside of English). And why should it be universal? Well ain't that obvious? Nobody but the Americans had that daft idea of mucking things up.
Americans would do well, in my opinion, to adopt this logical system of quotation. Its looks can't take that much getting used to. However, I guess that would be hoping for too much. At least here at Wikipedia logic prevails in this respect. Long let it.
Emerman, I understand your desire to have things changed to the style to which you are accustomed but judging from the responses here I don't think this desire is about to be fulfilled. Jimp 9Nov05
<< it should be "... eyes' becoming ..." >> You mean genitive? Wow, I guess you never stop learning... PizzaMargherita 07:35, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, I was just being pedantic since we're in a pedantic mood. Another point: I'm Australian but I don't ever recall learning this logical punctuation style at school. In fact I don't think I'd ever been aware of the issue until I read about it at Wikipedia. I've always used logical punctuation simply because it's logical. Never really gave the issue any thought. Now, though, I notice the American style and, as I say, it grates on me like I guess the logical style grates on Emerman.
Emerman, you say you continue to use American style in artilces about US law where "proper punctuation is extremely important." The logical style is not improper. Also it's an article about law, it's not a legal document. That asside wouldn't you think that in articles about law or any topic for that matter unambiguous punctuation would be best? How do law makers in the US get around this ambiguity I wonder. Jimp 11Nov05
You got confused. Emerman didn't raise that point, I did. To respond to Jimp's point: The issue of punctuation is a non-issue for American judges or legislators, because in nearly all cases it's not that important to show in the final text where a certain period or comma came from. There are a few reported contract cases where parties have fought over the meaning of the placement of punctuation, but if I recall correctly, the solution in those cases was to simply quote the entire relevant portion of the contract verbatim as a blockquote (in which case quotation marks are not used because the indentation and context are sufficient to show that the text is a quote from somewhere else). --Coolcaesar 03:11, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
Punctuating quoted passages: why British usage exclusively? [ edit ]
When punctuating quoted passages, include the mark of punctuation inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the mark of punctuation is part of the quotation. This is the style used in Australia, New Zealand, and Britain, for example.
I don't get it. With respect to U. S. versus British usage, everywhere else, we say that usage should follows either the nationality of the subject, or whichever convention was established when the article was started.
Why should we prescribe British punctuation style for an article that otherwise follows U. S. usage? Dpbsmith (talk) 19:50, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
...but obviously that maybe must roughly depend usually on the exact approximate order of the rules. PizzaMargherita 21:00, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
It's somewhat misleading to call it "British punctuation" as it's used by everyone but the Americans. There are good reasons to favour what is better referred to as "international punctuation". Firstly, it's logical: punctuation marks go where they belong. Secondly, it's unambiguous: with the American style you might not be able to determine whether the punctuation was part of the quote or not. A third reason specific to Wikipedia is that this topic has been done to death and the general consensus it to stick with logical punctuation. Jimp 00:21, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
The British system is more logical, but aesthetically gross. Quotes look better outside commas and periods, which I guess is why North Americans put them there. Felicity4711 03:22, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
It's gross if you are not used to it. Also I thought that (most) Americans put punctuation inside quotes, for example a question mark even if it's not part of the quotation, but it's part of an interrogative sentence that ends with a quotation. Anyway, I've changed to a more neutral wording, which is widely accepted, as you can see in the archives. I've also neatened up a bit, removing a poor example and removing a reference that is way too much for the scope of the MoS. Hopefully this is the last time we have to discuss this. PizzaMargherita 07:38, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
In AmE commas and periods precede closing quotation marks. Some punctuation examples: Did John really say "I quit"?
Mary saw the flames and shouted, "Fire!"
Susan sang the song "Tommorow." —Wayward Talk 07:58, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
Oh, and to answer the original question, because we reached a consensus that "logical" quotations are better. Check the archives. PizzaMargherita 07:44, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
As PizzaMargherita indicates grossness is in the eye of the beholder. It all depends on what you're used to. To me the US style looks ugly. The arguement from æsthetics sufferes from the fact that we've all got different taste. Jimp 07:13, 6 March 2006 (UTC) An aside—is "arguement" misspelt? Or is "argument" a US spelling? Just curious. --TreyHarris 03:33, 13 March 2006 (UTC) Chambers Dictionary, 9th ed., argument. So, apparently, a misspelling. —Wayward Talk 03:48, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
Getting in here a little late. Quoted passages should have the same punctuation as in the original passage, with quotes outside everything, to indicate what exactly is being quoted. Is this not clear? User talk:Wayward says punctuation precedes quotes, but in his first example it doesn't -- though it's a correct example of how U.S. typography is the same as British.
So:
"Did he really say that?" is the line Harry utters as Barbara enters the scene in "A Very Funny Play" by A. Playwright. (Because there's a question mark in the play's text.)
Is it true that Einstein said "God does not play dice with the universe"? (Because the quote certainly didn't contain a question mark; why put it inside the quote? Some might include a period too.)
Patrick Henry said "Give me liberty or give me death!" when he faced execution for treason. (His declaration could have ended with a period, which would be omitted in a fragmentary quote--but when the sentence is hanging, the exclamation point seems apt.)
This would be correct anywhere, I thought. Some U.S. publishing conventions seem incorrect to UK readers. But our practice of putting punctuation inside quotation marks in dialog is not the same as placing punctuation in quoted printed matter. The convention is that quotes go outside everything from the source text. Fragmented conversational quotes are the only time one punctuation mark, the comma, goes before the closing quote mark. Very few Wikipedia articles are going to contain quoted speech that was never printed, I would think.
Quoted text rarely ends in a comma, or no punctuation (a line of poetry, perhaps), so that weird Americanism should come up not at all.
Also, "just adopt the U.K. convention, world, it's more logical" is the one tiresome thing about the style guide. There's 200 million more potential readers that are used to U.S. conventions (or, punnily, "US" conventions). Besides, conventions are arbitary; the most common denominator makes as much sense as anything. It's bullyish, but just as true as "our way is really rather better!" (or, if you prefer, "really rather better"! -- tell me that looks more logical.)
(Really no offense intended. Just can't resist some punctuation banter is all. DavidH 05:29, 13 March 2006 (UTC))
Sorry for the late response. As I said in my reply above, commas and periods precede closing quotation marks in American-style punctuation. Other marks adhere to British style.
Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., 6.8: Periods and commas. Periods and commas precede closing quotation marks, whether double or single. This is a traditional style, in use well before the first edition of this manual (1906). As nicely expressed in William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's Elements of Style, "Typographical usage dictates that the comma be inside the [quotation] marks, though logically it often seems not to belong there." The same goes for the period. (An apostrophe at the end of a word should never be confused with a closing single quotation mark; punctuation always follows the apostrophe.) In the kind of textual studies where retaining the original placement of a comma in relation to closing quotation marks is essential to the author's argument and scholarly integrity, the alternative system described in 6.10 could be used, or rephrasing might avoid the problem.
Ibid., 6.9: Colons, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation points. Unlike periods and commas, these all follow closing quotation marks unless a question mark or an exclamation point belongs within the quoted matter. (This rule applies the logic absent in 6.8.)
Ibid., 6.10: Alternative system. According to what is sometimes called the British style (set forth in The Oxford Guide to Style [the successor to Hart's Rules]), a style also followed in other English-speaking countries, only those punctuation points that appeared in the original material should be included within the quotation marks; all others follow the closing quotation marks. This system, which requires extreme authorial precision and occasional decisions by the editor or typesetter, works best with single quotation marks.
MLA Style Manual. 2nd ed., 3.9.7: Punctuation with Quotations. By convention, commas and periods go inside the closing quotation marks, but a parenthetical reference should intervene between the quotation and the required punctuation . . . All other punctuation marks—such as semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points—go outside a closing quotation mark, except when they are part of the quoted material. —Wayward Talk 04:17, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
Articles with American subjects should be written in the American style, and articles with non-American subjects should be written in the British style. Problem solved.—thegreentrilby 03:12, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
This is not correct. The new rule says that all articles should follow the logical quotation style. PizzaMargherita 08:47, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
We've been over this a million times already. British usage = world usage. Even American style guides are finally starting to catch on to logical quoting. Wikipedia uses logical quoting. Let's move on. Kaldari 03:18, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
I concur with thegreentrilby's summary of the rough consensus that has been arrived at through numerous debates. Actually, Kaldari has slightly misstated the situation; most American style guides prefer the traditional American style. For example, the Bluebook, which is used by nearly all American lawyers, judges, and law professors, states at Rule 5.1(b): "Always place commas and periods inside the quotation marks; place other punctuation marks inside the quotation marks only if they are part of the matter quoted." --Coolcaesar 04:43, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
I'm an American convert to "logical quoting". I've been using the style for over ten years now, except when I've been forced to use the traditional style because I'm writing for publications that have adopted another style. It's sensible and easy to understand, and it has none of the gotchas of the traditional style. It can be stated extremely simply: "put punctuation belonging to the quote inside the quotation marks; any other punctuation goes outside". I think that the rationale for using American spelling in American articles doesn't really apply to quoting, because English spelling is largely empirical; logical quoting, on the other hand, is based on very simple rules. (If there were a widely-understood variant of English orthography that used purely phonetic spelling, I'd be in favor of Wikipedia using that consistently, too. But there isn't, so using phonetic spelling would be a barrier to readability. No such barrier exists here—people used to traditional American quoting rules can easily adapt to logical quoting.) --TreyHarris 08:42, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
Aaargh! The biggest benefit of the so-called American style is that it ends bickering about whether a period (or sometimed even a comma) belongs to the quoted passage, which can be no smal blessing.
The biggest drawback of it is that it is, in my experience, probably only used by Americans with a college education. Even then, I've worked with U.S. journalists who were unfamiliar with it. ProhibitOnions 11:40, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
I think the Brits prefer the "logical quotes" style because they love arguing—in this case, arguing over whether a mark of punctuation was part of the original quote or not. ::Ducks::—thegreentrilby 04:19, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
Speaking as an American who was taught to use the American style, the British style makes much more sense and is used pretty much everywhere else. I see no reason for American bizzarness to apply to wikipedia. JoshuaZ 04:22, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
Seconded. --maru (talk) contribs 04:39, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
Jr., Sr., and other suffixes [ edit ]
It has recently come to my attention that some articles use a comma between a person's name and suffix and others do not. For example, Martin Luther King, Jr. and William Strunk Jr. I (nor a few other people who have discussed the issue with me) have not found any guideline on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that, while commas historically have often been used, it seems that the pedulum is swinging the other way again.
Logically, they should not be used, since even though, for example, there are three MLKs, they are three people. Therefore, following comma rules, Jr./Sr. is much more restrictive (no commas) than non-restictive (commas) becuase it's determining the person. Additionally, many people forget that, when a comma is used, a comma must follow: [Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote "I Have a Dream."] is incorrect, while [Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote "I Have a Dream."] is better, since it correctly uses commas.
Furthermore, both the Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk and White's Elements of Style (and probably others, but I just checked these two becuase of issues of time and access) support not using commas.
Therefore, I would like to propose that a style guideline be created stating not use commas with suffixes based on the support from major/popular manuals of style and on the appeal of logic/comma rules). //MrD9 00:23, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Chicago (FAQ, since I can't find it or Elements on Google Print)
I second your proposal. It's good to have consistancy and the non-use of commas seem more logical. Jimp 01:35, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Aren't Jr, Sr, Dr, Mr, Mrs, St, Sts, and other such personal abbreviations which include the first and last letters of the expanded word supposed to be written without a period (.)? —Michael Z. 2006-03-02 02:05 Z
Ugh, British English... I totally forgot about this (btw, the "ugh" is not due to British English, it's due to my lack of remembering this difference between Britsh/US usage). I do not know what to say, since I havent seen any WP (or other) names ever written without the period in Jr/Sr, but that's because I'm from the US and chance has it I haven't stumbled across any. There are probably others who are better aware of this issue (and the whole Brit/Amer English policies in general) who could better answer, but my logical guess would be that the period could be used in names that tie with Britsh English-speaking countries, while the opposite with the US? Regardless, though, I still think we have to standardize the comma usage (rather, a lack of comma usage), and hoepfulyl someone can comment on the period/nonperiod issue with a good solution. //MrD9 02:15, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
I disagree - we have no right or need to alter people's names. Use what they used. For many that will be with a comma. Like "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."[9]. There is no need to impose a false consistency. Rmhermen 03:00, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
I seriously doubt that most articles are written by the people they are about. Therefore, the article titles are most likely commaed or not based on the author's preferences, and to people unaware of the style issues regarding them, they will most likely use a comma becuase it is what has been used up until recent years. While still used widely today, like I said, the lack of a comma is growing and becoming more preferable due to the logic behind it. //MrD9 00:01, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc. only lack a period in British punctuation. To North American readers, it looks wrong. Felicity4711 03:26, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
Not true: Dr Pepper doesn't have a period! 121.73.184.132 (talk) 02:07, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
Isn't the comma or lack thereof part of the person's name? My birth certificate includes it, and when I use my full birth name, I include it. If someone else doesn't use the comma, then we shouldn't either. Standardizing would seem to me to be like standardizing on hyphenation or spacing within a name. We don't standardize all Vandebergs, Van de Bergs, and VandeBergs, why would we standardize this? --TreyHarris 03:05, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
It's not, though. It's most likely there due to the gramatically illogical use of it by most people in the past. Your last name is still your last name; your first, your first; your middle, your middle; and your suffix, if you have one, your suffix. The last names you mentioned are official (or are used as if they were official, in some cases). They are their last names. But junior/senior are suffixes, and it depends on the writer's style to determine the punctuation with it. For example, the U.S. government varies between use of "Martin Luther King Jr." and "Martin Luther King, Jr." when talking about the national holiday, his national memorials, documents, and various other topics (I googled it before). And in a regular enecylopedia, the usage would be standardized, so why should it not be standardized here (preferably without the comma, as it is becoming more preferred, is logical, and looks better). //MrD9 03:43, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Birth certificates are also issued by many different agencies in many different places, so by their very nature they are going to be (and are) inconsistent, since people in different places, even if there are standardized rules in one office, are going to create different standard styles for their documents (or if there are no standards, then there's even less consistency. //MrD9 03:46, 2 March 2006 (UTC) I don't believe that without a comma is more logical, nor that suffixes are not part of a legal name. Whatever is on the certificate is the name. Rmhermen 00:25, 4 March 2006 (UTC) Nonsense. In the United States, typopgraphy and orthography and even spelling on some birth certificate has little or nothing to do with it. What you use is what matters, and even then, the presence or absence of a comma has no legal significance and no real bearing on whether or not we include it here. Gene Nygaard 06:42, 12 March 2006 (UTC) This is an encyclopedia. There are plenty of people indexed by names other than their birth names. Certainly a suffix can be (and almost always is) part of a legal name; my interpretation of MrD9's point is that people (generally) have a first, middle, and last name (of course there can be multiple or no middle name – and, frankly, I can only speak for most of the United States), and possibly a suffix. The former president's birth certificate may list "James Earl Carter, Jr.", but it is accurate to say that his first name is James, his middle name is Earl, his last name is Carter, and his suffix is Jr. Wikipedia could choose to index names as <first> <middle> <last> <suffix> (thus indexing the president as "James Earl Carter Jr."). We could also index him as Carter, James Earl, Jr. (though I definitely vote for the former). The point is that this question is about indexing not what's on their birth certificate. Needless to say, I third (or whatever we're at) the nomination for such a style guideline. (If some special note as to how their birth certificate appears is necessary, it can always be added; it needn't be in the page title.) How does this process work, anyway? Something tells me that it's not as simple as three people agreeing and then voilà, it's in. Alan smithee 07:59, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
BTW there is a convention on the question at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people)#Senior and junior. -- User:Docu
Quotation marks [ edit ]
Why is it that my English grammar book says that commas and periods always go within the quotation marks, but the MoS says to "include the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the punctuation mark is part of the quotation"? My grammar book says that rule applies to question marks, but never to periods or commas. ⇒ Jarlaxle Artemis 06:43, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Your "English grammar book" is actually an "American grammar book". Wikipedia follows its own compromise position between American usage and British usage. This has already been debated at length and decided upon. -Will Beback 06:51, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
To make it clearer: The compromise is that we allow American English usage in articles purely about American subjects (for example, U.S. state or San Francisco), where it would look odd, especially to Americans (about 2/3 of all native English speakers), to use non-American punctuation---but then use the Commonwealth English/British English usage everywhere else. --Coolcaesar 19:11, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Uh, really? Where are you getting that? I thought Wikipedia had a uniform style of commas outside the quotes. In fact, I just checked San Francisco, and it does its commas outside the quotes. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 19:32, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Well, in the case of San Francisco, that's because we get British/Commonwealth newbies all the time who keep introducing Britishisms like "practise", "lorry", or "petrol" into American articles where "practice," "truck," and "gasoline" are more appropriate. Please see Section 13 of the main MoS article, "National varieties," which states: "If an article's subject has a strong tie to a specific region/dialect, it should use that dialect." If you trace back through the article history, you'll see that this statement has been in the MoS in one form or another for about a year, and directly evolved out of a much older statement in the "Usage and spelling" section. --Coolcaesar 20:06, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
WP always adopts the logical quotation style, which is not British, and not even non-American, but logical. It is not a compromise. It is not dependent on the nature of the article. It has nothing to do with the botched rules for national varieties. This has been discussed so many times it should be considered vandalism to discuss it any further (joking). The last one was less than one month ago. Thanks. PizzaMargherita 20:13, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
It seems somewhat disingenuous for us to describe the decision about quotation marks as a "compromise" or a "splitting of the difference" (and not just for the reasons cited by PizzaMargherita). British usage hardly demands single quotation marks where American usage would demand double. More importantly, I don't see why this can't be another matter that is decided the way spelling is decided: be consistent with whatever the first nonstub version used was, and use the style of quoting favored by the region about which one is writing. Maybe this has been discussed a lot, but that doesn't mean the decision didn't manifest anti-US bias, and thus can never be reviewed. A true compromise would allow people to use the style that makes sense for them (unless they're writing about a topic whose "region-ness" would demand something else). --Cultural Freedom talk 2006-06-29 14:35 (UTC) P.S. And why is the default date format produced by ~~~~ British? Why not a more "logical" form (see one line up), combined with the default of UTC (which is European, if widely accepted elsewhere)? That would be some sort of "compromise," oui?
British punctuation in articles written in American English [ edit ]
I'm dismayed that WP policy is to use British-style punctuation (punctuation outside quotation marks) in articles that are written in American English. Sorry, but it's just wrong. WP might as well set a policy that "through" is to be spelled "thru." It doesn't make sense for WP to make up new rules of punctuation that are not used anywhere else, in any publication, anywhere in the English-speaking world. It also doesn't make sense to set a rule that will be violated by any literate person who hasn't read WP's Manual of Style. Anyone who understands the mechanics of punctuation in American English will naturally correct these mistakes --- and they are mistakes, regardless of whether the MoS tries to decree that they're not.--24.52.254.62 20:16, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Where does it say that? — Omegatron 21:16, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
It's a house style, not a mistake. Nothing to get tied up in knots about. —Michael Z. 2006-08-11 23:04 Z
It's correct that, according to the MoS, Hart's Rules should be used. But that doesn't apply to US-specific articles, I think. Since US-specific articles should use US spelling "and style," it is acceptable to use punctuation like "this." SpNeo 11:40, 12 August 2006 (UTC) No, this is an exception to the convention. Likewise, British articles don't use quote marks 'like "this"'. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:08, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
On the one hand, house styles can indeed be as arbitrary as the proprietors can get away with. And on the other, readers familiar with established conventions are free to find oddities of usage odd (or even semi-literate). I understand that in matters such as the serial comma, different organizations favor different practices, but in the matter of punctuating quotation marks, it makes sense to follow the flag rather than "splitting the difference." Is WP a US or UK enterprise? RLetson 05:49, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
It's an international enterprise, operated by an organization whose official place of registration happens to be in the United States. The problem with "following the flag" is that it results in inconsistent treatment, and it's fortunate that a compromise could be arrived upon in this matter at least. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:08, 15 August 2006 (UTC) As far as I know, the standard on WP has always been to use British spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary consistently in articles on specifically British subjects, and similarly for American style on American subjects. I don't see how it could reasonably be done any other way, since Americans don't know British spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation and vice versa -- and it looks ridiculous to mix them. If I'm understanding SpNeo's comment correctly, it seems to match what people actually do on WP. The only reason I was motivated to post here was that someone came along and officiously changed all the punctuation in Robert A. Heinlein to British style, refusing to take no for an answer from the Americans who had been working on this article about an American. It would be nice if the manual of style would just say a little more explicitly that there's nothing wrong with using consistently American style on a specifically American subject.--24.52.254.62 01:56, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
not a standard widely followed, however, and fortunately so [ edit ]
Every publisher in the English speaking world uses the conventions of his location. If a UK edition is published, and then a US, all the quotation marks and all the spelling will be changed. Some books with UK conventions are sold in the US, as not all works have a separate US edition. In addition, some works intending to have a "UK flavour" will retain the UK conventions. But the intent of this policy is apparently that all articles about English monarchs should be in UK style, including both the spelling and the use of punctuation. But look at them: US spelling is used, and US style quotation marks. We can't have a Wiki with style considered acceptable by publishers and educators in both countries, because there isn't any. The only way we could achieve that-- eventually--is to have UK and US versions with all the punctuation etc. automatically changed. Our goal for now ought to be a style which the readers of both countries will accept, which is fairly flexible, as readers do at least occasionally encounter both outside WP. An additional consideration is the ease of writing and editing. I want to write in the way I find easiest--there is quite enough problems without using an alien style. I do not want to go around changing other people's national style, or have them waste time changing mine. Let them look to my errors, instead. I'm not going to go through the English monarchs and change every quotation mark. I don't think anybody should. In the meanwhile, the best we can have is consistency. Certainly within an article: anyone editing an article ought to follow the style of the article, and it would be right to change inadvertent difference as one finds them. Possibly within a series of articles, possibly within a type of article, such as pop culture figures specific to one or another country, or which deliberately maintain such specificity. DGG 08:25, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
I concur with you on this issue. For American topics, I see no reason why Wikipedia should adhere to an unsightly punctuation style for which many English teachers in the United States would give a student only half credit (a C grade) or worse. --Coolcaesar 02:27, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Wow, what happens if they misspell "its" as "it's" then? Do they amputate their right hand? Anyway, as was said in the archives, unsightliness is in the eye of the beholder... PizzaMargherita 10:36, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Right, but there are a lot of beholders in the U.S. We have a huge publishing industry unequalled anywhere else which overwhelmingly prefers the practice of consistently placing commas and periods inside quotation marks because it is more aesthetically pleasing. Also, we don't amputate, we simply flunk people out of school. Eventually they end up in prison. See three-strikes laws for information on what happens then. --Coolcaesar 22:47, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Quite a few of them, however, seem to slip through the net and end up in reputable jobs. I bow to the magnitude of "your" publishing industry, but don't forget about the scores of beholders and publishers everywhere else in the world (including America) that adopt the other convention. PizzaMargherita 05:28, 18 August 2006 (UTC) At present, the convention is to put punctuation marks outside of quotes if they aren't part of the quote, whatever the topic of the article. If you would like to change it, discuss it here, do not revert someone who tries to edit an article to conform to our style guidelines. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:41, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
You might want to try avoiding imperatives like "do not." It comes off as rude and pushy. There are other ways to phrase a suggestion than by giving an order. You might also want to try other techniques rather than charging into an article and making a change against the consensus of editors who actually have a history of substantial contributions to the article.--24.52.254.62 03:59, 19 August 2006 (UTC) The principle that Wikipedia guidelines should generally be followed deserves imperatives, and general consensus trumps local consensus. Whether we have general consensus is up for debate, but something that's been on one of our biggest guideline pages for a couple of years needs to be considered prima facie to have consensus. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:35, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
Æsthetics is in the eye of the beholder as was mentioned. There may be a lot of beholders in the US but there are more outside. As for me, I don't find logical punctuation unsightly. Quite the contrary for me it's American punctuation which is the eye-sore. --Jimp 00:42, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
disagreement about WP style guidelines, and imperatives [ edit ]
In my particular field, scholarly publishing , the overwhelming majority of publishing is outside the US, as it has always been. Most scholarly journals use one style or another, because in conventional publication, one looks through an issue and it is unsettling if the successive ones do not look the same. In e-journals and other contemporary forms, people read each article by itself. They are as likely to go from an article of publisher A to one of publisher B, and, although they may notice the style difference, they don't much care. There's no real precedent for a work like this one. The structure invites people to go from one article to another, but the overall consistency in the makeup of the page is enough. If we keep that, its sufficient.
the effort devoted by publishers to house style is probably non-productive--it makes them feel important.
the effort devoted here to house style serves a similar purpose--it makes the copyeditors among us feel important.
much more to the point would be effort expended in fact checking, in clarifying the structure of WP, in ensuring articles are understandable and correct, and inconsistencies with other articles are found, and either adjusted or explained.
And that the number of references and the sourcing of material and the other important guidelines that affect usefulness and content are followed.
the need for a MOS in WP is to help the editor/authors. There are many matters where people need help with problems they have ever encountered; where their is a customary style, but non-specialists will not know it.
It's a reference, not a textbook
The discussion below about quotation style illustrates my point. It is perfectly possible to follow any of the contradictory set of WP conventions and end up with useful citations; it is also possible to follow them and produce the opposite.
We need to be prescriptive about the results, readability and accuracy.
We need style guidelines for problems that were not obvious at first--adding dates to quotations and data so they can be updated, saying the same thing twice over, trying to get too much into the lead--especially details which really belong much lower down.
We do indeed need to worry about style, but we are worrying about the wrong half--the "accidentals", not the "substantatives". The punctuation, not the ideas. DGG 08:25, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
Are we discussing quotation style? Again? It's not the "British" way, nor the "American" way. It's called logical quotation style. Wikipedia adopts it. End of story. Shall we put a comment in the MoS with a reference to the archives? PizzaMargherita 07:40, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Of course it is the British way and the American way, and those who call one of these the "logical" style confuse their own familiarity with "logicality". Redefining the language may fool some people, but it doesn't constitute an argument. If Wikipedia wants to adopt British style, that's fine, but it shouldn't misrepresent facts as it does so. - Nunh-huh
Please check the archives. PizzaMargherita 08:51, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the advice, but one would be stupid to believe that adopting the name "logical" for a style of punctuation actually makes it logical, no matter what people have said to the contrary in the archives. - Nunh-huh
What's illogical about it? Only the punctuation that is part of the actual quotation goes inside the quotation marks. This makes it logical. Conversely, how is the other convention logical? Being not logical, it is ambiguous. Consider this. Did Jane say "really?" What am I asking, if she said "really?" or "really"? Or, using the confusing convention, what am I asking, if she said "really?" or "really?" Finally, it's inconsistent, or anyway the rules are more complicated. Consider this. Did Jane say "Shut up!"? Why does the question mark stay outside in this case? PizzaMargherita 09:13, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Positioning of punctuation is a matter of convention, not logic. This should surprise no one: it is so with most matters of style. - Nunh-huh
Very good then, Wikipedia adopts the logical convention. Which incidentally, as discussed in the archives, it's not correct to call "British", nor it's entirely correct to call the other one "American". PizzaMargherita 10:29, 16 August 2006 (UTC) Conventions are conventions. They are not intrisically logical or illogical; they are conventional, and one is not better than another because you call it "the logical convention", just as you can't make someone "pro-death" by calling their opponents "pro-life". And we call things by the names by which they are known, whether or not you think they are entirely correctly so called or not. - Nunh-huh
Conventions may not be "intrinsically" logical or illogical, but they can be demonstrated to be so. Your argument has failed to convince me that the convention adopted by Wikipedia after a long debate (and I can't see any new elements being brought forward here) is not logical and that the other one is not illogical, inconsistent (or more complicated) and ambiguous. Feel free to propose a better name for the logical convention. PizzaMargherita 12:12, 16 August 2006 (UTC) I suppose that were you to become arbiter of what things are called, it would be important to convince you. In the meantime, I suggest you call it "the current Wikipedia style suggestion" rather than trying to enforce your perceptions of what is logical by a feat of naming. - Nunh-huh
It is very important to convince me as well as everybody else who agreed to adopt this convention. That of being logical is an objective property and has nothing to do with my perception, or anybody else's. Do you agree or do you not agree that one convention is logical and the other one is not? If you don't, are you able to explain why? Also calling it a suggestion when in fact it is an adopted convention would be negating the discussions that led to its adoption. PizzaMargherita 13:04, 16 August 2006 (UTC) It seems to be you, rather than "everybody else who agreed to adopt this convention", who is campaigning to call it the "logical" one. Placement of punctuation is not a matter of logic, but a matter of convention. If logic were involved, and one convention were clearly more logical than all others, there wouldn't be different conventions, would there? Therefore trying to "convince" you that one convention is more logical or less logical would be a silly task, because "logic" simply isn't involved. - Nunh-huh
If logic were involved, and one convention were clearly more logical than all others, there wouldn't be different conventions, would there?—Yes there would. They would be illogical and ambiguous, and demonstrably so. PizzaMargherita 14:07, 16 August 2006 (UTC) Well, thanks for proving that opinion rather than logic is your strong point. - Nunh-huh "Demonstrably so"? Then go ahead and demonstrate. Please note that you can't postulate anything that we don't all agree to fully; that's begging the question. I expect a proof in formal logical notation, please, if the convention is in fact more logical. The truth of the matter is, it's not more logical. It's occasionally less ambiguous than the American style, but only by a small degree, and that still only makes it more logical if you accept the axiom that style rules should be geared to minimize ambiguity, which clearly not everyone here does (I largely do). It's certainly not any more logical than the British style. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:00, 17 August 2006 (UTC) I have provided at least one instance that shows that the convention that you call "American" is ambiguous, and one instance that shows that it's inconsistent. Can you provide one counterexample? The current rule is more logical at least in the loose sense of the word, in that it's rational. You put in the quotes what is part of the quotes. I strongly believe that this is less logical than a rule that says "you put in the quotes the quotation itself, and other random stuff that has nothing to do with the quotation". Anyway, if you are suggesting that the style should not be called "logical" but "unambiguous", or "consistent", or "clear", or "simple", or "rational" I have no problems with that, although I would still prefer "logical". Other suggestions are welcome. PizzaMargherita 21:42, 17 August 2006 (UTC) The style is less ambiguous. I wouldn't object to calling them "unambiguous quotations", although obviously that sacrifices precision for concision. The point is that preferring less ambiguous constructions to more traditional ones is not inherently "logical". —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:35, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
If that were true you would be able to disprove that the one convention is logical and the other one is not. Sadly, you are trying to use irrational denial to do that. PizzaMargherita 05:30, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
PizzaMargherita, thanks for the pointer to the numerous past discussions on this issue. The fact that this gets brought up over and over again indicates several things: (1) Lots of people think the MoS is wrong as written. (2) Lots of people think it's ambiguous as written. (3) It's completely out of step with the way WP actually works. (4) It's causing lots of problems and con |
WASHINGTON—Expressing confidence that the nation would meet the ambitious benchmarks by the end of Donald Trump’s presidential term, Scott Pruitt, the president-elect’s nominee for chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, said Thursday he would seek a 30 percent cut in all carbon-based organisms upon assuming office. “The primary goal of the EPA over the next four years will be to eliminate roughly one-third of our country’s carbon-based life-forms,” said Pruitt, who added that while flora- and fauna-rich states would feel the brunt of these cuts, he believed that such a bold initiative would be able to finally move the country away from outmoded biodiversity. “The job opportunities created by eliminating one of every three living things will be significant. And with these initial parameters in place, I’m hopeful that by 2040 the U.S. will be able to operate free from the burdens placed on it by the continued existence of any carbon-based organisms.” Pruitt pledged that any noncompliant ecosystems would face harsh penalties.
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Remember Brink? Don't feel too badly if your answer is "no." Developed by Splash Damage and published by Bethesda in 2011, it was intended to blend single and multiplayer combat in a futuristic tale about a battle between the Resistance and Security aboard a crumbling floating city called the Ark. We scored it a very positive 76/100 in our review, but overall it tanked pretty badly and was quickly forgotten.
All of this leads to today's very short and sweet announcement that Brink is now free to play on Steam. Just download it and start shooting—if you enjoy the experience, you can also opt to spring for one of three DLC packs: The Fallout/Spec Ops combo pack or the Doom/Psycho combo pack, which go for $1 each, or the beefier Agents of Change DLC, which includes new maps, abilities, weapon attachments, and outfits, which is currently on sale for a little under $2.
In case you missed it in 2011, here's the Brink launch trailer. |
Calif. Wins Permission To Force-Feed Prison Hunger Strikers
Enlarge this image toggle caption Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
This post was updated at 3:47 a.m. ET Tuesday:
The Associated Press reports: A federal judge approved Monday's request from California and federal officials to force-feed inmates if necessary as a statewide prison hunger strike entered its seventh week.
Officials say they fear for the welfare of nearly 70 inmates who have refused all prison-issued meals since the strike began July 8 over the holding of gang leaders and other violent inmates in solitary confinement that can last for decades.
Prison officials said Monday that inmates are free to consume a liquid diet, but will be counted as having ended their hunger strike if they consume anything more than water, vitamins and electrolytes.
Original Post:
California prison officials are asking the federal government for permission to force-feed some inmates who have been on a hunger strike for seven weeks.
The AP reports:
"Officials say they are concerned about the health of nearly 70 inmates who have refused all prison-issued meals since the strike began July 8. "Prison policy is to let inmates die if they have a legally binding do-not-resuscitate request. But corrections officials and the federal authority who oversees prison medical care filed a motion Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco asking for authority to feed inmates near death. "That authority, if granted, would cover some who asked not to be revived."
Paige St. John, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, reports that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations is asking a federal judge to throw out "do not resuscitate" orders that were "signed just before the hunger strike."
Public radio's Here and Now spoke to the sister of Ronnie Dewberry, one of the strikers who has been in prison since 1981 and is protesting long-term solitary confinement.
"I don't want him to die," Marie Levin told Here and Now. "But if him continuing in this fight for some kind of relief for himself and for the other prisoners that are suffering under the same conditions, if that means that he needs to go forth and continue on, then I'm with him."
Other inmates are protesting prison conditions, including the quality of the food and the use of "group punishment."
Corrections officials told Here and Now that they believed they had already met the demands of the inmates, "including the demand to limit the length of solitary confinement."
As far as force feeding, the issue has, of course, been in the news because of the inmates in Guantanamo, whom the the U.S. is force feeding. Referring to those cases, The New England Journal of Medicine ran an op-ed that called the practice medically unethical.
"Physicians may not ethically force-feed any competent person, but they must continue to provide beneficial medical care to consenting hunger strikers. That care could include not only treating specific medical conditions but also determining the mental competence of the strikers, determining whether there has been any coercion involved, and even determining whether the strikers want to accept voluntary feedings to continue their protest without becoming malnourished or risking death," the op-ed read. |
Datacenters use a lot of energy to power the thousands of servers they each contain. But a significant proportion of that cost comes from actually keeping those servers cool. To minimize the costs of cooling, novel approaches have been taken such as reusing the waste heat, running entire datacenters very hot, or even building a datacenter 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
Leeds University has figured out how to bypass such extreme measures, however, by coming up with a new way of cooling servers in a liquid. So efficient is this so-called wet server, it can cut the cost of energy consumption related to cooling by up to 97 percent.
Typical air cooling systems require a lot of energy because the air has to be cooled first, then pumped into each server using fans. You also need to keep the environment the servers are placed in cool, too. The research team at the university replaced air cooling by submerging all the components inside a server module in liquid. This is no ordinary liquid, though. It’s a coolant called 3M Novec that doesn’t conduct electricity.
The new system is called the Iceotope Platform and actually relies on three different liquid coolants to function. A typical Iceotope rack can hold up to 48 hot-swappable server modules. Each module is a self contained unit holding the server components submerged in the 3M Novec liquid. The rack then has water pumped up and cascaded down over the modules to draw the heat away from them. That water doesn’t need to be cooled first. A third coolant is then used external to the rack, which dissipates the heat away through a heat exchanger system. In the case of the university Iceotope platform, they use this coolant to heat the room through radiators.
The only power required in this liquid cooling system is for the pumps that move the second and third coolants around, which are both low power units drawing a maximum of 80 watts. And as these are completely self-contained units it doesn’t matter what environment you put them in. It could be a very hot location and it wouldn’t negatively impact the system. One final benefit is a huge reduction in noise as there’s no fans used in the system
The liquid-cooled servers are being offered through the company Iceotope in a range of configurations. Due to the power savings and removal of the need for specialized facilities for handling cooling, Iceotope is sure to prove very popular and allow datacenters to start popping up in many more locations around the world. |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Amateur footage from inside the shrine shows people fleeing the scene
Pakistan says it has killed more than 100 militants in a security crackdown following Thursday's attack on a shrine that left at least 80 people dead.
A suicide bomber blew himself up among devotees at the Sufi shrine in the town of Sehwan.
Pakistan has reacted with raids across the country and by lashing out at Afghanistan which it accuses of tolerating militant sanctuaries.
So-called Islamic State said it had carried out the attack.
It was the latest in a string of bombings by the jihadist group.
In response, some 18 militants were killed in southern Sindh province, where the Sufi shrine is located, and another 13 in the north-west, officials said. It is unclear where the other alleged terrorists were killed.
Border crossings with Afghanistan have been closed and rockets have been fired into two Afghan provinces.
Funerals for victims have been taking place on Friday and the Sindh provincial government has announced three days of mourning.
Some 250 people were also wounded in the attack.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Is terror returning to Pakistan?
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the bombing and immediately vowed to track down those behind it.
Pakistan's army chief, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, said in a statement: "Each drop of the nation's blood shall be avenged, and avenged immediately. No more restraint for anyone."
Image copyright AFP Image caption Some devotees have complained about the lack of police protection
Armed forces spokesman Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor said more than "100 terrorists" were killed and many others arrested in 24 hours as part of operations across the country, including Punjab province.
He said more details would be shared later.
Correspondents say crackdowns of this type are a regular response from the state following a major militant attack.
However the number of militants the army is claiming to have killed this time is higher than normal, says the BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad.
The military needs to offset the impression that it is losing the war against militants, he adds.
Earlier, the paramilitary Rangers said they had targeted militants overnight in Sindh, while police said further raids were carried out in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the north-west.
The army also summoned officials from the Afghan embassy to its headquarters in Rawalpindi, protesting that Afghan soil was being used as a base for militants to carry out attacks in Pakistan.
Image caption It has been a bloody week in Pakistan
The army said it handed over a list containing the names of 76 "most wanted terrorists", insisting that Afghanistan take immediate action against them.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Friday condemned the shrine attack, saying: "Terrorists once again proved that they have no respect for Islamic values."
Devotees continued to flock to the shrine of Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan on Friday.
The mood was defiant, with the customary naqqara (drum beating) taking place at daybreak as usual, and worshippers vowing to hold their routine dhamal (sacred dance) in the evening.
There were also angry scenes, with some worshippers complaining to police that they had not provided enough security despite previous threats to the shrine.
The shrine attack was the most deadly in a series of militant attacks since Sunday that have killed more than 100 people across Pakistan, including civilians, police and soldiers.
"Blame game" becomes the norm: Dawood Azami, BBC World Service
Image copyright Reuters
A number of militants, especially many members of the Pakistani Taliban group (TTP), moved to Afghanistan after the Pakistani military's operation in North Waziristan in 2014.
They are mostly based in eastern Afghanistan in areas considered to be outside the Afghan government's control. Some of these militants later joined the Islamic State group. The Afghan government insists it has been targeting them and has killed several Pakistani Taliban commanders over the past two years.
When an attack takes place in Pakistan, officials generally point the finger at Afghanistan. Pakistanis blame elements in the Afghan intelligence agency and India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) for supporting militants who carry out attacks against Pakistan.
Afghan officials view this as hypocrisy, accusing Pakistan of discriminating between "good" and "bad" militants. They accuse Pakistan of allowing on its soil militant groups that attack Afghanistan and India. They also point to the presence and killing of a number of top-ranked militant leaders, including Osama Bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour, in US strikes in Pakistan.
The "blame game" has become a norm as the countries accuse each other of using militant groups as proxies. The border closure and fresh allegations by Pakistan will further erode the little trust that exists between the two governments. |
UN and WHO warmly welcome results of study on use of vaginal gel before sexual intercourse
Scientists held out the hope of a breakthrough in the prevention of HIV/Aids today with the results of a study showing that a vaginal gel used by women before sexual intercourse halved the numbers who became infected.
Scientists have been hunting for years for something that will allow women to protect themselves, and the excitement of Aids campaigners will be hard to contain, even though further research is needed to confirm the findings.
Women fall victim to HIV/Aids in disproportionately large numbers – 60% of new infections in Africa are among women. Many in the poorest countries have little education and suffer from very low status, so are unable to negotiate safe sex, using a condom, with their partner.
"We are giving hope to women," said Michel Sidibé, executive director of Unaids, the United Nations programme on Aids, as the trial results emerged. "For the first time we have seen results for a woman-initiated and controlled HIV prevention option. If confirmed, a microbicide will be a powerful option for the prevention revolution and help us break the trajectory of the Aids epidemic."
The director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Margaret Chan, also immediately congratulated the scientists. If their results were confirmed by further tests, "WHO will work with countries and partners to accelerate access to these products," she said.
A number of large microbicide trials have been run, but all have failed. The success of this one (run in South Africa where one in three young women aged 20 to 34 is living with HIV) is attributed to the use of an anti-retroviral drug called tenofovir – of the sort used to treat Aids – in gel form.
The study, called Caprisa 004, was conducted by the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa. The researchers recruited 889 women between 18 and 40 who were HIV-negative, sexually active and at risk of becoming infected.
Half were given vaginal applicators filled with gel containing 1% tenofovir. The others got something that looked the same but was inactive. Until the end of the trial, nobody knew who was in each group. The women were asked to insert a first dose of gel 12 hours before sexual intercourse and a second dose as soon as possible afterwards, within 12 hours. All were given counselling on avoiding HIV infection and a free supply of condoms.
At the end of a year, the researchers discovered that the gel had halved the numbers of women becoming infected with HIV. After two and a half years, the numbers had dropped, but there were still 39% fewer infections in those women using it. The drop in the numbers protected, they believe, is caused by some women tending to use it inconsistently as time went on, not knowing whether it was in fact having any effect.
The excitement of the researchers was clear in a teleconference before publication. "Picture a young woman in a rural community in South Africa who walks through my clinic doors asking me what I have to protect her from getting infected," said Dr Quarraisha Abdool Karim, one of the authors of the paper. "Her partner is a migrant worker and refuses to wear a condom and she is not sure of his faithfulness in this relationship.
"From being able to tell her for years that I have nothing, I can now offer her 1% tenofovir gel, which offers her 39% protection and, if she is highly attuned to this gel [uses it consistently], it offers her 54% protection."
Warren Mitchell, executive director of Avac, an Aids vaccine campaigning group, said it was "a historic day for HIV prevention research". The results demanded immediate action in South Africa and around the world, he said. "We believe that the most responsible plan of action now is to quickly and efficiently articulate the sequence of steps necessary for confirmation and follow-up of these results, while also aggressively planning for potential roll-out of a licensable product."
Another piece of good news is that the gel appeared to cause few side-effects. There is still work to do before the gel goes through to being manufactured.
But the WHO is committed to help and all agencies will do their best to speed it to women who need it, perhaps within two years, the researchers said.
• The headline on this article was amended on 20 July 2010. The original referred to the risk of infection by Aids. This has been corrected to infection by HIV. |
National Guard reinforcements helped contain the latest protests in Ferguson, preventing a second night of the chaos that led to arson and looting after a grand jury decided not to indict the white police officer who killed Michael Brown.
Demonstrators returned Tuesday to the riot-scarred streets. But with hundreds of additional troops standing watch over neighbourhoods and businesses, the protests had far less destructive power than the previous night. However, officers still used some tear gas and pepper spray, and demonstrators set a squad car on fire and broke windows at City Hall.
Since the grand jury's decision, protesters in cities throughout the country have rallied behind the refrain "hands up, don't shoot," and drawing attention to other police killings. As the tension in Ferguson eased somewhat, officer Darren Wilson broke his long public silence, insisting on national television that he could not have done anything differently in the confrontation.
The toll from Monday's protests — 12 commercial buildings burned to the ground, plus eight other blazes and a dozen vehicles torched — prompted Missouri governor Jay Nixon to send a large contingent of extra National Guard troops.
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The governor ordered the initial force of 700 to be increased to 2,200 in the hopes that their presence would help local law enforcement keep order in the St. Louis suburb.
"Lives and property must be protected," Nixon said. "This community deserves to have peace."
Guard units protected the Ferguson Police Department and left crowd control, arrests and use of tear gas to local officers. In one commercial area Wednesday morning, a soldier was stationed at every few storefronts, and some were on rooftops.
St. Louis County police said 45 people were arrested overnight in Ferguson. Outside police headquarters, one woman was taken into custody after protesters hurled what appeared to be smoke bombs, flares and frozen water bottles at a line of officers. Several other protesters were arrested after defying police instructions to get out of the street or out of the way of police vehicles.
Thirteen other people were arrested at a protest in St. Louis, including one on a felony charge of assaulting an officer.
Protesters threw rocks, tent poles, and bottles — some containing urine — at officers. As the crowd dispersed early Wednesday, some threw rocks through the windows of a muffler shop and a used-car dealership near a painted mural that read "Peace for Ferguson."
Some streets that had been overrun the previous night were deserted, except for the occasional police cruiser or National Guard vehicle. Some Guard crews monitored empty parking lots.
Protests across U.S.
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Large demonstrations were held throughout the country for a second day Tuesday. Some were peaceful, such as in New York, where Union Square was the jumping-off point for a large protest that splintered into smaller groups that walked to places like Times Square and the entrances of the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges. Hundreds of Seattle high school students walked out of classes, and several hundred people marched down a Cleveland freeway ramp to block rush-hour traffic.
Other events weren't as calm. In Oakland, California, a crowd of protesters smashed windows at car dealership, restaurants and convenience stores. A rally that drew thousands in Minneapolis took a turn when a car struck a protester and drove through a pack of others. And in Portland, Oregon, police used pepper spray and made arrests after about 300 people disrupted bus and light rail traffic by walking across a Willamette River bridge.
During an interview with ABC News, Wilson said he has a clean conscience because "I know I did my job right."
Wilson, 28, had been with the Ferguson police force for less than three years before the Aug. 9 shooting. He told ABC that Brown's shooting was the first time he fired his gun on the job.
ABC News' chief anchor George Stephanopoulos, left, interviews Ferguson, MO., police officer Darren Wilson about the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. (Kevin Lowder/Associated Press)
Asked whether the encounter would have unfolded the same way if Brown had been white, Wilson said yes.
Attorneys for the Brown family vowed to push for federal charges against Wilson and said the grand jury process was rigged from the start to clear Wilson.
"We said from the very beginning that the decision of this grand jury was going to be the direct reflection of the presentation of the evidence by the prosecutor's office," attorney Anthony Gray said. He suggested the office of the county's top prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, presented certain testimony to discredit the process, including from witnesses who did not see the shooting.
Brown's parents made public calls for peace in the run-up to Monday's announcement, and on Tuesday, their representatives again stressed that the people setting fires were not on Michael Brown's side.
Videos that were widely circulated on Tuesday showed Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, standing atop a car and breaking down as the announcement of the grand jury decision blares over the stereo.
Her husband, Brown's stepfather, comforts her, then begins angrily yelling "Burn this bitch down!" to a crowd gathered around him. Asked about the comment at a news conference, family attorney Benjamin Crump said the reaction was, "raw emotion. Not appropriate at all. Completely inappropriate."
Speaking on NBC's Today show on Wednesday, McSpadden, said it has been a "sleepless, very hard, heartbreaking and unbelievable" time since the grand jury decision was announced.
She also said Wilson's characterization of her son as looking demonic in their Aug. 9 confrontation "added insult to injury."
The Brown family attorneys said they hope an ongoing federal civil rights investigation leads to charges. But federal investigations of police misconduct face a steep legal standard, requiring proof that an officer willfully violated a victim's civil rights.
A protester holds up a sign in front of the Ferguson Police Department on Tuesday in Ferguson, Mo. (David Goldman/Associated Press)
Testimony from Wilson that he felt threatened, and physical evidence almost certainly complicates any efforts to seek federal charges.
Under federal law, "you have to prove as a prosecutor that the officer knew at the moment that he pulled the trigger that he was using too much force, that he was violating the Constitution," said Seth Rosenthal, a former Justice Department civil rights prosecutor.
The Justice Department has also launched a broad probe into the Ferguson Police Department, looking for patterns of discrimination.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the department aims to complete those investigations as quickly as possible "to restore trust, to rebuild understanding and to foster cooperation between law enforcement and community members."
Regardless of the outcome of the federal investigations, Brown's family also could file a wrongful-death lawsuit against Wilson. |
The 2013 NFL schedule release is all about the order, not the opponents. We already knew the 16 opponents for all 32 NFL teams heading into Thursday.
The schedule is based on a predetermined formula that doesn't allow for favoritism, a fact I've come to realize many fans and even media members don't understand. The divisions rotate playing one division in conference and another out of conference. (The teams in the NFC North, for instance, face the NFC East and AFC North this season.) That's eight games. Then you have six division games. That's 14 games decided.
The NFL tries to help out the lesser teams with the remaining two games. First-place teams play two conference games against the other first-place team from the year before. Last-place teams get two games against fellow bottom-dwellers in conference, and so on.
Those two games are the only difference between a schedule for a team like the San Francisco 49ers and a last-place squad like the Arizona Cardinals. Two games. That's it.
With that in mind, it's not easy for the NFL to put any team at a disadvantage on schedule-release day. The biggest issues are travel, bye weeks and when the tough games are. After taking a quick look, here are the teams that can't be thrilled with their schedules:
Miami Dolphins
It will be an uphill battle for the Dolphins to maintain their offseason excitement. They open with two straight road games, and three of four before returning home for a date with the Baltimore Ravens. It will be tough for the Dolphins to hit their Week 6 bye with a winning record.
Jacksonville Jaguars
Four of the Jaguars' first six games are on the road, including mission-impossible trips to Denver and Seattle. It's going to be tough for new coach Gus Bradley to find wins early in the season with his young team.
Tennessee Titans
The Titans drew the short straw with the rare, dreaded three-game road trip. From Weeks 12-14, they head to Oakland, Indianapolis and Denver. That could be a season-killer.
Philadelphia Eagles
Chip Kelly's squad is the only other team with a three-game road trip. They head to Denver, New York (Giants) and Tampa Bay from Weeks 4-6. At least the schedule-makers gave the Eagles a Thursday night game before the road swing, so the Eagles get some extra rest beforehand. All that running in practice should come in handy.
The entire NFC North
You can make a strong case that the NFC North is the best division top to bottom. It had three 10-win teams last season and a very talented last-place squad in the Detroit Lions. Its out-of-division schedule this season is similarly difficult. The teams in the division face the NFC East and AFC North. The Green Bay Packers have to add the Atlanta Falcons and San Francisco 49ers to this already tough slate. There just aren't any soft spots.
Kansas City Chiefs
This isn't about the Chiefs' schedule being particularly hard or unfair. But the Fighting Andy Reids only received one primetime appearance, and it was against Reid's old team. Alex Smith gets no respect!
For comparison's sake, relatively generic teams like the Chargers and Dolphins got three primetime outings. The Eagles and Jets were cut down to size after poor years; both teams are only in primetime twice.
Follow Gregg Rosenthal on Twitter @greggrosenthal. |
LEADVILLE — Floyd Landis’ perfect life began to unravel within days of winning the Tour de France a decade ago last month. He tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Like every other racer caught doping, he denied it and then launched several years of expensive, and yet fruitless litigation.
The scrutiny weighed heavy as he was ostracized from his tribe for following, as it turned out, the well-worn doping path.
“That was a hard couple years. There were very few of us out there like that — me and Tyler Hamilton — and we knew the whole story, but we didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to turn on those guys, but the way the public and press reacted to it, it just felt like I was getting abused,” he said. “That’s why I checked out of life.”
Landis, now 40, admitted his drug use in a bombshell 2010 e-mail that named names as it detailed doping procedures and exposed the sport’s darkest secret. The ripples of his admission linger today. A whistleblower lawsuit he filed against Lance Armstrong in 2010 — and joined by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2013 — could go to trial next year.
He moved to a small town in California. A hip injury led to an addiction to pain pills.
“One minute they make you feel great and the next minute you need them to function,” he said. “Absolutely awful stuff.”
Related Articles American cyclist Floyd Landis will appeal doping ruling
Case closed, now arbitrators to decide on Tour de France champion Floyd Landis’ fate
Take a look in the mirror – are you Floyd Landis? Today, Landis is onboard with a new dope that he credits with his recovery. Floyd’s of Leadville launched last month, peddling high-end cannabis products like CO2-extracted hash oil and pharmaceutical-grade transdermal ointments.
His product line, he said, is designed for “a group of people not assumed to be pot users.”
“Our line of products is targeted more to people who want to be discreet when they use it,” Landis said as he watched a steady stream of Leadville Trail 100 mountain bikers climb toward Columbine Mine. “Sure, there are a lot of people who feel it’s taboo, and everyone has been told that since the beginning of time and it’s going to take a while for that to go away, but the fact is, there are a lot of people who use it and don’t talk about it.”
Landis is no stranger to discreet doping. Using and keeping it quiet was the M.O. in cycling. He was one of the first to get busted. But by 2012, when the mighty Lance Armstrong admitted to systematic doping throughout his career, it was evident that nearly every athlete at the top of the sport in the 1990s and early 2000s was pedaling with performance-enhancing drugs. Landis was just ahead of the curve.
Once again, Landis is at the front of the pack, leading the high-country cannabis scene with top-shelf products cultivated from mountain-grown plants.
Landis didn’t use marijuana when he was racing. It just wasn’t part of the culture, he said. But it helps him today.
Tanned, a little heavier and quick with a hearty laugh, Landis is the father of a 2-year-old girl and is happy. Sometimes, he said, he takes a puff of his vape pen to help him sleep. It helps with his lingering hip pain. His transdermal cream works really well — better than opioids, but without the “horrible, horrible side effects and addiction,” he said.
“It just helps me relax,” he said. “It’s honestly the best transdermal stuff out there. This makes my life better.”
He’s not ready to take the route forged by Ross Rebagliati, the Canadian snowboarder who converted his temporarily yanked Olympic gold medal into a stage for promoting not just his own line of cannabis, but the training benefits of marijuana for hardcore athletes. But Landis is happy to advocate for a rational review of the nation’s failing drug war.
“Current federal laws do far more harm for society than any possible legalization can do,” he said, noting that draconian drug laws have targeted minorities and filled prisons with non-violent young men who should be working and raising families.
Floyd’s of Leadville products are based on marijuana cultivated in Colorado’s high country. His cannabis oil extraction process uses CO2, not the solvents and flammable gases used elsewhere. He’s hired technicians with pharmacy degrees who follow pharmaceutical guidelines and use top equipment to extract THC from flowers. He’s planning a line of edibles to a join product line of transdermal ointments and vape-pen oils.
Landis is part of a growing trend of famous musicians — and some athletes — promoting marijuana. Pro-model pot helps differentiate products in an increasingly crowded market. It likely works even if your name is associated with the more negative connotation of doping. Landis said he’s ready for the “doper peddling dope” reaction. Early feedback has been good, he said.
“I thought, ‘This could either go really, really badly or everyone will just take it as a joke and we’ll all be good about it.’ They were like ‘Yeah, the dude is selling weed. Right on. Why wouldn’t he be selling weed? He obviously likes drugs. We know that,'” he said. “There’s been very little cynical press about it.”
Landis loves Leadville. He fell for the place after racing the Leadville Trail 100 in 2007, drawing the eyes of road-racing’s elite athletes to the once local endurance mountain biking contest.
He spends most of his year in Leadville. It reminds him of tiny Idyllwild, Calif., west of Los Angeles, where he escaped the glare of public condemnation after that fateful 2006 drug test.
“There are such interesting people up here and they have stories I can relate to,” he says. “I like meeting these people and hearing their stories and sometimes, it makes me feel better about myself. Some of them have been through worse things than I’ve been through.” |
The Flat-Headed Stork is a large, powerful stork related to the African Shoebill. It is highly aggressive and often seen harassing other birds, even harmless fledglings and sparrows, for coming within a hundred feet of its young. Paradoxically, it tends to show the same aggression towards its own young, to the point of inflicting physical injury. Predatory, feeding on fish, lizards and small birds.This is part of a series where I am drawing all major characters from Life Is Strange as birds.I love birds (this should come as no surprise to anyone), but I confess that the Shoebill has always freaked me out a little. Something about it just screams "bully" to me, especially when you see it feeding on poor little ducklings. For this bird, I modified the head shape to reflect David's haircut, while using colours to invoke his security guard uniform.Font used: www.dafont.com/dudu-calligraph… |
NEWS RELEASE
SAULT STE. MARIE REGION
CONSERVATION AUTHORITY
***************************
The Sault Ste. Marie Region Conservation Authority has ended the Flood Warning issued to residents in regard to current river conditions.
Water levels on local rivers and streams are receding.
The flow of water remains higher than normal and public safety remains a concern.
The weather forecast indicates no significant precipitation is anticipated for the Sault Ste. Marie area for the next few days.
The Fort Creek Conservation Area is reopened but the public is reminded that there are still high water levels in the reservoir and surrounding area and to stay away from the reservoir and dam area.
Fort Creek water levels north of the dam and reservoir are high and the water flow is above normal conditions.
The Sault Ste. Marie Region Conservation Authority continues to closely monitor streamflows across the watershed.
All residents and visitors are advised to stay away from all rivers, creeks and streams.
Higher than normal water levels and flows can be dangerous and stream banks are slippery.
Please keep children and pets away from the fast flowing water.
This statement will not be updated unless conditions warrant.
*************************** |
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.
Rabbi Dr. Arthur Waskow founded and directs The Shalom Center , a prophetic voice in the Jewish, multi-religious and American worlds for justice, peace, and healing of the Earth.
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Several weeks ago, the Hillel House at Ohio State University banned from its facilities and its funding an organization of GLBTQ students — B’nai Keshet.
Why? B’nai Keshet had taken part in a coalition of student organizations working to support LGBTQ immigrants — a coalition that included Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a group that supports boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the state of Israel.
Hillel International has adopted a set of standards for dealing with matters relating to the state of Israel. One of those standards bans Hillel organizations from partnering with, housing, or hosting any organization that supports BDS and also bans from Hillel any organization that enters into a coalition with a banned organization.
Even though the coalition that B’nai Keshet entered had nothing at all to do with the Middle East and never took up any issue connected with Israel or BDS, OSU Hillel revoked B’nai Keshet’s Hillel membership.
Ever since, there has been a swirl of debate about this action. Some have accused OSU Hillel of undermining LBTQ life on campus and in the world, while others have responded that LGBTQ students are welcome at Hillel there and that LGBTQ life is celebrated.
For me, the issue goes deeper: What is the role of Hillel and of debate in the wider Jewish community?
For decades I saw Hillel as one of the few shining lights among “established” Jewish organizations, almost all of which were closed-minded, hide-bound, boring.
How did I come to respect Hillel after ignoring it while I was a college student and grad student? I came to know a Hillel rabbi — Rabbi Max Ticktin, who became one of my most beloved teachers and friends.
Ticktin was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) after studying with Mordechai Kaplan, a neo-Deweyan, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, a neo-chassid. A strong dose of pluralism!
He spent a year in the turmoil of the Zionist Yishuv just before Israeli independence, where he wrestled with strong pacifist urges but worked with Haganah, Labor Zionism’s armed force.
Then he became Hillel director at the University of Wisconsin, and later at the University of Chicago. There, with Rabbi Danny Leifer, he co-founded the Upstairs Minyan, one of the earliest of the chavurah-style minyanim. During those years in Chicago he served in the underground network called Jane, which arranged abortions for women who needed them when it was still illegal to do so. He joined with students in the Radical Jewish Union.
In 1972 he was named assistant national director of Hillel. When he came to Washington for that job, he joined not a fancy synagogue but a small chavurah minyan called Fabrangen, then just a year old, of which I was a member. He continued doing what had already been part of his work for Hillel — recruiting new directors — learned, creative, independent-minded and passionate people of varied Jewish backgrounds, all committed to Jewish pluralism. Above all, pluralism.
A few years later, he and I met with two pro-peace officials of Fatah when it was anathema in the Jewish world to do so. These particular Fatah members had come to the U.S. seeking Jewish support —- then given only by a small minority — for a two-state peace. They hoped to build support for that position inside the American and Israeli Jewish communities and then in Fatah, where that was still a minority view but was gaining adherents. Max — and then Hillel rabbis who had like Max joined Breira, the first American Jewish organization to pursue a two-state peace between Israel and Palestine — were bitterly attacked by right-wing Jewish organizations. But Hillel stood fast in their support.
For years, Hillel for me was the extended family of Max Ticktin, a shining light for multiple forms of Jewish practice and multiple approaches to major Jewish issues.
No longer.
The national prohibitions banning Jewish groups or individuals with “un-kosher” views about Israel from taking part in Hillel, and its application in exactly such cases as the expulsion of B’nai Keshet, changed Hillel into just another heresy-hunting Jewish organization.
The standards not only prohibit discussion of BDS, they forbid “applying a double standard to Israel.” This would have seemed strange to my grandmother, who said it was a “chillul hashem” — a desecration of God’s Name — when Jews acted badly. That insult did not apply to non-Jews acting badly.
She held Jews to a higher standard, and would have thought Jews are obligated to hold the State of Israel to a higher standard than other nations, because it claims to be the Jewish state. Criticizing Jews who acted badly was a Kiddush Hashem — an affirmation of God’s Holiness.
For me, the legitimacy and value of criticism is a central issue. If we erect a carved-out piece of the great flow of the universe into something that cannot be criticized, that something is an idol.
At our best, Jews are willing to criticize even God, who welcomed criticism by Avraham Avinu, and are willing to wrestle with God as Jacob did, even to name ourselves the Godwrestlers. At our worst, as Torah and the Prophets warn, we erect idols. Often, we worship them because they come in the form of gold, as our forebears did in the very shadow of Sinai.
I think it is an act of idolatry to forbid criticism of the State of Israel — its government, its culture and society, even its existence as a Jewish state.
I myself, on national television, have strongly criticized the BDS movement’s call for boycotts, etc., against all Israeli institutions. For that and other reasons, I find myself in important disagreement with Jewish Voice for Peace. But they are in fact part of the Jewish community –– no less so then the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (In fact, if numbers are one measure of who is part of the community, on most college campuses there are probably more flesh-and-blood Jews in JVP than in ZOA).
Both of them should be entitled to take a full part in every Hillel on every campus.
For me, the point is that the National Hillel regulations are idolatrous. Psalms 115 and 135 point out that idols have mouths but do not speak, noses but do not breathe — in short, are dead. And then the Psalms warn us that those who make or trust dead idols become like them –– dead.
So it is not surprising that at OSU, obeying the idolatrous rules ended up punishing an organization that was carrying out the life-giving mitzvah of supporting LGBTQ immigrants.
In my view, Hillel at OSU should have refused to obey idolatrous rules imposed by National Hillel. If Hillels throughout the country were to take a principled stand against idolatry and insist that discussion of Israel, like all other Jewish issues, must be open to all views, Hillel International might well face its own idolatry and do tshuvah — turn itself in a new — or old! — direction.
It might become again an institution that could honorably honor Rabbi Max Ticktin.
This story "Veteran Rabbi: Hillel Has Become A Heresy-Hunting Organization" was written by Arthur Waskow. |
HERE'S the new Yamaha XSR700, a custom-style edition of the MT-07 which has just been officially announced and revealed in these pictures.
It's the machine Visordown exclusively told you was coming last month, after Yamaha unveiled a concept MT-07 restyled by legendary Japanese custom-builder Shinya Kimura.
That concept was intended to 'validate the hypothesis' of a custom-style MT-07, Yamaha Europe's product manager Shun Miyazawa told Visordown at the time.
The XSR700 is the production version. It adds to Yamaha's range of custom-style 'Faster Sons' special editions, which also includes the XJR1300 Racer and XV950 Racer. Where those are based on already traditional-looking machines, the naked XJR1300 and XV950 cruiser, the XSR700 is the first to stem from a contemporary-styled model. We recently revealed how Yamaha had also considered the R1 for the treatment.
The XSR700 will be available from November. See our full gallery of pictures including lots of detail shots at the bottom of this story.
Yamaha's release issued today said:
'NEW XSR700 EVOLVES YAMAHA ‘FASTER SONS’ PROMISE
The Faster Sons Philosophy
Yamaha’s Sport Heritage bike building philosophy continues to move forward and evolve. Sharing its strong belief in respecting the iconic styles and designs of Yamaha motorcycles of the past, whilst intending to push the boundaries of motorcycle technology to create amazing bikes with real character that never compromise on riding ability. Yamaha called this new philosophy ‘Faster Sons’, a name that tips its hat in respect to the bikes that came before, whilst also showing pride in the faster sons of today and tomorrow, because above all, we love to ride.
To give tangible proof of this philosophy Yamaha chose to work with legendary Los Angeles based Japanese bike builder Shinya Kimura. Kimura’s shared vision of the Faster Sons philosophy led to a collaboration to produce the ‘Faster Son’, a tangible, real world concept motorcycle that embodied both Yamaha and Kimura’s belief in blending retro style with modern technology.
Design Inspiration
Building on the success of this collaboration, Yamaha is now launching the first production motorcycle that lives and breathes the Faster Sons philosophy. The all-new XSR700 takes its place as the latest model to join the Sport Heritage range, a casual, retro styled street bike that pays tribute to the iconic Yamaha XS650, a pure masterpiece of Yamaha simplistic design that still inspires today.
Underneath the super cool styling beats the heart of Yamaha’s latest technologies, the XSR700 delivers on the promise of the collaboration between Yamaha and Kimura with its perfect mix of timeless style, modern technology and emotional riding experience.
The XSR700 is a feast for the senses; its style is enhanced with a number of high quality parts to complete its look. Riders can enjoy an authentic retro feeling with the two-texture leather seat unit sitting on an easily customizable bolt on rear sub-frame. An old school style headlight and fastening stay sets it off at the front, and an aluminium tank unit reminds the rider they’re sitting on a Faster Sons machine. With a wet weight of just 186kg the XSR700 is the first of its kind, a modern day entry-level icon to style up the riding life of both new and experienced riders.
A period style speedometer sits between the wide tapered back handlebars, which offer a casual & upright riding position for its rider and a trick mesh cover on the side keeps all the high tech electronics under wraps. Use of quality metal materials such as aluminium on several components, including the front fender stay and radiator cover also work to complement the overall retro feel. A short stubby rear muffler provides the right soundtrack and Pirelli Phantom tyres front and rear not only look the part with an authentic pattern, but also do the job to keep the rider connected to the road.
The Ride
It’s not just in looks where the XSR700 delivers; the beating heart of the machine is Yamaha’s class leading 700cc inline 2-cylinder engine. Having powered several of Yamaha’s latest class leading motorcycles to huge success across Europe, the 700cc power plant was a natural choice for the XSR700. Built on the special ‘crossplane philosophy’ the perky motor kicks out a linear, deep torque for not just outstanding acceleration, but smiles in every gear. The uneven firing interval and 270-degree crank ensures a strong sensation of acceleration and outstanding traction, while maintaining continuous smooth & exciting power delivery till high rpm.
Power is of course nothing without control and the XSR700 excels in the handling department with a compact, lightweight chassis for remarkable agility and rideability and a short 530mm swing arm for further control. This combination of engine and chassis ensures the XSR700 is not just the perfect ride for new motorcyclists with the added benefit of ABS as standard, but also a massive dose of fun for more experienced riders.
This combination of engine and chassis ensures the XSR700 is not just the perfect ride for new motorcyclists but also a massive dose of fun for more experienced riders.
The rear suspension is a clever link-type Monocross system featuring a horizontal shock mounted directly to the engine’s crankcase, not only saving space to keep a clean look at the rear but also improving chassis performance.
The modern technology complementing the retro style continues with lightweight 10-spoke aluminium wheels and stopping power courtesy of 282mm wavy discs and 4-pot calipers at the front.
The XSR700 is the first bike of its kind to hit the market from Yamaha that truly delivers the complete Sport Heritage lifestyle, combining everything that is cool and inspiring from the old school custom motorcycle scene with all the latest technology to ensure maximum riding fun.
Accessories
Giving riders the opportunity to express their individual personal touch on the bike is one of the most important values for Yamaha’s Sport Heritage range motorcycles. The XSR700 follows this vision to offer maximum personalization possibilities for every rider, so very wide range of XSR700 accessories are available from the genuine options catalogue. This ensures owners can take the look of their ride even further and take advantage of the easily customizable nature of the bike to personalize their machines. In addition, several globally famous professional custom builders who fell in love with XSR700 concept have been already tasked to work on producing “Yard Built” custom bolt on parts, which will be introduced later this year.
Apparel
To make sure riders can fully immerse themselves in the scene, Yamaha is also creating a full ‘Faster Sons’ apparel range. The range will include super cool leather riding jackets, Sport Heritage gloves and helmets and a host of other items of clothing perfect for both a Sunday morning ride out for coffee or a summer trip to the mecca of custom bike scenes, the Wheels & Waves festival in Biarritz, France.
Highlights
* Two-texture leather seat
* Aluminium retro fuel tank
* Aluminium fender
* Aluminium headlight bracket
* Wide tapered back handlebars
* Mesh side panels
* Stubby rear muffler
* Embroidered seat logo
* Wide range of customization accessories
Chassis highlights
* Compact, lightweight chassis
* Short 530mm swing-arm
* Easily customizable, bolt-on rear sub-frame
* Rear Monocross horizontal shock system
* Standard with ABS
Engine highlights
* 700cc inline 2-cylinder engine
* Crossplane engine design philosophy
* Deep linear torque
* 270-degree crank for strong acceleration and traction
* Smooth, exciting power delivery to high rpm
Colours
* Forest Green
* Garage Metal
Availability
* November 2015' |
Remember that idea to build a thousand tiny houses to temporarily get the homeless off the streets? Well, a year has passed. We only built 28.
One year ago, Seattle was three months into its declared homelessness emergency, but it was already obvious the city wasn’t going to treat it as an actual emergency.
So last February, this newspaper devoted part of its front page to a column, written by me, about a city-floated plan to dramatically ramp up the urgency to get people off the streets.
As explained by Sally Bagshaw, the chairwoman of the city’s committee overseeing homelessness, the premise was: “What would we do in the event of a disaster like an earthquake? How would we house people who need help?”
Build a tiny house Tiny houses are cheap and easy to build — more are being built right now by public-school students and other volunteers. If you’d like to help, the Low Income Housing Institute has posted a “do-it-yourself” guide, with a supplies list and step-by-step plans put together by Seattle Central College’s Wood Technology Center, at lihi.org/tiny-houses. Please inquire to LIHI about need at 206-443-9935.
The proposed answer: Spread 1,000 “tiny houses” — 96-square-foot insulated huts built by volunteers — across the city in camps located in all seven council districts. The premise was for Seattle neighborhoods to act as the European Union had in response to the Syrian refugee crisis.
In return, the city would begin enforcing the no-camping law and start cleaning up the garbage-strewn sites under bridges and in greenbelts. Move to a tiny house, or move along.
I don’t have to tell you this if you live in Seattle, but none of this happened.
Instead of 1,000 tiny houses — a scale that could have made a serious dent in Seattle’s street homelessness — we have added, since last February, just 28.
What’s most vexing about the snail’s pace is that these 28 units, on vacant land behind a gas station in Rainier Valley, have generated incredible bang for the buck.
In its first nine months, this one site, called Othello Village, served 300 homeless people and moved nearly a hundred of them “up and out,” into real housing or more stable situations.
According to the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), which runs the camp, 68 people moved into either permanent or two-year housing. Fourteen got bus tickets to rejoin family members in other states, and another 13 moved into transitional shelter.
That’s 95 people off the streets. That figure doesn’t include the 50 folks currently living in the camp’s lighted, heated huts and some elevated tents.
The cost to construct the houses was $2,200 each, so $62,000 total, which LIHI director Sharon Lee says she raised from private sources. The huts are superior to tents or even to conventional shelters because you can lock up your belongings and also access your private unit 24 hours a day.
“We’re very aggressive at getting people off the street, keeping them dry and warm and then getting them into real housing,” Lee said. “Which is the goal, right?”
Why haven’t we done more of this?
One reason is a city-hired consultant blasted the idea last year, saying temporary encampments are a distraction from building real housing. This is fine in theory, but in reality we just had a lottery for 109 units of real housing and more than 2,000 people showed up. So there’s a crying need for something in the meantime.
Another reason is that any homelessness facility is politically tricky to site. A third reason, probably the biggest, is that city politicians spent much of last year bogged down in power struggles and an ill-fated crusade to open city parks to camping.
Now, to its credit, the city has committed to opening two new emergency tiny- house sites (as well as a tent camp in West Seattle). One tiny house village will be in Licton Springs, along north Aurora, and another in Georgetown. Slated to open this spring, they will together include 80 tiny houses.
Adding a handful already at other sites, that will bring us up to a grand total of about 120 citywide.
That’s one slow-rolling emergency response.
“It’s great they’re doing something, but we could easily have done so much more,” Lee says.
For $2.2 million — less than 5 percent of what the city spends annually on homelessness — we could build all 1,000 tiny homes.
Now that I’ve bashed the city for doing next to nothing, I’d like to amend that by noting they did finally clear out The Jungle last fall. But as critics pointed out, many of The Jungle denizens simply scattered into new jungles in the Sodo and Dearborn neighborhoods.
How many of those might be off the street if we had spent 2016 rallying as a city to build a thousand tiny houses?
We’ll never know. But there’s always now to stop accepting this, and start treating it like the disaster it is. |
LAS CRUCES, N.M. — Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) has retired its Grasshopper prototype, a 10-story, first-stage Falcon 9 rocket the Hawthorne, Calif., company used to develop and test vertical landing technologies.
In its place, SpaceX plans a December debut of a new test rig, known as Falcon 9R, and a new test site at Spaceport America in New Mexico, said Gwynne Shotwell, company president and chief operating officer.
On its final flight on Oct. 7, Grasshopper reached 744 meters — its highest altitude yet — before landing back on its launch pad in McGregor, Texas.
The upgraded prototype will have nine Merlin 1D engines compared with Grasshopper’s single motor, bringing the company closer to its long-term goal of developing reusable rockets.
As part of that effort, the first launch of SpaceX’s upgraded Falcon 9 rocket on Sept. 29 included a restart of the spent first stage to slow its descent before splashdown.
The first of two planned burns was successful, but during the second restart the rocket was spinning, choking off the flow of fuel. A photograph released Oct. 16 showed the Falcon booster was intact about 3 meters above the ocean.
“It didn’t remain intact after it hit the ocean, but it was intact. I don’t think anyone has ever done that,” Shotwell said at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces, N.M.
“Between the flights we’ve been doing with Grasshopper and this demonstration that we brought that stage back, we’re really close to full and rapid reuse of stages,” Shotwell said. |
Imagine you get a delivery to your house that you weren’t expecting. Not only is it something you didn’t order, but it’s a very expensive something — almost $40,000 worth of Chanel purses from Neiman Marcus. What would you do?
If you’re the guy this actually happened to, you would return this wealth of overpriced accessories to the local Neiman Marcus, much to the confusion of employees.
Writing on Instagram, an honest person named Matt Hwang explains his story:
Last friday, Neiman Marcus accidentally shipped me $39,168 worth of merchandise. I returned it yesterday morning with their employees looking at me as if I was crazy. Moral of the story – never do the right thing.
Maria Malkias of the Dallas Morning News, Neiman Marcus’s hometown newspaper, notes that the company has had serious issues while switching to a new inventory system, which have led to lost sales of as much as $65 million across the company’s various brands. Maybe this random shipment is a fluke occurrence, maybe not: It definitely would help explain those losses.
Update: We heard back from Neiman Marcus, which had an explanation for how this mixup happened. “The error was not related to NM’s new inventory system, NMG One,” a company spokesman said. “We are very grateful for Mr. Hwang’s honesty and his time spent returning these items. We know that it was mistakenly left with him during a return process through a shipping vendor.”
Consumerist readers have had similar experiences in the past, though usually the excess items are duplicates of items that they already ordered. A reader was supposed to receive one iPad as a gift, and instead received a case of five when someone likely slapped the shipping label on the wrong box at a Best Buy warehouse.
We would argue that one should always at least try to do the right thing, though contacting corporate is a better way to deal with high-priced weirdness like this than just showing up at a retail store. You are, of course, legally entitled to keep anything shipped to you without having to pay for it.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Consumerist. |
Recent MBA grads are increasingly looking west to big companies like Apple, Google and especially Amazon when searching for post-business school employment.
Elite MBA talent is being heavily recruited by tech firms, especially at a few target schools, like Northwestern's Kellogg School of Business and MIT's Sloan School of Management, according to new analysis from Poets and Quants, a news website that covers business schools.
One eye-popping factoid from the report: Over the past five years, Amazon hired 49 MBAs from Columbia Business School - nearly as many as the 51 MBAs Morgan Stanley hired over the same time period. (Morgan Stanley is a much more traditional choice for recent Columbia MBA grads.)
Another illustration of how big tech firms are increasingly recruiting MBAs is from Chicago's Booth School of Business. Five years ago, Google only hired four graduates from Chicago's elite business school. But last year, Google tripled its take to 12 graduates.
Finance and consulting are still the top fields that newly-minted MBAs are choosing, but schools are increasingly exposing their top students to Silicon Valley. "Some schools long ago saw the need to travel to the coast to get a sense of the Silicon Valley-Bay Area ecosystem; more and more are following their lead, making such pilgrimages de rigeur for the best programs," according to Poets and Quants.
Some students are even using the MBA as a credential to break into the technology industry. Median base salaries in tech for MBA graduates from certain schools can reach as high as $125,000 per year.
Here's a chart that shows just how many MBA grads have headed to big tech companies over the last five years from certain elite schools:
Read the entire report over at Poets and Quants.
Get the latest Google stock price here. |
Only one in ten Koreans would take in parents
Times have changed. Even in Korea, only one in ten would take in their aging parents.
Nine in ten Koreans would prefer to to live separately from their parents, according to a recent survey by the Planned Population Federation of Korea.
The feeling is mutual for the parents, as 76.7 percent said they would refuse in the future even if their own children wanted to live with them.
The survey, conducted over five days in April, questioned 1,466 married men and women in Korea.
Of them, 44.6 percent said it would be better to live separately, and 44.4 percent said it would be plausible only for economically well-off people. Meanwhile, 7.8% answered that it’s the responsibility of the first born son to take in aging parents, followed by sons (2.7 percent) and daughters (0.5%)
In addition, Sixty one percent of survey takers said they give their parents money on birthdays and holidays, while 28.6 percent said they send their parents money regularly.
Of those 28.6 percent, over half — 54.5 percent — said they give “allowances” to both families.
“This study shows that our culture of sacrifice and devotion has crumbled,” said Federation President Son Sook-mi. “The government needs to set up an infrastructure and a system for the elderly society to give them stability.” |
The Legend of Maian Ongoing 4.83
Author: Lim Dall-Young
Action Adventure Comedy Fantasy Shounen Romance Tragedy Ecchi
A powerful sorceress, Feicia Rand Philistin, once tried to conquer the nation of Shurian. In her wake of terror and destruction, a man stood up and rebelled against her oppression and domination. The ...more
A powerful sorceress, Feicia Rand Philistin, once tried to conquer the nation of Shurian. In her wake of terror and destruction, a man stood up and rebelled against her oppression and domination. The people called him Maian the Brave (Yongja Maian) and it was he that sealed the evil sorceress. A thousand years later, Felix Maian in the biggest mistake of his life releases the sealed sorceress that his ancestors have tried so hard to keep imprisoned. Now he has to keep the sorceress from taking over the world once again...
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The Dashwood 360VR Toolbox is a plugin suite for premiere, After Effects, Final Cut, and Motion, that offers eal-time 360 degree VR headset monitoring while editing.
preview 360 degree spherical footage in the Oculus® Rift
First seen at NAB 2015, 360VR Toolbox showed previewing 360 degree spherical footage in the Oculus Rift headset, while playing form an edited sequence in After Effects.
Now offered as a public beta, the 360VR Toolbox includes a host of features. The includes full stereoscopic support, reorientation of equirectangular “LatLong” panoramic footage, output of “pan and scan” mono or stereoscopic video, placement of 2D elements inside spherical footage, support for equirectangular, stereographic or cubic projections, and “seamless” 360 degree filters like blur, sharpen, glow and noise reduction.
360VR Toolbox can be downloaded and installed as a free trial from FxFactory. 360VR Toolbox is on-sale until September 30 for only $599 USD. |
Drinking is fun, alcohol makes us happy and do things that most of the time we wouldn’t dare doing. unfortunately, after a night of alcohol we have to front the side effects like a killer hangover that punish us for our sins. To avoid the different effects of alcohol we use all kinds of self persuasion techniques thinking they will help us, like not drinking beer (against beer-belly), or drink coffee to sober up. The problem is these are usually alcohol myths and the things we do don’t really help us. So before you drink large amounts of coffee to cure your hangover – you better read the following debunked alcohol myths.
1. Drinking beer before liquor will get you drunk faster
Actually, The order you are drinking your alcohol beverages does not matter, You’ll have a hang over because you drank too much, no matter how many or how much. Every drink you’ll drink, as long as its the same amount, will cause the same effects that over drinking cause: dehydration, lost of memory, nausea, and sensitivity to light.
2. Drinking beer will give you a “beer belly”
Gaining weight, the thing known as “beer belly” doesn’t happen just from beer. Every alcoholic beverage has a high level of calories and empty carbs, so beer belly can be caused from any alcoholic beverage whether its wine, vodka, liquor or any other kind. So next time you avoid beer, just know its not the only one to blame.
3. Coffee will help you get over a hangover
In order for you to sober up, the body needs to completely get rid of the alcohol in your body, coffee will not help to speed up the process. In order for you to get over the hangover, you’d have to wait for the body to naturally destroy the alcohol in the body and this may take a few hours. Drinking coffee MAY sharpen your senses a bit and make you think you are getting over the hangover, a dangerous phenomenon by itself. Even if you drink enormous amounts of coffee it will not speed up the process and its recommended to avoid dangerous activities like driving the next morning.
4. Alcohol destroys your brain cells
Drinking may slow down your thinking process and may disrupt your brain activity but don’t worry, no brain cell is completely destroyed because of that. Though its important to understand alcohol destroys and harm nerve cells in the central nervous system that controls learning and motor coordination. This lowers the communication between the nerve cells, changes their structure and cause some of the symptoms that happen when getting drunk. This may be a short term phenomenon, but the more you drink – the more the brain loses its ability to “fix” itself after a night of drinking.
5. You’ll feel more drunk if you mix alcohol and energy drinks
You will not feel more drunk, just different kind of drunk. If you drink alcohol with a caffeinated energy drink, you’ll be in a weird state thats called “totally awake drunk”. You will have the same amount of alcohol in your blood like if you were only drinking alcohol, but you will feel more sober because of the caffeine. This is a reminder to why coffee does not help hangovers. It is not recommended to mix energy drinks with alcohol, these two together can be very dangerous.
6. Vomiting would make us sober up
Vomiting will help you to get rid of the alcohol in your digestion system which will prevent it from entering your bloodstream, but your blood will still contain alcohol that the body needs to get rid of. So it may help you get rid of the alcohol in your stomach and by that stopping you from getting any drunker, but you’ll still have to wait a few hours for the body to get rid of the alcohol in your blood.
7. Lighter beverages (in color) will rid you of a hangover
Brighter alcohol beverages will make the whole business a bit better, the explanation is that Fermentation products that are in darker alcohol drinks – makes your hangovers stronger than lighter beverages do.
8. Men and women who are the same height can drink the same amount of alcohol
Even if you are the same height and weight as the man you’re with, you will still get drunk a whole lot faster if you both drink the same amount of alcohol. It happens because men have more muscle tissue than women, and muscle contains more water than fat. This means that alcohol is more diluted in a man’s system than it is in a woman’s. |
Celina Jaitly is unhappy. And the reason for her chagrin is one Sunny Leone and her husband. Jaitly has accused Leone and her husband of inhospitable behavior after the couple had rented out Jaitly’s penthouse for close to two years. According to a report by Bollywood Hungama, Jaitly, who now lives in Dubai with her husband and her two sons, has said that the couple even refused to vacate the premises after the lease had ended. She added that only when the security deposit of Rs 5 lakh was returned, was she allowed back into her own house. “And to think that I rented them my home out of compassion. No one was willing to give accommodation to Sunny and her insufferably arrogant and rude husband. I agreed. Only to regret my decision,” she was quoted as saying. The former Miss India-Universe said that she was also exploring legal possibilities. "What they've done to my house amounts to plunder and destruction. It's a like a Tsunami has passed through my once-beautiful penthouse. All my antique furniture was dismantled and dumped on the open terrace to rot. Brand new teak shelves were ripped off. Holes were drilled into the walls to install CCT cameras without our permission. Even the refrigerator and washing machine were damaged. I have to say Ms. Leone and her husband maintained very low hygiene standards." Leone and her husband have brushed aside the matter though. Weber said that the couple were “busier than ever” and that they wouldn’t respond to “garbage news put out by other celebs to bash us to gain self-publicity.” |
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Marks Rivers booking photo (Austin police photo)
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Marks Rivers booking photo (Austin police photo)
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Austin police working with Houston police intercepted a sophisticated motorcycle theft ring during ROT Rally weekend.
Detectives started looking at the case during MotoGP weekend when victims at two different hotels along Interstate 35 in Austin reported their motorcycles were stolen from the hotel parking lot. The first theft happened at the Wyndham Hotel on April 22 around 3:27 a.m. Hotel surveillance video showed a black Ford F-150 enter the lot and then, a few minutes later, two stolen motorcycles were seen being driven out by individual riders.
About an hour later, two more motorcycles were reported stolen from the Red Roof Inn, less than 2 miles away from the Wyndham Hotel. According to an arrest affidavit, three motorcycles were chained to the fence at the hotel and in a similar fashion, the black pickup truck pulled in and two motorcycles were ridden away. The four motorcycles stolen were valued around $28,000.
As investigators started looking into the pickup truck involved, they traced it back to 32-year-old Marks Rivers of Houston. The Houston Police Department Gang Unit told the Austin Police Department that Rivers is a "well-known motorcycle thief" and he has been known to steal large amounts of motorcycles from both Austin and Dallas, continued in the arrest affidavit.
With the help of the Houston Police Department, detectives were able to place a tracking device on Rivers' truck in Houston in early May. On June 9, during the ROT Rally weekend, the tracking device alerted police that Rivers' truck with a UHaul trailer attached was on the move from Houston to Austin.
According to an arrest warrant, when Rivers got into Austin, he met up with two other suspects who came in a separate vehicle. Police say the suspects went out and stole two motorcycles, one of which was a BAIT motorcycle that APD had setup. As the suspects loaded up the trailer and made their way back to Houston, officers pulled over the vehicle that was towing the trailer; however, Rivers wasn't in that vehicle. The suspects told police Rivers coordinated the thefts and that he was in the other vehicle so if the UHaul was stopped, he would not be caught with the motorcycles, continued in the affidavit.
In order to sell the stolen motorcycles, investigators determined the thieves would buy motorcycle frames with clean VIN numbers attached and swap the stolen motorcycle on it. They would then sell the motorcycle under the new and clean VIN number.
Rivers currently has a warrant out for his arrest, but once arrested, he'll be charged with engaging in organized criminal activity. |
Here are a few things to know about the NFC Championship game between the Atlanta Falcons and the Green Bay Packers:
> When, where, time: The game is scheduled for Sunday at the Georgia Dome. Kickoff is set for 3:05 p.m. and will be televised nationally on Fox. Good luck with finding tickets, be prepared to spend a lot of money to get some.
> What’s at stake: The NFC winner will play the winner of the AFC (New England or Pittsburgh) in Super Bowl LI (Roman numeral for the 51st Super Bowl).
> When and where’s the Super Bowl?: Super Bowl will be played Feb. 5 in Houston. Kickoff is set for 6:30 p.m. and will be televised nationally on Fox.
> The last time the teams met: Mohamed Sanu’s TD reception in the final minute gave the Falcons a 33-32 victory over the Packers Oct. 30 at the Georgia Dome.
Here’s a look back at the Falcons’ 36-20 divisional round win over Seattle:
> The five keys to the victory
> Strong game for offensive line
> MVP-like performance from Matt Ryan
> Falcons dismantle the ‘Legion of Boom’
> Complete coverage on ajc.com
***** |
It’s Christmas Sugar Cookie Day!!
No really, I have been waiting for this day forever. Who couldn’t love a good sugar cookie?!?! Crazy people that’s who.
I am currently having the problem that I only want to bake sweet things. Normally I have trouble coming up with sweet recipes, but this December I have so many that I want to make and not enough savory recipes. Like on Sunday, I set out to make two new savory dishes for you guys and they both just fell horribly flat. I think this was mostly because I wasn’t extremely excited about either recipe and I really just wanted to be baking and singing along to Christmas music.
Have I ever mentioned that I have always thought I would make the perfect Mrs. Claus? Because I have said this to my mom my whole life and now apparently I have the guts to tell all of you this. It’s because I can’t see you. Trust me, the online me is so much more daring and I guess personal. Meet me face to face and I am kind of shy. It’s better now that I am older though. As a kid, I clung to my mom’s hip like no kid you’d ever seen before.
Actually, when I was really young I wouldn’t even let my dad hold me. UGH. I was so mean, but hey, he’s pretty much my favorite person now.
Sorry, too much information for a cookie post.
SO. You know all those picture perfect Christmas cookies that basically look like Christmas cookie perfection? Yeah, these are not them… and they are not meant to be. I have always, always wanted to make the cut-out cookies, complete with the royal icing, pretty sanding sugar and little details like Santa’s rosy cheeks. I pretty much envy the beyond talented people who can create those gorgeous cookies. BUT I have finally accepted that, one, I do not have the patience for them, and two, they will never turn out as perfect as I want them to. Plus, if I am being honest, I really only like the look of those perfectly pretty cookies, the taste? Not so awesome.
This year, I finally decided to just give up on the perfect look and go for cute and good. Or ok, cute and delicious.
The verdict? It worked out so much better for me, and my day didn’t end with me covered in royal icing, sprinkles and crying on the floor while eating a sub-par cookie. Total upgrade.
These are cookies for people who want to have fun making cookies, people who have kids or people who just want a good frickin’ cookie. The whole slice and bake thing takes the effort right out of these and saves you your sanity. And the easy delicious frosting saves you from hours of trying to create the perfect picture cookie only to come up with something that looks like an art project gone so wrong. Plus, um again, they are so good.
The cookies are just a simple blend of butter, sugar and vanilla. Pretty much just like any other sugar cookie, but these have the vanilla flavor bumped up to the max. I love vanilla, and it’s Christmas time and that just means vanilla to me. The boys actually loved the cookies all by themselves. No frosting, no sprinkles. That was a little odd seeing as they love sugar, but I have to admit that the cookies themselves are perfect on their own. Soft, sweet and so vanilla-ey.
I still added frosting to most of the cookies though because no Christmas cookie should be left unfrosted. It’s just common sense. I went with a vanilla buttercream, but there’s a little secret ingredient involved. Salted caramel. It’s only a fourth of cup, but it just makes the frosting melt in your mouth. SOOOO good. Addictingly good.
I made my own, but you can use store-bought for a quicker frosting.
To decorate? I kept things SO simple. I used Christmas cookie cutters to make gingerbread men, Christmas trees and Santa hats. Couldn’t be easier. Just place the cookie cutter on top of the frosted cookie and sprinkle a little sanding sugar inside the cutter. Shake the cookie to evenly distribute the sanding sugar. DONE. My kind of cookie decorating.
If you want to make shapes with the cookies, this dough works great for that too. Just roll out the dough to about an eighth inch thickness, cut your cookies and bake as directed.
When I made these, there were of course a zillion snowboarders around from the US Team and yeah, they devoured these cookies. Said they were the best ever… maybe that’s why they haven’t left the house since?
Print Pin 4 from 174 votes The Recipe Easy Slice ‘n’ Bake Vanilla Bean Christmas Sugar Cookies w/Whipped Buttercream. By halfbakedharvest Course: Snack Cuisine: American Keyword: christmas cookies These delicious treats are for people who want to have fun making cookies,
Prep Time 20 minutes Cook Time 8 minutes Total Time 1 hour 30 minutes Servings 60 Cookies Calories 75 kcal Ingredients Cookies 3 sticks (1 1/2 cups) unsalted butter softened
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
1 vanilla bean seeds removed (optional)
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract* optional
2 eggs
4 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt Buttercream Frosting 2 sticks (1 cup) salted butter
2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup homemade or store-bought salted caramel sauce
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2-4 tablespoons heavy cream
assorted sprinkles for decorating Instructions To make the cookies, cream the butter, sugar, vanilla bean, vanilla extract and almond extract in a large bowl or bowl of a stand mixer until light and fluffy, about a full 3-5 minutes. Add the eggs and mix until evenly combined. Add half the flour, baking soda and salt, beating until combined. Add the remaining flour and beat until the dough forms a ball. Place half the dough on a large piece of plastic wrap and shape into a 10-inch log. Repeat with the remaining dough. Now try and make sure each log is pretty rounded and then wrap in a generous amount of tin foil. This will prevent the dough from forming a straight edge. Place the logs in the fridge for at least one hour or up to three days. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat. Remove one roll of dough at a time from the fridge. Unwrap the dough and slice crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick rounds, turning the dough a quarter turn after each slice to help keep the cookies round. Place 1/2 inch apart on the prepared baking sheet. If your cookies aren’t as round as you want them to be, shape the dough with your fingers. Bake 8 minutes for soft cookies. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Repeat with the remaining roll of dough, if desired. To make the frosting, in the bowl of a stand mixer (or large bowl with a hand mixer) beat together the butter and powdered sugar until smooth and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add the vanilla, pinch of salt and caramel, beat until combined Add the heavy cream and beat another 3 minutes or until the frosting is light and fluffy, add more cream to your liking. Frost the cooled cookies and decorate as desired. To make the shapes of your favorite christmas symbols, find some smaller Christmas cookie cutters and gently place in the center of the cookie. Sprinkle the inside of the cookie cutter with sanding sugar or sprinkles. Shake the cookie a little to help evenly distribute the sanding sugar and then remove the cookie cutter. Store cookies, covered for up to four days at room temperature. Recipe Notes *If you do not have almond extract on hand or cannot find it, feel free to just leave it out. BUT I think it makes these cookies great. *The cookie dough can also be stored in the freezer. To bake remove from the freezer and let sit on the counter for 5 minutes prior to slicing. Bake As directed.
Come on, these Slice ‘n’ Bake Vanilla Bean Christmas Sugar Cookies are pretty cute, right?!? |
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Professors requested and the IBJJF worked seriously to implant the drug testing for the first time in Jiu-Jitsu. In partnership with the agency United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), the tests were promoted for the first time during Pan 2013 in Irvine, Calif. last weekend.
Because of the contract, the Federation staff can’t talk about the athletes selected for the urine test. However, the champions commented on it, despite the initial strangeness.
“It was a bit embarrassing, because of the presence of a woman there watching you. But they are right, this is the way,” praised Gabi Garcia, one of the athletes who was seen heading for the test.
Other names were the absolute champion Marcus Buchecha, Andre Galvao, Roberto Tussa, Caio Terra, Rafa and Gui Mendes, Luiza Monteiro and Vanessa Oliveira.
Featherweight athlete and bronze medalist Augusto Tanquinho talked about the draw process: “They randomly selected the categories of black belt, not the athletes. So when we had the result of the champions of each, they were called for the test.”
For some athletes, the most uncomfortable part of the exam was not being able to see some of the finals, since they were being tested.
“I liked the initiative. I expected to be tested, but I was not drawn this time. It is better for the competitors and clearer to the public. In Jiu-Jitsu, nothing replaces hard work,” praised Michael Langhi, lightweight champion.
The USADA, which conducts tests in accordance with the international rules of the IOC, has examined athletes in the Olympic and Paralympic Games since 2000 in the U.S. The agency will report test results to athletes when they are completed. |
(Photo credits: European Robin, (left) Wivelsfield School @ http://www.wivelsfieldschool.org/classes/robins/ and American Robin (right) Miss Young’s Art Room (1st graders) @ http://missyoungsartroom.blogspot.com/2013/05/1st-grade-audubon-robins.html )
The first robin of spring is the subject of many poems and much folk lore, but is also the source of great misunderstanding between Europeans and Americans, because we are talking about two totally different birds. One always needs to be careful, when dealing with symbols. After all, one man’s spider is a blood-sucking trapper, and is another man’s stringer of cobwebbed dewdrops at dawn.
The European’s fondness for robins may be due to the fact the little, pert birds like to hop about investigating the soil just behind a plow, and they are unafraid of humans and easy to tame. Before Christ they were said to be a favorite of the god Thor, and after Christ they were said to have been stained by Christ’s blood when they flew up to try to comfort Him on the cross, singing in His ear. That red breast was also said to be made redder because they took pity on souls in purgatory, and brought them water, and were burned by the fires.
American Robins don’t seem to have the same history and symbolic lore, but I refuse to get all competitive about it. I’ll merely mention our robins are twice as big, and can kick European robin’s butts any day. Ours are edible, though we’ve become politically correct, (if not poetic), and not many people hunt them any more. Also European robins lay ugly brown eggs, while ours lay eggs of a beautiful sky blue. Their robins are squeaky flycatchers, while ours are melodious thrushes, and John Keats never wrote poems about flycatchers. (What rhymes with flycatchers?) But I only mention this as scientific fact.
Anyway, our robins are back, and it is a great relief to me and a friend of mine, as we had noticed a scarcity. Usually a gang or two of American robins hang about all winter, usually in the swamps. They are so dull-looking that some once thought they were a separate species, and dubbed them “wood robins.” However they are just less dandied-up during the winter than they are when attempting to woo each other in the spring. (Just like humans.) They are also less polite. There is something about a gang of winter robins that hints at the mentality of a mob. However there were none to be seen last winter, despite the fact the winter was mild.
I figured that they had learned not to hang around after the previous winter, which was particularly brutal around here. I saw them in the swamps that winter, but not last winter. It makes no sense that a bird would hang around the north when the winter was bitter, and head south when it was mild. So I figured they decided they didn’t want to take the chance, and had headed south before winter even began. They all vanished during the final days of August
Some say birds can’t learn in this manner. They say birds follow “patterned behavior” and “imprint”. An example is that, when whooping cranes are raised by sandhill cranes (because the second egg of a whooping crane nest was placed in a sandhill nest, in an attempt to increase the population), the young whoopers “imprinted” on sandhill parents, and became so convinced they were in fact sandhill cranes that they refused to mate with other whooping cranes.
I assert our robins are not so dumb as that, and it will be difficult to prove me wrong. (It is best to chose the high ground, if you decide to start a fight.) Others may assert there were no robins around this winter because the stay-north robins all froze, the prior winter. I just demand that they produce the corpses. They can’t, so I win.
However I was concerned by the lack of robins this spring, especially as both winter-robins, and the children at our farm-childcare, have a love of the withered apples on a crab apple in our pasture. The children, who will not touch good food prepared by loving mothers, like the apples because they are sour three degrees beyond inedible, and later, when they are too brown to eat, children like them because it is forbidden to pelt each other with them, and children are not known for always honoring rules.
These crab apples are so amazingly sour that no bird will touch them all winter, even when snows are deep and famine makes foxes unfriendly. (Maybe they get sweeter after a winter’s worth of frost; I’ve never tried them once they turn brown.) Then, during the last week of March or first week of April, the robins descend.
The gang of robins is more like the Hell’s Angels than anything remotely poetic. For one thing, they don’t sound like thrushes, and just do a quick, clear chirp, their “alarm call”. For another thing, though no other bird has expressed the slightest interest in rotten apples, they chase other birds away. How the heck am I to write a “first robin of spring” poem about such unseemly behavior? Consequentially, I never have.
I intend to make up for this shortcoming on my part, for, when I think of it, even among humans, spring is not noted as a season of good behavior.
This year, because I hadn’t seen a winter-robin all winter, I suddenly realized that this rowdy gang of birds was indeed a sign of spring, and, along with my friend, I worried about the chance something terrible had happened. As is often the case with worry, it was a waste of time, for yesterday a couple robins appeared, and today the entire gang descended.
During the summer robins are spread out, and chase each other from each others territories, so you seldom see more than two birds on a lawn. But today they were everywhere you looked. The pasture seemed covered with them, though I suppose there were only fifty at most, hopping here and flying there and chirping that alarm-call all over the place.
One slightly poetic thing they do, for no reason I can fathom, is to sometimes allow a few bluebirds to join their gang. It is likely sheer racism, as bluebirds are also thrushes. I hopefully looked about today, seeking a bluebird, because it is a heck of a lot easier to write a poem about a bluebird, than a pack of unruly robins. However there wasn’t a bluebird in sight.
The crab apple tree is partially hidden by by the white object in the upper left of the picture above. That useless white object was erected for a wedding, and now sits there and gets in the way of my mowing, and makes people wonder if I’m some sort of Zen Buddhist. I’m not, nor are the first robins of spring.
They are in that crab apple tree and glutting themselves on the rotten fruit. I tried to take a picture, but few wildlife photographers run a Farm-childcare, and have a bunch of kids tagging along. Not that I want the kids to tag along, but small children have an amazing ability to see when adults are up to something interesting.
If I silently raised my camera to take a picture of a rare and endangered species, a child would bellow from far away, before I could frame and focus, “Whacha takin’ a pick-shoor uv?” Nor can I even get that far. Long before I even get close to the rare and endangered species, the children can tell, just by the way I’m walking, that there is something wonderful that they, (simply because they want to see it, and yell so loudly that they want to see it), will never see.
Unless…unless…I figure out a way to show them.
(As an aside, amazingly, we found a way to let small children see baby foxes outside their mother’s den, a couple of springs ago. Even more amazingly, my amazing wife even got some pictures:
https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/baby-foxes/ )
However there are times my wife’s brilliance seems to be the exception to the rule. The rule would be that if you want to take pictures of a landscape devoid of wildlife, run a Childcare. And if you want to have photographic proof that robins never, never gorge themselves on rotton crab apples, walk in my shoes. I couldn’t get within fifty yards of that tree before the loud children scared the entire flock of robins, all chirping their loud alarm-calls, to the far side of the pasture.
So you can forget photographic evidence. You are going to have to trust me on this. There were a lot of greedy robins in that tree.
This brings me around to the conclusion that my mother didn’t raise me to be a wildlife photographer. She liked books, and I can only suppose she raised me to use something you are stuck with, when the camera doesn’t work: Words.
I’d rather use a camera. A good picture of rowdy robins in a crab apple tree would be worth a thousand words. But it looks like I’m stuck with words, and must somehow compose a sonnet about how biker birds are a sign of sensitive spring.
(If there is a blank place below, it means I gave up.)
I don’t see what is so spring-like about
Robins. They arrive like a biker gang,
Chase winter birdsong away, and just shout
Their short, “Chirp! Chirp!” alarm-call. Give me the twang
And trill of red-winged blackbirds in the reeds
And I can thrill of spring. But these robins
Just bully about, and I have my needs:
My weepin’s; my wailin’s; and my sobbin’s.
Robins don’t understand poets like me.
They grub worms; then, worse than Adam and Eve,
They crab apples. So, unspiritually,
I hate them, and feel they only deceive…
…But then, after apples, they make poets blush
For they launch to treetops and sing like a thrush.
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Grammy Award Winner for "Putin," Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals
Dark Matter, Randy Newman's first album of new material in nine years, will be released on Nonesuch Records on August 4, 2017, with the vinyl to follow on August 18. The record is the follow-up to 2008's acclaimed Harps and Angels, which the Guardian praised for its "sumptuous melodies, devastating pathos and thorny, irony-laden character songs," calling it, "the work of a true master of popular song." Dark Matter was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by long-time Newman collaborators Mitchell Froom, Lenny Waronker, and David Boucher. The album's nine songs include the 2016 digitally released "Putin," plus songs about the Kennedy brothers, Sonny Boy Williamson, science vs. religion, love and loss, and more.
Newman, who is known for writing from the perspective of various narrators, many of whom are unreliable, tried something new on Dark Matter: "If there is anything consistent about the songs, there is often more than one voice, in the big ones, and it's different for me, a difficult thing to bring off, to make it comprehensible," he says. "I think it works. They cover more ground than most songs do and portray a number of different characters. Audiences are smart. They'll understand the songs. I hope they like them as well.
"I'm proud of the record," Newman continues. "I think it's entertaining—I hope it's entertaining—and that's eighty percent of what I try to do. Also, I'm doing something different than I've ever done before. It's a step forward for me. And considering how long I've been doing this, I'm kinda proud of that."
After starting his songwriting career as a teenager, Newman began recording as a singer and pianist in 1968 with a self-titled album. Throughout the 1970s, he released several other acclaimed albums such as 12 Songs, Sail Away, and Good Old Boys. In addition to his solo recordings and regular international touring, Newman began composing and scoring for films in the 1980s. The list of movies he has worked on since then includes The Natural, Awakenings, Ragtime, all three Toy Story pictures, Seabiscuit, James and the Giant Peach, A Bug's Life, and most recently, Disney/Pixar's Cars 3.
Between 2003 and 2016, Nonesuch released three volumes of The Randy Newman Songbook, comprising solo recordings of songs from throughout Newman's five-decade career, along with a three-CD box set of all volumes (a four-LP, limited-edition vinyl version included bonus tracks). The New York Times said of the first disc: "The great craftsmanship is more apparent in the stripped-down context," and the Associated Press said, "Few singer-songwriters could inject more new life into solo piano versions of their work than Randy Newman." In 2011, the label released a live CD and DVD recorded at London's intimate LSO St. Luke's, accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra led by Robert Ziegler.
Randy Newman's many honors include six Grammys, three Emmys, and two Academy Awards, as well as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013—the same year he was given an Ivor Novello PRS for Music Special International Award. Newman also was presented with a PEN New England Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award in 2014. |
As your sunburn or tan fades, it can be hard to imagine how exactly it has affected your DNA.
Especially as – for most of us – we won’t see the damage come to the surface of our skin for another decade or so.
But what if you could?
That’s the idea behind seeUV, a new app from SunSmart, which uses augmented reality to show you what your skin could look like if you don’t protect it in the sun.
It’s a disturbing reminder of what UV damage can do if we let it add up, especially when you are remember that the more UV damage that adds up, the greater your risk of skin cancer.
seeUV is also a warning tool for current UV levels. Although you can’t see or feel UV, the app uses the current temperature and UV readings to depict the strength of UV rays in your environment – the more red rays dancing across your screen, the greater the UV damage danger at that location – telling you to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide. |
Early into the second day of a group of Uber drivers' work "strike," Uber sent out an email indicating that it was meeting one of the group's demands: Drivers of premium cars — either black cars or SUVs — could now opt out of receiving less lucrative Uber X requests.
As BuzzFeed News reported yesterday, the Uber Drivers Network of NYC — a group made up primarily of SUV and black car drivers — were fed up with either being penalized with a temporary suspension for not accepting Uber X requests or attempting to appease the company and accepting so many Uber X requests (at least 90% of all requests) that they did not have time to pick up passengers requesting a black car or an SUV.
The company rolled out this program for premium drivers to opt into receive requests for Uber X rides earlier this summer but only made it mandatory for all drivers, whether or not they opted in, earlier this month. In the email drivers received today, Uber wrote that the company was returning to its "opt in" policy where drivers could choose to receive Uber X requests.
However, drivers still have unaddressed complaints, namely the summer discount that pegs Uber X rates below that of yellow cabs and other taxis. It's an issue specific to New York City where the company has driven up demand for Uber X rides with its decrease in Uber X rates.
"We only won half of it," Uber X driver Masood Rehman told BuzzFeed News. "When the Uber X discount pricing first started, it was temporary, just for the summer, but the summer is pretty much over now. They are the same rate even if we drive upstate, New Jersey, or Long Island. This is where we go the most, and every other company, when they cross the New York City limits, the rate prices go double. But the company does not lower their commission."
Additionally, Uber drivers don't receive tips, making the decreased fare that much more difficult to make a living on, Rehman said.
"Uber says tip is included in the fare. When it's 20% lower than a yellow cab, how is tip included in the fare?" he asked.
When BuzzFeed News reached out to Uber for comment on whether the company plans on returning the fare price to its pre-summer rate, a spokesperson said, "Lowering prices brings greater efficiency by connecting more riders to drivers, more trips per hour, lower pickup times and increasing earning potential for drivers."
And so the strike continues. Though the group's Facebook page has seen a slew of positive comments claiming victory, the group organizers still plan to hold a meeting for drivers today and have encouraged drivers to continue to be on strike until after they speak with the drivers at said meeting. |
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