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Krakow, Poland — Pope Francis issued a rousing and impassioned call to action to young people around the world Saturday, saying our unsettled times require them to get off the couch and "set out on new and uncharted paths."
In 34-minute remarks to more than a million youths from 187 countries participating in a prayer vigil here for World Youth Day, the pontiff urged them to avoid "confusing happiness with a sofa" and instead put on their shoes and head out to "open up new horizons."
In a sometimes forceful but an often affectionately worded address, the pope in effect outlined a new, hopeful way of life for an entire generation.
"The time we are living in does not call for young couch potatoes but for young people with shoes -- or better -- boots laced," Francis exhorted the youth. "It only takes players on the first string, and it has no room for benchwarmers."
"Today’s world demands that you be a protagonist of history," said the pope. "The Lord wants to work one of the greatest miracles we can experience: he wants to turn your hands, my hands, our hands, into signs of reconciliation, of communion, of creation."
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"Today, we adults need you to teach us how to live in diversity, in dialogue, to experience multiculturalism not as a threat but an opportunity," he continued.
"Have the courage to teach us that it is easier to build bridges than walls!" he nearly shouted, before adding quietly: "You will be our accusers if we choose the life of walls, of enmity, of war."
Looking out over a crowd filling miles of open field for the chance to be with him, Francis emphasized the point by asking those present to make what he termed the "primordial bridge" and take each other's hands.
As the throngs -- cassocked bishops, habited sisters, and t-shirt and shorts-wearing pilgrims among them -- locked fingers, the pontiff exclaimed: "This is a great bridge of brotherhood, and would that the powers of this world might learn to build it."
Francis was speaking Saturday evening at a vigil that was at times joyful and at other times deeply saddening. He was responding in his remarks to testimonies from three young people who have been through difficult situations.
One woman -- a 26-year-old named Rand -- explained that she lives in Aleppo, Syria, and began sobbing as she described the violent deaths of friends and family members. She poignantly asked God to grant Syrians and the world 's people "the grace to show a touch of mercy and to plant joy on the hearts of everyone that is sad."
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Responding to Natalia at the beginning of his address, Francis asked for prayers for Syria and said bluntly: "This is no time for denouncing anyone or fighting."
"We have no desire to conquer hatred with more hatred, violence with more violence, terror with more terror," the pope said. "We are here today because the Lord has called us together. Our response to a world at war has a name: its name is fraternity, its name is brotherhood, its name is communion, its name is family."
Later, the pontiff warned the youth against paralysis that can come from thinking the problems of the world are too large to confront. But then he warned against what he called an "even more dangerous" kind of paralysis: "to think that in order to be happy all we need is a good sofa."
"A sofa that makes us feel comfortable, calm, safe," the pope described. "A sofa like one of those we have nowadays with a built-in massage unit to put us to sleep. A sofa that promises us hours of comfort so we can escape to the world of video games and spend all kinds of time in front of a computer screen."
"It is very sad to pass through life without leaving a mark," Francis warned. "But when we opt for ease and convenience, for confusing happiness with consumption, then we end up paying a high price indeed: we lose our freedom."
"Jesus is not the Lord of comfort, security and ease," the pontiff continued. "Following Jesus demands a good dose of courage, a readiness to trade in the sofa for a pair of walking shoes and to set out on new and uncharted paths."
"God expects something from you," Francis told the young people. "God wants something from you. God hopes in you. God comes to break down all our fences. He comes to open the doors of our lives, our dreams, our ways of seeing things."
"God comes to break open everything that keeps you closed in," said the pope. "He is encouraging you to dream. He wants to make you see that, with you, the world can be different. For the fact is, unless you offer the best of yourselves, the world will never be different."
Saturday's vigil took place about 10 miles southeast of central Krakow in a special outdoor venue set up by World Youth Day organizers that they are calling "Campus Misericordiae."
Francis entered the vigil by walking through a wooden trellis-like structure that organizers had prepared as the venue's holy door for the Jubilee year of mercy. He walked through with several young men and women, each taking hands and walking side-by side.
Once through the door, the pontiff invited the young people to join him in the pope-mobile as he drove through the crowd. Later, he asked them to sit at his feet as he sat on the large stage set up for the event.
The three testimonies were accompanied by a mini-play put on by about a dozen young people, showing different evocative scenes of younger peoples' lives today.
In one scene meant to evince the separation some people experience, several youths stood in glass boxes apart from one another as they typed or talked on their cell phones. A woman in a white dress moved around them, leading one man out of his box to dance with him.
Francis' visit to Poland continues Sunday with an open-air Mass at the same outdoor location before he heads back to Rome in the afternoon.
[Joshua J. McElwee is NCR Vatican correspondent. His email address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @joshjmac.] |
Mark of the Unicorn’s flagship digital audio workstation just received a major upgrade in Digital Performer 9. The update adds a huge amount of content, as well as an extremely long list of features that have been on the ‘want list’ of many users. I’ve used it for the past few weeks and I’m ready to tell the tale!
Content is King
It seems that many of the DAW companies are trying to ‘one-up’ each other in the included instruments and effects department lately—and that only benefits all of us users! MOTU has seen fit to bundle the pretty amazing MX4 Multisynth into Digital Performer and I couldn’t be happier about it. I’ve always felt that MX4 is an under-appreciated powerhouse, and now that it’s a part of Digital Performer, I think it will finally get the respect it deserves. MX4 can handle subtractive, wavetable, FM, AM, and analog emulated synthesis all in one interface. It’s a monster of a synth, and it’s flawlessly integrated into the DNA of Digital Performer now.
The plugins that MOTU has added in the last few versions have been top notch (the guitar pedals/live room simulators especially!). A wonderfully efficient 1176LN emulation is now included in Digital Performer, courtesy of MasterWorks. If you’re familiar with their EQ plugins, you’ll see the value right away of this update. As an owner of a hardware 1176, I can tell you this is a faithful recreation that I’ll be happy to use.
There’s a MultiFuzz distortion kit and MicroG/B polyphonic octave generators for guitar/bass. Perhaps my favorite (ok, I’m a synth guy) of the bunch is MegaSynth. It’s a subtractive synth processor that will let you guitarists finally join in on the fun that us self-confessed Moog-heads have been enjoying for years. You can input any signal into MegaSynth and have all the envelopes, LFOs, pattern generation, sub octave, and square wave tones you can shake a stick at. It’s a truly well polished plugin that allows you to make a synth out of just about any instrument. You can even bus audio to it and mix it with the original source for some sweet doubling of melodic lines!
Interface Tweaks and More
There are numerous new features but I’ll give you a smattering of the ones that stood out as truly useful to me. The first is MusicXML export. As someone who has to send out charts for print often, the ability to finally preserve all the changes to the letter that I make in the quick scribe window is extremely time saving. You can do all of your score tweaking in Digital Performer and feel confident that once you open the score in Finale or Sibelius, it will look the way you wanted it to look.
MIDI learn for audio plugins has long been on my ‘want list’ for Digital Performer and I’m thrilled it’s finally here. Muting MIDI notes is also pretty cool, and since I do a lot of keyswitching/articulating in the sequence editor, I can now temporarily mute an articulation change and put it back with the click of a shortcut.
Finally, a full on spectrogram for each audio track built inside of the sequence editor is way cool. I’m a big fan of anything that saves me time, and trying to hone in on what tracks are infringing on the frequency range of other tracks can happen much quicker with this feature.
Conclusion
I’m quite the big fan of this update. MOTU has created something really special in DP9. Digital Performer has always been one of the most stable workstations you could use, and DP9 continues that trend. I didn’t encounter a single crash in two weeks of testing, and I loaded every mix up with just about every new thing that they added. Digital Performer 9 is a huge step forward for MOTU users, and the future of DP looks very bright indeed.
Price: $195 Upgrade / $499 Full Product / fully functioning 30-day demo mode available here.
Pros: Included MX4 synth, new plugins, MegaSynth is fantastic, many requested features now implemented, as stable as ever, MusicXML Export, Retina Optimized Themes
Cons: No bundled ‘general sound set’ of standard instruments such as piano, drums, bass, etc. Although most professional users will likely have their own 3rd-party AU instruments
Web: www.motu.com |
WASHINGTON ― Student debt is forcing tens of thousands of elderly Americans into poverty, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.
The findings are startling. More than 110,000 senior citizens had their Social Security checks garnished in 2015 to pay off student loans they’d already defaulted on. Nearly 70,000 Americans over the age of 50 are living in poverty as their Social Security benefits are cut to pay off student loan debts.
Student lending is typically thought of as a millennial problem ― one of exploding college tuition costs and ruthless interest rates that took hold over the past 20 years.
But the GAO report ― requested by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) ― demonstrates that the debt hardship is shared across generations.
The elderly student debt nightmare is not going to sort itself out. A full 68 percent of older borrowers living in poverty with Social Security garnishment are only seeing their benefit cuts devoted to interest and fees. Their overall debt burden is not diminishing. They will never stop making payments under the current system without a new source of income.
The federal government is profiting from this mess. Every time a debt collector scrapes a Social Security check, the U.S. Treasury Department collects $15.
“Our government is shoving tens of thousands of seniors and people with disabilities into poverty through garnishment every year ― and charging them $15 every month for the privilege ― just so that the Department of Education can collect a little bit more interest and keep boosting the government’s student loan profits,” Warren said in a written statement provided to reporters. “This is predatory and counterproductive.”
The problem is getting worse, not better. Since 2005, the total student debt owed by Americans over the age of 65 has increased nearly fourfold.
This is not how either Social Security or private sector lending are supposed to work. Social Security is designed as a basic social insurance program ― you pay in as you work, you cash out when you retire. Functionally, this makes it an anti-poverty program. Old people don’t work, which means they don’t get paid, and so receiving a Social Security check keeps 22 million Americans out of poverty, according the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning think tank. When President Franklin Roosevelt designed the program in the 1930s, he didn’t include a caveat for people with lots of debt. If you paid in, you got the check, and any issues between you and your creditors were your own affair, not the government’s.
Lending is not a charitable enterprise. The Salvation Army doesn’t collect interest on bell-ringers in Santa Claus outfits. The financial sector makes a profit from interest rates for shouldering the risk that borrowers might not pay back their loans. Default is a cost of doing business.
By allowing lenders to garnish the Social Security checks of people living in poverty, the federal government is encouraging reckless student loans at interest rates that would be unsustainable in a free market. No sane borrower would take on a loan if paying it back would require them to live in poverty.
There is no constitutional amendment requiring the federal government to use Social Security as a subsidy for reckless bankers. As with many other 21st-century economic woes, it’s possible to trace the student debt debacle among the elderly back to the era of bipartisan cooperation between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). Prior to 1996, it was illegal for student loan creditors to garnish Social Security checks. Clinton and Gingrich changed that. Warren supports legislation introduced by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that would repeal the 1996 law.
Clinton spent much of his presidency extolling the values of higher education, insisting that the only way to get ahead in the Silicon Valley economy of the future was to “earn what you can learn.” To this way of thinking, poverty was not a function of structural imbalances in the economy that denied people a living wage, but the result of inadequate access to schooling. This ideology has been passed down through George W. Bush to Barack Obama.
“What I fundamentally believe — and what the president believes,” former Education Secretary Arne Duncan told The New York Times in 2012, “is that the only way to end poverty is through education.”
Education is great. It’s fun to learn about Plato and Chinua Achebe and Jane Austen and the Krebs cycle and lending at interest. It’s also fun to eat when you are old. And if tens of thousands of elderly Americans are living in poverty despite doing exactly what American presidents have told them to do for decades ― namely, getting an education ― then something is dreadfully wrong. |
There is something to be said for the whole “find something you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life” thing. Success takes hard work, but passion brings fulfillment from that hard work.
At the start of my career, people suggested that a woman could only be a racing reporter or timekeeper, but never an actual race car driver. Some say that I “crashed the boys’ club” or that I broke down the gender barrier in racing, but all I did was follow my passions.
Headshot: Alex Fine
I’ll always be someone with an edge who isn’t afraid to make a little noise and push the envelope a little bit. That part of me won’t ever change, but now it’s time to show who I am off the track. Being a professional athlete allows a level of name recognition available to few, but name recognition and brand awareness—having people know what you stand for—are very different things.
I’ve proven myself in my racing career, so now I am tapping into my personal passions that transcend the sport to round out my marketing portfolio. What once started as hobbies, like yoga, strength training and healthy eating, have now become my brand pillars; ones that I share with my fans on a daily basis. And my most powerful tool to help craft my brand? Social media.
Social media is a space to say exactly what you want to say, exactly how you want to say it and when you want to say it. I am a very visual person, so Instagram is my go-to channel. With just a quick post I can share racing, recipes, workouts, yoga, Dallas and Ella (my dogs), my latest article on The Players’ Tribune and the occasional motivational quote. These are the things that make me tick—healthy mind, healthy body, healthy life and the occasional glass of wine. These moments are things I would be doing anyway, but now I get the opportunity to invite people in and tell them my story; not just what they read in the news.
Social media has also allowed me to engage with my racing fans and participate in a community of people that share the same passions as I do. When tasked with developing recipes and workouts for my upcoming book, Pretty Intense, I relied on a community of committed people who tested each element and provided feedback on what worked and what didn’t. Where did I find these people? Through an online registration and dedicated Instagram feed. Social media is a two-way street. I not only post, but listen to my audience and their feedback.
By establishing myself off the track in the health and wellness space, I have been able to align myself with brands I am passionate about. In today’s market, both sides, the brand and the endorser, realize that the success of a partnership is completely dependent upon its authenticity. My race team sponsor, Aspen Dental, stands for more than plaque removal and flossing. The brand focuses on overall oral health, which fits in with my personal focus on health and wellness. And Code 3 Associates, a nonprofit organization specializing in animal rescue and recovery in disaster areas, is another race team partner that has allowed my fondness for animals to become actionable as my racing career has grown. In addition to my Nascar fans, my sponsors have access to a targeted audience because of my off-track brand, and give me another avenue to reinforce my interests.
Off the track I have made it a point to pursue opportunities that support my visions and allow me to be intimately involved in the process. Fashion has always been important to me and I have dreamed of having my own clothing line since I was a kid. When the opportunity to work with HSN came up, they were on board with me being involved every step of the way. From the name, Warrior by Danica Patrick, to the logo, the cuts, the prints and the fabrics, I was part of every decision. The end result is a line of stylish, comfortable athleisure wear and accessories that I am incredibly proud to have my name on, thanks to a partner that supported my vision and helped me bring it to life.
The biggest thing to remember is that all of this takes time. I have been racing for 26 years, and I am just now adding exploring my off-track passions to my already busy competition schedule. It is a lot of work and you have to sell yourself, but by carefully curating your personal brand portfolio around who you are—through social media, closely aligned partnerships and strategic business investments—you will find success.
It is an incredibly rewarding process that is worth every bit of effort you put into your vision. |
Of the many arresting moments that fill LCD Soundsystem's This Is Happening, perhaps the most unexpected comes less than halfway through album opener "Dance Yrself Clean." The seemingly unassuming, low-key rumble of a song morphs from its mumbled beginnings into an outsized flash of synth ballast and wailing vocals. The sudden shift is like the flicking on of a light, the perfect example of frontman-songwriter-mastermind James Murphy's effortless balance of restraint and release, organic rock and electro pop, and muted cool and vibrant emotion. This study in contrasts pervades LCD Soundsystem's third, and possibly final, release--an album where Murphy refracts images of heartbreak and longing through the scattered light of a disco ball.
The cautious observations and honest reveals that follow are literally and figuratively quieter moments than that initial blare. On "All I Want," against a wall of whirling guitar, Murphy recognizes a relationship that can't be saved, and instead asks for "your pity" and "your bitter tears." "Get Along" shuffles over pulsing keys and bubbling percussion as Murphy tries to bridge physical and emotional distance, singing, "You might forget, forget the sound of a voice / Still, you shouldn't forget the things we laughed about." Conversely, the sparsely decorated, sauntering "Somebody's Calling Me" is almost hopeful in comparison: "Somebody's calling me" Murphy half whispers, "to be my girl."
There are stretches of lyrical levity here, too. "You Wanted a Hit," which sits atop shiny synths, a driving bass-line and layers of handclaps, laments record label demands on what turns out to be one of the album's hookiest tracks. "Pow Pow" veers toward past "talkies" like "Losing My Edge," and features keyboardist Nancy Whang shouting in unison with Murphy.
With This Is Happening, Murphy has created a work of both nuanced introspection and distanced observation. DFA is proud to offer the vinyl version of this much lauded release, which also includes contributions from drummer Pat Mahoney and sound collagist Gavin Russom. |
A secret server is behind law enforcement’s decision to ban a former IT aide to Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz from the House network.
Now-indicted former congressional IT aide Imran Awan allegedly routed data from numerous House Democrats to a secret server. Police grew suspicious and requested a copy of the server early this year, but they were provided with an elaborate falsified image designed to hide the massive violations. The falsified image is what ultimately triggered their ban from the House network Feb. 2, according to a senior House official with direct knowledge of the investigation.
The secret server was connected to the House Democratic Caucus, an organization chaired by then-Rep. Xavier Becerra. Police informed Becerra that the server was the subject of an investigation and requested a copy of it. Authorities considered the false image they received to be interference in a criminal investigation, the senior official said.
Data was also backed up to Dropbox in huge quantities, the official said. Congressional offices are prohibited from using Dropbox, so an unofficial account was used, meaning Awan could have still had access to the data even though he was banned from the congressional network.
Awan had access to all emails and office computer files of 45 members of Congress who are listed below. Fear among members that Awan could release embarrassing information if they cooperated with prosecutors could explain why the Democrats have refused to acknowledge the cybersecurity breach publicly or criticize the suspects.
House Democrats employed Awan and four family members for years as IT aides. After learning of the House probe, Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, frantically transferred money to accounts in their native Pakistan.
Awan and Alvi were indicted in August on fraud charges related to the transfers, but they have not yet been charged with criminal cybersecurity violations partly because some of the 45 Democrats have been passive about helping build the case, the House official said.
Each House member’s data is supposed to be stored on his own server, but Imran moved files to a computer that was only supposed to hold the files of the administrative office of the Democratic Caucus, the senior official said.
In the spring of 2016, House administrators became aware that the Awans were allegedly falsifying purchase orders. They followed the trail and found that the misconduct extended to a major cybersecurity breach.
On Jan. 24, 2017, Becerra vacated his congressional seat to become California’s attorney general. “He wanted to wipe his server, and we brought to his attention it was under investigation. The light-off was we asked for an image of the server, and they deliberately turned over a fake server,” the senior official said.
“They were using the House Democratic Caucus as their central service warehouse … It was a breach. The data was completely out of [the members’] possession. Does it mean it was sold to the Russians? I don’t know,” the senior official said.
Capitol Police considered the image a sign that the Awans knew exactly what they were doing and were going to great lengths to try to cover it up, the senior official said. The House Sergeant-at-Arms banned them from the network as a result.
The senior official said the data was also funneled offsite via a Dropbox account, from which copies could easily be downloaded. Authorities could not immediately shut down the account when the Awans were banned from the network because it was not an official account.
“For members to say their data was not compromised is simply inaccurate. They had access to all the data including all emails. Imran Awan is the walking example of an insider threat, a criminal actor who had access to everything,” the senior official said.
The executive director of the Democratic Caucus was Sean McCluskie, who was Becerra’s chief of staff and is now chief deputy attorney general of California. McCluskie did not return TheDCNF’s repeated requests for comment.
Despite Democrats’ acute awareness of the importance of cybersecurity after the Democratic National Committee’s emails appeared on Wikileaks in July 2016, the employing members have gone to great lengths to avoid condemning Awan or have said nothing about whether they checked their office data’s security following the breach.
“After being notified by the House Administration Committee, this individual was removed from our payroll. We are confident that everything in our office is secure,” a spokesman for Michigan Democratic Rep. Sander Levin told TheDCNF in February. Levin’s chief of staff Nick Gwyn refused this week to square the assessment with the secret server and Dropbox arrangement.
A spokesman for Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge said in August that she terminated Awan after learning of the criminal investigation but claimed “there’s no indication that he stole information or did anything inappropriate.” Fudge’s spokesman would not clarify the August statement this week.
Since Fudge and other members have not acknowledged that the breach occurred, there is no reason to think they took action to investigate where their data might have gone and mitigate any harm to constituents and others.
Wasserman Schultz has acknowledged that chiefs of staff were informed that the Awans were under investigation for what she characterized as “data transfer violations.” She refused to fire Awan even after he was banned from touching official computers, and she used a May 17, 2017, budget hearing with the House Chief Administrative Officer to attack authorities for not stopping her from breaking the Dropbox rule.
“I am more than happy to admit that I use Dropbox. I have used it for years and years and years. It is not blocked. I am fully able to use it,” she said. Administrators told her they had clearly communicated the rules to IT aides, but instead of faulting Awan for not following them, Wasserman Schultz lashed out at the House for “just lobbing e-mail into a tech person’s inbox.”
The senior official said the Awans’ enterprise-scale use of Dropbox was not the casual use of a popular consumer application, but the funneling of huge quantities of data offsite where it could not be taken back by House authorities.
Becerra was one of five members who first hired Awan in 2004, his first year on the Hill. Only two of the five — Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York and Becerra — remained in office through 2016, and each of them later put two of Awan’s relatives on their payrolls as well, including his wife Alvi and brother Abid.
When Becerra became chairman of the Democratic Caucus in 2013, that office began paying Alvi $25,000 to $30,000 a year in addition to the payments from Becerra’s personal office, meaning he was responsible for far more of the payments to the Awan family than any other member.
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Welcome to the Spoiler Room, a safe place for spoiler addicts to come on a weekly basis to learn what’s coming next on their favorite shows and, hopefully, get a few of their own questions answered. If you want scoop on a specific show, send your questions to [email protected].
What’s coming up when The Blacklist returns? — Brandon
It actually looks like Red does not have the Fulcrum, but he will set his sights on getting it. Unfortunately, so will another Blacklister. But in the process, Red will be forced to risk his life to protect Liz, who you may be surprised to hear might have a connection to the Fulcrum.
What’s the state of Lisbon and Jane’s relationship when The Mentalist returns? — Jessie
They’re actually doing very well, like exchanging keys well. Though Lisbon isn’t quite ready to discuss their new relationship at work, it’s not long before someone gets suspicious. Also, you haven’t seen the last of Pedro Pascal’s Pike, who gives Jane pause when it comes to his future with Lisbon.
Please tell me we’ll get more scenes between Amelia and Owen on Grey’s Anatomy! — Ophelia
It sounds like we’ll get the first spark between Amelia and Owen next week when they have a “nice moment of understanding” after Amelia wants to address her sobriety more directly with Owen in the wake of what happened during Thursday s episode. “She expects him to be hard on her about what went down, but he knows what it’s like to live with demons,” Caterina Scorsone says. “He is surprisingly sensitive to what she’s been through and what she’s going through. That takes her back a little bit.” So, what’s the ‘shipper name?
Anything Originals? — Fortune
We all know there’s going to be a family reunion in the holiday episode—complete with the return of Rebekah!—but you may be surprised to hear that, for once, it’s actually a pretty happy, drama-free reunion. … Okay, it’s drama-free for a little bit, until one of the Mikaelsons does something to dampen the mood.
Is Bonnie really fired on How to Get Away with Murder? — Blake
Yes, but she won’t be away from the firm for long. In fact, we’ll see her back in the winter finale, though the dynamic between Annalise and her protégé has definitely changed. “She desperately wants to be Annalise’s person, but it’s not the same,” Liza Weil says. But her initial firing does lead to that surprising hookup with Doucheface. “Getting fired is a trigger,” she adds. “Where she goes from there definitely informs how she ended up with Asher.”
I know Marry Me isn’t really Happy Endings, but I still feel like I’m watching Penny every week. — Stalia
I know how you feel, and you’ll get a taste of that Penny charm when she oversteps by promising an extravagant feast for Thanksgiving, much to the disappointment of Jake’s mom, who doesn’t handle the couple wanting to host their first Turkey Day very well. She expects Annie to fail, and she will. Seriously.
Any scoop on the two-hour episode of Once Upon a Time? — Farah
Remember the Snow Queen’s yellow ribbons? You should definitely be worried about them because they’ll come back into play in a very major way. (Hint: I may have spotted certain people wearing them while I was on set.)
I’m so excited Lee Pace is going to appear on The Mindy Project. Do you have any scoop on his character? — Vera
Danny might find some competition when Mindy runs into the guy (Lee Pace) she lost her virginity to, who now happens to be rich, famous, and still pining after Dr. L. Funnily enough, this is also the same episode that Danny must play along when Morgan confesses to sleeping with Mindy.
Please give this Karmy fan some hope for Faking It. Will Karma ever forgive Amy? — Kim
It’s not looking good. In a bid to actually get her BFF to talk, Amy punches a cop, landing them in jail, where Karma will make it very clear that she hates Amy. Sniff. She’ll even give her an ultimatum that could see Amy transferring schools. I can guarantee that at least one person will be leaving Hester High by season’s end.
Has Henry ever run into anyone he knew decades later on Forever? — Bronte
We’ll actually see that in an upcoming episode during a flashback to the late ’50s when Henry runs into someone who saw him die on the beach in Normandy. Whoops.
Best news I’ve heard all week: Yes, everyone is rightly excited about the Gilmore Girls and Dawson’s Creek writers’ room reunions at ATX Television Festival next year, but I’ll be the first in line for the Journeyman reunion!
That’s a wrap on this week’s Spoiler Room. Be sure to email your questions to [email protected] or tweet them to @NatalieAbrams. |
news The Ontario Municipal Board is Long Overdue for Repairs
You’ve likely heard the stories—stories such as citizen group loses battle to stop sprawl from destroying wetlands. Or city plan for a mixed-housing neighbourhood overturned to allow a developer to build low-density homes instead.
It’s all too common in Ontario—decisions about planning that contradict what local residents want, what municipal councils advise and that undermine the intent of Ontario’s Greenbelt and Growth Plans.
Who makes these wrongheaded planning decisions? The Ontario Municipal Board (OMB)—an unelected quasi-judicial land-use appeals body that is undemocratic and unaccountable.
The OMB is broken and badly in need of an overhaul. The good news is that this fall, there’s a chance for some much needed repairs.
Earlier this fall Ontario launched a review of the OMB. Public town hall meetings were held across the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) region, including one in Toronto, where citizens spoke up about how the OMB process prevents citizen participation, unfairly favours developers and creates financial risks for citizens who dare to participate. The public comment period closes on December 19.
Toronto ratepayer groups echoed the message pointed out by citizen groups at every town hall meeting: participating in an OMB hearing is costly and frustrating and doesn’t respect local planning decisions.
Ratepayer groups—made up of local citizens—are tired of planning decisions made by municipal councils with full public consultations being overturned by an unelected OMB board member who doesn’t understand their neighbourhood, and in many cases doesn’t understand provincial policies.
The OMB is an arm of the provincial government, meant to serve all Ontarians. But the way it operates clearly is not serving the interests of all Ontarians.
Planning is and should be a public process. The trouble is once a planning issue is appealed to the OMB, the public can be shut out due to the time and expense of participating in an OMB hearing. Hearings often take weeks and require pricey lawyers and planning consultants. Not surprisingly, the process favours wealthy development interests. Citizen concerns are not top of mind.
Adding insult to injury, ratepayer groups that manage to fundraise and participate in a hearing may find that if they lose the appeal, they are penalized substantial cost awards, often thousands of dollars, just for participating in what should be a public dispute resolution process.
The expense of OMB hearings has led some municipalities to negotiate settlements with developers instead of participating in an OMB appeal. These settlements are another way that citizens are shut out of what should be a public process.
The biggest losers in the current equation are local residents, the character of communities, the environment and prime farmland. Too much farmland, sensitive watershed areas, including wetlands, forests and woodlots, have been destroyed due to OMB decisions that did not respect the spirit of Ontario’s Greenbelt and Growth Plans.
Across the Greater Golden Horseshoe, OMB decisions continue to perpetuate 1950’s sprawl that is eating up some of Ontario’s best farmland at an alarming rate. Simcoe County, Waterloo, York Region and other communities are losing farmland and wetlands for more sprawl due to OMB decisions that undermine community decisions and the province’s Growth Plan, which was established to curb runaway sprawl.
So what’s the solution?
The City of Toronto is so fed-up, it wants to opt out of the OMB process altogether. Under its own set of rules called the City of Toronto Act, the city is looking to manage planning disputes by establishing a local appeals body to hear its land-use planning appeals.
But what about the rest of the province? It’s clear Ontario must fix the OMB to protect forests and wetlands from sprawl, ensure citizen voices are heard and uphold community plans for livable neighbourhoods.
The process must change so the OMB no longer sides by default with the development industry, but looks at issues holistically, ensuring that other values Ontarians care about are considered, including community integrity and environmental protection. And as attendees at the recent town hall meetings made clear, the OMB must be fixed so its decisions uphold local and provincial planning policy. There is also a need to increase the qualifications and diversity of the Board members.
The town hall meetings confirmed that Ontarians are passionate about the need to reform the OMB. Now it’s time for the province to take long overdue action and fix the broken Ontario Municipal Board. |
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A 34-year-old woman arrested on drunken and impaired driving charges was found dead in a holding cell at the 120th Precinct stationhouse in St. George early Thursday morning, police said.
The woman -- whose identity has not yet been released pending family notification -- was found unconscious and unresponsive in the cell at around 4:35 a.m., and when EMS responded to the scene, she was pronounced deceased, according to a statement from the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.
The city medical examiner will determine the cause of death.
The woman had been arrested by Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority police officers when she was found passed out behind the wheel of her car at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge toll plaza about 6 p.m. on Wednesday, an MTA spokesman said.
FDNY/EMS administered the Narcan anti-overdose spray, and the woman was transported to Staten Island University Hospital in Ocean Breeze for evaluation.
She was treated there and then transported to the 120th Precinct stationhouse for processing on charges of DWI and operating a motor vehicle while impaired by drugs, police said.
A hospital spokeswoman confirmed the woman was treated and released.
The investigation is ongoing.
More information will be posted when it's available. |
A Coal Belt ad gone wrong
While the Obama administration’s stance on coal is providing endless ammunition for ads against Democratic candidates throughout the Coal Belt, here’s an example of one ad that backfired.
The lesson? Don’t use a coal executive to play a coal miner on TV.
From Jack Brammer’s report in the Lexington Herald-Leader:
An official with the United Mine Workers of America union lambasted a new TV ad by Republican Andy Barr on Monday because it features a Western Kentucky coal executive who appears to be speaking as an Eastern Kentucky miner. In the ad, Heath Lovell, the vice president of River View Coal in Union County, accuses Democratic U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler of trying to destroy the coal industry. Lovell is wearing a t-shirt, bib overalls and a coal miner's helmet. He is identified by name only. "I've never seen anything so appalling and deceitful from the coal industry and in a campaign," said Steve Earle, a regional vice president of the UMWA in Kentucky. "You have a pencil pusher acting like a coal miner."
This awkward spot aside, the coal issue continues to play a major role in races in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. For the most part, it’s put coal country Democrats on the defensive and forced them to keep President Obama at a safe distance. |
U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, speaking at one point in fluent Spanish, yesterday told some 800 immigrants and their supporters clamoring for comprehensive immigration reform, “Right now we have the ?moment” to change a “broken system.”
“We cannot let up for a minute. We need your passion. We need your voices,” Kennedy, who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, said to the crowd packed into ?Faneuil Hall yesterday.
Joining the congressman was U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who told the crowd she would fight for “common-sense immigration reform,” adding, “We need a path to citizenship.”
The Faneuil Hall rally, which was followed by a march, was part of a “Power Up for Citizenship” campaign launched nationwide this weekend that included events in Nashua, N.H., and Providence. It aims to drum up pressure to force the U.S. Congress to pass immigration reform, particularly the adoption of a path to citizenship for the 11 million foreign-born residents living illegally in the country.
A bipartisan group of senators, dubbed the “Gang of Eight,” is expected as soon as this week to unveil details of the overhaul plan they have been negotiating for months.
Roy Beck, president of Numbers USA, a Washington, D.C.-based group that seeks to limit immigration, said he is troubled by reports that the proposed reforms could, at minimum, call for immediate work permits for undocumented immigrants.
“They didn’t come here to get citizenship, they came here to get jobs,” said Beck, who predicted an “uphill battle” for the legislation. “They are holding jobs that there are Americans waiting in line for. It’s an affront to the 21 million unemployed Americans.”
While expecting some backlash on Capitol Hill, Warren and Kennedy both told reporters they are ?optimistic an immigration reform measure will pass.
“I’m going to hope that the will of the people will win out here. People want us to get this fixed,” said Warren,?who called the current ?immigration system “dysfunctional.”
Putting a face on the hardships caused by that system were several speakers at yesterday’s rally.
Ciara Lavery, 34, a former waitress living in South Boston, told of not being able to return to her native Ireland after the 9/11 terror attacks because of a crackdown on visas. “I was working two jobs, 80 hours a week, paying my taxes, acting like an American citizen, but not feeling like one,” she said. “Freedom is a human right.” |
Jack is back. Fox Broadcasting chief Kevin Reilly has announced that 24 will be returning in 2014. According to Brian Stelter of The New York Times, the show's ninth season will consist of 12 episodes — meaning producers plan to deviate from its longstanding format, where each hour-long episode represents an hour in realtime.
When it debuted in 2001, that unique approach established 24 as one of the first network programs tailored for binge viewing sessions. The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum shared that sentiment when we spoke to her last November, crediting 24 for breaking the network tradition of putting out procedural episodes, where "any individual hour could be distributed in any order." Scenes of torture inflicted upon terrorism suspects were also a new sight for television audiences in a post 9/11 climate.
Fox plans to switch things up for Jack Bauer's ninth day-long adventure. "What they'll be able to do is go in chronological order of the day, but skip hours," Reilly said. That means each hour viewers see will still be "real time," but 24's writers will be able to tell a tighter, more engrossing narrative. Apparently that idea came from showrunner Howard Gordon, who told Reilly that each 24-episode season of the show ultimately contained about 12 episodes of compelling storyline.
Reilly: @howardmgordon said most 24 yrs had 12 eps worth of story and lots of "connective tissue." This approach will be only highlights. — Alan Sepinwall (@sepinwall) May 13, 2013
Rumors pointing to a 24 reboot reached a fever pitch in recent days, and star Kiefer Sutherland has already been attached to the project. Reilly says the show is likely to return to Fox at some point in May 2014.
Update: 24's official Facebook page has been updated with new details on the show's return. Rather than a proper ninth season, the upcoming reboot is being billed as "a thrilling new tent-pole event series." It's officially called 24: Live Another Day and Fox confirms that it will begin airing next summer. |
Getty Image / Hulu
Twenty years ago this week, the iteration of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog that we know today first appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. “The bit started as a Westminster talent show,” remembers Robert Smigel, the man who sticks his hand into Triumph, about early iterations of Triumph from the early days of Conan’s Late Night, “I didn’t suggest an insult comic until four years later.”
A lot has changed for Triumph over the last 20 years – maybe most notably that with Smigel’s deal with Hulu, there’s finally been a mold made of Triumph so that he can be replaced easily. “They do wear out fairly rapidly,” says Smigel. “Sniffing butts with a rubber puppet tends to lead to an accelerated deterioration.”
(Before, getting a new Triumph wasn’t an easy task. A company in Mexico originally produced the puppets. Later, an optometrist in New York City, a fan of Triumph, bought up the remaining supply, forcing Smigel to have to buy them from him. For years Smiglel didn’t want this information known for fear that with some notoriety the optometrist might raise the rates. With the mold, this has become a moot point.)
In celebration of twenty years of Triumph, Robert Smigel looks back at 20 years of, let’s say, some not often told behind the scenes Triumph stories. (In other words, we skip the infamous Attack of the Clones story because it’s been told numerous times before.) Ahead, Smigel shares stories of Triumph getting kicked of the Westminster Dog Show, the time Triumph sang with Bruce Springsteen, Triumph covering the Michael Jackson trial, Triumph meeting Chris Christie (in a clip that’s never previously been online) – and of course the time Triumph tried to fuck a goat during the final game of the 2016 World Series.
Westminster Dog Show
“Probably the most popular recurring character on Conan right now is Jordan Schlansky. The other big part of the joke is, ‘What does he do?’ And to be honest, I don’t know what he does on the show now. We didn’t do a remote until 1999 and Jordan was the field producer. We got permission to go to Westminster and we did all of this preparation and the day before or so, this guy calls and revokes permission. It was because Andy [Richter] had gone a few years earlier and they didn’t like it, or whatever. Jordan thought it was because they researched Triumph and realized it was a horrible idea.
(Note: the video above is from Triumph’s return to Westminster the following year. The first visit doesn’t appear to be online.)
“Jordan refused to let it go. Jordan printed up fake NBC identification because we couldn’t go with our own Late Night credentials. So Jordan printed up fake NBC identification, which he justified in his Jordan way, ‘Well, given we work for NBC, I don’t consider it any manner of trickery.’ He scoped out the dog show and told us to go and say we’re NBC, but to go through the back entrance. He found a loading dock and told everyone to go through the loading dock and proceed with confidence and a sense of purpose. So we walked up this ramp with out laminated credentials.
“So we’re in there and doing our thing – and we lasted a fairly long time. But Jordan never lost sight of the fact that we’d probably be thrown out. So we told the cameraman that, no matter what happens, keep shooting. And sure enough, Triumph finally offended a dog groomer. We got ejected. And then Jordan is bullshitting the person who is trying to throw us out saying, ‘But I spoke to this so and so.’ And he had, but that was the person who said we couldn’t come. In a very Jordan way, he was like, ‘Well, technically I feel justified in my statement. I wasn’t lying.’
“So the cameraman kept shooting and we had the great ending where someone finally put their hand on the camera and that was the end of the piece. And the piece was an enormous hit. If we had given up, I don’t know if we would have attempted more remotes. I don’t know if we come up with, ‘Well, why doesn’t he go bother people in line for Star Wars?’” |
Consider for a second the fact that the closest thing to good fortune the Clipse experienced during the process of writing and recording their sophomore album, Hell Hath No Fury, was a beloved rap legend going deaf.
If it weren't for Foxy Brown losing her hearing in the second half of 2005, Pusha T and Malice (as he was then known), brothers from Virginia who had inadvertently sparked a minor culture war among hip-hop fans, wouldn't have gotten their hands on the beat for "Wamp Wamp (What It Do)," an atonal, dystopian missive for alligator skin and Italian leather. And when Foxy started to hear voices again, Jay Z of all people came calling for the beat back; the brothers didn't budge. They'd been waiting long enough.
The protracted legal battle over Hell Hath No Fury wasn't the first time the Clipse had to wade through a record label's jungle of red tape. Way back in the mid-90s, with voices a half-register higher, they'd parlayed a working relationship with Pharrell into a deal with Elektra. A debut album, Exclusive Audio Footage, was recorded, then shelved when it failed to generate any significant buzz. (On one song—the beat would later be repurposed for a Jadakiss single—Malice, who would go on to change his name to No Malice and put out a deeply felt Christian record, raps, "shit, we plenty nice, own it at any price / got them hardcore wannabe thugs calling on Christ.")
The Clipse bounced back. When they finally made it to retail shelves in the summer of 2002, they were still young, but had been around long enough to get grizzled, get jaded. From the opening notes, Pusha T is running up and down the stairs of his childhood home, humming the theme from Miami Vice, conceding "I see the villain's impact now that I'm older." Lord Willin' was an instant classic to those who picked it up: "Grindin'" reduced lunchroom tables to dust, "Cot Damn" sounded like a low-end-heavy apocalypse, kids from Virginia Beach to Venice Beach started searching for Fam-Lay bootlegs.
Lord Willin' had A-level beats from The Neptunes—the batch most new artists could only dream of. Even setting aside "Grindin'," something like "When the Last Time" would have been a welcome life raft on Blueprint 2. The sounds were mostly what rap listeners had come to expect from Pharrell and Chad Hugo: weird and skull-rattling, but familiar enough to flirt with pop radio. Lord Willin' was the last time the Clipse would hit those comfortable pockets. The album was Gold by the end of September.
In 2004, BMG merged with Sony Music Entertainment, meaning that Arista—the label that had issued Lord Willin'—would be absorbed by Jive, while Star Trak, the Pharrell-led imprint that also had a stamp on the Clipse's success, landed at Interscope. Unfortunately, language in the contract Pusha and Malice had signed precluded them from making the same jump. They were stuck on Jive, where they would remain for the next three years through lawsuits, pushbacks, and indignities like watching their marketing dollars be re-routed to Nick Lachey.
This month, Pusha told GQ "If you mimicked Clipse at a surface level, you would only glorify the street culture because you didn't really live it." That didn't stop innumerable rappers from trying to do just that while the duo sat on the shelf at Jive. The pair of Clipse mixtapes from that purgatory period, We Got It 4 Cheap volumes 1 and 2, were so revered that they helped to tilt the axis of rap discourse in ways that would reverberate for years after the fact. Comprised of freestyles over industry beats and original songs that had been slated for Hell Hath No Fury—and with assists from Ab-Liva and Sandman, who joined Push and Malice to form the Re-Up Gang—the tapes were dizzying successes. See "Zen" from the sequel, which warps and bends their coke rap into a transmission from a far-off galaxy.
The records were brilliant and immediately hailed as such—to the extent that Clipse's style and subject matter superseded all else in the minds of some critics. (Now is when you can listen to Open Mike Eagle's "Your Back Pack Past," which chronicles the mass exodus from the turn-of-the-century indie rap boom and the subsequent move to the snowy avant-garde. Sample lyric: "Write thinkpieces all about context!") In an admittedly dry time for major-label rap, Push and Malice had remade the blogs in their image.
And so when the single finally came (in the fall of 2006 and following a lawsuit and public relations campaign against Jive), they looked, briefly, like conquering heroes. "Mr. Me Too" didn't set radio on fire, but it still sounded like a minor triumph; it let Pusha rap, "these are the days of our lives / and I'm sorry to the fans, but them crackers weren't playing fair at Jive." On Jive.
I remember leaving the gym at my high school when my friend came bounding up to me, clutching the issue of XXL that had the Hell Hath No Fury review—a "XXL" score, the W. Bush era's imitation of five mics.
If "Zen" sounded like it was from outer space, Hell Hath No Fury sounds like it was made by disgruntled shuttle engineers. So much of the Clipse music from the past had been designed to rattle trunks and skulls; this was, too, but it sounds frequently like there's hand-held percussion being played just behind your head. ("Wamp Wamp," the beat the brothers swiped from Foxy, has a punishing low end but also has drums that could be bouncing around in a passing subway car.) And the instrumentation—is that an accordion? A xylophone? Fireworks?
But it added up to something singular. Pharrell's verse on "Mr. Me Too" ("Italian heartthrobs could not get rid of me") was the closest the album would come to happy luxury. There's plenty of material flexing to go around, but it all sounds so empty, so spiteful; "Ride Around Shining" promises just enough flexing to mark the slow decay of muscle and bone. And every trip to Jacob, every roofless coupe and seaside house is underscored by that line from "Keys Open Doors": "I ain't spent one rap dollar in three years, holla."
Most of Hell Hath No Fury sounds like a bad dream—both for the Clipse and for whoever might stand in their way. "Chinese New Year" makes breaking-and-entering sound so routine, Malice might not even break a sweat. "Momma I'm Sorry" speaks directly to Pusha's point about his supposed "glorification" of drug dealing, in that it sounds positively pained for the things he and his brother have done. (There's also that heartbreaking line from the intro, where Malice addresses his brother: "And to my little brother Terrence, who I love dearly so / If ever I had millions, never would you push blow / Never.")
And just as all the material consumption comes with a grim subtext, the trafficking is underscored by serious danger. "Hello New World" ("Bagging up grams at the Hyatt though / the news called it crack, I called it diet coke") ends with a protest from the courtroom—"The judge is saying 'life' like it ain't someone's life." If lawyer fees aren't enough to keep you up at night, Hell Hath No Fury ends with "Nightmares," a five-minute cold sweat of grief and paranoia.
The album's lighter spots—and there are lighter spots—are a Technicolor blur. "Trill" is the most foreign beat on an album full of confounding experiments; on the opposite end of the spectrum, "Dirty Money" sounds like the villain's theme from the kind of B-movie you watch in a dilapidated motel. And "Ain't Cha," which reassembles the Re-Up Gang, tosses salmon around a yacht with ease.
Hell Hath No Fury is a strange sticking point in the Clipse's discography. It might be their most arresting work, and yet it contains relatively few of the sounds that spring to mind when you think of the group. It doesn't sound like the product of Virginia so much as it sounds like a Dali sketch of the state, where perspective contracts and expands with no regard for the laws of physics. It's never been replicated, by the Clipse or their legion of imitators. It can be a dense, disquieting listen, but it's a masterpiece on its own terms.
Paul Thompson's words turn to Cavalli furs. Follow him on Twitter. |
In another delay for the health care law and another sign of problems with its central website, the Obama administration announced a day before the Thanksgiving holiday that it would push off online enrollment for small businesses by another year.
The Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday that it will delay the launch of the online SHOP Marketplace -- which is meant for small businesses -- until November 2014. Officials did not give a hard deadline, though the start could easily slip past the 2014 midterms, sparing the administration any headaches right before the election.
Critics, though, said the move would create more "onerous" paperwork for job creators during the next year.
"Business owners across this country are already having health care plans for their employees canceled by this law, and now they're told they won't have access to the system the president promised them to find them different coverage," House Speaker John Boehner said.
The announcement comes after the administration first announced, right before the Oct. 1 launch of all ObamaCare exchanges, that it was delaying the small business market. At the time, the administration claimed the delay would only be until this November.
More On This...
But with the end of the month fast approaching and the administration already struggling to repair the website for those on the individual market, HHS officials are now telling small business owners to sign up directly through an insurer, agent or broker.
"This allows small employers to sign up for coverage through offline enrollment while [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] works on creating a smoothly functioning online experience in the SHOP Marketplace," an HHS official said.
The delay will apply to those in the three-dozen states where the federal government is running the marketplace.
The announcement signals the administration is not only continuing to fix this particular feature, but is also trying to limit traffic to HealthCare.gov.
The administration is nearing its self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline for the fixing the site, and Fox News confirms that officials have already been urging allies not to drive traffic to the site -- out of concern that too much volume could cause the site to crash.
The National Federation of Independent Business voiced dismay at the latest announcement, saying it would only make employers' jobs harder.
"This new delay announcement is a disappointment but not a surprise. Small businesses continue to be low on the priority list during the Obamacare implementation process," NFIB legislative affairs manager Kevin Kuhlman said in a statement.
"It probably matters little to people in Washington that the failure to get the small business exchanges online adds yet another onerous paperwork requirement for job creators. The continued delays add to uncertainty and contribute to the decision of many owners to take early renewals of their small-group plans."
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., accused the administration of "doing its best to bury the latest confirmation that this law was not ready for prime time," by making the announcement right before the holiday.
When the administration first announced a delay in the small business sign-up in late September, they allowed employers to start shopping for coverage. They were able to get the process going by filling out a paper form.
With the announcement, HHS is urging small businesses to use "direct enrollment" to sign up, noting they can still enroll their staff via phone and mail, and in-person.
HHS also announced that the current Dec. 15 deadline for small businesses to enroll their employees if they want coverage by the first of the year has been extended to Dec. 23.
They also announced that small businesses will not have to send in an application for a separate tax credit now -- they can instead wait until tax time.
Under the law, most small businesses do not have to provide coverage. But firms with 50 or more employees face a mandate to offer insurance or risk fines from the government.
That coverage mandate was supposed to take effect Jan. 1, but the administration caused a stir this summer by unexpectedly delaying it a year to address employer complaints.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
There are many elements to successfully riding a difficult technical obstacle like a high skinny, but one that doesn’t get much attention is when and where to focus your eyes.
I’ve found that vague reminders like, “Eyes ahead!” or “Don’t stare at what you’re trying to avoid!” are nearly useless. My brain is just not wired to respond well to those commands, even if they’re coming from me. But if I’ve got something specific for my eyes to focus on, my brain gets interested. So before I ride a difficult skinny, I look for visual markers like a rock, a stick, a notch, a weed, an edge of something, etc., specifically planning where I’m going to be looking.
The Browner Stockade Skinny at the Hillside Park MTB trail in Elk River, MN is one of the most difficult in the Twin Cities Metro area. Before I attempted this skinny, I walked it and settled on four different visual markers: the top left edge of three upright logs, plus the left edge of a rock slab at the end:
I chose the extreme left edge of the three logs because with the skinny’s gradual curve to the right, the tracking of my 29er’s rear wheel left little margin for error. Focusing on the left edge of the rock slab beyond the skinny at the end was important in order to help me stay on track for the slightly-sharper bend to the right created by the last three small upright logs.
Since I knew I’d be going very slow, I anticipated that as I got to within 3-4 feet of each visual marker, I would shift my eyes to the next one. And since I knew I was likely to be tense during my attempts, I planned to also use each visual marker to remind myself to take a deep breath and exhale slowly.
I walked the skinny three times, mentally rehearsing all this before I attempted it. When I got back to my bike, I also closed my eyes and mentally rehearsed it. Even then, it took a dozen attempts before I cleaned it. Here’s a one-minute video clip:
Browner Stockade Skinny at Hillside Park MTB Trail from Griff Wigley on Vimeo.
Like any new skill, it takes some practice to get better at focusing your eyes on specific points. The good news: with a few planks, you can do this in your yard or neighborhood, even if you only have a few minutes to practice. Here I’ve got three planks of increasingly narrow widths lined up end-to-end. As I get to within a few feet of the first plank (yellow marker), I shift my eyes to the edge of the next plank (red arrow) and so on till I either fall off or clean it:
In the photo below, I’ve got a plank perpendicular to the edge of a curb, with the front edge propped up on a rock and a second rock on top of the middle of the plank, both for additional difficulty. The four red arrows are the focal points, with the first two being obstacles. My brain wants my eyes to lock on those “danger” points. The challenge, of course, is to not look at each one as my front wheel approaches it, but rather to focus on the one beyond it, evolutionary instincts not withstanding.
The “Holding a Line” video series
Last month’s article on Singletracks, 11 Drills for Holding a Line: Gain Confidence on Skinnies and Narrow, Exposed Terrain, focused entirely on learning side-to-side bike/body separation. I’ve created a video for that, as well as for this month’s topic on focusing your eyes. I have two more videos in the works for the “holding a line” series, covering:
Seat height (when it’s important to lower it)
Body stance (neutral vs. ready/attack)
Hand pressure on bars
Strategies for falling off/dismounting
To be notified when these videos become available, subscribe to my free Thick Skull Mountain Bike Skills newsletter. |
Bevo XV might be jealous of this rig.
A recent YouTube upload from a polka band traveling through Nebraska captures a sedan outfitted with a special sidecar big enough to house a Texas Longhorn.
Again, a Texas Longhorn was caught on video riding shotgun in a sedan in Nebraska.
"We were driving down the highway on our way to Kolache Days in Verdigre, NE, to play a polka gig, when traffic began to slow down,” the video’s description reads. “We went to pass the slow vehicle and noticed as we passed by, there was a crazy sight. We pulled over and waited for it to come by so we could see it again and take a video...It wasn't until the car passed by a little that we noticed the bull defecated on the car."
More: Welcome, Bevo XV: Sunrise Spur makes his debut as Texas’ mascot
It appears the sedan is a heavily modified Ford model police cruiser, with steel bars on the passenger door holding the Longhorn’s pen together.
Let’s hope the car is modified enough to transport all that weight. Good thing it’s driving slow.
More bovine news: Video shows runaway cow charging toward Temple officer in dash for freedom
IN OTHER NEWS:
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Yet another extension of the reach of big brother from the Big Apple:
New York City’s workplace smoking ban six years ago drove cigarette and cigar puffers outdoors. But soon some of the outdoors may be off limits, too: The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, said Monday that he would seek to ban smoking at city parks and beaches.
Dr. Farley said the ban — which officials said may require the approval of the City Council, but could possibly be done through administrative rule-making by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation — was part of a broader strategy to further curb smoking rates, which have fallen in recent years. The proposal, however, seemed to catch Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg off guard.
On Monday night, the mayor, who has championed antismoking programs but also is running for re-election, issued a statement that did not disavow the proposal but appeared to qualify it, saying he wanted “to see if smoking in parks has a negative impact on people’s health.”
He added, “It may not be logistically possible to enforce a ban across thousands of acres, but there may be areas within parks where restricting smoking can protect health.”
The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, whose support could be crucial, said she would want the Council to hold hearings on the matter. She said that fines should be modest and not intended primarily to punish, and that any ban should make clear whether areas like boardwalks are affected.
“Conceptually, that’s an idea I’m very, very interested in and open to,” she said of Dr. Farley’s proposal. |
We demonstrated that the severity of HAL-induced motor side effects differs between young and aged mice, and through detailed biochemical and pharmacological analyses, our data suggest that the epigenetic regulation of the Drd2 promoter is likely to underlie some of the observed behavioral differences. Our data provide strong evidence indicating that histone hypoacetylation and hypermethylation at certain histone residues associated with the Drd2 promoter in the striatum result in reduced D2R protein levels and subsequent dysfunction, thus contributing to the exacerbated motor side effects in aged mice. These histone modifications are likely caused by the increased HDAC activity and decreased HAT activity observed in the striatum of these aged mice. In addition, while young mice show a compensatory response in upregulating D2R after HAL administration, likely mediated through increased HAT activity, the aged mice lack this compensatory increase in both HAT activity and D2R expression. This blunted response is likely to be associated with the increased sensitivity of aged mice to the motor side effects induced by chronic HAL administration. Lastly, we show that pharmacological inhibition of HDACs, particularly VPA, diminished the severity of HAL-induced motor side effects in aged mice, most likely through the restoration of D2R function in the striatum. Overall, these data suggest that histone modification may be a novel adjuvant therapy to reduce APD-related side effects in elderly patients.
To examine the phenomenon of age-dependent increases in APD-related side effects, we chose to examine the robust and reproducible deficits associated with a classical APD, HAL. We found that HAL increased the duration of cataleptic episodes, an often used marker of APD side effects (Ionov and Pushinskaya 2013), in a dose-dependent manner in both young and aged mice. However, the severity of cataleptic episodes is increased in aged mice, consistent with previous reports (Barnes et al. 1990; Campbell et al. 1988; Wiley and Evans 2008). In addition, similar results were obtained using the rotarod, a test of motor dysfunction (Kirschbaum et al. 2009). Although age-related differences were not significant in locomotor activity in the open field, higher doses of HAL resulted in decreased locomotion in aged mice. These findings present strong evidence that our model of age-dependent increases in motor side effect severity is robust and helps to contextualize the subsequent pharmacological and biochemical analyses.
Multiple studies from the literature have suggested differences in APD pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics between younger and older patient populations (Uchida and Mamo 2009; Uchida et al. 2009), though it is unclear what exact mechanisms underlie these changes and what contributions each makes to the resulting increase in side effect severity. Consistent with the clinical literature, our previous work (Montalvo-Ortiz et al. 2014) also observed changes in both these processes. Pharmacokinetically, we demonstrated increased accumulation of HAL in the plasma and brain of aged mice compared to controls in a dose-dependent manner. Importantly, however, the plasma and brain concentrations at the lowest dose of HAL assayed (0.01 mg/kg) were comparable in both groups. Because our behavioral and biochemical experiments used this dose of HAL, it is very likely that the changes in side effect severity measured by our assays are truly differences in the pharmacodynamic responses due to age (Montalvo-Ortiz et al. 2014).
Age-related changes in dopaminergic signaling are thought to mediate the increased severity of APD-induced side effects found in elderly patients, and this change may underlie the pharmacodynamic response changes associated with age. In line with this, we assessed the functionality of the D2R in the striatum by measuring adenylyl cyclase activity following stimulation with DA and quinpirole (selective D2R agonist). We found that D2R function was impaired in the striatum of aged mice as shown by the reduced ability of DA and quinpirole to decrease cAMP levels. Along with these findings, we observed an age-related decrease in striatal D2R protein upon HAL administration. These results suggested that D2R was uniquely altered during aging and that the decrease in available D2R might explain both the decreased cAMP catabolism and more severe D2R-mediated motor deficits apparent in elderly patients treated with APDs, though a more complex mechanism cannot be ruled out. A recent study looking at dose reduction and D2/3R occupancy in elderly patients concluded that the percentage binding of DA to the receptor is likely correlated with the manifestation of EPS (Graff-Guerrero et al. 2015). Though a specific therapeutic threshold was difficult to establish, the implication from this study and our own data is that the decreased D2R expression may make small changes in endogenous DA transmission more drastic in older patients, which may result in greater changes in the percentage of occupied D2R due to an age-related low baseline amount of the receptor. This narrowing therapeutic window with age may be explained by the decreased D2R and epigenetic modifications found in our study, though further investigation is necessary to confirm this in patients.
Previous rodent studies examining D2R after chronic HAL administration have shown a compensatory increase in striatal D2R (Cazorla et al. 2014), similar to the young cohort of mice in our study. Interestingly, the ability of the aged cohort of mice to upregulate D2R after HAL administration was absent or greatly reduced in a dose-dependent manner. These results suggest that not only is baseline D2R expression reduced in aged mice, but they lack the ability to sufficiently upregulate the receptor upon its antagonism. Consistent with this, young mice show an increase in HAT activity upon HAL administration while aged mice lack this increase. Taken together, this further supports that a more restrictive and less plastic epigenetic landscape exists in aged populations and that this epigenetic constraint may underlie the increase in side effect severity.
Precedence for epigenetic changes as a strong driver of behavior in aging has been previously demonstrated in the aging-dependent cognitive decline associated with changes in histone modifications in the hippocampus of mice. Specifically, age-related memory impairment has been linked with decreased hippocampal acetylation of H4K12 (Peleg et al. 2010). More generally, increased di-methyl and tri-methyl H3K9, both repressive epigenetic marks, have been implicated in the aging processes (Sen 2014). In our study, we show changes in specific histone residues: decreased acetylation of H3K9, H3K27, and H4K12 (markers associated with transcriptional activation) and increased H3K27 tri-methylation, (a marker associated with transcriptional repression) at the striatal Drd2 promoter. Concordantly, we found that the enzymes that modulate these histone modifications by removing (HDACs) or adding (HATs) acetyl groups are altered in aged versus young mice during APD administration. Our results are consistent with previous reports where HDAC activity is increased (Singh and Thakur 2014) while HAT activity is decreased (Li et al. 2002) during aging and also consistent with previously shown increases in striatal HDAC1 and HDAC2 with age (Willis-Martinez et al. 2010). This suggests the possibility that specific changes in these histones may represent a more generalizable mechanism behind the increase in all APD-induced side effects found in the elderly population, though this would need to be validated through much more rigorous experimentation with different behaviors and biochemical analyses of the brain regions that facilitate those behaviors.
Aberrant patterns of histone modifications that occur with aging can be pharmacologically corrected with HDAC inhibitors. In our previous work, we demonstrated that pretreatment with the HDAC inhibitors VPA and MS-275 can restore the impaired ability of aged mice to respond to HAL by increasing acetylation at the c-fos promoter in the nucleus accumbens shell and prefrontal cortex (Montalvo-Ortiz et al. 2014). Previous studies have indicated that VPA can have protective effects on dopaminergic neurons (Chen et al. 2006; Kidd and Schneider 2010), and recent findings suggested that VPA may directly affect D2R signaling by modulating histone acetylation at the Drd2 promoter (Lee et al. 2012). HDAC inhibition promotes dopaminergic neuron survival by enhancing H3 acetylation, decreasing inflammatory factors, and increasing apoptosis in microglia (van Heesbeen et al. 2013). Further, blockade of D2R signaling by APDs can induce histone H3 modifications in the striatum, including H3 phospho-acetylation, H3pS10-acK14, associated with transcriptional activation (Lee et al. 2004). Our study adds to evidence that HDAC inhibition may be beneficial to restoring proper D2R signaling and subsequently affected behavior. However, HDAC inhibitors are relatively broad spectrum and will influence the expression of many other genes other than Drd2. Therefore, the observed effects on the Drd2 promoter are likely only a subset of the effects precipitated by these drugs. Our previous report that HDAC inhibitors influence the c-fos promoter supports this hypothesis. Additional studies to investigate HDAC inhibitors’ effects on other genes influenced by APDs, such as Htr2a, will provide a more complete perspective underlying the behavior induced by HDAC inhibition and the biochemical sequelae in the brain.
It should be noted that differences were observed between VPA and MS-275. VPA is more effective in restoring D2R in the striatum of aged mice, most likely due to a stronger effect of VPA in increasing histone acetylation, as evidenced by higher acetylated H3K9, H3K27, and H4K12 at the Drd2 promoter and lower HAT activity when compared with MS-275 under HAL conditions. The differences observed between these two HDAC inhibitors may be due to (1) broader effect of VPA at histone acetylation markers, (2) de-methylating action of VPA (Dong et al. 2010), or (3) VPA’s direct potentiation of DR2 activity by enhancing prostate apoptosis response-4 (PAR-4), an intracellular binding partner of DR2 (Lee et al. 2012). The doses of VPA and MS-275 used in our study were selected based on previous publications that have examined both behavioral effects and brain-specific histone acetylation (Ren et al. 2004; Simonini et al. 2006; Tremolizzo et al. 2002). The dose of 0.01 mg/kg selected for HAL-induced motor side effect in aged mice in this study was equivalent to the recommended daily dosages of 2.5 mg (two thirds lower than regular dose) for clinical use in aged patients (Markianos et al. 1999) Future studies are needed to identify the dose-dependent effects of HDAC inhibitors and optimal dosing for translation of HDAC inhibitors to a clinical population.
Another limitation of our study is the sole investigation of HAL, a classical APD, since atypical APDs are now more commonly prescribed. Our rationale for investigating HAL instead of an atypical APD was to develop a clear preclinical model to associate the changes in side effect severity with epigenetic alterations. It will be of utmost importance to investigate the generalizability of our current epigenetic results to the effects of atypical APDs in aged populations, and ongoing studies in our lab are investigating the atypical APD risperidone in age-related side effect severity. Lastly, our tissue collection method for the biochemical analyses precluded evaluation of more specific subregions within the striatum, as the dorsal and ventral striatum have distinct functional roles in motor function and resultant EPS (Bressan et al. 2003). Future studies are needed to further characterize the regional selectivity of APD action in the striatum. In addition, further investigations of other brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex, will be helpful in understanding the changes in the epigenetic landscape with advanced age.
In summary, the results of our study suggest that hypoacetylation and hypermethylation at certain histone residues associated with the Drd2 promoter may mediate the decrease in the expression and functionality of D2R in the striatum of aged mice at baseline. Further, it is likely that the adaptability of this epigenetic landscape is impaired in aged compared to young mice, as evidenced by diminished compensation of D2R with HAL administration in aged mice. These age-related epigenetic changes are likely one of the mechanisms that contributes to increases in the sensitivity of older individuals to the motor-related side effects induced by HAL and other APDs. Importantly, HDAC inhibitors, particularly VPA, mitigate such adverse effects by restoring histone modifications in the striatum of aged mice and easing the epigenetic constraints on the Drd2 promoter. This mechanism of epigenetic regulation underlying APDs’ behavioral effects in aged mice together with the reversal of side effects with HDAC inhibitors has significant clinical implications for the development of novel, adjuvant treatment strategies that couple HDAC inhibitors and APDs for better treatment results in aged populations. |
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June 20, 2016, 10:12 AM GMT / Updated June 20, 2016, 10:12 AM GMT / Source: Reuters By Reuters
Six Flags plans to expand to Saudi Arabia, its chief financial officer told Saudi-owned Arabiya TV on Monday, bringing roller coasters and bumper cars to the ultra-conservative kingdom.
"We're very honored to be provided with an opportunity to enter into a partnership to bring Six Flags to the kingdom ... Our parks can provide the entertainment to which Saudis aspire," Chief Financial Officer John Duffy said. His comments were dubbed into Arabic.
Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo
Duffy did not elaborate on the terms of the partnership.
His announcement followed a meeting between company CEO James Reid-Anderson and deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is visiting the United States to promote a reform plan to wean the kingdom away from oil revenue.
The powerful royal, who also heads the country's economic council, hopes the so-called "Vision 2030" initiative will jump start the private sector, provide jobs for a growing population and improve Saudis' cloistered lifestyles.
"We consider culture and entertainment indispensable to our quality of life. We are well aware that the cultural and entertainment opportunities currently available do not reflect the rising aspirations of our citizens and residents," the 2030 plan said in April.
Salman's reform plans flirt with social change in a country where women are barred from driving, cinemas are banned and women's sports are discouraged as promoting sin.
It is unclear whether the theme park company will tailor its rides, which include water slides, to the social codes of a country where public spaces are gender segregated and patrolled by state-sponsored Islamic morality enforcers.
Six Flags operates approximately 20 theme and water parks in North America and signed an agreement with a private Ho Chi Minh City based company in March to open two parks in Vietnam.
Both Abu Dhabi and Dubai are encouraging the development of theme parks to help boost foreign tourist arrivals as oil prices slump, causing an economic slowdown in the region. |
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America has a looming water health crisis and no one seems interested in talking about it.
Over the last year many Americans have likely heard of the lead poisoning affecting the drinking water of Flint, Michigan. We have heard the horror stories of children being sickened due to the failure of Flint’s bureaucracies and failing infrastructure. However, a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council reveals that Americans in every state are suffering because of failing infrastructure, under-reporting of violations, and lax enforcement of drinking water standards. The NRDC is an environmental advocacy group based in New York City.
The report, “Threats on Tap: Widespread Violations Highlight Need for Investment in Water Infrastructure and Protections,”found close to 80,000 violations of drinking water standards in every state in the U.S. “Very small systems found in rural or sparsely populated areas account for more than half of all health-based violations, and nearly 70 percent of all violations,” the NRDC writes.
Rural towns with smaller water systems are often unable to cover the financial and technological burden required to upgrade infrastructure which could reduce the amount of contaminants in the water.
The report concludes that nearly one in four Americans receive their drinking water from systems which fail to meet federal health standards. This failure is exacerbated by a lack of reporting these violations, as well as a lack of enforcement when violations are reported. The council’s report indicates that water contamination is not exclusive to Flint, but rather, Flint is representative of a national water crisis.
“America is facing a nationwide drinking water crisis that goes well beyond lead contamination,” said Erik Olson, Health Program Director at NRDC and a report co-author. “The problem is two-fold: there’s no cop on the beat enforcing our drinking water laws, and we’re living on borrowed time with our ancient, deteriorating water infrastructure. We take it for granted that when we turn on our kitchen tap, the water will be safe and healthy, but we have a long way to go before that is reality across our country.”
Of all the states with health-based violations, Texas comes in at number one, followed by Puerto Rico, Ohio, Maryland, and Kentucky. The authors believe the problem will only get worse under the Trump administration amid calls for cutting the budget of the EPA.
The council analyzed data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This data found some 27 million people are using water-distribution systems which are responsible for around 12,000 health-based violations. These violations involve amounts of contaminants in the water supply well above federal health and safety standards. The contaminants include lead, nitrates, and pesticides.
Related Reading: 6 Flint Residents Arrested At Town Hal For Protesting Water Crisis – Yeah, That’s Still Happening
The NRDC report comes on the heels of a multi-part investigation published by USA Today in March of this year. The investigation found almost 2,000 water systems in all 50 states with excessive levels of lead contamination. “The water systems, which reported lead levels exceeding Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] standards, collectively supply water to 6 million people,” according to reporters Alison Young and Mark Nichols.
The full impact of these reports can be understood when compared to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study, “Association of Childhood Blood Lead Levels With Cognitive Function and Socioeconomic Status at Age 38 Years and With IQ Change and Socioeconomic Mobility Between Childhood and Adulthood,” concluded that children with elevated levels of lead in their blood at age 11 were likely to grow into adults with lower cognitive function and lower-status jobs than their parents. The researchers followed around 1,000 children born in Dunedin, New Zealand in the early 1970s. The children who tested positive for lead in 1983 were more likely to have lower IQs and lower socioeconomic status three decades later. The researchers accounted for the children’s IQs, their mothers’ IQs and their social-economic background and still found the negative associations.
Despite these studies and a fairly obvious crisis at hand, the average American seems to be completely ignorant to the issue. A quick search regarding the NRDC shows only one article from The New York Times. Why is there an absence of reporting on an issue so vital which obviously affects all Americans? Mae Wu, a senior attorney with the council’s health program, told the Times the data is “not sexy,” making it difficult to motivate lawmakers to fund new infrastructure and improve drinking water standards.
Whether the data is sexy or not, this is one issue that should be on the forefront of every single person’s mind. Without clean water we die. Water literally is life. Let’s do our work to spread this information and call for improved drinking water.
Help Us Be The Change We Wish To See In The World. |
Media playback is not supported on this device Murray's tears at Dunblane memory
Andy Murray hopes his tennis success has helped the healing in Dunblane, his home town ripped apart by a horrific shooting incident 17 years ago.
Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and one teacher at Dunblane Primary School on 13 March, 1996.
It is just nice being able to do something the town is proud of Andy Murray
In a BBC One documentary broadcast on Sunday, Murray, a pupil at the school at the time of the shooting, broke down in tears when recalling what happened.
"You have no idea how tough something like that is," he told Sue Barker.
Cradling his dog on his lap, the emotional Scot, 26, said the incident had affected him deeply but hoped his numerous triumphs on the tennis court had been a positive influence on Dunblane.
"It is just nice being able to do something the town is proud of," said the reigning Olympic and US Open champion, whose elder brother Jamie was also a pupil at Dunblane Primary School.
In the hour-long documentary, Murray's mother, Judy, recalled the day Hamilton entered the school with four handguns, opening fire on a class of five- and six-year-olds in the gymnasium.
He later shot himself dead before he could be captured.
Andy Murray signs autographs on a visit to Dunblane following his Olympic success in 2012
Judy said that Andy had been walking to the gym when the shootings had begun and said her family knew Hamilton, a 43-year-old unemployed former shopkeeper, before the incident took place.
"Andy's class were on their way to the gym, his class were the next ones in the gym," she said. "His class was stopped when somebody went up, when they heard the noise and discovered what had happened."
Struggling to contain her emotions, she explained: "I was one of hundreds of mums that were queuing up at the school gates waiting to find out what had happened, not knowing if your children were alive or not."
She added she still found it difficult visiting the school and purposely avoided the gym where the shootings took place.
It wasn't until a few years ago that I started to actually research it and look into it Andy Murray
"I actually don't go near that part of the building," she said. "When I go up to school now, if I'm doing something, I'll do it in the playground or I do it in the new gym."
In the aftermath of the shooting, Judy said Andy and Jamie had wanted to know why Hamilton had done what he did.
"There were lots and lots of questions from them, mainly I think because they knew the guy who had done it because they used to go to one of his boys' clubs up at the high school," said Judy.
She also revealed that she had given Hamilton "lifts up and down from the train station to the high school", making her sons question the killer's motives even more.
She added that Andy would talk about the incident from "time to time" but that Jamie "never ever talked about it".
Andy added that he had not wanted to know too much about what had happened at the time but that his view had changed.
"It wasn't until a few years ago that I started to actually research it and look into it," he said.
Jamie, 27, was also interviewed in the BBC documentary, titled 'Andy Murray: The Man Behind the Racquet'.
Media playback is not supported on this device Highlights: Federer wins seventh title
A former Grand Slam winner himself, having won the mixed doubles title with Jelena Jankovic in 2007, he agreed that his brother's achievements had helped Dunblane recover from its ordeal.
"It's nice that, after all the negative publicity the town got after what happened so many years ago, that it's able to be shown in a positive light now," he said. "I guess that's a testament to the success that Andy's had."
Andy, currently ranked number two in the world, begins his quest for a first Wimbledon men's singles crown on Monday, when he faces German Benjamin Becker in a first-round match on Centre Court.
The British number one lost in last year's final, beaten in four sets by Roger Federer, who was claiming the title for a seventh time.
You can watch the documentary again on BBC iPlayer. |
Fable Legends, the newest entry in Microsoft and Lionhead’s long running fantasy franchise, may not seem like much of a looker (although it does have a rather striking artstyle), but it has some pretty impressive technology powering it under the scenes, it seems. Speaking to Bidness Etc, Lionhead’s Stuart Whyte recently confirmed that Fable Legends uses some fairly impressive, high level technology.
The developer claims that DX12 has helped the Xbox One to have better graphical and computing capabilities, without actually updating the hardware. “Fable Legends is using a number of features on Xbox One,” said Whyte, “including asynchronous compute and efficient multi-threaded rendering.” This has enabled the developer to “push the visual bar higher than would otherwise be possible.”
Of course, this kind of thing sounds like it is par for the course for Microsoft’s newest API- DirectX 12 is, by all accounts, a wondrous IP that can extract far more performance from hardware than was possible earlier. It is good to see that it will have some definite yields and benefits, even on the Xbox One.
Fable Legends will launch some time this year on the Xbox One and PC. The game will be having a closed beta in the coming months first. |
It's a question some parents ask when their children go off to school or they see the inside of the state's ubiquitous yellow school buses: Why aren't seat belts required in school transportation vehicles to encourage students to buckle up?
New Bedford Rep. Antonio Cabral has been trying to get the state to require seat belts in school buses for the last ten years. Retrofitting existing buses would cost around $11,000 a piece, no small burden on school districts or bus operators.
"Small price to pay? Yes it is. I think we as a society, we as a community, we as a state have to determine is it worth the life of a child, is it worth the $11,000?... This is about the safety of our own children," Cabral said at a hearing of the Legislature's Public Safety Committee Tuesday.
The School Transportation Association of Massachusetts represents the companies that operate school buses. They've opposed the bill in the past, arguing that bus seats are already safe for riders. But now they say they could back the bill if there's enough lead time and if drivers are not held liable for injuries to children who aren't buckled up. |
It sounds like a classic horror story -- eyeless, mouthless worms lurk in the dark, settling onto dead animals and sending out green "roots" to devour their bones. In fact, such worms do exist in the deep sea. They were first discovered in 2002 by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), who were using a robot submarine to explore Monterey Canyon. But that wasn't the end of the story. After "planting" several dead whales on the seafloor, a team of biologists recently announced that as many as 15 different species of boneworms may live in Monterey Bay alone.
After years of study, the researchers have begun to piece together the bizarre story of the boneworms, all of which are in the genus Osedax. The worms start out as microscopic larvae, drifting through the darkness of the deep sea. At some point they encounter a large dead animal on the seafloor. It may be a whale, an elephant seal, or even the carcass of a cow that washed out to sea during a storm. Following chemical cues, the tiny larvae settle down onto the bones of the dead animal.
Once settled, the boneworms grow quickly, like weeds after a rain. One end of each worm develops feathery palps, which extract oxygen from seawater. The other end of the worm develops root-like appendages that grow down into the bone. Bacteria within these roots are believed to digest proteins and perhaps lipids within the bones, providing nutrition for the worms.
Soon the worms become sexually mature. Strangely enough, they all become females. Additional microscopic larvae continue to settle in the area. Some of these larvae land on the palps of the female worms. These develop into male worms. But they never grow large enough to be seen by the naked eye. Somehow these microscopic male worms find their way into the tube that surrounds the female's body. Dozens of them share this space, not eating at all, but releasing sperm that fertilize the female's eggs. Eventually the female worm sends thousands of fertilized eggs out into the surrounding water, and the cycle begins again.
Dr. Robert Vrijenhoek, an evolutionary biologist at MBARI, has been fascinated with these worms ever since he and his colleagues first discovered their unusual lifestyles and bizarre reproductive habits. Vrijenhoek has been trying to find out how widespread and genetically diverse these worms are. He would also like to know how they manage to find and colonize the bones of dead whales in the vast, pitch-black expanse of the deep seafloor.
Between 2004 and 2008, Vrijenhoek's research team towed five dead whales off of Monterey Bay beaches and sank them at different depths within Monterey Canyon. Every few months, coauthor Shannon Johnson and others on the team would send one of MBARI's remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) down to study the worms and other animals that had colonized the whale carcasses.
To their surprise, the different whale carcasses yielded different types of boneworms. One whale carcass hosted three or four different types of worms. After examining all of the worms, coauthor Greg Rouse concluded that most of them were entirely new to science. The researchers also discovered that the worms would colonize cow-bones placed on the seafloor, which showed that the worms were not limited to feeding on dead whales.
In their recent paper in the journal BMC Biology, Vrijenhoek and his coauthors describe the results of extensive DNA analyses on all the different types of Osedax worms that have been discovered so far (including two species found off Sweden and Japan). This work suggests that these worms could belong to as many as 17 different species, most of which have yet to be named. None of the worms appear to interbreed, despite the fact that some of them grow side by side.
Based on their appearance and similarities in their DNA, the researchers divided the boneworms into several groups. Some of the worms have feathery palps, which may be red, pink, striped, or even greenish in color. Others have bare palps. One type of boneworm has no palps at all. Its body forms a single, long, tapering tube, which curls at the end like a pig's tail. This worm has evolved to live in the seafloor sediment near a dead whale. It sends long, fibrous "roots" into the mud, presumably in search of fragments of bone on which to feed.
Knowing how fast the DNA of these worms changes (mutates) over time, the researchers can calculate how long it has been since worms in the genus Osedax first evolved as a distinct group. Using one possible estimate of mutation rates, the researchers hypothesized that this group could have evolved about 45 million years ago -- about the time the first large open-ocean whales show up in the fossil record. Alternatively, the worms may have evolved more slowly, which would suggest that the genus is much older, and first evolved about 130 million years ago. If this second estimate is correct, the worms could have feasted on the bones of immense sea-going reptiles during the age of the dinosaurs.
Eventually the researchers will give all these new worms their own species names. First, however, they must collect enough samples of each possible species for additional laboratory analysis and distribution to type-specimen collections. Like a classic horror story, the macabre saga of the boneworms will continue to thrill marine biologists for years to come.
This research was sponsored by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. |
“We’ve got a lot of room to improve. But before you can get to any of that, you’ve got to accomplish what was accomplished this year.”
Winnipeg Jets head coach Paul Maurice perfectly captured his team’s 2014-15 season when he spoke following the Jets’ elimination from the playoffs at the hands of the Anaheim Ducks.
It also captured one of the team’s biggest strengths over the last few seasons: patience.
Now that they have reached the status of a playoff team, can the Jets continue their steady incline and build on their success?
Roster-wise, there’s no reason to believe they won’t. The fact that there aren’t a lot of new faces on the team works in their favour — the core has had ample time to develop the chemistry we saw last year — and it gives the club the chance to integrate the considerable young talent they’ve developed (and done so with patience) over the last few years.
Head coach: Paul Maurice
GM: Kevin Cheveldayoff
Team payroll: ($58.86 million of $71.4 million cap)
Last season record: 43-26-13
Goals for: 230
Goals against: 210
PP: 17.8 per cent, ranked 17th
PK: 81.8 per cent, ranked 13th
Corsi for 60: 55.7 (via stats.hockeyanalysis.com)
Key acquisitions: After the blockbuster trade that sent Evander Kane and Zach Bogosian to Buffalo, the Jets are prepared to let their deep prospect pool do the talking rather than make a splash in the off-season free agent market. They did, however, bring forward Alexander Burmistrov back from the KHL.
Key departures: Michael Frolik, Lee Stempniak, Jiri Tlusty.
Rookies to Watch: Nikolaj Ehlers, Josh Morrissey, Nicolas Petan, Andrew Copp, Joel Armia, Connor Hellebuyck. The Jets have one of the deepest prospect pools in the NHL and have insisted on not rushing the development process. Of the top prospects, expect Ehlers to break into the lineup. Morrissey might just prove himself ready for the big-league blueline with a strong training camp and pre-season.
Highlight of 2014-15: The moment Jets fans had been waiting nearly 20 years for — a return to the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Forwards: The Jets’ lineup of forwards hit its stride last year, led by the strong chemistry between veterans Bryan Little and Andrew Ladd. Mark Scheifele, Adam Lowry and top-scorer Blake Wheeler added character and grit. And while they lost Frolik to the Flames in free agency, there are more goal-scorers coming down the pipeline, led by Ehlers.
GRADE: B
Defence: The Jets’ solid defence corps, led by Dustin Byfuglien, Tyler Myers and Jacob Trouba, limited opponents to a franchise-best 210 goals against. A consistent (and consistently healthy) season from the back end could prove to be what propels the Jets to a second-straight playoff berth.
GRADE: A
Goaltending: The emergence of an impressive Michael Hutchinson was one of the Jets’ biggest surprises last season, and all signs point to him having another strong year. Veteran Ondrej Pavelec struggled at times, but found his stride when it counted most. That tandem should give the Jets confidence in the crease this year. And with up-and-coming prospect Connor Hellebuyck knocking on the door from his AHL crease, the Jets’ net looks like it’s in good hands.
GRADE: B
The Jets will have a successful season if… they can maintain the momentum of last year and solve the elephants-in-the-room that are the contracts of pending UFAs Dustin Byfuglien and Andrew Ladd. Distractions could be detrimental for this momentum-filled team.
The Jets will have a disappointing season if… they don’t make the playoffs. Sure, it’s the goal of every team in the league. But now that they’ve reached the post-season and sent a message to the league, anything less will surely be a disappointment. |
Three days after a sudden swell in the Beas washed away 24 students at Thalot in Himachal Pradesh, a couple of media reports have questioned the irresponsible release of waters from the Larji dam that caused the tragedy.
Pointing out that the Larji project “authorities had been releasing excess water in the Beas, almost without prior warning, since Friday”, The Indian Express reported that the project suddenly reduced generation of power on Saturday evening, “presumably because demand had dipped”.
Around 5:50 pm, warned by the national grid load dispatch centre via Shimla, the Larji authorities reduced power generation from 138 MW to 64 MW. Next, they decided to open the floodgates at the bottom of the project’s reservoir which was threatening to flood the Chandigarh-Manali highway near Aut. At 6:15 pm, 50 cubic metres per second (cumecs) of water was released and within minutes tragedy hit 2.7km downstream.
Shocking, but there is nothing unusual, as media reports suggest, about these events. The very idea of demand-driven power generation necessitates sudden release of water and drastic hourly fluctuations in river flow. And it is happening daily across the country, routinely claiming lives and jeopardizing livelihoods tied to riverine agriculture, fishing and cattle-rearing. Only when the lives of engineering students are lost to this madness do the headline-obsessed media and the nation take note.
There is almost no data in the public domain on water level fluctuations from existing hydro-electricity projects. But official studies on a slew of proposed projects, mainly in the Northeast, provide a grim picture that is likely to be true for most hydel projects in north India as well. Even secondary evidence of manmade disasters, such as the Beas tragedy, is aplenty.
In 2007, Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi knocked at the External Affairs ministry’s door when release of water from Bhutan’s Kurichhu dam, without any warning, led to a “catastrophic flood” that devastated lower Assam in just seven hours. It has not helped that the project was executed by our own NHPC. Sudden releases from the reservoir have been causing floods of varying intensity in western Assam every monsoon since.
Even when it does not lead to major flooding, drastic daily fluctuation in river flow caused by demand-driven supply of power can throw life completely off gear. The Lower Subansiri project on the Assam-Arunachal borders, for example, will hold back water for about 20 hours before releasing the load for maximum power generation during peak demand hours in the evening. That means downstream flows in winter will fluctuate from 6 cumecs to 2,560 cumecs. The river will trickle for 20 hours before swelling with monsoon-like surges for four hours, every day.
Subansiri is no exception. The 2,700 MW Lower Siang project in Arunachal Pradesh will cause a daily water level fluctuation of more than 13 feet in winter. As more than 100 proposed dams are to follow the same daily routine on the Brahmaputra and all its major tributaries, at stake is the entire local economy that rests on fishing, flood-recession agriculture, navigation and livestock rearing. And that is not to mention the destruction of the riverine and wetland ecology.
When the Ranganadi hydel project was commissioned in 2002, large quantities of water released in the river without any warning swept away many cattle, and a villager according to unconfirmed reports. Amid sustained protests, the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation issued a circular in June 2006, saying, “The gates of Ranganadi diversion dam may require opening from time to time… the corporation will not take any responsibility for any loss of life of human, pet animals and property damage…”
Timely and adequate warning before sudden releases of waters may save lives, but not livelihoods. Going by the experience of Ranganadi and Subansiri, flow fluctuation deals a death blow to fisheries, driftwood collection, sand and gravel mining and farming and grazing on riverine islands. Fish that breed in shallow waters or hibernate along the shorelines are particularly vulnerable.
During my visit last year, local fishermen near Gogamukh claimed that they spent twice as much time to catch barely half the quantity of fish they used to get before the dam came up. Sand miners complained that the Subansiri now brought more silt than sand.
And warning or not, the ecology is a silent and certain casualty. “These daily floods affect groundnesting birds, amphibians and even mammals — Bengal Floricans to tigers — that use the chaporis (riverine islands). Dolphins, on the other hand, will not survive the dry hours,” said North Lakhimpur-based biologist Lakhi Prasad Hazarika who has documented the impact of flow fluctuation in the Subansiri.
Yet, no hydel project is required to assess its downstream impact beyond 10 km or the distance from dam to powerhouse. So, more than 150 projects are coming up in Arunachal Pradesh alone. The other Himalayan states of Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh are not lagging far behind. And the pledge to save the Ganga stands firm on the foundation of nearly 600 dams planned on the river and its tributaries.
“Every summer, I watched in frustration as nesting birds along the Ganga were swept way when ACs were switched on en masse in Delhi,” rues a researcher who used to work with a government organization in Uttarakhand. “Do we care either about the people or agriculture or the birds and animals that live along these rivers? India’s rivers sustained human civilizations and wildlife populations for thousands of years and in one century, we are all set to destroy it completely.”
Tragedies like last year’s floods in Uttarakhand or last week’s drownings in Himachal Pradesh only offer a glimpse of the human cost that such policy madness will eventually extract. A customary probe has been ordered and three Larji officials have been suspended. But will the new government dare purge the disease rather than merely treat the symptoms? Implementing the recommendations made by the MoEF’s expert body in its April 2014 report on Uttarakhand floods can be a good starting point.
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Why Are Oil Prices On The Rise?
The national average for a gallon of gasoline is up to $3.07, and in some places it's a lot higher than that. The cost of heating oil is rising, too. And it's not the time of year you might expect a spike in oil prices. So what's going on? NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Phil Flynn, an analyst with PFG Best futures in Chicago.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
As you have no doubt noticed at the gas pump, gasoline prices are back up. According to AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge Report, the national average price of a gallon of regular is now over $3. Why? Well, that's our question for Phil Flynn, senior market analyst for PFGBEST Research in Chicago.
Mr. Flynn, what's the answer? Why?
Mr. PHIL FLYNN (Senior Market Analyst, PFGBEST Research): Well, partly because the economy is getting better, believe it or not. We're seeing more demand, not only here in the United States, but throughout the globe, and that's driving up the price. But I wish that was all that there was to it. To be honest with you, what we're seeing in the price of gasoline shouldn't be happening.
SIEGEL: What are you talking about? What has happened that has aggravated this problem?
Mr. FLYNN: Well, I think if you look over the past few weeks, you have to go back to the France strikes. A few months ago, of course, because of the France austerity package, France shut down some major refineries. And when those refineries went down, Europe was scrambling to get supplies - supplies that would normally end up here in the United States.
And then after that, you had all these refinery problems. You had a refinery going down in Venezuela. You had one going down in St. Croix, one down in the East Coast. And before you knew it, we see these gasoline prices surging forward.
SIEGEL: So as we try to figure out if what we're seeing at the gas stations nowadays is the new normal, or back to what it would obviously have been absent the recession, what is it? Is it - are we at an unusually high period, or is it getting used to it, it's going still higher?
Mr. FLYNN: Well, I - I mean, there's projections out there that people are going to see $5 a gallon in the next two years. To be honest with you, I don't think that's going to happen. I think prices are ahead of themselves. In fact, if you look at the price of crude oil, which did hit a two-year high, the price of gasoline has even exceeded that. So gasoline prices should not be this high, and we should see these prices start to come back down.
But we have this situation where the U.S. dollar is very weak. We've seen a lot of stimulus to the U.S. economy. That generally puts more upward pressure on the price of oil and gasoline. Part of the reason is because the dollar becomes weaker, and the price of crude oil is priced in dollars. And in a global marketplace when we see the price of the dollar go down, oil prices go up.
SIEGEL: But does that mean that in other parts of the world, where people are filling up their cars with fuel that they pay for with euros or yen or whatever, that they are not experiencing as steep an increase as we are here using the dollar at the pump?
Mr. FLYNN: No, because the euro has been relatively strong. They're not feeling this latest increase. Though in Europe, they are feeling the increase in other ways because of their very cold winter.
I think the other thing you have to acknowledge here, what's happening, when we look at the gasoline market overall, you know, the United States isn't the only game in town anymore. It used to be whatever the U.S. consumers did - you know, whether they drove more or whether they drove less - really determined what gasoline prices did.
But now, of course, with the growing competition from China and from the emerging markets, they are really having a major impact on what we pay for a gallon of gasoline. In fact, if you go back to last year, for the first time since the 1960s, the United States was actually a net exporter of gasoline. Instead of the U.S. importing more and more from other countries, we're actually exporting to other countries. So that has become a major new development in the gasoline market that we haven't seen for decades.
SIEGEL: Phil Flynn, thanks for talking with us about this.
Mr. FLYNN: Thanks, Robert.
SIEGEL: Phil Flynn is senior market analyst for PFGBEST Research in Chicago.
Copyright © 2011 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
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Independent islands in the Caribbean are fearful that their infrastructure will be left in ruins as countries such as the UK focus relief and aid efforts on their own overseas territories.
Gaston Browne, prime minster of Antigua and Barbuda, said his country was being overlooked in relief efforts because it was an independent island and had a higher per capita income than some Caribbean countries.
“Technically, the Queen is still our head of state, which means there should be some empathy,” he said. “But I think because we are independent, and they’re looking at some artificial per capita income criteria, we are being overlooked.”
The island of Barbuda was devastated by Hurricane Irma in September, with 95% of all properties on the island destroyed. When it was feared Barbuda would be struck again by Hurricane Jose a few days later, all the roughly 2,000 residents were evacuated to the larger sister island of Antigua.
The evacuees are living with friends and family on Antigua, or in large shelters run by the government in technical colleges, churches and a cricket stadium. People have begun to return to the island for a few days at a time to start the clear-up, often sleeping in tents on their lawns. Barbuda still has no water or electricity. Browne praised developing countries that had offered help, naming Cuba, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, as well as Qatar, China and India. Even the small Caribbean island of Dominica pledged $250,000 before Dominica itself was hit and devastated by Hurricane Maria, Browne said.
“We reciprocated afterwards by pledging $300,000,” he added “Even among countries that were devastated, there is a form of human cooperation to help each other.”
However, Browne said the response from developed nations was “minimal”: his country had received donations of roughly $200,000 from Canada and $100,000 from the US, but he was not aware of any donations from the UK or the EU.
The UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) has pledged £62m in emergency relief for Caribbean countries affected by hurricanes Irma and Maria. While £5m of this will go to the island of Dominica, it has not said how the rest of the money has been divided up. However, Michael Joseph, president of the Antiguan and Barbudan Red Cross, said his organisation had received $300,000 from the DfID.
Browne said he thought the country’s increased per capita income meant that wealthy countries were not giving them assistance to rebuild after the hurricane.
The hurricane has already greatly affected the country’s economy, he added, with airport closures and people cancelling holidays to Antigua under the mistaken belief that it, too, had been destroyed by the hurricane.
Shadow international development secretary Kate Osamor said that if the British government did not assist Antigua and Barbuda in its rebuilding efforts, this would be a “slap in the face” for the country.
“We have to look at our responsibility and of course the British territories do need to be looked after, but we do also need to look at where the greater need is, especially long-term need and the eastern part of the Caribbean has experienced various hurricanes,” she said.
Browne said that wealthy countries had a particular responsibility to help with rebuilding efforts, given that in his view the hurricanes that have devastated Caribbean islands over the past few months were the result of climate change.
“We’re a proud people, we don’t like the idea of going cap in hand and begging, but we happen to be the victims of climate change,” Browne said. ”Climate change is real and we’re suffering the consequences disproportionately.
“We all know that these powerful and frequent storms are a result of warmer seas, as a result of a warmer climate, which comes from large amounts of greenhouse gases that these large industrial countries are emitting into the earth’s atmosphere. So what they are actually using to create and sustain their wealth, these emissions, are harmful to our own survival.
“I think that the wealthy countries, the least they can do, is assist, not only Antigua and Barbuda, but the other countries in the Caribbean that suffered from this devastation.”
The British government has pledged to give £14m to Antigua and Barbuda over eight years between 2016 and 2024 to help build climate-resilient infrastructure projects.
A DFID spokesman said: “British troops and aid workers were amongst the very first in the region following hurricanes Irma and Maria, and delivered vital life-saving aid where it was needed most. Britain supported the Red Cross appeal and money has been provided to Antigua and Barbuda and St Kitts and Nevis through this appeal.”
Rebuilding on Barbuda has been complicated by the fact that due to a land tenure system on the island, most people do not take out home insurance, and so will not receive any money from private insurance companies.
“What should be a private risk has been transferred to become public risk. So it’s become our job to build homes,” said Browne. “The need in Barbuda is greater than in Dominica because homeowners in Dominica can look forward to getting an insurance cheque – Barbudans have nothing to look forward to.” |
Øltype: Imperial Brown Ale
Alkohol: 12% vol. (35 cl.)
Forhandler: Beergium.com, 10,99 €
Kapsler: 5 ud af 5 kapsler.
English review below rating.
Mathias gav pizza og jeg gav øl. Det skulle gerne være en dyr og helst en ret speciel øl.
Frem fra gemmerne, fandt jeg to øl: Prairie Artisan Ales – Okie, en imperial brown ale lagret på whisky egetræs fade og De Molen – Rasputin, en imperial stout lagret på bourbon fade. Valget faldt på Okie, da jeg kan huske at Peter fra The Master of Hoppets, var helt vild med øllen her, og jeg syntes det var et godt incitament for endelig at få knappet øllen op.
Det er desuden den sidste øl fra Beergium.com, som jeg modtog tilbage i januar. Du kan læse om min oplevelse med pakken og de mange øl fra Omnipollo. Jeg har desuden linket til de forskellige øl i artiklen, hvis du skulle være ekstra nysgerrig.
Udseende
Det er en flot brunlig øl jeg hælder op i glasset. Skummet er overraskende fyldig, men forsvinder hurtig fra øllets overflade.
Duft
Vådt træ dufter øllen af og vi kan sagtens dufte whiskyfadene øllen er lagret på.
Chokolade, kakao, kaffe, hasselnødder og Nutella spreder sig i rummet og op i vores næser. Okie har en lækker duft af den sødmefulde alkohol.
Smag
Det er en vild mundfylde der møder os. Smagen af alkohol sidder længe i munden, og den indkapsler tungen med sin voldsomme tilstedeværelse.
Den fede mundfylde er ét, noget andet er smagen af chokolade, kakao og hasselnødder – plus smagen af whiskytønder.
Konklusion
Vi har her at gøre med en vild og hypet øl (hypet af The Master of Hoppets).
Fed er den på den fede måde, med en sødme- og fedmefuld alkoholfylde, der aldrig slipper sit jerngreb af sine sagesløse ofre (os).
Aldrig har vi smagt en imperial brown ale og slet ikke en der er lagret på whiskyfade. Trods sine tunge 12 procenter, så glider den overraskende nemt ned. Men det er en deleøl, da den nemt ville kunne blive for sød og klæg, hvis man død og pine skulle drikke den helt alene (ironi kan forkomme).
Dette er dog vores eneste anke, da øllen ellers er helt fantastisk lækker.
5 ud af 5 kapsler.
English review
Beer style: Imperial Brown Ale
ABV: 12% (35 cl.)
Where did I get it: Beergium.com, 10,99 €
Rating: 5 out of 5 bottle caps.
The appearance
Beautiful brown colour has Okie. The foam of the beer is surprisingly thick, but suddenly it disappears out of the blue.
The aroma
Wow, what an incredible aroma. The smell of wood from the oak whisky barrels has an excellent scent. Besides that, the beer has an aroma of chocolate, cocoa, coffee, hazelnuts and Nutella – I can almost recall the aroma.
The taste
The mouthfeel and the taste are as incredible as the aroma. The alcohol embraces my tongue and teeth and the sweet taste from the oak whisky barrels is everywhere. Like the aroma, I can also sense chocolate, cocoa, coffee and Nutella.
The conclusion
Okie Aged on Oak Whisky Barrels is the greatest Imperial Brown Ale I ever have tasted. It is sweet, thick and has the best mouthfeel ever.
5 out of 5 bottle caps. |
Toilets in a labor camp (Oxfam/FLOC)
Toilets in a labor camp (Oxfam/FLOC)
Working and living conditions for workers on North Carolina tobacco farms are nothing short of appalling, as portrayed in a new report (PDF) by Oxfam America and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. Interviewers visited more than 100 labor camps in 5 key North Carolina tobacco farming counties and conducted 86 full interviews with 103 people, speaking to hundreds more along the way. Additionally, they interviewed growers, government officials, and manufacturers.
The North Carolina tobacco workforce is believed to include a higher proportion of undocumented workers than estimates of agricultural work nationally; in line with that, the vast majority of workers Oxfam and FLOC interviewed were undocumented; a few were working on H-2A visas or had permanent legal residency or citizenship.
These vulnerable workers face dangerous conditions on the job, disgusting and unsanitary conditions in their camps, and low wages.
"Of the 103 interview participants, 22 (about 1 in 4) reported that they were paid less than the minimum wage, one as low as $6 per hour. 51 workers were paid at minimum wage, and only 11 were paid more than the minimum wage."
For more than a third of workers interviewed, lunch was the only break they got during the work day; only a third reported having access to toilets while in the fields.
"Sixty-one of the 86 workers interviewed said there was water in the field, but several said they were only allowed to drink it at certain times. Seven workers told interviewers that the water provided was dirty, hot, or often ran out during the day. Three workers said water was only provided sometimes, and three said water is not provided and they have to bring their own."
Without adequate protective gear, workers are exposed to large amounts of nicotine absorbed through their skin—up to the equivalent of 36 cigarettes on a day when it has rained and the plants are wet. Many suffer green tobacco sickness. "Common symptoms they reported included nausea, vomiting, headaches,
skin irritation, weakness, dizziness, fatigue, difficulty sleeping, hallucinations,
and a feeling like being intoxicated."
skin irritation, weakness, dizziness, fatigue, difficulty sleeping, hallucinations, and a feeling like being intoxicated." Workers were often exposed to pesticides and lacked adequate hand-washing facilities.
In the living facilities provided by employers, workers faced inadequate toilet and shower facilities, inadequate or absent laundry and cooking facilities, lack of privacy, infestations of bugs and rodents, and worn out or missing mattresses.
Child labor is common.
With such pervasive abuses, there needs to be in industry-wide reckoning with labor issues, and a dramatic increase in government oversight at both the state and federal levels. As we see time and time again, workers who are vulnerable for whatever reasons—immigrant status, language, race or ethnicity, gender, desperation—get exploited by employers and industries all too willing to take advantage of vulnerability. Giving workers more rights, including the right to organize into unions or gain a collective voice through non-union organizing, and enforcing the rights they have, are the only way to stop these abuses. Growers and manufacturers and other employers aren't going to do it just out of the goodness of their hearts.
(h/t AFL-CIO Now) |
Don’t drink so much. "Stop victim-blaming."
Watch your drink. "Stop victim-blaming."
Walk in well-lit areas at night. "Stop victim-blaming."
If colleges cannot suggest basic common sense measures to protect students — which help guard against crimes that aren’t rape and help men as well — without being accused by the feminist chorus of blaming victims, what can they say?
“It's a tough line to tread because the blame should still be on the perpetrator, but you also want to protect these people,” Larkin Sayre, a sophomore at Massachusetts Institute of Technology told NPR.
Suggesting women don’t drink so much or don’t wear short skirts feels wrong, Sayre said, because being able to wear what one wants is “a basic human right” and “we don't tell men to not get blackout drunk.”
If there are people who aren’t telling men not to get blackout drunk then that definitely needs to change. No one should be getting blackout drunk, not just because of what crimes one could commit or have committed upon them, but for health reasons as well.
University of Wisconsin police spokesman Marc Lovicott argued that doing whatever it takes to protect students is more important than being politically correct.
“Man, it just seems like we live in such a politically correct society these days, and everybody's watching the words they use and they should be, I mean, to a certain extent,” Lovicott said. “But when it comes to crime prevention, we're not gonna stop.”
UW was under fire for its supposed victim-blaming crime prevention tips, which it has since updated.
Lovicott added that students should be advised on how to stay safe.
“But how do you say that in a way that you're not offending a victim who went through this horrible crime?” he said.
University of Virginia law professor Anne Coughlin said she was holding back “commonsense advice” because of the blowback she’s received.
This creates a problem. By not allowing colleges and police departments to suggest ways to avoid being a victim, activists are potentially putting women — and men — at risk. Rape accusations need to be investigated and everyone needs to be aware of common-sense protections they can take to reduce their risk of any crime. |
LiveEdu is building the world's first project learning platform using blockchain smart contracts. It will be the next-generation Lynda.com using blockchain smart contracts and the world's biggest project learning library. There is no project learning platform which teaches college students and professionals who have passed the beginner stage how to build complete products.
LiveEdu does NOT compete directly with existing online learning platforms as they are focused on practical tutorial projects (project-based learning) and users who have passed the beginner stage (post-beginners, intermediates, experts). LiveEdu is focused on intermediate to expert educational level, while other existing online education sites are focused mostly on beginners. They are focused on the main reason people start learning new skills; building a product. They don’t see Coursera, Udemy or Udacity as competitors, but as potential partners. Their plan is to syndicate their content to potential partners via their API. Those sites are great for beginners to learn theory and introductory topics. LiveEdu does not provide this, but is focused on teaching people who are above the level of these sites how to build a complete product, e.g a VR Game, an AI Bot, a Bitcoin autotrader. You can describe them as kindergarten and LiveEdu as high school.
Compared to the indirect competitors Lynda, Pluralsight and Udemy:
• Indirect competitors have high expensive content production costs while it costs LiveEdu less than $500 to create a complete project.
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• Interactive Q&A chat to discuss things in real time.
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• LiveEdu is flexible and can create projects on new emerging technologies faster.
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Visit the official website and social media pages. Their telegram group or Email is the fastest way to communicate with the LiveEdu team.
Official ICO Website: https://tokensale.liveedu.tv/
Email: [email protected]
Telegram: https://t.me/liveeduico
Blog: https://medium.com/liveedu-ico
Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/liveedutv
Media Contact
Contact Name: Dr. Michael J. Garbade |
We kicked off the day with our Episode 212 stunt meeting. It mostly involved director Will Waring, stunt coordinator John Stead, and me debating the merits of various daggers. With that done, I left the blades behind (despite my better judgement) and headed out for a two hour clear-the-air sit-down during which I watched a heavy-set customer beside us consume an entire family bowl of breakfast chicken tenders. From there, it was back to the production offices for a quick lunch, then cross town to Urban for an afternoon of cuts and corrections with editor BenWilkinson of Episode 209.
While I spend my day in the relatively warm confines of civilization, Ivon was out in the wilderness of Rockton, overseeing production on Episode 211. Apparently, the snow-encrusted forest looked absolutely gorgeous this morning…
Then downright miserable when things warmed up and the surroundings turned into a muddy morass.
Meanwhile, there was a little dronery going on as captured by Ivon Bartok (he snapped the above pics as well). What’s the deal? Well, it won’t be long ’til you find out!
Speaking of Things To Look Forward To – Dark Matter’s TWO, Melissa O’Neil, will be doing a fan Q&A on this blog. If you have a burning question for #2Boss, post it in the comments section. You’ll have until Wednesday night!
On a non-Dark Matter-related note – If you liked this commercial:
You’ll love these outtakes:
Finally, back to Dark Matter, let me leave you with this:
https://www.inverse.com/article/14035-14-underrated-sci-fi-shows-you-need-to-binge-watch-before-they-return
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I can think of no greater honor than being invited to speak on the occasion of Milton Friedman's ninetieth birthday. Among economic scholars, Friedman has no peer. His seminal contributions to economics are legion, including his development of the permanent-income theory of consumer spending, his paradigm-shifting research in monetary economics, and his stimulating and original essays on economic history and methodology. Generations of graduate students, at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, have benefited from his insight; and many of these intellectual children and grandchildren continue to this day to extend the sway of Friedman's ideas in economics. What is more, Milton Friedman's influence on broader public opinion, exercised through his popular writings, speaking, and television appearances, has been at least as important and enduring as his impact on academic thought. In his humane and engaging way, Milton Friedman has conveyed to millions an understanding of the economic benefits of free, competitive markets, as well as the close connection that economic freedoms such as property rights and freedom of contract bear to other types of liberty. Today I'd like to honor Milton Friedman by talking about one of his greatest contributions to economics, made in close collaboration with his distinguished coauthor, Anna J. Schwartz. This achievement is nothing less than to provide what has become the leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history, the onset of the Great Depression--or, as Friedman and Schwartz dubbed it, the Great Contraction of 1929-33. Remarkably, Friedman and Schwartz did not set out to solve this complex and important problem specifically but rather addressed it as part of a larger project, their magisterial monetary history of the United States (Friedman and Schwartz, 1963). As a personal aside, I note that I first read A Monetary History of the United States early in my graduate school years at M.I.T. I was hooked, and I have been a student of monetary economics and economic history ever since.1 I think many others have had that experience, with the result that the direct and indirect influences of the Monetary History on contemporary monetary economics would be difficult to overstate. As everyone here knows, in their Monetary History Friedman and Schwartz made the case that the economic collapse of 1929-33 was the product of the nation's monetary mechanism gone wrong. Contradicting the received wisdom at the time that they wrote, which held that money was a passive player in the events of the 1930s, Friedman and Schwartz argued that "the contraction is in fact a tragic testimonial to the importance of monetary forces [p. 300; all page references refer to Friedman and Schwartz, 1963]." Friedman and Schwartz's account of the Great Contraction is impressive in its erudition and development of historical detail, including the use of many previously untapped primary sources. But what is most important about the work, and the reason that the book is as influential today as ever, is the authors' subtle use of history to disentangle complicated skeins of cause and effect--to solve what economists call the identification problem. A statistician studying data from the Great Depression would notice the basic fact that the money stock, output, and prices in the United States went down together in 1929 through 1933 and up together in subsequent years. But these correlations cannot answer the crucial questions: What is causing what? Are changes in the money stock largely causing changes in prices and output, as Friedman and Schwartz were to conclude? Or, instead, is the stock of money reacting passively to changes in the state of economy? Or is there yet some other, unmeasured factor that is affecting all three variables? The special genius of the Monetary History is the authors' use of what some today would call "natural experiments"--in this context, episodes in which money moves for reasons that are plausibly unrelated to the current state of the economy. By locating such episodes, then observing what subsequently occurred in the economy, Friedman and Schwartz laboriously built the case that the causality can be interpreted as running (mostly) from money to output and prices, so that the Great Depression can reasonably be described as having been caused by monetary forces. Of course, natural experiments are never perfectly controlled, so that no single natural experiment can be viewed as dispositive--hence the importance of Friedman and Schwartz's historical analysis, which adduces a wide variety of such episodes and comparisons in support of their case. I think the most useful thing I can do in the remainder of my talk today is to remind you of the genius of the Friedman-Schwartz methodology by reviewing some of their main examples and describing how they have held up in subsequent research. Four Monetary Policy Episodes
To reiterate, at the heart of Friedman and Schwartz's identification strategy is the examination of historical periods in the attempt to identify changes in the money stock or in monetary policy that occurred for reasons largely unrelated to the contemporaneous behavior of output and prices. To the extent that these monetary changes can reasonably be construed as "exogenous," one can interpret the response of the economy to the changes as reflecting cause and effect--particularly if a similar pattern is found again and again. For the early Depression era, Friedman and Schwartz identified at least four distinct episodes that seem to meet these criteria. Three are tightenings of policy; one is a loosening. In each case, the economy responded in the way that the monetary theory of the Great Depression would predict. I will discuss each of these episodes briefly, both because they nicely illustrate the Friedman-Schwartz method and because they are interesting in themselves. The first episode analyzed by Friedman and Schwartz was the deliberate tightening of monetary policy that began in the spring of 1928 and continued until the stock market crash of October 1929. This policy tightening occurred in conditions that we would not today normally consider conducive to tighter money: As Friedman and Schwartz noted, the business-cycle trough had only just been reached at the end of 1927 (the NBER's official trough date is November 1927), commodity prices were declining, and there was not the slightest hint of inflation.2 Why then did the Federal Reserve tighten in early 1928? A principal reason was the Board's ongoing concern about speculation on Wall Street. The Federal Reserve had long made the distinction between "productive" and "speculative" uses of credit, and the rising stock market and the associated increases in bank loans to brokers were thus a major concern.3 Benjamin Strong, the influential Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a key protagonist in Friedman and Schwartz's narrative, had strong reservations about using monetary policy to try to arrest the stock market boom. Unfortunately, Strong was afflicted by chronic tuberculosis; his health was declining severely in 1928 (he died in October) and, with it, his influence in the Federal Reserve System. The "antispeculative" policy tightening of 1928-29 was affected to some degree by the developing feud between Strong's successor at the New York Fed, George Harrison, and members of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington. In particular, the two sides disagreed on the best method for restraining brokers' loans: The Board favored so-called "direct action," essentially a program of moral suasion, while Harrison thought that only increases in the discount rate (that is, the policy rate) would be effective. This debate was resolved in Harrison's favor in 1929, and direct action was dropped in favor of a further rate increase. Despite this sideshow and its effects on the timing of policy actions, it would be incorrect to infer that monetary policy was not tight during the dispute between Washington and New York. As Friedman and Schwartz noted (p. 289), "by July [1928], the discount rate had been raised in New York to 5 per cent, the highest since 1921, and the System's holdings of government securities had been reduced to a level of over $600 million at the end of 1927 to $210 million by August 1928, despite an outflow of gold." Hence this period represents a tightening in monetary policy not related to the current state of output and prices--a monetary policy "innovation," in today's statistical jargon. Moreover, Friedman and Schwartz went on to point out that this tightening of policy was followed by falling prices and weaker economic activity: "During the two months from the cyclical peak in August 1929 to the crash, production, wholesale prices, and personal income fell at annual rates of 20 per cent, 7-1/2 per cent, and 5 per cent, respectively." Of course, once the crash occurred in October--the result, many students of the period have surmised, of a slowing economy as much as any fundamental overvaluation--the economic decline became even more precipitous. Incidentally, the case that money was quite tight as early as the spring of 1928 has been strengthened by the subsequent work of James Hamilton (1987). Hamilton showed that the Fed's desire to slow outflows of U.S. gold to France--which under the leadership of Henri Poincaré had recently stabilized its economy, thereby attracting massive flows of gold from abroad--further tightened U.S. monetary policy. The next episode studied by Friedman and Schwartz, another tightening, occurred in September 1931, following the sterling crisis. In that month, a wave of speculative attacks on the pound forced Great Britain to leave the gold standard. Anticipating that the United States might be the next to leave gold, speculators turned their attention from the pound to the dollar. Central banks and private investors converted a substantial quantity of dollar assets to gold in September and October of 1931. The resulting outflow of gold reserves (an "external drain") also put pressure on the U.S. banking system (an "internal drain"), as foreigners liquidated dollar deposits and domestic depositors withdrew cash in anticipation of additional bank failures. Conventional and long-established central banking practice would have mandated responses to both the external and internal drains, but the Federal Reserve--by this point having forsworn any responsibility for the U.S. banking system, as I will discuss later--decided to respond only to the external drain. As Friedman and Schwarz wrote, "The Federal Reserve System reacted vigorously and promptly to the external drain. . . . On October 9 [1931], the Reserve Bank of New York raised its rediscount rate to 2-1/2 per cent, and on October 16, to 3-1/2 per cent--the sharpest rise within so brief a period in the whole history of the System, before or since (p. 317)." This action stemmed the outflow of gold but contributed to what Friedman and Schwartz called a "spectacular" increase in bank failures and bank runs, with 522 commercial banks closing their doors in October alone. The policy tightening and the ongoing collapse of the banking system caused the money supply to fall precipitously, and the declines in output and prices became even more virulent. Again, the logic is that a monetary policy change related to objectives other than the domestic economy--in this case, defense of the dollar against external attack--were followed by changes in domestic output and prices in the predicted direction. One might object that the two "experiments" described so far were both episodes of monetary contraction. Hence, although they suggest that declining output and prices followed these tight-money policies, the evidence is perhaps not entirely persuasive. The possibility remains that the Great Depression occurred for other reasons and that the contractionary monetary policies merely coincided with (or perhaps, slightly worsened) the ongoing declines in the economy. Hence it is particularly interesting that the third episode studied by Friedman and Schwartz is an expansionary episode. This third episode occurred in April 1932, when the Congress began to exert considerable pressure on the Fed to ease monetary policy, in particular, to conduct large-scale open-market purchases of securities. The Board was quite reluctant; but between April and June 1932, it did authorize substantial purchases. This infusion of liquidity appreciably slowed the decline in the stock of money and significantly brought down yields on government bonds, corporate bonds, and commercial paper. Most interesting, as Friedman and Schwartz noted (p. 324), "[t]he tapering off of the decline in the stock of money and the beginning of the purchase program were followed shortly by an equally notable change in the general economic indicator. . . . Wholesale prices started rising in July, production in August. Personal income continued to fall but at a much reduced rate. Factory employment, railroad ton-miles, and numerous other indicators of physical activity tell a similar story. All in all, as in early 1931, the data again have many of the earmarks of a cyclical revival. . . . Burns and Mitchell (1946), although dating the trough in March 1933, refer to the period as an example of a 'double bottom.' " Unfortunately, although a few Fed officials supported the open-market purchase program, notably George Harrison at the New York Fed, most did not consider the policy to be appropriate. In particular, as argued by several modern scholars, they took the mistaken view that low nominal interest rates were indicative of monetary ease. Hence, when the Congress adjourned on July 16, 1932, the System essentially ended the program. By the latter part of the year, the economy had relapsed dramatically. The final episode studied by Friedman and Schwartz, again contractionary in impact, occurred in the period from January 1933 to the banking holiday in March. This time the exogenous factor might be taken to be the long lag mandated by the Constitution between the election and the inauguration of a new U.S. President. Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in November 1932, was not to take office until March 1933. In the interim, of course, considerable speculation circulated about the new President's likely policies; the uncertainty was increased by the President-elect's refusal to make definite policy statements or to endorse actions proposed by the increasingly frustrated President Hoover. However, from the President-elect's campaign statements and known propensities, many inferred (correctly) that Roosevelt might devalue the dollar or even break the link with gold entirely. Fearing the resulting capital losses, both domestic and foreign investors began to convert dollars to gold, putting pressure on both the banking system and the gold reserves of the Federal Reserve System. Bank failures and the Fed's defensive measures against the gold drain further reduced the stock of money. The economy took its deepest plunge between November 1932 and March 1933, once more confirming the temporal sequence predicted by the monetary hypothesis. Once Roosevelt was sworn in, his declaration of a national bank holiday and, subsequently, his cutting the link between the dollar and gold initiated the expansion of money, prices, and output. It is an interesting but not uncommon phenomenon in economics that the expectation of a devaluation can be highly destabilizing but that the devaluation itself can be beneficial. These four episodes might be considered as time series examples of Friedman and Schwartz's evidence for the role of monetary forces in the Depression. They are not the entirety of the evidence, however. Friedman and Schwartz also introduced "cross-sectional"--that is, cross-country--evidence as well. This cross-sectional evidence is based on differences in exchange-rate regimes across countries in the 1930s. The Gold Standard and the International Depression
Although the Monetary History focuses by design on events in the United States, some of its most compelling insights come from cross-sectional evidence. Anticipating a large academic literature of the 1980s and 1990s, Friedman and Schwartz recognized in 1963 that a comparison of the economic performances in the 1930s of countries with different monetary regimes could also serve as a test for their monetary hypothesis. Facilitating the cross-sectional natural experiment was the fact that the international gold standard, which had been suspended during World War I, was laboriously rebuilt during the 1920s (in a somewhat modified form called the gold-exchange standard). Countries that adhered to the international gold standard were essentially required to maintain a fixed exchange rate with other gold-standard countries. Moreover, because the United States was the dominant economy on the gold standard during this period (with some competition from France), countries adhering to the gold standard were forced to match the contractionary monetary policies and price deflation being experienced in the United States. Importantly for identification purposes, however, the gold standard was not adhered to uniformly as the Depression proceeded. A few countries for historical or political reasons never joined the gold standard. Others were forced off early, because of factors such as internal politics, weak domestic banking conditions, and the local influence of competing economic doctrines. Other countries, notably France and the other members of the so-called Gold Bloc, had a strong ideological commitment to gold and therefore remained on the gold standard as long as possible. Friedman and Schwartz's insight was that, if monetary contraction was in fact the source of economic depression, then countries tightly constrained by the gold standard to follow the United States into deflation should have suffered relatively more severe economic downturns. Although not conducting a formal statistical analysis, Friedman and Schwartz gave a number of salient examples to show that the more tightly constrained a country was by the gold standard (and, by default, the more closely bound to follow U.S. monetary policies), the more severe were both its monetary contraction and its declines in prices and output. One can read their discussion as dividing countries into four categories. The first category consisted of countries that did not adhere to the gold standard at all or perhaps adhered only very briefly. The example cited by Friedman and Schwartz was China. As they wrote (p. 361), "China was on a silver rather than a gold standard. As a result, it had the equivalent of a floating exchange rate with respect to gold-standard countries. A decline in the gold price of silver had the same effect as a depreciation in the foreign exchange value of the Chinese yuan. The effect was to insulate Chinese internal economic conditions from the worldwide depression. . . . And that is what happened. From 1929 to 1931, China was hardly affected internally by the holocaust that was sweeping the gold-standard world, just as in 1920-21, Germany had been insulated by her hyperinflation and associated floating exchange rate." Subsequent research (for example, Choudhri and Kochin, 1980) has identified other countries that, like China, did not adhere to the gold standard and hence escaped the worst of the Depression. Two examples are Spain, where the internal instability that ultimately led to the Spanish Civil War prevented the country from re-adopting the gold standard in the 1920s, and Japan, which was forced from the gold standard after being on it for only a matter of months. The Depression in Spain was quite mild, and Japan experienced a powerful recovery almost immediately after abandoning its short-lived experiment with gold. The second category consisted of countries that had restored the gold standard in the 1920s but abandoned it early in the Depression, typically in the fall of 1931. As Friedman and Schwartz observed (p. 362), the first major country to leave the gold standard was Great Britain, which was forced off gold in September 1931. Several trading partners, among them the Scandinavian countries, followed Britain's lead almost immediately. The effect of leaving gold was to free domestic monetary policy and to stop the monetary contraction. What was the consequence of this relaxed pressure on the money stock? Friedman and Schwartz noted (p. 362) that "[t]he trough of the depression in Britain and the other countries that accompanied Britain in leaving gold was reached in the third quarter of 1932. [In contrast, i]n the countries that remained on the gold standard or, like Canada, that went only part way with Britain, the Depression dragged on." Third were countries that remained on gold but had ample reserves or were attracting gold inflows. The key example was France (see p. 362), the leader of the Gold Bloc. After its stabilization in 1928, France attracted gold reserves well out of proportion to the size of its economy. France's gold inflows allowed it to maintain its money supply and avoid a serious downturn until 1932. However, at that point, France's liquidation of non-gold foreign exchange reserves and its banking problems began to offset the continuing gold inflows, reducing the French money stock. A serious deflation and declines in output began in France, which, as Friedman and Schwartz pointed out, did not reach its trough until April 1935, much later than Great Britain and other countries that left gold early. Fourth, and perhaps the worst hit, were countries that rejoined the gold standard but had very low gold reserves and banking systems seriously weakened by World War I and the ensuing hyperinflations. Friedman and Schwartz mention Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Romania as examples of this category (p. 361). These countries suffered not only deflation but also extensive banking and financial crises, making their plunge into depression particularly precipitous. The powerful identification achieved by this categorization of countries by Friedman and Schwartz is worth reemphasizing. If the Depression had been the product primarily of nonmonetary forces, such as changes in autonomous spending or in productivity, then the nominal exchange rate regime chosen by each country would have been largely irrelevant. The close connection among countries' exchange rate regimes, their monetary policies, and the behavior of domestic prices and output, is strong evidence for the proposition that monetary forces played a central role not just in the U.S. depression but in the world as a whole. Of course, those familiar with more recent work on the Great Depression will recognize that Friedman and Schwartz's idea of categorizing countries by exchange rate regime has been widely extended by subsequent researchers. Notably, in the paper that revived Friedman and Schwartz's temporarily dormant insight, Choudhri and Kochin (1980) considered the relative performances of Spain (which, as mentioned, did not adopt the gold standard), three Scandinavian countries (which left gold with Great Britain in September 1931), and four countries that remained part of the French-led Gold Bloc (the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Poland). They found that the countries that remained on gold suffered much more severe contractions in output and prices than the countries leaving gold. In a highly influential paper, Eichengreen and Sachs (1985) examined a number of key macro variables for ten major countries over 1929-35, finding that countries that left gold earlier also recovered earlier. Bernanke and James (1991) confirmed the findings of Eichengreen and Sachs for a broader sample of twenty-four (mostly industrialized) countries (see also Bernanke and Carey, 1996), and Campa (1990) did the same for a sample of Latin American countries. Bernanke (1995) showed that not only did adherence to the gold standard predict deeper and more extended depression, as had been noted by earlier authors, but also that the behavior of various key macro variables, such as real wages and real interest rates, differed across gold-standard and non-gold-standard countries in just the way one would expect if the driving shocks were monetary in nature. The most detailed narrative discussion of how the gold standard propagated the Depression around the world is, of course, the influential book by Eichengreen (1992). Eichengreen (2002) reviews the conclusions of his book and concludes largely that they are quite compatible with the Friedman and Schwartz approach. The Role of Bank Failures
Yet another striking feature of the Great Contraction in the United States was the massive extent of banking panics and failures, culminating in the Bank Holiday of March 1933, in which the entire U.S. banking system was shut down. During the Depression decade, something close to half of all U.S. commercial banks either failed or merged with other banks. Friedman and Schwartz take the unusually severe and protracted U.S. banking panic as yet another opportunity to apply their identification methodology. Their argument, in short, is that under institutional arrangements that existed before the establishment of the Federal Reserve, bank failures of the scale of those in 1929-33 would not have occurred, even in an economic downturn as severe as that in the Depression. For doctrinal and institutional reasons to be detailed in a moment, however, the extraordinary spate of bank failures did occur and led in turn to the massive extinction of bank deposits and an abnormally large decline in the stock of money. Because the decline in money induced by bank panics would not have occurred under previous regimes, Friedman and Schwartz argued, it can be treated as partially exogenous and thus a potential cause of the extraordinary declines in output and prices that followed. Before the creation of the Federal Reserve, Friedman and Schwartz noted, bank panics were typically handled by banks themselves--for example, through urban consortiums of private banks called clearinghouses. If a run on one or more banks in a city began, the clearinghouse might declare a suspension of payments, meaning that, temporarily, deposits would not be convertible into cash. Larger, stronger banks would then take the lead, first, in determining that the banks under attack were in fact fundamentally solvent, and second, in lending cash to those banks that needed to meet withdrawals. Though not an entirely satisfactory solution--the suspension of payments for several weeks was a significant hardship for the public--the system of suspension of payments usually prevented local banking panics from spreading or persisting (Gorton and Mullineaux, 1987). Large, solvent banks had an incentive to participate in curing panics because they knew that an unchecked panic might ultimately threaten their own deposits. It was in large part to improve the management of banking panics that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. However, as Friedman and Schwartz discuss in some detail, in the early 1930s the Federal Reserve did not serve that function. The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's infamous 'liquidationist' thesis, that weeding out "weak" banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system. Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System. Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks--which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed--felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view. In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. Bank failures and depositor withdrawals greatly reduced the quantity of bank deposits, consequently reducing the money supply. The result, they argued, was greater deflation and output decline than would have otherwise occurred. A couple of objections can be raised to the Friedman-Schwartz inference. One logical possibility is that the extraordinary rate of bank failure of the 1930s, rather than causing the subsequent declines in output and prices, occurred because depositors and others anticipated the collapse of the economy--that is, that the banking panics were endogenous to the expected state of the economy. Friedman and Schwartz's institutional arguments persuade me that this is unlikely. If previous arrangements had been in place, bank panics would not have been allowed to progress to the degree they did, independent of the severity of the downturn. Moreover, I don't find it plausible that, in 1930 and 1931, depositors and bankers fully anticipated the severity of the downturn still to come. A second possibility is that banking panics contributed to the collapse of output and prices through nonmonetary mechanisms. My own early work (Bernanke, 1983) argued that the effective closing down of the banking system might have had an adverse impact by creating impediments to the normal intermediation of credit, as well as by reducing the quantity of transactions media. Friedman and Schwartz anticipated this argument and adduced as contrary evidence a comparison of the United States and Canada (p. 352). They pointed out that (1) Canada's monetary policy was tied to that of the United States by a fixed exchange rate; (2) Canada had no significant bank failures; but (3) Canada's output declines were as severe as those of the United States. Friedman and Schwartz concluded that Canada's economy declined because of its enforced monetary contraction--whether that monetary contraction took place through bank failures or was enforced by the exchange-rate regime was immaterial. I would argue that Canada, both being a commodity exporter and being unusually highly integrated with the United States, may not have been fully representative of the experience of all countries in the 1930s. For example, in Bernanke (1995, table 3), I showed using a sample of twenty-six countries that, with the exchange-rate regime held constant, countries suffering severe banking panics had subsequent declines in output that were significantly worse than those in countries with stable banking systems. This result supports the possibility of an additional, nonmonetary channel for bank failures. At the same time, my results were also strongly supportive of the view that adherence to the gold standard, and the associated monetary contraction, was of first-order importance in explaining which countries suffered severe depressions. Thus, as I have always tried to make clear, my argument for nonmonetary influences of bank failures is simply an embellishment of the Friedman-Schwartz story; it in no way contradicts the basic logic of their analysis. Benjamin Strong and the Leadership Vacuum
Finally, what is probably Friedman and Schwartz's most controversial "natural experiment" stems from the premature death, in 1928, of America's preeminent central banker, Benjamin Strong. Strong, who was Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the de facto equivalent to a Fed Chairman today, had led the Federal Reserve throughout the 1920s. Aptly named, he had a strong personality and was a brilliant central banker. Quite plausibly, his personality and skills created a leadership position within a Federal Reserve System that--as suggested by its name--was intended by the Congress to be a relatively decentralized institution. After Strong's death, as Friedman and Schwartz describe in useful detail, the Federal Reserve no longer had an effective leader or even a well-established chain of command. Members of the Board in Washington, jealous of the traditional powers of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, strove for greater influence; and Strong's successor, George Harrison, did not have the experience or personality to stop them. Regional banks also began to assert themselves more. Thus, power became diffused; worse, what power there was accrued to men who did not understand central banking from a national and international point of view, as Strong had. The leadership vacuum and the generally low level of central banking expertise in the Federal Reserve System was a major problem that led to excessive passivity and many poor decisions by the Fed in the years after Strong's death. Friedman and Schwartz argued in their book that if Strong had lived, many of the mistakes of the Great Depression would have been avoided. This proposition has been highly controversial and has led to detailed examinations of what Strong's views "really were" on various matters of monetary policymaking. This counterfactual debate somewhat misses the point, in my opinion. We don't know what would have happened had Strong lived; but what we do know is that the central bank of the world's economically most important nation in 1929 was essentially leaderless and lacking in expertise. This situation led to decisions, or nondecisions, which might well not have occurred under either better leadership or a more centralized institutional structure. And associated with these decisions, we observe a massive collapse of money, prices, and output. Thus, it seems to me that the death of Strong does qualify as one more natural experiment with which to try to identify the effects of monetary forces in the Great Depression. Conclusion
The brilliance of Friedman and Schwartz's work on the Great Depression is not simply the texture of the discussion or the coherence of the point of view. Their work was among the first to use history to address seriously the issues of cause and effect in a complex economic system, the problem of identification. Perhaps no single one of their "natural experiments" alone is convincing; but together, and enhanced by the subsequent research of dozens of scholars, they make a powerful case indeed. For practical central bankers, among which I now count myself, Friedman and Schwartz's analysis leaves many lessons. What I take from their work is the idea that monetary forces, particularly if unleashed in a destabilizing direction, can be extremely powerful. The best thing that central bankers can do for the world is to avoid such crises by providing the economy with, in Milton Friedman's words, a "stable monetary background"--for example as reflected in low and stable inflation. Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again. Best wishes for your next ninety years. |
About
-You will be one of the first to get one of the very first LFN Bike in the world.
-You will save money on transportation.
-You will feel better helping clean the environment and your body will thank you.
We've been working on LFN Bike for years. The prototype is ready funded by ourselves. Production is getting closer and we need your support to start producing. It has taken too long, we've come a long way and done everything possible in our hands. Your support is crucial in making this dream come true. Help us spread the word, tell your friends about LFN Bike they might want to have this beautiful machine.
Prototype is 100% tested and ready, now our focus is on:
All funds will be assign to manufacture all different components and necessary expenses of LFN Bike. Since this is a new and unique concept the manufacture costs are more expensive then a regular bike. We are asking for enough time to develop all the custom parts and give manufacturers the time to familiarize themselves with the different components to manufacture them, test them and approve each part accordingly.
We are very excited to bring you this beautiful and stunning LFN Bike. It was built from scratch and we worked in good faith to provide the best possible bike that we can develop. Even though; we feel 100% confident in the results, we still reserve the right to send you an upgraded version of LFN Bike. Support us to make this new machine roll on the streets of your hometown. Get your LFN Bike and start climbing the mountain without the mountain.
Is not necessary to learn something new to ride LFN Bike since walking, running, riding a bike, stepping, or climbing are part of your daily routine. All those natural body motions are what you need to ride LFN Bike.
We are not here to sale existing bicycles on this awesome platform, we are here to try to make a dream come true. This is a totally new concept, so new that we haven't named the bike yet. That's why we use the three letters "LFN", which means "LOOKING FOR NAME". And yes, it is our concept, Imagine this: "Us claiming the design and development of the bike, then you find it on sale in another Country designed and developed by another company" that would be embarrassing and sad. We guaranty that our Bike is not on the market in any country, we dreamed it, designed it, developed it, patented it, and brought it to you to get your support. So...
Risks and challenges
Risks are everywhere, at any time and with everyone especially producing a new product with many unique components. Below are some risks we may encounter and what we are doing to minimize them.
- Product life: We have been testing this prototype for 2 years (real testing) on the streets, uphill, bumps, weather conditions, maximum strength leg power with an over 250 lbs rider. It has been working with no problems, but you never know if there are hidden issues that could arise, that's why we are trying to find any potential weaknesses to solve them before they become a problem.
- Production: In this matter is where some issues may visit us. To try to mitigate this, we are going to invest extra time to make adjustments on possible delays.
-Manufacturer: we have chosen manufacturers that are recognized in producing bicycles and others who specialize in producing CNC parts, gearbox, and other components, but still something out of our control can occur.
-Quality and Control: A member of our team and an agent who specializes in bikes will be in China checking the quality and control to make sure production is been done the way we need it. Keep in mind that checking quality and control of all parts will start at the same time and that may bring some delays.
Q&A
What does LFN Bike means?
It means "Looking For Name" Bike, Hopefully we can name the bike before the campaign ends.
What colors are available?
On this edition only black color.
What is the difference between LFN Bike and regular bikes?
Well, we see it this way; lets say that a regular bike and LFN Bike are fruits, one is an APPLE the other one is a MANGO. They are different kinds of fruits so it depends on what you crave. There is no point of comparison.
What size is the frame?
On this edition the frame is made to be a standard size to fit most from 4'11" to 6'11"
What is the maximum weight support?
Prototype has been tested with 250 lbs, we can not recommend more than that for this edition.
What are the dimensions of the bike?
Length is 74"
Height (at handlebars) is 44" and (with extensions) 49"
Width (at handlebars) is 18" 1/2"
How much is the total weigh of LFN Bike?
The prototype weights 55 lbs , the plan is to make LFN Bike lighter for the riders.
What happens if LFN Bike gets a puncture?
To fix it, is the same as a regular bike
Can this be used in NYC?
There are some restrictions on e-bikes in N.Y. State, please check with the authorities, they have frequent changes on this type of regulations.
What size are the tires?
700C
How many watts is the motor?
350W motor for USA - 250W for other Countries
What is the range of the battery?
Electric/Pedal assist range up to 35-60 miles (it may vary with rider, speed, weight and terrain conditions).
Only Electric Power Range - up to 20 miles (it may vary with rider speed, weight and terrain conditions).
Battery is 48V 10ah
What Is the frame made of?
Aluminum.
Is this Bike different from the regular bikes?
Yes, on the motion system and exercise results is Completely different.
How many speed?
Up to 7 speeds.
Does the bike comes with warranty?
One year, on defective parts. However, it is inevitable the normal wear of tires, bearings, brake pads and rollers those are not covered, neither altered, opened or unsealed gearbox and cassettes.
How fast is this LFN Bike?
Electric, Up to 20 MPH (level ground) Leg power, it depends on the rider strength.
When will I receive my LFN Bike?
Please check the Perk Timeline graphic.
Do I need to wear a helmet?
Riders should check on bicycle States law of their Country.
Who is responsible to pay any additional taxes, duties or VAT?
The backers.
What is the shipping cost?
USA is $199 and International is $249. (Note: The buyer is responsible for all local tax/duty fees)
Where can I buy replacement parts?
Our plan is to offer replacement parts, but even better news is that most of the parts including tires, tubes, pedals, chain, brakes, and many more can be purchased at any regular bike shop.
Is TAX, VAT and duty included in the price?
TAX, VAT and duty is not included in the price.
*Up to 52 Miles With Pedal Assist |
PORTLAND, Ore. – The Portland Timbers have signed T2 winger Victor Arboleda to a short-term agreement ahead of their 2016-17 Scotiabank CONCACAF Champions League match against Deportivo Saprissa at Providence Park on Wednesday, Oct. 19, it was announced today.
In his first season with T2, Arboleda, 20, appeared in 25 USL games (20 starts), tallying four goals and one assist. Earlier this season, Arboleda was named to the USL’s 20 Under 20 list, ranking 20th in his first USL season as one of the top young players in the league.
MLS clubs may sign players from their USL affiliate to short-term agreements (up to four-day contracts) for Scotiabank CONCACAF Champions League, Amway Canadian Championship, Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup and exhibition matches. An MLS club may sign a player to a maximum of four short-term agreements each season (maximum of 16 days).
Playing their final group-stage match of the 2016-17 Scotiabank CONCACAF Champions League, the Timbers will face Deportivo Saprissa at Providence Park on Wednesday, Oct. 19, beginning at 7 p.m. (Pacific). Wednesday’s match will feature a live stream in English on CONCACAF’s Facebook page with a tape-delayed broadcast on Univision Deportes Network. |
“What an unlikely hero!” exclaimed Mike Breen, play-by-play announcer for game 3 of the Portland Trail Blazers vs. Houston Rockets playoff series, after Troy Daniels drained the tie-breaking three with 11 seconds left. The Rockets would not relinquish that lead, their lone victory so far in the series. The shot would prompt headlines like this, “Troy Daniels, D-League call-up, saves Rockets’ season,” “Rockets win game three thriller over Blazers as Troy Daniels shines,” and “Houston beats Portland on a game-winning 3-pointer by unheralded rookie Troy Daniels.” No one saw this coming, but should they have?
How unlikely was it that Daniels got a chance to shoot and drain that three? Not as unlikely as you think. The five-man crew on the court during that shot; Dwight Howard, James Harden, Jeremy Lin, Patrick Beverley and the aforementioned Daniels. Your first question must be…where is Chandler Parsons? Parsons entered the OT period with five fouls and was called for his sixth just 1:40 in, bringing in their next best bench shooter, Troy Daniels.
It made sense that he was on the court, but why did he get the ball? Let’s go back to Virginia Commonwealth University to answer that question.
After toiling away on Shaka Smart’s1 “havoc”-based VCU teams for two years, Daniels was given a chance to come off the bench in his junior season. The shooting guard took almost seven threes/game for Smart, converting 38% of them. This jumped to 8.6/game in his senior year, and putting 40% of them through the net.2
Still, Daniels didn’t have much hype leading into the NBA draft, and that led to him going undrafted. He was signed by the Charlotte Bobcats originally, but underwhelming performance in the Summer League3 resulted in Daniels being let go. He resurfaced once or twice with Houston, but spent the majority of the year with their D-League affiliate, the Rio Grande Valley Vipers.
The 6’4” guard took more threes per game than any other player, by three. Daniels averaged 12.5 attempts per game from deep, while shooting 40.1%. High volume, high success as evidenced by his D-League shot chart.4
Daniels’ numbers from beyond the arc were so good that he broke the D-League record for number of three pointers made in a season in just the 20th game.5 He would finish with 240 makes on 599 attempts.
The Roanoke, Virginia native got into five games for the Rockets during the regular season, including the season finale against the New Orleans Pelicans where he took 11 threes, hitting six of them (54.5%).
Earlier in the game three win, Daniels went two-for-five from deep. All of this leads me to one conclusion; why was it such a surprise that Daniels was the one taking this shot? Yes, Harden, Lin and probably even Beverley were more likely players to see take the shot, but would they have been the right decision? Maybe. But, looking at the play again, there is a scramble for the ball. Confusion ensues and Lin finds himself in the middle of three Blazers defenders. Lin finds Daniels calling for the ball on the left-wing. Harden is wide open in the right-corner, OK, that’s a surprise. The rest could potentially be history in the shooting career of Daniels.
Where does Daniels go from here? At 6’4” and 205 lbs., Daniels doesn’t have the height advantage to play anywhere on the wing like Kyle Korver does (and he doesn’t shoot 47% from three…yet). Daniels career could resemble a late-career Ray Allen more likely. He doesn’t have a great ability to get to the hoop, only shooting 2% better from the field as a whole than he did from three. This isn’t a future Harden, this is a deadly catch and shoot specialist. If Daniels develops, this could spell the end of Parsons in Houston because of the cost of re-signing him in the future.6
For now, let’s just enjoy the emergence of a new cult favorite and possible three-point machine, as evidenced here – The Sniper from the Vipers. |
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(TFC Op-Ed) Washington, DC – The airwaves are full of pundits screaming about violence against police officers. These are the same pundits that disregarded the warnings of experts in the field of insurgency when the Ferguson riots broke out and chose to dismiss the rioters as “thugs.” They continued to cheerlead for more police militarization even after the first officers were shot in targeted killings. They are now continuing their efforts to support police militarization. Those of us that warned of this last year, have watched in horror as all of our predictions came true. We are now in the fourth stage of the cycle of insurgency. The fifth stage is open insurrection. It is time for officers to dismiss the pundits on Fox News that have never held a firearm outside of a range and listen to people that know what they are talking about. None of us that have made these warnings did so because these are things we want to happen, we did it in an attempt to stop them from happening. A year after my first article on the subject, every single prediction has come true. Can the pundits on Fox News say that? No, and listening to their rhetoric has caused more cops and innocents to die.
To understand where we are headed, we have to know what has already happened. For a bit of background, review a brief synopsis of the cycle of insurgency from an article written in August of 2014:
Pamphlets:
Prior to the digital age, pamphlets were the main method of spreading dissent around the world. The pamphlets examined and questioned the authority of the contemporary governments and control systems. In the modern world, pamphlets have been replaced by blogs, memes, social media, and to a smaller degree, adversarial journalists.
Reactive Protests:
Once the seed of dissent is planted, people take to the streets to voice their opposition to the government. These protests occur after the control systems of the era attempt to diffuse an offending incident.
Preemptive Rioting:
Preemptive rioting follows a period of reactive protests that go unanswered by the government. The people begin taking to the streets and destroying private and public property as soon as an offending incident takes place, rather than waiting and hoping for the government to police itself.
Military or Law Enforcement backlash and crackdowns:
These riots and small incidents of resistance trigger a government reaction. The control systems of the country tighten their grip on the people and further curtail civil liberties and infringe on people’s rights. The government crackdown fuels the resistance movement as more people tire of government intrusion.
Widespread rebellion and insurrection:
At some point during the crackdown, an incident occurs that tosses a match into the powder keg of dissent. At this point, open rebellion occurs.
***
We are now in the Fourth Stage and the media that you falsely believe represents the views of the American people are calling for a harder crackdown. From the same article last year, written before NYPD officers were ambushed while sitting in their car:
“Without serious reform in what’s left of the justice system, the future is not one of officers walking free after killing an unarmed person; it will be one of officers becoming the target of sporadic violence. Despite the propaganda, being a cop in the United States is safer than being a trash collector. That will change, and officers will become targets of opportunity for those that previously sought reform through peaceful means.
“Those in departments that have excused the actions of their officers and made significant peaceful reform impossible, have now set the stage for their officers to be shot while sitting at traffic lights. Only 61% of murders are solved in the United States. Imagine how hard it will be to solve an officer’s murder that is completely random and lacks a direct connection to the shooter. Without a clear motive, there is no place to even start investigating.”
Certainly, departments all over the country will be issuing memos explaining the new security procedures to counter the threat of targeted killings. Some officers may have already received one. Allow me to guess its contents. The memo suggests riding in pairs, only answering a call once back up has arrived, sitting at separate tables when you eat in a restaurant, and performing all actions as a team to provide greater security. I’d be willing to bet that the phrase “safety in numbers” is somewhere in the memo. These tactics will all fail. The attackers will simply upgrade from firearms to pipe bombs. An even worse scenario is that officers do succeed in making themselves too difficult to attack. The insurgents will stop targeting cops and begin targeting their families while the officers are at work. This is what has happened in every insurgency in history.
[taboola]
It is extremely important to note that in all of recorded history, an insurgency that matured through the phases and reached this stage has never been quelled through force. Ever. It may have been delayed, but the insurgency simply went underground until opposition forces relaxed. In some cases it took 800 years to achieve an insurgent victory. Once an insurgency reaches this stage, it wins. It is that simple. See: Irish Republic Army.
At this point, in a form of bizarre just deserts, the only option law enforcement has is the same option it offered to the American people, which prompted this cycle: comply or die.
Certain police departments may believe they are isolated from the violence because of their geographic location. They aren’t. Because of social media, events that historically would have only prompted violence within the immediate vicinity can prompt violence on the other side of the nation. We are so close to an open insurrection in this country that it boggles the mind. If police proceed with a law enforcement crackdown, events could spiral out of control and open insurrection could happen tomorrow.
Some in the media are calling for the arrests of the leaders of Black Lives Matter, Cop Block, and other organizations. This is possibly the worst move law enforcement could make. This gives the cause martyrs. To continue the Irish comparison, after the Easter Rising the British government arrested, interned, and even executed some of the rebellion’s leaders. The names of those men are still recited in songs today, 100 years later. It fanned the flames of rebellion and as Éamon de Valera is said to have remarked while waiting for the British government to decide between executing or imprisoning him, “every one of us they shoot brings ten more to the cause.” Today, with social media, the effects of martyr-based propaganda are even stronger. As a more recent example, ask those associated with the Anonymous collective how much influence people like Jeremy Hammond, Aaron Swartz, and Dennis Collins hold. Two of them are deceased, one sits rotting in a federal prison, and yet they are still massive recruiting tools.
Is this guy really saying to give in to violence? Yes. That is exactly what I am saying. There was an opportunity for a negotiated peace after Ferguson. Law enforcement chose to refuse. Law enforcement chose to dismiss the threat. Law enforcement chose to listen to pundits within the media that were only interested in pandering to their viewers. Now, that time has past. My best advice: immediately decommission the MRAPs, end no-knock raids for non-violent offenders, make certain the suspect is home and that you have the correct house before executing a raid, issue body cameras to all officers, end intrusive electronic surveillance, decommission the drones, and adopt a “do not fire until fired upon” policy. The end result of this scenario will be law enforcement demilitarizing; the only thing left to determine is how many cops and innocents die along the way.
Those in political office do not care about police officers’ lives. The last time the United States came this close to an open insurrection we had a President that understood insurgency. In fact, he understood it so well that he is responsible for the SEAL Teams and Green Berets having the role they have today. He understood that once it reaches a certain point, violent revolution is inevitable. He said:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”
Of course, this is President John F. Kennedy. The threat of open insurrection was during the Civil Rights movement. The reader may still be under the false narrative that the Civil Rights movement was a nonviolent movement. While Dr. Martin Luther King played an important role in the building the movement that would finally achieve victory, he was most important in the first stage of the cycle. In the end, it was not “I have a dream” that forced the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it was “I have a gun.” The reader can take a detailed timeline of the Civil Rights movement and compare it to the stages listed above. For the sake of brevity, we will jump in at the point where the targeted killings of law enforcement began. John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, had this conversation:
Robert Kennedy said
“The Negro Reverend Walker…he said that the Negroes, when dark comes tonight, they’re going to start going after the policemen – headhunting – trying to shoot to kill policemen. He says it’s completely out of hand….you could trigger off a good deal of violence around the country now, with Negroes saying they’ve been abused for all these years and they’re going to follow the ideas of the Black Muslims now…If they feel on the other hand that the federal government is their friend, that it’s intervening for them, that it’s going to work for them, then it will head some of that off. I think that’s the strongest argument for doing something…”
President Kennedy replied
“First we have to have law and order, so the Negro’s not running all over the city… If the [local Birmingham desegregation] agreement blows up, the other remedy we have under that condition is to send legislation [The Civil Rights Act] up to congress this week as our response…As a means of providing relief we have to have legislation.”
John and Robert avoided an open insurrection by recognizing the signs of insurgency and providing relief. There is no person in political office at the national level that has this foresight today. The changes will have to be made at the local and state levels. The reader may be wondering why this historical tidbit was left out of their high school history book. It really isn’t in the government’s interest to tell citizens that the fastest way to achieve reform is to begin shooting government employees.
Officers and politicians can ignore this article as they have the articles over the last year. If they choose to do so, they should rework their fiscal budget to buy more flags to put on coffins. Those funerals are inevitable without immediate and drastic reform.
Please, post this this article to your local police department’s Facebook page. While many may be cheering the idea of open insurrection, most do not understand the casualties and hardships associated with an insurgency. Since the federal government is unwilling to intercede, it is up to the American citizen to try to stop this from occurring. We have to take responsibility and stop the scenarios laid out above from happening.
This article (What Happens After Cops Start Getting Shot?) by Justin King is an opinion editorial (OP-ED). The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of Anti-Media. It originally appeared on The Fifth Column and was used with permission. Tune in! Anti-Media Radio airs Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Help us fix our typos: [email protected].
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“The U.K. is ahead of the U.S. in terms of radical sexuality and gender, they’re far ahead,” the author said.
An article this week in The New York Times referred to a speaker using the honorific Mx. However, Philip B. Corbett, a Times editor who oversees the newspaper’s style manual and usage rules, called that appearance of Mx. in The Times an exception. “I don’t think we’re likely to adopt Mx. in the near future,” he said. “It remains too unfamiliar to most people, and it’s not clear when or if it will emerge as a widely adopted term.”
Linguistic experts say it is harder to change usage habits of words uttered frequently in speech, such as “she” and “he.” But a realignment in honorifics may be more quickly achieved because courtesy titles are less often spoken than written, like in the completion and mailing of government, health care and financial documents, as well as in newspapers and other media publications.
Katherine C. Martin, the head of United States dictionaries for the Oxford University Press, said that she and her colleagues were surprised by the huge, mostly positive reaction to online reports regarding the incorporation of the title. She said Mx. was on the “new-words watch list” for OxfordDictionaries.com.
The first citation of Mx. found by Ms. Martin’s team dates to 1977, in a publication called The Single Parent. In the midst of the Ms. era, an article in it wondered whether a courtesy title that masks gender might help ameliorate any bias against single parents. “On second thought, maybe both sexes should be called Mx.,” the article said. “That would solve the gender problem entirely.”
Mx.’s next notable appearance, Ms. Martin said, came in the early 1980s, when some people engaged in nascent forms of digital communication and did not know one another’s gender. In the last decade, she added, it popped up regarding people who chose not to identify with either gender or were in transition. |
MONTREAL – Seated on a sofa across from a man he believed to be a crime boss able to smuggle him out of Canada on a ship, Ismael Habib explained last February why he wanted to get to Syria so badly.
He said he dreamed of living under Shariah law in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and was prepared to die in the fight to establish Islamic rule.
“We love death like you love life,” he explained during the meeting in Montreal. It was a recurring theme in Habib’s nearly three hours of conversation with the man who peppered his speech with Québécois curses.
It turned out the supposed crime boss was an undercover RCMP officer, and Friday the video of Habib’s encounter was played at his trial. He is charged with attempting to travel to Syria to commit a terrorist act and giving false information to obtain a passport.
The officer, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, testified earlier about how he had won Habib’s confidence through a series of conversations on the phone, in restaurants and in parking lots.
In the video, Habib recounts how as a teenager in Montreal he got involved in street gangs and drugs. He was raised a Muslim, but the only thing he prayed for was to have a girlfriend.
That changed at about age 18 when he became devout. He said he believed in Shariah. “Shariah is Islamic law,” he said. “When you steal, they cut off your hand.”
Now, he said, he believes he is headed for paradise if he dies following God’s path. He said he wanted to be sure to pay off his debts before leaving for Syria because if he died in debt, he would be denied entry to paradise and the 72 women – “beautiful and virgins,” he said – awaiting him there.
The agent quizzed Habib on other Montrealers he knew who would be willing to pay to be smuggled by ship to the war zone. Habib suggested he try the mosque of Adil Charkaoui, a controversial local imam. The
Assahaba mosque where Charkaoui preaches, also known as the Centre islamique de l’Est de Montréal, has been linked to several young people who left for Syria or attempted to leave.
“You know he gives course to the youth and there are a lot of young people who are riled up,” Habib said.
He described a 2013 trip to Syria during which he met up with his brother-in-law and they connected with Chechen jihadis. He said he spent three months in Syria before ISIL solidified its control. There were multiple jihadi groups at the time and the atmosphere was mostly relaxed.
“Like a summer camp,” he said. “You chill, you have fun. You see different groups and drink tea with the Syrians.”
But one time his group captured a soldier from the Syrian army, and Habib described to the agent how he whipped the prisoner.
He said his jihad involves fighting to establish an Islamic state in the Middle East, not attacking civilians in the West.
“I wouldn’t do attacks here. That’s not my style,” he said. “I’m not against them. If they do it, that’s their business.”
He said the November 2015 attacks in France were deserved because of French intervention in the campaign against ISIL. He said he was “really happy” when the attacks occurred, killing 130 people.
The video shows the two men at ease, laughing frequently. But at the beginning of the meeting, Habib asked the agent to leave his phone outside the room in case it could be used to eavesdrop on them.
As a hidden camera and microphones captured the scene, the agent said he considered the request an insult and kept his phone next to him.
• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: grayhamilton |
SAN JOSE, California: Jarryd Hayne is big and fast. That may seem like the most obvious sentence ever written, but it's that rare combination that allowed him to slide a foot into the door of the National Football League and it's what will keep evaluators interested in the former Rugby League star when he sputters and stumbles during his first season.
And there will be stumbles. They're inevitable for someone just starting out in America's favourite sport and doing so at the highest level possible. But Hayne has taken some smart initial steps as he jumps sports and continents.
Leap of faith: Jarryd Hayne faces a hard initiation with the San Francisco 49ers. Credit:Getty Images
First he chose the 49ers, whose first-year head coach, Jim Tomsula, is a veteran of NFL Europe, which once served as a developmental league for the NFL.
Tomsula made a name for himself working with men just like Hayne – players who had plenty of raw talent but very little experience in American football. He's patient and he knows how to teach. |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Monday tapped Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai to head the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which is expected to roll back many of the Obama Administration’s telecommunications and internet policies.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Ajit Pai (L) and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler testify at a House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee hearing on the FCC's FY2016 budget, on Capitol Hill in Washington March 24, 2015. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Pai, a former Justice Department, FCC and Capitol Hill staffer, in December predicted landmark “net neutrality” rules adopted in 2015 would not last. The son of Indian immigrants who grew up in Kansas, Pai said the commission should take a “weed whacker” to unneeded rules and was harshly critical of many FCC regulations imposed during the Obama administration.
“During the Trump administration, we will shift from playing defense at the FCC to going on offense,” he said in December. “We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation.”
Pai will also have a key role in deciding whether to approve or reject or impose conditions on mergers involving cable and telephone companies. In May, Pai opposed FCC conditions imposed on Charter Communication’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable.
Last week, then FCC chairman Tom Wheeler urged Republicans against dismantling internet access protections that bar service providers from slowing consumer access to web content.
Internet providers fear net neutrality rules make it harder to manage internet traffic and make investment in additional capacity less likely. The Republican-controlled Congress is also considering rewriting the net neutrality rules.
Pai said in 2015 that consumers would be worse under net neutrality and should “expect their bills to go up, and they should expect that broadband will be slower going forward.”
Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington state Democrat, criticized Pai in a letter to President Donald Trump Monday as “not a supporter of the FCC’s strong rules to protect an open internet, putting at risk our robust net neutrality rules and the three million internet economy jobs it supports.”
Under Wheeler, the FCC and major telecom and cable companies have been at odds over a number of big issues in recent years, including tougher broadband privacy rules and a proposal to allow pay-TV consumers to ditch set top boxes.
Comcast Corp, AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications Inc, Frontier Communications Corp, T-Mobile US Inc and Charter all praised Pai’s appointment in separate statements.
“Chairman Pai will work with his fellow commissioners to quickly and decisively put back in place the commonsense regulatory framework necessary to support the president’s agenda,” AT&T said.
However, advocacy group Free Press President Craig Aaron said Pai “has been on the wrong side of just about every major issue that has come before the FCC during his tenure. He’s never met a mega-merger he didn’t like or a public safeguard he didn’t try to undermine.”
U.S. Telecom, an industry trade group, said in a statement it shares Pai’s vision for a “future based on a bold but pragmatic strategy to erase the many regulatory barriers impeding the expansion of our nation’s communications infrastructure, and the jobs and economic opportunity that depend on it.”
Pai does not need Senate confirmation as chairman but his current term expires at year end and he will need to be reconfirmed to continue. |
December 18, 2012 | Emil Kako | Comments
I may be in the minority here, but my iPhone 5 has had horrible WiFi connectivity since the day I got my hands on it. We’ve had many people report to us here at iPD that they’ve experience similar issues, while threads on Apple’s support site have shown that we’re indeed not alone.
Unfortunately, the iOS 6.0.1 update didn’t fix the issue for us, so we’ve been waiting for this day to finally come. Apple has just pushed out iOS 6.0.2 to iPhone 5 and iPad Mini users addressing the infamous WiFi bug. I haven’t had the chance to try it yet, but I’m praying that this is the answer to all of my problems.
Head inside for the download links:
· iPad Mini (Wi-Fi) (iPad2,5) version 6.0.2 (Build 10A550), Download
· iPad Mini (GSM) (iPad2,6) version 6.0.2 (Build 10A8500), Download
· iPad Mini (CDMA) (iPad2,7) version 6.0.2 (Build 10A8500), Download
· iPhone 5 (GSM) (iPhone5,1) version 6.0.2 (Build 10A551), Download
· iPhone 5 (CDMA) (iPhone5,2) version 6.0.2 (Build 10A551), Download
Make sure to follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your circles on Google+ to be the first to hear about breaking iPhone news, tips, hacks, and more! |
In Seattle, Democratic Party activists have held enormous sway over the outcome of local elections. But now, as campaign season begins, a non-Democrat is causing a rift in one corner of the party. Kshama Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative Party, launched a long-shot bid for the Seattle City Council in 2013. With little money and few endorsements, she ousted a longtime Democratic incumbent, becoming the City Council's first Socialist member. "It’s exciting to be able to run yet another grassroots independent working-class campaign,” Sawant said. Now she’s back, running for the council again as the city moves to elect officials by district. And this time, prominent Democrats have announced they support her. They include King County Council member Larry Gossett and state Sen. Pramila Jayapal.
Sponsor
But the prospect of Democrats breaking ranks to support a Socialist doesn’t sit well with some party activists. “Philosophically it’s a problem that we’ve never dealt with before,” said David Corrado, chair of the 37th District Democrats in Southeast Seattle. The 37th District Democrats were set to co-sponsor a candidates’ forum with the 43rd District Democrats in which Sawant was invited to appear. But when some members realized the Socialist would be sharing a stage with Democrats, they objected strongly. “The concerns raised were that as a local Democratic group, our mission is to elect Democrats, and by lending our name, we were giving this stage to someone who is not a Democrat,” Corrado said.
Sponsor
So the 37th District Democrats' executive board pulled out of the forum and decided to hold its own —without Sawant. It also declined to extend an invitation to Josh Farris, a housing activist who is running against incumbent Bruce Harrell in City Council District 2. Farris, a Sawant supporter, says he's an independent. You can imagine the response from Sawant’s supporters. "I felt outraged,” said Jeanne Legault, a Democratic Party activist who supports Sawant. She helped draft a petition to have Sawant included in the forum. It was signed by 76 members. Legault said it shouldn’t matter what party Sawant aligns herself with, as long as she agrees with Democrats on key issues. “I think we need to open our tent a little bit, and include other minor party organizations, like the Green Party or the Socialist Party or whatever, because we are all on the same side and we are stronger working together,” Legault said.
Sponsor
After receiving the petition, the 37th District Democrats decided to cancel its candidates’ forum entirely. Legault wants the organization to draft by-laws that would allow members to endorse non-Democrats. Meantime, for Sawant’s District 3 seat, Legault will be leading an effort for the 37th District Democrats to take no position on the race. Corrado said it’s uncharted territory to have an incumbent who is not a Democrat and who sits far to the left of the Democratic Party. He said the entire membership of the 37th District Democrats would need to decide how inclusive they want their party to be. The 43rd District Democrats will go ahead with their candidates' forum at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Seattle. |
JPMorgan Chase's disclosure yesterday that it has lost $2 billion in the last six weeks through a failed hedging strategy has sparked renewed calls for tougher financial regulation.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) released a statement today calling the loss a debacle that needs to be prevented by breaking up the power of the six big banks in the U.S.
In the wake of yesterday's announcement, Securities and Exchange Commission regulators are already looking into the mega-bank for possible civil violations. According to the New York Times:
The inquiry, which is being run out of New York, will probably examine the bank’s past regulatory filings about the internal unit that placed the trades, as well as recent statements from the firm’s top executives.
Sanders has been vocal about the state of big banks for years, and in 2011 he told Ed Schultz on MSNBC: "Ed, today, you have six financial institutions, the largest six, that have assets that are the equivalent of 60 percent of the GDP of the United States of America."
Sanders' full statement from today notes:
The debacle at J.P. Morgan Chase reaffirms my view that the largest six banks in this country, including J.P. Morgan Chase, which have assets equivalent to two-thirds of our GDP, must be broken up. This is important in order to bring more competition into the financial marketplace and to prevent another ‘too-big-to-fail’ bailout. At a time when 23 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed, huge financial institutions should not be involved in ‘making wagers or high-stake bets.’ They should be investing in the productive economy creating jobs and improving our standard of living.
Other members of the House and Senate are also chastising the big bank.
"The argument that financial institutions do not need the new rules to help them avoid the irresponsible actions that led to the crisis of 2008 is at least $2 billion harder to make today," said Representative Barnie Frank, co-author of the Dodd-Frank financil reform law of 2010.
Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon, who has touted the bank's relative success during the financial crisis, has positioned himself strongly against post-crisis regulation--but as Reuters reports, his credibility is substantially undermined by the loss.
Dimon says that he does not believe that the hedge trades would have violated the Volcker Rule, which is still in the process of being finalized. The rule would "restrict the ability of banks whose deposits are federally insured from trading for their own benefit." But Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) says the rule would have likely prevented what just happened to JPMorgan. Levin told CNBC "If the regulators do what the law says and define hedging properly, this activity would not be permitted." Earlier this year, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street called Occupy the SEC drafted a letter criticizing the Volcker Rule and offering their own suggestions: |
A manhunt has been launched after an 18-year-old woman was found dead in a Wigan park.
A student was reported missing yesterday evening by her family after she failed to return from college and police are working to establish if she is the victim.
The body was found in local beauty spot Orrell Water Park at about 2.30am this morning after police received information 'via social media'.
They said she was found with head injuries.
Detective Superintendent Howard Millington said it was a 'brutal attack' of a kind 'rarely seen in Greater Manchester'. Pictured: Orrell Water Park, where the woman's body was found early this morning
The body of the 18-year-old girl was found in Orrell Water Park (pictured above) at about 2.30am this morning
Police said they can't rule out a sexual motivation for the attack. Pictured: An officer guards the entrance to the park
Pictured: Police at the scene investigating the death. Detective Superintendent Millington said: 'Things like this don't happen in Orrell'
Detective Superintendent Howard Millington said: 'This was a brutal attack on a young woman, the type rarely seen in Greater Manchester.
'We have a full investigation team working on finding out what exactly happened to her and to try and find the person who did this.'
He added: 'I understand that there will be many people in the community extremely worried, things like this don't happen in Orrell, but I would like to reassure them that we are working as hard as we possibly can to get the answers to all of the questions.'
Police also said two young women were reported to have been followed by two men in the area on Thursday.
Pictured: Police investigating at the scene in Wigan
Pictured: Flowers, which have already been laid for the victim of the attack
Pictured: Flowers laid at a sign near Orrell Water Park in Wigan
There will be a large police presence in the area and on the streets as the death is investigated.
Police said they 'can't rule out' a sexual motive in the investigation, but they don't yet have any suspects.
They also warned people from going near the area.
Detective Superintendent Millington added: 'This is very much an ongoing investigation, we will leave no stone unturned and myself and my team will not stop until we have found out exactly what happened and have brought whoever did this to justice.'
Pictured: A close-up of a bouquet of flowers left at the scene of the 18-year-old girl's death
Police said there will be a large police presence in the area (pictured) and on the streets as the death is investigated
Formal identification has yet to be established and police said they are keeping an open mind at this stage.
At a press conference this afternoon, Detective Superintendent Millington said he would dedicate 'significant resources' to the investigation.
Anyone with any information is asked to contact police on 0161 856 7103 or 101.
Alternatively, contact Crimestoppers - anonymously - on 0800 555 111. |
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called on Tuesday for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, courting Latino voters and drawing a line between herself and Republican rivals for the White House in 2016.
“We can’t wait any longer for a path to full and equal citizenship. Now, this is where I differ from everybody on the Republican side,” Clinton told a group of students at a high school in Nevada.
The Latino vote is likely to be crucial in the 2016 election, especially in potential swing states like Nevada and Colorado. Republicans are seeking to win a bigger slice of the Latino vote than in 2012 when they were perceived by many Hispanics as being too tough on illegal immigration
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a Republican who is weighing a White House bid, has proposed legal status for undocumented immigrants that falls short of full citizenship, although he has not ruled out some way for them to become Americans eventually.
Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for the November 2016 presidential election, said Republicans were offering “second-class status.”
“When they talk about legal status, that is code for
second-class status and we should never forget who this debate is about,” she said at Rancho High School.
The school is approximately 70 percent Hispanic and less than 10 miles north of the Las Vegas strip of casinos, a magnet for workers from all over the world.
Another potential rival of Clinton, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, played a prominent role in drafting a broad immigration bill in 2013 which ultimately failed in Congress. He has since backed off a comprehensive reform effort. |
A stream of US military intelligence reports accuse Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency of arming, training and financing the Taliban insurgency since 2004, the war logs reveal, bringing fresh scrutiny on one of the war's most contentious issues.
At least 180 files contain allegations of dirty tricks by the powerful agency with accounts of undercover agents training suicide bombers, bundles of money slipping across the border and covert support for a range of sensational plots including the assassination of President Hamid Karzai, attacks on Nato warplanes and even poisoning western troops' beer supply.
They also link the ISI to some of the war's most notorious commanders. In April 2007 for instance, the ISI is alleged to have sent 1,000 motorbikes to the warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani for suicide attacks in Khost and Logar provinces.
But for all their eye-popping details, the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity. Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred.
A retired senior American officer said ground-level reports were considered to be a mixture of "rumours, bullshit and second-hand information" and were weeded out as they passed up the chain of command. "As someone who had to sift through thousands of these reports, I can say that the chances of finding any real information are pretty slim," said the officer, who has years of experience in the region.
If anything, the jumble of allegations highlights the perils of collecting accurate intelligence in a complex arena where all sides have an interest in distorting the truth.
"The fog of war is particularly dense in Afghanistan," said Michael Semple, a former deputy head of the EU mission there. "A barrage of false information is being passed off as intelligence and anyone who wants to operate there needs to be able to sift through it. The opportunities to be misled are innumerable."
The shaky intelligence does not mean the US does not believe the ISI is supporting the Taliban. The spy agency nurtured the Taliban in the 1990s and, although it purported to sever its ties after 9/11, is believed to maintain the relationship.
The British and US governments have repeatedly urged Pakistan to root out the Taliban from their sanctuary inside the border, with little effect. In July 2008 the deputy head of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, flew to Islamabad to reportedly confront the ISI with evidence that the agency orchestrated a suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul that month which killed 54 people including the Indian defence attache. The CIA claimed to have intercepted phone conversations between ISI officers and the militants who carried out the attack.
Pakistani strategists see the Taliban as a useful proxy to marginalise the influence of arch-rival India. Indeed plots to attack Indian facilities in Afghanistan provide some of the most plausible allegations in the files. One report from November 2007 said the ISI was plotting an attack on the Indian consulate in Jalalabad; another, titled "ISI order murder and kidnappings", has the agency offering between $15,000 and $30,000 for the assassination of Indian road workers.
But many of the 180 reports appear to betray as much about the motivation of the sources than those of the alleged foreign puppet-masters. Some US officers were aware of this. One report from 2006 notes that an informant "divulges information for monetary remuneration and likely fabricated or exaggerated the above report for just that reason".
Some of the most striking claims come from the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's foremost spy agency and a bitter rival to the ISI.
In July and August 2008 the NDS passed information to the US that three Pakistan-trained militants plotting to kill Karzai had been groomed by a named ISI officer and had trained at the Zarb Momen camp outside Karachi. The attackers were Palestinian and Arab, the report said, and intended to strike during a visit by Karzai to a Kabul mosque or the luxury Serena hotel.
But the report's strong assertions fade under retrospective scrutiny. The predicted assault on Karzai never took place (the last reported attempt was in April 2008, four months earlier), and there is no known militant camp called Zarb Momen in Karachi, a city with hundreds of hardline madrasas. The al-Rashid Trust, a charity with militant links, publishes a magazine by the same name, said Amir Rana, an Islamabad-based militancy expert.
The miltiary's grading system offers one way of sifting the ISI file. Some 27 of the 180 reports are graded as C3 and above, meaning they come from a "fairly reliable source" and are "possibly true".
But many such reports appear highly implausible. In February 2007 the ISI and insurgents planned "to buy alcoholic drinks from markets in Miranshah [in Pakistan's tribal belt] and Peshawar [in order to] mix them with poison and use them for poisoning ANSF and ISAF troops" according to a C3 report. The Karzai plot is assessed to be "probably true".
Apparently more credible reports of ISI skulduggery are marked SEWOC, or Signals Intelligence Electronic Warfare Operations Centre, signifying they come from intercepted communications. One SEWOC report, in December 2007, accused the ISI of deploying children as suicide bombers. But the military source said that such intelligence was also prone to distortion, and that its value depended on whose conversation was being eavesdropped. "If we ever found out anything that the ISI or Pakistani military were somehow complicit in the insurgency, it never came from these sources. Never," he said.
One name that frequently surfaces is that of General Hamid Gul, director general of the ISI between 1987 and 1989, who is referenced in eight reports. One has him smuggling magnetic mines into Afghanistan to attack Nato troops; in another he is plotting to kidnap United Nations staff to bargain for imprisoned Pakistani militants. A report from January 2009 has Gul meeting Arab militants in Pakistan's tribal belt to send suicide vehicles into Afghanistan. "It was not known whether Hamid Gul was acting with the knowledge or consent of the ISI," the report states.
But while Gul, 73, is a well-known fundamentalist ideologue in Pakistan, experts say he is unlikely to play a frontline role in the fighting. Afghan informers may have used his name – he is notorious in Afghanistan – to spice up their stories, said Semple.
"There's a pattern of using a dramatis personae of famous ISI officers and Afghan commanders, and recurring reports of dramatic developments such as the delivery of surface-to-air missiles, to give these reports credibility," he said. "But most of them are simply fabricated."
Afghanistan has a long history of intelligence intrigues that stretches back to the early 19th century. Afghans have learned to use intelligence as a tool to influence the foreign powers occupying their land. In the past quarter century it has become a lucrative source of income in a country with few employment opportunities.
Since 2001 intelligence has become a tool to influence US policymakers, who enjoy the greatest military clout in the region but are poorly informed about its intricacies. The retired US officer said some NDS officials "wanted to create the impression that Pakistani complicity was a threat to the US". And more broadly speaking, "there's an Afghan prejudice that wants to see an ISI agent under every rock".
US generals are aware of the problem. In January Major General Michael Flynn said foreign newspaper articles about Afghanistan were more useful than the information collected by his own soldiers in the field. The huge intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan was "only marginally relevant" to Nato's overall war plan, he said. "We're no more than fingernail-deep in our understanding of the environment." |
In fall 2009, Jeremy Perrine lost his job and found out his wife was pregnant in the same week. The couple then decided to move from Louisville, Kentucky, to Pearland to help some friends who were opening a church in the city.
“My pregnant wife, our dog and I were staying in a [recreational vehicle]in someone’s driveway,” Perrine said. “We had just moved here. We had no jobs and no place to stay.”
Although Perrine said he intended to find a day job before pursuing a business venture, a friend approached him about buying a local coffee shop three days after arriving in Pearland. Perrine put together a business plan in four days and began Pearland Coffee Roasters with co-owner Eric Hammond in January 2010 at the former Antigua Coffee House. The business moved to its current location in March 2011.
Perrine first got the idea of opening a business from his mentors while studying to be a pastor. Perrine said he was initially puzzled at the notion but became more interested after managing a struggling Starbucks in the Louisville airport.
“I took the challenge [of managing the store], and I realized that I enjoyed running a business,” Perrine said.
Further inspiration came after attending a gathering of “super coffee nerds,” Perrine said.
“They invited me to come out to this coffee party,” he said. “I remember tasting this coffee, and I had never tasted a coffee like [it]before. I realized there was so much more that I could do on my own if I were to start my own coffee company.”
Hammond is in charge of capturing a blend’s desired flavor through a variety of roasting techniques.
“Roasting is just like [cooking]a steak,” Perrine said. “Adjusting [the temperature]a few degrees really changes the whole thing.”
Pearland Coffee Roasters offers traditional java drinks and pastries from a Houston bakery. Some of the shop’s specialty items include miel—a honey-and-cinnamon latte—and the House Latte, made with a bayleaf and uncracked-peppercorn syrup. RELATED Texas Education Agency’s A-F accountability ratings reveal link to poverty Texas school districts and campuses received state accountability ratings this fall from the Texas Education Agency, and campuses in Tomball... >
Pearland Coffee Roasters is a wholesale provider for several restaurants in the Greater Houston area, Perrine said. He said he hopes to grow that aspect of the business while continuing to provide flavorful blends for his customers.
“Something we’ve maintained is that we just want to make the best cup of coffee we can make,” he said.
Off the record
Pearland Coffee Roasters also offers records for sale through a partnership with Sweet Spot Audio in Webster. Records range from The Beach Boys to The Ramones.
After trips to coffee shops in San Francisco and Nashville, Tennessee, Perrine said he was motivated to bring a record player into his store.
4106 W. Broadway St., Pearland
281-485-6670
www.pearlandcoffeeroasters.com
Hours: Sun. 8 a.m.-4 p.m., Mon.-Sat. 7 a.m.-8 p.m. |
Gunnar Göthberg, chairman of the Swedish Pediatric Surgeons Association (Svensk barnkirurgisk förening), compared the procedure to female genital mutilation.
A survey done by the association reported that two of three pediatric surgeons do not want to perform circumcision. Göthberg regards the operation as an assault since the procedure is done without the child's consent.
Dagens Nyheter reported that 12 of 21 local municipalities also refuse to perform circumcisions for non-medical reasons.
Around 3,000 circumcisions are estimated to be done in Sweden each year. Of these, around 2,000 are performed by people who are not doctors and who do not have a medical license, which pose risks for the child and lead to complications.
Circumcision of boys for non-medical reasons is permitted in Sweden, and the Swedish Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) is of the opinion that a prohibition would be an illegal limitation on religious freedom.
The authority has proposed that the issue should be legally regulated and that all municipalities should offer male circumcision for non-medical reasons. The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions believes that a formal recommendation would be sufficient.
Critics claim that non-medical circumcision is in violation of the United Nation's Declaration of the Rights of the Child, reported DN. |
In Focus
Inside the White House media bubble
The US president met Abbas at the Palestinian Authority's headquarters on the second day of his Middle East tour aimed at bolstering peace talks.
'Contiguous territory'
The US president said that any future Palestinian state must be a "contiguous territory" rather than a patchwork of Palestinian-controlled areas divided by Israeli checkpoints and Jewish settlements.
"Swiss cheese isn't going to work when it comes to the territory of a state."
Abbas urged Bush to press Israel to halt Jewish settlements and ease security restrictions in the occupied West Bank that Palestinians say cripple their society and economy.
In video Al Jazeera looks at Bush's checkpoint gaffe Gaza woman reflects on 10 years since Clinton visit Bush also urged Israel, which frequently mounts raids into the West Bank, not to take action that undermines Abbas's security forces. Bush also urged Israel, which frequently mounts raids into the West Bank, not to take action that undermines Abbas's security forces. "There needs to be a fair amount of work to modernise the [Palestinian] security forces... my message to Israelis is that they ought to help, not hinder [them]," he said. "And I believe it's possible - not only possible, I believe it's going to happen - that there be a signed peace treaty by the time I leave office [in January 2009]," he said.The US president said that any future Palestinian state must be a "contiguous territory" rather than a patchwork of Palestinian-controlled areas divided by Israeli checkpoints and Jewish settlements."Swiss cheese isn't going to work when it comes to the territory of a state."
On the issue of the Gaza Strip, which has been entirely under the control of the Hamas movement since June last year, Bush said: "There is a competing vision in Gaza."
But in another comment likely to draw Palestinian ire, Bush said that the two parties should leave behind unimplemented UN resolutions, such as those calling for the removal of Israeli settlements and a right of return for Palestinian refugees.
'Totally disconnected'
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, said that there was a sense that Bush was making an effort with the peace process.
"He really wants to leave a legacy of a peace-maker between the Israelis and the Palestinians," he said.
Bush visited the Church of the Nativity
but declined to tour Bethlehem [AFP] "On the other hand his discourse in the press conference shows that he has either been poorly briefed or he is totally disconnected from the Palestinian-Israeli reality,"" he said.
After meeting Abbas in Ramallah, Bush flew by helicopter to Bethlehem to visit the Church of the Nativity, built over the traditional birthplace of Jesus.
There the president, a devout Christian, spoke of his hope for a divine gift of freedom for all people and an end to the walls and checkpoints that ring the Palestinian town.
However, Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland said that residents felt "that their whole city has been put under curfew, effectively for a visit that's for them devoid of meaning". "The UN deal didn't work in the past... this is an opportunity to move forward and negotiate a new deal," he said.Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, said that there was a sense that Bush was making an effort with the peace process."He really wants to leave a legacy of a peace-maker between the Israelis and the Palestinians," he said."On the other hand his discourse in the press conference shows that he has either been poorly briefed or he is totally disconnected from the Palestinian-Israeli reality,"" he said.After meeting Abbas in Ramallah, Bush flew by helicopter to Bethlehem to visit the Church of the Nativity, built over the traditional birthplace of Jesus.There the president, a devout Christian, spoke of his hope for a divine gift of freedom for all people and an end to the walls and checkpoints that ring the Palestinian town.However, Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland said that residents felt "that their whole city has been put under curfew, effectively for a visit that's for them devoid of meaning". The Palestinian minister of tourism said she had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the US president to take a walking tour of Bethlehem - where the Israeli separation wall almost encircles the town, choking off its economy - in order to understand the situation there. He said the people of Gaza need to choose between Hamas, which has "delivered nothing but misery", and "those who have negotiated a peace settlement".
Bush was forced to travel by car to meet Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, in the West Bank after his helicopter was grounded by bad weather.The journey took him through an Israeli security checkpoint and within sight of the separation barrier.Bush said that he could understand why Palestinians were "frustrated" by the checkpoints, but they were necessary to "create a sense of security for Israel".Al Jazeera's David Chater in west Jerusalem said that the remarks were extraordinary given the pain and humiliation that is caused at the checkpoints."I remember once in Hawara, one of the checkpoints outside Nablus, and I was doing the story of a family who lost their main loved one ... he was a cancer patient and he was told to get out of his car and walk across the checkpoint, and that killed him," he said."That's the experience that most Palestinians have of these humiliating checkpoints ... it was very much in bad taste and was a joke that will not have gone down well with anyone in Gaza or the occupied West Bank."Bush said he believed that the Palestinians would sign a treaty with Israel to establish their own state before he leaves office in about one year. |
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You know what you're going to get when you play Swansea: passes. On Saturday Chelsea and the Swans attempted 995 passes between them â the third-highest number this season, topped only by Swansea's trip to Man City (1004) and their home game last weekend with West Brom (1036).
You also know what you're going to get when you play Stoke: a lot of hoo-haa about Rory Delap's throw-ins. But Delap is now much more useful to Tony Pulis as a midfielder than as a catapult: only one of his five throw-ins against Manchester United reached its target, and that was a relatively short one. Still, better than last week at Sunderland, when none of his 11 throws reached a Potter.
Indeed, those long throws may be more of a threat than a promise. Although they undoubtedly have the potential to worry defences and create what managers love to call "second-ball situations", they've long since stopped being a direct source of assists. In 2008/09 four Stoke goals came straight from Delap's hands, but there were none the following season, one last season and none so far this.
Not that Stoke are averse to, shall we say, a lofted pass. Peter Crouch's legendary Good Touch For A Big Man wasn't particularly evident on Saturday â he misplaced half of his passes in United's third â but then again, looking at the average length of passes he received, perhaps that's quite an achievement.
Certainly Stoke took some containing: although United had 58.5% possession it was much deeper than usual, and they ceded 55.9% territory to the hosts. The champions have now conceded 39 shots on target this season, a total matched by Bolton but 'bettered' by nobody.
Contrary to pundit supposition it's not just long shots from opportunists testing David De Gea: 23 of the 39 have been from inside the box, a total topped only by Bolton and Swansea (25). And here's something you don't say every week: Newcastle have the division's tightest defence, at least in terms of shots allowed on target â 18 in total, 12 inside the box. Meanwhile, up the other end, Alan Pardew's posse peppered 21 shots on Blackburn's goal â but only four were on target, of which three were goals.
After a boo-inducing midweek home defeat to Bolton, the last thing Aston Villa needed was to look woeful in the opening half-hour at QPR. Sadly for Alex McLeish that's what he got: in the opening 35 minutes Villa struggled to find fluency, or frankly team-mates, being systematically outpassed by the hosts and not managing a single shot or even corner.
Presumably terrified of McLeish's rapidly reddening face, they improved rapidly after that and doubled their passing rate over the next half-hour, before withdrawing into their shell again after QPR replaced Jay Bothroyd with DJ Campbell just after the hour. In all, Villa's defenders had a measly 62% pass completion rate â well under the 80% Premier League average.
Stewart Downing has impressed for Liverpool this season but on Saturday his passes in the Wolves defensive third were frequently backwards or at least laid inside â while behind him, left-back Jose Enrique was far more direct. This could have been a cunning ruse from Kenny Dalglish and Steve Clarke to draw Wolves' defence out of position⦠or perhaps Downing's just scared of Wolves right-back Richard Stearman.
Robin van Persie reached 100 Arsenal goals this weekend, with a little help from his friend Theo. Mr Walcott set up the Dutchman's centenary to continue a remarkable run: each of the youngster's seven assists in all competitions this calendar year have been for Van Persie. Some may say the former Southampton flyer should be leading the line, but Van Persie won't object to being set up â and the players' passing patterns reflect the fluidity of Arsene Wenger's system.
Finally, hats off to Harry Redknapp: for the second weekend in a row, Tottenham made the most passes, this time against Wigan. Scuttling away in the heart of the side, quietly dictating things by retaining possession and switching the point of attack, is Scott Parker. The summer signing is making more successful passes per 90 minutes than anyone: an average of 70 per game, and rising. Great, Scott.
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may be able to land astronauts on Mars cost-effectively by 2039 if the US space agency takes a stepwise approach that includes a manned trip to the red planet's moon Phobos, scientists say.
Sending astronauts to Mars is the top long-term priority of NASA's human-spaceflight programme.
"Mars is possible, and in a time horizon of interest," said Hoppy Price, of NASA's in Pasadena, California.
"It could happen in our lifetime, and it wouldn't take a trillion dollars to do it," Price said.
Price said that it is a good idea to get astronauts to Mars orbit - specifically, to Phobos or Deimos, one of Mars' two tiny moons - before trying to land them on the dusty Martian surface.
Breaking up a manned red planet campaign into two discrete parts dilutes the risks and costs, making them more manageable on a year-by-year basis, he said.
Price and two colleagues at JPL have drawn up a proposed mission architecture that gets astronauts to Phobos by 2033, then down to the surface of Mars by 2039, 'Space.Com' reported.
The design is just a concept, not an official strategy, Price said. He hopes the concept will help people view manned Mars exploration in a more optimistic light.
The plan, which was devised by Price, John Baker and Firouz Naderi, would establish a base on Phobos, a roughly 16 kilometres-wide moon that orbits 6,000 km from the Martian surface.
This would require four launches of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket, which is currently in development and is scheduled to make its maiden flight in 2018.
The first Phobos-oriented SLS launch, in 2029, would loft a space tug and two chemical-propulsion payloads - a Phobos Transfer Stage and a Trans-Earth Injection Stage.
The tug would use solar-electric propulsion (SEP) to haul the two payloads to Mars orbit in just less than four years.
A second SLS liftoff would carry another SEP tug and the Phobos base, which could support a crew of four.
The third SLS launch, around 2032, would carry a deep-space habitat and a Mars Orbit Insertion Stage to Earth orbit.
Another SLS liftoff would then send NASA's Orion capsule and a crew of four up to meet this preplaced gear, which would help take the astronauts to Mars orbit in a journey lasting 200 to 250 days.
The waiting Phobos Transfer Stage would ferry the astronauts down to the base in 2033, where the crew would remain for about 300 days. The astronauts would then head back to Earth.
A similar multistep approach could get astronauts to the Martian surface in 2039, but this second phase of the red planet effort would require six SLS launches, not four, Price said. |
Celebrated children's author Lewis Carroll has been branded a 'repressed paedophile' in a new BBC documentary which uncovered naked photographs of the real-life sister of Alice in Wonderland taken by the writer.
Carroll, who died in January 1898, befriended Alice Liddell and her two sisters as they were children. It was Miss Liddell who was the inspiration for the famous book.
However, researchers working on a documentary on the 150th anniversary of the publication of the much-loved children's book discovered some disturbing images.
Scroll down for video
New photographs discovered in advance of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice in Wonderland has led to claims that author Lewis Carroll, pictured, may have been 'a Victorian Jimmy Savile'
Carroll took many photographs of sisters Edith, left, Lorina, centre, and Alice Liddell, right, around 1859
According to the show's presenter Martha Kearney, some of the pictures of Alice's elder sister Lorina, which featured her naked in a full-frontal pose, are images that 'no parent would ever have consented to'.
Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, knew the girls' father Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church, Oxford.
The BBC programme investigates whether Carroll could be considered as a 'Victorian Jimmy Savile'.
Carroll was a keen photographer who took many photographs of Alice and her sisters.
English professor Hugh Haughton told the programme: 'It will certainly make it harder for those who believe that Carroll's interest in little girls was totally innocent; it will make it more complicated.'
Author Will Self said: ' Dodgson [Carroll] himself, I think, was a heavily repressed paedophile, without a doubt.'
Alice's great-grand daughter Vanessa Tait told the programme: 'He was a strange man but an admirable one, and I don't want to tar him with accusations of paedophilia which we're all so obsessed with now.'
The Secret World of Lewis Carroll will be broadcast on Saturday January 31, at 9pm
Carroll dressed Alice Liddell up as a beggar maid for this photograph which was taken in 1859 |
These children are the products of a relativistic, materialistic, hedonistic culture that has relentlessly indoctrinated them with the ideas that all belief systems and cultures are of equal value and are essentially interchangeable, and that it is wrong and “racist” to oppose even an authoritarian and violent ideology, and that defense of one’s homeland and culture is likewise “racist,” and that Judeo-Christian Western civilization is itself uniquely “racist” and responsible for the great majority of the evil in the world. So what do they expect?
From the looks of this, the conquest and Islamization of Europe will be easy.
“90 percent said they would convert to Islam if the IS came – generation without ideals,” translated from “90 Prozent würden zum Islam konvertieren, wenn der IS käme – Generation ohne Ideale,” Katholisches.info, April 1, 2016 (thanks to William Kilpatrick): |
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) called out the media for their biased coverage of presidential campaigns, and refusal to inform the American people during an interview on CNN’s Reliable Sources.
During the interview, Sanders hit on the media bias against discussing issues, and the media’s obsession with negative campaigning.
Video:
Transcript via CNN:
STELTER: With your campaign now a few weeks in, are you finding that the media is taking it seriously or are you finding they’re using you only as a foil to Hillary Clinton to get headlines?
SANDERS: I think we are doing pretty well. And I think the media — we have gotten more serious discussion on our issues than I might have thought about.
But this is what I worry about. In terms of campaign coverage…
STELTER: Yes.
SANDERS: … there is more coverage about the political gossip of a campaign, about raising money, about polling, about somebody saying something dumb, or some kid works for a campaign sends out something stupid on Facebook, right? We can expect that to be a major story.
But what your job is, what the media’s job is, is to say, look, these are the major issues facing the country. We’re a democracy. People have different points of view. Let’s argue it.
STELTER: Fundamentally, you’re describing what is the systemic issue in press, in the nation’s news media, which is an interesting spectacle over policy.
SANDERS: To me, it is astounding. And correct me if you think I’m wrong. When you have ABC, CBS, and NBC not devoting one minute to the most significant trade agreement in the history of the United States of America, help me out, help me out. Give me an explanation.
….
SANDERS: I mean, television is an important medium. You cannot ignore that. You cannot ignore the reality of income and wealth inequality.
You cannot ignore the fact that Citizens United is undermining our democratic way of life. Now, there are two sides to the story. I’m not saying everybody has got to agree with me, but have that issue, have that debate. That’s what elections should be about.
(CROSSTALK)
STELTER: Some people might say, how do you do that in a way that keeps people watching, that gets people stay tuned and not turn the channel?
SANDERS: Oh, all right, good question, good question. All right.
So, let me back it up. About a year ago, there was a poll out there. Pollsters asked the American people, tell me which political party controls the U.S. Senate and controls the U.S. House? That was a year ago, when the Democrats controlled the Senate.
STELTER: It’s always disappointing to see how many people are wrong with their answers.
SANDERS: Sixty-three percent of the people in this country did not know that answer.
Who bears responsibility for that? Does the media bear any responsibility? How do you have a serious discussion? If you don’t like what’s going on in Washington, which nobody does, who are you going to Plame if you don’t know which party controls what? So I think that, instead of coming up with the next news of the moment, breaking news, there was an automobile accident, a cat got run over, here is breaking news. For 40 years, the American middle class has been disappearing and the rich have been getting richer. Why?
The reason TPP isn’t getting discussed in the mainstream press is that the media is run by large corporations who benefit from these trade agreements. American media fundamentally changed when news became a for-profit venture. Cable news networks and network news divisions generate huge amounts of profit for their owners, and the way to keep those profits rolling in is to cover cheap gossipy stories.
Hard news is expensive. It costs money to establish and run news divisions around the world. The corporate media discovered that devoting airtime to the latest celebrity scandal was cheap and brought easy ratings. This same mentality has spilled into presidential campaign coverage. The media is more interested in the soap opera storylines of presidential campaigns than the issues.
The majority of American news consumers are either misinformed or underinformed. There is a lack of basic current events knowledge in our society. Most people get their news from television, and television has decided not to cover serious issues.
Media coverage is biased against facts and issues. The corporate press is biased against informing the public. Our electoral system is based on the assumption of an informed electorate, but networks like Fox News are undermining the system by intentionally misinforming.
Sen. Sanders is one of the lone voices who is using his presidential campaign platform to call for a better and more responsible media. Bernie Sanders is fighting for your right to be informed, and the corporate press is getting a lesson in what the American people should expect from the media.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human: |
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The proposals for a new generation of grammars are not in the Queen's Speech
The creation of a new wave of grammar schools in England has been ditched from the government's plans.
The Queen's Speech says the government will "look at all options" for opening new schools, but that will not include removing the current ban on expanding selection.
The controversial plan to stop free lunches for all infants is also absent.
This takes away the biggest source of extra funding promised for schools in the Conservative manifesto.
The government, setting out its plans for the next two years, has not announced any legislation for education.
This means dropping their most high profile proposed education reform - the expansion of selective education in England.
Budget shortages
The re-written plans now call for "every child to go to a good or outstanding school" - but with the recognition that any changes will depend upon being able to "command a majority".
A Department for Education source said that the Queen's Speech was an unambiguous decision not to go ahead with creating more grammar schools.
No new grammar schools
Plans dropped to stop free lunches for all infants
No legislation announced for education
School funding plans to be put forward at a later date
Changes to how individual school budgets are allocated will go ahead
Technical education to be upgraded
Schools have been campaigning about budget shortages - with a letter being sent this week to two million families warning about funding cuts.
But the government's biggest proposal to deliver extra funding, announced in the Conservative manifesto, also seems to have been ditched.
The scrapping of free meals for all infants was meant to save about £650m, which would have been the majority of an extra £1bn per year to boost school budgets.
This leaves a significant shortfall in the manifesto promise for extra school funding.
A joint response from four teachers' unions said schools were "sending out begging letters to parents" and the "lack of urgent action is deeply disappointing".
Jules White, the West Sussex head teacher who has co-ordinated a funding campaign in 17 local authorities, said: "The government said that it had heard the message from the electorate.
"It's high time they acted to put things right and fund schools in a way that every child deserves."
The government says it will bring forward its proposals on school funding at a later date.
High-skills, high-wage jobs
Jo Yurky, who ran a parents' campaign over school cuts, said the lack of movement on funding had shown a "baffling disregard for the concerns of parents, teachers and school leaders".
But the government says it is pressing ahead with changes to how budgets are allocated to individual schools, through a new National Funding Formula.
More on the Queen's Speech
The new formula is meant to resolve unfairness and anomalies in how funding is allocated.
There is also a commitment to improving vocational education and improving the level of skills in the workforce - training people for "high-skilled, high-wage jobs of the future".
The ambition is for vocational exams to be given as much status as their academic counterparts - and there are plans for so-called "T-levels" for technical qualifications.
Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman, Layla Moran, said: "It is incredulous that the government have claimed they will deliver fair funding for every school in today's Queen's Speech.
"The reality is that pupils and teachers will still bear the brunt of billions of pounds of cuts under Conservative plans." |
World
Iraq’s Al-Mukhtar Army Vows to Hit Saudi Oil Installations, Ports in Case of War on Syria
TEHRAN (FNA)- Leader of Iraq’s Jaysh Al-Mukhtar (Al-Mukhtar army) Sheikh Wathiq Al-Battat vowed to target Saudi Arabia’s oil installations and ports if the US attacks Syria in a bid to harm the West’s economy by stopping the flow of crude to the western countries.
“We will cut the West’s economic artery in Saudi Arabia by attacking Saudi ports and oil installations …,” Sheikh Al-Battat told FNA in Baghdad on Wednesday.
He warned that attacking Syria will be the starting point for the end of Saudi Arabia because the Al-Saud regime is the main party which has encouraged and masterminded war plans against Syria.
Sheikh Al-Battat pointed to the Al-Saud’s support for terrorists in Syria, and said, “… the Saudi Royal family is trying to stir instability and insecurity in some countries by interfering in their internal affairs …”
Sheikh al-Battat likened Saudi Arabia to a glass-house whose owners attack their neighbors with stones, and vowed that the Al-Saud family will not be immune from Al-Mukhtar’s attacks and operations.
In similar remarks, Sheikh al-Battat also vowed last week to target Washington’s interests in Iraq and the Persian Gulf region by thousands of martyrdom-seeking (suicide) operations if the US attacks Syria.
Sheikh Al-Battat told FNA that his group has "23,000 fully-trained and equipped martyrdom-seeking forces who can blow the US interests in Iraq and the Persian Gulf at any time if the US commits such a stupid act".
Sheikh Al-Battat warned against any adventurism against the Syrian nation, and reiterated that the US will not be immune from the martyrdom-seeking operations of his warriors.
He saw the US and Israel as the main losers of any possible military strike on Syria, and said, “Taking into account the Islamic and Arab awakening movements as well as the (regional) nations' transparent stance on their confrontation against any possible US military strike on Syria, the United States and the Zionist regime will be definitely defeated” if they open war on Syria.
The call for military action against Syria intensified after foreign-backed opposition forces accused the Syrian government of launching a chemical attack on militant strongholds in the suburbs of Damascus on August 21.
Damascus has vehemently denied the accusations, saying the chemical attack was carried out by the militants themselves as a false flag operation. |
The French government suppressed testimony about brutal torture carried out by the killers at the Bataclan in Paris last year,"On the causes of the death of my son A., at the forensic institute in Paris, I was told, and what a shock it was for me at that moment, they had cut off his testicles, had put them in his mouth, and he was disemboweled," read a letter a victim's father sent to the president of the committee.An unidentified investigator testified in Parliament that the killers gouged out eyes, castrated and beheaded some of their victims."Bodies have not been presented to families because there were beheaded people there, the murdered people, people who have been disemboweled. There are women who had their genitals stabbed," the witness said, according to a translation"Some of the bodies found at the Bataclan were extremely mutilated by the explosions and weapons, to the point that it was sometimes difficult to reconstruct the dismembered bodies," the prosecutor responded, pointing out that no sharp knife was found at the scene.In a letter to the investigating committee, one father described his victimized son as so disfigured that he could only recognize half of his son's face. Responding to questions about the father's statements, the investigator replied that "injuries described (by) this father may also have been caused by automatic weapons, by explosions or projections of nails and bolts that have resulted."Asked by a member of the committee if any of those weapons could have left a man's testicles in his own mouth, the prosecutor replied: "I do not have that information."on Monday that six or eight French military personnel were stationed at the Bataclan entrance on the night of the attack. They were a part of the Ministry of Defense's Sentinelle project, which began in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.Their mandate, according to the Centre, is "to protect the French people and provide security in support of the Internal Security Forces (FSI) at the most sensitive locations in Paris and the provinces."The soldiers didn't engage the attackers because their rules of engagement didn't permit it. |
It happened in 1517 that a Dominican monk named Johann Tetzel, a braggart, caused a great stir. Maximilian once sentenced him to drowning in the River Inn - presumably because of his great virtue - but Duke Frederick rescued him in Innsbruck from the punishment of being drowned. Duke Frederick reminded him of this incident when he began to denounce us Wittenbergers. Actually, he admitted it quite openly. This same Tetzel now began to peddle indulgences. With might and main he sold grace for money as dearly or a cheaply as he could. At the time I was preacher here in the cloister and was filled as a new doctor with an ardent love for the scriptures.
When many people from Wittenberg ran after indulgences to Jüterborg and Zerbst, I did not know - as surely as my Lord Christ has redeemed me - what indulgences were, but no one else knew either. I carefully began to preach that one could do something better and more certain than to purchase indulgences. On an earlier occasion I had already preached here in the castle against indulgences, but was not very graciously received by Duke Frederick, who was fond of his collegiate church. Now, to speak about the real cause for the 'Lutheran scandal', at first I let everything continue its course. Then it was reported to me, however, that Tetzel was preaching some cruel and terrible propositions, such as the following:
He had grace and power from the Pope to offer forgiveness even if someone had slept with the Holy Virgin Mother of God, as long as a contribution would be put into the coffer.
Furthermore, the red Cross of indulgences and the papal coat of arms on the flag of the churches was as powerful as the Cross of Christ.
Moreover, even if St. Peter were here now he would have no greater grace or power than he had.
Furthermore, he would not want to trade places in heaven with St. Peter, for he had redeemed more souls with his indulgences than Peter with his sermons.
Furthermore, if anyone put money into the coffer for a soul in purgatory, the soul would leave purgatory for heaven in the moment one could hear the penny hit the bottom.
Also the grace of indulgences is the grace by which man is reconciled with God.
Furthermore, it is not necessary to show remorse or sorrow or do penance for sins when purchasing indulgences or a letter of indulgence. He even sold indulgences for future sins. Such abominable things he did abundantly. He was merely interested in money.
At the time I did not yet know who was to get the money. Then there appeared a booklet with the illustrious coat of arms of the Bishop of Magdeburg. In it the commissioners of indulgences were ordered to preach some of the propositions. Thus it came to light that Bishop Albert had employed Tetzel, because he was such a braggart.
Source: Martin Luther, Wider Hans Worst, 1541. (WA 51, 538.)
After Tetzel had received a substantial amount of money at Leipzig, a nobleman asked him if it were possible to receive a letter of indulgence for a future sin. Tetzel quickly answered in the affirmative, insisting, however, that the payment had to made at once. This the nobleman did, receiving thereupon letter and seal from Tetzel. When Tetzel left Leipzig the nobleman attacked him along the way, gave him a thorough beating, and sent him back empty-handed to Leipzig with the comment that this was the future sin which he had in mind. Duke George at first was quite furious about this incident, but when he heard the whole story he let it go without punishing the nobleman.
Source: Luthers Schriften, herausg. von Walch. XV, 446.
At the time a Dominican monk named Johann Tetzel was the great mouthpiece, commissioner, and preacher of indulgences in Germany. His preaching raised enormous amounts of money which were sent to Rome. This was particularly the case in the new mining town St. Annaberg, where I, Friedrich Myconius, listened to him for over two years. The claims of this uneducated and shameful monk were unbelievable. Thus he said that even if someone had slept with Christ's dear Mother, the Pope had power in heaven and on earth to forgive as long as the money was put into the indulgences coffer. And if the Pope would forgive, God also had to forgive. He furthermore said if they would put money quickly into the coffer to obtain grace and indulgence, all the mountains near St. Annaberg would turn into pure silver. He claimed that in the very moment the coin rang in the coffer, the soul rose up to heaven. Such a marvellous thing was his indulgence. In sum and substance: God was no longer God, as he had bestowed all divine power to the Pope: 'Tu es Petrus, tibi dabo claves, quodcunque.' And then there were the masters of the Inquisition, who banished and burned those saying conflicting words.
This indulgence was highly respected. When the commissioner was welcomed to town, the papal bull was carried on velvet or gold cloth. All the priests, monks, councilmen, teachers, pupils, men, women, maids, and children went to meet him singing in solemn procession with flags and candles. The bells tolled and when he entered the church the organ played. A red Cross was put up in the middle of the church to which the Pope's banner was affixed. In short: even God himself could not have been welcomed and received more beautifully.
Source: Friedrich Myconius, Historia reformationis, p. 14.
The Text of a Sermon on Indulgences
by Johann Tetzel
What are you thinking about? Why do you hesitate to convert yourself? Why don't you have fears about your sins? Why don't you confess now to the vicars of our Most Holy Pope? Don't you have the example of Lawrence, who, compelled by the love of God, gave away his inheritance and suffered his body to be burned? Why do you not take the example of Bartholomew, Stephen, and of other saints who gladly suffered the most gruesome deaths for the sake and salvation of their souls? You, however, do not give up great treasures; indeed you give not even a moderate alms. They gave their bodies to be martyred, but you delight in living well and joyfully. You priest, nobleman, merchant, wife, virgin, you married people, young person, old man, enter into your church which is for you, as I have said, St. Peter's, and visit the most holy Cross. It has been placed there for you, and it always cries and calls for you. Are you perhaps ashamed to visit the Cross with a candle and yet not ashamed to visit a tavern? Are you ashamed to go to the apostolic confessors, but not ashamed to go to a dance? Behold, you are on the raging sea of the world in storm and danger, not knowing if you will safely reach the harbor of salvation. Do you not know that everything which man has hangs on a thin thread and that all of life is but a struggle on earth? Let us then fight, as did Lawrence and the other saints, for the day it is well, but ill tomorrow. Today alive and tomorrow dead.
You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the counsel of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all their sins. If they visit, after confession and after the Jubilee, the Cross and the altar every day they will receive that indulgence which would be theirs upon visiting in St. Peter's the seven altars, where complete indulgence is offered. Why are you then standing there? Run for the salvation of your souls! Be as careful and concerned for the salvation of your souls as you are for your temporal goods, which you seek both day and night. Seek the Lord while he may be found and while he is near. Work, as St. John says, while it it yet day, for the night comes when no man can work.
Don't you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, 'Have mercy upon me, have mercy upon me, because we are in severe punishment and pain. From this you could redeem us with a small alms and yet you do not want to do so.' Open your ears as the father says to the son and the mother to the daughter . . ., 'We have created you, fed you, cared for you, and left you our temporal goods. Why then are you so cruel and harsh that you do not want to save us, though it only takes a little? You let us lie in flames so that we only slowly come to the promised glory.' You may have letters which let you have, once in life and in the hour of death . . . full remission of the punishment which belongs to sin. Oh, those of you with vows, you usurers, robbers, murderers, and criminals - Now is the time to hear the voice of God. He does not want the death of the sinner, but that he be converted and live. Convert yourselves then, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, to the Lord, thy God. Oh, you blasphemers, gossippers, who hinder this work openly or secretly, what about your affairs? You are outside the fellowship of the Church. No masses, no sermons, prayers, sacraments, or intercession help you. No field, vineyard, trees, or cattle bring fruit or wine for you. Even spiritual things vanish, as many an illustration could point out. Convert yourself with all you heart and use the medicine of which the Book of Wisdom says, 'The Most High has made medicine out of the earth and a wise man will not reject it.'
Source: W. Köhler, Dokumente zum Ablassstreit, pp. 125-26.
The above are quoted from The Reformation, by Hans J. Hillerbrand, published by Harper & Row, publishers, Copyright 1964 by SCM Press Ltd and Harper and Row, Inc., Library of Congress catalog card number 64-15480, pp. 41-46. |
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PHOTO: North side of the Hazeldean Bridge over the Carp River, March 2016.
OTTAWA SUN, JULY 30, 2011: “A $4-million bridge over the Carp River will take an extra month to complete after a structural problem caused it to sink this week. A Sun tipster said the project foreman ordered workers off the Hazeldean Rd. structure this week after it sank four inches when supports were taken away. Stittsville Coun. Shad Qadri said city engineers confirmed to him Saturday something called a “deck deflection” took place. The deck of a bridge is the roadway portion, including the shoulders. A deflection is the displacement of a structural beam or system under load. Qadri said there was structural testing of the bridge this week, but said he heard the deflection was “a matter of centimetres, not inches.” (Link)
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN CURIOUS about what happened to the Hazeldean Road bridge over the Carp River. A spokesperson for the construction company said at the time that “all bridges are designed to drop a little”. But two years before it sank, the Ottawa Citizen published a city engineer’s concerns about its design. As far as I know, there’s never been an official explanation made public for what happened. I started asking questions about it over a year ago.
***
MARCH 2015: I was doing some research on the Carp River Restoration Plan, and sent a note to the City’s media department: “When the bridge was completed in 2011, the opening was delayed due to structural problems. I’m looking for information on what was found to have caused those problems.”
A few days later, I received a response back, attributed to the city’s Carina Duclos, Manager Design and Construction, West: “During construction, the bridge deck settled more than the anticipated amount and a structural modification was made to rectify the problem.”
That didn’t tell me much more than the newspaper reports at the time, so I emailed back another question: “What caused it to settle more than anticipated and what structural changes had to be made? Is there a report or any background info available about the repairs?”
A few days later I got a follow-up response, again in an email attributed to Duclos: “The original construction provided insufficient support for the bridge deck. As a result, the bridge deck settled more than was originally anticipated during construction. Remedial work was conducted to correct this issue, including the installation of a new support system for the bridgedeck.”
As for a report, Duclos wrote: “The City of Ottawa worked collaboratively with the contractor and bridge designer to complete the work and correct the issues. This work was done through the regular construction process and no formal reports were developed. It is also of note that the repairs were completed at no additional cost to the City of Ottawa.”
I remember thinking that was strange. A $4-million bridge repair project had a structural failure, was delayed a month from opening, and there was no formal report? The bridge wasn’t central to my research, so I parked that thought and moved on.
***
FAST FORWARD TO NOVEMBER, 2015: A local truck driver got in touch with concerns about the bridge. He remembered when it sank back in 2011, and thought it might be sinking again. I took a photo and sent it along with a note to the City’s media department on November 16:
“A reader alerted us to a crack on the Hazeldean Road bridge that crosses the Carp River. I took this photo last Friday (attached). This photo shows the westbound lane, on the west side of the bridge. The crack continues across both the eastbound and westbound lanes, and there’s a similar crack on the east side of the bridge. There’s a separation of about 1-2″ in width, and a grade separation of about an inch across the bridge.
Normally I would not send in a media request about a crack in the road, but this bridge is different — when it first opened around 2011, the bridge deck settled, and structural deficiencies had to be repaired. I wonder if this crack might be indicative of grade separation occurring due to deficiencies in the design?
My questions:
– When was this bridge last inspected? Is staff aware of this crack?
(The resident I talked to says he called it in to city about 7 months ago.)
– How often is this bridge scheduled to be inspected (yearly? every two years?, etc?)
– Does the crack pose a safety hazard?
– What could cause the crack?
– Is the crack related to the previous structural problems with the bridge?”
For good measure, I asked again if there was any report.
“Finally, was there a report completed to examine the design/construction of the bridge to determine why it had structural problems? And if so, what were the findings of the report and how can I obtain a copy?”
***
A reply came back a few days later on November 18 from Councillor Shad Qadri:
“As per your recent inquiry to the City I am providing you with a follow up to your individual questions. You mention that a resident called in to the city several months ago asking about the Hazeldean Bridge structure in reference to cracks and did not receive a response. It is unfortunate that the resident did not go through my office as I could have replied being aware of the specific issue and having already spoken with staff back in March of 2015.
The information below is based on my initial inquiry with Public Works in December of 2014 and a follow up response from the engineer responsible for the infrastructure. I do want to thank you for your inquiry and for my office working with the city to provide the above response
Staff is aware of the crack in the pavement at the bridge approaches. Staff inspected the structure in December 2014. A full inspection, in accordance with the Ontario Structure Inspection Manual, was completed in August 2014. The inspection found that the structure is in good condition with only minor works identified such as routing and sealing of cracks.
The bridge structure is inspected every two years. This is a regulated standard.
There are no safety concerns with the pavement cracking. These types of settlements are normal and the structural integrity of the bridge is not affected by the crack in the pavement.
Typically settlement of the approach embankments leading to the structure causes these types of transverse cracks in the pavement.
There is no evidence or indication that this would be related to issues other than embankment settlement.”
As for that report, Qadri replied:
“An investigation was completed during the initial construction when deficiencies were identified. The investigation identified deflection in the structure and corrective measures were undertaken at the time of construction.”
So if there was an investigation, maybe there was a report as well?
***
I wrote back to Qadri later that night: “I understand that quite a bit of work and engineering was done during construction of the bridge and roadway to mitigate embankment settlement at this location. Have city engineers confirmed that the settlement that is within expected/accepted parameters for this bridge? Besides sealing and routing of cracks, will any additional work be done to correct the issue? Is a copy of this report available online or can you share a copy of the report?”
***
NOVEMBER 27, 2015: Councillor Qadri emailed back:
“As previously indicated, inspections have found that the structure is in good condition. The types of settlements that are visible are normal for this type of structure and the structural integrity of the bridge is not affected by the crack in the pavement. There are control joints at the end of the approach slab for this bridge to accommodate any movement or settlement. Staff will continue to monitor and inspect the structure.”
“The report in question has no connection to the pavement cracking. There is no evidence or indication that this would be related to issues other than embankment settlement. The report produced during construction was obtained as part of a matter that was settled with a number of other parties on a confidential basis subject only to the provisions of MFIPPA.”
So, there was a report! But due to MIFPPA (Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act) it was only available by submitting an Access to Information request. They cost $5 and usually take weeks or months to get a response.
I submitted the request to City Hall: “Requesting a copy of an engineering report produced by a third party in late 2011, that was a review of the design and construction of the Carp River Bridge on Hazeldean.”
Then I waited, and waited, and waited.
In the meantime, city crews patched the crack on the west side sometime in December.
***
JANUARY 9, 2016. I hear back from one of the City’s information officers. They have the document I’m looking for, but because it includes third party information, the other party gets to review it before it gets released to the public. They third party has until January 21 to respond.
***
FEBRUARY 19, 2016. I checked my mailbox. Mixed in with flyers there was a large envelope from the City of Ottawa. Inside, a cover letter from City Clerk Rick O’Connor. “Access is hereby granted in full to the records requested.”
Enclosed there’s a copy of a report, dated November 15, 2011 on Delcan letterhead: “Assessment of the Hazeldean Road Bridge”. Fifty-two pages, black and white double sided.
***
DELCAN, AN ENGINEERING COMPANY SPECIALIZING IN TRANSPORTATION and water infrastructure, was asked to investigate why the bridges “were not performing as expected, did not have the geometry which was expected, and had sustained damage.” They were also asked to come up with a way to fix it.
Delcan, along with geotechnical engineers from Golder Associates, examined the designs, conducted site visits, and did structural analyses of the bridge. They found that the towers had leaned inwards towards the bridge decks, that anchors connecting steel hangers to the towers were damaged, and that the bridge deck sagged. “None of these behaviours was anticipated,” the engineers found.
“The bridges, although only partially completed, had failed to support the loads imposed upon them by their own deck weight. They clearly did not have the capacity to support the additional dead loads and live loads which they were intended to support in accordance with the original design,” said the report.
The report also looked at what role the falsework might have played in the collapse. Falsework is the temporary structure used to hold up the bridge while it’s under construction.
“It has been reported anecdotally that the Contractor did not camber the decks in such a manner as to take account of falsework settlements… To our knowledge there is no evidence that the falsework settlements were an issue on this bridge affecting the capacity of the bridge to carry load.”
The report concludes: “Irrespective of the existence or otherwise of the possible workmanship issues which have been brought to our attention, the bridge would have failed as a result of the design.”
Because of my request, the report is now a public document. You can read it here.
***
The Hazeldean bridge was designed by Genivar, an engineering firm that was also involved in the problematic Airport Parkway pedestrian bridge.
Construction on the Airport Parkway bridge began in June 2011, just before the Hazeldean bridge problems happened. The 75-meter pedestrian and cycling bridge wasn’t finished until 2014 at a cost of over $11.5-million, well over the original $6.9-million estimate. The City filed a $4.6-million claim against Genivar in 2014.
“We are calling on Genivar to pay for the $4.6 million in costs that have resulted from their design,” said Mayor Jim Watson in a press release about the 2014 claim. “This multi-million dollar claim demonstrates our commitment to holding outside consultants accountable for the role that they played in this troubled project.”
That matter is ongoing, and no trial date has been set as of March 2016, according to City Solicitor Rick O’Connor.
Genivar was one of the companies involved in the corruption scandal in Quebec’s construction industry. They’ve since changed their name to WSP Global.
***
IT TOOK MORE THAN A YEAR, but now I have an official reason for why the $4-million bridge failed: it was improperly designed by the engineering company.
Why couldn’t City officials tell me that a year ago? Vague explanations like “the deck settled more than anticipated” and “the investigation identified deflection” don’t give the public any real explanation. And why did they tell me that “no formal reports” were developed, when the City did in fact hire Delcan to do a full analysis?
Given the link to another problem-plagued bridge project, not to mention previous errors identified with computer models used to evaluate Carp River flood levels, I would have expected more transparency from the City on this file.
Regardless of who paid for the repairs (in this case, the contractor covered the cost), the City should have proactively disclosed this info in 2011 when they received the report.
There are still more questions: How and why did a faulty bridge design (actually two faulty bridge designs) get approved in the first place? Has the City made any changes to their procurement and contracting process as a result of this report?
Maybe it’s all just “water under the bridge” for the City, as the old saying goes. |
Treasurer Joe Hockey has cast doubt on a recommendation by the Murray inquiry that a deposit insurance levy be imposed after a bank failure as the Treasurer made the case for an up-front tax on deposits.
In an exclusive interview with The Australian Financial Review, Mr Hockey confirmed that a bank deposit levy would be included in the May budget and it was unlikely the government would change its mind before the $500-million tax was due to begin on January 1, 2016.
Labor proposed a 0.05 per cent levy on deposits up to $250,000. The money would be invested in a Financial Stability Fund and to be used only in the unlikely event of a bank collapse. The fund would also help the budget by being used to offset gross debt, as the Future Fund does.
David Murray's Financial System Inquiry recommended against an up-front, or ex-ante, levy. Alex Ellinghausen
David Murray's financial system inquiry recommended against an up-front, or ex-ante, levy, saying there should be an ex-post model in which a levy would be imposed on the banks if the scheme were triggered by a failure and there were insufficient funds recovered through a bank's liquidation to recoup the government's costs.
"It is preferable to retain an ex-post funding model that avoids placing an ongoing financial burden on the industry," the Murray inquiry said. |
Assistant pastor at Roane County church charged with sexually assaulting 2 underage girls Copyright by WATE - All rights reserved Hugh McDowell (source: Roane County Sheriff's Office) [ + - ] Video
WATE 6 On Your Side staff - NIOTA (WATE) - An assistant pastor at a church in Roane County was arrested at his home in McMinn County Thursday on charges he sexually abused and/or raped several girls at the church.
Hugh McDowell, 62, of Niota, is facing six felony charges, including two counts of sexual battery by an authority figure, two counts of continuous sexual abuse of a child and one count of rape of a child.
According to a report from the Roane County Sheriff's Office, the investigation began in late June when a Department of Children's Services investigator told the Roane County Sheriff's Office of several alleged incidents at Spoken Words Ministry Church in Ten Mile. The investigator said two victims, ages 17 and 12, had been subjected to sexual assault by McDowell, an assistant pastor at the church.
The investigator said the last alleged incident was on June 21 and the family had confronted McDowell over the accusations, but he threatened their lives. The investigator said the family believed McDowell would hurt them if the allegations came out and he has a lot of influence in McMinn County where both families live. McDowell was a first responder in Sweetwater and a former law enforcement officer.
There were also other alleged incidents that had happened at McDowell's home.
A few days later, a sheriff's office investigator met with the parents and said McDowell had told the 12-year-old at the church to ask him to see his genitals and touch him inappropriately. They also said he had touched the 17-year-old's breasts. Deputies told the parents to have the children checked out at Children's Hospital and contact the district attorney's office.
Interviews were conducted in July with both girls who confirmed what their parents had said and went on to describe, in great detail, other incidents of alleged sexual assault and sexual abuse, including touching, kissing and at least once incident of digital penetration. Some of the incidents took place at the church. Investigators believed at the time the girls could not have fabricated the events in such detail and were likely telling the truth.
McDowell was interviewed on July 21 and said he knew the family and the two girls, but denied a relationship with him. The report says he initially denied he had ever touched the girls, but later admitted to hugging and kissing them. He then said he wanted an attorney and the interview ended.
One of the girls then admitted she and McDowell had been calling and texting each other for a year. She said he had been asking her for nude photographs and had also purchased a piece of red lingerie for her to wear and photograph herself in. Her phone was broken and officers were not successful in retrieving any text messages from it, but they requested records from both her and McDowell's phones from Verizon.
While several months worth of data was missing from the report, the logs showed nearly 1,100 phone calls between McDowell and the girl between January 2015 and June 2016. There were also 6,000 text messages back and forth, the content of which was not available.
The case was sent to the District Attorney General's Office to be presented to the grand jury. McDowell was taken into custody on Thursday in McMinn County and transferred to Roane County. |
Two days after they failed to qualify for the Asia Minor, ViCi have announced a roster change: Bin "Savage" Liu will be returning to the team, replacing LinXiao "JeXeN" Wang.
ViCi's current roster was assembled in February of this year, when the veteran AWPer Bin "Savage" Liu lost his spot in the first team after some underwhelming performances.
The 28-year-old is returning to ViCi's first squad
The new ViCi team had some good results online, but after going out with a 0-3 record at IEM Sydney and failing to qualify for the Asia Minor due to a 2-1 loss to Flash, the Chinese side has decided to go for a roster change. ViCi have recalled Savage to the first team, making way will be LinXiao "JeXeN" Wang who wasn't able to assert himself in the crucial games.
Along with Savage, BingYuan "tb" Li will be joining ViCi once again, now serving as a coach.
ViCi is now:
Professeur writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter. |
It’s been a year since Flattus Maximus has been called back to the stars, and GWAR, like a stank and bloody phoenix, has risen from the ashes with the arrival of Pustulus Maximus. I sat down with Dave Brockie to conduct an interview, but Oderus came in to find Brockie dangerously close to his crack and vaporized him. With Oderus fully cracked out, we began discussing how the newest member of GWAR is adjusting to his life on Earth. And, as a bonus to actually getting to the end of this shit (or scrolling down, whatever), there’s a shiny new image gallery from their Santa Ana show on 11-3-12.
I’d love to know a bit more about our newest overlord, Pustulus Maximus. Where did he go to school, is he currently seeing anyone?
He didn’t go to school. He was born with a guitar in his hand. Now, one thing ALL Maximus’ have in common is that they are all shredding guitarists., I don’t know why that is. It could have as easily been a ukulele. There’s another clan of space scumdogs that play harpsichords, but we have no need of such instruments in our band. But, guitars? Very important. Now Pustulus and Flattus even had a mild rivalry, they were the best of the best. Pustulus was the one born with a guitar in his hand, which ripped his mother’s vagina wide open and then he devoured her. Flattus was born the same way, but was considerate enough to push the neck of his guitar out first, have that flop to the floor, then crawl out, make sure his mother was OK and THEN devour her.
How’s he adjusting to life on Earth?
Malignantly. He’s becoming more pissed all the time. I think he’s starting to figure out that it was us that damaged his space ship so that he couldn’t return to outer space. After Flattus returned to the stars, we blew the mighty horn of hatred, which is made out of turtle shells, by the way. Mean ones, not cute ones. Horrible turtles, big ones. So, we blew that and it let all the Maximus’, and indeed, ALL the scumdogs across the galaxy know what was going on and they converged on the GWAR temple in their great golden battle-bus hulking war-barges. And you’d think that parking those things in Antarctica would not be a problem because there’s pretty much nothing there, it’s just an ice plain, with a fortress sticking out of it, but no, they were crashing into each other constantly and we realized that the penguins we hired as parking lot attendants were just completely incompetent and getting high all day. So, we brought Mexicans in, and that caused a labor strike, believe it or not. Pustulus was the last one to show up and all the other Maximus’; Infecticus, Bubonis, Farticus was there; he was the last one to show up and just said “Hit record button NOW” and we started doing some jams with him and he pretty much devastated the competition. So while he was laying down tracks, I ran out to his space ship and made sure that the Mexicans thoroughly vandalized the vehicle. Graffiti all over it, it was up on blocks, the engines were gone. Pustulus was pissed off that he’s stuck with us now. He’s disdainful of the humans, he hates them, but in a strange way, he’s enjoying their helpless adulation, the way their heads explode when he plays guitar. So, we’ll take the bitter with the sweet for now. Considering that today is the one year anniversary of Flattus’ passing from this planet, it is amazing what this band has achieved, and to be back on the top of our game a year later, and acknowledging that with Pustulus as part of the squad, speaks volumes to not only the sheer awesomeness of this band, but the amazing fans that simply REFUSE to let us stop.
Is there truth to the rumor that most, if not all, natural disasters are caused by a member of the Maximus clan either farting, or in the case of Hurricane Sandy, sharting.
Sharting. Farting, whatever other things. Flattus, of course, was known for his massive flatulence, but it had mellowed with age after he created the Sahara desert. I guess, maybe after he was frozen for so many years, it had calmed down his fart juices and we actually able to get through a set. I mean, it actually smelled bad to US, which is saying something. When something smells bad to GWAR, it’s going to melt anyone else. As for Pustulus’ power, it seems to be limited now to the guitar. He has many other disgusting traits about him, especially his acne, which is a sore spot for him. Many, many sore spots. It’s all over his face and his feet as well. I don’t know if you’ve ever had acne on your feet before, but it’s not good. It hurts, a lot. You might have heard, though, that the pain for poor Pustulus is so great, that the only relief is either heavy metal music, oral sex, or jacking off an elephant onto his face. But then the semen has to spoil as it sits there on his face. So he has to lay there with spoiled elephant semen all over his face. Now, this has led to him not doing that that much, he doesn’t enjoy it. And no chicks want to suck his dick, either, it pretty much breaks their skull off so he goes through the solace and suffer of heavy metal music constantly, which has completely deprived him of his hearing. He’s constantly yelling and screaming at us, though he thinks he’s speaking in a normal conversational tone, but he’s yelling at the top of his lungs and he’s very fucking loud. I’m like “Why are you yelling at me?” “GOD DAMMIT, FIND ME AN ELEPHANT TO JACK OFF, THIS FUCKING SUUUUUCKS!” and we’re like, “Quit yelling at us!” and he’s “WHY ARE YOU MOVING YOUR LIPS AND NOT SAYING ANY WORDS?!?!” This is getting worse every day, actually, but he’s nailing it during the shows and that’s all I really give a fuck about.
Have you introduced him to any of the few joys of Earth, like nachos or beer.
Oh, he loves all that stuff. We haven’t introduced him to the glass dick, yet, though. I like to hoard the crack all to myself if at all possible. Pustulus, right now, is a drug-free scumdog, and that’s never happened before. I don’t want to fuck it up, so I’m going to let him develop his own vices. He’s got his own little room at the back of the bus, and he might be in there dressed as a ballerina right now for all I know. I don’t want to know. All I know is that when we play tonight, he will be there and we’ll blow fucking heads up.
Has he tried to kill you or any of the other scumdogs as of yet?
A fewwww, several levels of the fortress were trashed. He was pretty pissed when he found his space ship was jacked and chopped and bits of it were found in Mexico. He’s a pissed off character. Where Flattus was the gentle giant, the more reflective, poetic scumdog; didn’t say a lot, preferring to speak with his guitar; Pustulus is filled with piss and vinegar. He likes to jump around all over the fucking stage and he’s singing back up vocals, he’s shredding at the guitar. Of course, this all comes at having violent confrontations with him constantly because he’s a real pisser! Sometimes getting him on the bat-shaped helicopter can be difficult. But he loves beer, he is quite a drunk. And the oral sex does help him with the acne pain. So he tries to drink himself silly and copulate with the heads of women, but he doesn’t know enough about the human anatomy yet to know what hole to stick it in really, so it’s very messy.
Have you, having been involved in GWAR for decades longer, grown at all tired of the wholesale slaughtering the human race?
Oh, no, it’s my greatest of joys. Humans need food, I was just reading these charming accounts of the surrounded 6th Army at Stalingrad, where the horses were so rotten and frozen and fucked up that the soldiers were bashing in the skulls of the horses and eating their brains right of there. I think that sums up my relationship with the human race in a lot of ways. I can’t live without killing you. And since I won’t use atomic weapons, I must kill you with my hands. My brothers and I prefer the old ways: the drawn and quartering, the spears, the red-hot pokers up the ass, you know, all that other crap. Nukes are for pussies, really. Now, if we kill 1,200 humans a day, and that’s a good day, there’s still tens of thousands of you that have been born. It’s a losing battle, there’s no way we can do it. So we do encourage you to do it as well. I don’t want to support Mitch Romney [sic], and I don’t want to support Obama, either, but a lot of people don’t know how blood-thirsty Obama really is. He’s spent more time in that little command bunker underneath the White House than any president ever has in history. He loves to order Predator drone strikes and attack civilian targets. He’s a real vampire, that Obama and that’s why I’m throwing my support behind him. Unfortunately, both candidates have to die. It’s the GWAR way.
Do you find yourself keeping abreast of mankind’s current wars.
Certainly, I find it interesting and hopefully inspiring to all the troops. It happens all the time, we get emails and comments “Hey, man, I just blew up a bunch of Arabs: WAR PARTY!” That’s great! You hear it all the time, these guys will go off to war and wire up their armored vehicles so that they can crank metal. I believe there’s an awesome movie about it called Generation Kill and these guys are listening to fucking Angel of Death as they lob 120mm anti-tank rounds into civilian apartment buildings. It’s great fun!
Do you think it would terrify Al Qaeda or the Taliban if the US trips showed up in GWAR-esque armor?
I think that the Taliban would be absolutely terrified of GWAR. I mean, look at us, our dicks are hanging out, or asses are hanging out and we’re not even women!
I’m not sure what women they have with huge dicks hanging out.
Shows what you know of their culture. That’s why they were those burqas over their body, because their women have dicks, Goddammit! Sometimes there’s two or three under there. They CLAIM to be so pious, but they’re all just sucking each other off and transvestites gathering together in a back room and jerking off into a fruit salad bowl. It’s a sham. Like most religions, it’s a fucking sham.
Now, in closing…
THANK GOD!
…What does the future hold for GWAR with the addition of Pustulus?
I know for sure what it holds. We’re already about 13 songs into the new album, it’s gonna be the greatest fucking GWAR album ever. It’s written in honor of Flattus, but it goes into brand new places with Pustulus. He’s already written songs for us, one we’re playing called Madness at the Core of Time. This new album is a full-concept story album, kind of like Beyond Hell or Lust In Space, but with a lot more definition, a lot more clarity. I think it will be easier for people to see what we’re after. The story tells a vision of the future, the coming apocalypse is on the horizon. Now, they Mayans were only off by a year or two. Soon, there will be an event that will wipe the human race clear once and for all, and might even have an impact on GWAR. Basically, this is about Oderus seeing into the future, and then doing everything he can to make sure time works out in a different way. With GWAR, time goes backwards, sideways and all directions all at once, all you really have is the present, the rest is bullshit. Now, you can use the future to kind of figure out where to go. The reality that Oderus sees and how it affects the band is what the new album’s about and I don’t want to get into it too much, because I haven’t figured it out yet. But when I do, it’s gonna be great!
Do you have a title?
Right now, the working title is Mad at the Sun. That’s an old GWAR saying, it’s just looking up at the sun and being pissed off at it, it’s always up there, EXPLODING. It’s much like GWAR’s career: exploding…slowly.
Also, here’s the link to the Smoot Family Fund to help Flattus Jr and Co.: http://www.metalblade.com/smootfamilyfund/
-Jonathan Yost |
By Geoff Bird
New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal
In 1969, the Apollo 11 space flight put a man on the moon. In 2011, the NB Space Race had a somewhat less lofty goal: Put a Toronto Blue Jays’ baseball cap and a beer cooler into near-space.
The NB Space Race is the cheeky name Brian McCain and his friend, Jamie Allison, gave to their weekend project in Florenceville, N.B, 100 kilometres northwest of Fredericton.
[np-related]
They bought about $150 worth of used electronics, including a digital camera and video recorder purchased off Kijiji, and loaded the contents into a white Styrofoam cooler.
The cooler was tied to a $50 weather balloon filled with helium, which was then let loose to climb roughly 30 kilometres toward the final frontier.
“It was pretty low-tech,” said McCain, an engineer by trade.
The nearcraft, the name for vessels that cruise the near-space, coasted upward for about 90 minutes before the balloon popped as designed. The on-board camera captured images first of the New Brunswick countryside, rising through the clouds, then eventually spectacular scenes from the literal edge of the Earth, 30 kilometres high, where the atmosphere shines a brilliant blue until it fades to black.
“I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with space,” McCain said about his motivation to get into near-space exploration. He read about it in a magazine and on the Internet and figured he’d try it himself.
Such amateur balloon flights have become increasingly popular, with the low cost of electronics making them much more affordable. YouTube is now filled with amateur video captured on flights similar to the NB Space Race.
McCain said the Jays ball cap was a late addition to the ship’s cargo, brought in for a very specific set of skills.
“It was a last-minute thing. We were looking for a little extra weight to throw into it,” McCain said.
After the balloon popped, the cooler briefly hurtled towards the Earth, reaching speeds of 200 kilometres per hour before a parachute deployed, gently dropping the payload into Moose Lake, about 100 kilometres from Florenceville.
McCain and Allison tracked it with a GPS. When they reached it, they cracked the seal on the beer cooler and inspected its contents, all still dry after a brief dip in the lake.
“The first thing I thought of when I put my hat back on was, ‘is this thing radioactive?’” Allison said with a laugh.
He said he’s telling friends the story of his hat’s adventure, though he’s omitting one fine detail.
“I leave out the near part and I just say space,” he said.
The Florenceville near-space explorers are planning on one more extraterrestrial voyage, though next time with more sophisticated equipment to accurately measure height and temperature. And possibly a more sophisticated passenger.
“If we’re doing it again, I’d try to send something a little more symbolic,” Allison said. |
DOJ responds to FL claim that feds illegally withholding DHS immigrant database
Ernest A. Canning Byon 6/18/2012, 12:52pm PT
Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning
Last week, after notifying the state of Florida of its intention to do so, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit [PDF], seeking to halt what Asst. U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez described in his June 11, 2012 letter [PDF] to FL Sec. of State Ken Detzner (R), as "a new program for systematic voter removal, which may ultimately target more than 180,000 registered voters."
A longtime respected election official in the state went further, describing the attempted scrubbing of the rolls to be "un-American".
The lawsuit alleges that the ongoing, systematic voter removal program violates the provisions of the National Vote Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), which "expressly forbids such removal programs during the 90-day period before an election for Federal office."
The complaint seeks not only an immediate federal court injunction to stop the purge, but an order directing FL officials "to take all steps necessary to ensure that no registered voter identified as potentially ineligible based on the [faulty FL Department of Highway Safety & Motor Vehicles] database and voter verification procedures...is removed from the voter rolls within 90 days of a primary or general election for Federal office."
The injunction may prove to be necessary only in three of the Sunshine State's 67 counties --- Lee, Collier and Bay --- where election officials have signaled they intend to continue the allegedly unlawful voter roll purge, even after the actions taken by the DOJ.
When interviewed last week by Brad Friedman on the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show, Leon County (Tallahassee), FL's legendary Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho --- the man placed in charge of the aborted 2000 Florida Presidential recount --- explained the reasons why most of the Supervisors of Elections (both Democratic and Republican) in each of the state's 67 counties have now refused to carry out the state-ordered purge. He described the ongoing effort by the Governor and Sec. of State as "shameful."
The DOJ's 6/11/12 letter also responded to, and seemed to debunk, the claim made by FL that it had been denied access to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration database. The state, in its own lawsuit filed against the DHS last week, has cited lack of access to that database as their reason for using the less reliable state Dept. of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (DHSMV) database for the basis of its voter purge.
The purge, to date, has identifies hundreds of perfectly legal citizen voters for removal from the rolls.
The state of FL, in its response to the DOJ, appears not to be offering the full facts about their attempt to use the DHS database and, as it turns out, Republican Gov. Rick Scott should, by now, be very well acquainted with the perils of voter purges based on inaccurate information...as an apparent victim of one such purge himself...
DOJ's twin obligations
Where the FL GOP has attempted to justify the purge of thousands of voters on the basis of the possibility that there may be non-citizens who have been registered to vote, the DOJ, by way of the 6/11/12 Perez letter to Detzner, explained that the DOJ, an agency headed by the nation's chief law enforcement officer, has an obligation to ensure "that all eligible citizens have the opportunity to register and vote, and that ineligible persons, including non-citizens, do not register and vote in federal elections."
Both the NVRA and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) mandate, as Perez observed, "that every person seeking to register to vote in a federal election swear or affirm under penalty of perjury their United States citizenship."
Moreover, he added, the DOJ "does not hesitate to investigate and, where appropriate, prosecute" all forms of voter registration and voting fraud, "including non-citizens."
FL purge violates the NVRA
As explained by Perez in his 06/11/12 letter:
Congress enacted the NVRA against a historical backdrop...in which many purge programs were initiated close to elections, which prevented or deterred eligible citizens from casting ballots in those elections. Where the registration status of eligible citizens is questioned close to an election, it creates significant confusion for both voters and election officials that cannot easily be resolved in the immediate pre-election period where there is insufficient time to identify errors or remedy incorrect removals. The 90 day quiet period in the NVRA protects these legitimate voters from being dropped from the rolls right before an election.
The DOJ complaint alleges that, under the NVRA, with certain exceptions not applicable in this case, any state program that seeks "to systemically remove the names of ineligible voters," must be completed by a state "no later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office." As a federal primary election is scheduled in the Sunshine State for 8/14/12, FL may not lawfully engage in this systematic form of removal after 5/16/12.
By way of an earlier 6/6/12 letter from Detnzer to the DOJ, FL declared that it "intended to proceed with [its] voter verification process," despite direction from the DOJ that the purge is in violation of the NVRA as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) in a number of counties where the VRA requires federal preclearance of new election procedures.
'Round up the usual suspects.'
The process of targeting as many as 180,000 legal voters as "potential non-citizens" in order to identify, at most, a handful of non-citizens who may have voted in an election at some point, calls to mind a remark made by Captain Renault (Claude Rains) in the classic 1942 film, Casablanca: "Round up the usual suspects."
In covering the ACLU federal lawsuit filed recently in hopes of blocking the latest purge, The BRAD BLOG cited a study by the Brennan Center for Justice which revealed that illegal, non-citizen voting is about a scarce as hen's teeth. The "penalty (not only criminal prosecution, but deportation) is so severe, and the payoff (one incremental vote) is so minimal," the Brennan Center observed, that few could be expected to take the risk.
That position was seconded by Asst. AG Perez, who observed in his June 12 letter that "federal criminal laws [that] prohibit fraudulent voter registration as well as non-citizens voting...have proven quite effective in deterring non-citizens from registering to vote and from casting ballots in federal elections."
In its federal complaint [PDF], the ACLU alleged that FL Secretary of State Detzner created the "potential non-citizen" purge list based upon a FL DHSMV database which is incapable of establishing non-citizenship as the DHSMV did not require applicants for new or renewed driver's licenses to present proof of citizenship until 2010. Many, like named plaintiff, Murat Limage, became naturalized citizens after their driver's license was last updated, so that information is not reflected accurately in the state database.
The DOJ, in its federal complaint, alleges that FL officials are knowingly relying upon an "outdated and inaccurate database" that has put "U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote" at risk of being disenfranchised; that this has included not only recently "naturalized U.S. citizens" but also "native-born citizens, including decorated combat veterans who served in the United States Armed Forces."
As we previously reported, those ensnared by the purge included U.S. citizens like Bill Internicola, the 91-year old, Brooklyn-born, World War II veteran and Bronze Star recipient who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and Archibald Bowyer, another 91-year old WWII vet who has been a citizen since the age of 2, and who received his letter from the state warning he would be purged just as his wife had recently died.
Disturbingly, this "shameful", knowing reliance upon an inaccurate database comes at the behest of a governor who, from personal experience, knows that it could interfere with a citizen's lawful right to vote. In 2006, before he was elected to office by the state of Florida, Gov. Rick Scott (R) was forced to cast a provisional ballot because Collier County election officials, based on a Social Security Death Index Record, mistakenly believed he was dead.
Equal Protection
Although it was not directly mentioned in either the ACLU or DOJ complaints, there is an Equal Protection issue that arises from the purge.
Gov. Scott insists that there is nothing wrong with his "round up the usual suspects" approach because U.S. citizens are afforded "due process." They are given 30 days notice and an opportunity to prove their citizenship, he claims.
As revealed by previous cases which struck down a draconian Photo ID law in WI as unconstitutional, however, coming up with certified copies of documents necessary to prove citizenship (e.g., birth certificates, passports, naturalization papers) can be expensive and time-consuming.
Moreover, as Brad Friedman observed during his interview with Leon County, FL Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho, a vacationing citizen may not receive notice in time to act. Worse, a notice could be mailed to the FL address of a soldier who is in the midst of combat in Afghanistan.
The disparate number of minorities and Democrats targeted by a purge that has been arbitrarily compiled by partisan state officials from a known faulty database suggests that the effort to shift the burden of proof of citizenship to otherwise eligible voters is tantamount to a denial of Equal Protection as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Sancho, when interviewed by Friedman last week, was more direct. He directly lambasted the effort by Scott and the other state officials as nothing less than "un-American."
FL election supervisor revolt
During his June 12 interview, Sancho told Friedman that FL county election supervisors need not, and most will not, carry out the purge. He is aware of only three GOP controlled FL counties that are still vowing to continue the removal of voters.
Sancho explained:
They were basically told that they had to, but under questioning of the Supervisor of Elections at our recent conference we received contradictory information. We were told that we didn’t have to remove them if we did not feel that the quality of information was good, and it’s not.
The vast majority of county election supervisors, he said, have refused to purge "American citizens [who are] perfectly legal to vote."
DHS did not deny FL access to database
In his 6/11/12 letter, Perez responded to FL's claim that they were denied access to the DHS Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database which, the state alleges, is a more comprehensive and accurate database than the they one currently being used from the state DHSMV.
That database, however, Perez explains, does "not include a comprehensive and definitive listing of U.S. citizens, and does not include, for example, those born in the United States."
While SAVE can verify documentation regarding naturalized citizens and "U.S. citizens born abroad who derived citizenship from U.S. parents," Perez wrote, as early as October 2011 the DHS advised FL that "SAVE...can verify these individuals only if [FL provides the DHS with] unique identifiers, such as alien registration numbers or certificate numbers found on immigration-related documents."
In other words, the SAVE database cannot identify immigration status based on names alone, as FL had been hoping to use to compare suspected non-citizens to the federal database.
The state, Perez wrote, "admitted to DHS nearly eight months ago that the Division of Elections does not collect any of the immigration-related numeric identifiers or documentation that DHS has advised would be necessary to participate in SAVE."
Thus, this appears not to be a case of DHS denying a state access to the database, as FL has claimed, and as its rightwing proponents have echoed in the media, but rather a case in which a state has failed to provide the information necessary for it to participate in the federal program.
"In fact," Perez notes, "we understand that the SAVE program has had long and successful working relationships with a number of Florida agencies that need to verify immigration status for their programs and that are able to comply with SAVE requirements."
Moreover, the letter explains, the SAVE program is used by another state (it does not identify which one) "for purposes of verifying citizenship of new voter registrants through use of appropriate identifying information that DHS requires of governments participating in that program."
"Your claim that the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security have worked in concert to deny Florida access to the SAVE Program is simply wrong," Perez admonished, reminding Detzner that the state admitted to having been informed eight months ago of the necessary requirements for participation in the program, but have "failed" ever since to "provide the necessary information DHS."
"As a result, the significant problems you are encountering in administering this new program are of your own creation," the Asst. Attorney General scolded.
The state of Florida has yet to respond publicly to the DOJ lawsuit, other than to indicate they intend to continue their purge of "non-citizens", and any inaccuracies in that effort can be laid at the feet of DHS for not giving them access to the federal database they claim is required to be shared with them by law.
With additional reporting by Brad Friedman.
* * *
Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968). Follow him on Twitter: @Cann4ing. |
Usage: sayebackup.sh [options] sources... OPTIONS: --inc make reverse incremental backup --dry run and show rsync with --dry-run option --help print usage summary -C <dir> backup directory (default: '.') -E <exclfile> file with rsync exclude list -l <account> ssh user name to use (see ssh(1) -l) -i <identity> ssh identity key file to use (see ssh(1) -i) -P <sshport> ssh port to use on the remote system -L <linkdest> hardlink dest files from <linkdest>/ -o <prefix> output directory name (default: 'bak') -q, --quiet suppress progress information -c perform checksum based file content comparisons --one-file-system -x disable crossing of filesystem boundaries --version script and rsync versions DESCRIPTION: This script creates full or reverse incremental backups using the rsync(1) command. Backup directory names contain the date and time of each backup run to allow sorting and selective pruning. At the end of each successful backup run, a symlink '*-current' is updated to always point at the latest backup. To reduce remote file transfers, the '-L' option can be used (possibly multiple times) to specify existing local file trees from which files will be hard-linked into the backup. Full Backups: Upon each invocation, a new backup directory is created that contains all files of the source system. Hard links are created to files of previous backups where possible, so extra storage space is only required for contents that changed between backups. Incremental Backups: In incremental mode, the most recent backup is always a full backup, while the previous full backup is degraded to a reverse incremental backup, which only contains differences between the current and the last backup. RSYNC_BINARY Environment variable used to override the rsync binary path. |
Jaime Noguera
Año 1982. Mientras las tropas argentinas que han recuperado las Malvinas por orden de la Junta Militar esperan impacientes la llegada de la temible Flota Británica, al otro lado del mundo, en España, una estrambótica misión secreta ha desplegado a cuatro montoneros argentinos para que, desde la Bahía de Algeciras, ataquen el puerto de Gibraltar. ¿Sus armas? Un equipo de buceo, unos pasaportes más falsos que el carnet de espía del pequeño Nicolás, unas minas magnéticas y un mapa turístico de la Costa del Sol.
La idea, imaginamos, era emular a los submarinistas italianos que, el 20 de setiembre de 1941, habían hundido en el puerto de la colonia británica dos buques tanque, el Fiona Shell y el Denbydale, más el mercante armado Durban. Con la salvedad de que, en el caso que nos ocupa, de ser hechos prisioneros, los miembros del comando albiceleste no serían reconocidos como soldados argentinos por su gobierno.
Según vemos en el excelente documental de Jesús Mora Operación Algeciras la misión había sido bendecida por el almirante Jorge Isaac Anaya, y para ella se contaba con dos antiguos miembros de la guerrilla peronista Montoneros. Uno de ellos (el protagonista de la cinta) era Máximo Alfredo Nicoletti (alias Gordo Alfredito) ex buzo táctico a sueldo del servicio de inteligencia de la Armada Argentina.
Nicolettí viajó junto a Antonio Nelson Latorre alias El Pelao Diego y Miguel Angel Castigli el Marciano, en un vuelo de Iberia a Madrid, vía París. En la capital francesa ya les dieron problemas los pasaportes, que eran (¿cómo decirlo?) un poquito falsos. Consiguieron sin embargo dársela con queso a los franceses y llegar a la capital española, donde recogieron (en la Embajada Argentina) unas cargas explosivas que debían pegar al casco de los objetivos a hundir.
Desde Madrid, y con un mapa turístico de la Costa del Sol como única ayuda, el comando se trasladó a Málaga, donde alquilaron unos coches para desplazarse hacia la Algeciras, aunque se quedaron una temporada en Marbella para acostumbrarse a la zona, realizar reconocimientos de la Bahía de Algeciras y esperar órdenes, dado que se mantenían las conversaciones diplomáticas entre Reino Unido y Argentina. Nicoletti recordaría que solían tratar los pormenores de su plan de ataque nada menos que en el Casino de Marbella “Era evidente que allí no se iba a producir ninguna redada policial en el que nos pudiésemos ver comprometidos. Aunque llegó un punto en el que nos cansamos de tanto árabe“
Sin embargo, los gauchos no sabían que los ingleses, que en aquella época ya se dedicaban a las escuchas telefonicas, sabían de sus intenciones y habían avisado al gobierno español, pese a que este se había abstenido en la votación de la resolución de la ONU en la exigía la retirada de las tropas argentinas.
¿Y qué atacamos?
Los saboteadores habían comprado una zodiac en El Corte Inglés de Málaga, esquivando como podían las preguntas del vendedor especializado de turno (que qué iban a pescar, que cómo y dónde), y con ella se pusieron a investigar por donde podían colarse en el puerto gibraltareño. Había unas torres de vigilancia que les mosqueaban muy mucho, pero se tranquilizaron al observar de cerca que estaban abandonadas. Viendo que la operación era factible, sólo quedaba esperar una buena pieza.
Dos dragaminas fueron las primeras en interesarles, pero dado su bajo potencial propagandístico, se decidió esperar a que fondease algo de más nivel. Un superpetrolero fue la siguiente posibilidad, pero la Armada argentina lo rechazó ante el temor de que muriesen numerosos civiles y que se causase un vertido de petróleo en la Bahía de Algeciras que perjudicase las relaciones con España.
Entre visita y visita al Casino, llegaron al puerto dos flamantes buques de guerra británicos. Además, hacía mal tiempo, lo cual era bueno para camuflar las operaciones en el agua de los buzos, así que la ocasión la pintaban calva para desencadenar el ataque. Sin embargo, se les denegó el permiso: Reino Unido y Argentina habían retomado la negociaciones.
Aquello pareció importarle un pimiento morrón a los británicos, que aquel mismo 2 de mayo, hundieron sin pestañear con un submarino el crucero Almirante Belgrano, matando a 323 marinos argentinos.
Los miembros del comando argentino decidieron que hundirían el primer barco de guerra británico que entrase en el puerto. Pero no contaban con la astucia de la Policía Española, que se interpuso en su camino…
Game over en la Costa del Sol
Y lo que suele pasar en toda buena historia de operaciones secretas (el pedir tres cervezas con los dedos que no son, el activar la máxima velocidad del Anal Intruder sin leer antes las instrucciones…) pues pasó. El dueño de la empresa de alquiler de coches malagueña se olió que aquellos argentinos que pagaban en dólares (lo normal era que los guiris pagasen con tarjeta de crédito) y que renovaban el alquiler cada dos por tres (nunca lo hacía en el horario acordado) ocultaban algo… ¡Drogas! Avisaron a la policía y esta detuvo a dos de los argentinos cuando procedían a extender el plazo de devolución de los vehículos. Los saboteadores confesaron de qué iba todo aquello. Según leemos en Andaluces. es, las fuerzas del orden no se tragaron de primeras la versión de los arrestados.
-Soy el capitán Fernández, de la Armada Argentina y estoy en una misión secreta y desde este momento me considero un prisionero de guerra. No diré una palabra más. –Si tú eres marino argentino, yo soy el sobrino del Papa.
Alfredo Nicoletti estaba durmiendo cuando cuatro agentes armados entraron en su habitación. “¿Perdimos?”, les preguntó, a lo que el oficial en jefe le contestó que sí. Entonces el buzo le preguntó a los policías si había comido. Aquello le pareció extraño al oficial en jefe. Nicoletti les propuso ir a comer y que luego les llevasen a internarlos en prisión o lo que les tocase.
Muy pragmáticos los policías, que tenían hambre, decidieron irse todos juntos a un restaurante a comer. Allí, tras sincerarse los argentinos, los agentes malagueños hicieron lo propio lamentándose de haber avisado a sus jefes tan pronto de las detenciones.
“Hombre, si yo hubiera sabido que ibais a hundir un barco inglés hubiéramos mirado para otro lado”.
La comida terminó con sendos brindis por “Gibraltar español” y por “Malvinas Argentinas”.
La comitiva de coches de policía todavía hizo una parada antes de meterlos por unas horas en los calabozos de la Comisaría de Málaga. Para que Miguel Angel Castigli el Marciano pudiese recoger unos pantalones que había dejado en una tintorería.
Tras semanas interminables de viajes en zodiac por las aguas de la Bahía de Algeciras, aburridas renovaciones de contratos de alquiler, veladas exasperantes en el Casino de Marbella y un continuo deambular por la Costa del Sol, los agentes argentinos fueron informados, para su sorpresa, que serían enviados a su país ipso facto. Ni cárcel, ni juicio ni dulce de leche. España (recién ingresada en la OTAN) no quería un escándalo de tal magnitud y el entonces presidente Calvo Sotelo, que estaba en Málaga (¿casualidad?), dispuso que se les enviase rápidamente en su avión charter a Madrid, donde embarcaron en un vuelo regular que, vía Canarias, los llevó de vuelta a Argentina.
Las minas magnéticas incautadas fueron destruidas por artificieros españoles en un polígono de tiro de Almería. A finales de 1983, la revista Cambio16 publicó un reportaje sobre aquel arriesgado pero inútil intento de atacar el puerto de Gibraltar que, de haber tenido éxito habría cambiado (al menos un poco) el rumbo de la historia.
Hollywood no ha producido la película todavía, ni esperamos que lo haga.
Con información de: Revista El Buzo, Revista El Tranvía, Andaluces. es.
Jaime Noguera es amante de la parrillada y autor de ‘España: Guerra Zombi‘.
¡Síguenos en Facetrambotic y en Twitterbotic!
BONUS TRACK: Cinco inesperados beneficios para la salud de la masturbación
Probablemente tampoco te interese:
– “Si Gana Podemos lo primero que va a hacer es cerrarnos el negocio”
– El desayuno de los campeones: 59 bocados, 8.000 calorías, prohibido compartir
– Los increibles hombres planta y otras criaturas del bancal
– Crean un lubricante de marihuana que promete orgasmos de 15 minutos |
In honor of inventor Nikola Tesla‘s 157th birthday, we’ve turned to two Tesla experts and historians to help us compile a list of interesting facts you probably never knew about the guy. The information below comes from interviews with W. Bernard Carlson, author of “Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age,” and Marc Seifer, author of “Wizard: Life and Times of Nicola Tesla.”
1. HE WAS BORN DURING A LIGHTNING STORM
Nikola Tesla was born around midnight, between July 9 and July 10, 1856 during a fierce lightning storm. According to family legend, midway through the birth, the midwife wrung her hands and declared the lightning a bad omen. This child will be a child of darkness, she said, to which his mother replied: “No. He will be a child of light.”
2. HE WAS REALLY FUNNY
Most people don’t know that Tesla had a terrific sense of humor, Seifer said. For example, after dining with writer and poet Rudyard Kipling, he wrote this in a correspondence to a close friend:
April 1, 1901 My dear Mrs. Johnson, What is the matter with inkspiller Kipling? He actually dared to invite me to dine in an obscure hotel where I would be sure to get hair and cockroaches in the soup. Yours truly, N. Tesla
3. HE AND EDISON WERE RIVALS, BUT NOT SWORN ENEMIES
Many have characterized Tesla and inventor Thomas Edison as enemies (see this and this,) but Carlson says this relationship has been misrepresented. Early in his career, Tesla worked for Edison, designing direct current generators, but famously quit to pursue his own project: the alternating current induction motor. Sure, they were on different sides of the so-called “Current Wars,” with Edison pushing for direct current and Tesla for alternating current. But Carlson considers them the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of their time: one the brilliant marketer and businessman and the other a visionary and “tech guy.”
On a rare occasion, Edison attended a conference where Tesla was speaking. Edison, hard of hearing and not wanting to be spotted, slipped into the back of the auditorium to listen to the lecture. But Tesla spotted Edison in the crowd, called attention to him and led the audience in giving him a standing ovation.
Seifer qualifies it more, saying the two had a love/hate relationship. At first Edison dismissed Tesla, but came to eventually respect him, he said.
“When there were fires at Tesla’s laboratory, Edison provided him a lab, so clearly there was some mutual respect,” Seifer said
4. HE DEVELOPED THE IDEA FOR SMARTPHONE TECHNOLOGY IN 1901
Tesla may have had a brilliant mind, but he was not as good at reducing his ideas to practice, Carlson said. In the race to develop transatlantic radio, Tesla described to his funder and business partner, J.P. Morgan, a new means of instant communication that involved gathering stock quotes and telegram messages, funneling them to his laboratory, where he would encode them and assign them each a new frequency. That frequency would be broadcast to a device that would fit in your hand, he explained. In other words, Tesla had envisioned the smart phone and wireless internet, Carlson said, adding that of all of his ideas, that was the one that stopped him in his tracks.
“He was the first to be thinking about the information revolution in the sense of delivering information for each individual user,” Carlson said.
He also conceived of, but never developed technology for radar, X-rays, a particle beam “death ray” and radio astronomy.
5. ‘HE SHOOK THE POOP OUT OF MARK TWAIN’
One famous legend surrounding the eccentric Tesla was that he had an earthquake machine in his Manhattan laboratory that shook his building and nearly brought down the neighborhood during experiments.
Tesla’s device wasn’t actually an earthquake machine, Carlson said, but a high frequency oscillator. A piston set underneath a platform in the laboratory shook violently as it moved, another experiment in more efficient electricity.
It didn’t bring the block to ruins, Carlson said, but it did “shake the poop out of Mark Twain.” Twain was known for having digestive problems, so Tesla, who knew Twain through their gentlemen’s club, invited him over. He instructed Twain to stand on the platform while he flipped on the oscillator. After about 90 seconds, Twain jumped off the platform and ran for the facilities.
6. HE HAD FAMOUS FRIENDS
People aren’t aware that he was close friends with conservationist John Muir, Seifer said. Muir, one of the founders of the Sierra Club, loved that Tesla’s hydroelectric power system was a clean energy system. It runs on waterfalls, which Tesla referred to as “running on the wheelwork of nature.” Also among his friends: financiers Henry Clay Frick and Thomas Fortune Ryan. “He lived in the Waldorf Astoria, at the height of the gilded age,” Seifer said, adding that his fame later in life lessened.
7. PEARLS DROVE HIM CRAZY
Tesla could not stand the sight of pearls, to the extent that he refused to speak to women wearing them. When his secretary wore pearl jewelry, he sent her home for the day. No one knows why he had such an aversion, but Tesla had a very particular sense of style and aesthetics, Carlson said, and believed that in order to be successful, one needed to look successful. He wore white gloves to dinner every night and prided himself on being a “dapper dresser.”
Every photograph of Tesla, he said, is very carefully constructed to capture his “good side.”
8. HE HAD A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY AND A FEAR OF GERMS
Tesla had what’s known as a photographic memory. He was known to memorize books and images and stockpile visions for inventions in his head. He also had a powerful imagination and the ability to visualize in three dimensions, which he used to control the terrifying vivid nightmares he suffered from as a child. It’s in part what makes him such a mystical and eccentric character in popular culture, Carlson said. He was also known for having excessive hygiene habits, born out of a near-fatal bout of cholera as a teenager.
Jenny Marder contributed to this report.
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By Brandon Turbeville, Natural Blaze
If recent developments are anything to go by, the United States government could be slaughtering 90,000 wild horses at the behest of the livestock lobby.
The question of what to do with wild horses on land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been a subject of debate for some time with accusations that the horses are competing for precious grass resources in the American West.
Pro-slaughter proponents argue that the population of the horses is too large. Opponents, however, point out that 80% of BLM land grazed by livestock has no wild horses on it at all.
Still, livestock industry groups are lobbying for the killing and slaughter of wild horses and burros and the U.S. government is showing signs that it is preparing to do just that.
As EcoWatch writes:
The American Wild Horse Campaign on Thursday harshly criticized Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke‘s appointment of Brian Steed, the former chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT), as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) as dangerous and out of step with the wishes of the vast majority of Americans. “Rep. Stewart is leading the charge to slaughter America’s wild horses and burros over the opposition of 80 percent of Americans,” said Suzanne Roy, AWHC Executive Director. “Putting his deputy at the helm of the agency charged with protecting these national icons is like putting the wolf in charge of the chicken coop.” “Americans don’t want the government to be in the horse slaughter business, and Interior Secretary Zinke should appoint someone to lead the Bureau of Land Management who is committed to protecting, not destroying, America’s historic mustangs,” Roy concluded. Roy added that the long-term leadership for this agency, which manages 245 million acres of public land in the West, should be determined through a full and transparent confirmation process, not a late-in-the-day political appointment by the secretary. SOS Pocket Survival Kit – Free Today (ad)
The U.S. House of Representatives has already passed the Stewart Amendment to a 2018 spending bill that the AWHC has labeled a death warrant for the horses and burros as it would allow for the killing and slaughter of the animals that the BLM considers surplus.
The Senate has not yet taken up the subject but if it agrees with the House, the amendment could lead to the slaughter of more than 90,000 wild horses in holding facilities and on the range.
EcoWatch reports,
Stewart and Zinke are pushing for the destruction of America’s mustangs to appease the special interest livestock lobby, which views wild horses as competition for cheap taxpayer subsidized grazing on public lands. (Public lands ranchers pay $1.87 per animal per month to graze livestock on public lands while the going rate for private land grazing in the West is $22.60.) Livestock industry groups like the National Cattleman’s Association are lobbying for the killing and slaughter of wild horses and burros on public lands even though 80 percent of BLM land grazed by livestock has no wild horses present on it. AWHC is calling on Congress to reject the Stewart amendment in favor of appropriations language that would require the BLM to use non-lethal birth control to manage America’s wild herds, as recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. The Senate is expected to release its 2018 Interior Appropriations bill later this month.
Clearly, if the horse populations needs to be dealt with or reduced, non-lethal birth control is the better option. That is, of course, assuming that the populations are an issue to begin with.
Coming on the heels of an attempt to allow the importation of elephant hunting trophies to the United States, it appears the U.S. government is gearing up to commit yet another genocide in the name of corporations and the corporate lobby.
As Americans lose more freedom by the day, and as its military marches overseas, animals are also finding their lives and living conditions becoming increasingly worse in the United States.
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Japanese divorce laws change to allow women to remarry at any time, in line with laws for men
Updated
Until just a few days ago, a divorced woman in Japan had to wait at least six months before being allowed to remarry, while men did not have to wait a single day.
Key points: Supreme Court decided the code was unconstitutional
Prompted Japanese Diet to pass amendment to the law
But if a women is pregnant, she must wait 100 days
Original husband considered a baby's father if birth is up to 300 days after divorce
But those laws have changed after an amendment passed in the Japanese upper house.
One woman from the Okayama prefecture was not happy with the Civil Code's remarriage ban, and she successfully challenged it in the Supreme Court last year.
The Supreme Court decided the code was unconstitutional, which prompted the Japanese Diet to pass an amendment last week.
The amendment ruled that normally women would no longer have to wait a single day to get remarried.
But MPs decided to keep the law that said if the woman was pregnant, she would still have to wait 100 days before remarrying.
The law was first introduced in the 1890s, when there were concerns over how to identify a father if a divorced woman happened to be pregnant.
Japan's civil code was discussed when the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women met earlier in the year in Geneva.
Mikiko Otani, a human rights lawyer, attended that meeting. She said while she welcomed this latest amendment, divorced women continued to face discrimination in Japan.
"[The] Civil Court of Japan and the family law does not explicitly say that marriage properties shall be divided between husband and wife 50–50," she said.
Ms Otani also said more legal protections were needed to ensure newly divorced women were not left in financial stress.
Topics: marriage, community-and-society, human-interest, women, divorce, japan
First posted |
In which I explain my newly-found attachment to renaissance faires to an imaginary audience.
There’s a story lodged in your head? You’re lucky to have such a powerful thing.
Renaissance faires–enthusiastically–represent a history that never happened. People don’t study up to attend a faire. They absorb the lingo and the manners of behavior through osmosis. God’s teeth, they barely spoke English back then. And they certainly didn’t have overpriced turkey legs and diet cokes. Complaints like this are common, even with faire attendees, but they miss the point.
The European Renaissance happened in stages from roughly the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Wikipedia will tell you that it was vaguely sandwiched in-between the Baroque period and what we patronizingly call the “Middle Ages”–or, even worse, we call them the “Dark Ages”. As if people walked around with torches, the better to see the martyrs they were about to burn.
Many of you probably think of the Renaissance as a period of cultural and scientific leaps, increased literacy, and educational improvements. It’s when Michaelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine chapel on his back and Leonardo invented the helicopter and the scaffold. Right? A lot of this did happen, more or less. Of course, there was an awful lot of other stuff going on in the world during these slightly better-lit years. This picture is all most of you need to get a feel for the era, possibly supplemented by Monty Python’s take on this important time in European history. You’ll get some of that through osmosis, too.
But I’m not here to mock the fantastic, quasi-historical weekend you’re about to have. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m a little disappointed that ren faires don’t celebrate the intellectual freedom that was the hallmark of the Renaissance as much as they could, but I still love them. These faires will give you a wonderful, permissive license to imagine your lives in other ways.
Some of you get in character to attend the faire. Maybe your characters are well thought-out, or ill-defined and vague. But it almost doesn’t matter: Regular faire-goers are people who are comfortable with the stories in their heads. While some of you walking through the ticket booth are there to see the people in silly costumes, many of you know precisely what to expect when you walk past the tents selling clothing and lutes and pouches. (The pocket as we know it was invented a few centuries after the time of Chaucer.) Some of you will join the festivities by putting on gracious airs, or speaking in an accent that could, charitably, be described as a pastiche of the “Elizabethan” accent.
Some of you want to construct an “historical persona” that might have existed in a post-medieval bazaar, complete with appearance and airs. Some will role-play, deferring to the king as he inexplicably, imperiously walks through the mud of the marketplace. And there are those who are entertainers, with a backstory, a tailored costume, and a modus operandi ready to be shared with this world of the gloriously dusty past.
But all of you have a story in your head. You one-time curiosity-seeking patrons who happened across the faire on the way to Sunday brunch? Every one of you almost certainly will wonder how you could fit into this scene. If you wanted to.
I’m an entertainer, and I have a costume and a story and a mode of behavior. I get it, mostly. I have a foot in the tent door, and I think I know why my new renny friends do all this, and what draws all of you here: A story in the head is a powerful thing, and must be deferred to. A little deference to the bright tale in my head is enough to get the story out of my head, where I can share it with others.
Because a faire is nothing without sharing our personas, our stories, our reasons for being there. We’re bring someone else along in our heads for a weekend, even if it’s a someone else that’s just a little bit different than who we really are.
Those stories in your heads? In our lives of commuting and paying the bills and microwaving dinner, those stories can be difficult to let out without feeling a little silly.
At a renaissance faire, everybody’s being, let’s face it, a little silly. And that’s the key: The faire gives us a reason to imagine that things are not as they are. And a reason to spend a couple of days telling those stories.
This article would be much less colorful and festive without the help of Julie Goldberg.
Neil Fein is a freelance editor who specializes in novels. If you’ve written a manuscript or are getting close to finishing, you can get in touch with him here, and even ask for a free sample edit. He rides his bicycle as much as he can, and he paints when he damn well feels like it. He also plays acoustic guitar in the band Baroque & Hungry. His other band, The Trouvères, is currently on tour and can be seen at the Connecticut Renaissance Faire through the end of October. |
The Enlightened Capitalist
Bichler, Shimshon and Nitzan, Jonathan. (2014). April. pp. 1-9. (Article - Monograph; English).
There is a more recent version of this eprint available. Click here to view it.
Abstract or Brief Description
On April 16, 2014, we published a short article in the Indian fortnightly Frontline, titled 'Profit from Crisis'. Scarcely had a day passed from the article’s publication that we got an angry email from an asset manager whom we'll call 'Mr. X'. Mr. X is an enlightened capitalist, and reading our piece had set him on fire. Our article, he protested, was 'terribly flawed'. It 'failed miserably' in understanding capitalism, and its allegation that capitalists do not want recovery is doing 'tremendous harm'. This note deconstructs Mr. X's protestations in the context of the current capitalist angst.
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EnglishArticle - Monographand. (2014).. 2 May. pp. 129-131. (Article - Magazine; English).beating the average environment real capitalism sabotage statism05 May 201409 Apr 2016 00:51 |
This isn't the real America
Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.
At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements -- including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.
Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.
IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.
Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.
These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.
Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties.
Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.
Of even greater concern is that the U.S. has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on people in U.S. custody.
Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.
Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.
Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).
I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable. |
Home farming: Bill Stagg turning up his beans, Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940. He will next pile them for curing.
Homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food, and may also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale. Pursued in different ways around the world—and in different historical eras—homesteading is generally differentiated from rural village or commune living by isolation (either socially or physically) of the homestead. Use of the term in the United States dates back to the Homestead Act (1862) and before. In sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in nations formerly controlled by the British Empire, a homestead is the household compound for a single extended family. In the UK, the term 'smallholder' or 'crofts' is the rough equivalent of 'homesteader'.
Modern homesteaders often use renewable energy options including solar electricity and wind power. Many also choose to plant and grow heirloom vegetables and to raise heritage livestock. Homesteading is not defined by where someone lives, such as the city or the country, but by the lifestyle choices they make.[1]
As historical governmental policy [ edit ]
Historically, homesteading has been used by governmental entities (engaged in national expansion) to help populate and make habitable what were previously little-desired areas; especially in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Guided by legal homestead principles, many of these "homestead acts" were instituted in the 19th and 20th centuries in order to drive the populating of specific, national areas, with most being discontinued after a set time-frame or goal were achieved. And it has very good space for people with large families.
Renewed interest in homesteading was brought about by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's program of Subsistence Homesteading in the 1930s and 1940s.[2]
As a social movement [ edit ]
The attractiveness of back-to-the-land movements dates from the Roman era, and has been noted in Asian poetry and philosophy tracts as well.[3] The ideas of modern homesteading proponents, such as Ralph Borsodi, gained in popularity in the 1960s in the United States. Self-sufficiency movements in the 1990s and 2000s began to apply the concept to urban and suburban settings, known as urban homesteading. According to author John Seymour, "urban homesteading" incorporates small-scale, sustainable agriculture and homemaking.[4]
As economic choice [ edit ]
In homesteading, social and government support systems are frequently eschewed in favor of self-reliance and relative deprivation, in order to maximize independence and self-determination. The degree of independence occurs along a spectrum, with many homesteaders creating foodstuffs or crafts to appeal to high-end niche markets in order to meet financial needs. Other homesteaders come to the lifestyle following successful careers which provide the funding for land, housing, taxes, and specialized equipment such as solar panels, farm equipment and electricity generators.
Modern government regulation—in the form of building codes, food safety codes, zoning regulations, minimum wage and social security for occasional labor, and town council restrictions on landscaping and animal keeping—can increase the marginal cost of home production of food in areas affected by these restrictions. Careful choice of homesteading location is essential for economic success.
Actual financial savings from adopting a homesteading lifestyle can be significant if planned and executed properly. Many homesteaders express deep satisfaction with their standard of living and feel that their lifestyle is healthier and more rewarding than more conventional patterns of living.[5][6]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ] |
Dragon Ball FighterZ launches February 1 in Japan, adds Nappa and Captain Ginyu [Update]
Latest information from V-Jump.
Dragon Ball FighterZ will launch for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC in Japan on February 1, 2018 for 7,800 yen, the latest issue of V-Jump reveals.
New playable characters Nappa and Captain Ginyu are also revealed. Nappa can summon Saibamen and use the Meteor special attack “Kappa!” Captain Ginyu has a technique that summons The Ginyu Force, and can use the Meteor special attack “Body Change” to switch characters and HP with his opponent.
In Story Mode, an event occurs in which the Super Warriors fall one after the other. When Goku awakens, the spirit of the player will be linked to him. In this way, the story will develop by linking characters with the player’s spirit. In the Android Chapter, for example, the spirit of the player is linked with Android 18. And in the Enemy Warriors Chapter, the spirit of the player is linked with Frieza.
You can also deepen your bonds with characters. If your bonds are deep enough, you will be able to hear private conversations, such as Yamcha saying, “I want to get married!” or Vegeta saying, “Bulma has a nasty personality…”
In Story Mode, you will be able to freely choose whether to battle and build experience points, rescue allies, learn skills, and more while advancing on a map.
In North America and Europe, Dragon Ball FighterZ is due out in early 2018 and February 2018, respectively.
Thanks, Ryokutya2089.
Update 8:43 a.m.: Added scan, via ShonenGamez. |
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A transgender man is appealing for help after he was abused by two mothers on a London train.
Naith Payton, 28, claims he was called a “faggot” and a “boy with tits” by the women while travelling on the London Overground train.
According to video footage, the women yelled a string of foul-mouthed insults at the chef, all while their two young children sat watching.
Beware the video on page 2 contains scenes some may find distressing
They then ordered their own children to insult the passenger – telling their kids to “shout at him and tell him he’s bad”, according to the victim’s account.
Mr Payton took to Facebook the following day to share a video of the ordeal, after dealing with the initial shock.
The incident, which took place between Willesden Junction and Kensington Olympia in west London, ended with the women smashing the phone out of his hand.
He said: “When they got on the train, they were swearing and using slurs, and there were some children on the train, including their own.
“One of them, the blonde woman, was repeatedly yelling ‘you fucking prick’ down the phone, while her daughter was sitting in her lap.
“I asked them to stop swearing, since there were kids around, and they turned on me.
“I didn’t get the worst of what they said on camera, but it was very homophobic and transphobic – they called me a ‘faggot’, a ‘fucking gay boy’ and a ‘boy with tits’.
“They also consistently misgendered me, as you can hear in the video.”
RELATED: This trans athlete is sharing their inspiring story.
Mr Payton told PinkNews: “Nothing like this has happened to me before, and it was very upsetting to be made to feel unsafe so close to where I live.
“It was also a reminder that homophobia and transphobia are still a real problem.”
The incident has now been reported to police who are understood to be investigating. |
Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line
Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee
Confronting Reality/Learning from the History of Our Movement
First Published: April 1981.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright:This work is in the Public Domain
Publisher’s Note: The Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee (BASOC) is a local Marxist-Leninist organization based in San Francisco and Oakland, California. A part of the anti-revisionist/anti-ultraleft trend that has developed in recent years, BASOC began in 1977 as a diverse collection of study groups exploring the issues confronting the communist movement today, and especially the question of party building. The first paper in this collection, “The Development of BASOC,” traces the growth of our organization’s political unity. The five papers forming the bulk of this pamphlet present BASOC’s views on reform, revolution, party building, and communist organization, the results of this initial process in developing our political orientation. As such, they are intended as a contribution to the debate within our movement, and not as a series of final pronouncements. We welcome readers’ criticisms, comments, or questions.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE DEVELOPMENT OF BASOC
The Study Process
Mass Work Initiatives
Work in the Communist Movement
Some Lessons
A Summary
IMPERIALISM AND THE STRUGGLES AGAINST IT IN THE UNITED STATES TODAY
Imperialism Today: The End of the American Century
Prospects for Mass Struggles
Conclusion
REFORM AND REVOLUTION
Introduction
The Role of Reforms in Revolutionary Situtations
Reforms in Situations of Political Stability
Ultra-left Purity, The Other Easy Solution
The Role of Communists in Reform Struggles
Priorities for Mass Work
Propaganda and Agitation
Unity with the Advanced
Working with Reformist Elements
Reform and Revolution
PARTY BUILDING
Party Building Is Our Central Task
The Current Scene
Some Working Definitions
Political Line
The Principal Task
Theory and Practice in the Development of Line
Testing in Practice
The Scope of the General Line
Obstacles within Our Movement
The Positions of Other Forces
Summation
A TWENTY-YEAR LEGACY OF ULTRA-LEFTISM
“Left” and Right Errors
Adventurism
Left Sectarianism
Left Economism
Foundations of Ultra-leftism
Ideological Factors
Ultra-centralism
Objective Conditions
The International Context
Deja Vu
Correcting “Left” Tendencies
DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM
The Principles of Democratic Centralism
Problems of Democratic Centralism
Monolithic Unity
Commandism
Lack of Leadership Accountability
Ultrademocracy
The Question of Factions and Tendencies
Democratic Centralism in Today’s Movement
Appendices
BASOCS ORIGINAL POINTS OF UNITY
BUILDING A NATIONAL FRACTION OF EDUCATION WORKERS |
The leader of Toronto Hydro’s unionized workers says he’ll fight any move to lay off his members at the city-owned utility. Toronto Hydro has axed contractors employing between 700 and 1,000 workers after receiving a stinging rebuke from the Ontario Energy Board.
The dramatic cuts come after the energy board siad it won’t give Toronto Hydro the $500 million a year it says it needs to mend its aging system. ( JACK LAKEY / TORONTO STAR )
And the company says that hundreds of permanent staffers – as much as 20 per cent of its workforce of 1,700 – will be told soon that their jobs, too, will disappear. John Camilleri, who heads CUPE Local One at Toronto Hydro, said Wednesday that’s not acceptable. “It’s my expectation that no staff at Toronto Hydro be laid off,” Camilleri said in an interview.
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“There’s a lot of work to be done, and there has to be some compromise where 1,000 people don’t lose their jobs.” Camilleri said he has seen underground hydro vaults with concrete crumbling off the roof, and other instances where existing facilities are no longer capable of serving rising demand. Camilleri said it’s up to the province to resolve the current conflict between the energy board, which regulates rates, and Toronto Hydro. The province can issue policy directives to the energy board. Toronto Hydro owns the wires that carry electricity directly to homes and businesses in Toronto. The dramatic cuts come after the energy board signaled that it won’t give Toronto Hydro anything close to the $500 million a year in extra revenue it says it needs for each of the next three years to mend its aging system.
A spokesperson for a group representing electrical contractors and unions said the cutbacks will have a direct effect on reliable power service. “It won’t be long before we face power outages, longer and more frequent,” said Giselle Matin, spokesperson for the group called Keep the Lights On.
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Martin said that 850 to 1,000 employees will be let go in the near term by contractors working on projects to upgrade the city’s aging power grid. Blair Peberdy, vice president of Toronto Hydro, estimated that 700 to 900 contract workers will lose their jobs. “We’ve started the process of right-sizing, or down-sizing the company to meet the approved amount,” Peberdy said in an interview. Contractors already have the bad news, he said. But it won’t stop there. “The impacts will start to hit Toronto Hydro’s own workforce shortly,” he added. No final decisions have been made on the staffing cuts required, he said, but “it could be up to a 20 per cent reduction.” That would be 340 layoffs of hydro staff. One source said layoff announcements could come as early as Thursday. All the jobs being lost are on projects that Toronto Hydro has on its books to renew aging equipment. The company says it needs to spend heavily in coming years because its equipment isn’t as reliable as it should be. Much of it was installed in suburban areas during the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, the company says. It’s now half a century old, and beyond its normal life expectancy. Some of the renewal work is being done by Toronto Hydro crews, and some by contract firms. The company had warned the energy board that failure to grant it a significant rate increase would leave it short of money, forcing it to scrap much of its renewal program. Chief executive Anthony Haines had told the board that failing to get the rate the company was seeking would put it in “survival mode.” Toronto Hydro “would be in the position of having an insufficient workforce and few-to-no contractors to do the capital work required,” Haines had told the board. As a result, “the distribution system would be maintained at unacceptable service levels.” The energy board, which regulates the rates of local hydro utilities, last week dismissed the company’s depiction of a rapidly deteriorating system as “not sufficiently credible.” The board said Toronto Hydro has failed to demonstrate that its service is eroding, and criticized it for failing to make productivity improvements. The board pegged Toronto Hydro’s rate increase to a formula that will give the company an additional $140 million a year in revenue. The company had said it needs $500 to $600 million a year, costing a typical household an extra $5 a month. The energy board told Toronto Hydro it can re-apply for extra money if it’s needed. But that’s a lengthy process, and early this week Toronto Hydro began to cancel contracts. Both Peberdy and Matin warned that the workers being lost are highly skilled and mobile. That means they can look for jobs outside Ontario, and won’t be easy to get back if they do leave. |
Hoping to revive the Ring of Fire, Ontario is seeking private and public partners — especially the federal government — in a development corporation to build about $2 billion of roads and mining infrastructure. The money is needed to open up the vast northwestern Ontario zone rich in mineral deposits such as chromite, a key ingredient in stainless steel, Premier Kathleen Wynne said Friday in a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Development of the so-called Ring of Fire northeast of Thunder Bay hit a snag earlier this year when its biggest developer called a halt to an environmental assessment there. ( Tanya Talaga / Toronto Star file photo )
Ontario is prepared to invest a “substantial” but undisclosed sum in the project and wants Ottawa to match it to prepare the zone for mining, which is expected to be worth about $60 billion, said the premier. Estimated costs are up to $1 billion for “industrial infrastructure” and $1.25 billion for roads. “We expect your government to come to the table,” Wynne wrote Harper, citing previous federal investments in the Alberta oilsands, hydroelectric development at Churchill Falls in Labrador and a British Columbia transmission line.
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The federal government reiterated its willingness to collaborate on the Ring of Fire, but Greg Rickford — minister of state for northern Ontario economic development — told the Star he had no advance notice of Wynne’s “vague” request. “We’re not saying yes or no to it,” Rickford added. “We’ve been very clear on what issues are exclusively provincial.” Development of the 4,000-square-kilometre area, about 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay, hit a snag in June. That’s when the biggest developer, U.S.-based Cliffs Natural Resources Inc., called a halt to an environmental assessment, putting in jeopardy its plan to open a mine in 2016. There has also been a delay in building a road into the area.
Cliffs, which planned to build a massive smelter near Sudbury, blamed delays in approving terms of reference for the environmental assessment and sources said failure to lock down a favourable long-term price for electricity was one of several other snags. New Democrat MPP Michael Mantha (Algoma-Manitoulin) said government action to co-ordinate development of the Ring of Fire, long touted by the Liberal government as a boon for northern jobs, was long overdue.
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“They’ve wasted enough time,” said Mantha, his party’s mines critic, skeptical that Friday’s announcement was a public relations exercise. “The biggest question we have is getting the infrastructure developed and electricity cost.” Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak has said he would speed up development of the Ring of Fire, which is 300 kilometres from the nearest railway line. Wynne said other partners in the development corporation could include mining companies and First Nations, represented in negotiations with the province by former Liberal MP and one-time NDP premier Bob Rae. “Those who want to be truly involved in the project, we think, will make their intentions known quickly,” Northern Development and Mines Minister Michael Gravelle told a news conference in Thunder Bay. “The bottom line is we need to move forward in bringing all the partners together. Decisions need to be made. We, obviously, are keen to drive this process forward.”
Read more about: |
If you’ve been keeping up with the Rio Olympics, you know that international teams are having a bad time there (see Rio 2016: Lebanese Want Israeli Team Thrown Off Bus). Olympic officials have been robbed multiple times during their stay in Brazil. Because it’s Rio… the home of rampant crime, Zika, and dirty trash water.
That being said, you know your country sucks when your Olympic athlete – the person representing your nation – makes Rio even crappier than it already is. Instead of an athlete being the victim of a crime, this time an athlete is the perp. In this case, a combat athlete. Yeah, let that sink in for a second.
Rio authorities threw a boxer in the slammer to keep him from continuing on a rape spree. Meanwhile they’re investigating sexual assault allegations made against him.
Take a guess where he’s from? Hint: he’s not Norwegian…
A Moroccan boxer has been arrested and jailed in Rio de Janeiro after an allegation of attempted rape was made against him, just one day before he was due to fight at the Olympic Games. He was stripped of his Olympic competitor status. Hassan Saada, 22, was arrested by police on Friday morning after allegations of sexual assault were made against him by two Brazilian women who work in the Olympic Village in Barra da Tijuca as waitresses. Police have confirmed that Saada will be jailed for 15 days while they conduct a rape investigation… Judge Nunes Saly [said]: “It has been necessary to arrest Hassan Saada to investigate the allegations against him. If he was at liberty there would be a risk that he could interfere with witnesses. And there is a risk that Hassan Saada could reoffend.”
Surprise! He’s Moroccan. Now, we can’t say this is verified for certain, but, the man’s name is Hassan Saada, and the country of Morocco is 99% Islamic. Thus it’s safe to say there’s a 99% chance that this lad is a Muslim. He could also be a Buddhist. But considering Islam’s track record when it comes to rape… let’s go with Muslim.
No no no. Islam is not a race, but a religion. Demeaning an entire demographic of people due to skin color? Bad. Criticizing a system of laws and ideas based on the teachings of a pagan moon god? It’s cool. Also, what are the chances that this guy decided to experiment with rape for the very first time in Rio? Maybe, just maybe he was bringing his “rape culture” mindset along with him from Morocco and they’re just a whole lot less, “tolerant” in Brazil. Just throwing out possibilities.
Imagine being Morocco right now? You’ve sent off the best of your athletes to compete in one of the most esteemed events of all time. The world is watching… Meanwhile, your guy? He’s prepping for the games by raping it up in a Brazilian shanty. Time to clean house a little bit, wouldn’t you say?
NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT! IT’S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE. |
Are You a Vampire? No, I've Just Met God
DXM
Citation: P.J.. "Are You a Vampire? No, I've Just Met God: An Experience with DXM (exp1878)". Erowid.org . Jun 16, 2000. erowid.org/exp/1878
DOSE:
354 mg oral DXM (liquid)
BODY WEIGHT: 180 lb
To gather insight into my current state of affairs. In retrospect, I would have been better served calling the Psychic Friends Network.It was 1 am. I was on my way to bed; I had been researching DXM on the web, and figured, what the heck. Previously I had not been in the best possible mind set for the last two weeks. The love of my life had left me saying that I was too intense for her, and she didn t want to be consumed. It was also about a month off from the anniversary of my father's death, and a mess of other angry-make events. I admit to being an adrenaline junkie, (ex NASCAR driver); but my most recent of two trips, gave me pause to re-examine my lifestyle. I had tripped a week before, on the same stuff, with a little less quantity, fairly uneventful, and actually pretty dull. The second time I had Massive Attacks newest on the juke box, and it was a cold and windy night. Not a cloud in the sky when I walked the dog around 10pm. I had left one window open to circulate fresh air, and so I could hear the outside world, a lucid dreaming trick I had learned at the NIH.24 years old, 180lb, I have a rather exotic neurological disorder: Friedriech s Ataxia, (think Steven Hawking), and have a 160 iq, scored perfect on the language part of the SAT, (piss poor on the math, but nobody's perfect). I had never even smoked marijuana before, and was a virgin extreme to altered states. I had just finished some Sam Adams, and was already a little woozy as I toddled off to bed.At 1 am, I chugged a bottle of Robitussin Maximum Strength, Cough and Cold, (354mg dosage, not a lot I know, [5ml per dose / 118ml in the bottle x15mg per dose]); I did not gag at all. I climbed into bed, turned off the lights, and waited. Within 30-45 minutes I was becoming nauseous, but having had to throw back some truly disgusting substances for my neurology, I knew could keep it down. About 15 minutes later the sickness passed, and I, feeling sort of drunk opened my eyes, to look for visual hallucinations. No such luck, so I closed my eyes, and rolled over thinking, screw this, just go to sleep . I could feel my thighs tense and relax, like a puppy in rem. I could hear the leaves rustling outside. Every car that went by outside, I felt like I was the car for a split second...Then I opened my eyes again, and found the ceiling, white, was shifting like it was liquid. This was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Big sigh. I found myself thinking about my girlfriend; I think I may have had an out-of-body experience, because I was suddenly in her bedroom in NC, while I knew My body was in NY. I was sort of swept along by my thoughts, and found myself crying over her as she slept. I kissed her on the neck, and was gone. Back to my room, I opened my eyes again, and felt a presence. It wasn t an elf, or an alien, or anything which I could make out clearly enough to identify. The shadows on the ceiling sort of came together to form a void mouth type thing. It saw that I had been crying and thought/asked if there was anything to be done. Before I thought/said anything else, It thought/said she'll be back, she misses you too . Once again I cried. It then started to rain outside, right on cue, and I knew then what/who I had been conversing with. I didn't fear it, but I started thinking, hey this is pretty cool, getting to meet god on your second trip. I then sort of got up, and robo-walked, (very, very odd) into the bathroom for the most wonderful piss of my life. The other odd thing about my jaunt to the can was that I didn't wake up the puppy. I felt such empathy for her, as she slept; I then had a flash, and I was the dog. So bizarre, so basic, so hungry, (the vet said that she was overweight, so I was cutting back on her food). I got her a biscuit, and laid it at the tip of her nose, and went back to bed. Crawling back to bed, this was odd, but I could swear that I was levitating, and just sort of slid onto the mattress. I then stayed awake until the sun came up, coming down; I had peaked at about 2:30-3:30am, and was feeling unusually beat. I fell asleep and woke refreshed and only had a mild hangover at about 1pm. I massaged my thighs in a hot bath to lessen the stiffness, and sit here in my bathrobe, writing this.I have also in reading the stories, faqs, and information on the web, have encountered a number of strange real-world phenomena with regards to my two trips. The first is the dimming of street lights in my presence. I can shut off all the lamps on Broadway, one after the next, within a 20-30 foot radius. As I pass by, the last one flicks back to life. The other thing worthy of note is that I think I shut off the coffee bean roaster, at my favorite local coffee house, until they took my order, and then blammo, back on. Really quite bizarre; the other thing that gave me pause to re-examine was after the first trip, I was sitting at a red light, but the green wouldn't turn on! From red to nothing...A sign to slow down my life now, before it s too late. One which I am heeding with great care. I don t think that this is something which I could control, but am having fun, with my thought clapper, as I walk downtown after dark and amaze the odd pedestrian with my new found power. A group of teens asked me if I was a vampire; to which I replied' No, I ve just met god. 'The only recommendation I would have for people interested in DXM, is to of course take it slowly, and to be certain that they read and comprehend all of the warnings and contra-indications before they proceed. I am so grateful to the people who have gone before and left descriptions of their experiences, I felt it only right to leave my own for the next generation of pyschonauts. Good-Luck.P.S. I ll let you know if God was right about my fiancee. |
Stoke City are chasing Sergi Roberto (Picture: Getty)
Stoke City are ahead in the race to sign Barcelona midfielder Sergi Roberto with the player already in England waiting for a deal to be agreed.
Roberto, 22, has earned a reputation as one of Barca’s brightest young prospects, with some comparing him to Xavi in recent years for his excellent midfield performances.
But having failed to knuckle down a first-team place this season, reports suggest he has been allowed to leave the Nou Camp in January, and Stoke are keen on a deal.
Roberto was at the Britannia Stadium this week to visit former Barca colleagues Bojan and Marc Muniesa – and he could now join them at the club if the deal goes through as planned.
Arsenal and Tottenham are thought to have previously had bids rejected for the pass-master. |
Not good.
WASHINGTON —The Central Intelligence Agency has begun moving weapons to Jordan from a network of secret warehouses and plans to start arming small groups of vetted Syrian rebels within a month, expanding U.S. support of moderate forces battling President Bashar al-Assad, according to diplomats and U.S. officials briefed on the plans.
The shipments, related training and a parallel push to mobilize arms deliveries from European and Arab allies are being timed to allow a concerted push by the rebels starting by early August, the diplomats and officials said, revealing details of a new covert plan authorized by President Barack Obama and disclosed earlier this month.
The CIA is expected to spend up to three weeks bringing light arms and possibly antitank missiles to Jordan. The agency plans to spend roughly two weeks more vetting an initial group of fighters and making sure they know how to use the weapons that they are given, clearing the way for the first U.S.-armed rebels to enter the fight, diplomats briefed on the CIA’s plans said. |
It’s been a long time since anything truly good has happened for the small but resurgent international left. The performance of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom general election last night changed that.
The party, led by the socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn — who has often been compared to Bernie Sanders here — vastly outperformed expectations and picked up dozens of seats, pushing the conservatives out of a majority in an election that was supposed to be a landslide and into a hung Parliament. They even took one seat that had been held by the Tories for a full century.
A quick look at the electoral map right now #GE2017pic.twitter.com/vRcETACw2w — TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) June 9, 2017
It looks like the Tories will be able to form a majority coalition or arrangement with the conservative N Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, but Prime Minister Theresa May is far weaker than anyone expected at the beginning of the campaign. More importantly, Corbyn's message is far stronger than anyone expected, and it seems all but certain that he'll stay on as leader of the party for the foreseeable future.
We're two completely different countries, but the struggle for the left is international now. We're all facing the same dehumanizing austerity, the same impending climate catastrophe. To see ideological siblings in the United Kingdom — in a country with which the United States has been so closely connected for all of its history — rally for a result that was plainly unthinkable when the campaign started is genuinely one of the most inspiring and remarkable things to happen in an absolutely dogshit last few years.
With that in mind, the American left can take a few lessons from Corbyn and Labour's incredible night.
First and foremost, that the future is exceedingly bright. Before the election, one poll showed that Labour was actually ahead by three points in one unadjusted poll, but the adjusted result put the Tories up by five by taking out, according to the Independent, “those historically unlikely to vote, who include black and ethnic minorities as well as the under 35s and the least well off older people.”
As the numbers showed, that was a mistake.
In 2015, Miliband won the youth vote by 15 points.
In 2016, Clinton won it by 18 points.
Tonight's exit poll: Corbyn won it by 44 points — Jeff Stein (@JStein_Vox) June 9, 2017
Corbyn did so well with young people because he put forward a clear and optimistic vision for the future, which made investments for the priorities of young people like education and the environment. In return, the youth came out for him in droves; it appears that those polls we've seen indicating that young people support socialism in higher numbers are starting to pay off.
The American analogue, of course, was Bernie Sanders' big support from young people in the Democratic primary last year. But Corbyn has proven it can be part of a winning message not just for on the left-wing, but people who are on the fence as well. The kernel here for the progressive movement is that putting our trust in young people and actively reaching out to them, trying to give them a reason to get over the cynicism that's so dominated our politics, is a way for the left to reach people.
The second big lesson is that the center won't hold. The Liberal Democrats, formerly a coalition partner to Tories and historically the UK's largest third party before the rise of the Scottish National Party, ran as an explicitly pro-EU third option and tried to pull in votes from the Labour right and Tory voters who voted to remain in the EU last year.
It didn't work. The Liberal Democrats (who were also hurt by ties to an austerity coalition with David Cameron's conservatives they were apart of for five years) only picked up a few seats, and surrendered much of the popular vote to Labour and the Tories — so much so, in fact, that the Corbyn-led Labour won its second-largest share of percentage in the last sixty years with over forty percent, a nearly ten-point pickup from just two years ago.
As the last two miserable years have shown, the far-right has found a market in driving up fear of immigrants and Muslims in a Western society that has been crushed by late capitalism.
What Labour's result shows is that giving people the chance to have a better future rather than what the Liberal Democrats and the Tories offered — a version of “stability” that, for many people, was anything but stable — can be a winning message for the larger population. The significant number of undecided voters who came over the Labour during the campaign showed this, and raises the tantalizing question of what could have been if Labour had even one more week to campaign.
The last lesson the left should take from Corbyn, however, is that it's still in a stage of growing pains. Corbyn's victory, great as it is, is mostly moral in nature, enhanced by the atrocious expectations that were set for him at the beginning of the campaign. But with or without May, the Conservatives will still be able to form a government, although it's possible they'll call for another election now that they find themselves in an extraordinarily worse-off position than they previously were.
Even if Labour had miraculously won, the party itself is still divided; there are many in the Labour Party who spent the last two years sounding of the alarm of Labour Party's demise under Corbyn; as Tony Blair wrote before Corbyn's first election, Labour was “walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff's edge to the jagged rocks below.”
Of course, he was dead wrong. But chances are that this result is just going to solidify, for some of those people, that a more centrist candidate would have routed May and returned Labour to government—even if it's obvious, from the amount of people who came over to Labour during the election, that they were wrong.
…and those who decided during the campaign broke for Labourhttps://t.co/jBlv7ScWJopic.twitter.com/DpjyTzQIF2 — Lord Ashcroft (@LordAshcroft) June 9, 2017
For those in the British press who loathe Corbyn, there was literally no standard by which he could have succeeded https://t.co/3oAb95UcHc — Dan CO'Sullivfefe (@Bro_Pair) June 9, 2017
The Blairites are still a force to be reckoned with in the party, however, and no one should count on this result shutting up the Labour right. It’s a worthy reminder for the American left that the center will not just cede power and seamlessly assimilate into the left; current talk of unity and purity politics be damned, there will undoubtedly be a war for the soul of the party — as well as the more existential one for the soul of the country — that will be waged in the decades to come.
Progress is a slog; there will be more of these moral victories, and there will be false starts, and there will be devastating, brutal losses. The important thing is to realize that there’s still a long way to go; the worst thing for the left right now would be to fall into the liberal trap of expecting the wins to eventually fall in our laps just because we’re right.
It’s obvious, from recent wins—such as the fight for single-payer in California and the passage of Medicaid for All in Nevada—that this progress cannot rely on demographics alone, but the efforts of organizers to make it happen. And as Jeremy Corbyn showed last night, the power of collective action is alive and kicking, and can overcome sabotage from the right, the center, and the press. Because of Corbyn and the organizers who made this happen, there’s reason for those of us on the other side of the pond to enjoy a little bit of optimism today. |
Patch 1.3.1 Live - Patch Notes - [Potential Spoilers]
Team worked increadably hard over the last week to provide fixes and updates! See the notes below. Please Update your game, or uninstall/reinstall.Patch 1.3.1 - Patch NotesBugs- Linux fixes- Menu UI fixes- Sensitivity fixes- Graphics Options fixes- Collision fixes- Ai Pathfinding fixesGeneral- Added a game pre loader- Updated functionality to Options Menu- Added more graphical options- Graphics adjustments- Updates to various text- Updated Credits, Animator of "Tombstone Picnic" Cartoon Tiffany Chia aka "TimetheHobo"- Additional optimizationChapter 1- Credits now load properly- CH2 now loads properlyChapter 2- Soft/Hard locks at the end of CH2 fixed- Ai paths updatedChapter 3- Fixed unobtainable Hearing Voices achievement- Ai paths updated- Enemy pathing updates- Added visual objective queues in Pause menu- Changes to spawn timers- Butcher Gang enemies have more unique Ai- Changes to hitpoints and damage to enemies- Changes to objective spawn points- Updated Objective instructions- More Bendy- Less Fetching!Secrets- There's more ;)If you're having issues with the patch, try uninstalling then reinstalling your game.(This will also fix the "No voices" bug if you're having it.)For any immediate bugs or issues please email us at [email protected] Thanks!Mike Mood! |
This weekend Tame Impala will headline their first ever UK festival, End of the Road, in Dorset.
It is off the back of their third album, Currents, which went in at number three in the Official Chart, their highest position to date.
It has been a gradual process for the Australian psych rockers, who are now amassing fans worldwide.
And for Kevin Parker, who effectively is Tame Impala, it could not have been any other way.
"I am glad it has been a slow, steady climb, because it gives me time to process this thing in my own time," he tells Newsbeat.
"Sometimes I have this kind of weird envy for artists who suddenly just shoot up as an overnight sensation.
"That must be a cool feeling, but at the same time, I feel like if that ever happened to me, I feel like I wouldn't know how to deal with it, so it's good, I can't complain."
And he is right, he can't complain.
The album has been Tame Impala's biggest success to date, despite him once describing it as "completely unlistenable".
"I have come around now," he laughs.
"I mean, that is how I always feel, I say it is unlistenable because I can't hear it without the flaws or the faults in it.
"But it has been a few months, and now I can listen to it, and enjoy it, as in just listening to an album."
Kevin Parker writes, produces and records everything that Tame Impala release and because of that, he often gets described as a 'genius'.
"Well, I was saying it all along, I'm just surprised it has taken people this long to pick up on it," he jokes.
"I think that kind of word is more like a character that people tag you with. It's more a way of processing the idea that someone does everything.
"For me, I have been making music on my own, multi-tracking all the instruments since I was really young.
"Not that it was very good back then, but it is kind of something I have grown up doing, and I guess for people on the outside who haven't kind of experienced that thing, it seems like some great feat," he says modestly.
This weekend, he and his band will take centre stage as they headline their first UK festival, End of The Road.
"It is a pretty new thing for us, festivals used to be a day thing, when we were not the main focus," he says.
"It was always a nice relief when we would headline our shows, then we would do a festival and just be like one piece of the puzzle, the pressure wasn't on us.
"I guess it puts a bit of responsibility on you, but it's cool it just gives a different vibe."
And while there is no official UK tour confirmed just yet, he promises there will be one at some point.
"The people probably have plans that I just haven't seen yet, well maybe I have seen, I just kind of glaze over things unless they are like a month from now."
"But I can say it's the UK, we will be there sooner or later."
Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter, BBCNewsbeat on Instagram, Radio1Newsbeat on YouTube and you can now follow BBC_Newsbeat on Snapchat |
Scotland to be at 'very heart' of Europe
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has told the SNP's conference that "Scotland will one day become an independent country".
Referring to her now 30-year membership of the party, Ms Sturgeon said she had never doubted that, one day, Scotland would separate from the rest of the UK.
"And I believe it today," she added, to enthusiastic applause in the hall.
The Brexit vote - in which 62% of voters in Scotland backed Remain - was a key part of the leader's address.
Sturgeon: 'Every chance of a referendum'
Vowing to avoid "the fate of a hard Brexit", Ms Sturgeon said she would work "with others across the political divide" to evade such an outcome.
But if the UK ended up leaving the EU's single market, she said her government would propose new powers to help keep Scotland in the trading area.
Hinting at a new independence referendum, she said of the Conservative government at Westminster: "If it insists on taking Scotland down a path that hurts our economy, costs jobs, lowers our living standards and damages our reputation as an open, welcoming, diverse country, then be in no doubt Scotland must have the ability to choose a better future.
"And I will make sure that Scotland gets that chance."
Ms Sturgeon told the conference earlier in the week that the Scottish Government would publish a draft independence referendum bill next week as part of a consultation exercise.
Sturgeon pledges to 'protect' Scotland's interests
Ahead of the UK's exit from the EU, Ms Sturgeon told delegates that Scotland was establishing "permanent trade representation in Berlin", to help keep Scotland at the "very heart" of Europe.
There were also three further measures "to boost trade and exports".
The Scottish government is to get a new "board of trade".
There will be a "trade envoy scheme", in which "prominent Scots" will be asked to help "boost our export effort".
And the number of "Scottish development international staff" working across Europe is to be more than doubled.
The First Minister was scathing about her political rivals.
She described the Tories' vision for the UK as "xenophobic, closed, inward looking, discriminatory", saying: "Let's be frank, the Tories are no longer the Conservative and Unionist Party.
"After last week, we should call them what they are - the Conservative and Separatist Party. Or Ukip for short."
At Westminster, Ms Sturgeon said the SNP would "continue to provide the strong opposition that Labour is failing to deliver". |
Sammy Corporation Adopts AMD Embedded R-Series APU for Pachislot
SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 25, 2016) - AMD ( NASDAQ : AMD) today announced that Sammy Corporation in Japan is using the AMD Embedded R-Series APU for its new pachislot machine, named "Pachislot Hokuto no Ken: Shura no Kuni." Much like other gaming options, pachislot systems are increasingly compute intensive and graphically immersive, requiring high performance 3D graphics for the modern game player. Sammy has announced that the new machine is expected to launch in pachislot parlors across Japan beginning in fall, 2016.
The strong visual element and growing need for quality graphics in gaming machines are an ideal match for AMD Embedded R-Series processors that combine high performance x86 CPUs and with leading graphics capabilities.
"Gaming is a natural application of our APU technology that combines strong compute with high performance and stunning graphics," said Stephen Turnbull, director of embedded vertical industry marketing, AMD Enterprise Solutions. "Our collaboration with Sammy Corporation has enabled the development of a pachinko slot machine which employs real 3D video technology in an industry that traditionally employs 2D imagery. The energy-efficient AMD Embedded R-Series processors help Sammy to create amazing visual experiences for their customers."
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About AMD
For more than 45 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics and visualization technologies -- the building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms and the datacenter. Hundreds of millions of consumers, leading Fortune 500 businesses and cutting-edge scientific research facilities around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work and play. AMD employees around the world are focused on building great products that push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow, visit the AMD ( NASDAQ : AMD) website, blog, and Facebook and Twitter pages.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners. |
DURHAM, N.C. — The onslaught of criticism, economic sanctions and a lawsuit being leveled at Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina grew on Tuesday, as the largest corporation in his state joined the fight against a new law that eliminated anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Bank of America, which has its headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., announced late Tuesday on Twitter that its leadership was joining over 80 chief executives, including Timothy D. Cook of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, in objecting to the new law. Earlier in the day, the chief executives published a letter, addressed to Mr. McCrory, on the Human Rights Campaign website, saying, “Such laws are bad for our employees and bad for business.”
Mr. McCrory, a Republican, signed the law last Wednesday to create a mandatory statewide anti-discrimination policy that excludes protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The bill, created by Republican legislators in an emergency session that same day, was intended to overrule a new municipal ordinance in Charlotte, the state’s largest city, that provided such protections, including allowing transgender people to use bathrooms according to the gender they identify with. It was set to take effect Friday.
Condemnation rained down in response. The governors of New York, Washington and Vermont issued bans on most official state travel to North Carolina, as did the mayors of San Francisco, Seattle and New York. The National Basketball Association implied it might move the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte. The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, called the law “meanspirited.” |
Ten Viking Age individuals from the northern Norwegian site at Flakstad were analysed for δ13C, δ15N and ancient mitochondrial DNA fragments. The material derives from both single and multiple burials with individuals treated in different ways. The genetic analyses show that the individuals buried together were unlikely to be maternally related, and stable isotope analyses suggest different strata of society. It is, therefore, suggested that slaves may have been offered as grave gifts at Flakstad. A comparison with the remaining population from single graves shows that the presumed slaves had a diet similar to that of the common population, whereas the high status individuals in multiple graves had a diet different from both slaves and the common population. The results provide an insight into the subsistence of different social groups in a Viking Age society, exposing unexpected patterns of living conditions and food distribution. |
A few weeks ago, Dave Cameron wrote a piece on RE24, explaining that, because RE24 measures offensive production with respect to the specific base-out state, one could compare it to a context-neutral offensive metric, such as Batting runs, in order to measure the effects of situational hitting.
Situational hitting is a vague term often used to laud making outs as long as it moves the runner up a base, but as I see it, all the phrase means is hitting differently depending on the situation. That is, good “situational hitting” is distributing your hits and extra base hits into the times that you hit when runners are on base, and especially in scoring position.
Subtracting Batting Runs (or Bat) from RE24 works as a good measure of situational hitting because it compares the value of the context-neutral event (single, strikeout, home run, etc) with the value of the actual change in base-out state. A single is worth more in certain situations; that “more” is measured using this method.
However, while this subtraction is a simple measure in some ways, it is unnecessarily complex in others. Both Bat and RE24 are park-adjusted and league-adjusted, but they make these adjustments in very different ways, not to mention the fact that FanGraphs’ RE24 includes stolen bases and caughts stealings, while Bat does not, so the differences between the two is actually a measure of situational hitting with a little bit of baserunning mixed in for fun.
To fix this, I recalculated RE24 to not include a park adjustment or include SB/CS. I then compared this new version of RE24 not to Bat, but to wRAA, the non-park adjusted version of our context neutral linear weights metric. Let’s take a look at the leaders and laggards based on this comparison this season (as of Wednesday):
Freddie Freeman, by context-neutral standards, is having a very good year. He’s been about 50% better than the average hitter; he walks, hits for moderate power, and makes a lot of contact. First basemen are supposed to be above average hitters, and Freddie Freeman, without considering context, has been better than the average first baseman.
Considering context, Freeman has been not just a very good hitter, but one of the best hitters in baseball. His RE24 is second in the league, whether you make a park adjustment and include stolen bases or not. This 2+ win jump based on the timing of Freeman’s hits is unsurprising when you consider the fact that he is hitting .440 with runners in scoring position this year. That’s right. .440. I’m almost surprised that the above difference isn’t greater given a number like that.
You may also notice that two Cardinals are in the top three, and three are in the top ten. This makes sense, since St. Louis has a remarkable 138 wRC+ with runners in scoring position this year, compared to a 105 wRC+ overall. Their batting average with RISP is .329, better than the next best Tigers by an incredible 47 points.
But why are we talking about batting average with RISP when we have this fancy new situational hitting tool! If we sum the new RE24 and wRAA for every team, and again take the difference between the two metrics, we see the following results:
Num Team newRE24 wRAA Difference 1 Cardinals 99.4 29.0 70.4 2 Athletics 71.5 44.4 27.1 3 Orioles 49.5 32.5 17.0 4 Yankees -24.8 -38.7 13.9 5 Reds 20.4 8.1 12.3 6 Indians 58.0 46.4 11.6 7 Mets -62.7 -69.5 6.8 8 Royals -50.0 -55.3 5.3 9 Astros -61.9 -61.5 -0.4 10 Marlins -165.2 -162.4 -2.8 11 Blue Jays 13.9 17.3 -3.4 12 Braves 14.2 17.7 -3.4 13 Nationals -15.2 -11.0 -4.1 14 Tigers 145.0 151.2 -6.3 15 Red Sox 138.4 145.6 -7.3 16 Angels 54.8 62.4 -7.6 17 Cubs -46.3 -37.0 -9.3 18 Diamondbacks -4.4 7.1 -11.5 19 Giants -51.7 -39.2 -12.5 20 Padres -79.5 -66.4 -13.0 21 White Sox -72.8 -59.4 -13.5 22 Phillies -58.9 -42.0 -17.0 23 Brewers -34.4 -16.7 -17.7 24 Rangers 9.0 27.6 -18.6 25 Rockies 14.5 33.2 -18.7 26 Pirates -46.0 -26.8 -19.2 27 Rays 24.0 43.5 -19.4 28 Dodgers -18.9 10.9 -29.8 29 Twins -69.9 -37.9 -32.0 30 Mariners -62.7 -28.7 -34.0
70 runs. The Cardinals have seen a 70 run difference based on the timing of when they get their hits. That’s seven additional wins created only from sequencing. In other words, the Cardinals situational hitting was essentially the equivalent to adding Miguel Cabrera to their line-up.
Is this situational/timely hitting something that we can expect to continue? Probably not. Of the 30 teams, only 14 were on the same side of zero last year in this difference. The Cardinals, despite their ridiculous situational hitting this year, were almost exactly average with regards to their situational hitting last year. On an individual basis, there is only about a 0.1 correlation between this difference last year and this year. It’s not a large sample, but is some confirmation of what we already knew about the lack of a sustainable clutch hitting skill.
Not everything has to be predictive, though. This measure might not tell us much about what will happen, but it helps us understand what has happened in the past. When you look at Freeman’s RBI numbers or the Cardinals average with RISP, it’s difficult to know how much of an actual advantage their performances conferred to their teams. This gives us an idea of just how valuable those performances were, and reminds us again that sequencing can be a huge part of wins and losses. |
Hey everyone. I've decided to sell this PVC Pipe Marimba I built. It is inspired by the instruments the Blue Man Group play and sounds amazing for both performance and recording purposes. Let me know if you're interested!
Overview:
- 2 octave PVC pipe instrument
- 25 pitches from A0 to A2
- amazing sound quality
- playing area flat and organized like a piano or marimba
- all pipe ends facing forward for better projection and for easy recording
- tight pipe design and arrangement
- sturdy and attractive wood frame
- comes with 2 pairs of paddle sticks
Here is a short video demonstration of each note. Keep in mind, I used my iPhone mic to record this so you're not going to hear a lot of bass:
Here are some older videos from a couple years ago. Note, I did some upgrades to the frame and these videos are before those upgrades:
Finally, here is some recorded music using my PVC Instrument:
This instrument is great for:
- live performance
- street performance (I made good money doing this!)
- amplification with microphones
- studio recording
- a bass instrument in your band
- recording as a digital sample instrument
- paint it or add lighting effects
Contact me if you have any questions or would like to drop by and hear it in person. Asking for $950. It really is an amazing instrument and I hope I can give it to someone that will love it as much as I have!
Pat |
Ron Paul wanted some legitimacy this time around, a bigger platform for his movement, and with his third-place showing in last night’s Iowa Republican Caucuses, he might just get it.
On stage before a cheering crowd in a hotel ballroom here as the final votes were being counted, Paul said that winning elections is the best way to promote a cause, declaring himself one of the night’s three winners.
Paul claimed a ticket out of Iowa, vowing to continue his fight, even as his GOP rivals have dismissed him as a fringe candidate and as party leaders have flatly declared him unelectable.
Iowa voters thought otherwise, taking to Paul’s strident antiwar and small-government message in enough numbers to lift him into a finish just a few percentage points behind Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Evangelicals, home-schoolers, young people, moderates, libertarians and disaffected Democrats formed an unlikely coalition that led to Paul’s strong showing, and at his Tuesday evening rally he predicted Iowa would be a launching pad to bigger things.
“We have tremendous opportunity to continue this momentum, it won’t be long that there’s going to be an election up in New Hampshire, and believe me, this momentum is going to continue and this movement is going to continue and we are going to keep scoring,” Paul said to his supporters. “So tonight, we have come out of an election where there were essentially three winners, three top vote-getters and we will go on, we will raise the money, I have no doubt about the volunteers.”
The question for Paul, though, is how he can capitalize on one good night in Iowa and turn it into more good nights in New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond.
As returns came in Tuesday, he got something of a lift from former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who said that the Republican Party should not ignore the Texas congressman’s view of fiscal policy or his fervent base of young supporters.
In New Hampshire, Paul has been airing a 60-second TV commercial that touts his consistency and casts him as the only candidate who can take on Washington. A campaign aide said that he will “make a real run at Mitt” in New Hampshire, a firewall for Romney, with a strong ground game and an aggressive ad campaign.
“He has an image problem among conservatives and Republicans on foreign policy, but his anti-Washington message is the strongest, and he has some great spots that are unique and that are breaking through,” said Michael Dennehy, a New Hampshire strategist who advised John McCain in 2008. “He will continue to pick up support in New Hampshire, especially from moderates and independents — but he does have a ceiling, of about 22 to 25 percent.”
On the stump, Paul has led with a strong antiwar message, vowing to shrink the military’s footprint and slash the defense budget.
Paul, who was a flight surgeon in the Air Force, says he has received more donations from active-duty military members than all of his rivals combined, some $112,000. His message of radically shrinking the size of government has especially resonated with young people — particularly men — and over the next days, the campaign will continue to deploy Paul’s son Rand, a Republican senator from Kentucky, as a top surrogate in New Hampshire and South Carolina.
South Carolina has a significant number of evangelicals, who caucused for Paul in Iowa and will probably be a crucial voting bloc in the Palmetto State’s Jan. 21 primary. To appeal to them, the Paul campaign recently started running an antiabortion ad in South Carolina highlighting the Texas congressman’s work as an obstetrician.
Less clear is how his foreign policy stance against military intervention will play out in a state with a sizable military population.
“People that haven’t heard from us yet and haven’t really heard what Ron really stands for on foreign policy, they have to scratch their heads a little bit,” said Jesse Benton, Paul’s national campaign manager. “Luckily we’ve got the resources and the volunteers to be able to communicate directly with the voters and let them know what Ron really stands for.”
In Iowa, at least, that strategy worked well enough for Paul to have doubled the votes he received in 2008, when he campaigned with much the same message.
“Dr. Paul isn’t going to change or tailor his message to fit any audience and that’s what people like about him. We are going to keep doing what we’ve been doing,” said Gary Howard, Paul’s press secretary. “We are in this for the long run.” |
Canadians won't understand how badly they need a television channel devoted entirely to Canadian films until such a channel is forced onto every television subscription in the country, a new specialty channel argued to the country's broadcast regulator.
A full slate of well-known Canadian movie executives appeared before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Thursday to make its case for mandatory carriage for Starlight: The Canadian Movie Channel, a rare designation that ensures a channel is included in every basic television subscription in the country.
When asked why Canadians would want the service – which exclusively air Canadian films and has vowed to put 70 per cent of its revenue toward producing new Canadian films – actor Paul Gross said people don't truly know what they are missing when Canadian films aren't readily available on television.
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"It's something that is difficult to quantify," he said. "If you go and ask people if you need to see such and such a film, they may not know unless you offer it to them. We're talking about providing access and letting it prove itself."
The channel would like to be in every home, and receive 45 cents per subscriber. That money would be used to fund its operations, but also to fund up to a dozen movies a year that would run exclusively on the channel. A key requirement of any channel that receives mandatory carriage is to produce Canadian content, and producer Robert Lantos said it would be pointless to launch the channel without a commitment to make films.
"Our mission with Starlight is twofold," he said. "On one hand, we want to bring the entire legacy of English and French Canadian films to every Canadian home to create easy and inexpensive access for all Canadians to their own stories. The other part is to create original programming … and to heavily market them so they will have been heard of when they air."
The channel's backers argue Canadian broadcasters that also own their own specialty channels aren't interested in showing Canadian films. It needs to be licenced as a mandatory service, Mr. Lantos said, because broadcasters are unlikely to put the channel on basic tiers of service unless they are forced.
"It boils down to a simple analogy," he said. "Approaching them for a service that is seeking as wide a carriage as their own services is really no different than asking wolves to guard the sheep. It is simply not going to happen."
CRTC commissioner Stephen Simpson asked why Canadians should be made to pay for a channel they may not want to watch.
"This could add 2.5 per cent to the average basic cable bill," he said. "Have you thought about that?"
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Starlight responded that the cost of service would be less than two rented movies a year. The channel's research shows most Canadians support their initiative, they replied, adding that their movies are among the country's most important cultural exports.
"Of all fiction programming, Canadian feature films have the highest cost, are the most difficult to finance and are the riskiest to produce," director David Cronenberg said. "They also represent the high water mark in Canadian creative and cultural expression. But there is no place where Canadians can get consistent and affordable access to our feature films on television. That is why Starlight is so important."
Mr. Lantos added: "What I find difficult to swallow is that Canadians are deprived of inexpensive access to our products."
The hearing will hear from other channels seeking mandatory carriage until the end of the day Thursday, and will also hear from those who oppose and support each channel into next week. Each channel also gets a chance to make a closing argument next week.
There is no timeline for a decision. |
Last Friday, the Pakistani Taliban revealed the identity of their new leader, a thirty-something militant named Maulana Fazlullah. On November 1st, the C.I.A. killed his predecessor, Hakimullah Mehsud, in a drone strike; the group’s founder died under similar circumstances, in 2009.
Fazlullah was an inspired choice, by the Taliban’s warped standards. He is young and ruthless, and has taken responsibility for a panoply of barbaric acts over the years: floggings, suicide bombings, even the attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai, a teen-age girl who survived gunshots to the head and neck, and who has become an even more driven advocate for girls’ education. (She recently addressed the United Nations and appeared on “The Daily Show.”) Last summer, his men kidnapped and beheaded seventeen Pakistani soldiers.
But what distinguishes Fazlullah from his predecessors is his evangelism. He is as much a rebel and a crusader—bent on imposing his harsh interpretation of sharia on others—as he is a terrorist. He was perhaps the first militant leader to declare jihad against the Pakistani government. When the Pakistani Taliban announced their existence a month later, they turned their guns on the state, toppling a long-standing relationship between elements inside the Pakistani government and jihadists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Compared to their Afghan counterparts, the Pakistani Taliban have turned into a sophisticated group with global reach—they planned the failed attack on Times Square, in 2010—as a result of their alliance with Al Qaeda. Still, some members are reportedly amenable to peace talks with officials in Islamabad. Fazlullah is not one of them. According to the Guardian, he won the top job inside the Taliban owing, in large part, to his opposition to any form of negotiations.
I met Fazlullah several years ago, in October, 2007, after he invited me and a Pashtun journalist to visit his compound in Swat, a lush, forested valley in the northwest province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It was late morning on a busy Friday, with thousands of men—many in wool caps and shouldering weapons—waiting to witness Fazlullah deliver his weekly sermon. He had already attracted a cult-like following, riding a white horse around Swat and broadcasting speeches, twice a day, over a pirated radio station. Media outlets referred to him as “Mullah Radio.” I doubted anyone called him that to his face.
One of his deputies brought us to a small, cinderblock structure—sort of a Taliban green room. A local elected official was there to pay respects to Fazlullah, which was a wise move on his part, considering that the Taliban had murdered several politicians. Fazlullah’s lieutenants—some of them Uzbek fighters, all of them wearing black turbans and vests strapped with ammunition clips and walkie-talkies—loitered about. Finally, a phalanx of bodyguards pushed into the room, with Fazlullah at the center.
He cut an unremarkable figure: short, with hippo teeth, wavy tresses, and a bulky, black turban. But the attention others paid to his safety translated to charisma. He introduced himself, made small talk (“What newspaper do you work for?”), and encouraged me and my translator to roam the compound. He directed one of his bodyguards to protect us. Then he excused himself and went to preach.
Before long, his voice came over the P.A. system. “When I die, the angels will ask me about my actions. Will this government save me? No! I must act for myself and for my own salvation. You people have no rights here unless there is an Islamic system and government in place, based on rights and honor. Are you ready for an Islamic system?” Cheers went up. “Are you prepared to make the sacrifices?” More cheers.
He pivoted to the matter of the day: lashings. “The government says we shouldn’t go things like this public punishment, but we don’t follow their orders. We follow the orders of Allah!” When he finished speaking, the crowd migrated to a wooden platform erected along the bank of the Swat River. Three young men, accused of kidnapping, were marched onto the stage and whipped with a leather belt that, from a distance, resembled a beaver tail. (I wrote about the visit, and the lashing incident, in my book “To Live or To Perish Forever,” and in the Times Magazine.)
Two weeks later, Fazlullah’s men began to occupy police stations and take over intersections throughout Swat. In response, Pakistani Army units moved into the valley. Using artillery fire and close air support, they drove the Taliban out of several strongholds. Fazlullah slipped away.
A year went by. The Army lost focus. Fazlullah’s men crept back into Swat. The Taliban regained the upper hand. Fazlullah used his pulpit on the airwaves to ban polio vaccinations in Swat and prohibit female education. His men blew up dozens of schools for girls.
In February, 2009, the government signed a peace treaty with Fazlullah’s father-in-law, effectively handing the district over to Fazlullah; the Taliban pledged to stay in Swat. But Fazlullah’s ambitions extended beyond merely holding a sanctuary. By late April, truckloads of his fighters had conquered a pair of districts abutting Swat, lifting their flag above government buildings and placing the Taliban within sixty miles of the capital, Islamabad. The Army responded with another incursion, driving the Taliban back into the hills.
Since then, Fazlullah has reportedly floated between the northern reaches of Swat, the neighboring district of Dir, and Afghanistan, where he plans attacks on targets inside Pakistan. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Taliban leadership has been holed up in North and South Waziristan, where they enjoy free rein on the ground but are surveilled day and night by missile-firing drones. Fazlullah has escaped death numerous times, always to pop up again. He recently took responsibility for a roadside bomb that killed a two-star Pakistani general; his men caught the episode on tape. A senior Taliban official has sworn to avenge Hakimullah Mehsud’s death by attacking “security forces, government installations, political leaders, and police,” all of whom work for the government in Islamabad, which he dubbed a “slave of America.”
Fazlullah’s selection, as one Pakistani official told the Times, “changes the whole equation.” The Pakistani Taliban’s center of power may well shift from Waziristan to the so-called settled areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, raising the prospect, once again, of pitched battles between the Army and the militants. And the C.I.A. may lose a crucial advantage that it has gained through its drone program; the agency is unlikely to fire missiles into settled areas of Pakistan with the same fervor as it has in Waziristan. But, most significant of all, the Pakistani Taliban has gained a new kind of leader, one who is as interested in territory as he is in terrorizing.
Video footage from 2008 shows Maulana Fazlullah speaking with journalists in Pakistan’s Swat valley. Image: STR/AFP/Getty. |
The Atracidae, commonly known as Australian funnel-web spiders, are a family of mygalomorph spiders. They have been included as a subfamily of Hexathelidae, but are now recognized as a separate family.[1] All members of the family are native to Australia.[1][3] Atracidae consists of three genera: Atrax, Hadronyche, and Illawarra, comprising 35 species.[1] Some members of the species produce venom which is dangerous to humans and bites by spiders of six of the species have caused severe injuries to victims. The bite of the Sydney funnel-web spider (Atrax robustus) and Northern tree funnel-web spider (Hadronyche formidabilis) are potentially deadly, but no fatalities have occurred since the introduction of modern first-aid techniques and antivenom.[4]
Description [ edit ]
These spiders are medium to large in size, with body lengths ranging from 1 to 5 cm (0.4 to 2.0 in). They have a hairless carapace covering the front part of the body. Like the related diplurid spiders, some hexathelids have relatively long spinnerets; this is especially true of A. robustus. Males have a large mating spur projecting from the middle of their second pair of legs.[3] Like other Mygalomorphae (also incorrectly called "Orthognatha") —an infraorder of spiders that includes the tropical tarantulas[5] —these spiders have fangs which point straight down the body and do not point towards each other (cf Araneomorphae). They have ample venom glands that lie entirely within their chelicerae. Their fangs are large and powerful, capable of penetrating fingernails and soft shoes.[6]
Funnel-webs make their burrows in moist, cool, sheltered habitats—under rocks, in and under rotting logs, some in rough-barked trees (occasionally metres above ground). They are commonly found in suburban rockeries and shrubberies, rarely in lawns or other open terrain. A funnel-web's burrow characteristically has irregular silk trip-lines radiating from the entrance.[3] Unlike some related trapdoor spiders, funnel-webs do not build lids to their burrows.
The primary range of the Australian funnel-web spiders is the eastern coast of Australia, with specimens found in New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria, and Queensland.[3][7] The only Australian states or territories without funnel-webs are Western Australia[8] and the Northern Territory.
Taxonomy [ edit ]
The first atracide spider, Hadronyche cerberea, was described by Carl Ludwig Koch in 1873. Octavius Pickard-Cambridge described another atracide species, A. robustus, four years later. For a considerable time, confusion existed as to the limits of the genera Hadronyche and Atrax, not helped by the destruction of type specimens of Hadronyche cerberea during World War II. In 1980, Robert J. Raven merged the two genera under Atrax. In 1988, Michael R. Gray separated them again, and in 2010 added a further genus, Illawarra.[3]
The family placement of the group has varied. In 1892, Eugène Simon placed Atrax and Hadronyche in the family Dipluridae. In 1901, Henry R. Hogg considered them to be sufficiently distinctive to form a separate group, which he called "Atraceae"[9] – the basis of the modern family name Atracidae. When in the 1980s, Raven elevated part of Simon's Dipluridae to the family Hexathelidae, he included the atracine group. Molecular phylogenetic studies consistently threw doubt on the monophyly of the Hexathelidae.[3][10] In 2018, the group was restored to a full family as Atracidae. The following cladogram shows the relationship found between Atracidae and related taxa. Its sister is Actinopodidae.[11]
Dipluridae Hexathelidae Porrhothelidae Macrothelidae Calisoga (Nemesiidae) Hebestatis (Halonoproctidae) Atracidae Actinopodidae
Genera [ edit ]
The family includes the following genera.[3]
Atrax O. P.-Cambridge, 1877
Hadronyche L. Koch, 1873
Illawarra M.R. Gray, 2010
Medical significance [ edit ]
Australian funnel-webs are one of the most dangerous groups of spiders in the world and are regarded by some to be the most deadly, both in terms of clinical cases and venom toxicity.[12][13] Six species have caused severe injuries to human victims, including the Sydney funnel-web (Atrax robustus), northern tree funnel-web (Hadronyche formidabilis), southern tree funnel-web (H. cerberea),[14] Blue Mountains funnel-web (H. versuta), Darling Downs funnel-web (H. infensa), and the Port Macquarie funnel-web (H. macquariensis).
Examination of bite records has implicated wandering males in most if not all fatal funnel-web bites to humans. Adult males, recognised by the modified terminal segment of the palp, tend to wander during the warmer months of the year looking for receptive females for mating.[15] They are attracted to water, hence are often found in swimming pools, into which they often fall while wandering. The spiders can survive immersion in water for several hours and can deliver a bite when removed from the water.[16]:p.313–22 They also show up in garages and yards in suburban Sydney. Contrary to commonly held belief, funnel-web spiders are not able to jump, although they can run quickly.[16]:p.313–22
While some very venomous spiders do not always inject venom when they bite, these spiders most often do.[citation needed] The volume of venom delivered to large animals is often small, possibly due to the angle of the fangs, which are not horizontally opposed, and the fact that contact is often brief before the spider is brushed off. About 10% to 25% of bites are claimed to produce significant toxicity,[12] but the likelihood cannot be predicted and all bites should be treated as potentially life-threatening.
Bites from Sydney funnel-web spiders have caused 13 documented deaths (seven in children).[12] In all cases where the sex of the biting spider could be determined, it was found to be the male of the species.[17] One member of the genus Hadronyche, the northern tree funnel-web, has also been claimed to cause fatal envenomation,[7] but to date, this lacks the support of a specific medical report. Assays of venom from several Hadronyche species have shown it to be similar to Atrax venom.
Toxins [ edit ]
Many different toxins are found in the venom of Atrax and Hadronyche spiders. Collectively, these spider toxins are given the name atracotoxins (ACTX), as all these spiders belong to the family Atracidae. The first toxins isolated were the δ-ACTX toxins present in the venom of both A. robustus (δ-ACTX-Ar1, formerly known as robustoxin or atracotoxin) and H. versuta (δ-ACTX-Hv1a, formerly known as versutotoxin). Both these toxins produce the same effects in monkeys as those seen in humans, suggesting that they are responsible for the physiological effects seen with crude venom.[17]
A. robustus) in warning posture Female Sydney funnel-web spider () in warning posture
These toxins are thought to operate by opening sodium channels. They are presynaptic neurotoxins that, via sodium channels, induce spontaneous, repetitive firing of action potentials in autonomic and motor neurons and inhibit neurally mediated transmitted release resulting in a surge of endogenous acetylcholine, noradrenaline, and adrenaline.[18]
Although extremely toxic to primates, the venom appears to be fairly harmless to many other animals. These animals may be resistant to the venom's effects due to the presence of IgG, and possibly cross-linked IgG and IgM inactivating factors in their blood plasma that bind to the toxins responsible and neutralise them.[19]
The female venom was thought to be only about a sixth as potent to humans as that of the male.[20][citation needed] The bite of a female or juvenile may still be serious; however, considerable variability occurs in venom toxicity between species, together with assumed degrees of inefficiency in the method of venom delivery.
Symptoms [ edit ]
Envenomation symptoms observed following bites by these spiders are very similar. The bite is initially very painful, due to the size of the fangs penetrating the skin.[14] Puncture marks and local bleeding are also usually visible. If substantial envenomation occurs, symptoms generally occur within minutes and progress rapidly.
Early symptoms of systemic envenomation include goose bumps, sweating, tingling around the mouth and tongue, twitching (initially facial and intercostal), salivation, watery eyes, elevated heart rate, and elevated blood pressure. As systemic envenomation progresses, symptoms include nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath (caused by airway obstruction), agitation, confusion, writhing, grimacing, muscle spasms, pulmonary oedema (of neurogenic or hypertensive origin), metabolic acidosis, and extreme hypertension. The final stages of severe envenomation include dilation of the pupils (often fixed), uncontrolled generalised muscle twitching, unconsciousness, elevated intracranial pressure, and death. Death generally is a result of progressive hypotension or possibly elevated intracranial pressure consequent on cerebral oedema.[12][21][22]
The onset of severe envenomation can be rapid. In one prospective study, the median time to onset of envenomation was 28 minutes, with only two cases having onset after 2 hours (both had pressure immobilisation bandages applied).[12] Death may occur within a period ranging from 15 minutes[17] (this occurred when a small child was bitten) to three days.
Treatment [ edit ]
Owing to the severity of symptoms, and the speed with which they progress, in areas where these spiders are known to live, all bites from large, black spiders should be treated as though they were caused by a funnel-web spider. First-aid treatment for a suspected funnel-web spider bite consists of immediately applying a pressure immobilization bandage; a technique which consists of wrapping the bitten limb with a crepe bandage, as well as applying a splint to limit movement of the limb. This technique was originally developed for snakebites, but has also been shown to be effective at slowing venom movement and preventing systemic envenomation in case of a funnel-web spider bite. Some evidence suggests that periods of prolonged localisation may slowly inactivate the venom.[21][23]
Further supportive care may be necessary, but the mainstay of treatment is antivenom. Venom from the male A. robustus is used in producing the antivenom, but it appears to be effective against the venom of all species of funnel-web spiders.[24] Funnel-web antivenom has also been shown, in vitro, to reverse the effects of Eastern mouse spider (Missulena bradleyi) venom.[25]
Prior to the introduction of antivenom, envenomation resulted in significant morbidity and mortality.[26] The purified rabbit IgG antivenom was developed in 1981 through a team effort led by Dr Struan Sutherland, head of immunology at the Australian Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Melbourne.[27] The antivenom is fast-acting and highly and globally effective.[28] Antivenom therapy has shortened the course of envenomation effects; prior to antivenom availability, the average length of hospital treatment for severe bites was about 14 days. Today, antivenom-treated patients are commonly discharged from hospital within 1 to 3 days.[17] No deaths are known since it became available.[12] |
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