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The debate will go on for now, and for decades (at least until the reboot) on whether there was any need for Peter Jackson to split over Tolkien’s children fable, encompassing boss battles and earth-shattering battlefield scenes, all of which the author didn’t bother to write. Tolkien scholars would definitely be enraged, but let’s not forget that Peter Jackson, with “The Hobbit” trilogy, have given us spectacularly staged sequences brimming with invention and invigoration. Yeah, there was lot of sugary stuff and some scenes looked arduous to sit through, but it isn’t terrible like Lucas’ first two ‘Star Wars’ episodes or Bay’s “Transformers” saga. There’s that usual pomp, tender character moments, and the most crowd-pleasing eye candies.
“Battle of the Five Armies” (2014), the last installment of this unnecessary trilogy, surely doesn’t give us the epic feeling we witnessed in “Return of King” (2003). But, you also have to understand the weak foundations on which Jackson has built this movie. The significant standout elements of “Hobbit” book were mostly finished with the first two movies – Gollum, barrel fighting, spiders, and chit-chat with Smaug the Dragon. So, the final movie was based on little story and footnotes. However, minute-by-minute Jackson has once again succeeded in delivering us the blockbuster spectacle. “Battle of Five Armies” surely has the sharpest narrative than the first two “Hobbit” flicks.
“The Desolation of Smaug” finished with a most unsatisfying cliff-hanger ending. And so here, the director waste any moments with prologue, putting us right in the middle of dragon’s assault on Lake Town. The assault and the inevitable death of Smaug makes up for an incredible opening sequence. Then, the movie at last gets back to its meaty theme: the power of greed. Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) gets corrupted by Smaug’s plunder and goes back on his words with the humans (Lake town refugees), and enrages the elves.
Thorin is ready to fight a war Erebor’s vast treasures, against the elves and humans. Alas, you can’t keep the orcs out of the picture and they come in with the thundering army. What happens next will be quite easy to figure out. Among all these rivalries, Bilbo and Gandalf firmly take their place imbuing enough wisdom to cast away the forces of evil. The final battle which was nearly 45 minutes long is thoroughly entertaining and gripping. One thing Peter Jackson perfectly knows (and Michael Bay doesn’t) is when and how to showcase the carnage. These sequences are once again inventive, exhibiting ingenious tactics, punctuated with some tender moments.
Apart from the battle and opening smaug sequence, the other captivating ones are the brief conflict between the ring wraiths and Galadriel plus Thorin’s hallucinatory descent into floor of burnished gold. At 148 minutes, Peter Jackson must have really controlled himself to add more flabby elements. He must have removed everything that didn’t concern with the main battle. Legolas pursuit for Bolg and similar threads are left unresolved, which may be answered with a weighty extended edition. In the final scene, Bilbo gets back to the picturesque Shire, and the goodbyes he gave aren’t as protracted as Frodo’s.
In the end, “Battle of the Five Armies” (2014) doesn’t look like Jackson’s work of greed. He tries to evoke the grandiloquence that might have made Tolkien proud. It may not be superlative, but definitely not superfluous.
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NO SECRETS: Aaron Tahuhu, a fundamentalist Muslim, says he is one of more than a dozen people in Christchurch who have similar beliefs.
A bearded Aaron Tahuhu, wearing a brown robe and jandals, looks out over green fields near his home.
In years to come, he hopes to look out on desert sands near Mecca.
Tahuhu is one of Christchurch's fundamentalist Muslims. To some, he fits the description of an extremist.
A member of the Aotearoa Maori Muslim Association, he openly supports Islamic State and claims to be in contact with people on the front lines in the Middle Eastern conflict.
His Facebook page features articles and videos about the group and many of his friends are Muslim converts.
Tahuhu, 33, also known as Yusif Haroon Mik'eal, says the public have nothing to fear.
Yesterday, at his rural home in Belfast, he told The Press he supported Islamic State's efforts to establish an Islamic caliphate but denounced atrocities committed by some members of the group in Syria and Iraq.
"I've got no intentions of blowing anything up or going out and finding a disbeliever and beheading them in a mall or anything like that," Tahuhu said.
Christchurch was host to more than a dozen people who had beliefs similar to his, he said.
Prime Minister John Key this week said up to 80 Kiwis were being monitored over their links to Islamic State, which has called for lone wolf-style terrorist attacks on Western targets.
Some were fighting in Syria and an unknown number, from a watch list of up to 40, wanted to take up arms there.
Others were either financing the terrorist organisation, attempting to radicalise others, or actively promoting terrorist attacks within New Zealand, Key said.
Another 40 people needed to be investigated.
New Zealand troops could help Iraqi forces fight Islamic State but Key ruled out sending SAS or any soldiers in combat roles.
Tahuhu said that if New Zealand did engage in fighting with the Islamic State he would be forced to travel overseas.
"I can't stay in a country that's going to be fighting my religion. If my country is going to make me an enemy of my country then I have no choice but to go and move to the Islamic State where I will be welcomed as a citizen . . . and not be persecuted for my religion or my beliefs."
If he did move to the Middle East, he would work as an engineer to help rebuild infrastructure, he said.
A New Zealand Security Intelligence Service spokesperson would not confirm if Tahuhu was on the Government's watch list.
Tahuhu claimed two detectives spoke to him about six to eight weeks ago and said he was being monitored.
They told him his conversion to Islam and extensive criminal history meant "I fit a criteria that says I may become a potential homeland terror threat".
"They basically wanted to let me know that they were watching me and if I made any covert plans to move then I would have my passport taken off me."
He would be allowed to travel overseas but only if he was transparent about his plans, Tahuhu said.
Tahuhu grew up in Aranui. He was exposed to alcohol, drugs and violence and by his late teens he was already serving time for aggravated robbery. After being released from prison, he committed burglaries, cultivated cannabis and found himself in trouble with the law again - ending up behind bars for about seven years.
About two years ago, disillusioned with Christianity, he converted to Islam at the Christchurch mosque on Deans Ave.
It was a decision that changed his life.
"They [the Government] can watch me all they like. I've got nothing to hide," he said.
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Hello fans, friends, and fellow magicians.
If you haven’t heard the big news, here it is: This week, I am going to be featured on the national TV show “Penn and Teller’s Fool Us!”
The show, which will be on the CW (channel 15 locally), rounds up magicians from all over the United States, and has them perform at the Rio Casino in Vegas for Penn and Teller. At the end of your act, they get to guess how it’s done. If you can fool them; not only do you get to say you fooled the most cunning, most well known, most influential magical duo in the world – but you get to open up for their show in Vegas.
I remember binge watching this show for hours at a time when it premiered some time ago in the UK, planning out what I would do if I ever were to be featured. It was my favorite show for a long time, for obvious reasons.
So getting the call from one of the producers inviting me to perform was hands down one of the best moments of my life. To be honest, the entire trip places as one of the best weeks ever, too. The entire atmosphere of being surrounded by fellow magicians, all with that same eager goal as you – it was incredible.
Penn and Teller are the magicians of the twenty first century. There isn’t one person in America or the UK that hasn’t heard of them. It was one thing to meet them – but to get to show them my magic? It was pretty darn cool.
The surrealism of it all is quite amazing. I am beyond grateful for all the circumstances that have lead up to me achieving all that has happened in the past year; as well as for all the fans that have been behind me since the days I started in Saratoga. This show is certain to be my biggest national appearance yet, and I can’t wait to share it with you all.
So tune in to the CW on Monday July sixth at 8:00pm to cheer me on. Thank you for your support I wouldn’t be here without all of you!
Thank you, Steven Brundage |
(left) averaged 14.1 points in 39 games for the Lou Williams (left) averaged 14.1 points in 39 games for the Hawks last season. (Jim McIsaac/Getty Images Sport)
Hawks guard Lou Williams, who suffered a torn ACL last January, has been medically cleared to practice and could return soon.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer said Williams is participating in full-contact drills and getting into basketball shape after rehabbing the better part of the calendar year. From the AJC:
"He is basically competing full-go now,” Budenholzer said Wednesday morning before the Hawks took on the Knicks. “I guess, in that sense, you could say he’s been cleared. He is doing everything. It’s now getting game-ready or game-comfortable. He’s played five-on-five. He is basically cleared to do everything. We’ll get him to where he feels comfortable playing in a game.”
Williams was the runner-up for the Sixth Man Award in 2011-12, averaging 14.9 points for the Sixers. That summer, he signed with the Hawks, but played only 39 games last season before sustaining the season-ending knee injury. When healthy, Williams was serving as one of Atlanta's main ball handlers and go-to-scorers, with averages of 14.1 points and 3.6 assists in a reserve role.
Despite his absence, Atlanta's offense has been surprisingly crisp this season. The Hawks rank fifth in offensive efficiency and sixth in shooting (46.7 percent).
DOLLINGER: Hawks up to No. 14 in Power Rankings
The Hawks have used the starting lineup of Al Horford, Paul Millsap, DeMarre Carroll, Kyle Korver and Jeff Teague for all seven games. With Williams rounding back into shape and accustomed to coming off the bench, it's reasonable to think that the starting unit will remain intact after he returns.
Budenholzer said Williams will not play Wednesday against the Knicks but that the team is actively monitoring his progress. |
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Weighing only a few ounces, warblers are not known for their winter hardiness, but the yellow-rumped, or myrtle, warbler is one tough bird. As warblers go, this species is just a little larger, a little heavier and a little bulkier than its kin. They can be downright abundant in the late fall landscape, darting through the thinning tree branches, or even shaking off the season’s first snowflakes. The yellow-rumped warbler (Setophaga coronata) overwinters farther north than any other North American wood warbler, and is very hardy. Butter butts, as birders call them because of the bright yellow patch above their tails, are just beginning to show up in our local woodlands as their passerine brethren abandon the cold Northeast for the warmth of Central and South America. The birds are official New Yorkers throughout the winter months.
Few insects are active during an average New York winter, so the yellow-rumped warbler has evolved to capitalize on other foods for winter survival. It is one of only a handful of birds or other vertebrates able to digest wax. In our area, the fragrant bluish fruit of the northern bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) is covered in a thick waxy coating the birds find ideal. In fact, they are so reliant upon bayberry (and relatives like wax myrtle in the Southeast) that their ranges coincide almost identically on both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts.
Until recently the East and West Coast populations of the yellow-rumped warbler were segregated into two closely related but separate species, Audubon’s warbler on the West Coast and the myrtle warbler in the east. Despite obvious differences (for example, Audubon’s warblers sport a yellow throat; the myrtle’s is white), DNA testing has revealed that both birds represent one variable species with an extensive range across North America. Hybrids also occur where the two varieties’ ranges overlap.
Myrtle warblers are wonderful trail companions; always good company as they flit through the outer branches of trees and shrubs, their slight chirping calls the perfect complement to the sound of rustling leaves. Gregarious and inquisitive, they often gather in large flocks to feed on bayberries and other ripe winter fruits. The birds will sometimes land within an arm’s length of a quiet hiker.
During the fall and winter months, the myrtle warbler is a streaky warm gray, marked with what seem like randomly placed bright yellow patches. But as days lengthen and spring arrives, the birds color until their random yellow marks are framed by sharp black and white patterns. Then, almost overnight, they’re off, on a migration that will deliver them, in full color, to mates in the north woods.
In Brooklyn, Floyd Bennett Field’s North 40 or the Saltmarsh Nature Center’s trails are great places to observe these winter residents. In Queens, Fort Tilden offers acres of quiet bayberry shrub land for winter hiking. Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx and Battery Park in Manhattan also offer suitable habitats for these adaptable urban birds. |
The Rev. Roderick Dwayne Belin, a senior A.M.E. Church leader, stood before a gathering of more than 1,000 pastors in a drafty Marriott ballroom in Naperville, Ill., this month and extolled the virtues of a Hollywood movie.
“Imagine this clip playing to your congregation, perhaps tied to a theological discussion about our sacred lives and our secular lives and how there is really no division,” he said, before showing the trailer for “Hidden Figures,” which 20th Century Fox will release in theaters nationwide on Jan. 6.
The film has no obvious religious message. Rather, it is a feel-good drama about unsung black heroines in the NASA space race of the 1960s. But Fox — working with a little-known firm called Wit PR, which pitches movies to churches — sought out Mr. Belin to help sell “Hidden Figures” as an aspirational story about women who have faith in themselves. He became a proponent after a visit to the movie’s set in Atlanta, where Wit PR invited seven influential pastors to watch filming and hang out with stars like Kevin Costner and Taraji P. Henson, who spoke of her own struggles to succeed in Hollywood.
“I came away really interested in using film to explore faith,” Mr. Belin said.
On the surface, Hollywood is a land of loose morals, where materialism rules, sex and drugs are celebrated on screen (and off), and power players can have a distant relationship with the truth. But movie studios and their partners have quietly — very quietly, sometimes to the degree of a black ops endeavor — been building deep connections to Christian filmgoers who dwell elsewhere on the spectrum of politics and social values. In doing so, they have tapped churches, military groups, right-leaning bloggers and, particularly, a fraternity of marketing specialists who cut their teeth on overtly religious movies but now put their influence behind mainstream works like “Frozen,” “The Conjuring,” “Sully” and “Hidden Figures.” |
A relative easy win for Denmark over Slovakia, who didn’t seem to give their all. Only at the end of the game Slovakia would find the net, but it was too late to threaten the Danes: 2-5.
The audience didn’t see any goals in p1, but this had more to do with the goalies than with the players. Quite some shots were fired, but no one scored. It was shortly in p2 (20.20) when Stefan Hedorf put Denmark in a 0-1 lead. It was his first goal of the day, but more were to come…
Later during the second period Denmark scored again, this time in powerplay. Score after 40.00 was 0-2 in Danish favor. Both teams had already made it to the play offs, but winner of this game would also become Group C winner. It seemed Slovakia didn’t really care about that, as they didn’t fight as hard as we might expect them to be capable of. Denmark kept on working – and scoring! At 46.50 the 0-3 was made, shortly after followed by 0-4 (48.33). It was Stefan Hedorf again who scored the Danish fourth goal, and he wasn’t done yet – at 51.35 he finished his hattrick: 0-5!
Slovakia finally did something back by scoring at 56.31: 1-5. In the last minute of the game Denmark was given two 2-min penalties, which gave Slovakia the opportunity to play a 6-vs-3 situation. At 59.52 the young Dudovic scored the 2-5, which was the final result. Denmark finishes first in Group C, Slovakia second.
Goals in time order:
Floorball Worldwide Facebook Group - 1.920 members! Become a member For lovers of floorball worldwide! Here you find the latest news about floorball!
Join the Floorball Worldwide Facebook Group |
Not all battles are fought with weapons. Duels of wits, battles of wills, and blood-pumping bartering matches are all hallmarks of excellent roleplaying games. Dungeons and Dragons says that there are three pillars of the game: combat, interaction, and exploration. Here are some tips to make your social interactions just as exciting as combat!
What’s the “battlefield” of this encounter? Look to TV shows and movies filled with intrigue and politics for ideas. Social encounters can take place at locations like: Fancy balls Council meetings Diplomatic missions Interrogations Stake-outs and sleuthing Hot dog stands…if hot dog stands exist in your world You must know the goal of the encounter. In combat, the goal is usually “kill the enemy and not die,” but social encounters often have more complex goals. Be clear with the players and ask your players to be clear with you, to avoid confusion. You’ll have an easier time if you know your NPCs goals and motivations beforehand. Detailed NPCs with Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws are easier to roleplay than improvised ones. Make a list of vital information these NPCs know. This information can be secrets the PCs need to acquire, or bombshells the NPC can drop to turn the encounter in their favor. Diplomacy often requires making alliances. What factions are involved in this encounter? Which ones want the PCs help? Which ones do the PCs want help from? And which ones want to see the PCs eat dirt? It’s easy for social encounters to lose tension. Think of ways to raise the stakes! How can this encounter affect the world at large? If you have no other way to raise the stakes, most social encounters can become combat encounters if negotiations fail!
Of course these are just the basic tips written out in a handy list format. If you need more detail, check out the video above with Critical Role’s illustrious DM, Matt Mercer. We’ll have more Game Master Tips every Friday, so stay tuned!! |
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg 'hacked into emails of rivals and journalists'
Allegations: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of hacking into the email accounts of rivals and journalists.
The CEO of the world's most successful social networking website was accused of at least two breaches of privacy in a series of articles run by BusinessInsider.com.
As part of a two-year investigation detailing the founding of Facebook, the magazine uncovered what it claimed was evidence of the hackings in 2004.
In the first instance, it said that, when Zuckerberg discovered that Harvard's student newspaper The Crimson was planning on running an article on him in 2004, he used reporters' Facebook logins to hack into their accounts.
In the second instance, the magazine claimed Zuckerberg hacked into the accounts of rivals at Harvard who accused him of stealing their idea for a social network. He then allegedly tried to sabotage the rival network they had set up.
Business Insider claimed that Zuckerberg learned The Crimson was planning to write an article on him when he was called in for an interview in 2004.
The newspaper was investigating allegations by other Harvard students that Zuckerberg had stolen their social networking idea - allegations that are now well-documented and became the subject of a $65million legal suit.
In 2004, however, Facebook - which now boasts over 400million users around the world and is an incorporated company worth millions - was still just a network confined to Harvard students known as TheFacebook.com.
At the time, Zuckerberg was involved in a now well-publicised dispute with three other Harvard students who had originally asked him to help them create an online social network.
Business Insider chronicles the dispute in detail as part of its main article on the founding of Facebook.
The other Harvard students - Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra - had accused Zuckerberg of intentionallly misleading them about his willingness to help them build their website, HarvardConnection.com.
They had approached the student newspaper, the Crimson, about their accusations.
On hearing their claims, Crimson reporters then spoke to Zuckerberg about the allegations, Business Insider said.
Zuckerberg was apparently able to convince the newspaper that he network he was building differed substantially to HarvardConnection.com, which he viewed primarily as a dating website. The newspaper pulled the story.
Claims: Harvard University, where the student newspaper was planning on running an article on Zuckerberg
However after further claims emerged, Zuckerberg apparently became anxious that the paper would run a story on him after all.
Business Insider claimed he then told a friend how he had hacked into the accounts of Crimson staff.
He allegedly told the friend that he used TheFacebook.com to search for members who said they were Crimson staff.
Then, he allegedly examined a report of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com.
In the instances where they had, Business Insider claimed that Zuckerberg said he tried using those incorrect passwords to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts.
In two instances, the magazine claimed, he succeeded - and was able to read emails between Crimson staff discussing the possibility of writing an article on the accusations surrounding him.
'In other words,' Business Insider claimed, 'Mark appears to have used private login data from TheFacebook to hack into the separate email accounts of some TheFacebook users'.
It would not be the only time that Zuckerberg breached privacy, Business Insider claimed.
In a separate article in the series, the magazine alleged that Zuckerberg had also hacked into his rivals at HarvardConnection.com - which, by May of 2004, had been renamed 'ConnectU'.
Although Facebook was already wildly popular by the summer of 2004 - reaching a million users by the fall - Zuckerberg, the magazine claimed, was still concerned about his competition.
Those concerns, it was alleged, led him to hack in to ConnectU's site and make changes to multiple user profiles - including one of its founders and the fellow student accusing him of stealing the ideas for Facebook, Cameron Winklevoss.
Social networking: The Facebook site is now used by more than 400million people worldwide
Business Insider alleged that Zuckerberg created a fake account filled with fake information for Winklevoss.
It also alleged that he logged into the accounts of some ConnectU users and changed their privacy settings to invisible - apparently making it harder for people to find friends on the network.
Eventually, the magazine claimed, Zuckerberg deactivated at least 20 ConnectU accounts entirely.
Business Insider admitted it was not clear how Zuckerberg could have hacked into the ConnectU accounts.
When Facebook was approached about the allegations in the Business Insider articles, the company told Mail Online: 'We’re not going to debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook’s early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations.
'The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook's growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400 million people.'
However the magazine also claimed that a source close to the company said it was the fallout from instances such as these - as well as the expensive litigation with ConnectU - that has shaped Facebook's current privacy policies.
Fears over privacy present one of Facebook's biggest challenges, with the company coming under fire from users almost every time it makes a change to its privacy policies.
After its investigation, Business Insider concluded that Zuckerberg had led his ConnectU rivals on regarding his own intentions of building a social network.
But the magazine said that, in light of the fact that Zuckerberg appeared to consider the two networks as two separate things, and that he had never signed a contract with Connect U, the $65million settlement eventually paid to ConnectU was over the top.
The alleged hackings detailed above, however, it claimed were far 'more troubling'.
The claims will be read with interest by the millions of Facebook users concerned about their privacy - but the full fallout still remains to be seen. |
Kyle Washington, the executive chairman of Seaspan Corp., has been handed a three-month driving ban but avoided a criminal record after pleading guilty to a charge of driving without due care and attention Thursday in North Vancouver provincial court.
The plea Thursday stemmed from a bizarre incident on the night of Dec. 23, 2014, when Washington smashed his pickup into a wall while leaving the West Vancouver Yacht Club, then ended up driving into a ditch at the nearby Gleneagles Community Centre.
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Crown prosecutor Sunny Bains said a member of the public called police after seeing Washington drive into the wall, damaging the front axle of his truck. When that person tried to find out if Washington needed help, he refused to speak or roll down the window, she said.
Police were then called to the Gleneagles Community Centre, by witnesses who saw Washington drive into the ditch, then continue to rev his engine.
The police officer who attended described Washington as “stumbling all over the road” after he was asked to get out of his truck.
Washington was taken back to the West Vancouver police detachment, where he blew breathalyzer blood alcohol readings of .110 and .100. The legal limit is .08.
Washington was originally charged with impaired driving and driving with a blood alcohol level over .08. Under an agreement between Crown and defence lawyers, those charges were dropped and Washington pleaded guilty to the less serious Motor Vehicle Act offence.
Matthew Nathanson, Washington’s defence lawyer, said his client’s unusual behaviour that night was caused by a reaction to a prescription sleeping pill he’d taken that night. Nathanson said Washington had never taken the drug before and didn’t know how it would affect him.
He added some of Washington’s “bizarre behaviour” that night was “totally inconsistent with alcohol” but consistent with a reaction to the sleeping pill he’d taken. He added Washington has very little recollection of what happened.
Nathanson noted Washington does significant work in the community, including being involved in foundations that work with at-risk youth and adults and has already completed 20 hours of community work service. “This behaviour is not typical of his character,” he said.
Judge Doug Moss handed Washington a $2,000 fine in addition to the three-month driving ban. “In my view, your driving was quite dangerous,” he said.
The judge noted Washington only lives a short distance from the yacht club. “You could have walked home,” he said. |
"[Batman] has two primary modes of transportation: swinging from gothic clock towers on his Batline, and cruising around Gotham in the Batmobile. Sure, he's got a Batwing and a Batjet and a Batcopter and even a Bat-Segway, but mostly Batman relies on his ride to get from point A to point B. "Now, the Batmobile is a seriously tricked-out car, and you can't blame the guy for wanting to drive it, but it must be a serious pain in the ass dealing with the Batmobile every night. "As anyone who lives in or near a big North American city knows, urban driving can be a maddening experience. Heavy traffic, one-way streets, swerving buses, crazy-ass taxi drivers, potholes, inadequate signage, kamikaze bike messengers, oblivious pedestrians — don't even get me going about parking...Now just imagine trying to navigate Gotham City's rat nest of streets and alleys in an extra-wide custom hot rod with a wonky torque converter and limited visibility. "Okay, the actual driving itself would probably not be an issue, as Batman probably has advanced defensive driving skills and an intimate knowledge of the street layout of Gotham. Plus, people would get the hell out of the Batmobile's way. If Batman wants to change lanes, you will let him into your lane. "But what about parking? Can that thing even fit into a standard parking spot? Have you ever tried to parallel park a car that has huge scalloped bat wings on the back while wearing a rubber cowl that prevents you from moving your neck more than five degrees in any direction? I want to see a director's cut of Tim Burton's Batman where Michael Keaton tries to slide that beast into a parking spot without scraping the curb or bumping into another car."
Batman first appeared 75 years ago, in May of 1939 in Detective Comics #27. Although the first true Batmobile did not appear for another two years, it has become one of the Dark Knight's best known weapons.
The Batmobile made its career debut in Batman #5, then appeared on a comic cover for the first time for Batman #20. Because of different artists' interpretations of what the car should be, it changed size, shape, and features frequently. Later, as the car was marketed beyond the comics, more forms appeared based on practical or aesthetic considerations. In the 1960s, the first full size, fully operational Batmobile was built for the TV show Batman, and had to face financial and functional questions. A few years later the design of this car would be modified for use in the Superfriends cartoon series, with the unique considerations of making a car that could be easily drawn repeatedly for animation. Then, nearly three decades after the TV series, Batman returned to live action with Warner Brothers Batman movies. At about the same time, Batman: The Animated series came out, with a whole new take on the design of Batman and his universe. All of this was on top of the natural evolution of the car over 60+ years, taking into account new technological features like the jet engine and the computer.
I started collecting data on the Batmobiles a few years ago while trying to research a model project I was working on (you can visit my scale model site here). I discovered that there were very few reference guides to the Batmobile, and none of them covered the complete history of the car. Many focused only on a single generation (such as the Futura Batmobile), or they covered a particular genre (TV, cartoons, movies, etc.). As I collected information from all of these sources, I decided to put together my own history of the Batmobile.
Before I started this project, I had no idea how convoluted the history of the Batmobile could be. Over the last decade I have learned more about the car, the creators behind it, and Batman in general than I ever expected. Still, there's a lot that I haven't learned yet. If you know of anything that belongs here, or if you have any information on an existing entry, send me an e-mail at [email protected]. |
Since the Oscars are tonight, I thought it would be fitting to do today's Movie Trivia post on one of the most-celebrated films of all time. And if you don't know what I mean, (I didn't know this, 'til I started doing the research) you'll see when you read the very first factoid.
Of the seven Academy Award nominations Silence of the Lambs received, it took home five - the Oscars Grand Slam of Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay (or Best Writing). Only two other movies have ever done this: It Happened One Night in 1934 at the seventh Academy Awards, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975 at the 48th Academy Awards.
Just before the Oscars, a group of gay activists crashed into the New York Film Critics Circle Awards to protest The Silence of the Lambs. They claimed it made drag queens and crossdressers look bad; that the movie implied that men who dress up as women must be sick and deranged. The matter was handled peacefully, though - no arrests were made.
MGM sort of accidentally garnered a lot of Oscar buzz. In 1992, it was still pretty common for films that were up for Oscars to avoid a video release until after the ceremony. But a horror movie hadn't won a major award since 1941's Rebecca, so MGM didn't think they had a shot and figured it was no big deal if they released to VHS. This may have inadvertently been what earned it such Oscar support - Academy voters were able to watch the movie in their own homes.
The movie came out on Valentine's Day in 1991. Perfect date movie, don't you think?
Gene Hackman originally wanted to direct and write the screenplay for the movie based on the novel. He was also going to play Dr. Lecter himself. But time passed and he lost interest; Jonathan Demme picked it up and wanted Michelle Pfeiffer to play Clarice Starling. She, however, thought it was too dark. Of course, all three roles that were replaced - director, actor and actress - won Academy Awards.
Despite the fact that most people will forever link Anthony Hopkins with Dr. Lecter, Hopkins is only in the movie for 16 minutes. It's the shortest lead role to ever win an Oscar.
The movie is one of only two Oscar winners Gene Siskel ever gave a thumbs-down to. The other was Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.
Anthony Hopkins improvised a couple of really memorable moments in the movie. When Clarice and Lecter first meet, Hannibal the Cannibal mocks her Southern accent. This wasn't scripted and Jodie Foster had no idea he was going to do it, so when she appears to be offended and shocked, she really is. He also improvised the slurpy noise Lecter makes after describing his meal of human flesh, fava beans and a nice chianti.
Horror movie veteran George Romero has a little cameo in the movie - he is with Chilton when the two guards remove Clarice from the area after her last meeting with Dr. Lecter. Roger Corman also has a cameo, as does Jonathan Demme himself. Corman plays FBI Director Hayden Burke and Demme can be spotted at the very end of the movie in the crowd scene wearing a blue cap.
Brooke Smith, who plays Buffalo Bill's victim, was actually really good friends with Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill) on set. Because of this, Jodie Foster referred to her as "Patty Hearst." Until recently, you could find both of these actors on T.V. - Brooke Smith was on Grey's Anatomy, and Ted Levine is still on Monk. This disturbs my husband every time we see him on Monk.
The moth cocoon found in the victim's throat was made from Tootsie Rolls and gummy bears, so it wouldn't be a big deal if the actress accidentally swallowed it.
Dr. Lecter was based on several people, but he was largely inspired by Ted Bundy and the relationship he had with a criminology professor at the University of Washington. Anthony Hopkins also based some of Hannibal's mannerisms on Charles Manson - specifically, he noticed that Manson very rarely blinked when giving an interview, and strived to do the same when on camera.
Likewise, Buffalo Bill is a combination of Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, and Gary Heidnick. Ed Gein skinned his victims, Ted Bundy tricked people into his van by acting like the cast on his hand was hampering him, and Gary Heidnick kept women in a pit in his basement.
The icon on the movie posters - the moth covering Jodie Foster's mouth - has an element of Salvador Dali incorporated into it. The back of the Death's-Head Hawk Moth is actually made up of naked women if you look closely; it's Female Bodies as a Skull, which was later made into a portrait of Salvador Dali by famous photographer Philippe Halsman. Check out the whole story here.
Anthony Hopkins has said that his Hannibal voice was a mix of Truman Capote and Katharine Hepburn. |
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
Rosa Parks had a predecessor. About 70 years before Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, a woman named Ida B. Wells would fight to stay put on a Nashville-bound train. That moment marked a turning point not just in Wells’ personal history, but in America’s as well.
Ida B. Wells’ Early Days
As is the case today, Ida B. Wells came of age in a world where changes in laws did not signal immediate changes in thoughts and behaviors. While born six months after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves at a federal level, Wells and her family lived in the South — Holly Springs, Mississippi, to be exact — and thus they remained subjected to the prejudice that no piece of legislation could fully quell.
In spite — or perhaps because — of their geography, Wells’ parents became very active in advocating for equality, particularly in education. Her father was a founding member of then-Shaw University (now Rust College), which Wells went on to attend.
As a young woman, Wells approached her education with enthusiasm, but at age 16 tragedy struck and Wells had to abandon her studies. As the eldest of eight children, when her parents and one younger brother died from yellow fever, she took on the care of her siblings.
In 1882, Wells and her siblings moved to Memphis to live with an aunt. Resourceful and driven, Wells — around 18 at this time — managed to land a few teaching jobs despite losing a few years of study to care for her family.
However, it didn’t take Ida B. Wells long to get back into academics, and soon she began going back and forth from Memphis to Nashville to attend college.
“I Proposed To Stay”
In the spring of 1884, one such train ride to Nashville would change the course of Ida B. Wells’ life forever.
Having purchased a first class ticket for her journey, she refused when one of the crew members demanded that she move to the segregated car of the train. The crew member tried to insist that first class was a whites-only privilege, but Wells refused to leave her seat on principle.
The crew member physically, and forcibly, removed her from the train. At some point, Wells bit his hand. As Wells recalled in her autobiography:
I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies’ car, I proposed to stay. . . [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn’t try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.
Wells sued the railroad company. She won in local court, and received a $500 settlement. The defendants appealed, however, and the trial then went to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Wells lost and had to return the settlement — and pay $200 in damages to the railroad.
Outraged, Wells decided to tell the story to local newspapers. Writing under the pseudonym Iola, Wells quickly established herself as a journalist on the beat of social justice, particularly its intersection with education.
This decision came with consequences. When Wells began to vocalize her criticisms of the state of schools for black children in 1891, she lost her teaching post at a segregated school.
A Red Record
Continuing to write about racial injustice in an accessible manner, Ida B. Wells became particularly vocal on the subject of lynching. While the practice posed a threat to all African-Americans, it hit very close to home for Wells: after attempting to defend his store from a group of white men, one of Wells’ friends died by lynching.
Writing soon translated to physical activism, and Wells began to travel throughout the United States to investigate lynching, and kickstarted a robust campaign against the practice.
Her reporting was widely disseminated in brochures, and she also published a book, A Red Record, an extraordinary monograph on lynching throughout the confederate South.
Wells’ keen observations and analysis are striking in their own right, but are even more-so when considered in a modern context. Much of what Wells perceives and elucidates in her writing about racial inequality and the social dynamics among races very much hold up today, when people continue to justify violence against people of color through means of law and order:
The first excuse given to the civilized world for the murder of unoffending Negroes was the necessity of the white man to repress and stamp out alleged “race riots.” For years immediately succeeding the war there was an appalling slaughter of colored people, and the wires usually conveyed to northern people and the world the intelligence, first, that an insurrection was being planned by Negroes, which, a few hours later, would prove to have been vigorously resisted by white men, and controlled with a resulting loss of several killed and wounded. It was always a remarkable feature in these insurrections and riots that only Negroes were killed during the rioting, and that all the white men escaped unharmed.
In the book, Wells offers statistics about lynchings throughout the South — as well as the names, locations, and the justification for the lynching of each individual about whom she learned. Words like “attempted” and “alleged” appear often as a precursor to the many crimes attributed to those who were lynched — an important qualifier to note, because these individuals more often than not did not have any kind of proper trial.
Sometimes, white men did not attempt to invoke claims of crime or violence to legitimize their call for lynching: reasons such as “insulting whites” appear in Wells’ account, as does “lynched as a warning,” and perhaps worst of all, “no offense.”
Wells continued to soldier on in the fight for social justice throughout her life, and this fight would eventually include campaigning for women’s suffrage.
Here, too, Wells faced barriers. Despite Wells’ highly-respected status as an advocate and journalist, white feminists leading the March on Washington still relegated Wells and other non-white feminists to either march at the back of their parade, or have a march of their own.
As a black woman, this experience signaled to Wells that racial equality is a necessary precondition for the attainment of true gender equality. If Wells needed any more evidence to support her belief, she got it in her quest for women’s suffrage: For all intents and purposes, white women received the right to vote before black women.
While the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited racial discrimination when it came to voting, it wasn’t until 1965 that the Voting Rights Act made the systematic suppression of black voters (through the administration of “literacy tests” or requirement to pay poll taxes, for example) that black women could participate in one of the pillars of democracy like their white female peers.
Ida B. Wells’ legacy, both as an advocate and scholar of social justice issues, endures today. Her fight to stop violence against people of color, to dismantle racial prejudice that oppressed and excluded, and her analyses on the sociopolitical structures built to keep white men in power remain relevant in 2017 — and beyond.
To honor Ida B. Wells’ legacy, we must not simply take note of these truths, but act. As Wells once said, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
Intrigued by this look at Ida B. Wells? Next, discover four other female civil rights leaders you didn’t learn about in school. Then, look back at the women’s suffrage movement in photos. |
We’re tracking down InVision users inside the world’s most amazing companies to discover their favorite tools, inspirations, workspace must-haves, and the philosophy behind what makes them so awesome. This week we interviewed Moses Ting, UX Design Lead at LinkedIn.
Tell us about your role and responsibilities at LinkedIn?
I’m a UX Design Lead on LinkedIn’s mobile team. The products I’m currently involved with are the LinkedIn Android phone app and Contacts iOS phone app.
The design culture at LinkedIn places an important emphasis on personal and career growth. One of the ways we’re encouraged to challenge ourselves is by doing rotations within different parts of LinkedIn’s design team. I’ve been at LinkedIn for three and a half years, and have gone through five or six rotations. Each rotation focuses on an entirely different component of LinkedIn, and I’ve found the change in scenery to be both refreshing and full of opportunities. New responsibilities mean we are not pigeon-holed into a single aspect of design. Continual growth and learning is important for designers.
InVision helps us to better sell what we’ve created by allowing people to experience the application for themselves, rather than having it explained to them.
How did you get into design and what was your path into your current role?
My career started in the technical realm; I graduated college with a master’s in electrical engineering and my first job involved developing sensor networks to protect buildings from biological and chemical terrorist attacks. Later on, I taught myself how to code and wrote full-stack code for a small software company with offices in Boston and New York.
Ever since college, I knew that I had a passion for design. I’d help friends and classmates with design-focused side projects. Even when I started my career, I just couldn’t stay away. I’d come home from my day job, eat dinner quickly, and put on my designer hat to work on freelance projects. I’d often lose track of time in the middle of the night perfecting pixels – I just loved it.
In 2010, I finally decided to take the leap and made design the focus of my career. My first truly design-focused role was at LinkedIn. It’s been a journey filled with excitement and growth ever since.
What are the three critical elements of an effective workspace?
The workspace that makes me effective includes:
Two notebooks – A small one to keep a track of the things I need to do and a larger one with a dotted grid for sketches and ideation.
– A small one to keep a track of the things I need to do and a larger one with a dotted grid for sketches and ideation. Adequate desk space (standing and sitting) – My desk is super messy when I’m in the middle of a project, so having enough space gives me a sense of order through the chaos. A height-adjustable desk gives me flexibility so I can think on my feet or code while sitting.
– My desk is super messy when I’m in the middle of a project, so having enough space gives me a sense of order through the chaos. A height-adjustable desk gives me flexibility so I can think on my feet or code while sitting. Music – Music helps me get into the flow. Right now, Avicii, Lorde and Imagine Dragons are on heavy rotation when I need to be ultra productive. When it comes time for high-level concept thinking, I’ll always have jazzy notes playing from the likes of Thelonious Monk and Wes Montgomery.
As designers, our superpowers enable us to turn abstract ideas into tangible bits that help move the conversation forward.
What are some of the tools you use in the design process?
Pen and notebook – I love starting with pen and paper sketching to get ideas out in the open. the medium I choose to design with impacts the type of feedback I’m likely to receive.
– Conversations with non-designers – I find these kinds of discussions to be invaluable gut checks.
– I find these kinds of discussions to be invaluable gut checks. Illustrator – For single page visual designs.
– For single page visual designs. InVision – For creating prototypes or demonstrating interactive flows.
– For creating prototypes or demonstrating interactive flows. Quartz Composer – For refining mobile transitions.
– For refining mobile transitions. Code – XCode, Android Development Kit, or HTML/CSS/JS for actual prototypes or to help engineers define styles and polish layouts.
What equipment are you using and how does it help you do your job effectively?
Mac Pro: hooked up to an Apple Cinema Display
Dell monitor: to understand what non-Apple users see
MacBook Air: for on the go
Dropbox: Syncs my files across every device
Apple Magic Mouse: I used to have a pen and tablet but I’m faster with the mouse.
Where do you look for inspiration for your designs?
This might sound weird, but I look for design inspiration in books. I get through about 40 books every year on topics like understanding leadership, developing the creative mind, or memoirs of important historical figures. Great books, unlike tweets, require immense amounts of research, thinking, and revisions. All of that goodness is rendered into pages and pages of insights and knowledge. For example, Nelson Mandela’s leadership principles are extremely useful when I’m trying to guide an important design discussion. And reading about president Teddy Roosevelt’s journey to the River of Doubt in Brazil challenges me to push beyond my own limitations.
The moment you think you’re an expert is the moment you stop growing.
When I’m looking for a more diverse range of inspiration, I rely on the web. I love incorporating elements from other forms of work into my design. There’s always something useful simply by looking at beer bottle packaging or breakthroughs in material science techniques.
What design blogs, news sites or magazines are you loving at the moment?
I use Feedly to stay on top of all the blogs I want to read. Here’s a few:
Fast Company Design – Daily digest of design related articles, there’s always a good article sitting in my inbox every morning.
– Daily digest of design related articles, there’s always a good article sitting in my inbox every morning. Brand New – Showcases and offers opinions on corporate and brand identity work. Also great for inspiration and learning.
– Showcases and offers opinions on corporate and brand identity work. Also great for inspiration and learning. Little Big Details – A great inspiration blog that showcases the little details on web designs.
– A great inspiration blog that showcases the little details on web designs. Medium – Weekly collection of great short-formed content on a diverse range of topics.
What separates a good designer from a great one?
What makes a designer great is the ability to communicate effectively. As designers, our superpowers enable us to turn abstract ideas into tangible bits that help move the conversation or product forward. You have to be a good storyteller in order to get someone to believe in your vision.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give other designers who want to eventually get a position somewhere as awesome as LinkedIn?
Never stop learning. If you’re a visual design person, try a bit of interaction design. If you’re designing for mobile, try getting your hands dirty and do some of the coding. Every little thing you pick up will make you better in the long run.
The moment you think you’re an expert is the moment you stop growing.
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About Moses
Moses is a UX Design Lead at LinkedIn. Connect with him on LinkedIn |
The maximum annual salary amount from which social insurance contributions can be made will be LVL 32,600 or EUR 46,400 as of the year 2014, the government decided today by approving the Welfare Ministry's amendments to the regulations on social insurance contributions, informs LETA.
This means that the ceiling on social contributions will be restored in Latvia next year. Social contributions were capped from 1997, but the ceiling was lifted temporarily in 2009 in order to increase social insurance budget's revenue. This also meant, in turn, that high-income residents earned the right to impressive benefits and pensions.
From January 1, 2014, the maximum amount of social contributions per one person will be LVL 11,113.34 or EUR 15,817.76 a year.
Therefore, if a person is paid LVL 34,000 a year, he or she will only make social contributions from LVL 32,600. To the remaining amount, only personal income tax will apply.
Last year, there were 4,259 persons in Latvia whose annual salary exceeded LVL 32,600 – this is 0.4 percent of all insured persons in Latvia, according to the State Social Insurance Agency's data. |
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Rachel Dolezal has said that she faces more stigma being “racially fluid” than transgender people do.
The controversial former professor, who previously came out as bisexual, said in an interview with Salon that she believes she is less accepted than transgender people because she is “transracial”.
Dolezal said she drew the comparisons because her white identity was revealed at the same time as Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender.
She said: “What’s not similar is the stigma right now. There was stigma [for being transgender] in the past, for sure, and that still perpetuates.
“But there’s more acceptance for gender fluidity than there is for race fluidity right now, and I don’t think anybody would deny that.”
Dolezal, who became a talking point after the world learned that she was actually white in 2015, said that transracial people will become more societally accepted one day – just as LGBT people are.
She added: “There was a time when we did call transgender, and even gay and bisexual, people crazy — and [said they had] mental health issues and all these clinical terms — just stigmatised and rejected [them].
“Maybe we will evolve and grow, and racial fluidity will become a thing in 20 years? I do hope that inclusivity does expand to all people of all stripes.”
Dolezal came under fire earlier this week for comparing herself to transgender people on BBC Newsnight.
The comments sparked anger from writer Guilaine Kinouani, who said that “comparing transgenderism with trans-racialism is a fallacy.”
Dolezal continues to insist she did not “lie” about her race.
She said: “It didn’t feel like a lie… the idea of race is a lie, so how can you lie about a lie?
“It felt like a true representation of who I am and what I stand for. Even though race is a social construct, you have to take a side and I stand on the black side of issues. For me to not check that box would have been some sort of betrayal.
“I definitely did not feel at home in the white world. It felt foreign to me and it felt uncomfortable and awkward to be there. It also felt oppressive because I had to constantly repress parts of myself in order to survive socially.” |
I've told you in the past about how the drug companies have managed to "invent" diseases to match the chemical spectrum of the chemicals they sell. CNN recently picked up on the beat. In their report, CNN says that Pharma is now selling the diseases that petrochemical pharmaceuticals treat. Consider the common condition "urge incontinence" that, for years, carried a stigma of weakness. Pharma found a way to reframe your thinking. Instead of weakness problems that caused embarrassing incontinence, they renamed it to "overactive bladder." Now, instead of weakness causing the problem, the bladder has a problem that a drug can fix. And the best part is that you didn't even have to leak to qualify. All you had to do is go to the bathroom a lot. This enabled darling drug Detrol to become a huge hit. By creating the disease of "overactive bladder," the company created an instant market of 21 million potential patients. But it gets better. Have you ever experienced shyness? I sure did when I was a teen. Remember standing around at dances shy, and scared to reach out to the opposite sex? Now, according to the drug companies, about 80% of us, including me, would have suffered from their new "social anxiety disorder"! And that fabricated disease would automatically qualify you for an antidepressant, with the blessings of the FDA, Pharma's henchman. Don't get me wrong, people are a bit smarter than that. So, Pharma giant Glaxo, maker of Paxil, hired a public relations firm. The goal was to make people aware that they might be "allergic" to people. The company hired academic psychiatrists working on "social anxiety disorder" and sent them on a lecture circuit. Before the FDA approved Paxil for the bogus disorder, there were only about 50 references on this nutty diagnosis. But, during the 1999 PR campaign, there were over one billion references. In two years, Paxil became the 7th most profitable drug in America. The doctors pushing this campaign received awards for the education of doctors and the public on what has become the third most common "mental disease" in the world.
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Remember West Side Story? The young hoodlum sings to Officer Krupke that he has a "social disease." While his was far from shyness, this serves well to point out that Pharma can transform just about any truly normal human variation into a chemical-needing disease. And worse, if you would really look at the raw data from Pharma for say a long accepted disorder called depression, you'd find that their petrochemicals work only a tiny bit better than a sugar placebo. And we wonder why "health" costs are soaring. The sad thing is that if all drugs were benign, disease branding would be relatively harmless, too. But no drug is clean. Detrol can make elderly people delirious and may cause memory problems. Paxil can cause sexual dysfunction and dependence. It also has a black-box warning for suicide in children and adolescents, the very target of social anxiety (shyness) disorder. So the next time a doctor suggests that you take a Pharma mind-altering drug, ask for a shot of vitamin B12. Aside from its marvelous effects on your nervous system, the placebo effect alone will trump anything from Pharma, and won't have any toxicity. |
In October of 2013 I was riding solo in Stanley while Maria was overseas for work. While I was “stuck” in Portland, OR and surrounded by an endless supply of great beer I had the pleasure of meeting up with the Jon Davidson and Kimberly Johnson who together make up the Brew Explorers. As you can probably guess by the name they like to drink new beer in new places but also throw in a mix of outdoor activities.
They were kind enough to show me around a small section of Portland’s beer scene as we hit Cascade Brewing, Base Camp Brewing Co, and the Spirit of 77 Bar. Jon has a big personality befitting his front man status as a musician which seems to play quite well with Kimberly’s willingness to try new things even if it puts her in uncomfortable situations. Be sure to follow this entertaining duo as they explore the world of beer and adventure.
TRP: Tell us about yourselves in 140 characters or less. OR in a haiku
JD: Here’s our haiku.
Kimberly and Jon
Love crazy outdoor ventures
And drinking craft beer
TRP: If beer drinking was your “job” what title would you give yourself? If beer drinking is your job, tell us more!
JD: We would be Supreme Magnificent Master Lord And Lady Of The Beer Mug. Actually, our titles would be somewhere along the lines of “Brew Explorers.” We’ve learned a lot about beer, and yet still have a lot more to discover. We hope that someday soon we can make adventure and craft beer exploration our only occupation.
TRP: How did you get involved with craft beer?
JD: We both grew up in the Midwest, where the craft beer scene is finally taking off, but Michigan and Minnesota were definitely a bit behind the curve while we were living there. In my small southwestern Michigan hometown, my idea of a ‘craft beer’ was a Killian’s or a Guinness. I moved to Oregon for the mountains, the culture, the climate, and the adventure side of things, but my mind was quickly blown by the sheer variety and quality of the craft beers that were now at my fingertips. Kimberly had a similar experience when she moved, and both of our palates quickly shifted to appreciate bigger, bolder beers.
TRP: Tell us about your website Brew Explorers?
JD & KJ: The inspiration for our website, initially, was simply to blog about our adventures, both outdoor- and craft beer-related. In the subsequent months since its inauguration, we’ve tried to include more community- and personality-based elements by sharing our own stories, interviewing some brewers, mentioning and giving awards to beer and adventure people that we love, and providing information for those wanting to duplicate our adventures.
We plan to continue to grow the site to include various types of articles that will entertain, inform, and inspire people to get out and grab life by the beer and by the adventure. We recently added “Grab Life Awards,” where we pass out accolades for our favorite brews, adventures, and more on each trip we take; “News, Muse & Reviews,” where we add our thoughts about travel, beer and life, to the blogosphere; and “Friends & Resources,” to show some love to our favorite people we meet along the way and favorite resources we find that help us explore. We also hope to start featuring other Brew Explorers and their stories. Stay tuned at www.brew-explorers.com!
TRP: How did your love of outdoor activities come about?
JD: Personally, I can thank my dad. Even though I grew up in the flat, cornfield-filled state of Michigan, my father made it a point to take us hiking and backpacking at least once or twice a year in the beautiful mountains of Oregon, California, and Colorado. By the time I was 15, I’d climbed 40 mountains over 14,000 feet tall, and my love for the outdoors has expanded to include snowboarding, kayaking, whitewater rafting, mountain biking, rock climbing, skydiving and more since I’ve moved to the outdoor activity mecca of Portland. For me, nature is where I find peace and happiness, not to mention an adrenaline rush. I’m grateful to have someone like Kimberly in my life who lets me coerce her into trying some crazy things with me.
TRP: How do you define beer travel?
KJ: Beer travel is taking a trip for the sake of exploring a place’s craft beer. It’s about learning about a town, city, area of a city, country and its people through the beer they are crafting and what the locals are imbibing. Of course, we, as Brew Explorers, do more than just explore beer when we roadtrip or take a longer trip but beer travel is about taking the trip and choosing the place in order to indulge in its beer.
TRP: Why do you travel for beer?
KJ: We love to travel and explore, and we love beer. We throw our passions together, and we travel for beer. We love to go to beer towns, check out breweries and meet the people behind the craft. We love connecting with people, and the beer community is a great way to learn about a place. We also love to choose places not known for their beer and see what is brewing there. There always seems to be something going on related to beer nowadays.
TRP: What have you learned about beer culture from your travels?
KJ: The craft beer community is so welcoming, genuine and all around amazing people! We love how each and every person in the craft beer industry or who champions the craft beer industry is so creative and passionate about not only beer but life and living a life that they choose. We are very blessed to now find ourselves part of the community and can’t wait to meet more amazing #beerfriends.
JD: We’ve also been struck by how diverse, yet unified, the beer culture is. Geographic location often drives beer preferences, and while people in Amsterdam, for instance, love very different beers than people in Portland do, that unifying love for craft beer helps every beer lover to find common ground.
TRP: What was your first craft beer travel memory?
KJ: We traveled to Astoria, Oregon last August (2013). We wanted to get away for a few days, and I, who had recently moved to Portland at the time, hadn’t been to Astoria yet. After climbing the Astoria column, we hit up Fort George Brewery, where we got a full 24-tap flight of all their beers, a full history lesson of Fort George and background of their beers. After tasting a few, Brew Explorers was born. Right then and there, we decided we would start a blog and explore through beer.
TRP: What is your favorite form of beer travel and why?
KJ: Great question. I’m not sure we know all the ways to beer travel yet. However, we love road trips. Even if we fly somewhere, we love jumping in the car and driving to find all the breweries in the area. If we could and we want to someday, we would love to travel via RV. You and Maria have definitely piqued our interest in this form of travel, and we think it would be super fun. We also have dreams of a round-the-world trip, which would, of course, include exploring beer.
TRP: Where all have you traveled for beer?
KJ & JD: California, Alaska, Idaho, Utah, all over Oregon & Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Amsterdam, China, The Philippines, Australia…
TRP: What is on your beer travel wish list?
KJ: Lots of places, as you can imagine. San Francisco, Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul, more of San Diego please, Austin, Grand Rapids, Ireland, Germany (Everywhere), Vancouver (BC), Enterprise (OR), more Bend and Eugene, Milwaukee, Pullman (WA), Portland (ME), Kansas City, Toronto, Seoul, Sheffield, Nottingham, London, Hanoi, Antwerp, Philly, Boston, Asheville, Prague, etc.
TRP: What are your favorite beer styles right now (respectively)?
KJ: IPAs, Imperial IPAs. The hoppier and stronger, the better. I also love stouts and spicy beers, and often times, if the stout and spicy beer are mixed together.
JD: I’ve been an IPAficionado for years, but have recently become enamored with a lot of stouts, porters, sours, Rauchbiers, chile beers, infused beers, meads, IPLs, IRAs, CDAs, strong ales, barleywines, Belgians, winter warmers. I’m on a huge barrel-aged kick right now. I basically love everything but lagers, wheats, and ambers, although I’ve met a few in each of those categories, too, that I’m fond of.
TRP: What have you learned about yourselves from traveling?
KJ: I learn to take risks more. I love traveling because I often times find myself uncomfortable being in new situations, and I love pushing myself in that way. I learn to be more open. I love newness and pushing through the fear. Every time I travel, whether it be brew exploring or otherwise, I learn something new about myself and the world and just how much capacity we all have to learn and grow.
TRP: Is it easier to travel as a couple when beer is involved?
KJ: Well sure, I guess. Of course, anything as a couple is always easier with a little beer involved. However, I wouldn’t say beer is the trick to traveling well with your significant other. I would say three things make it easier, at least for us anyway. (And forgive me for this long answer, I get passionate about this because it isn’t all that easy).
1). Genuinely liking and loving being with your partner. I really enjoy Jon’s company. He is my best friend, and I love having great conversations with him, finding new things to photograph on the road, learning new things with him and pushing ourselves to do new things together.
2). Having the same travel style. Jon and I both love adventures and activities while traveling. If we were to lie around (on a beach, let’s say), it’s simply to rest up for the next adventure. We also both love trying new things, finding new places, and meeting new people. I think it’s critical to love doing the same types of things while traveling.
3). Patience and respect. It’s a no-brainer here. Just like while not traveling, a couple must have patience with each other. Because we are faced with different experiences, and emotions are higher while traveling, this is even more important. If you think you’re being kind, you must be even kinder to each other while traveling.
TRP: Where can we find more about you online?
www.brew-explorers.com |
Apple's much anticipated new high-end Mac Pro desktop, in a completely new and unique cylindrical design completely manufactured in America, will become available to order starting Thursday at an entry price of $2,999.
Apple announced availability of the new Mac Pro on Wednesday, boasting that the redesigned desktop will sport the latest Intel Xeon processors, dual workstation-class GPUs, PCIe-based flash storage, and ultra-fast ECC memory.The launch less than a week before Christmas means Apple will meet its self-imposed December deadline, announced by the company in October, when it also revealed pricing for the professional-grade machine.The new Mac Pro is 9.9 inches tall and one-eighth the volume of its predecessor, featuring Xeon E5 processors of up to 12 cores, as well as AMD FirePro graphics that can deliver up to eight times the graphics performance of the previous Mac Pro. It also sports next-generation flash with a PCIe controller with up to 1.2GB/s reads, 1.0GB/s writes, and up to 1-terabyte capacity.Thunderbolt connectivity with six integrated ports offers 20Gb/s throughput, and the new Mac Pro can drive up to three 4K displays with HDMI 1.4 support. In all, Apple says the Mac Pro can support up to 36 high-performance peripherals, including the latest 4K displays, all at once.With ECC DDR3 RAM, the system can deliver up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth, which Apple says will allow seamlessly editing full-resolution 4K video while simultaneously rendering effects in the background.The Mac Pro is also a landmark achievement for Apple, as it will be the company's first machine entirely assembled in the U.S. Apple and its supply chain partners have been under fire for years for working conditions in mainland China and the Far East.AppleInsider took a first look at the Mac Pro when Apple showed off the revamped hardware in October . Its innovative industrial design rethinks the entire concept of desktop computing by looking at the current state of computing with a fresh perspective.Apple said the all-new Mac Pro will be available to order on Thursday through its online store, Apple's retail stores, and select authorized Apple resellers. No word was given on when shipments may arrive.The Mac Pro is available with a 3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of VRAM each, 12GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starting at $2,999.When configured with a 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of VRAM each, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage, the desktop starts at $3,999.Configure-to-order options are also available, including faster 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of VRAM, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage. |
Cardiff Blues are hopeful of staging the Amlin Challenge Cup final as part of a bid that will see the Millennium Stadium host the Heineken Cup in 2014.
European Rugby Cup and the Welsh Rugby Union have called a press conference for Wednesday which is expected to confirm a successful Welsh bid.
That could see the Arms Park, host the Amlin.
"We're part of that bid in terms of the Arms Park hosting the Amlin final," said Blues chief Richard Holland.
"That will be a huge tick in the box if we're able to be successful in that bid, but we'll watch this space, leave the decision to ERC and the guys next door at the Union who are working hard on behalf of Welsh rugby."
I see this as the future of rugby surfaces and I would expect other clubs and potentially national grounds to follow suit Richard Holland Cardiff Blues chief executive
The WRU in June after the French Rugby Federation withdrew from staging the matches in Paris.
The French decision to withdraw from staging both finals in 2014 was the result of uncertainty over the availability of the Stade de France.
That opened the door to bids from Wales and England, with Cardiff now seemingly set to host the Heineken Cup final for a seventh time.
The last time the Millennium Stadium hosted the Heineken Cup final, in 2011, it was the Cardiff City Stadium that housed the second tier Amlin final.
The Blues ground-shared with Cardiff City Football Club at the Cardiff City Stadium for three season, before for the 2012-13 season.
The move back to the 12,500-capacity Arms Park (which can be raised to almost 15,000 by installing temporary seating) has proved a success with crowds rising last season, but there were continuing concerns over the boggy state of the pitch.
That has been addressed by installing a state-of-the-art artificial playing surface at an estimated cost of £400,000 and hosting the Amlin would put the pitch in the shop window, as well as generating potential profits of £50,000-£100,000.
"It's IRB [International Rugby Board] approved and Saracens have led the way and we're the second to follow suit," Blues chief executive Holland said.
"If we are successful in our bid to host the Amlin that will be big kudos for the pitch, but also an endorsement from the European governing body would be a huge thing for us here at Cardiff Arms Park.
"It's 2013 and I see this as the future of rugby surfaces and I would expect other clubs and potentially national grounds to follow suit.
"Myself and the board have taken the decision to install this product and we're excited about the future here."
The Blues took part in the first professional rugby match to be played on Saracens' artificial pitch at Allianz Park in January 2013, and the region's management were impressed with the surface.
The new pitch will allow the Blues' age-group teams, Cardiff RFC and the Cardiff University rugby side to train regularly at the Arms Park, something that was impossible in the past as the natural grass surface had to be used sparingly.
Laying of the new surface is a week ahead of schedule and the Blues expect to christen the pitch in a pre-season friendly against Sale Sharks on Friday, 23 August. |
Published in the spring of 1962, Michael Harrington’s The Other America was a sweeping description of the country’s poor, combined with an appeal to the federal government and “better-off” to save them. It became one of the best-selling books ever authored by an American socialist, inspired the creation of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society regime, and has been routinely hailed as one of the most influential books of the 20th century. This year partisans of the welfare state are commemorating the golden anniversary of The Other America with a series of celebrations and renewed calls for government programs to save the poor once more.
Several of the left’s heavy hitters have penned op-ed pieces singing the book’s praises. Peter Dreier, writing in The Huffington Post, praised The Other America for causing Americans to “be ashamed to live in a rich society with so many poor people.” In The New York Times, Harrington’s biographer, Maurice Isserman, praised the book’s “moral clarity” and lamented that since Harrington’s death in 1989 “no one has assumed the role of socialist tribune” that “Harrington so eloquently filled.” In March there was a two-day conference at Harrington’s alma mater, Holy Cross, to honor his “seminal analysis of poverty” and present an array of new proposals for government policies on behalf of “the ‘Other America’ of today.”
What none of these celebrants has noted is The Other America’s profound and even jarring conservatism. The book is stridently paternalistic, hostile to what the left calls “multiculturalism” (and to African-American culture particularly), and it spawned an ideology that enabled the agents of the country’s elite to control the most intimate aspects of the lives of the poor.
Raised in an Irish-American family in St. Louis and educated in Catholic schools from kindergarten through college, Michael Harrington was shaped by what was then the institutional soul of conservatism. According to Isserman’s The Other American: The Untold Life of Michael Harrington (2000), “Apart from family, the presence that loomed largest” in the young Harrington’s life “was that of the Catholic Church.” Although he later left the Church and differed with its doctrines, Harrington, “as he would be the first to acknowledge, never shed their influence.” Paramount among these teachings was the injunction to seek out, raise up, and redeem the poor—an exhortation that merged seamlessly with the socialism he embraced as a young adult. As a pastor is to his flock, Harrington conceived of himself a father to the underclass.
Though rarely acknowledged, the paternalism of The Other America is naked and unabashed. Its central argument is that the poor are powerless to affect their own lives. They “generally are those who cannot help themselves” because they are “so submerged in their poverty that one cannot begin to talk about free choice.” Since the poor “are unable to speak for themselves” and “cannot help themselves,” their fate “hangs upon the decision of the better-off.” Unable to speak or even think for themselves, the poor need someone like the author himself, “a novelist as well as a sociologist.…They need an American Dickens to record the smell and texture and quality of their lives.”
Though it contains not a single word spoken by a poor person—perhaps a deliberate omission to demonstrate its argument—The Other America is nonetheless filled with descriptions of the innermost workings of the minds of the poor. They are “maimed in body and spirit,” “pessimistic and defeated,” and “victimized by mental suffering.” Unlike ghettos that had once been filled with striving immigrants, the other America “is populated by the failures,” “the less imaginative,” and “the defeated.” Poverty, in Harrington’s mind, defines the entire person. “Everything about [the poor], from the condition of their teeth to the way in which they love,” he wrote, “is suffused and permeated by the fact of their poverty.” Because the poor have “markedly different attitudes toward sex,” most of their children “never know stability and ‘normal’ affection.” There is “a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a world view of the poor.” They are “hopeless and passive, yet prone to bursts of violence; they are lonely and isolated, often rigid and hostile.” They all possess “a twisted spirit.” And yet they all managed to reveal themselves fully to the apparently omniscient sociologist.
Harrington, like most on the left, thought of himself as a countercultural bohemian, but his book betrays an elitist antagonism toward nonbourgeois behavior. In language no different from that used by Victorian moralists, Harrington asserts that the poor “do not postpone satisfactions.…When pleasure is available, they tend to take it immediately.” Related to their addiction to immediate gratification “is a tendency on the part of the poor to ‘act out,’ to be less inhibited, and sometimes violent.” Never having trained as a psychologist or placed any of his subjects on an analyst’s couch, Harrington nonetheless blithely concludes that every poor person in America “suffers from a psychological depression.”
Anyone who invokes The Other America in the course of justifying the welfare state should be forced to answer for its chapter on African Americans. In it, Harrington narrates his tours of Harlem from the detached and superior perspective of a zoologist. The neighborhood is marked by its “poverty and backwardness.” The clothing, food, and music, “like so many of the simple things in Harlem, have the smell of poverty about them.” Harrington takes special note of the food in Harlem, dismissing what would soon become celebrated as “soul food” as only “the things the white man did not want.”
It is also astonishing that no leftist, to my knowledge, has taken Harrington to task for his claim that the psychology of many blacks “at bottom is made of the same stuff as Amos ’n’ Andy: the laughing, childlike, pleasure-loving Negro who must be patronized and taken care of like a child.” Harrington could say this, of course, because he knew black people better than they knew themselves. In Harlem, he wrote, “You will find faces that are often happy but always, even at the moment of bursting joy, haunted.” Their minds contain nothing more than “the fear, the lack of self-confidence, the haunting.” To Harrington, there is no African-American culture apart from a “culture of poverty” and behaviors mimicked from whites. Unlike immigrants in other New York City neighborhoods, “There are no traditions of the ‘old country’ that bind Harlem as a Ghetto.…The people participate in the consumption cult of the white world.…They do not huddle together around a language and a common memory from overseas, saving, planning, waiting for the breakthrough, isolated from the lures of easy life in the magazines and on television.” One may wonder just how many residents of Harlem at the time—who included Malcolm X, congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, actor Billy Dee Williams, jazz greats Nina Simone and Sonny Rollins, the young Thomas Sowell, Lew Alcindor, and hip-hop pioneers Kurtis Blow, Keith Sweat, and DJ Red Alert—thought of their own lives as so simple, shallow, and pitiful.
Harrington saw nothing of value in black culture, but he was not a racist—he saw nothing of value in anything produced by poor people of any color. What he found in Appalachian towns populated by white hillbillies, for example, was “a sort of loose, defeated gaiety about the place, the casualness of a people who expected little.…In some ways, they resembled the stereotype of the happy-go-lucky Negro, and the truth in the description is about the same for both.” And as with blacks, Harrington could see not only into their souls but also into their futures: “It was relatively easy to guess which boys might end in a penitentiary, which girls would become pregnant before they were out of grade school.”
His argument that the poor suffer from a comprehensive degradation leads Harrington to prescribe a totalizing project: the elimination of “the cultures of the poor,” the “abolition of the neighborhoods” in which they live, and “the establishment of new communities” for them. Of course, according to Harrington, there is “only one institution in the society capable” of carrying out such a project: “That is the Federal Government.”
Though cultural conservatives have protested both the content and the legacy of The Other America, the book inspired a mission to remake the poor in their image. One of the few conservatives to recognize the continuity between the welfare state and his own ideology was Edward C. Banfield, a Harvard political scientist and future adviser to President Ronald Reagan, who in 1970 agreed with Harrington that “the lower-class individual lives from moment to moment.…His bodily needs (especially for sex) and his taste for ‘action’ take precedence over everything else.…Impulse governs his behavior.… He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless.…[He] has a feeble, attenuated sense of self.” Banfield’s prescription, like Harrington’s, was for state paternalism. The poor should be cared for in “semi-institutions,” allowed “to have no more than two or three children,” and be subject to “surveillance and supervision from a semi-social-worker-semi-policeman.”
In fact, Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” deployed legions of social workers, armed not only with the power to extort proper behavior from the poor with welfare payments but also with the prevailing idea that their subjects should be treated as children, with restrictions imposed on their sex lives, leisure time, diet, spending habits, clothing, and grooming styles. In 1996 the welfare regime tightened its grip with the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), signed into law by another Democrat, Bill Clinton. This “welfare reform,” as it was known, enforced the twin pillars of bourgeois culture: sexual repression and the Protestant work ethic. The act instituted “workfare,” making welfare payments available only to those who have jobs or participate in government make-work such as picking up leaves in public parks or removing trash from subway stations. Many who supported the bill argued not only that the poor needed to be weaned from their dependency on the state but also that they needed to learn what the Puritans brought with them to New England: the idea that work in itself, no matter how ill-paying or demeaning, is virtuous. The bill also appropriated $250 million for “mentoring, counseling, and adult supervision to promote abstinence from sexual activity.” Welfare recipients were to be taught “the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity,” that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity,” and that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”
Welfare recipients are now instructed in how to improve their attitudes and demeanor so as to be more employable. In Michigan, Florida, Georgia, and Utah, they are subject to drug testing as a condition of their benefits. Bills are now before 23 state legislatures that would require testing for people who apply not just for welfare but also in some cases for food stamps, public housing, job training, and even home heating assistance.
Although few of its left-wing supporters or right-wing detractors know it, our welfare state represents the unity of their cultural values. It is the dream of Republicans, justified by the ideas of a socialist and enacted by armies of progressive do-gooders, of eliminating not just “the other America” but any other America.
Thaddeus Russell is the author of A Renegade History of the United States (Free Press). |
COMMONLY-PRESCRIBED proton pump inhibitors (PPI) – drugs to treat ulcers and acid reflux – have been linked to an increased risk of bone fractures among certain long-term patients, according to the Irish Medicines Board.
In its latest drug safety newsletter, the IMB advises healthcare workers:
Long term use of PPIs (> 1 year), especially at high doses is associated with a modest increase in the risk of fractures predominantly in the elderly and those with other recognised risk factors.
The Pharmacovigilance Working Party of the European Medicines Agency investigated the link between the drugs and the increased risk of fracture after several studies suggested a slight risk increase.
The IMB notes that the studies differed in terms of the risk level and the duration of drug treatment involved.
The studies did not examine PPIs which could be obtained over-the-counter without prescription as these medicines are only authorised for short-term use and “the evidence was not considered sufficiently robust to indicate an increase in risk for PPI-containing medicinal products available without prescription,” the newsletter said. |
Jealous wife trapped by her lipstick after faking hate campaign and framing love rival
A woman was caught out by DNA on her lipstick after staging a hate campaign against herself and trying to frame her husband’s lover.
Lyn Kitching went to extraordinary lengths to gain revenge on her former friend Andrea Pearce, who had told her she was having an affair with her husband Jason, 39.
Kitching, 27, threw bleach in her own face, stabbed herself with a screwdriver, sent herself death threats and started a fire in her house during a nine-month campaign against her love rival.
Extraordinary methods: Kitching threw bleach in her own face and stabbed herself with a screwdriver during the campaign. She was given a nine-month suspended prison sentence
The incidents were blamed on Mrs Pearce, a married mother, and reported to the police.
As a result Mrs Pearce was arrested four times and spent 20 hours in custody over incidents she had nothing to do with.
Eventually police discovered the truth by forensic detective work. In February, Kitching used lipstick to write ‘Ha ha die fast’ on her window and then sent a threatening letter to herself, hoping to put Mrs Pearce in the frame again.
But forensic tests on the lipstick proved it belonged to Kitching and the gum on the envelope of the letter also had her DNA on it.
Kitching admitted responsibility after being confronted with the scientific evidence.
She pleaded guilty to attempting to pervert the course of justice at Hull Crown Court last week and was given a suspended nine-month prison sentence, and an 18-month supervision order.
The Recorder of Hull, Judge Michael Mettyear, said: ‘This was absolutely outrageous conduct. I have never come across conduct like it.
‘You wasted substantial police time. She had told you she was having an affair with your husband and that caused you to flip and you fell into this almost addiction of making up stories against her.’
Kitching, of Hull, made eight false allegations to police between May last year and February. She began by writing on her own window: ‘I will get you. I will kill you both.’
She claimed eight days later someone had knocked on her door and thrown bleach in her face. She was treated in hospital for burns to her cheek. Kitching suggested Mrs Pearce was behind it. In June last year she dialled 999 over a faked arson attack, claiming her smoke alarm had gone off and she had found burning newspapers in her home.
In August Kitching accused Mrs Pearce of throwing bleach in her eyes as she put rubbish in her wheelie bin.
Kitching then stabbed herself in the stomach with a screwdriver – and needed medical treatment for a 3in wound – and told police Mrs Pearce was responsible.
Mrs Pearce denied any wrongdoing and she and her family were forced to keep diaries to help prove her innocence.
Her victim impact statement said: ‘These allegations affected me greatly and disrupted my family life. It affected my children and caused arguments with my husband. It caused me to question my sanity. I want to put this nightmare behind me.’ |
In a recent New York Times Magazine profile, Laura Hillenbrand, the best-selling author of “Seabiscuit” and “Unbroken,” revealed that she actually buys old newspapers to do her research. This allows her to see some of the other stories that were occurring at the same time. Hillenbrand hits on one of the surprising joys of what can be dreary research work — seeing historical events that crop up in real time in old newspapers and finding out surprising details that were left out of later history.
From my own research projects on recall elections, I’ve gotten to check out 1903 papers and run into coverage of the first World Series game. In 1911, I saw the first big cover story on Sun Yat-Sen’s takeover in China. In 1981, there’s the first mention of AIDS. But my most surprising find happened was when trying to track down the story of Wisconsin’s adoption of the recall in 1926.
Right before that election day, on October 31, 1926, Ehrich Weisz (or Weiss — it was changed), better known as Harry Houdini, died. His hometown papers — he was born in Hungary, but grew up in Appleton — were filled with encomiums and discussions of the great magician’s legacy. One particular article, found on Google News’ compilation of old newspapers, focused on Houdini’s relationship with the Jewish community and his Jewish practices.
This may seem surprising. While his father was a rabbi and he was buried in a Jewish cemetery, Houdini didn’t seem to take too much of public interest in Judaism. He married Bess Rahner, a Catholic, and spent his later years serving as the great debunker of spiritual frauds. His friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle collapsed under the Sherlock Holmes’ creator’s unwillingness to accept that the mediums and spirit-guides were simply charlatans. His break with Doyle represented perhaps his best-known use of his Judaism. Houdini scoffed at Doyle’s wife’s attempt to contact Houdini’s mother. He noted that Mrs. Weisz would not have been drawing a cross, nor would she have been speaking English.
While his biographies don’t focus on his religion, one feature story in the Milwaukee Sentinel on November 1, 1926 does. In the article: “Friends Here Reveal Houdini Highlights,” members of Milwaukee’s Jewish community claim that Houdini was apparently very serious about Jewish tradition.
They note that Houdini came back regularly to weep at his old childhood home and at the graves of his parents. This statement is a little odd, as his parents were actually buried in NY. There are a number of other seemingly factual discrepancies — his real childhood home seemed to be Appleton, not Milwaukee, and on a different street than is named in the article, and he is listed as being born in Appleton (though that may have been something he claimed). What is interesting is how these friends and former neighbors present a different side of what one Jewish community newspaper editor calls the “nervous, eccentric, melancholy” master of magic.
The article claims that: “They know him as a man devoutly religious, who, wherever his performance brought him, carried his phylacteries and mezuzahs, Jewish creedal symbols, with him…The mezuzahs, strips of parchment with scriptural passages encased in tin, considered effective in warding off evil, he is said to have nailed to the door of the hotel room wherever he lodged for the night, on the true orthodox Jewish fashion. And the phylacteries, little leathern boxes with scriptural parchment recognized as charms, he bound to his forehead and left arm each morning during his prayers, his friends declare.”
It also goes on to note that Houdini was a big supporter of Zionism and a contributor to Jewish charities.
I haven’t done a full on examination of the extended Harry Houdini oeuvre, but this seems to be the only mention of Houdini’s Tefillin. And that’s the beauty of research — you can never tell where it takes you.
Joshua Spivak is a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College in N.Y., and blogs at http://recallelections.blogspot.com/
This story "The True Story of Harry Houdini's Tefillin" was written by Joshua Spivak. |
Story of Sinuhe. A raised-relief depiction of Amenemhat I accompanied by deities; the death of Amenemhat I is reported by his son Senusret I in the
The Story of Sinuhe (also known as Sanehat)[1] is considered one of the finest works of ancient Egyptian literature. It is a narrative set in the aftermath of the death of Pharaoh Amenemhat I, founder of the 12th dynasty of Egypt, in the early 20th century BC. It was composed around 1875 BC, although the earliest extant manuscript is from the reign of Amenemhat III, c. 1800 BC.[2] There is an ongoing debate among Egyptologists as to whether or not the tale is based on actual events involving an individual named Sinuhe (Egyptian: z3-nht "son of the sycamore"),[3] with the consensus being that it is most likely a work of fiction.[4][5] Due to the universal nature of the themes explored in Sinuhe, including divine providence and mercy, its anonymous author has been described as the "Egyptian Shakespeare" whose ideas have parallels in biblical texts. Sinuhe is considered to be a work written in verse and it may also have been performed.[6] The great popularity of the work is witnessed by the numerous surviving fragments.[7]
Sources [ edit ]
There are a number of sources telling the Story of Sinuhe. A limestone ostracon (a pottery or stone fragment) in the Egyptian Museum is over a yard long, and is possibly the largest ostracon in existence. It tells the beginning of the Story of Sinuhe, and is inscribed in Hieratic. The story dates from the XII dynasty, and the fragment was found in the tomb of Sennutem.[8]
Story of Sinuhe [ edit ]
Sinuhe is an official who accompanies prince Senwosret I to Libya. He overhears a conversation connected with the death of King Amenemhet I and as a result flees to Upper Retjenu (Canaan), leaving Egypt behind. He becomes the son-in-law of Chief Ammunenshi and in time his sons grow to become chiefs in their own right. Sinuhe fights rebellious tribes on behalf of Ammunenshi. As an old man, in the aftermath of defeating a powerful opponent in single combat, he prays for a return to his homeland:[6] "May god pity me...may he hearken to the prayer of one far away!...may the King have mercy on me...may I be conducted to the city of eternity!"[7] He then receives an invitation from King Senwosret I of Egypt to return, which he accepts in highly moving terms. Living out the rest of his life in royal favour, he is finally laid to rest in the necropolis in a beautiful tomb.[6]
Interpretations [ edit ]
The Story of Sinuhe has spawned a great deal of literature which explores the themes contained in the work from many perspectives. The scope and variety of this material has been likened to the analysis of Hamlet and other notable works of literature.[6] Scholars debate the reason why Sinuhe flees Egypt, with the majority ascribing panic over a perceived threat.[6] The tale is full of symbolic allusions. Sinuhe's name (="Son of the Sycamore") is seen as providing an important link in understanding the story. The sycamore is an ancient Egyptian Tree of Life,[9] associated with Hathor (the Goddess of fertility and rebirth and patroness of foreign countries), who features throughout the work.[6]
Sinuhe comes under the protective orbit of divine powers, in the form of the King, from whom he first tries to run away, and that of the Queen, a manifestation of Hathor. On fleeing Egypt, Sinuhe crosses a waterway associated with the Goddess Maat, the ancient Egyptian principle of truth, order and justice, in the vicinity of a sycamore tree.[6]
The ancient Egyptians believed in free will, implicit in the code of Maat, but this still allowed divine grace to work in and through the individual, and an overarching divine providence is seen in Sinuhe's flight and return to his homeland. Unable to escape the orbit of the gods' power and mercy, Sinuhe exclaims: "Whether I am in the Residence, or whether I am in this place, it is you who cover this horizon".[6]
Parallels have been made between the biblical narrative of Joseph and the Story of Sinuhe. In what is seen as divine providence, Sinuhe the Egyptian flees to Syro-Canaan and becomes a member of the ruling elite, acquires a wife and family, before being reunited with his Egyptian family. In what is seen as divine providence, the Syro-Canaanite Joseph is taken to Egypt where he becomes part of the ruling elite, acquires a wife and family, before being reunited with his Syro-Canaanite family.[6] Parallels have also been drawn from other biblical texts: the Hebrew prophet Jonah's frustrated flight from the orbit of God's power is likened to Sinuhe's similar flight from the King.[10] The battle between David and Goliath is compared to his fight with a mighty challenger, whom he slays with a single blow, and the parable of the Prodigal Son is likened to his return home.[11]
Influences on modern culture [ edit ]
Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer, published in 1941 a story entitled Awdat Sinuhi translated by Raymond Stock in 2003 as The Return of Sinuhe in the collection of Mahfouz's short stories entitled Voices from the Other World. The story is based directly on the Story of Sinuhe, although adding details of a lovers' triangle romance that does not appear in the original.
The story also formed part of the inspiration for the 1945 novel by Mika Waltari, and the 1954 Hollywood film epic, both titled The Egyptian, which although set during the reign of 18th dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten, features a lead character named Sinuhe (played by Edmund Purdom) who flees Egypt in disgrace, to return after achieving material success and personal redemption in foreign lands.
Elizabeth Peters made reference to the tale in her novel The Falcon at the Portal.
Cuban songwriter and singer Silvio Rodriguez composed a song title "Sinuhe" (2003) included in his album A Date with the Angels (Cita con los Angeles original Spanish). The lyrics used the figure of Sinuhe as a metaphor of the past intellectual greatness of the Middle East and portraits a contrast with the contemporary conflicts and wars in the region.
References [ edit ]
Literature [ edit ]
Barta, M. 2003 Sinuhe, the Bible and the Patriarchs, Czech Institute of Egyptology/David Brown Book Company.
Greig, G. S. 1990. "The sDm=f and sDm=n=f in the Story of Sinuhe and the Theory of the Nominal (Emphatic) Verbs", in: Israelit-Groll, I. (ed.), Studies in Egyptology. Presented to Miriam Lichtheim, Vol. I. Jerusalem: Magnes Press/Hebrew U., 264–348.
Kitchen, K. A. 1996. “Sinuhe: Scholarly Method versus Trendy Fashion” BACE 7, 55–63.
Mahfouz, Naguib. "The Return of Sinuhe" in Voices from the Other World (translated by Robert Stock), Random House, 2003
(translated by Robert Stock), Random House, 2003 Meltzer, E. S. 2004. "Sinuhe, Jonah and Joseph: Ancient ‘Far Travellers' and the Power of God", in: Ellens, J. H. et al. (eds.), God's Word for Our World, vol. II. Theological and Cultural Studies in Honor of Simon John De Vries (London-New York: Clark/Continuum), 77–81.
Morschauser, S. 2000. "What Made Sinuhe Run: Sinuhe's Reasoned Flight" JARCE 37, 187–98
Parkinson, R. B. 1997. The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940–1640 BC (Oxford World Classics). Oxford: Oxford U. Press.
(Oxford World Classics). Oxford: Oxford U. Press. Quirke, Stephen. 2004. Egyptian Literature 1800BC: Questions and Readings , London, 58–70 ISBN 0-9547218-6-1 (translation and transcription)
, London, 58–70 ISBN 0-9547218-6-1 (translation and transcription) Tobin, V. A. 1995. "The Secret of Sinuhe" JARCE 32, 161–78. |
When it comes to bubble status, like the Renew/Cancel Index we’re focusing on the likelihood that a show will be renewed **for next season** (2012-13). Certain shows are toss-ups where based on the ratings, the renewal decisions could go either way and not be surprising.
Here, “canceled” is used interchangeably with “won’t be renewed for next season” and is not meant to imply a show will be yanked off the schedule in the current season though obviously the two outcomes are not mutually exclusive. The semantics police and lawyers should feel free to break out the handcuffs and plead their cases in the comments. Besides, no matter what anyone at ABC says, reasonable people know with certainty that Pan Am isn’t coming back next season.
This Isn’t The Renew/Cancel Index
Though the basic methodology is the same (intra-network relative ranking of shows by adults 18-49 ),unlike the Renew/Cancel Index which predicts what would happen if the season ended now, Bubble Watch prognosticates about what will happen by May. The two are still usually closely aligned, and almost certainly very closely aligned towards the end of the season.
Not to burst the bubble of any fans who in the wake of Terra Nova’s cancellation are hopeful that means it’s more likely that Alcatraz and The Finder will be renewed, but, it doesn’t mean it’s more likely those shows will be renewed. It’s no less likely either though! Though it’s likely The Finder will be canceled, depending on how it does on Fridays I wouldn’t be shocked if it was renewed. Barring a dramatic ratings uptick in its final three episodes I would be very surprised if Alcatraz survives so I’ve downgraded it to certain cancellation.
Breaking In debuts on the bubble but to me that’s a formality due to only having aired one episode and being slightly singed last season (I had it as likely to be cancelled, and it kinda was before being uncancelled). I don’t fault Fox for noting that this year’s season premiere was up versus last year’s finale since there was really no good apples-to-apples comparison to make since last season’s premiere was behind American Idol. But the comparison to last year’s finale isn’t apples-to-apples either since it ran behind Raising Hope while Tuesday’s season premiere had the higher-rated New Girl as its lead-in.
For those who’ve continually been asking when the likes of 30 Rock and Law & Order: SVU will be downgraded my reply is not yet, and perhaps never. But somewhat like the CW NBC has a lot of low-rated shows packed tightly together that could make things tricky to predict if there’s no clearer separation between shows in the next couple of months.
For now it’s still a bit too soon to demote Awake to likely cancellation. The trend is certainly not Awake’s friend but it’s still not clear where (and when) it will stabilize.
Note: only scripted shows that have aired at least one episode this season are in the table below.
Show Network Status Charlie’s Angels ABC Canceled Man Up ABC Canceled Pan Am ABC Canceled Work It ABC Canceled How To Be a Gentleman CBS Canceled Allen Gregory Fox Canceled Terra Nova Fox Canceled The Firm NBC Canceled Free Agents NBC Canceled Prime Suspect NBC Canceled The Playboy Club NBC Canceled Body of Proof ABC Certain Cancellation A Gifted Man CBS Certain Cancellation Alcatraz Fox Certain Cancellation Harry’s Law NBC Certain Cancellation The River ABC Likely Cancellation Unforgettable CBS Likely Cancellation Hart of Dixie CW Likely Cancellation Ringer CW Likely Cancellation Fringe Fox Likely Cancellation I Hate My Teenage Daughter Fox Likely Cancellation The Finder Fox Likely Cancellation Are You There, Chelsea? NBC Likely Cancellation Cougar Town ABC On The Bubble GCB ABC On The Bubble Private Practice ABC On The Bubble CSI: NY CBS On The Bubble The Good Wife CBS On The Bubble Rob CBS On The Bubble Rules of Engagement CBS On The Bubble Gossip Girl CW On The Bubble Nikita CW On The Bubble Supernatural CW On The Bubble The Secret Circle CW On The Bubble Breaking In Fox On The Bubble Napoleon Dynamite Fox On The Bubble Touch Fox On The Bubble Awake NBC On The Bubble Community NBC On The Bubble Whitney NBC On The Bubble Castle ABC Likely Renewal Happy Endings ABC Likely Renewal Last Man Standing ABC Likely Renewal Revenge ABC Likely Renewal Suburgatory ABC Likely Renewal Blue Bloods CBS Likely Renewal CSI CBS Likely Renewal CSI: Miami CBS Likely Renewal The Mentalist CBS Likely Renewal 90210 CW Likely Renewal Bones Fox Likely Renewal Raising Hope Fox Likely Renewal 30 Rock NBC Likely Renewal Parenthood NBC Likely Renewal Parks & Recreation NBC Likely Renewal Smash NBC Likely Renewal Up All Night NBC Likely Renewal Grey’s Anatomy ABC Certain Renewal Modern Family ABC Certain Renewal Once Upon a Time ABC Certain Renewal The Middle ABC Certain Renewal 2 Broke Girls CBS Certain Renewal Criminal Minds CBS Certain Renewal Hawaii Five-0 CBS Certain Renewal Mike & Molly CBS Certain Renewal NCIS CBS Certain Renewal NCIS: Los Angeles CBS Certain Renewal Person of Interest CBS Certain Renewal Two and a Half Men CBS Certain Renewal Vampire Diaries CW Certain Renewal Glee Fox Certain Renewal New Girl Fox Certain Renewal Grimm NBC Certain Renewal Law & Order: SVU NBC Certain Renewal The Office NBC Certain Renewal How I Met Your Mother CBS Renewed The Big Bang Theory CBS Renewed American Dad Fox Renewed Family Guy Fox Renewed The Cleveland Show Fox Renewed The Simpsons Fox Renewed Desperate Housewives ABC Final Season One Tree Hill CW Final Season House Fox Final Season Chuck NBC Final Season |
In a recent press conference, Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity reportedly claimed that homosexuality is caused by pornography stating, "Pornography leads to homosexuality. I'm happy that, finally, a bill to eliminate pornography in Uganda will be ready to punish the promoters of this vice."
While Ugandan evangelical leaders claim homosexuality in their country is a form of Western colonialism, observers such as Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia, say that homophobia is a Western export to Africa and note that Africans promoting antigay hatred in Uganda and Sub-Saharan Africa have ties to American evangelists such as Rick Warren. As Talk To Action reported in December 2009,
a charismatic network overseen by Warren's doctoral dissertation advisor, C. Peter Wagner, has played a major role in politically organizing and inspiring the Ugandan legislators who have spearheaded the anti-gay bill.
Both in their extreme anti-homosexual animus and sexual repressiveness, the proposed Ugandan legislation, both against gays and against allegedly immoral forms of cultural expression and media, are more severe than analogous laws passed by Adolf Hitler's Third Reich prior to the onset of World War Two. And, some very influential American churches have allied themselves with African leaders who have proposed this sort of legislation.
But you might already suspect that if you had read my December 2006 Talk To Action story, Schismatic VA Episcopalians OK With Anti-Gay Laws Worse Than Pre-WW2 Nazi's ?
To round out the profile, Uganda's government has approved the mass distribution of a virulently anti-Jewish comic book, to Uganda's school children |
ROME (Reuters) - Pope Francis called on Thursday for concerted action against environmental degradation and climate change, renewing a fierce attack on consumerism and financial greed which, he said, were threatening the planet.
Pope Francis arrives to leads the weekly audience at the Vatican August 31, 2016. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini
A year after publishing the first papal document dedicated to the environment, the pope urged Christians to make the defense of nature a core part of their faith, adding it to the seven “works of mercy” they are meant to perform.
“God gave us a bountiful garden, but we have turned it into a polluted wasteland of debris, desolation and filth,” Francis said in a document released to coincide with the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.
Born in Argentina, Francis is the first pope from a developing nation and has placed environmental causes at the heart of his papacy, denouncing what he sees as a throwaway consumer culture and rampant, market-driven economies.
“Economics and politics, society and culture cannot be dominated by thinking only of the short term and immediate financial or electoral gains,” Francis said, suggesting more ambitious action might be needed to curb climate change.
World leaders agreed in Paris last December to commit to limiting greenhouse-gas emissions in an effort to stabilize rising temperatures, while the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in July the earth was warming faster than expected and on track for its hottest year ever.
Francis welcomed the Paris accord, but urged voters everywhere to make sure their governments did not backtrack.
“It is up to citizens to insist that this happen, and indeed to advocate for even more ambitious goals,” he said.
He asked the world’s one billion Roman Catholic to embrace a green agenda, saying defense of the environment should be added to the works of mercy, which provide believers with guiding principles and duties that they are meant to follow.
These include taking care of the hungry and sick, and teaching the ignorant. Six were spelled out in the New Testament; the seventh — burying the dead — was added in the Middle Ages.
“May the works of mercy also include care for our common home,” Francis said, adding that simple, daily gestures which broke with “the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness” would make a difference.
Even recycling rubbish, switching off lights and using a car pool or public transport would help, he said. “We must not think that these efforts are too small to improve our world.”
Bishop Brian Farrell, head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said the pope’s words did not represent new Church rules, but thought his suggestions would be assimilated by congregations around the world.
“It is obviously a rare thing to add to the acts of mercy, but things change. This shows the movement of the church through time. We need new calls for responsibility,” he told Reuters. |
While it seems that the American public holds a dim view of most of its elected officials these days, a recent Fox News poll highlighted one lawmaker who has seemingly won over the majority of voters: Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The survey, published Wednesday, found that 61 percent of respondents said they view the Independent senator from Vermont, an avowed Democratic socialist, favorably.
At the same time, only 32 percent of respondents said they approve of the the job that Democrats are doing in Congress (60 percent disapprove), and even less (29 percent) agree with the work of the GOP.
Notably, the polling comes as Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats and lost in a competitive presidential primary bid to Hillary Clinton, has faced antipathy from the party establishment.
Pointing to the Fox News poll as well as a Huffington Post chart that tracks Sanders' favorability over time, the Guardian's Trevor Timm wrote Friday: "One would think with numbers like that, Democratic politicians would be falling all over themselves to be associated with Sanders, especially considering the party as a whole is more unpopular than the Republicans and even Donald Trump right now."
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"Yet," Timm continued, "instead of embracing his message, the establishment wing of the party continues to resist him at almost every turn, and they seem insistent that they don't have to change their ways to gain back the support of huge swaths of the country."
But, as the conservative news survey seems to suggest, Sanders' message of economic justice may be one of the few points of popular resonance in the U.S. Case in point, earlier this week the progressive senator traveled to West Virginia to connect with supporters of President Donald Trump over the growing interest in a single-payer healthcare system.
Another interesting statistic from the Fox News poll: Planned Parenthood, the embattled women's healthcare provider widely scorned by Republican lawmakers, also boasts strong favorability among U.S. voters. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they are either 'strongly' or 'somewhat' in favor of Planned Parenthood, compared to only 32 percent who view the organization unfavorably.
Sanders' rating is the highest yet for the poll, which has also taken samples in September 2015, as well as in March, June, and August 2016. Planned Parenthood's popularity has also jumped 7 percent since August 2015.
Notably, Sanders is the only individual among those on the survey who broke 50 percent favorability. Some of the others include: Vice President Mike Pence (47 percent); President Donald Trump (44 percent); Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), with 39 percent; House Speaker Paul Ryan (37 percent); House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (33 percent); Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (26 percent); and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (20 percent). |
Yakuza 5 Coming In December With Five Playable Characters
By Spencer . May 22, 2012 . 8:22pm
Yakuza 4 had four characters. Yakuza 5 ups the ante with five characters and five locales to travel to. Famitsu reports Kazuma Kiyru is playable along with Yakuza 4 leads Shun Akiyama and Taiga Saejima. Haruka Sawamura who Kazuma protects like his daughter is a playable character in Yakuza 5.
Tatsuo Shinada is a new character. He used to be baseball player, but was banned from the game for gambling. Debt collectors are chasing Shinada down who may not be guilty. Famitsu says Shinada is a character players can emphasize with.
The story picks up after Yakuza 4 (some sources say two years after, but this is unconfirmed). Haruka left Okinawa and went to Osaka hoping to become an idol. She has been practicing singing and dancing, but her agency has sinister plans for her. Taiga is in prison serving a three year sentence. Shun is traveling to Osaka and Kazuma is working as a cab driver in Fukuoka. Players will be able to visit five different areas in Yakuza 5 – Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka, and Hokkaido.
Famitsu also says the game will have the largest amount of content than any game in the Yakuza series. The development team spent twice the time working on Yakuza 5 and made many improvements to the game’s controls (which were not revealed) and have seamless transitions between battle and adventure scenes.
Yakuza 5 is slated for release on PlayStation 3 in December. |
Recess
Fish, reptiles, and even some invertebrates appear to play. But when is it play, and not something else? And why do animals do it?
During a visit to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, biopsychologist Gordon Burghardt decided to peek in on a Nile soft-shelled turtle its keepers affectionately called “Pigface.” Pigface had been a zoo resident for more than 50 years, and Burghardt had seen him before, but this time, he noticed something a bit curious—Pigface was playing basketball.
“It was by itself,” recalls Burghardt, currently at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and “it had started to knock around” a basketball provided by its keepers. The year was 1994, and play had only rarely and anecdotally been reported in animals other than mammals, but he thought that might be what Pigface was doing. The 1-meter-long turtle exuberantly pushed the ball around its aquatic enclosure, swimming through the water with ease as it batted the ball in front of it with its nose. “If you saw a dog or an otter going around batting a ball, bouncing around and chasing it, and going back and forth and doing it over and over again, we’d have no problem calling it play,” he says. “And that’s what the turtle was doing.”
More recently, ethologist Jennifer Mather of the University of Lethbridge in Canada learned that two of her octopus research subjects had repeatedly blown jet streams of water at floating empty pill bottles, shooting them across the surface of their tanks at the Seattle Aquarium. “If you give an [octopus] something new, it will grab it in its arms and bring it up to its mouth, probably exploring it chemically,” she says. This would usually happen a couple of times, she adds, until it “knew what it was, and didn’t bother anymore. But these two, it’s like they suddenly thought, ‘Maybe I can do something with this.’ ”
For Burghardt and Mather and most researchers who have witnessed such bizarre activities in reptiles, fish, and even invertebrates, it is clear that these animals engage in some form of play. But not everyone is convinced. “I personally doubt it,” says behavioral physiologist Bernd Heinrich of the University of Vermont. “I personally have never seen anything I’d call ‘play’ in turtles and wasps, both of which I’ve watched quite a bit. [To say these animals are playing], I think you really have to be stretching the idea of play.”
To find play outside the realm of mammals is incredibly exciting [and] quite humbling. —Kerrie Lewis, Texas State University
Part of the controversy stems from the difficulties researchers have formulating a solid working definition of what constitutes play. “You know it when you see it, but it’s kind of hard to [define],” says Kerrie Lewis of Texas State University, who studies the neuroanatomy of play in primates. For mammals that are more similar to humans, one can usually identify play behavior by simply looking for behaviors that are reminiscent of a child playing, or by equating the behavior to that seen in animals where play is obvious, such as puppies. It’s not hard to tell, for example, that when young chimpanzees chase and wrestle each other, they are just like kids at play. While such anthropomorphizing is generally verboten in biology, when defining play, it can be a “valid argument,” says behavioral biologist and psychologist Edwin van Leeuwen of the Free University of Amsterdam. With regard to play behavior, “interobserver reliability” can also serve as a useful “criterion to determine if it’s play behavior or not,” he says. “There is some value to our intuition.”
The difficulty, then, comes in observing animals so different from us that assigning human emotions is next to impossible. “When we’re looking at species more distantly related to us, we have to rely on more strict criteria,” van Leeuwen says. “We don’t have that same feeling [as we do] when we look at chimpanzees.”
In addition to the lingering uncertainty of how widespread play is, there is the fundamental—yet frustratingly enigmatic—matter of its function in animals. “It’s such a pleasure to watch, [but] no one knows why they do it,” says behavioral ecologist Lynda Sharpe of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. “It’s generally accepted that it’s beneficial, but we don’t know why; we don’t know what the advantages are.”
But despite this void in scientists’ understanding of the behavior, theories about why play exists abound. “Play is intriguing to me because it takes in so many other aspects of behavior. It’s a big mystery,” says Lewis. Although it may be hard to define, “when you see it, you think, ‘What is it, if it’s not play?’ They’re not feeding themselves, they’re not trying to get a mate, they’re not searching for shelter. They’re playing.”
LAUGHING RATS For years, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp had been watching rats play at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University, and recording some extremely high-pitched vocalizations they made as they did so. Then one morning in 1996, it hit him. Maybe, he thought, the bizarre sounds his lab rats made while they played were something akin to human laughter. “I just walked into the lab and [said], ‘Let’s go tickle some rats,’” he recalls. Sure enough, flipping the rats on their backs and giving them a good belly tickle elicited a response that “was so wonderfully strong and powerful,” he says—the rats just couldn’t stop “laughing.” Panksepp saw great value in studying rat laughter (technically termed ultrasonic vocalizations, or USVs). He suspected that the sound could be used as an objective measure of the animals’ positive affect, or pleasure, as it was produced most consistently during playtime, which was known to be a pleasurable and rewarding activity. Sure enough, as he and his colleagues began to work out the brain circuitry underlying the vocalization, they found that it overlapped with a reward pathway in the brain known to be activated during feelings of enthusiasm, joy, anticipation, and eagerness. “Every place in the [pathway] that we stimulated, we got a chirp,” Panksepp says. “That’s the gold standard that [this vocalization] is [associated with] a big reward.” As the laughter is heard robustly during playtime, it indicates that play is in and of itself rewarding, or fun. But more important, rat laughter itself could provide the first objective measure of positive affect in nonhuman animals. This finding could lead to greatly improved animal models for psychiatric disorders, which currently rely on indirect measures such as sugar intake. “If we take animal feelings seriously and develop ways to measure [them], [we can] profoundly increase our understanding of ourselves, especially at the lower levels where we’re so similar,” Panksepp says. “This is the first deep neuroscience of the mind.”
For years, animal play was an area of research plagued by criticism from skeptics. It used to be that “people had kind of written off play as a ‘garbage pail’ behavior,” says ethologist Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado, who studies social play in wolves and coyotes. “They claimed animals don’t play, and we [just] assign a behavior pattern to the category of play when we can’t assign it to anything else.”
But within the last few decades, rigorously documented accounts of play behavior in a wide variety of mammals, as well as some bird species, have brought play research from laughable to reputable. “I don’t think anyone seriously denies play exists as a phenomenon,” Burghardt says. “I think where the main issues lie now are in the diversity and extent of play.”
Indeed, few will argue with the notion that puppies or kittens play, as they watch young litters romp around with their brothers and sisters. But even in these cases where play is seemingly obvious, defining the behavior has proven difficult—scientists can tell when a kitten is playing, for instance, but can’t say why they’re so sure that is what’s happening. And without formal criteria for play, it’s challenging for researchers to identify it in less obvious species.
Recognizing this problem, Burghardt set out to solve it by observing play in species accepted as demonstrating playful behavior, and using them to establish five criteria to help researchers identify play in unfamiliar species. The first is that the behavior is not fully functional. When animals play, they mimic various other functional behaviors, such as those involved in predation or mating, but in the context of play, these behaviors do not serve their usual function. Imagine a domestic dog wildly whipping around a stuffed toy, for example. While remarkably similar to the hunting behavior seen in wild dogs and wolves, this dog is not trying to kill and ingest its toy, but merely give it a good ride.
Some of his other criteria: the behavior is spontaneous or pleasurable, incomplete or exaggerated, repeated, and only occurs when the animals are well fed, healthy, and free from acute or chronic stressors. This last criterion has even prompted some researchers to suggest monitoring play as a proxy for animal welfare. In summary, as Burghardt has repeatedly defined it in his reviews: “Play is repeated behavior that is incompletely functional in the context or at the age in which it is performed and is initiated voluntarily when the animal (or person) is in a relaxed or low-stress setting.”
These criteria may explain why play appears to be so much more common in mammalian species, than in reptiles, fish, or invertebrates, Mather says. There are few situations where cold-blooded animals are safe, comfortable, and well fed, as they must constantly deal with regulating their body temperature, avoiding predators, and finding food. Conversely, mammals are warm-blooded and often have extensive periods of parental care, which provide a safe and comfortable childhood. Cold-blooded animals in captivity, on the other hand, may find themselves in much more relaxing settings.
Applying these criteria to Pigface, Burghardt concluded that hitting the basketball around its enclosure could indeed be classified as play. “It fit the five criteria,” he says. “The behavior was certainly not functional in any obvious sense, it was certainly voluntary or rewarding because it did it repeatedly and spontaneously, and it was a behavior that was different than the normal behavior of that animal.”
Similarly, the criteria worked for the octopuses shooting the pill bottles across the surface of the water, Mather says. “You’re not allowed to call it play if they do this once or twice,” she says, but this “ball bouncing” happened “about 20 times.” It could be that the octopuses were bored, Mather adds, but that’s exactly the type of scenario where one would expect to see play.
Burghardt’s five criteria have also been used to identify play in a variety of other species, including fish, komodo dragons, and even insects. Sociobiologist Elisabetta Palagi of the University of Pisa in Italy, for example, used these criteria to classify some confusing behaviors in the paper wasp as play. When the wasps form colonies each spring, they must establish dominance hierarchies. This involves a ritualized behavior in which the dominant female beats her antennae over the head of the subordinate wasp, often licking, biting, and begging for food. But Palagi noticed similar behaviors just before their winter hibernation, when no dominance battles were expected. The winter behavior thus fit all five of Burghardt’s criteria, leading Palagi to suggest that the wasps were possibly playing, similar to play-fighting observed in young mammals.
The field has certainly not shed all of its skeptics, however, most of whom cite the lack of data. “There certainly are species that probably play,” says ethologist Judy Diamond, a professor and curator at the University of Nebraska State Museum, who studies play in birds with her husband Alan Bond. But “no systematic work has been done on their play. The question is whether people can come up with a rationale for why this is play and exclude other explanations.”
One of the “other explanations” many play researchers find difficult to rule out is that of exploratory behavior. When an animal plays with an inanimate object, for instance, it’s easy to confuse play with simple exploration, Diamond says. “How you separate object play from exploratory behavior is really quite difficult,” she says. “Of course it could be play, [but] it could be anything.” Even Pigface could have simply been exploring his environment, not playing with a basketball, says Bekoff. “It was one of those situations where you couldn’t really tell what in the world was going on unless you ask[ed] the animal.”
“My guess is that play is an offshoot of exploration,” says Mather, recalling the strong exploratory tendencies of the octopuses she has studied. The distinction, which is not an easy one to make, is that play should have fragments of other nonplay behaviors—the third of Burghardt’s five criteria—whereas exploration is expected to consist of longer bouts of investigation. “It’s the fragmentation you should be looking for in play, which you wouldn’t see in exploration,” she says.
Thus, by conducting studies of behavior that adhere strictly to Burghardt’s criteria, many are warming up to the possibility that play might exist in a wide range of species outside of mammals. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” says Sharpe. “There does appear to be good evidence,” at least in some species.
“To find play outside the realm of mammals is incredibly exciting [and] quite humbling, actually,” says Lewis, a skeptic-turned-believer in nonmammalian play behavior. Furthermore, she adds, “It just challenges our view on the evolution [of play]. If play exists in all of these different [species], either play exists in everything, which we don’t know that it does, or is this something that’s so adaptive it’s evolved repeatedly across lineages?”
While the debate over how wide-ranging the behavior is rages on, the concept of animal play is now generally accepted as a separate and important category of behavior. As such, the question is no longer if animals play, but why. And there’s no easy answer.
To me, that’s the most important question still— why do individuals engage in play? —Anthony Auger, University of Wisconsin–Madison
For most behaviors, says Sharpe, the function is clear, such as the use of aggression to win resources or mates. With less obvious behaviors, the general experimental approach is to stop the animals from doing the behavior and take a look at the effects. In a recent study of social grooming in meerkats, for example, the researchers treated the animals with insecticides to reduce the time they spent picking off ticks and fleas and found, surprisingly, that they became less aggressive. “But it’s really difficult to stop an animal from playing without impacting other aspects of its behavior,” Sharpe says.
Indeed, “in the 1960s and ’70s before the advent of ethics committees,” she adds, “a number of studies did just that—raising rats and monkeys in social isolation so they couldn’t play-fight, or confining young ungulates to small spaces so they couldn’t gallop and frolic.” While the researchers saw effects, they were “largely meaningless” because of all the other aspects of the animals’ lives that were affected by the experimental conditions, she says. “[So] no one’s been able to come up with any convincing, strong evidence that there’s a benefit at all.”
“To me, that’s the most important question still—why do individuals engage in play?” agrees neuroscientist Anthony Auger of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “There [are] many theories, but I don’t know which is the best.” Because play exists in such a wide range of animals, social behavior researcher Giada Cordoni of VademECOS in Italy says it is likely “a behavior that is maintained by natural selection.” As such, “we can argue that play has some adaptive function.”
Perhaps play has a delayed benefit, but no immediate function. One leading theory is that play helps animals develop socially and cognitively, and, in highly social species, helps establish dominance hierarchies. Some of the strongest evidence for this hypothesis comes from comparative studies of closely related species. Bekoff’s research on canid species—which include coyotes, wolves, and domestic dogs—found that “the more social canids played more in early life,” he says. Furthermore, “the amount of play in early development is related to the later social organization [and] the complexity of the relationships that the animals form.”
A similar pattern was also seen in bird species in which play has been well documented, including parrots, corvids, and hornbills. In these birds, complex social play, such as the rambunctious wrestling and synchronized wing-flapping and hopping behaviors observed in some parrot species, appeared more likely in species that lived in complex, social groups and maintained relationships after the juveniles fledged from the nest. This suggests that “one function [of play] might be that it ameliorates aggression,” says Diamond. “Play may have evolved as a mechanism to reduce fighting when there are selection pressures that prevent [juvenile] dispersal.”
Many scientists are also looking closely at the neuroanatomy of play behavior for clues to its role. “We tend to associate play, particularly the complex cognitive aspects of play like social play, with animals that are smart,” says Lewis. “So there’s this ongoing assumption that there should be this relationship between brain size and play behavior.” But when a comparative study of mammals showed that “absolute brain size tells us nothing,” she says, researchers started to look at particular regions of the brain that might affect the frequency and complexity of play behavior.
Looking at primates, researchers tied social play to the size of particular brain regions important in social cognition, finding that species with a larger cerebellum, neocortex, hypothalamus, and amygdala all engage in more social play. The findings corroborate the idea that animals are using social play to learn social rules, Lewis says. The amygdala and hypothalamus, for example, are “completely bound up in emotion and the socioemotive aspects of [social development],” she says. “Primates, being social, are naturally very keyed in to the points of view of others in their group, and they need to be able to do that to be successful as primates.”
Similarly, the cerebellum, involved in social learning, and the neocortex, the “thinking part of the brain,” seem important for learning how to respond in socially appropriate ways, Lewis says. “If you fail to learn how to react appropriately to things, you’re not going to make a good adult. Young animals have to play to make their adult brains better.”
In fact, studies using rats showed that one-third of genes in the neocortex were modified by play. “That means play is having a big effect on our higher brain,” says neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University. “But we know that [the] higher brain is not needed for play,” he adds, “because we’ve taken it away and animals [still] play normally.”
Another popular theory says that play helps juveniles develop motor skills. “In [the] ’70s and ’80s, everyone thought [play’s function] was practicing physical skills—hunting in predatory animals or fighting in [species] like baboons and social animals,” says Sharpe.
In juvenile ground squirrels, for example, individuals who played more often and with many partners appeared to have improved motor skills. Because juvenile American kestrels prefer to play with objects that resemble prey, researchers have suggested the behavior helps hone their hunting skills in adulthood. Similarly, in populations of herring gulls that drop prey items to break them open for consumption, juveniles sometimes drop and re-catch prey before they hit the ground. Researchers have classified this as play behavior, possibly serving to improve the young birds’ foraging ability by strengthening muscles or solidifying neural connections important for dropping behavior.
But direct support for this hypothesis is lacking, and recently, “there’s been more of an emphasis [on how play] might be priming [animals’] more physiological [systems], like their stress response,” Sharpe says. “When animals play they use the same neurochemical receptors that are used in [dealing with stress],” she explains. “When young animals prime these systems, they respond to stress differently—they don’t get as stressed or anxious, and they recover quicker.”
This idea was formally conceived in 2001 and dubbed “training for the unexpected.” Because “the behavior of animals that play is more flexible,” says Cordoni, “play seems to be useful to manage the uncertain situations.”
“Training for the unexpected seems to be a fairly global reason why animals play,” agrees Bekoff. “Across species, it seems that play really prepares animals to deal with unexpected circumstances in their social and physical environment because it gives them the opportunity to practice different variations on behavior.”
But while all of these hypotheses—social, cognitive, and motor development, and preparing for unexpected situations—are likely to play a role in why play behavior evolved, the evidence for these benefits remains sparse. Furthermore, biologists are now beginning to realize that play may also serve an immediate function, as play has recently started to be documented in adults as well. “It’s difficult to think that adult play may work for developing motor skills,” Palagi says.
Instead, Palagi and her colleagues found evidence that adult play in chimpanzees served to help them to cope with their competitive tendencies just before feeding time. Similarly, a study of adult Japanese macaques that continue to play with stones as juveniles do suggested that the behavior is psychologically relaxing, and may help maintain neural pathways and slow the cognitive degeneration associated with aging.
“The context is very important for definition of the possible roles of play,” Cordoni says. “I’m quite sure that play has got various functions depending on the species, the sex, the age, the social context and environment. It’s a very complex behavior, and because it’s complex, it’s very interesting.”
BURGHARDT’S FIVE CRITERIA FOR PLAY
1- Play is not fully functional in the form or context in which it is expressed.
2- Play is spontaneous, voluntary, and/or pleasurable, and is likely done for its own sake.
3- Play is incomplete, exaggerated, or precocious.
4- Play is repeated but not in exactly the same way every time, as are more serious behaviors.
5- Play is initiated when animals are well fed, healthy, and free from acute or chronic stressors. |
"I think that they'll take the best player available," Brandt said. "Last year the best player was (Malcom Brown) from Texas and he fell to them, a pretty good player."
Meanwhile, former Tampa Bay general manager Mark Dominik, who's attending the combine in his role an ESPN analyst, has a very specific position in mind for New England.
"I think this is a year where Bill Belichick decides, 'Okay, I'm going to go back and draft a running back, maybe in the second or third round again,'" Dominik speculated, envisioning a scenario similar to 2011, when the Patriots chose Shane Vereen (second round) and Stevan Ridley (third) back-to-back.
"Dion Lewis and James White, I think they're really good in their roles. But they need that every-down back, the kind of guy that they can trust to can catch the ball out of the backfield, that can protect and kind of do everything. This feels like a good class where they can maybe steal one in the second round."
Dominik spoke just as running backs were taking the field for their workout inside Lucas Oil Stadium.
"What they're going to want to see is who can catch the ball," Dominik said. "Who's the guy who isn't (Alabama's Derrick) Henry, who's not going to be there and obviously, (Ohio State's) Ezekiel Elliot, he's not going to be there at (pick) 32, let alone 60.
"I think they're really watching today to see who catches the ball. And from the interviews they've had these last couple of days (wondering), "Who do we feel is smart enough to handle the volume of what we ask them to do in Josh McDaniels' offense?' Once they find that, especially from the intelligence aspect, then it's about who catches the ball real naturally out here. I think that's what the Patriots are going to be heavily watching, and that's what I'd be watching too." |
On Wednesday Deadspin.com posted an article about Tom Brady the quarterback of the New England Patriots and his legal battle with the National Football League. The subject of the story was an email leak that the NFLPA (Players Union) released in response in their lawsuit with the NFL.
Deadspin which focuses on sports, touched upon one nugget of interest to domain owners, a potential domain purchase of the domain Name TB12.com Deadspin however only published one email related to the domain name TB12.com.
Now anyone could take the time to dig up this information if they had a PACER account or signed up to get one, paid the .10 per page and were willing to go through over 1,400 pages of emails.
I went through 1,400 emails, because you see the emails were in no order, there was no rhyme or reason to how they were released.
So I finally got to the info on TB12.com
TB12 is Tom’s brand, for those not familiar with Tom or American Football, Tom Brady is the quarterback for the New England Patriots and his number is 12. So Tom is emailing someone about a myriad of issues about TB12, one of them is intellectual property.
Now some emails have certain info redacted, other things don’t make sense as the name of the CEO of a company Tom works with is redacted, but it has his title and company name, so it is not too hard to figure out who the person is.
Tom Brady starts out emailing Robyn Glaser who works for the Kraft Group, (Robert Kraft is the owner of the New England Patriots). From reading everything and putting pieces together it seems that maybe some domain names were under the Kraft Group instead of Tom Brady or TB12. Robyn Glaser responds.
Tom then has an email communication with the CEO of SCS Financial, the CEO was forwarded a message and asked Tom Brady,
“BTW-who owns TB12.com?”
Tom Brady replied “Somebody who is squatting”
Next up is an email from Tom Brady, to someone whose name has been redacted, like I said this stuff is all over the place and you have to piece it together, they are not just straight sent and received, some of these fwd’s look out-of-place. But first Tom is replying to Robyn Glaser, I did not post what Robyn Glaser said as it was all redacted, but Tom Brady does say “I am good with all of that”. Then the CEO of SCS chimes in. One common theme throughout all this is that people keep remarking how cheap reg fee domains are.
Above you see the first time that someone mentions to purchase the name in stealth mode using the old student model. I thought it was funny he mentioned the Chinese, they do like the naming convention of LLNN.com (article I am currently working on) and there have been many websites in China sued for selling counterfeit merchandise.
Jeff Surrette, Senior Vice President of TB12 responds, (This was the one email about TB12.com that Deadspin published)
From: Jeff Surette
To: Tom Brady Alex Guerrero
Sent: February 26, 2015 4:59:00 AM PST It’s interesting — someone’s owned the TB12.com domain for 13 years, so it’s possible that they’re not a squatter and just like the “TB12” name, which is probably a better situation for us. Last week Tony suggested that — if we did want to try to buy TB12.com — we should do everything possible to conceal the real identity of the buyer. Apparently he’s gotten good deals in the past by having interns convince squatters that they’re doing school projects, etc. It’s worth doing whatever we can, I suppose. Anyway, here’s the status of the most relevant domain names I could come up with. Let me know if there are others that you think I should check. Anything in red is owned by someone else, anything in green by us / RKK. Given that these cost $10/year to register, I’d recommend that we lock up all / most these available names.
So here we see Surette has done a bit of homework and that the domain owner is using the name in good faith and not trying to squat on or cause confusion with Tom Brady or TB12.
Surette goes on to say,
Anyway, here’s the status of the most relevant domain names I could come up with. Let me know if there are others that you think I should check. Anything in red is owned by someone else, anything in green by us / RKK. Given that these cost $10/year to register, I’d recommend that we lock up all / most these available names.
I can’t see what those domain names are as they were redacted out of the email. This next part I will say I laughed out loud, it is from the CEO of SCS Financial and he thinks squatters are douchebags:
I first thought it was interesting that he deemed Network Solutions as “cheap” they are one of the most expensive registrars out there for a .com registration.
So to answer the question that the CEO asked, obviously from the previous email from Surette, this man is named Tony, but anyway, they did register Tbrady12.com, UATB12.com ?, TB12UA.com and TB12brain.com, they are under Jeff Surette’s name at Gandi of all places,
I thought he said Net Sol was so cheap.
All of the domain names were registered on March 3, 2015.
It does not look like they got TBTwelve.com, that one was registered in 2014 at Go Daddy under privacy.
Up next, it looks like Jeff Surette has found out a little more about the owner of TB12.com.
Actually Mr. Surette, there has been content on the site as far back as 2003 according to archive.org, the site quoted the Bible and the owner stated that his name was Twelve.
That was the end of the emails they did not get the domain name obviously.
They did register TB12.net on June 13, 2013 at NetSol. The domain is under privacy. Someone else registered TB12.org at Go Daddy.
I think it is clear that they were never getting the domain by the route they wanted to go, “the student who has no money”. They may not have gotten it going to Mr.Smith with a big offer, he seems to be a religious man, and the name may have more inherent value to and some one time payoff was not going to result in a sale. That is just me speculating, maybe $100,000 gets the job done, Tom Brady certainly could have afforded that, with proper due diligence his team would have understood the writing on the website since 2003, that the registrant has legitimate rights, and the proper way to negotiate this kind of deal would have been straight up. It is interesting to note that TB12.com was pointing to the Deadspin story on Wednesday, today it is not resolving.
On another note it does not seem Mr. Brady’s representatives do not know about new gTLD’, as the domain name TB12.Football is available to be registered as of publication for $15 at Godaddy.com.
No dealing with Cybersquatter douche bags required. |
United Sample has released the results of an extensive survey of 727 AT&T and Verizon smartphone users. And if the responses of this seemingly small survey group track out to the general population come February 10Verizon iPhone 4 launch daythen that sound you hear is Android and RIM's cheerleaders weeping quietly in the corner.
That's because 54 percent of current owners of Blackberry or Android phonesVerizon customers, mind youregistered themselves as either "very likely" or "somewhat likely" to switch to the iPhone 4 on launch day itself. On the flip side, 33 percent of this group indicated that they were "very unlikely" or "somewhat unlikely" to make the jump.
Breaking this down a bit further, 66 percent of Verizon's Blackberry users specifically stated that they were either very or somewhat likely to pick up an iPhone 4 on launch day. That number drops to 44 percent for Verizon's Android owners. But you can always ask them yourself: In total, 24 percent of existing Verizon owners intending to make a switch on launch day stated that they intended to stand in line to pick up a new device.
The chief reason for the switchcoming in at 60 percent of all surveyed Blackberry and Android owners on Verizon's networkremained the differences in interface between either Android or Blackberry phones and the iPhone 4. A dislike of the respective phones' web browsers and preference for the iPhone 4's came up at 58 percent, and "media"presumably what a phone supports as well as its ability to easily play or transfer mediawas indicated by 51 percent of Verizon Blackberry and Android users looking to jump ship.
However, the biggest factor holding this populace back from going Apple is the costs for doing so. Nearly half of the surveyed Verizon users, 46 percent, cited it as the largest reason as to why they wouldn't want to switch to an iPhone 4. In fact, 41 percentwhen asked if they had any second thoughts about switching after learning more about Verizon's iPhone 4indicated that the costs of the phone and associated data plans remained a large roadblock in their decision-making process.
Interestingly, only 26 percent of surveyed AT&T users indicated that they were "somewhat" or "very" likely to buy an iPhone 4 on launch day. The chief reason that any members of the surveyed AT&T audience would do soat a 48 percent response ratewas the dropped calls they experienced on AT&T's network. However, 45 percent of the group indicated that the cost of the transition was the biggest issue holding them back.
For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag. |
High carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of total mortality, whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke. Global dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings.
During follow-up, we documented 5796 deaths and 4784 major cardiovascular disease events. Higher carbohydrate intake was associated with an increased risk of total mortality (highest [quintile 5] vs lowest quintile [quintile 1] category, HR 1·28 [95% CI 1·12–1·46], p trend =0·0001) but not with the risk of cardiovascular disease or cardiovascular disease mortality. Intake of total fat and each type of fat was associated with lower risk of total mortality (quintile 5 vs quintile 1, total fat: HR 0·77 [95% CI 0·67–0·87], p trend <0·0001; saturated fat, HR 0·86 [0·76–0·99], p trend =0·0088; monounsaturated fat: HR 0·81 [0·71–0·92], p trend <0·0001; and polyunsaturated fat: HR 0·80 [0·71–0·89], p trend <0·0001). Higher saturated fat intake was associated with lower risk of stroke (quintile 5 vs quintile 1, HR 0·79 [95% CI 0·64–0·98], p trend =0·0498). Total fat and saturated and unsaturated fats were not significantly associated with risk of myocardial infarction or cardiovascular disease mortality.
The Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study is a large, epidemiological cohort study of individuals aged 35–70 years (enrolled between Jan 1, 2003, and March 31, 2013) in 18 countries with a median follow-up of 7·4 years (IQR 5·3–9·3). Dietary intake of 135 335 individuals was recorded using validated food frequency questionnaires. The primary outcomes were total mortality and major cardiovascular events (fatal cardiovascular disease, non-fatal myocardial infarction, stroke, and heart failure). Secondary outcomes were all myocardial infarctions, stroke, cardiovascular disease mortality, and non-cardiovascular disease mortality. Participants were categorised into quintiles of nutrient intake (carbohydrate, fats, and protein) based on percentage of energy provided by nutrients. We assessed the associations between consumption of carbohydrate, total fat, and each type of fat with cardiovascular disease and total mortality. We calculated hazard ratios (HRs) using a multivariable Cox frailty model with random intercepts to account for centre clustering.
The relationship between macronutrients and cardiovascular disease and mortality is controversial. Most available data are from European and North American populations where nutrition excess is more likely, so their applicability to other populations is unclear.
Recently, several meta-analyses of randomised trials and prospective cohort studiesand ecological studies,largely done in European and North American countries, showed either no association or a lower risk between saturated fatty acid consumption with total mortality and cardiovascular disease events.The uncertainty regarding the effect of saturated fatty acids on clinical outcomes in part might be due to the fact that most observational cohort studies have been done in high-income countrieswhere saturated fatty acid intake is within a limited range (about 7–15% of energy). Furthermore, it is not known whether findings obtained from European and North American countries where nutritional excess is more common, can be extrapolated to other regions of the world where nutritional inadequacy might be more common. The Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study provides a unique opportunity to study the impact of diet on total mortality and cardiovascular disease in diverse settings, such as those where overnutrition is common and where undernutrition is of greater concern. In this study, our primary aim was to assess the association of fats (total, saturated fatty acids, and unsaturated fats) and carbohydrate with total mortality and cardiovascular disease events. The secondary aim was to examine associations between these nutrients and myocardial infarction, stroke, cardiovascular disease mortality, and non-cardiovascular disease mortality.
Intake of saturated and trans unsaturated fatty acids and risk of all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies.
The association between dietary saturated fatty acids and ischemic heart disease depends on the type and source of fatty acid in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition—Netherlands cohort.
Intake of saturated and trans unsaturated fatty acids and risk of all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies.
Removing current restrictions on fat intake but limiting carbohydrate intake (when high) might improve health. Dietary guidelines might need to be reconsidered in light of consistent findings from the present study, especially in countries outside of Europe and North America.
Current guidelines recommend a low fat diet (<30% of energy) and limiting saturated fatty acids to less than 10% of energy intake by replacing them with unsaturated fatty acids. The recommendation is based on findings from some North American and European countries where nutrition excess is of concern. It is not clear whether this can be extrapolated to other countries where undernutrition is common. Moreover, North American and European populations consume a lower carbohydrate diet than populations elsewhere where most people consume very high carbohydrate diets mainly from refined sources. Consistent with most data, but in contrast to dietary guidelines, we found fats, including saturated fatty acids, are not harmful and diets high in carbohydrate have adverse effects on total mortality. We did not observe any detrimental effect of higher fat intake on cardiovascular events. Our data across 18 countries adds to the large and growing body of evidence that increased fats are not associated with higher cardiovascular disease or mortality.
We did a systematic search in PubMed for relevant articles published between Jan 1, 1960, and May 1, 2017, restricted to the English language. Our search terms included “carbohydrate”, “total fat”, “saturated fatty acid”, “monounsaturated fatty acid”, “polyunsaturated fatty acid”, “total mortality”, and “cardiovascular disease”. We searched published articles by title and abstract to identify relevant studies. We also hand-searched reference lists of eligible studies. We considered studies if they evaluated association between macronutrient intake and total mortality or cardiovascular disease. The studies cited in this report are not an exhaustive list of existing research. Existing evidence on the associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality are mainly from North America and Europe.
Cardiovascular disease is a global epidemic with 80% of the burden of disease in low-income and middle-income countries.Diet is one of the most important modifiable risk factors for cardiovascular disease and other non-communicable diseases and current guidelines recommend a low-fat diet (<30% of energy) and limiting saturated fatty acids to less than 10% of energy intake by replacing them with unsaturated fatty acids.However, recommendations on lowering saturated fatty acids are largely based on one ecological studyand observational studies done in European and North American countries such as Finland, where the intake of saturated fatty acids (about 20% of total energy intake) and cardiovascular disease mortality were both very high.Furthermore, dietary recommendations are based on the assumption of a linear association between saturated fatty acid intake and LDL cholesterol, and then the association between LDL cholesterol and cardiovascular disease events. However, this assumption does not consider the effect of saturated fatty acids on other lipoproteins (eg, HDL cholesterol), ratio of total cholesterol to HDL cholesterol, or on apolipoproteins (which could be a better marker of cardiovascular disease risk)and blood pressure, which also affect the risk of cardiovascular disease.
The funders and sponsors had no role in the design and conduct of the study; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data; in the preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. MD, AM, XZ, SR, SIB, SSA, and SY had full access to the data and were responsible for the decision to submit for publication.
The effect of isocaloric replacement (as 5% of energy) of carbohydrate with saturated and unsaturated fats and protein was estimated using multivariable nutrient density models.In this modelling approach, the percentage of energy intake from saturated and unsaturated fats and protein were included as exposures with total energy as a covariate. The coefficients in this model indicate change in outcomes by replacement of carbohydrate (as 5% of energy) by other nutrients. For all analyses, the criterion for statistical significance was α=0·05. Statistical analyses were done with SAS software, version 9.3. Spline curves were generated with the SAS LGTPHCURV9 Macro.
In subgroup analyses, since higher carbohydrate (but lower fat) consumption is more common in Asian countriesand lower carbohydrate intake (and higher fat) in non-Asian countrieswe examined whether the effect of carbohydrate and fats on outcomes were consistent in these two regions. The countries in Asia included Bangladesh, China, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan; the remaining countries were considered to be non-Asian countries. We used this approach for two main reasons: to assess the consistency of the associations across regions representing different levels of nutrient intake, with Asian countries characterising higher carbohydrate (and lower fat) consumption and non-Asian countries capturing lower carbohydrate intake (and higher fat); and to maximise the power within regions (compared with examining effects within smaller geographical regions with fewer people and relatively few events). Participants were categorised into region-specific quintile categories of nutrient intake based on the intake distribution of participants in Asian and non-Asian countries, with the lowest quintile category used as reference group within regions (we did not do further region subgroup analyses due to low statistical power to detect subgroup interactions). Since the impact of macronutrient intake on outcome events might or might not occur through changes in waist-to-hip ratio, we excluded waist-to-hip ratio from the multivariable models in secondary analyses to assess the impact on estimates.
Continuous variables were expressed as means (SDs) and categorical variables as percentages. Education was categorised as none, primary school (first 6 years), or secondary school (7–11 years) and college, trade school, or university (>11 years). Smoking was categorised as never, former, or current smoker. Physical activity was categorised based on the metabolic equivalent of task (MET) per min per week into low (<600 MET min per week), moderate (600–3000 MET min per week), and high (>3000 MET min per week) activity. Waist-to-hip ratio (waist circumferences [cm]/hip circumferences [cm]) was used as a continuous variable. Since food patterns are culture dependent and dietary patterns are generally related to geographical region rather than income region, we categorised countries into seven regions. Regions included China, south Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan), North America, Europe (Canada, Poland, and Sweden), South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia), Middle East (Iran, occupied Palestinian territory, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates), southeast Asia (Malaysia), and Africa (South Africa and Zimbabwe). For the overall analysis, participants were categorised into quintiles of nutrient intake (carbohydrate, fats, and protein) based on percentage of energy (% E) provided by nutrients, which was computed by dividing energy from the nutrient by the total daily energy intake (eg, for carbohydrate, %E=([carbohydrate (g) × 4]/total energy intake [kcal]) × 100). To assess the shape of associations between nutrients and events we used restricted cubic splines, fitting a restricted cubic spline function with three knots. We calculated hazard ratios (HRs) using a multivariable Cox frailty model with random intercepts to account for centre clustering (which also adjusts for region and country). Estimates of HRs and 95% CIs are presented for percentage of energy from carbohydrate, total protein, total fat, and types of fat. All models were adjusted for age and sex. Additionally, all multivariable models were adjusted for education, smoking, physical activity, waist-to-hip ratio, history of diabetes, urban or rural location, and total energy intake.
The follow-up period varied based on the date when recruitment began at each site or country. During the follow-up period contact was made with every participant on an annual basis either by telephone or by a face-to-face interview with the local research team. The median duration of follow-up was 7·4 years (IQR 5·3–9·3), which varied across countries ( appendix p 22 ).
The primary outcomes were total mortality and major cardiovascular events (fatal cardiovascular disease, non-fatal myocardial infarction, stroke, and heart failure). Secondary outcomes were all myocardial infarctions, stroke, cardiovascular disease mortality, and non-cardiovascular disease mortality. The numbers of cases of heart failure were too few to be analysed separately.
For the current analysis, we included all outcome events known to us until March 31, 2017. 148 723 participants completed the FFQ, of which 143 934 participants had plausible energy intake (500–5000 kcal per day) and had no missing values on age and sex. We excluded 1230 participants (0·8% of the cohort) because follow-up information was not available and 7369 participants with a history of cardiovascular disease (5·0% of the cohort). The remaining 135 335 individuals were included in this analysis ( appendix p 19 ).
Participants' habitual food intake was recorded using country-specific (or region-specific in India) validated food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) at baseline. Where a validated FFQ was not available (ie, Argentina), we developed and validated FFQs using a standard method.Multiple 24-h dietary recalls were used as the reference method to validate the FFQs in about 60–250 participants from each country ( appendix p 18 ). To convert food into nutrients, country-specific nutrient databases were constructed with information on 43 macronutrients and micronutrients. The nutrient databases are primarily based on the United States Department of Agriculture food composition database (release 18 and 21), modified with reference to local food composition tables, and supplemented with recipes of local mixed dishes.However, for Canada, China, India, Malaysia, South Africa, Sweden, and Turkey we used the nutrient databases that were used for validation of the FFQs. The FFQ was administered together with other questionnaires at the baseline.
Relationship between healthy diet and risk of cardiovascular disease among patients on drug therapies for secondary prevention: a prospective cohort study of 31 546 high-risk individuals from 40 countries.
Development, reproducibility and validity of the food frequency questionnaire in the Poland arm of the Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological (PURE) study.
Data were collected at the community, household, and individual levels. Within participating communities, our goal was to enrol an unbiased sample of households. Households were eligible if at least one member was between 35 and 70 years of age, and the household intended to stay in the current address for another 4 years. Standardised questionnaires were used to collect information about demographic factors, socioeconomic status (education, income, and employment), lifestyle (smoking, physical activity, and alcohol intake), health history, and medication use. Physical activity was assessed using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire.History of diabetes was self-reported. Physical assessment included weight, height, waist and hip circumferences, and blood pressure. Detailed follow-up occurred at 3, 6, and 9 years and repeated measures of selected risk factors, causes of death, other health outcomes, and community data were collected. Standardised case-report forms were used to record data on major cardiovascular events and mortality during follow-up, which were adjudicated centrally in each country by trained physicians using standard definitions ( appendix pp 8–17 ). Data were electronically transferred to the PHRI where quality control checks were undertaken.
The design and methods of the PURE study have been described previously.PURE recruitment occurred between Jan 1, 2003, and March 31, 2013, and included individuals aged 35–70 years from 18 low-income, middle-income, and high-income countries on five continents. We aimed to include populations that varied by socioeconomic factors while ensuring feasibility of long-term follow-up when selecting the participating countries. We included three high-income (Canada, Sweden, and United Arab Emirates), 11 middle-income (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Iran, Malaysia, occupied Palestinian territory, Poland, South Africa, and Turkey) and four low-income countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe), based on gross national income per capita from the World Bank classification for 2006 when the study was initiated. Additional countries have joined PURE, but since follow-up in these countries is incomplete, they are not included in the present analyses. The study was coordinated by the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI; Hamilton Health Sciences, Hamilton, ON, Canada). More details of the sampling and recruitment strategy used in PURE are detailed in the Article by Miller and colleaguesand an earlier report.
Use of secondary prevention drugs for cardiovascular disease in the community in high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries (the PURE Study): a prospective epidemiological survey.
Isocaloric (5% of energy) replacement of carbohydrate with polyunsaturated acids was associated with an 11% lower risk of mortality (HR 0·89 [95% CI 0·82–0·97]), whereas replacement of carbohydrate with saturated fatty acids, monounsaturated acids, or protein was not significantly associated with risk of total mortality. Replacement of carbohydrate with different types of fat or with protein was not significantly associated with major cardiovascular disease. Replacement of carbohydrate with saturated fatty acids was associated with a 20% lower risk of stroke (HR 0·80 [95% CI 0·69–0·93]). No significant associations with stroke risk were found for replacement of carbohydrate with other fats and protein. Replacement of carbohydrate with polyunsaturated fatty acids was associated with 16% lower risk of non-cardiovascular disease mortality (HR 0·84 [95% CI 0·76–0·94]; figure 3A–C ).
Hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs are adjusted for age, sex, education, waist-to-hip ratio, smoking, physical activity, diabetes, urban or rural location, and energy intake. Centre was also included as a random effect and frailty models were used. Major cardiovascular disease=fatal cardiovascular disease+myocardial infarction+stroke+heart failure.
Higher carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of total mortality in both Asian countries and non-Asian countries ( figure 2A ). Conversely, higher intake of total fat and individual types of fat were each associated with lower total mortality risk in Asian countries and non-Asian countries ( figure 2B–E ).
Hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs are adjusted for age, sex, education, waist-to-hip ratio, smoking, physical activity, diabetes, urban or rural location, and energy intake. Centre was also included as a random effect and frailty models were used (p for heterogeneity >0·2 for total fat and >0·5 for carbohydrate, saturated fatty acids, monounsaturated fatty acids, and polyunsaturated fatty acids). Q1–Q5=quintiles 1–5.
Associations between (A) carbohydrate, (B) total fat, (C) saturated fatty acids, (D) monounsaturated fatty acids, and (E) polyunsaturated fatty acids with risk of total mortality in Asia and other regions
Figure 2 Associations between (A) carbohydrate, (B) total fat, (C) saturated fatty acids, (D) monounsaturated fatty acids, and (E) polyunsaturated fatty acids with risk of total mortality in Asia and other regions
We investigated the influence of socioeconomic status and poverty using four different measures of socioeconomic status to adjust in the analysis of the associations between different nutrient intakes and total mortality and cardiovascular disease events. These were household wealth, household income, education, and economic level of the country subdivided by urban and rural locations. When we included education in the models, the estimates of association were robust. Additionally, we adjusted for study centre as a random effect which takes into account socioeconomic factors and clustering by community. When we reanalysed the data using household income, household wealth, or economic level of the country our results were unchanged ( appendix p 34 ).
Restricted multivariable cubic spline plots for total mortality and major cardiovascular disease and other outcomes are shown in figure 1 and the appendix (pp 20, 21) . Multivariable splines for total fats and subtypes showed non-linear, decreasing trends in total mortality and major cardiovascular disease outcomes with increasing nutrients. However, multivariable splines for carbohydrate had a non-linear increasing trend in risks of total mortality and major cardiovascular disease ( figure 1 ) and non-cardiovascular disease mortality ( appendix p 21 ). The rise appeared to occur among those who consumed more than 60% (mid estimate from the spline) when energy intake from carbohydrate exceeded 70% energy (where the lower CI is above a HR of 1).
In comparisons between quintile 5 and quintile 1, a higher intake of saturated fatty acids was inversely associated with risk of total mortality (HR 0·86 [95% CI 0·76–0·99]; p=0·0088), stroke (HR 0·79 [0·64–0·98]; p=0·0498), and non-cardiovascular disease mortality (HR 0·86 [0·73–1·01]; p=0·0108; table 3 ). Higher saturated fatty acid intake was not associated with major cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality. Similarly, monounsaturated fatty acid intake was associated with lower risk of total mortality (HR 0·81 [95% CI 0·71–0·92]; p<0·0001), a non-significant trend for lower risk of stroke (HR 0·85 [0·70–1·03]; p=0·10), and lower risk of non-cardiovascular disease mortality (HR 0·79 [0·68–0·92]; p=0·0003). Intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids was associated with lower risk of total mortality (HR 0·80 [95% CI 0·71–0·89]; p<0·0001) and non-cardiovascular disease mortality (HR 0·75 [0·65–0·86]; p=0·0002). Intakes of monounsaturated fatty acids and polyunsaturated fatty acids were not significantly associated with major cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, and cardiovascular disease mortality.
In comparisons between quintile 5 and quintile 1, total fat intake was associated with lower risks of total mortality (HR 0·77 [95% CI 0·67–0·87]; p<0·0001), stroke (HR 0·82 [0·68–1·00]; p=0·0562), and non-cardiovascular disease mortality (HR 0·70 [0·60–0·82]; p<0·0001). No significant associations between total fat intake and major cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, and cardiovascular disease mortality were found. Similarly, total protein intake was inversely associated with risks of total mortality (HR 0·88 [95% CI 0·77–1·00]; p=0·0030) and non-cardiovascular disease mortality (HR 0·85 [0·73–0·99]; p=0·0022; table 2 ). Animal protein intake was associated with lower risk of total mortality and no significant association was observed between plant protein and risk of total mortality.
Hazard ratios and 95% CIs are adjusted for age, sex, education, waist-to-hip ratio, smoking, physical activity, diabetes, urban or rural location, and energy intake. Centre was also included as a random effect and frailty models were used. Major cardiovascular disease=fatal cardiovascular disease+myocardial infarction+stroke+heart failure.
Hazard ratios and 95% CIs are adjusted for age, sex, education, waist-to-hip ratio, smoking, physical activity, diabetes, urban or rural location, and energy intake. Centre was also included as a random effect and frailty models were used. Major cardiovascular disease=fatal cardiovascular disease+myocardial infarction+stroke+heart failure.
Carbohydrate intake was higher in China, south Asia, and Africa compared with other regions. In south Asia about 65% of the population consume at least 60% of energy from carbohydrate and 33% consume at least 70% of energy from carbohydrate, and in China the corresponding percentages are 77% and 43% ( appendix p 33 ). The highest amount of fat consumed was in North America and Europe, Middle East, and southeast Asia. Intake of protein was highest in South America and southeast Asia.
During a median follow-up of 7·4 years (IQR 5·3–9·3), 5796 individuals died and 4784 had a major cardiovascular disease event (2143 myocardial infarctions and 2234 strokes). 1649 died due to cardiovascular disease and 3809 died due to non-cardiovascular disease. There were 338 deaths due to injury, which were not included in non-cardiovascular disease mortality because these were considered to be unlikely to be associated with diet. Among non-cardiovascular disease mortality, in all regions except Africa, the most common cause of mortality was cancer followed by respiratory diseases. In Africa, infectious disease was the first and respiratory disease was the second most common cause of non-cardiovascular disease mortality.
Discussion
In this large prospective cohort study from 18 countries in five continents, we found that high carbohydrate intake (more than about 60% of energy) was associated with an adverse impact on total mortality and non-cardiovascular disease mortality. By contrast, higher fat intake was associated with lower risk of total mortality, non-cardiovascular disease mortality, and stroke. Furthermore, higher intakes of individual types of fat were associated with lower total mortality, non-cardiovascular disease mortality, and stroke risk and were not associated with risk of major cardiovascular disease events, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality. Our findings do not support the current recommendation to limit total fat intake to less than 30% of energy and saturated fat intake to less than 10% of energy. Individuals with high carbohydrate intake might benefit from a reduction in carbohydrate intake and increase in the consumption of fats.
9 Hooper L
Martin N
Abdelhamid A
Davey SG Reduction in saturated fat intake for cardiovascular disease. , 35 Hamley S The effect of replacing saturated fat with mostly n-6 polyunsaturated fat on coronary heart disease: a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. , 36 Ramsden CE
Zamora D
Majchrzak-Hong S
et al. Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968–73). , 37 Schwingshackl L
Hoffmann G Dietary fatty acids in the secondary prevention of coronary heart disease: a systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression. 38 Hu FB
Stampfer MJ
Manson JE
et al. Dietary saturated fats and their food sources in relation to the risk of coronary heart disease in women. For decades, dietary guidelines have focused on reducing total fat and saturated fatty acid intake, based on the presumption that replacing saturated fatty acids with carbohydrate and unsaturated fats will lower LDL cholesterol and should therefore reduce cardiovascular disease events. This focus is largely based on selective emphasis on some observational and clinical data, despite the existence of several randomised trials and observational studies that do not support these conclusions.Moreover, many studies that report higher risk of coronary heart disease deaths with higher saturated fatty acid intake were from North American and European populations (with relatively high intakes of total and saturated fats) where in the past cardiovascular disease was the major cause of deathsand their applicability to other populations is uncertain.
39 Ascherio A
Rimm EB
Giovannucci EL
Spiegelman D
Stampfer M
Willett WC Dietary fat and risk of coronary heart disease in men: cohort follow up study in the United States. , 40 Burger KN
Beulens JW
Boer JM
Spijkerman AM
van der AD Dietary glycemic load and glycemic index and risk of coronary heart disease and stroke in Dutch men and women: the EPIC-MORGEN study. , 41 Oh K
Hu FB
Cho E
et al. Carbohydrate intake, glycemic index, glycemic load, and dietary fiber in relation to risk of stroke in women. 42 Fan J
Song Y
Wang Y
Hui R
Zhang W Dietary glycemic index, glycemic load, and risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, and stroke mortality: a systematic review with meta-analysis. 43 Hoogeveen RC
Gaubatz JW
Sun W
et al. Small dense low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol concentrations predict risk for coronary heart disease: the Atherosclerosis Risk In Communities (ARIC) study. , 44 Parish S
Offer A
Clarke R
et al. Lipids and lipoproteins and risk of different vascular events in the MRC/BHF Heart Protection Study. 45 Mente A
Dehghan M
Rangarajan S
et al. Association of dietary nutrients with blood lipids and blood pressure in 18 countries: a cross-sectional analysis from the PURE study. 45 Mente A
Dehghan M
Rangarajan S
et al. Association of dietary nutrients with blood lipids and blood pressure in 18 countries: a cross-sectional analysis from the PURE study. In our study more than half of the participants (52%) consumed a high carbohydrate diet (at least 60% of energy) and about a quarter derive more than 70% of their energy from carbohydrate. This value is higher than most previous studies done in North America and Europe ( appendix p 33 ). Furthermore, our study population represented a broad range of carbohydrate intake (mean intake of 46–77% of energy). This might explain the stronger association between carbohydrate intake and total mortality in our study compared with previous studies, which generally included participants with lower mean consumption of carbohydrate and a relatively narrower range of carbohydrate intake (35–56% of energy).Moreover, in our study most participants from low-income and middle-income countries consumed a very high carbohydrate diet (at least 60% of energy), especially from refined sources (such as white rice and white bread), which have been shown to be associated with increased risk of total mortality and cardiovascular events.Therefore, recommending lowering carbohydrate might be particularly applicable to such settings if replacement foods from fats and protein are available and affordable. It is also noteworthy that the spline plots showed a non-linear increasing trend in total mortality with a carbohydrate intake and the rise seems to occur among those who consumed more than 60% of energy from carbohydrate (ie, based on the midpoint of the estimate, with the lower CI showing an HR >0·1 when more than 70% of energy came from carbohydrates). Additionally, higher carbohydrate intakes increase some forms of dyslipidaemia (ie, higher triglycerides and lower HDL cholesterol), apolipoprotein B (ApoB)-to-apolipoprotein A1 (ApoA1) ratios and increased small dense LDL (the most atherogenic particles)and increased blood pressure(see Mente and colleagues). However, the absence of association between low carbohydrate intake (eg, <50% of energy) and health outcomes does not provide support for very low carbohydrate diets. Importantly, a certain amount of carbohydrate is necessary to meet short-term energy demands during physical activity and so moderate intakes (eg, 50–55% of energy) are likely to be more appropriate than either very high or very low carbohydrate intakes.
46 Wang DD
Li Y
Chiuve SE
et al. Association of specific dietary fats with total and cause-specific mortality. 47 Yu E
Rimm E
Qi L
Rexrode K
et al. Diet, lifestyle, biomarkers, genetic factors, and risk of cardiovascular disease in the Nurses' Health Studies. A high carbohydrate diet is usually accompanied by a low fat intake. Our findings show a higher risk of total mortality, non-cardiovascular disease mortality, and stroke by lower fat consumption. The health benefit of replacing total fat with carbohydrate has been debated. Previous studies showed that replacement of fat with carbohydrate was not associated with lower risk of coronary heart disease and a pooled analysis of two large cohort studies (the Health Professionals Follow up and the Nurses' Health Study)showed an inverse association between total fat and total mortality. Furthermore, higher glycaemic load was shown to be associated with a higher risk of ischaemic stroke in the Nurses' Health Study.Our findings indicate that limiting total fat consumption is unlikely to improve health in populations, and a total fat intake of about 35% of energy with concomitant lowering of carbohydrate intake might lower risk of total mortality.
38 Hu FB
Stampfer MJ
Manson JE
et al. Dietary saturated fats and their food sources in relation to the risk of coronary heart disease in women. , 39 Ascherio A
Rimm EB
Giovannucci EL
Spiegelman D
Stampfer M
Willett WC Dietary fat and risk of coronary heart disease in men: cohort follow up study in the United States. , 48 Hu FB
Stampfer MJ
Manson JE
et al. Dietary fat intake and the risk of coronary heart disease in women. , 49 Li Y
Hruby A
Bernstein AM
et al. Saturated fats compared with unsaturated fats and sources of carbohydrate in relation to risk of coronary heart disease: a prospective cohort study. 9 Hooper L
Martin N
Abdelhamid A
Davey SG Reduction in saturated fat intake for cardiovascular disease. , 35 Hamley S The effect of replacing saturated fat with mostly n-6 polyunsaturated fat on coronary heart disease: a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. , 36 Ramsden CE
Zamora D
Majchrzak-Hong S
et al. Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968–73). , 37 Schwingshackl L
Hoffmann G Dietary fatty acids in the secondary prevention of coronary heart disease: a systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression. 50 Yamagishi K
Iso H
Kokubo Y
et al. Dietary intake of saturated fatty acids and incident stroke and coronary heart disease in Japanese communities: the JPHC Study. 9 Hooper L
Martin N
Abdelhamid A
Davey SG Reduction in saturated fat intake for cardiovascular disease. For individual fats, we found an inverse association between saturated fatty acid intake, total mortality, non-cardiovascular disease mortality, and stroke risk without any evidence of an increase in major cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, and cardiovascular disease mortality. Our spline showed a non-linear association between saturated fatty acid intake and outcomes and this suggests that the nature of the relationship is more complex than previously assumed and the risks might depend on the amount of nutrient consumed. This is the first large study to describe the association between low level saturated fatty acid intake (eg, <7% of energy) and total mortality and cardiovascular disease events. Two large prospective cohort studies (the Health Professionals Follow up and the Nurses' Health Study) did not find significant associations between saturated fatty acid intake and risk of cardiovascular disease when replacement nutrients were not taken into account.Randomised controlled trials of saturated fatty acid reduction (replaced by polyunsaturated fatty acids) have also not shown a statistically significant impact on total mortality.Unlike previous studies from North American and European countries, our study covers a much broader range of saturated fatty acid intake including a large number of people in the lower range of intake (ie, 50% of participants consumed less than 7% of energy and 75% of participants consumed less than 10% of energy from saturated fatty acids compared with 50% of participants with greater than 10% of energy in studies of North American and European countries). The larger number of people (75%) with lower saturated fatty acids consumption in PURE allows us to examine the associations of low saturated fatty acids with total mortality and cardiovascular disease events. Our findings of an inverse association between saturated fatty acid intake and risk of stroke are consistent with some previous cohort studies.Collectively, the available datado not support the recommendation to limit saturated fatty acids to less than 10% of intake and that a very low intake (ie, below about 7% of energy) might even be harmful.
46 Wang DD
Li Y
Chiuve SE
et al. Association of specific dietary fats with total and cause-specific mortality. 51 Guasch-Ferre M
Babio N
Martinez-Gonzalez MA
et al. Dietary fat intake and risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality in a population at high risk of cardiovascular disease. 52 Nagata C
Nakamura K
Wada K
et al. Total fat intake is associated with decreased mortality in Japanese men but not in women. 53 Mozaffarian D
Micha R
Wallace S Effects on coronary heart disease of increasing polyunsaturated fat in place of saturated fat: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. We found an inverse association between monounsaturated fatty acid intake and total mortality. Consistent with our findings, two large cohort studies of the Health Professionals Follow up and the Nurses' Health Study showed lower total mortality by higher monounsaturated fatty acid intake.Furthermore, our findings are consistent with randomised trials of the Mediterranean diet that have shown reduced risk of total mortality and cardiovascular disease among those consuming higher amounts of olive oil and nuts.Higher polyunsaturated fatty acid intake was associated with lower total mortality rates and a modest lower risk of stroke. This finding is consistent with the lower total mortality among US men and women (the Health Professionals Follow up and the Nurses' Health Study) and Japanese men,as well as a meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials.Extensive adjustment for socioeconomic status using four different approaches (education, household income, household wealth, and income level of the country, with subdivision by rural and urban location) did not alter our results. Despite this, it is possible that high consumption of carbohydrate and low consumption of animal products might simply reflect lower incomes; residual confounding as a potential reason for our results cannot be completely excluded.
46 Wang DD
Li Y
Chiuve SE
et al. Association of specific dietary fats with total and cause-specific mortality. 7 Siri-Tarino PW
Chiu S
Bergeron N
Krauss RM Saturated fats versus polyunsaturated fats versus carbohydrate for cardiovascular disease prevention and treatment. , 47 Yu E
Rimm E
Qi L
Rexrode K
et al. Diet, lifestyle, biomarkers, genetic factors, and risk of cardiovascular disease in the Nurses' Health Studies. In our replacement analyses, the strongest association on total mortality was observed when carbohydrate was replaced with polyunsaturated fatty acids, which is consistent with the pooled analyses of the Health Professionals Follow up and the Nurses' Health Study.We found a lower risk of stroke when carbohydrate was replaced with saturated fatty acids, which is consistent with previous work showing that refined carbohydrate intake is associated with increased risk of stroke.
45 Mente A
Dehghan M
Rangarajan S
et al. Association of dietary nutrients with blood lipids and blood pressure in 18 countries: a cross-sectional analysis from the PURE study. Mente and colleaguesrelate the intake of total fat, types of fat, and carbohydrate to blood lipids and observed patterns of associations that were consistent with previous studies (eg, higher intakes of saturated fatty acids are associated with higher LDL cholesterol, but also with higher HDL cholesterol, lower triglycerides, lower total cholesterol-to-HDL cholesterol ratio, and lower ApoB-to-ApoA1 ratio). By contrast, increased carbohydrate intake is associated with lower LDL cholesterol but also with lower HDL cholesterol and higher triglycerides, total cholesterol-to-HDL cholesterol ratio, and ApoB-to-ApoA1 ratio. The latter is particularly noteworthy as ApoB-to-ApoA1 ratio is the strongest lipid predictor of myocardial infarction and ischaemic strokes; this might provide a mechanistic explanation for the higher risk of events seen with high carbohydrate intake and the generally lower risk of cardiovascular disease with greater saturated fatty acid intake. The lipid findings not only confirm the validity of the FFQs that we used in the PURE study, but also show that nutrients have varying effects on different lipid fractions. This suggests that predicting the net clinical effect based on considering only the effects of nutrient intake on LDL cholesterol is not reliable in projecting the effects of diet on cardiovascular disease events or on total mortality.
Our study is the first to our knowledge that used country-specific FFQs and nutrient databases in a large number of individuals from countries in diverse regions with varying food habits. The standardised dietary method enabled a direct comparison of nutrients and foods within each region included in the study and standardised methods to collect and adjudicate events. However, our study had some limitations. First, we used FFQs to estimate participants' dietary intake which is not a measure of absolute intake, but is suited for classifying individuals into intake categories and is the most commonly used approach for assessing intake in epidemiological studies. Measurement error in reporting might lead to random errors that could dilute real associations between nutrients and clinical events. Second, dietary intakes were measured only at baseline, and it is possible that dietary changes might have occurred during the follow-up period. Even if major dietary changes occurred after the baseline assessment, they probably would have weakened the observed associations. Third, there is potential for social desirability bias and individuals who are health conscious might also adopt other healthy lifestyles. However, if this were the case, we would not expect to see different associations for the different outcomes. Fourth, as with any observational cohort study, observed associations might be in part due to residual confounding (eg, differences in the ability to afford fats and animal proteins, which are more expensive than carbohydrates) despite extensive adjustment for known confounding factors. Furthermore, while high-carbohydrate and low-fat diets might be a proxy for poverty or access to health care, all of our models adjusted for education and study centre (which tracks with country income and urban or rural location) and would be expected to account for differences in socioeconomic factors across intake categories. Additional analyses adjusting for other measures of socioeconomic status (household wealth or income) did not alter the results. Despite this, it is possible that high consumption of carbohydrate and low consumption of animal products might reflect lower incomes and residual confounding of our results cannot be completely excluded. We were unable to quantify separately the types of carbohydrate (refined vs whole grains) consumed. However, carbohydrate consumption in low-income and middle-income countries is mainly from refined sources. Fifth, we were unable to measure trans-fat intake which might affect our results, especially our replacement analyses. Lastly, our FFQ assessed polyunsaturated fatty acid intake mainly from foods, rather than from vegetable oils, which might have different health effects than those observed in our study. |
If you're hitting the road for Thanksgiving, here's some advice on travel, including tips on airport parking and information on wait and arrival times.
A just-released travel forecast by AAA predicts Thanksgiving 2016 will see the the most travel since 2007, with a 1.9 percent increase in travelers, and the highest volume of airline travelers in eight years. One million more Americans are expected to travel this Thanksgiving than 2015. Based on AAA.com bookings, the top 5 destinations will be Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego, Orlando, and New York.
Of course, you already know to check with your airline for flight departure/arrival status prior to arriving at the airport. That goes without saying. Carry-on items are limited to one small bag and one personal item such as a camera, laptop, briefcase, or purse.
Dallas Love Field
Dallas Love Field has many spots under construction; as a result, many areas have been changed. You'll want to give yourself time to get acquainted with new locations and directions.
Regarding arrival times, you should arrive at least one-and-a-half to two hours before your flight, to allow time for parking, check-in, baggage check, security, and any unplanned events, especially during peak hours.
Drop-off and curbside check-in for all Southwest Airlines' passengers is on the upper roadway in front of the Ticketing/Check-In on Herb Kelleher Way (formerly Cedar Springs Road).
Pickup for all arriving passengers is in front of Baggage Claim on the upper roadway on Herb Kelleher Way. Who knew that Cedar Springs Road inside the airport is now called Herb Kelleher Way? Already, this is new information.
Use the Cell Phone Waiting Lot when picking up travelers. It is located on airport property as you approach the terminal, right before the valet parking lot. You can wait there until your passenger calls for pickup at the curb. But parking or waiting curbside is not allowed. Dallas police will be on-site to control traffic and curb monitoring. Vehicles parked in unauthorized areas will be towed.
Parking garages A and B offer the first 30 minutes of parking for free. After that, charges apply; see Dallas-LoveField.com/parking. To avoid theft, don't forget the old "Hide, Lock, and Take." Hide your belongings. Lock your car. Take your keys. If you own a truck, be sure to lock or secure the tailgate.
Pickup for taxis, limousines, transportation network companies, and for-hire shuttles is located on the lower level curbside.
Additional travel and airport information can be obtained by visiting one of the three information booths in the terminal lobby, baggage claim, and the concessions village. There's a concessions village? That is more new information.
Public transportation options to Love Field are now limited to DART’s Inwood/Love Field station. You need to take a shuttle bus, Route 524, to get there from the airport. It's a free shuttle that operates every day from approximately 5:30 am to 1 am. For schedule and fare information, visit www.DART.org/LoveField.
The airport recommends you consider any option other than driving to the airport, due to the volume of vehicles during the holidays. That includes DART, taxis, shuttle services, and transportation network companies (Lyft, Uber, Wingz, etc.). Although from personal experience, some of those can be sketchy; one time, one of the shuttle companies just plain blew me off and I had to call a taxi at the very last minute.
The airport also suggests having someone pick you up or drop you off, which is easy for them to say; apparently the airport has better friends than I.
For more information, call the airport communication center at 214-670-5683 or email at [email protected].
DFW Airport
From November 18 through November 29, 2016, approximately two million passengers are anticipated to travel through DFW Airport to their final Thanksgiving destination.
Arrive at DFW at least two hours before your departure time to ensure ample time to park, check-in, clear security, and arrive at your departure gate.
The airport is kicking off Thanksgiving travel season on November 23, by offering a week of free Terminal Parking. The first 1,000 cars that enter through specially marked parking plaza lanes starting at 6 am on November 23 will be given parking vouchers. They can be used by travelers entering Terminal Parking between November 23-27. The promotion runs a maximum of seven days after date of entry through 11:59 pm on December 4.
Normal parking rates will apply following those seven days.
DFW Airport has new shopping and dining options throughout its five terminals, including the new Univision Travel Shop and Whitetail Bistro in Terminal D; and Lorena Garcia Tapas y Cocina in Terminal A.
To easily access flight information and notifications, travelers are encouraged to download DFW’s Mobile App and sync it with their Apple watch. Does everyone have an Apple watch?
Parking options include valet, terminal, express, and remote parking.
To speed up the security process, you can join programs such as TSA Pre✓ or Global Entry, available from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the US Customs and Border Protection, respectively. Click on the links to enroll.
Pack lightly and remember 3-1-1: Liquids should be in containers of no more than three ounces, packaged in a one-quart bag, with no more than one bag allowed per person. Leave gifts unwrapped to ensure swift inspection at security checkpoints.
DART schedules
Look for schedule changes on November 24-25; Regular scheduled transit service resumes on Saturday November 26. The changes include: |
If you’ve ever created a custom plugin in WordPress, you should be familiar with the standard plugin header code. The information set in your plugin header is displayed under the Plugins admin menu in WordPress shown below:
There is a lesser known piece of information that can be defined in your plugin header that tells WordPress to only show your plugin on the WordPress Multisite Network Plugins page. This will hide your plugin from being displayed and activated at the site level in WordPress Multisite. To only allow your plugin to show at the Network Plugins level, simply add this one line to your plugin header code:
Network: true
Easy, right? Let’s look at an example comparing a standard plugin header with a network only plugin header.
Standard Plugin Header:
/* Plugin Name: My Awesome Plugin Plugin URI: http://webdevstudios.com/support/wordpress-plugins/ Description: This is my extremely awesome WordPress plugin Version: 1.0 Author: Brad Williams Author URI: http://webdevstudios.com License: GPLv2 */
Network Only Plugin Header:
/* Plugin Name: My Awesome Plugin Plugin URI: http://webdevstudios.com/support/wordpress-plugins/ Description: This is my extremely awesome WordPress plugin Version: 1.0 Author: Brad Williams Author URI: http://webdevstudios.com License: GPLv2 Network: True */
Using this method you can be sure your WordPress plugin will only be network activated in Multisite. |
How scientists could use brain scans to detect whether you are a racist
Brain scans show differences in the way people with negative racial attitudes perceive black and white faces
Tell-tale signs: This graphic highlights the facial-recognition area of the brain which researchers say can reveal whether subjects are racist
Brain scans could soon be used to detect whether or not people are racist, scientists say.
Researchers found that brain scans were able to pick up on differences in the way that people with implicit negative racial attitudes viewed black and white faces.
Racial stereotypes have previously been shown to have subtle and unintended consequences on how we treat members of different race groups.
But the new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows race biases also increase differences in the brain's representations of faces.
Psychologists Tobias Brosch of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and Eyal Bar-David and Elizabeth Phelps of New York University examined activity in the brain while participants looked at pictures of White and Black faces.
Afterwards, participants performed a task that assessed their unconscious or implicit expression of race attitudes.
By examining patterns of brain activity in the fusiform face area — a brain area involved in face perception — the researchers were able to predict the race of the person that the participant was viewing, but only for those participants with stronger, negative implicit race attitudes.
This, the researchers said, implies that people with stronger, negative implicit race attitudes may actually perceive black and white faces to look more different than others who held no such prejudice.
All in the mind: By examining patterns of brain activity in the fusiform face area researchers were able to predict the race of the person participants with stronger racial biases were viewing Striking: This graph from the paper shows the correlation between subjects implicit racism and the ability to detect whether they were looking at black or white faces from their brain scans
CAN DRESSING SMARTLY MAKE BLACK PEOPLE LOOK 'WHITER'?
Clothing, it seems, can make us colour blind, because whether we perceive someone as ‘white’ or ‘black’ depends not just on skin tone – but also how smartly they are dressed, according to researchers.
Volunteers in a U.S. study tended to label someone as white if they were dressed in a suit – even if the face had dark skin – and labelled someone black if they were dressed in working overalls.
In the study, conducted by a team of researchers from Tufts University, Stanford University and the University of California, participants, of various races, were shown a series of computerised faces, with different skin colours and clothing.
Some wore business attire and some working overalls - similar to what a caretaker might wear.
Not only were the faces dressed in suits more likely to be seen as white, and those in scruffier clothes black, but even when a white face was dressed down, the volunteers’ hand movements showed that they were at first instinctively drawn to labelling it black.
The scientists claimed that perception of race is shaped by prejudices that we already hold - and that racism runs deeper than we think.
Dr Brosch said that 'these results suggest it may be possible to predict differences in implicit race bias at the individual level using brain data.'
However, Dr Phelps said further work would be needed before the technique could reliably detect whether people really were racists.
'Although these findings may be of interest given the behavioural and societal implications of race bias, our ability to predict race bias based on brain data is relatively modest at this time,' she said.
The new study further deepens the scientific understanding of the processes in the brain that lie behind the racist attitudes that some people hold.
Previous research by Dr Phelps has claimed that racism could be 'hard wired' into the brain, since the neural circuits which allow people to recognise ethnic groups overlap with others that drive emotional decisions.
Because of that, the researchers claimed, it's possible that even people who believe themselves to be egalitarian could harbour racist attitudes without knowing.
The findings published last summer in the journal Nature Neuroscience could lead to fresh ways of thinking about unintended race-based attitudes and decisions.
Dr Phelps and colleagues reviewed previous brain scanning studies showing how social categories of race are processed, evaluated and incorporated in decision-making.
They showed a network of brain regions called the the amygdala, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex are important in the unintentional, implicit expression of racial attitudes. |
Trust me, Abbott is a PM without power
Posted
John Howard had a reputation for being a "safe pair of hands" before he started trashing his promises. Tony Abbott didn't have that clout, so the backlash was swift, writes Tim Dunlop.
Tony Abbott remains in office but he is no longer in power. I don't think I'm exaggerating in saying that.
Political power in a democracy derives from the consent of the governed - as the political scientists say - and voters only give their consent when they trust. I think it is fair to say that most people no longer trust Abbott.
Politicians can obviously survive broken promises, but Abbott's first budget has taken us into new territory.
A comparison with his old boss, John Howard, is instructive.
Howard came to power in 1996 with a high level of public trust. He had been around so long that most people thought they understood his motivations and his world view.
So even when he went all "core" and "non-core" on his election promises, people wore it because, to a large extent, they accepted his reasoning.
In those days it was pretty common to hear that Howard was "a safe pair of hands". So even though voters weren't thrilled with the broken promises, they still trusted him to do the right thing by the country. Even to those who didn't trust him, his authority was clear.
It took a few more terms of government for Howard to completely throw away that goodwill.
A report prepared inside his own party in 2001 branded him as "mean and tricky" and out of touch. Then came the "children overboard" fiasco and significantly, the deceptions around Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. To top it all off, there was WorkChoices.
By 2007, John Howard had so thoroughly trashed his brand that he not only lost government, he lost his own seat, becoming only the second prime minister in history to suffer that ignominy.
Losing the election had a lot to do with the rise of Kevin Rudd. Losing his seat was entirely down to Howard himself.
Yes, as the saying has it, all political careers end in failure, but at least Howard had success along the way.
Abbott, on the other hand, came to office without any of Howard's trust ballast. The media might have curled up in his lap after christening him the greatest opposition leader ever, but he was never popular.
Like Howard, he was a known quantity, but not in a good way.
Abbott's victory in 2013 was a classic case of the truism that says governments lose elections, oppositions don't win them.
All through the Howard years, Abbott was never considered a leadership contender (not even remotely), and even after they lost power in 2007, Abbott's elevation was more or less accidental. It only came after the party had burned through two other leaders (three if you count the fact that Peter Costello, the heir apparent, spat the dummy and ran back to Toorak).
Abbott's victory in 2013 was a classic case of the truism that says governments lose elections, oppositions don't win them.
What's more, I think it is fair to say that it was Abbott's poor standing with the electorate that caused him to overcompensate with his promises. On some basic level, he understood that people didn't trust him and so he went into absolute overdrive to assure people that he was, at the very least, preferable to Julia Gillard whom sections of the media had tirelessly constructed as "Juliar".
All the hand-on-heart promises and reassurances he gave as opposition leader went well beyond the normal level of campaigning and entered into a sort of pathological zone of desperation.
This is why the broken promises are currently doing him so much damage.
It is not because people are shocked that a politician has gone back on his word, but because in going back on his word, Abbott has reinforced the negative view that people had of him anyway, the one he was compensating for in making the promises in the first place.
Still, there is more to it than broken promises. There is the fact that the specifics of what he has done are worse than most people ever dared imagine.
He has delivered a budget that not only breaks faith with his pre-election promises - in a way that is breathtaking for even the most hardened of political cynics - but that breaks faith with what I call the founding myth of Australian society, a commitment to egalitarianism and the fair go.
Back in March 2013, I wrote a piece that suggested that the Australian consensus on a fair go may no longer be shared by a significant section of the political class, and I worried about what an incoming Abbott Government would do.
One of the reader comments on that story said this:
A poor article ... A commitment to a fair go and egalitarianism will continue to be a part of Australian society. To suggest otherwise is hysterical.
I'm sure many people felt the same way. It was inconceivable that any government would attack the pillars of Australia's self-understanding. But that's exactly what this budget does.
As any number of expert analysts have shown (see this, for example), the burden of this Government's restructuring falls on those at the lower end of the income and wealth scales.
Budget measures are, by and large, designed not just to hit lower and middle-income families, but specifically to insulate the rich from much of the pain. And as Ross Gittins puts it:
Don't think just because you voted for the Coalition Hockey is looking after you.
Howard took four full terms as prime minister to completely ruin his reputation for honesty. Abbott has done it in less than one full year. How could anyone be so clumsy?
The answer lies in authority.
Both inside and outside the party, Abbott draws on very shallow reservoirs of support. This in turn is related to the fact that the Coalition itself no longer connects with a significant "base".
This is why our politics has become more and more an exercise in media management than in policy commitment. And that situation is made worse by the fact that the media itself has fractured beyond repair and thus mirrors the political sphere in its lack of authority.
Such a situation does not lend itself to long-term planning. It lends itself to short-term shock-and-awe tactics. When you sense the precariousness of your grip on power, you want to shake things up as quickly as possible, to try to alter the landscape radically while you can.
That's why this budget feels like WorkChoices for everything.
Howard waited for three terms and a favourable Senate before he dared try anything like that. I sincerely doubt that Abbott, even on his best day, thinks he will last that long, and so there is no time to waste.
Of course, none of this means he will necessarily be replaced as Leader of the Liberal Party (and therefore as PM) or even that he will lose the next election.
Why? Because the same lack of authority that plagues Abbott and the Coalition also applies to Bill Shorten and the ALP.
Which is why an argument you will hear a lot is that governments can afford a tough budget early in their term, even if they break promises, because it leaves them two more years in which to repair the damage, show that the pain was worth it, and soften the blows closer to the next election.
That's true, but so egregious is Abbott's break of faith with the electorate that the conventional wisdom may not hold, just as it almost didn't hold in 2010 when, after only one term in power, Labor was forced to rely on independents and minor parties to form government.
Are we therefore heading for a hung parliament? I have no idea, but one thing you can be sure of is that if we are, the anti-politician/post-politics position that is likely to resonate powerfully in the electorate is all but owned by Clive Palmer.
Both Abbott and Shorten should be scared to death.
Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. You can follow him on Twitter. View his full profile here.
Topics: government-and-politics, abbott-tony |
I've been playing Pokémon games all my life since Pokémon Red and Blue when I was younger. I appreciate every game that they release and love everything down to the minor changes. That's just me though. The games are pretty similar to the original Sun and Moon, however, there are a few new things added like the Ultra Recon Squad, and there are new Pokémon to collect, although only a handful. Though, that has never happened in any Pokémon game before that. Every time they've done an "upgraded" version if you will, we've only seen new forms, like in Pokémon Black and White 2. Anyway, I'm not much of a great reviewer, but I can say if you are a Pokémon fan you'll probably enjoy these games. The end to the 3DS era, and on to the Nintendo Switch!
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Significance During communication, social ostensive signals (like gaze) are exchanged in a temporally contingent manner. Synchronized behavior creates social connectedness within human dyads, and even infants synchronize behaviorally with adults. However, the neural mechanisms that support infant–adult synchronization are unknown. Here, we provide evidence that infants up-regulate neural synchronization with adult partners when offered direct ostensive gaze, as compared with gaze aversion. Gaze therefore brings infant–adult neural activity into mutual alignment, creating a joint-networked state that may facilitate communicative success. Further, infants’ own communicative attempts were positively associated with adults’ neural synchronization to them, indicating mutual regulation of synchronization within infant–adult dyads. Thus, interpersonal neural synchronization may provide a mechanism by which infants construct their own earliest social networks.
Abstract When infants and adults communicate, they exchange social signals of availability and communicative intention such as eye gaze. Previous research indicates that when communication is successful, close temporal dependencies arise between adult speakers’ and listeners’ neural activity. However, it is not known whether similar neural contingencies exist within adult–infant dyads. Here, we used dual-electroencephalography to assess whether direct gaze increases neural coupling between adults and infants during screen-based and live interactions. In experiment 1 (n = 17), infants viewed videos of an adult who was singing nursery rhymes with (i) direct gaze (looking forward), (ii) indirect gaze (head and eyes averted by 20°), or (iii) direct-oblique gaze (head averted but eyes orientated forward). In experiment 2 (n = 19), infants viewed the same adult in a live context, singing with direct or indirect gaze. Gaze-related changes in adult–infant neural network connectivity were measured using partial directed coherence. Across both experiments, the adult had a significant (Granger) causal influence on infants’ neural activity, which was stronger during direct and direct-oblique gaze relative to indirect gaze. During live interactions, infants also influenced the adult more during direct than indirect gaze. Further, infants vocalized more frequently during live direct gaze, and individual infants who vocalized longer also elicited stronger synchronization from the adult. These results demonstrate that direct gaze strengthens bidirectional adult–infant neural connectivity during communication. Thus, ostensive social signals could act to bring brains into mutual temporal alignment, creating a joint-networked state that is structured to facilitate information transfer during early communication and learning.
Temporally contingent social interactions between adults and infants play a vital role in supporting early learning across multiple domains of language, cognition, and socioemotional development (1, 2). Infants rely heavily on the temporal dynamics of facial cues such as eye contact and gaze direction to infer intention, meaning, and causality (3⇓–5), which is unsurprising given that infants’ early visual experience is heavily composed of faces (6). Of all cues, direct gaze is thought to be one of the most salient ostensive signals in human communication for conveying communicative intent (4). Gaze also acts to release and reinforce infants’ own social responses such as smiling and vocalization (7, 8). From birth, infants prefer to look at pictures of faces with direct gaze over averted gaze (9). By 4 mo, direct gaze elicits a larger amplitude in the face-sensitive N170 event-related potential (ERP) relative to averted gaze (10), which suggests that gaze also enhances infants’ neural processing of face-related information.
Social Synchronization Through Gaze in Communication According to the social brain hypothesis, human brains have fundamentally evolved for group living (11). Social connectedness is created when group members act jointly (e.g., synchronously) or contingently (e.g., turn-taking) with each other (12). Even infants show synchronization with their adult caregivers, and adult–infant temporal contingencies have long been observed in behavioral and physiological domains. For example, patterns of temporally synchronous activity between parent and child during social interaction have been noted for gaze (13), vocalizations (14), affect (15), autonomic arousal (16, 17), and hormones (18). The synchronization of gaze (through mutual gaze and gaze-following) is thought to foster social connectedness between infants and adults (19). Previous research has also suggested that infants, like adults (20), show neural synchronization (or phase-locking) of cortical oscillatory activity to temporal structures in auditory signals (21). However, adult–infant behavioral and physiological synchronization is typically observed over much slower timescales (e.g., minutes or seconds) than neural synchronization (tens or hundreds of milliseconds). Thus, it remains to be seen whether neural synchronization also develops between infants and adults during social interaction and if/how such neural coupling is related to social synchronizing signals like gaze. Recently, researchers have begun to examine the neural mechanisms that support the contingency (temporal dependency) of one partner’s neural activity with respect to the other during social interactions (see refs. 22 and 23 for reviews). This work has revealed that during verbal communication (especially face-to-face communication, which permits mutual gaze), adult speaker–listener pairs develop synchronous patterns of activity between brain regions such as the inferior frontal gyrus, prefrontal, and parietal cortices (24, 25). Further, the strength of speaker–listener neural synchronization predicts communication success (26). Thus, in adults, effective communication involves the mutual alignment of brain activity, as well as the temporal alignment of behavior (e.g., conversational turn-taking and mutual gaze). However, to our knowledge, no previous research has yet investigated whether infants’ neural activity also shows contingency on an adult partner’s neural activity and whether gaze acts as a neural synchronization cue during adult–infant communication.
Gaze-Cuing of Interpersonal Neural Synchronization Here, we assessed whether the temporal dependency (synchronization) between adult and infant neural signals differed between direct and indirect gaze. Two experiments were performed to assess gaze-cuing of interpersonal synchronization in video and live modalities, respectively. In experiment 1, infants watched a prerecorded video of an experimenter singing nursery rhymes. Patterns of temporal dependency were assessed between infants’ neural activity recorded “live” and adult’s prerecorded neural activity (Fig. 1). We manipulated the adult speaker’s gaze to be either direct to the infant, indirect (head averted at a 20° angle), or direct-oblique (head averted but eyes toward the infant). The direct-oblique condition was included to control for the side view of the face that was presented during indirect gaze and to preclude the possibility that infants were responding to superficial visual differences between stimuli. In experiment 2, which used an entirely separate cohort, infants listened live to an adult reciting nursery rhymes while she presented direct or indirect gaze to the infant. Partial directed coherence (27), a statistical measure of Granger causality (28), was used to measure gaze-related changes in interpersonal neural synchronization within the adult–infant dyadic social network. Fig. 1. Illustration of experimental protocols and connectivity analysis. (A) In experiment 1, infants viewed a video screen showing an experimenter reciting nursery rhymes. Three gaze conditions were presented interleaved: direct, indirect (head averted by 20°), and direct-oblique (head averted by 20°, direct gaze). The infant’s live EEG was compared with the adult’s prerecorded EEG. (B) In experiment 2, infant and adult sat opposite each other. Direct and indirect gaze (head averted by 20°) conditions were presented. (C) The adult–infant network comprised left (L) and right (R) electrodes each from the infant and adult. Interpersonal neural connectivity was assessed across all pairwise connections between electrodes using partial directed coherence. (D) Examples of infant and adult EEG data, which were analyzed within Theta (3–6 Hz) and Alpha (6–9 Hz) bands.
Predictions In terms of affect and physiological changes, research has shown that the influence of infants and parents on one another is bidirectional (29, 30). Accordingly, we predicted that (i) significant neural coupling would exist between adults and infants during social interaction, (ii) direct (and direct-oblique) gaze would both be associated with higher interpersonal neural connectivity than indirect gaze, and (iii) in experiment 1 (video), only unidirectional [adult-to-infant (A → I)] coupling would be observed, but in experiment 2 (live), bidirectional [adult-to-infant (A → I) and infant-to-adult (I → A)] coupling would be observed. Further, as temporally contingent social interactions with adults are known to facilitate infants’ own vocalizations (8, 31), we predicted that infants’ vocalization efforts would be greater during direct than indirect gaze.
Results Gaze Modulation of Interpersonal Neural Connectivity. General Partial Directed Coherence (GPDC) measures the degree of influence that each electrode channel directly has on every other electrode channel in the network (27). Here, GPDC values were computed for real and surrogate (shuffled) data, for all nonself channel pairs (connections), for each participant dyad, for each gaze condition, and in Theta and Alpha EEG bands (Fig. 1 C and D). In the subsequent network diagrams (Figs. 2 and 3), only connections whose GPDC values significantly exceeded their surrogate threshold are plotted. A breakdown of GPDC values for each neural connection is provided in SI Appendix, section 1 (SI Appendix, Tables S1 and S2). Here we focus our analysis on mean A → I and I → A connectivity. Fig. 2. (Left) Network depiction of experiment 1 Theta (3–6 Hz, Top) and Alpha (6–9 Hz, Bottom) connectivity, plotting GPDC values for direct (Left), indirect (Middle), and direct-oblique gaze (Right) conditions. Nodes represent C3 (L) and C4 (R) electrodes for adult (A) and infant (I). Arrows indicate the direction and strength of connectivity (higher GPDC value, thicker arrow). Connections that do not significantly exceed the surrogate threshold are excluded. (Right) Grand mean GPDC values averaged across all adult-to-infant (A → I) connections for Theta (Top) and Alpha (Bottom) in direct (D), indirect (I), and direct-oblique (D-O) gaze conditions. Error bars show the SEM. *P < 0.05. Fig. 3. (Left) Network depiction of experiment 2 Theta (3–6 Hz, Top) and Alpha (6–9 Hz, Bottom) connectivity, plotting GPDC values for direct (Left) and indirect (Right) gaze conditions. Nodes represent C3 (L) and C4 (R) electrodes for adult (A) and infant (I). Arrows indicate the direction and strength of connectivity (higher GPDC value, thicker arrow). Connections that do not significantly exceed the surrogate threshold are excluded. (Right) Grand mean GPDC values averaged across all adult-to-infant (A → I, Left) and infant-to-adult (I → A, Right) connections for Theta (Top) and Alpha (Bottom) in direct (D) and indirect (I) gaze conditions. Error bars show the SEM. *P < 0.05. Experiment 1: Video. Only unidirectional A → I connectivity was observed in experiment 1; no significant I → A connectivity was detected (Fig. 2). This confirmed the validity of the GPDC measure as infants could not have affected the adult’s prerecorded neural activity. Dunnett’s tests revealed that, as predicted, A → I connectivity was (i) significantly stronger for direct > indirect gaze in both Theta and Alpha bands (P < 0.01 and P < 0.05, respectively, one-tailed) and (ii) significantly stronger for direct-oblique > indirect gaze in both Theta and Alpha bands (P < 0.0001 for both, one-tailed). However, while connectivity in the direct and direct-oblique conditions was not significantly different in the Theta band (P = 0.30) as predicted, for the Alpha band a significant difference between these conditions was observed (direct-oblique > direct, P < 0.01). Experiment 2: Live. During the live experiment, bidirectional connectivity was observed with significant A → I as well as I → A influences (Fig. 3). Regarding A → I connectivity, consistent with experiment 1, Dunnett’s tests revealed that the adult's influence on infants was significantly stronger for direct > indirect gaze in both Theta and Alpha bands (P < 0.05 and P < 0.0001, respectively, one-tailed). For I → A connectivity, Dunnett's tests indicated that infants' influence on the adult was likewise significantly stronger for direct > indirect gaze in both Theta and Alpha bands (P < 0.01 and P < 0.05, respectively, one-tailed). Infant Vocalization Analysis. For experiment 1 (video), there was no difference in the number of infant vocalizations (summed over all categories) between gaze conditions (means: direct = 8.2 per infant, indirect = 7.4, direct-oblique = 7.1), F(2, 32) = 0.29, P = 0.75, η2 p = 0.02. There was also no difference in the duration of vocalizations across gaze conditions (means: direct = 0.69 s per utterance, indirect = 0.82 s, direct-oblique = 0.70 s), F(2, 24) = 0.37, P = 0.70, η2 p = 0.03. However, for experiment 2 (live), we observed a significantly higher number of vocalizations during direct gaze (mean 6.3 per infant) than indirect gaze (mean 5.0 per infant), t(18) = 2.41, P < 0.05, but no difference in the duration of vocalizations (mean: direct = 0.80 s per utterance, indirect = 0.85 s), t(15) = −0.79, P = 0.44. Further, during experiment 2 (live), individual differences in infants’ vocalization durations were significantly associated with their I → A GPDC values [r = 0.67, P < 0.05, Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate (FDR) corrected] (32) (see Fig. 4). However, this correlation only emerged during direct gaze and was absent for indirect gaze (r = 0.07, P = 0.78). Therefore, infants who produced longer vocalizations also influenced the adult more strongly—but only when she offered direct gaze. SI Appendix, section 2 provides further analyses of infants’ vocalizations. Fig. 4. Scatterplots showing the correlation between (n = 19) individual infants’ mean infant-to-adult GPDC value (averaged across Theta and Alpha bands, x axis), and their vocalization duration (y axis) in experiment 2. Left and Right show direct and indirect gaze conditions, respectively. *P < 0.05 (Benjamini–Hochberg FDR corrected).
Discussion Temporally contingent social interactions between adults and infants scaffold early learning and development. Here, we tested the hypothesis that gaze acts as an interpersonal neural synchronization cue between dyadic (adult–infant) partners. Two experiments were performed to assess the effect of direct speaker gaze on interpersonal synchronization using video (experiment 1) and live (experiment 2) modalities. Across both experiments, significant neural coupling between infants and adults was observed during social interaction, relative to rigorous control analyses that accounted for nonspecific neural coupling. Adult–infant neural coupling was observed consistently across video and live presentation formats, using two separate cohorts of infants. Further, during unidirectional interactions in experiment 1 (i.e., infants watching a prerecorded adult speaker), the adult had a significant influence on infants’ neural activity, but (as expected) infants had no influence on the adult’s neural activity. Conversely, during live (bidirectional) social interactions (experiment 2), there were significant and bidirectional patterns of influence between adult and infant. Across both experiments, we consistently observed that direct gaze produced higher interpersonal neural synchronization than indirect gaze in both Theta and Alpha frequency bands. Further, in experiment 2 (live), the synchronizing effect of gaze was observed bidirectionally: During direct gaze, the adult had a stronger influence on the infant, and the infant also had a stronger influence on the adult. This gaze-related increase in synchronization was not due to power differences in the EEG spectra, nor was it a metaphenomenon of changes in basic sensory processing of the speech signal (which remained unchanged across gaze conditions). In experiment 1, we further showed that the gaze effect was not driven by superficial visual differences in the stimuli, since direct-oblique stimuli were visually similar to indirect stimuli but produced greater synchronization. It was also not the case that infants were more inattentive during indirect gaze, as infants looked just as long at indirect and direct-oblique stimuli in experiment 1 and at indirect and direct stimuli in experiment 2. Therefore, the increased interpersonal neural synchronization produced by direct gaze appears to reflect stronger mutual oscillatory phase alignment between adult and infant. A Mechanism for Interpersonal Neural Synchronization. One mechanism that might mediate this effect is mutual phase resetting in response to salient social signals. The phase of cortical oscillations (the neural feature used in GPDC computations) reflects the excitability of underlying neuronal populations to incoming sensory stimulation (33). Sensory information arriving during high-receptivity periods is more likely to be encoded than information arriving during low-receptivity periods. Consequently, neuronal oscillations have been proposed to be a mechanism for temporal sampling of the environment (20). Specifically, salient events are thought to reset the phase of ongoing neuronal oscillations to match the temporal structure of these events and optimize their encoding (33). Consequently, interpersonal neural synchronization could increase within a dyad during the course of social interaction because each partner is continuously producing salient social signals (such as gaze, gestures, or vocalizations) that act as synchronization triggers to reset the phase of his or her partner’s ongoing oscillations. As a result, infants’ most receptive periods become well-aligned to adults’ speech temporal patterns (e.g., prosodic stress and syllable patterns) (34), optimizing communicative efficiency. This mechanism could also allow slow-varying behavioral synchronization signals (like gaze) to hierarchically control fast-varying neural synchronization between partners (33). Direct Gaze Supports Communication Through Synchronization. Our findings suggest that direct gaze from the adult may reset the phase of infants’ oscillations to align with that of the adults’, thereby increasing mutual synchronization (i.e., stronger A → I connectivity). One aspect of our results was, however, unpredicted. In experiment 1, we had predicted an equal effect for direct and direct-oblique gaze, yet we found that Alpha neural synchrony was higher for direct-oblique than direct gaze. One possible explanation for this is that infants are less frequently exposed to direct eye contact when the speaker’s head is averted, which could therefore present greater novelty. However, infants did not look for longer at the speaker during the direct-oblique condition relative to the direct gaze condition, which is inconsistent with this explanation. A second potential explanation is that the direct-oblique condition provided a stronger intentional ostensive cue because the speaker’s gaze was intentionally forward while her face and body were averted. This predicts that social cues that are perceived as the most intentional will produce the strongest increases in interpersonal connectivity. Further, since phase resetting optimizes information transfer between dyadic partners (33), stronger intentional signals could produce more effective phase resetting, which would increase the potential for mutual communication and learning within the dyad. Future work should investigate this hypothesis in more detail. As observed in previous studies (8), we also found that infants vocalized more frequently toward the adult during live direct gaze (when interpersonal synchronization was higher) than indirect gaze. Further, individual infants who vocalized for longer under live direct gaze also had stronger neural connectivity with their adult partner (i.e., stronger I → A connectivity), even during segments when no vocalizations were occurring. One possible reason for this could be that infants’ vocalizations (which were communicative signals to the adult and could potentially trigger phase resetting) acted as a social feedback mechanism to positively reinforce and sustain dyadic synchronicity (8, 31, 35). Our present findings may offer the potential for integrating three separate strands of research into early learning: first, research that has pointed to the importance of eye gaze as an ostensive cue during learning (3); second, research into the importance of contingent social feedback, which is thought to energize early learning (31); and third, research into the role of bidirectional parent–child synchrony in structuring and scaffolding learning experiences (36). Phase resetting due to synchronization triggers that are more prevalent during mutual than indirect gaze may, potentially, offer the means for providing contingent feedback (in which the child responds to the parent, and vice versa) within the framework of the periodic oscillatory activity that structures and scaffolds early learning (36). Over longer time frames, infants’ neural synchrony with adults may also offer an implicit mechanism for learning adult-like response patterns via entrainment.
Limitations and Conclusion Our results converge with previous dual functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) studies (24, 37) where greater frontal neural synchronization between adults was observed during eye contact. However, one limitation of the current work is that due to the adult’s speech production artifacts, only two EEG channels, C3 and C4, could be analyzed from each individual. Thus, unlike the fNIRS studies, we were unable to make inferences about the potential neural sources of these effects. A second limitation of the current work is that, by excluding a large proportion of infants’ “active” data by technical necessity, this could present a selective view of the neural dynamics underlying adult–infant engagement. Nonetheless, the current data are still valuable in providing insight into adult–infant neural coupling during social communication. The current study demonstrates that adults and infants show significant mutual neural coupling during social interactions and that direct gaze strengthens adult–infant neural connectivity in both directions during communication. Further, live gaze appeared to stimulate infants’ own communicative efforts, which could help to reinforce dyadic synchronization. Thus, gaze and speech act as cues for interpersonal synchronization. The contingent exchange of these social signals acts to bring adults’ and infants’ brains into temporal alignment, creating a joint-networked state that is structured to optimize information transfer during communication and learning.
Acknowledgments This research was funded by a UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Transforming Social Sciences Grant ES/N006461/1 (to V.L. and S.W.), a Lucy Cavendish College Junior Research Fellowship (to V.L.), Nanyang Technological University start-up Grant M4081585.SS0 (to V.L.), and a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship and ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship ES/N017560/1 (to S.W.).
Footnotes Author contributions: V.L. and S.W. designed research; V.L., E.B., K.C., and S.G. performed research; V.L., S.G., S.L., and S.W. analyzed data; and V.L. and S.W. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. U.H. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1702493114/-/DCSupplemental. |
The preliminary report on Saturday's Air Evac helicopter crash has been filed by the NTSB and it indicates the pilot had aborted the first attempt to land. And when he tipped the nose over to get air speed, the helicopter entered a violent right turn.He reported it was the fastest he had even spun and he told the crew to hold on and he was going to try to fly out of it. But he said he could not get control despite applying more left pedal torque and the copter continued to spin. It spun 5 times before crashing and exploding.The patient on board died, and Wednesday the flight nurse died at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The pilot was treated at United Regional, and another crew member remains at Parkland Hospital.The pilot reported no problems before the landing attempt and said the engine had plenty of power and was operating normally. The pilot said he punched the windshield out to escape the burning craft.He said he heard no unusual noises before "the tail coming out from underneath them" and did not hear or see any warning horns or lights. The report also reveals the crash was recorded on a hospital surveillance camera.The full report is below:
NTSB Identification: CEN15FA003
Nonscheduled 14 CFR Part 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
Accident occurred Saturday, October 04, 2014 in Wichita Falls, TX
Aircraft: BELL HELICOPTER TEXTRON 206L 1, registration: N335AE
Injuries: 2 Fatal,2 Serious.
This is preliminary information, subject to change, and may contain errors. Any errors in this report will be corrected when the final report has been completed. NTSB investigators either traveled in support of this investigation or conducted a significant amount of investigative work without any travel, and used data obtained from various sources to prepare this aircraft accident report.
On October 4, 2014, about 0155 central daylight time, N335AE, a Bell 206L1+, was destroyed by post-impact fire after it impacted terrain while on approach to the United Regional Hospital helipad, in Wichita Falls, Texas. The commercial pilot and the paramedic were seriously injured and the flight nurse and patient were killed. The helicopter was registered to and operated by Air Evac EMS, Inc, O'Fallon, Missouri. A company visual flight rules flight plan was filed for the patient transfer flight that departed Jackson County Hospital, near Waurika, Oklahoma, about 0133. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed for the air medical flight conducted under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 135.
According to the pilot, he stated that he and his Duncan, Oklahoma, based medical crew had just returned from a flight to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, when he received a call from company dispatch to pick-up a patient in Waurika and transport him to United Regional Hospital in Wichita Falls. The pilot accepted the flight, but told dispatch that they needed 15 minutes on the ground to prepare for the flight since they had just landed.
The pilot said that he, along with the paramedic and flight nurse, re-boarded the helicopter, performed the necessary checklists, called dispatch and filed a flight plan. The flight to Waurika was uneventful. After landing, the pilot stayed in the helicopter for about 20 minutes with the engine running while the patient was prepped and loaded. The pilot and medical crew then departed for Wichita Falls. The weather was clear and the wind was three knots or less. Upon arriving in Wichita Falls, the pilot said he performed a "high recon" of United Regional Hospital's helipad and called out his intentions to land. He performed the pre-landing checklists, and started the approach to the helipad from the northwest at an altitude of 700 feet above ground level (agl). Both of the hospital's lighted windsocks were "limp" but were positioned so they were pointing toward the northwest. The pilot, who had landed at this helipad on numerous occasions, said the approach was normal until he got closer to the helipad. He said he felt fast "about 12-15 knots" and a "little high," so he decided to abort the approach. At this point, with about ¼ to ½ -inch of left anti-torque pedal applied, he added power, "tipped the nose over to get airspeed," and "pulled collective." The pilot said that as soon as he brought the collective up, the helicopter entered a rapid right turn. He described the turn as "violent" and that it was the fastest he had ever "spun" in a helicopter. The pilot told the crew to hold on and that he was "going to try and fly out of it." The pilot said he tried hard to get control of the helicopter by applying cyclic and initially "some" left anti-torque pedal "but nothing happened." The pilot said he added more, but not full left anti-torque pedal as the helicopter continued to spin and he was still unable to regain control. He also said the engine had plenty of power and was operating fine. The pilot recalled the helicopter spinning at least five times before impacting the ground. The pilot said the helicopter landed inverted and quickly filled up with smoke. He unbuckled his seatbelt assembly, took off his helmet, punched out the windshield and exited the burning helicopter.
The pilot also said that he did not hear any unusual noises prior to the "tail coming out from underneath them" and did not recall hearing any warning horns or seeing any warning/caution lights. When asked what he thought caused the helicopter to spin to the right so quickly, he replied, "I don't know."
The helicopter was equipped with tracking software that recorded its position every 60 seconds. A preliminary review of the track data revealed that after the helicopter departed Waurika, it flew on a south westerly heading until it crossed Highway 447 in Wichita Falls. It then flew on a westerly heading until it reached Highway 287, where it then turned on a north westerly heading. As it flew to the northwest, the helicopter flew past United Regional Hospital to the east before it made a 180 degree turn about 1 to 1.5 miles north of the hospital. The helicopter then proceeded directly to the helipad on a south easterly heading before the data stopped at 0154, about .2 miles north west of the helipad. At that time, the helicopter was about 212 feet above ground level (agl), on a heading of 138 degrees at a ground speed of 11 knots.
A portion of the accident flight and impact were captured on one of the hospital's surveillance cameras. A preliminary review of the surveillance tape revealed the helicopter approached the helipad from the north with the spotlight turned on (The pilot did state in his interview that he was using the spotlight during the approach). The helicopter then climbed and went out of frame before it reappeared in a descending right hand turn before it impacted the ground. The time of impact was recorded at 0154:56. About 6 seconds later, a large explosion occurred where the helicopter impacted the ground.
An on-scene examination of the helicopter was conducted on October 4-5, 2014, under the supervision of the National Transportation Safety Board Investigator-in-Charge (NTSB IIC). The helicopter collided with power lines and came to rest inverted between two trees that lined a public sidewalk about one block northeast of the helipad. All major components of the helicopter were located at the main impact site. A post-impact fire consumed the main fuselage and portion of the tail boom. The tail rotor assembly and vertical fin exhibited minor fire and impact damage.
The pilot held a commercial pilot certificate for rotorcraft-helicopter, and instrument rotorcraft-helicopter. His employer reported his total flight time as 1,810 hours. About 1,584 of those hours were in helicopters, of which, 214 hours were in the Bell 206 model helicopter. His last Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) second class medical was issued on May 13, 2014, without limitations or waivers. |
For other people with the same name, see Daniel Boyle (disambiguation)
Daniel Francis Boyle (born 20 October 1956)[1] is an English film director, producer, screenwriter and theatre director, known for his work on films including Shallow Grave, Trainspotting with its 2017 sequel, The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, and Steve Jobs. His debut film Shallow Grave won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film. The British Film Institute ranked Trainspotting the 10th greatest British film of the 20th century.
Boyle's 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire, the most successful British film of the decade, was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won eight, including the Academy Award for Best Director. He also won the Golden Globe and BAFTA Award for Best Director. Boyle was presented with the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award at the 2008 Austin Film Festival, where he also introduced that year's AFF Audience Award Winner Slumdog Millionaire.
In 2012, Boyle was the artistic director for Isles of Wonder, the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics.[2] He was subsequently offered a knighthood as part of the New Year Honours, but declined.[3] In 2014, it was announced that Boyle would become a patron of HOME in Manchester.[4]
In February 2017, Boyle announced his bid to help launch a £30 million film and media school in Manchester, stating: "This is just what Manchester needs and I am delighted to be part of the International Screen School Manchester."[5]
Early life and background [ edit ]
Danny Boyle was born on 20 October 1956[1] in Radcliffe, Lancashire, England, about 6 miles north of Manchester city centre, to Irish parents from County Galway.[6][7] Although he now describes himself as a "spiritual atheist",[8] he was brought up in a working class Catholic family. Boyle was an altar boy for eight years and his mother had the priesthood in mind for him, but aged 14 he was persuaded by a priest not to transfer from school to a seminary.[9]
Whether he was saving me from the priesthood or the priesthood from me, I don't know. But quite soon after, I started doing drama. And there's a real connection, I think. All these directors – Martin Scorsese, John Woo, M. Night Shyamalan – they were all meant to be priests. There's something very theatrical about it. It's basically the same job – poncing around, telling people what to think.[10][11]
He later studied at Thornleigh Salesian College in Bolton,[12] and studied English and Drama at University College of North Wales (now Bangor University).[6][13]
Theatre and television work [ edit ]
The Children's Monologues in 2010 Boyle with the cast ofin 2010
Upon leaving school he began his career at the Joint Stock Theatre Company, before moving onto the Royal Court Theatre in 1982 where he directed The Genius by Howard Brenton and Saved by Edward Bond. He also directed five productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company.[14]
In 1987, Boyle started working in television as a producer for BBC Northern Ireland where he produced, amongst other TV films, Alan Clarke's controversial Elephant before becoming a director on shows such as Arise And Go Now, Not Even God Is Wise Enough, For The Greater Good, Scout and two[15] episodes of Inspector Morse. These were Masonic Mysteries and Cherubim and Seraphim.
Boyle was responsible for the BBC Two series Mr. Wroe's Virgins in 1993.[14] In between the films The Beach and 28 Days Later Boyle directed two TV films for the BBC in 2001 – Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise and Strumpet.[16]
On 14 November 2010, he directed a one night play at the Old Vic Theatre titled The Children's Monologues with Sir Ben Kingsley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Gemma Arterton and Eddie Redmayne as the cast. In 2011 he directed Frankenstein for the National Theatre.[17] This production was broadcast to cinemas as a part of National Theatre Live on 17 March 2011.[18] He has also appeared on Top Gear and drove the fastest wet lap at that time.[19]
Isles of Wonder [ edit ]
Boyle was artistic director for the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in London. Over the years, Olympic opening ceremonies have become multimillion-pound theatrical shows, which have become known for their extravagance and pageantry to celebrate the start of the largest multi-sport event in the world.
The ceremony, entitled Isles of Wonder, charted aspects of British culture, including the Industrial Revolution and British contributions to literature, music, film and technology.
Reception to the ceremony was generally positive, both nationally in the United Kingdom and internationally.[20][21][22][23] In December 2012 it was widely reported that Boyle turned down a knighthood in the New Year Honours list. He told BBC Radio 4 "I'm very proud to be an equal citizen and I think that's what the opening ceremony was actually about."[24]
Film [ edit ]
Boyle's love for film began with his first viewing of Apocalypse Now:
It had eviscerated my brain, completely. I was an impressionable twenty-one-year-old guy from the sticks. My brain had not been fed and watered with great culture, you know, as art is meant to do. It had been sandblasted by the power of cinema. And that's why cinema, despite everything we try to do, it remains a young man's medium, really, in terms of audience.[25]
1990s: Shallow Grave and Trainspotting [ edit ]
The first film Boyle directed was Shallow Grave.[14] The film was the most commercially successful British film of 1995,[26] won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film, and led to the production of Trainspotting, based on the novel by Irvine Welsh.[27] Working with writer John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald, Shallow Grave earned Boyle the Best Newcomer Award from the 1996 London Film Critics Circle.[26] Shallow Grave and Trainspotting caused critics to claim that Boyle had revitalised British cinema in the early '90s.[14] The BFI ranked Trainspotting the 10th greatest British film of the 20th century.[28]
Boyle declined an offer to direct the fourth film of the Alien franchise, instead making A Life Less Ordinary using British finance.[29][30]
2000s: The Beach, 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire [ edit ]
Boyle's next project was an adaptation of the cult novel The Beach. Filmed in Thailand with Leonardo DiCaprio in a starring role, casting of the film led to a feud with Ewan McGregor, star of his first three films.[14] He then collaborated with author Alex Garland on the post-apocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later.[31]
He also directed a short film Alien Love Triangle (starring Kenneth Branagh), which was intended to be one of three shorts within a feature film. However the project was cancelled after the two other shorts were made into feature films: Mimic starring Mira Sorvino and Impostor starring Gary Sinise.[32] In 2004 Boyle directed Millions,[10] scripted by Frank Cottrell Boyce.[33] His next collaboration with Alex Garland[10] was the science-fiction film Sunshine, featuring 28 Days Later star Cillian Murphy, and was released in 2007.[34]
In 2008 he directed Slumdog Millionaire, the story of an impoverished child (Dev Patel) on the streets of Mumbai, India who competes on India's version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, for which Boyle won Academy and BAFTA Awards for Best Director. The most successful British film of the decade, the film won eight Academy Awards and seven BAFTA Awards in total.[35][36][37] On film-making Boyle commented, "To be a film-maker...you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different."[14] Andrew Macdonald, producer of Trainspotting, said "Boyle takes a subject that you've often seen portrayed realistically, in a politically correct way, whether it's junkies or slum orphans, and he has managed to make it realistic but also incredibly uplifting and joyful."[14]
2010s: 127 Hours, Steve Jobs and T2 Trainspotting [ edit ]
In 2010, Boyle directed the film 127 Hours, starring James Franco and featuring Amber Tamblyn and Kate Mara. It was based on Aron Ralston's autobiography Between a Rock and a Hard Place, which detailed his struggle of being trapped under a boulder while canyoneering alone in Blue John Canyon, southeastern Utah, and resorting to desperate measures to survive. The film was released on 5 November 2010 to critical acclaim. The film got six nominations at the 83rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Boyle and Best Actor for Franco.[38][39]
Boyle's next film was Trance, while another instalment of the 28 Days Later franchise is in the development stages.[40][41] Boyle has stated previously that in theory the third instalment of the series would be titled 28 Months Later, but alluded to a film taking place somewhere else in the world he created in 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. He is also stated to be producing the upcoming film Paani.[42] He has directed the sequel to Trainspotting, T2 Trainspotting.[43]
Boyle told an interviewer about the eclectic range of his films, "There's a theme running through all of them—and I just realised this. They're all about someone facing impossible odds and overcoming them."[44] With a strong interest in music, Boyle has mentioned in interviews that he has considered a musical film with original compositions. Boyle has also expressed interest in an animated film, and, in 2013, a sequel to 28 Weeks Later.[45]
Boyle's eponymous biopic of Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs closed the 59th BFI London Film Festival. This was the third time Boyle has had that honour, after Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 and 127 Hours two years later. The BFI's London Film Festival Director, Clare Stewart, said Boyle had created an exhilarating and audacious film about a complex, charismatic pioneer.[46]
In a BBC interview, Boyle stated that he didn't write his own films but they did reflect his personality. "I am not a big auteur fan and like to work with writers, but ultimately a film is a director's vision, because he gets all its elements together towards that vision."[47]
In March 2018, Boyle confirmed he would be directing the new James Bond movie, Bond 25.[48] In August 2018, it was announced that he no longer would direct the film due to creative differences.[49]
Future projects [ edit ]
In March 2018, Danny Boyle and writer Richard Curtis announced they were working on a musical comedy set in the 1960s or 70s centred around a struggling musician.[50][51] Yesterday, starring Himesh Patel, Kate McKinnon, Lily James and Ed Sheeran, is scheduled to be released on June 28, 2019, by Universal Pictures.[52]
Personal life [ edit ]
While at university, Boyle dated the actress Frances Barber.[53] He was in a relationship with casting director Gail Stevens from 1983 to 2003, with whom he has three children.[54]
Boyle is the patron of North West-based young people's substance misuse charity, Early Break, which was founded and based in his home town of Radcliffe. He is also a trustee of the UK-based African arts charity Dramatic Need.[55]
Filmography [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Year Title Director Producer Writer Notes 1987 The Rockingham Shoot Yes TV film 1987 Scout Yes TV film 1987 The Venus de Milo Instead Yes TV film 1989 Elephant Yes TV short 1989 Monkeys Yes Yes TV film 1989 The Nightwatch Yes Yes TV film 1989–1993 Screenplay Yes 3 episodes 1990–1992 Inspector Morse Yes 2 episodes 1991 For the Greater Good Yes TV film 1993 Mr. Wroe's Virgins Yes 3 episodes 2001 Strumpet Yes TV film 2001 Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise Yes TV film 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony Yes Yes 2014 Babylon Yes Yes Episode: "Pilot" 2017 Alternativity Yes play of Banksy 2018 Trust Yes Yes 3 episodes
Recurring collaborators [ edit ]
Awards and nominations [ edit ]
Recognition [ edit ]
In 2010, The Tablet named Boyle one of Britain's most influential Roman Catholics.[57] The BBC referred to Boyle as a “titan of the British film industry – renowned for his spunky grit – typified by his 1996 film Trainspotting.”[58] In 2012, Boyle was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his lifetime.[59][60]
Bibliography [ edit ]
The Filmmakers Filmlovers Survival Triva Cookbook (1984)
(1984) Slumdog Millionaire, Class Set: Helbling Readers Movies/Level 5 (B1) (with Paul Shipton, 2013) |
Good news, everybody: We're trending!We're only a few days in and this effort is already getting traction on social media and in the press. Please check out and share this great coverage in USA TODAY:When John Oliver jokes about how we “never imagined the invention of Twitter would lead us to the brink of nuclear armageddon," we can all have a good chuckle. But the people who understand how crises escalate aren't laughing very hard. An American president's words matter. Whether it’s Trump improvising at a press conference or manically tweeting at 2AM, the world is always listening. Some people may think Americans can afford to "take him seriously, not literally," but after many years working as a CIA operative, I can tell you that no other government on the planet has that luxury. Least of all the North Koreans.My hope in setting up this page was to shine a spotlight on just how dangerous Donald Trump's use of Twitter really is. I wanted to reach new audiences and show them they don't have to sit by while the Donald Trump uses this huge platform to undermine not just the moral fabric of this country, but our national security as well. This isn’t about suppressing free speech online. It’s about taking a stand against reckless bravado and threats of nuclear violence that could have horrific consequences in the real world.I also wanted to raise some funds for a critically important cause I care deeply about: preventing the catastrophic use of nuclear weapons.Thanks to you, we’re off to an amazing start! We’ve raised nearly $6,000 from over a 120 donors, and have reached tens of thousands of people through social media and the press. This wouldn't have been possible without your enthusiasm, generosity and support.We have a long way to go to reach our ambitious $1b goal, but don’t worry! All proceeds will be donated to Global Zero, an incredible charitable organization I’m so proud to support. I won’t be keeping a penny of these funds personally. Instead, all donations will be put toward organizing the public against nuclear war and stopping Trump’s dangerous escalation of the North Korea crisis — before it's too late.I'll keep you all posted as this campaign progresses. In the meantime, thank you all so much for chipping in and spreading the word.Let’s keep at it!Valerie Plame |
Indian officials are in negotiations with Westinghouse to build six 1150 MW AP1000 nuclear reactors in Gujarat, the home state of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
If the talks result in contracts, they could be worth tens of billions of dollars. Indian suppliers of reactor components would likely get a significant share of the business.
It’s not over until the fat lady sings, and right now a key character remains center stage which is the chief villain of this political opera, and it is the supplier liability law passed by India’s Parliament led by Modi’s BJP party.
12/29/15: Updated with new cost data for both Westinghouse and Rosatom deals
The wire services are humming this week with news that there is a breakthrough in the long-standing freeze on US nuclear reactor firms having any sales of their units to India.
Westinghouse CDEO Daniel Roederick said in an email reported by the Bloomberg wire service on 12/23/15 that India is in talks with the firm to eventually place a massive order for six 1150 MW AP1000 nuclear reactors to be built at a single site. Reuters carried the initial report about the talks, but without a quote for attribution from a senior executive at Westinghouse.
According to Reuters India’s NPCIL hopes to close the negotiations with Westinghouse, at least in principle, within the first six months of 2016.
The announcement comes as India says it is poised to make changes in its supplier liability law. Those changes must be made by the same body that created them, which is the Indian Parliament.
PM Modi cannot make the changes by executive order alone. However, the Indian government is offering a fig leaf, so to speak, to try to cover this stark reality.
According to Indian news media reports, India will sign the IAEA Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC). As an international agreement, it shifts liability to the operator which for India is its state-owned form NPCIL which operates all nuclear reactors in the country. Westinghouse said it would welcome such a development but did not say specifically that this action alone would allow it to do business with NPCIL.
India’s Civil Liability for Nuclear Damages (CLND) law of October 2010, and the Rules of 2011, were enact by Indian Parliament and the government. The CLND provisions give the Nuclear Power Corporation (NPCIL), as a nuclear plant operator, the right of recovery in terms of financial compensation from nuclear suppliers. No other country imposes such a burden on reactor component suppliers including their own. US and French suppliers have unanimously rejected it.
The Indian government then came up with the Indian Nuclear Insurance Pool (INIP) to cover the suppliers’ risk of potential liability. The assumption was that both parties would be de-risked once this pool was established and insurance policies were issued to NPCIL and its hardware suppliers. However, the $200M pool of funds does nothing to change the provisions of the underlying law.
Last September Jeff Immelt, CEO of the parent firm that is a partner in GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, said that the rest of the world had a standard liability regime which focuses on the operator of the plant and not the supplier of the components. Despite the huge market opportunity represented in India, he said: “There is no project that’s worth so much to put GE into risks.”
A GE spokesman told India’s Economic Times newspaper on 12/23/15 that it retains a “strong interest” for India’s nuclear energy market, and government action to sign the IAEA’s CSC would represent progress.
At a recent US trade mission to India, in which the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), was a participant, there were hints India might be ready to back off its hard line. In a press statement, Ted Jones, NEI’s director of supplier programs, said, “Our delegation was really interested to learn about the proposed solutions to remedy problems in India’s domestic liability laws. For virtually every U.S. company considering exporting to India, liability is a critical threshold issue.”
The current liability law, which was put forward by Modi’s BJP party, was always intended to do several things, and they don’t have much to do with compensation for liability in case of a nuclear accident.
First, the law is intended to tamp down on the progress India will make towards its goal of 60 Gwe of nuclear power so that the country’s powerful coal interests can continue to make profits as suppliers of fuel for fossil power plants. At the recent climate change talks in Paris, India’s delegation said that as a developing nation it would not abate its use of coal to provide power for the country. Yet, India has suffered several nationwide power outages which affected over 600 million people at their peak.
Second, India’s politics are still strongly influenced by its commitment as a “nonaligned” nation taking an independent line between the Cold War rivals of Russia and the US. This is an artifact of the Cold War, but it is still a factor today.
Significantly, the media reports about the Westinghouse talks came to light while Modi was traveling in Moscow, Russia, signing deals for new reactor deals with Russia’s Vladimir Putin (right) like the two 1000 MW units that will break ground at Kudankulam this winter.
India is expected to ink a new deal during Modi’s visit for six new Russian built reactors to be built at a coastal site in Andhra Pradesh. The fact that the announcement about the Westinghouse talks made the news while Modi was in Moscow may not have been a coincidence, but rather may have been part of a deliberate signal that India is not going to have Rosatom as its sole supplier for nuclear reactors.
If the deal goes through, Indian heavy industry firms like Laresen & Toubro and Bharat Heavy Electricals would see new orders for major components like pumps, turbines, cranes, and pipes. Neither firm would comment to the Indian press about the Westinghouse talks. Rosatom has used both firms for major components for the two 1000 MW VVERs at Kudamkulam.
Challenges Ahead
In summary, India is expected to ink a new deal during PM Modi’s visit for six new Russian built reactors at a coastal site in Andhra Pradesh. If India finds a way to finance both the six Westinghouse AP1000s and six more Rosatom VVERs, that will come to 13 Gwe of new carbon emission free electrical power on the Indian grid.
The challenges for a build of this size are well known – supply chain for components, labor force to build to nuclear design standards, and engineers to run the plants once complete. Upgrading the electrical grid to deliver the power to customers will also be on the agenda.
Separately, Japan is expected to finally sign an agreement with India to supply nuclear reactor components despite the fact that India did not sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Westinghouse is owned by Japan’s Toshiba so any deal with the Pittsburgh, PA, American unit would have to get the approval of its Tokyo based corporate parent.
Financing 12 new nuclear reactors
Financing the Westinghouse deal is going to be a problem for India. NPCIL does not have the resources to commit the tens of billions of dollars needed over five-to-eight years to build six AP1000 units. In its dealings with Rosatom, it has borrowed the money at four percent interest with the provision that it will repay the loans with revenues from electricity generated by the plants.
Assuming the six Westinghouse Ap1000 units have an average price, given India’s lower labor and component costs, of $4,000/kWh, each unit comes in at $4.6 billion or $27.6 billion for the six pack. Add in costs for upgrading the electrical grid to deliver power to customers, and the price to hit the revenue service milestone easily soars past $30 billion.
By comparison, the Russian 1000 MW VVERs have an unofficially reported cost of about $2,500/kWh so each one costs $2.5 billion and six come to $12.5 billion. Add in the same costs to upgrade the electrical grid, and you easily soar past $15 billion.
Taken together the two separate projects, at two separate sites, could cost about $43-46 billion over a 15-20 year period. Both Westinghouse and Rosatom will also be the fuel suppliers. While Westinghouse will rely on India to come up with a plan for long term disposition of spent fuel from its six units, Rosatom will retrograde its spent fuel back to Russia for reprocessing into MOX. This is a standard practice for most of Rosatom’s export deals.
Toshiba, which is the parent of Westinghouse, is flat-lined financially having just posted revised balance sheets after it was revealed it was not being truthful about its numbers. A firm set of orders from India for the six Westinghouse reactors might attract international equity investments.
India’s other nuclear projects
While India is in talks with Westinghouse, and Rosatom, for up to a dozen new nuclear reactors, it is moving ahead aggressively with the construction and operation of domestically developed pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWR) of 700 MW each. See WNA profile of India’s plans for new nuclear reactors for a list of projects.
Six of these reactors are under construction in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Haryana. Another 14 such reactors are planned to be built in Rajasthan, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh over the next decade. All of these reactors have 100% Indian supply chains.
French state owned nuclear giant Areva has still not broken ground for the first two of a planned six reactor power station in Jaitapur. That project remains mired in land disputes and, more recently, lost its environmental certification due to the fact the term of the permit expired due to project delays.
The bottom line is If PM Modi wants six nuclear reactors built in his home town, he’s going to have to make some pretty significant political moves regarding the liability law.
# # # |
Posted: December 7, 2015 by Jérôme Segura
Last updated: March 30, 2016
We have been tracking an attack via .eu sites for several days but were missing the final payload. However, this changed when we managed to reproduce a live infection via an ad call coming from popular video streaming site DailyMotion, ranked among Alexa’s top 100 sites.
This malversiting incident happened via real-time bidding (RTB) within the WWWPromoter marketplace. A decoy ad (pictured below) from a rogue advertiser initiates a series of redirections to .eu sites and ultimately loads the Angler exploit kit.
The bogus advertiser is using a combination of SSL encryption, IP blacklisting and JavaScript obfuscation and only displays the malicious payload once per (genuine) victim. In addition, Angler EK also fingerprints potential victims before launching its exploits to ensure the user is not a security researcher, honeypot or web crawler.
We immediately contacted Atomx, the online media exchange platform used in the ad call, who informed us the issue was coming from WWPromoter and more specifically a malicious buyer (the rogue advertiser) on their network.
The incident was resolved very rapidly once the proper contacts were made and the problem isolated. For this, we would like to them all parties involved in taking such prompt action, therefore limiting the potential damage to innocent users.
This particular malvertising attack is one of a few campaigns we have been tracking which is much more sophisticated than the average incidents we encounter daily. We can say that lately threat actors have really stepped up their game in terms of being very stealthy and making a particular ad call look benign when reproduced in a lab environment.
Indeed, the problem comes when we suspect foul play but can’t prove it with a live infection. It is difficult to convince ad networks to take action, when on the surface there’s nothing wrong with a particular advertiser.
This is also a reminder that even popular sites with recognized brand names can still be used as a vector to distribute malware.
Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit users were protected against this attack (Flash CVE-2015-7645) which would have dropped Bedep and ad fraud, but possibly other payloads as well.
Technical details
Infection flow
Publisher : dailymotion.com/video/xv1pn7_the-x-factor-uk-s09e22-live-shows-10-11-2012-part-1_shortfilms Ad call : p.ato.mx/placement?v=8&id=9146&size=728×90&type=iframe&b=0&domain=&screen=1600x900x24
&timezone=300&cookies=1&flash=1&r=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymotion.com
%2Fvideo%2Fxv1pn7_the-x-factor-uk-s09e22-live-shows-10-11-2012-part-1_shortfilms Malvertising : creative.wwwpromoter.com/pop-imp/1491/11672 Fake advertiser (loads advert picture and JS) : {sanitized}.eu/advertising.html Fake advertiser (booby trapped JS) : {sanitized}.eu/scripts/media.js? Fake advertiser : {sanitized}.eu/advertising.html?tm=1449123577264 Redirector (SSL) to Angler EK : worldbesttraffic.eu/ Angler EK : ftuifio.vpkoqbs.eu/civis/viewforum.php?f=3s5&sid=vk830.1892qo288&
Fiddler view
If you would like more information about this attack, feel free to contact us via the usual means. |
[UPDATED March 3rd, 2016 @ 6:45 PM EST] Phil Spencer has just tweeted an update retracting his statement regarding PC gamers having to spend 2X what the XBOX ONE costs to play at the same resolution.
@FlaxeLaxen No and the 2x comment is wrong, my mistake. My point is from a performance/price standpoint console is a great value. — Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) March 3, 2016
Original article as it was published on March 3rd 2016 at 04:45 PM EST :
————————————————————————————————–
If you have read the title and you’re not sure what we’re talking about then let me fill you in. Phil Spencer is Microsoft’s head of the XBOX division, he also happens to lead all of the company’s teams for games and entertainment including Windows.
In an attempt to court PC gamers in an interview on IGN’s “Unlocked” show Spencer made one of the most outrageous comments we’ve ever seen him make about PC gaming. I’m going to quote the entirety of his answer so our readers know nothing is being taken out of context. The question was “What do you want to say to the folks who, in light of Quantum Break coming to PC, say ‘There’s no reason to buy an Xbox One anymore if all this stuff is coming to PC?” and this is what Spencer had to say :
We think that there’s a fundamental difference between a gaming experience on a PC and a gaming experience on a televesion. And there’s certain either people or time that you decide I want to play in front of my television. I want XBOX ONE to be absolutely the best console gaming experience we can create. We’re committed to that today and we’ll be committed to that for many years. We’re also Microsoft we also look at windows obviously as something that’s critical to the success of the company. And frankly as us the gaming group we look at windows and we think we can actually have a positive impact on Windows 10 as a gaming platform. The argument that people give me that “hey I’m just going to sell my XBOX ONE and play all these games on my PC” I get the emotion around that argument. Frankly from a financial standpoint, absolutely the most cost effective way to go play these games is to own an XBOX one – IGN interviewer interjects “yeah it’s a $300 box” . Yeah the graphics card alone is probably 2X what the XBOX [costs] to run at a similar resolution. But we also know that people love gaming rigs and they’ve got them setup. So I look at that customer and absolutely I want to bring XBOX live. we’re committed to bringing our biggest franchises with XBOX and windows, we’ve said that. Doesn’t mean necessarily that every game ends up on both platforms cause there could be some differences in just the play space and how things play. What it’s going to mean for my console customers is more games to play. We’re already seeing that, we’re seeing more developers focusing on XBOX as the ecosystem gets bigger. So more people that they can sell their games to and can play. Means more people playing, more games under development. I think those are really strong things for the XBOX ONE community.
Here’s a time-stamped link to the interview in question which will take you straight to Spencer’s comment.
PC Gaming Is Nowhere As Expensive As Spencer And IGN Are Portraying
Lets start with one of Spencer’s earliest remarks in the quote above. He said that he thinks that there’s a fundamental difference between a gaming experience on a PC and a gaming experience on a television. As if they’re mutually exclusive, as if PC gamers can’t plug their systems into televisions and play using whatever peripheral device they wish to play with, an XBOX controller even. I’ll return to this comment a bit later, but let’s move over to Spencer’s other eye brow raising remark.
Spencer claims that from a financial standpoint it’s more cost effective to game on an XBOX ONE. He continued to say that the graphics card alone will cost twice as much as the XBOX ONE just to play on a similar resolution. Frankly, as a PC gamer I found these claims, being touted as truth, deeply outraging. The level of ignorance that these remarks display is simply appalling. Remarks that were made by no other than the head of Microsoft’s gaming platforms and the man responsible for catering to both XBOX ONE and PC gamers. A man that evidently has a deeply flawed and distorted understanding of what PC gaming is about.
Before I move on any further let me quickly dispel both claims made by Spencer ,which is going to be incredibly easy for me to do thanks to the vast body of technical data and testing that exist done by countless respected tech outlets all over the web. Which adds even more mystery as to how Spencer would even spread such misinformation. This is the same person that has seemingly tried to build bridges with the a PC gaming community that’s growing ever more disgruntled with Microsoft’s disregard for their needs.
The same person that not long ago was quoted saying :
Phil Spencer speaking with PCGamer.
“I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming…”
“I love investing more in PC games.” Phil Spencer speaking with Gamespot
“I can tell you definitively that our team has never committed more resources to making Windows better for game developers and gamers, and that means any gamer on Windows 10, regardless of storefront or device.” Phil Spencer speaking with PCGamer
I” don’t want people to look at this as a passing fancy on our part of “can we just quickly port some console games over to PC and hope to make a little bit of money?” It’s not all about that. We are the Windows company, and ensuring that the Windows gaming ecosystem is strong is important, and that means supporting these features.”
Let’s examine the first claim first, that the XBOX ONE is the most cost effective solution. This one is easily refutable and we’ll cite Digital Foundry’s budget PC frame rate comparison to the XBOX ONE and the PS4 which you can watch here or below. A build that features a $99 graphics card, one third what the XBOX ONE costs. We’ll also cite our own budget PC build which we published last year. A build that’s even more powerful than Digital Foundry’s budget PC. And a build that can be made faster and cheaper today thanks to the continuous evolution in the PC hardware space.
No Mr. Spencer A GPU That Costs 2X The XBOX ONE Would Be Six Times More Powerful
Digital Foundry’s video alone easily dispels the second claim as well that you need to spend twice as much as the XBOX ONE on a graphics card alone to play on a similar resolution. But we’re going to entertain this notion and actually look at how $600 graphics cards that you can buy today actually fare against the XBOX ONE. In fact, we’ll do one better than that. We’ll go down to $500 graphics cards. For $500 today you can buy an AMD Radeon R9 Nano, an 8.19 TERAFLOP/S graphics card. That’s six times more computing power than the XBOX ONE’s integrated GPU which is rated at 1.31 TERAFLOP/S.
Pitcairn Vs. Bonaire Comparison Chart Xbox One (Bonaire) PS4 (Pitcairn) Stream Processors (SP) 768 1152 Raster Operation Processor (ROP) 16 32 Texture Mapping Units (TMU) 48 72 GPU Clock 853 800 Memory Clock (Effective) 1066Mhz (2132 Mhz) 1375Mhz (5500 Mhz) Memory Bus 256 256 Rated Floating Point 1.31 TFLOPs 1.84 TFLOPs Unified Memory 8GB DDR3 8GB GDDR5 eSRAM 32MB (192GB/s) N/A
The XBOX ONE’s integrated GPU is based on the “Bonaire” graphics chip from AMD. However there are several important differences between the Bonaire based graphics cards that were sold on the desktop under the R7 260X and HD 7790 brands and XBOX ONE’s Bonaire. For one Bonaire features 896 GCN – Graphics Core Next – stream processors, the GPU inside the XBOX ONE has 128 units disable to improve manufacturing yields.
Secondly the console version operates at a frequency that’s ~20% below the desktop version which sold at a reference clock speed of 1100Mhz. Thirdly the console version has a tiny frame buffer that’s limited to the integrated 32mb eSRAM cache. Making it significantly more complicated for developers to work with, an issue that developers have actually brought up on more than one occasion. A Pitcarin based R7 370 graphics card which you can buy today for $130 on Amazon.com not only is faster than the XBOX ONE’s graphics chip, but even faster than the Playstation 4’s integrated GPU.
Let’s put these numbers into context and actually show you what a six fold delta in performance means. It means that a game that would normally run at 30 FPS 1080p on the XBOX ONE like Far Cry 4, an R9 Nano or equivalent card would allow you to enjoy at 5K on the PC. With five times the visual crispness and clarity.
There’s certainly a fundamental difference between the gaming experience on a console be it an XBOX ONE or Playstation 4 and the gaming experience on PC. We love it because we get to decide what framerate, what resolution and what graphical settings to play on. We love it because we get to dictate how we play our games and what peripherals to use. We love it because the boundaries by which we can invest to improve our experience are virtually limitless.
We love it because when games get more demanding and we need more performance we can simply upgrade a part and keep going rather than end up with an obsolete box. We love it because it pushes technology, games and the entire entire industry to strive for betterness. We love it because it’s ours, we mold it to be what we want it to be, we construct it in our image. It’s not a one size fits all deal, it’s not about what the folks at Microsoft or Sony think is best for me. It’s about what I know is best for myself. Every gaming PC is unique because every gamer is unique. The PC gaming community is one of the most welcoming, diverse, well-informed and vocal. Gaming on the PC is an experience that’s all about freedom, choice and pushing the limits of what’s imaginable and what’s possible. It’s an experience that I urge anyone and everyone who hasn’t experienced to thoroughly examine. |
This undated photo provided by the Jackson County (Missouri) Detention Center, shows Otishus Kirkwood. Kirkwood is accused of critically injuring a woman by purposely dropping an old television set onto her from a third-floor balcony. Jackson County prosecutors charged Kirkwood, of Kansas City, Missouri, with first-degree assault and armed criminal action. Authorities say the victim, who was not identified, sustained life-threatening injuries. (Jackson County Detention Center via AP)
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri man is accused of critically injuring a woman by purposely dropping an old television set onto her from a third-floor balcony.
Jackson County prosecutors charged 36-year-old Otishus Kirkwood of Kansas City, Missouri, with first-degree assault and armed criminal action.
Authorities say the victim, who was not identified, sustained life-threatening injuries.
Investigators allege in court filings that officers on Thursday found the victim unconscious in front of the apartment building, near a broken tube television set.
Police say a witness reported that Kirkwood threw the large television from an apartment’s third-floor balcony, striking the victim on the head. The apartment’s occupant said the victim and Kirkwood were homeless, and that he allowed them to occasionally sleep in his apartment.
Online court records don’t show whether Kirkwood has an attorney. |
Abstract
Choline alfoscerate (α-GPC) is a common choline compound and acetylcholine precursor in the brain, which has been shown to be effective in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease and dementia. α-GPC has been shown to enhance memory and cognitive function in stroke and Alzheimer's patients but currently remains untested in patients suffering from epilepsy. This study aimed to evaluate whether α-GPC treatment after seizure can ameliorate seizure-induced cognitive impairment and neuronal injury. The potential therapeutic effects of α-GPC on seizure-induced cognitive impairment were tested in an animal model of pilocarpine-induced seizure. Seizures were induced by intraperitoneal injection of pilocarpine (25mg/kg) in male rats. α-GPC (250mg/kg) was injected into the intramuscular space once daily for one or three weeks from immediately after seizure, or from 3 weeks after the seizure onset for 3 weeks. Here we found that immediate 1-week treatment of α-GPC showed no neuroprotective effects and neurogenesis. Immediate 3-week treatment of α-GPC showed neuroprotective effect but no effect on neurogenesis. To evaluate the effect of late treatment of α-GPC on cognitive impairment following seizure, rats were injected α-GPC from 3 weeks after seizure for 3 weeks and subjected to a water maze test. In the present study, we found that administration of α-GPC starting at 3 weeks after seizure improved cognitive function through reduced neuronal death and BBB disruption, and increased neurogenesis. Therefore, α-GPC injection may serve as a beneficial treatment for improvement of cognitive function in epilepsy patients.
Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. |
When you bite down on wintergreen-flavored LifeSavers candies in the dark, they glow. The production of light by some materials when under friction or pressure, a phenomenon called triboluminescence, has been known for centuries, mostly as a novelty. Now researchers have shown that rapidly unwinding a roll of Scotch tape inside a vacuum generates not only visible light but also enough x-rays to image a human finger. Led by physicist Seth Putterman at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the researchers are now developing what they hope will be a cheap, simple source of x-rays for clinical imaging.
Credit: Juan Escobar and Carlos Camara
According to the UCLA work, published in the journal Nature this week, unpeeling Scotch tape at a speed of three centimeters per second produces large numbers of x-rays. However, Carlos Camara, a postdoc in Putterman’s lab, says that there’s no need to worry about exposure while wrapping your holiday gifts: the high-energy radiation is only produced when the tape is peeled under vacuum conditions.
Below, you can watch Camara, Putterman, and UCLA postdoc Juan Escobar demonstrate the Scotch-tape imaging technique, capturing a picture of Escobar’s finger on a dental x-ray film. The images don’t have the same quality as clinical x-ray images: “They’re taken with Scotch tape, so there’s room for improvement,” says Camara.
The UCLA researchers used the Scotch tape to prove that triboluminescence can be harnessed for x-ray imaging. Their ultimate imaging device, Camara predicts, won’t use the adhesive. Having applied for several patents, the UCLA researchers are not yet ready to divulge just what triboluminescent material they’ll use. Perhaps Wint-O-Green mints?
Video credit: Nature
You can view the full video here. |
International travel can be lonely, which is why one Belgian airport hotel provides guests with an optional companion: a pet goldfish, rented on a nightly basis for around $4 U.S., according to The Independent.
Located near the Brussels South Charleroi Airport, the Hotel Charleroi Airport in Gosselies has offered fish rentals for several years now. “The idea was to surprise our guests, as we always try to do,” hotel manager David Dillen told The Independent. “It’s brilliant to see how people react to it. They smile, they take pictures to put on social media. We rent a few fish per week.”
Word of the unconventional service spread after New Zealand radio producer Michelle Cooke tweeted a picture of one of the inn’s scaly sidekicks swimming in a glass bowl. “My friend is staying in a hotel in Belgium,” Cooke wrote in her post. “They've offered her the option of renting a fish for the night, in case she's lonely.”
My friend is staying in a hotel in Belgium. They've offered her the option of renting a fish for the night, in case she's lonely. #noshit pic.twitter.com/DG74iRSfhY — Michelle Cooke (@Mich_Cooke) September 2, 2017
The tweet went viral, with some social media users arguing that the service is unethical towards animals, or that the hotel’s fishbowls are too tiny. Dillen addressed these criticisms, saying the goldfish are healthy and well cared for, with a “big fish tank in the housekeeping department, with a shelter, oxygen, and plants,” as he told The Independent. “When we think it’s necessary, we put them there for a few days.”
That said, if you don't have a good track record with fish, we recommend sticking with regular hotel amenities like free breakfasts and fully stocked minibars.
[h/t The Independent] |
Bae "dade" Eojin and ex-SK Telecom T1 jungler Im "T0M" Jaehyeon have officially joined QG Reapers, according to Newbee's weibo.
Following information from Chinese journalists covering the LPL that dade would join QG Reapers and that T0M may also be on the table throughout the week, QG have made the acquisition official. According to a report by Korean journalist Kenzi, dade will begin in the reserve league. Chinese journalist Pijie has suggested that the two will operate as a duo.
Neither player will start for the first match of QG Reapers tonight, as the QG roster from last year was shown at the start of the broadcast. According to the Newbee announcement, however, "the two new Korean players have been settled and have begun to participate in training to prepare for the LPL." It's not clear if or when these players may be worked into the main QG LPL roster or if they will simply play for the recently announced reserve league, starting on Jan. 19.
dade played for Masters3 last year after leaving Samsung Blue. He did not perform to expectations, but played a variety of control mage champions not previously considered part of his pool. T0M trained in SK Telecom T1 as a rookie jungler, but ultimately didn't see a considerable amount of play time next to SKT's primary jungler, Bae "bengi" Seongwoong.
Kelsey Moser is a staff writer for theScore eSports. You can follow her on Twitter. |
Restored 'Metropolis' to stream live February 11, 2010 |
This eagerly awaited restored version of Fritz Lang's silent classic uses what it said to be nearly an hour of footage long thought to be lost. This is one of the the most important film archival discoveries in history, as surprising as if the missing ending of "The Magnificent Ambersons" were found.
If you're American, viewing the restored version of "Metropolis" today (Feb. 12) may not be as easy as it seemed. The French and German sites I listed earlier do not have streaming rights here, I've learned. The sites will work in Europe, and may work in other nations.
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Around the world, Zattoo.tv is the best way to watch the live feed from Berlin. However, Zattoo also does not have U.S. streaming rights. The Zattoo software is a free download.
Wherever you are, you can try. The stream begins at 8:15 p.m. Berlin time on Feb. 12 -- an hour earlier in the UK and Ireland, six hours earlier in New York, seven hours earlier in Chicago, and so on.
This eagerly awaited restored version of Fritz Lang's silent classic uses what it said to be nearly an hour of footage long thought to be lost.This is one of the the most important film archival discoveries in history, as surprising as if the missing ending of "The Magnificent Ambersons" were found.
Here is the French link from which the movie will stream: http://j.mp/9SS92S
The German link: http://j.mp/dhktCR
A gallery of photos: http://j.mp/aYTgWY
It is not clear what languages the film will be seen in. Since the general story is familiar and Lang worked so powerfully with images, it hardly matters.
Here is my Great Movie review of the version seen around the world until now: http://j.mp/ckaxfK
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AJ Styles appeared on the Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling podcast to clear the air about the rumors of his injuries keeping him from competing at ROH’s Final Battle and New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Wrestle Kingdom 10. Other topics discussed include whether or not he’s been contacted by WWE, the infamous Claire Lynch angle in TNA, if he would work for Jeff Jarrett’s Global Force Wrestling and much more. You can listen to the full episode at Podomatic.com.
Here are some highlights:
Has there been a pursued interest by WWE to get you into NXT and join both Samoa Joe and James Storm:
“I haven’t had a call from someone who wants to hire me so nothing really and I’m okay with that and that’s not a big deal to me. I think it’s more of the fans wanting something like this to happen than what I am wanting to happen. I want to be able to retire in a couple of years so I am going to go wherever that takes me. But I have no problem doing the Independents, I love it. I have a great time on the Indies. I’ve had a lot of great opportunities to wrestle a lot of great wrestlers. Also doing Ring of Honor and Japan that’s a good combination. ”
Before you retire do you even want a full time spot in NXT since that seems to be the gateway to superstardom in the WWE:
“Like I said before, I want to support my family and I am going to go wherever that takes me. Would I like to have a “WrestleMania moment”? Sure. But I am very content with having a “Wrestle Kingdom moment” in front of 60,000 fans. I think that is pretty awesome walking down that long ramp of the Tokyo Dome in probably one of the bigger matches on the show. There is probably a couple other people out there that want to do the same thing.”
Has Jeff Jarrett approached AJ about joining Global Force Wrestling and his relationship with Jeff:
“It’s a good relationship. I think a lot of Jeff. He put me on top in TNA, we’ve had our weird moments with Jeff being the boss but for the most part it’s very positive and I’ll never forget what Jeff has done for me and gave me an opportunity and gave me a stage to make AJ Styles a name. We had talked about it (competing in GFW) when it was first getting started but with Ring of Honor and New Japan I had no time for pretty much anything else. Just schedule wise it never really came about that I could be on it. ”
AJ Styles full career is chronicled in a FULL ONE HOUR interview with TMPToW. He covers all his feuds in TNA, NJPW, ROH and so much more.
VIDEO from AFTER RAW: Roman Reigns WWE Championship Celebration |
Marching to the San Bernardino Civic Center on Thursday, members of Inland Congregations United for Change hoped to stop the violence in their city.So far this year, 34 people have been murdered in San Bernardino. City leaders joined concerned community members for a candlelight vigil."Forgiveness is what helps to begin that healing process. It helps us to overcome anger and hate," San Bernardino Mayor Carey Davis said.Before marching to City Hall, the group marched to school district headquarters."When you sit there and you're talking to a kid one day and the next day he's been shot and killed, it makes you motivated," said Ray Culberson, director of youth services at San Bernardino City Unified School District.Two weeks ago, Officer Gabe Garcia was shot and critically wounded by a gunman with an assault rifle. San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said Officer Garcia is regaining consciousness after being in a coma since August 22. He added reducing violence involves more than just the police."We play a very vital role in every society, but it's almost impossible for us to have enough of an influence over the lives of every a young person when everything they're surrounded by is bad. It takes people like yourself." Burguan said.Standing before the crowd was a mother whose two daughters have been murdered. Melanie Mietswas was killed during a drive by shooting in 2005. Her sister Michelle was murdered in July."We want to create that pathway to help. We want to end the suffering. We want to bring healing to our people," family friend Karla Elizarraraz said.City leaders said they'll work with clergy and community groups in hopes of reducing violent crime and sparing more families from tragedy. |
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MOB: the acronym under a red button on almost every commercial fishing vessel. If pressed, it means that a man is overboard, floundering in that 71 percent of the world called the ocean. In cold waters, each number of degrees the ocean temperature registers on the Celsius scale is roughly equal to the number of minutes it takes the average human to reach hypothermia. Crossing through Rósagarður, relatively warm fishing grounds between Iceland and Norway, in early October the water temperature is a balmy 5 ˚C. That’s five minutes for a person to tread water while the crew on board throws a life ring, turns the boat, and readies the rescue net for a MOB recovery.
The belief that you can make it back to the boat—or, if it’s close, to shore—once you’re in the open sea is largely a fallacy. Whether you can swim or not, the cold ocean almost always grabs you and doesn’t let go. This myth of potential survival, however, has affected every child, every taxpayer, and every town in Iceland. The story many Icelanders tell themselves is simple: few will drown in the ocean (or, bonus, anywhere else), if you teach everyone to swim.
Outside the greater Reykjavík area, towns and villages in Iceland have, on average, 19 boats, 1,182 people, two petrol stations, one church, and one outdoor swimming pool. Just like every other adult in Iceland, I spent 10 years swimming back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in a 25-meter pot of water—never going anywhere. By the time we finish sixth grade, we can swim 200 meters without aid, the Nordic definition of being able to swim. Compulsory swimming lessons may be a good idea, but not for drowning prevention, like most Icelanders believe.
Throughout the 20th century, joining a boat crew meant enrolling in Iceland’s most dangerous profession (since the country had no army). The deaths of seamen were reported on public radio like the loss of foot soldiers. Listeners heard a name, along with the victim’s home address, marital status, and number of children. In a nation that has never exceeded 335,000 residents, any individual’s chance of knowing some of the drowned was relatively high. On February 17, 1939, everyone apparently had enough of the bad news when six children lost their fathers.
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Earlier that day, the steamboat Ólafur 57 had anchored off the town of Akranes, where captain Bjarni Ólafsson wished to attend church. The Ólafur crew members, along with Ólafsson, piled into a dinghy and headed for shore when a large breaking wave capsized their small boat. The captain and three of his mates drowned only 300 breaststrokes or so away from land. Back then, few people knew how to swim, including sailors. That fatal wave helped spur a metaphorical one across an ocean-centered society; with half the male population destined to work on a boat at some point in their life, there was a nationwide call to improve safety at sea and to teach younger generations how to swim. It seemed like a logical response.
In 1940, the government passed as law mandatory swimming lessons for students in grades one through 10. Townspeople in Akranes opened Bjarnalaug pool—named after a beloved skipper—on the annual Fisherman’s Day in 1944. Everyone who could lift a shovel, push a wheelbarrow, and mix cement joined forces at the construction site in the town center. Since the local government could afford only a third of the cost, youth and women’s associations collected the remaining funds. “Growing up, it was the landmark in town,” says Þórólfur Sigurðsson, 72, who both learned and taught swimming in Bjarnalaug. Pictures from the opening event show hundreds of proud faces, remotely detached from war-torn Europe, where most other communities were busy building barracks and restoring bombed hospitals.
Soon every community—large and small, rich and poor—had a public pool with children going back and forth from morning to afternoon. Unlike the banal objectives of some school subjects, swimming lessons were to the point: pay attention or you may drown one day. So Icelanders learned to swim, and swimming eventually became a cultural pastime, and pools became community gathering places. As youngsters, Icelanders learn the usual acrobatic strokes, along with the so-called “school backstroke,” designed for long-distance survival, and how to swim with an unconscious person in our arms. Despite all this, for decades Icelanders continued listening to the radio with a sigh and murmur, hafið gefur, hafið tekur—the ocean gives, the ocean takes. The death rate for seamen remained stubbornly high: the Icelandic Maritime Administration estimates that a total of 4,000 people drowned in the sea, lakes, and rivers during the last century. An annual toll of 20 to 50 men, healthy and hard at work, seemed like an inevitable part of coastal life. A 1992 study found that, despite mandatory swimming lessons, from 1966 to 1986, the death rate hardly dwindled in Iceland. Not until the early 1990s did the rate finally start to drop. The year 2008 was the first time in Icelandic history that none of our compatriots’ lives were lost at sea. Hurrah! In recent years, the death rate has hovered at one or two per year, if no major accidents occur, although no deaths were registered in 2011 or 2014. But how much of that was the result of swimming instruction?
Even in good weather conditions, sailors adrift in North Atlantic waters rarely swim to safety—again, it’s the hypothermia issue. The fall in the death rate for seamen is mostly the result of safety training and better technology. Accidents still happen, and surprisingly often in calm conditions when it might seem as if someone could swim to safety.
“Today, the typical accident takes place in broad daylight, in good weather, and involves an experienced seaman,” says Hilmar Snorrason, principal of the Maritime Safety and Survival Training Centre, which is onboard a ship in downtown Reykjavík. Perhaps signifying its vaunted status, the school—the Sæbjörg—is prominently placed, docked next to the city’s landmark Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre. Since 1985, the center has worked to dramatically change the working conditions for Icelandic seamen. Add in improved technology, in the form of better boats, better weather forecasts, and rescue helicopters, and heading to sea is a lot less dangerous than it was in 1939.
Seamen now enroll in basic safety training every five years. The intense five-day course teaches sailors working on large vessels (over 15 meters in length) everything from recognizing various alarm sounds to rescuing a dummy from a burning cabin; by the last day, the sailors even know what the lifeboat biscuits taste like. What’s not covered, however, are techniques typically taught to children in swimming pools. Experts know that despite the country’s long-held views about swimming lessons, it’s the focus on safety that saves lives. The only time sailors are expected to move around in the open seas is if they end up in the water after an “abandon ship” command and need to reach a life raft. The protocol orders the crew to dress in floating survival suits that make everything other than a variation of the backstroke—a swimming technique that takes the least amount of effort and keeps your head above water—a bad move. Staying still and conserving energy, a person in a survival suit can float for six hours in freezing water without losing more than one degree of body temperature. When emergency gear and protocol fail, a swimmer has a better chance at survival if help is close, but survival often depends on luck.
But Icelanders, Vikings at heart, eschew luck and cling to epic tales of survival, old and new, that showcase grit, strength, and swimming prowess. Heroes include Grettir “the Strong” Ásmundsson in The Sagas of Icelanders, who returned from self-exile at the island of Drangey by swimming more than seven kilometers to shore, and Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, who cheated death after his fishing boat sank near the Westmann Islands in 1984. Wearing a shirt, sweater, and jeans, Friðþórsson swam five kilometers in 5 to 6 °C water. He then walked barefoot for three hours across a frozen lava field until he found help. Once at the hospital, Friðþórsson presented with only a mild case of dehydration, no hypothermia. An insulating 14 millimeters of fat kept him alive, while the four other crew members died, never making it out of the water. His story should be considered motivation for overeating, but is instead the anecdote for swimming advocates. “But Guðlaugur …,” are words I hear repeatedly when talking swimming lessons and survival.
Icelandic students get 1,200 to 1,800 minutes of swimming lessons every year from the age of six to 16. To people such as the former mayor of Reykjavík, Jón Gnarr, those 20 or 30 hours are an outdated use of time and resources. In today’s society, other risks are equally important. “Women, for example, are more likely to be harmed by men than water,” he wrote in an op-ed column for Fréttablaðið, an Icelandic daily, “why not spend the time teaching them judo or karate?”
A nation of swimmers or a nation of karate kids? Surely the statistics on drowning in the general population—forget sailors—support a swimming education.
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Globally, drowning is the third leading cause of accidental death, claiming 372,000 lives a year—more than the population of Iceland. The threat hits low- and middle-income countries hardest, where 91 percent of unintentional drownings (meaning not the result of suicide) occur—most involving children. These countries typically lack safety regulations, and swimming lessons are uncommon. In the western Pacific region, drowning is the number one cause of death for children ages five to 14, and evidence from a swimming program in Bangladesh suggests that teaching all children how to swim can reduce fatalities by 93 percent.
Even in wealthier countries, poor children are less likely to learn how to swim than their richer counterparts. In Denmark—a country that prides itself on equality—only half of children ages seven to 14 can swim 200 meters without aid. And only 14 percent of children have learned through school programs, according to a 2014 survey by the Danish Swimming Federation. Nationally, 65 percent of adult Danes know how to swim, and almost all of them learned before the age of 15, many through school lessons. Today, fewer children are learning how to swim. But when Tobias Marling, manager of the Learning to Swim project launched in 2015 by the Danish Swimming Federation and a charitable foundation, TrygFonden, urges schools to do better, officials grind their teeth about the cost. Denmark has far fewer pools than Iceland per capita and most often they are distant from schools: transportation is thus the biggest bite in their budget. But isn’t it worth it to save kids, if not sailors, from drowning? Unlike in Bangladesh, swimming lessons do not have a huge impact on drowning rates in Denmark.
A case study comparing Denmark and Iceland shows that the relationship between swimming lessons and drowning is more complex in wealthier countries. The two countries share similar geography, culture, and wealth, yet the swimming abilities of their residents are vastly different. Denmark, however, has a lower drowning rate than Iceland, with 1.2 drownings per 100,000 inhabitants versus Iceland’s rate of 2.5 drownings. Much like the focus on safety for sailors, government regulations on water safety, supervision, and fences around pools have greatly reduced drowning rates among children of both countries and made them a rare incident. Also, in neighboring Norway, a study found that half of children are ósyndur—the Icelandic adjective for people unable to swim—and the death toll shows a trend of 1.4 drownings per 100,000 inhabitants. The only thing this proves, however, is that drowning rates and swimming abilities are impossible to isolate as variables.
Iceland, meanwhile, spends a lot of money on its swimming culture. The country has one pool per 2,000 people, usually in walking distance from a schoolyard. For almost all communities in Iceland, it’s the pool itself that’s a financial drain on local economies—some more than others. Of Iceland’s 169 pools, 31 are not geothermally heated and need an artificial (and expensive) source of heat. Skaftárhreppur in southern Iceland has one of the more expensive pools. Like most other modern sundlaug, as we Icelanders call our pools, it has multilevel hot tubs (for the lazy) and a small waterslide (for the crazy). It’s outdoors and is a great place to spend an afternoon; indeed pools are more popular than museums, cinemas, or churches in Iceland. Admission ranges from US $7 to $9. But not even the most popular of Reykjavík’s six pools—and thus, the most popular in the whole country—can sustain itself with admissions alone, even if geothermally heated. Imagine how tough it is for smaller communities. According to Sandra Brá Jóhannsdóttir, mayor of the Skaftárhreppur municipality with a population of 470, the sports center operating her local pool runs an annual deficit of about $600,000, or a swimming pool of nickels, which her municipality then balances out every year. That is 19 percent of the municipality’s total budget. In other words, instead of teaching everyone how to swim, her community could take that 19 percent and spend it on care for the elderly, to plow snowy, hazardous roads, or send each of the 470 residents a cheque for $1,276 every year.
Compulsory swimming lessons may be a good idea, but not for the reason most Icelanders believe. Water isn’t a native place for humans, terrestrial mammals, so why would people living alongside particularly cold water feel so strongly about their relationship with it? A habit formed, by law, in the 1940s, for illogical reasons and accepted by the country, damn the cost, is the explanation. In my hometown, a man named Magnús Tryggvason has stood by the sides of the local pool for the past 30 years—in rain, snow, darkness, and the other elements of the Icelandic winter—yelling at thick-skulled children like myself. “Crawl! Bend the wrist! Turn!”
“I know I am making a difference,” Tryggvason says when asked what motivates his lifelong commitment. “The moment when a child realizes [she] can go under water and come up again without the feeling of drowning—it’s that sincere excitement in the child’s face that rewards my work.”
And maybe that’s what it’s about: a feeling. The older fishermen I chatted with, aside from leaning on those old stories of survival through an epic swim, talked about how knowing how to swim made them feel: less intimidated by the ocean and more calm if facing an emergency situation.
For Icelanders, perhaps swimming is not about overcoming risk, but, rather the opposite. We walk from the beach into the cold water until it laps at our shoulders, the stinging cold forcing attention away from everything else, shrinking the world down to the ocean and us: we embrace the risk of the sea, kids once again. |
Betsy Wolfe Offers Concert Tonight, Including Frozen Song
The Broadway actress performs a benefit concert in her hometown of Visalia, CA.
Betsy Wolfe, a Visalia, CA, native who will be seen this fall in the Broadway revival of Falsettos, returns to her hometown August 13 for a benefit concert at the L.J. Williams Theatre.
An Evening with Betsy Wolfe, featuring musical director Andrew Resnick on piano, begins at 7:30 PM. The singing actress will feature songs from the worlds of Broadway, opera, cabaret and more.
Wolfe, who played the role of Elsa in a workshop for the eagerly awaited stage version of Frozen, will include a song cut from the film musical in the concert. The actress told visaliatimesdelta.com, “I don’t want to give too much away, but I have been given special permission to sing the coolest song that was actually cut from [the] Frozen [film]. I’m beyond lucky to have Andrew Resnick, my musical director on board for this concert. He recently finished conducting The King and I on Broadway. I’m singing a handful of the songs I recently sang at my Carnegie Hall concert, so I’m excited to share some of those memories and I have a handful of other surprises up my sleeve.”
Wolfe also spoke about playing Elsa in the aforementioned Frozen workshop, saying, “It was an empowering and interesting first look at bringing Elsa to life onstage. Obviously, because this show is in the early stages, I am still exploring. You never want to come to any role however well known with too many preconceptions. As things progress organically, you really have to figure out who the character is through the rehearsal and developmental process. I grew up watching Disney movies, so I also know why Elsa specifically garners universal love. She’s uniquely different. She’s an outcast who struggles to find her place in the world. There’s a bit of her in all of us.”
Tickets for the concert, which will benefit the Visalia Education Foundation, are $45, $35 and $25. Click here for more information.
(Updated August 13, 2016) |
Zach Braff in Scrubs
Any fictional television show about a real profession runs the risk of getting things wrong. I work for a newspaper and cringe whenever I see reporters portrayed on TV. (They’re always so self-serving and venal. What’s up with that?) I once interviewed a criminology professor who complained about the stunningly obvious things CSI characters say at crime scenes. Real forensic investigators, he explained, don’t shout, “Look at this! It looks like blood! We’d better send it to the lab!” But if you talk to doctors, they’ll often sing the praises of one medical show in particular, which they say captures the training process, the profession, and the dynamics of a hospital with remarkable accuracy. No, it’s not House, the tale of a misanthrope who happens to be a doctor. It’s not Grey’s Anatomy, a torrid romance novel disguised as a medical show. It’s not even the recently departed ER, which broke television ground with its realistic gore. It’s Scrubs.
After seven seasons on NBC and an eighth on ABC, the series airs tonight what might be its final episode. If it returns next fall—”a coin flip,” at this point, creator Bill Lawrence told me—it will feel like a different show, tracking familiar characters but at a different stage in their lives and careers. Scrubs follows the travails of doctors John “J.D.” Dorian (Zach Braff), Christopher Turk (Donald Faison), and Elliot Reed (Sarah Chalke), who launched their careers in 2001 as interns at the fictional Sacred Heart Hospital.
To the layman, the half-hour sitcom may hardly seem like a paragon of factual accuracy. Its approach isn’t realist or vérité—on the contrary, it’s essentially a live-action cartoon, filled with fantasy cut-aways, bathroom humor, sex jokes, and jiggy dances. At any moment, a Sacred Heart physician might imagine sick patients ballroom dancing through the ward or a scowling malpractice lawyer strutting through the waiting room and tossing out business cards like a blackjack dealer. J.D., meanwhile, has been known to contemplate a tough medical decision while stroking Justin, his stuffed “soul-searching unicorn.”
This probably doesn’t sound like any hospital you’ve visited. But if you look past the cartoonishness, you find a series that’s quite in tune with the real lives of doctors—and unlike your typical medical drama, one that’s not required to end each episode with a climactic surgical procedure or whiz-bang diagnosis. ER, for instance, was about the heroic things doctors do to save lives, and every episode was rife with calamity. Scrubs, on the other hand, is mostly about what happens at hospitals between crises—the way doctors and nurses handle ordinary cases. And doctors say that as a depiction of the residency process, the show hits strikingly familiar emotional notes. J.D. narrates nearly every episode in a voice-over, setting up jokes and transitions between bits, but also describing his thoughts and insecurities. Doctors say they recognize in J.D.’s internal monologue the real thought processes of a young doctor at work.
“He says exactly what a resident feels, day in or day out. ‘Am I hurting the patient? Am I learning what I should? Am I kissing up too much to the attending?’ ” says Jonathan Samuels, an attending rheumatologist at the NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases. “I always thought Scrubs was right on.”
If the show feels like somebody’s real-life experience, that’s probably because it is. Creator Bill Lawrence, the man behind Spin City, Clone High, and the upcoming Cougar Town, built Scrubs around stories from his college friend Jonathan Doris, now a cardiologist in Los Angeles and a medical adviser to the show. He found humor in Doris’ experiences, he says, and also a truth about human nature that’s not often seen in medical shows. “In television, we like our doctors to be very heroic and very dramatic, and they kick doors open, and they say the word stat a lot,” Lawrence says. But: “If your buddy was a funny kind of goofball that made jokes out of everything in college, then as a doctor, he’s the same guy.”
Some moments from Doris’ residency found their way directly onto Scrubs, says Dr. Paul Pirraglia, an internist in Providence, R.I., who was part of Doris’ Brown University resident class. In the pilot, J.D. performs a procedure called a paracentesis to drain fluid from a patient’s distended belly; he turns away for a moment, then looks back to discover a geyser of fluid gushing into the air. It happened—just like that—to a fellow resident at Brown. Lawrence says Doris, like the fictional J.D., also hid in a closet early in his residency to avoid being the first doctor on the scene when a patient was coding.
In fact, Lawrence says, nearly every medical scenario on the show has originated with a real-life situation, tweaked a little bit for drama and the constraints of half-hour comedy. Each year, he assigns his writers to interview five doctors and report back with story ideas. Doctors often volunteer funny stories as well, he says, though many of them involve objects that patients manage to insert in their rear ends—a plotline Lawrence and his crew could use only once. (For Scrubs purposes, it was a light bulb.)
But Pirraglia and other doctors say what makes Scrubs resonate isn’t the specific scenarios so much as the broader themes. The show tracks the tensions between surgical and internal medicine residents—the jocks vs. the chess club, as J.D. puts it in the pilot. It captures the allure of private practice—in Season 6, Elliot takes that route and enjoys the fruits of an inflated salary. It explores the risks and rewards of intra-hospital romance, through the on-again, off-again relationship between Elliot and J.D.—which is currently quite on. It dramatizes the ways hospitals struggle to allocate resources—Dr. Kelso, Sacred Heart’s chief of medicine, has more than once ordered a patient without insurance to go untreated. And it pokes fun at the way residents jockey to get plum assignments—in one episode, residents race down a hallway like Pamplona bulls for the right to treat a member of the hospital board, trampling one another and several patients in the process.
Even these fantasy sequences can be seen as an element of the show’s verisimilitude, suggesting a sort of survival tactic, a way to endure the grueling rhythms of life on 36-hour shifts. Scrubs captures the agony of hunger and fatigue those shifts force doctors to endure, says Dr. Svetlana Krasnokutsky, another attending rheumatologist at NYU and Samuels’ fiancee. (Hospital romance does happen in real life; there’s hope for J.D. and Elliot yet.) She recalls watching a Scrubs doctor eat food off a comatose patient’s tray. Krasnokutsky says she’s never gone that far, but she’s thought about it.
Krasnokutsky says she, too, identifies with J.D.’s constant self-reflection and self-doubt. In the pilot, J.D. declares, “I don’t know jack,” and the show in many ways has been an ongoing exposition of that point. Residents often feel like they know nothing, Pirraglia says, yet they’re suddenly invested with huge amounts of responsibility, expected to give orders to much-more-experienced nurses, required to make quick decisions with life-or-death consequences.
“Being a resident is a strange place between officially being a doctor, which you are, but also really not knowing it all,” he says. “You get this level of authority that you don’t think you deserve. All of a sudden you’re the doctor and people are going to listen to you.”
What helps—and also comes through on Scrubs, he says—is the support of fellow doctors. A seminal moment in his own residency came when he was called to a patient with a serious gastrointestinal bleed. Blood poured over the table. Time was running out. And suddenly, the room was filled with fellow residents, offering unsolicited help. Over and over again, even when they’re mired in hospital politics or a relationship squabble, Elliot and J.D. do the same for each other. In the Season 4 episode “My Office,” they snipe at each other relentlessly after being named co-chief residents. But when a patient codes, they work together without a second thought. “The best thing about this place,” J.D. says in his voice-over, “is that when somebody’s really in trouble, all the pettiness melts away.”
Despite the dogged efforts of the medical staff, however, the patients on the show sometimes die anyway—sometimes because the Scrubs doctors have made fatal mistakes. Scrubs isn’t a procedural built around dramatic recoveries, and many of the episodes, as goofy as they are, end on notes that are wistful or just plain sad. “You never promise a patient they’re gonna be fine,” the abrasive Dr. Cox growls to J.D. in the Season 4 episode “My Best Moment.” “God hates doctors. He truly does. …”
That case had a happy outcome—it was a Christmas episode, after all. Unflinching as it often is, Scrubs also maintains an unabashedly sentimental perspective on medicine. That could well be something else that doctors love about the show and a reason Lawrence is asked to speak at medical school graduations. J.D and his colleagues may be by turns blustery and mired in secret self-doubt, but they’re also uniformly human and well-meaning; even the supposedly hard-hearted, penny-pinching Dr. Kelso has turned out to be a softie in the end. God might hate doctors, but Scrubs loves them, and the feeling is mutual. |
A new report published by the Digital Citizens Alliance estimates that the most popular cyberlockers generate millions of dollars in revenue. The research claims that the sites in question are mostly used for copyright infringement. The list of "rogue" sites includes the Kim Dotcom-founded cloud hosting service Mega, albeit based on a false assumption.
The most popular file-hosting sites, also known as cyberlockers, have millions of visitors per day.
In recent years many of these sites have gotten a bad reputation as they are frequently used to share copyrighted files.
Today the Digital Citizens Alliance released a new report (pdf) that looks into the profitability of these sites and services. Titled “Behind The Cyberlocker Door: A Report How Shadowy Cyberlockers Use Credit Card Companies to Make Millions,” it offers insight into the money streams that end up at these alleged pirate sites.
The study, carried out by NetNames and backed by the entertainment industry, uses information from the busted Megaupload service to estimate the earnings of various other sites. Based on these and other assumptions it concludes that the top cyberlockers generate an average $3.2 million per site per year.
“Overall, total annual revenue across the thirty cyberlockers equated to $96.2 million or $3.2 million per site. One site gathered $17.6m per year in revenue,” the report notes, adding that it’s a conservative estimate.
Estimated revenue and profit per direct download cyberlocker
The report brands these sites as piracy havens based on a sample of the files they host. All the sites that are listed are used predominantly for copyright infringement, they claim.
“The overwhelming use of cyberlockers is for content theft. Analysis of a sampling of the files on the thirty cyberlocker sites found that the vast majority of files were clearly infringing,” the report reads.
“At least 78.6 percent of files on direct download cyberlockers and 83.7 percent of files on streaming cyberlockers infringed copyright,” it adds.
Alleged “infringing” use per cyberlocker
Here’s where the researchers make a crucial mistake. The sample, where the percentage of allegedly infringing files is based on, is drawn from links that are posted publicly online. These are certainly not representative for the entire site, at least not in all cases.
For Mega the researchers looked at 500 files that were shared online. However, the overwhelming majority of Mega’s files, which number more than 500,000,000, are never shared in public.
Unlike some other sites in the report, Mega is a rather traditional cloud hosting provider that’s frequently used for personal backup, through its desktop client or mobile apps for example. The files that are shared in public are the exception here, probably less than one percent of the total.
There is no denying that there are shady and rogue sites that do profit heavily from piracy, but lumping all these sites together and branding them with a pirate label is flat-out wrong.
Aside from “exposing” the estimated profitability of the cyberlockers the report also has a secondary goal. It puts out a strong call to the credit card companies Visa and MasterCard, and hosting providers such as Cloudflare, urging them to cut their ties with these supposed pirate havens.
“They should take a hard look at the checkered history of their cyberlocker partners. Simply put, the businesses that simply exploit and expropriate the creative efforts of others do not occupy a legitimate place in the Internet ecosystem,” the report notes.
“Content theft is a cancer on the Internet. It introduces viruses and malware to computers, robs creators who rely on the Internet to sell their products, damages brands by associating them with illegal and inappropriate content and provides seed money for criminals to engage in other illegal activities,” it adds.
Hopefully future reports will have more nuance. At minimum they should make sure to have all the facts right, as that’s generally more convincing. |
After completing Plebe Summer training, Regan Kibby, right, hugs his younger sister Elena Kibby during Plebe Parents Weekend, August 2015. (Photo by Tawnia Kibby)
On Wednesday, a few hours after President Trump announced, via Twitter, that he would ban transgender people from serving in the military, U.S. Naval Academy midshipman Regan Kibby drove to a nearby gym. In the locker room, he opened his bag and pulled out a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Navy” and the academy’s mascot, Bill the Goat. Then he started to cry.
“I might not be able to say that anymore,” Kibby, 19, says. “I might not be able to claim ‘Navy.’ ”
Kibby has just finished his sophomore year at U.S.N.A. One year ago, he had told his company officer that he wanted to transition from his biological sex, female, to the gender with which he had long identified, male. After months of medical appointments, paperwork, and discussions up the chain of command, he became the first midshipman to receive clearance to transition while enrolled at the Academy. In less than a week, he would schedule his first hormone therapy appointment at a clinic near his home in Sophia, North Carolina.
If all went well, he would submit a formal request to change the designation of his gender in official records. If he demonstrated physical and emotional stability for 18 months, he would take his final exams, graduate, and receive a commission as an officer: a goal that he has dreamed of since childhood.
But then, the tweet. “Now, I replan my future,” Kibby says.
On Wednesday, President Trump tweeted that “the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” citing the “tremendous” medical cost and “burden” that transgender individuals pose to the military.
It remains uncertain how that announcement will affect transgender individuals serving in the military. General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the heads of the military branches that there would be no modifications to current policy until further direction was received from the president. It likewise remains unclear how the announcement will affect transgender cadets and midshipmen such as Kibby. When asked, a spokesman for the Pentagon referred The Washington Post to Dunford’s statement.
Commander David McKinney, a spokesman for the U.S. Naval Academy, said that he does not yet know what the announcement will mean for the academy, or for Kibby.
Originally from San Diego, an area replete with Naval bases, Kibby had always seen the military as his obvious career choice. His father had served in the Navy, and Kibby enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps in high school. The summer after his junior year there, he attended not one service-oriented summer program, but three, at the U.S. Naval Academy, U.S. Military Academy, and U.S. Air Force Academy.
“I felt if I could do it, I should,” he says. “It felt like a duty.” The only question was which academy he would ultimately attend: Kibby settled on the Navy’s, because he felt a sense of comfort on the water.
But just as certain as Kibby felt about his future career, he also knew something else about himself. Since he was a child, he had simply not felt like a girl.
For a long time, Kibby didn’t give that feeling a name. As a high school student, it wasn’t that he didn’t know what “transgender” meant, it was that he did: no academy, no career.
But in 2015, during Kibby’s “plebe summer” — the intense training program for incoming freshmen at the academy — something happened. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter announced that the Pentagon would move to allow transgender people to serve openly. With that announcement, Kibby finally felt able to name the feeling that he had always had. He joined Navy Spectrum, an organization for LGBT midshipmen and their allies. He started identifying as transgender to a few members of the group, then to his roommates, and finally, in his second semester, to his company officer.
U.S. Naval Academy midshipman Regan Kibby appers in a January, 2016, cellphone self-portrait taken in an IHOP parking lot during winter break. (Photo by Regan Kibby)
At first, Academy officials could only offer acceptance and support. But when the Pentagon officially announced last summer that transgender people could serve openly in the military, Kibby emailed his company officer and asked about the prospect of transitioning.
Kibby’s company officer helped put him in contact with a medical officer, as the first step toward that process would likely be obtaining a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Finally, this past November, the Navy issued a directive outlining the protocol for service members, including midshipmen, to transition. Kibby would be the first (and so far only) midshipman at the Academy to go through that process. It would entail not only obtaining a diagnosis, but consulting with multiple mental health care providers, endocrinologists, and plastic surgeons, sending his case to the Transgender Care Team at Portsmouth’s Naval Medical Center for review, and working with medical and legal teams to prepare an official request to take a medical leave-of-absence to transition. The Academy’s commandant and superintendent approved that request in May, almost a year after Kibby had initially inquired about transitioning.
Kibby and the Academy were navigating this new process under a veil of uncertainty, following interim guidelines on a policy whose full implications were not yet clear. The military branches had yet to release protocols for what are known as “accessions,” or the process of accepting new service members. Two cadets who came out as transgender — one while enrolled at the U.S. Military Academy and one at the U.S. Air Force Academy — graduated, but were denied commissions in May. In June, the Pentagon pushed back the deadline for developing an accession plan another six months. And since the 2016 presidential election, some advocates have expressed fear that transgender rights might be rolled back
Brynn Tannehill, a transgender Naval Academy alum and director of advocacy for the group SPARTA (Service Members, Partners, Allies for Respect and Tolerance for All), offered Kibby the only advice she could. “Make yourself indispensable,” she told Kibby. “You’re going to have to work twice as hard to get the respect you deserve.” Tannehill spoke from experience: After graduating, she served as a Naval aviator for ten years before retiring from service to transition, and to advocate on behalf of transgender service members.
Regan Kibby, left, reunites with his younger sister Elena Kibby and mother Tawnia Kibby, right, during Plebe Parents Weekend. (Family photo)
Kibby followed Tannehill’s advice: completing credits for a double major, playing the bagpipe for Pipes and Drums, taking on leadership positions in Spectrum. Days at the Academy begin with 7 a.m. formation and often don’t end until past 2 a.m. There were moments when Kibby felt exhausted and discouraged, not knowing if all the appointments and consultations would ever come to anything. But he never thought about giving up. “I just thought I could fly under the radar, graduate, and serve my country like I always planned to,” he says. And when his transition plan finally received approval, it all seemed worth it. He wouldn’t have to make a choice between two fundamental parts of his identity.
He started searching for clinics that provide transgender services and that accept Tricare, the military’s health insurance. He found one. He planned to schedule an appointment.
And then, on Wednesday, an email from a professor, offering comfort and support. Without asking what the professor meant, Kibby Googled “transgender military.” He saw the tweet.
“It was devastating,” Kibby says. “I’m very likely not going to be able to continue my education, the path that I planned for my life.” No matter what happens, he’ll continue with the transition process.
Without guidelines from the Pentagon, McKinney could not say whether Kibby would be allowed to return to the Academy or receive a commission. Spokesmen at the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy said that they did not know of any currently enrolled transgender cadets at their schools.
Riley Dosh, the transgender cadet who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in May, now feels little hope that she’ll ever earn her commission.
Since graduating, she had been looking for work while awaiting clarification of accession policies that might allow her to earn her commission. “[The tweet] kind of signaled the end for me,” she says. Right now, she’s focusing on advocating for the transgender service members already on active duty.
As for Kibby? He went to the gym. Just like every other afternoon. “I’m still a member of the military,” he says. “Right now, I’ll keep my routine.” |
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As an amateur photographer I know how hard it is to get that perfect picture. Countless times, over the years, I’ve ended up with the perfect shot only to have it spoiled by one small detail that if removed, would enhance the photo a great deal.
I’ve not had to remove Uncle Bob (who’s now out of favor with the family), or my ex-girlfriend from any photos, but that may well be because I’ve not had the time, the patience, or the appropriate software that made it easy to do the job.
PhotoShop of course, is a terrific software for all sorts of photo manipulation, including removing unwanted objects from photos. The downside with PhotoShop is the learning curve is particularly steep. As well, PhotoShop is definitely at the upper end of the price range for software, and probably out of reach of the average user.
Recently I came across a great little (1.5MB), free Windows application that may just change my mind on getting rid of Uncle Bob. PhotoWipe, developed by Hanov Solutions, is a basic photo editing tool that makes it easy to get rid of unwanted elements from photos.
Using PhotoWipe doesn’t require that the user learn a complicated process.
All you need to do is:
Open the image to be worked on.
Paint over the parts to be removed black, (Uncle Bob for example), using one of the brushes which are available in a number of sizes.
If you make a mistake you can use the eraser tool to correct your error.
Use the built in preview viewer to check your work.
Save your new file.
Take a look at the bars in the cage before, and after, applying the removal effect.
PhotoWipe does a good job when removing, or repairing, minor elements within a photo, so don’t expect miracles. Even so, it should be part of every amateur photographer’s image editing toolbox.
System Requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista |
Asrock X370 Gaming Professional Fatal1ty
All the features you want including AC WIFI and 5 Gbps Ethernet!
For our next X370 review we look at the brilliant ASRock X370 Gaming Professional Fatal1ty. This enthusiast class line of Ryzen motherboard is not just stylish, it has 5 Gbps Ethernet, AC WIFI, dual M.2 slots and every feature you could wish for on the high-end Ryzen platform. AsRock released two motherboards that look fairly similar, the ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Gaming K4 priced at, give or take, €189 and the X370 Gaming Professional Fatal1ty priced at roughly €309. Obviously that last board is the premium version, equipped with the good stuff like that 5 Gbps Ethernet jack, AC WIFI and much more. So please understand that the Gaming Professional edition is the enthusiast premium product, but price wise, you have options available matching your budget.
AMD has released Ryzen 7, the product name and series for their released 8-core (16 thread) processors. A processor series fabbed at a more efficient and optimized 14 nanometer FinFET process, rather than the 32 nm and 28 nm processes of previous AMD FX CPUs and AMD APUs, respectively. AMD's processors and APUs over the years have run their course really, for the gamer and more mainstream PC aficionado the older FX and APU series simply lack in raw processor performance compared to what the competition has been offering. We discussed it many times in the reviews, but if you compared an Intel processor core and an AMD processor core and clocked them at the very same frequency, Intel was almost half faster. The effect of that phenomenon showed in the less optimized and threaded applications, many games are a good example here. Ryzen series 7 is likely best matched with the B350 (a little more value) and the X370 motherboards as it is a high-end desktop (HEDT) product series.
Much like the competition, AMD will be selling Ryzen in product stacks; low-end, mid-range and high-end much like Intel's Core i3, i5 and i7 series. Earlier on referred to as SR7, SR5 and SR3, matching up with Summit Ridge (SR) and thus a performance segment denominator. But then Summit Ridge from the new Zen architecture was named Ryzen, and hence one more change in naming has now been made. You will see Ryzen series 3, 5 and 7 processors. The Ryzen series 7 processors are eight core processors at attractive prices combined with an IPC increase of roughly 52%. They come with four integer units, two address generation units and four floating point units, the decoder can decode four instructions per clock cycle. L1 data cache size is 32 KiB and 64 KiB for instructions, the L2 cache size is a whopping 512 KiB per core. Two of the floating point units are adders, two are multipliers. One unit that holds four processors is a CCX (core complex). Ryzen 7 is an 8-core processor series and thus that means 2 CCXs x 8 MB (L3) + 8 x 512 KB (L2) = 20 MB in total for L2 and L3 caches. These numbers sound familiar, eh (Intel)? Today is obviously not just about the processors, au contraire mon ami, you are going to need a new motherboard as well of course. A new processor series will need a new chipset as the motherboard needs an infrastructure as well. This has been outsourced and at launch you will see multiple product stacked motherboard chipsets. For Ryzen, you probably want a high-end / enthusiast class chipset with lots of features and tweaking options, this will be the X370 chipset that went along with the launch of the processor series release. X370 will give home to the new socket AM4 and will provide DDR4 memory support (as well as all other modern usual suspects like USB 3.1 gen 2, SATA Express, as well as NVMe protocol based M.2 support and surely PCI-Express Gen 3.0). For socket AM4 the following chipsets will be released: X370, B350, A320, X300 and A300.X370 is the more high-end series.
ASRock has released their X370 Gaming Professional Fatal1ty. A top of the line product in the X370 series product stack. The flagship Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming is their tier-1 gaming positioned board. It features a nice black and red theme, and has dual M.2 slots. The power delivery of this board is impressive, the IR digital PWM has 16 phases for just the processor. The board has your standard 2x PCIe 3.0 x16 with steel enforced slots as well as an extra X16 slot but that one runs gen 2.0 x4. One of the biggest features of the X370 Gaming Professional is the fact that it comes with the new Aquantia 5Gb/s LAN Ethernet jack. So if in the future you upgrade your network, this motherboard is ready, along with 802.11ac WiFi +BT 4.2 for connectivity. On the storage side we see two M.2 slots (one at full PCIe Gen 3 x4 / one at PCIe Gen 2 x1), there are also a whopping ten SATA ports. ASRock also did not skimp on the audio and feature-set side of things, embedded is a Creative Sound Blaster Cinema 3 audio solution over the Realtek 1220 CODEC, HEX debug LED, USB 3.1 and RGB headers which you may connect RGB strips to. The board supports two-way SLI and CrossFireX configs split between its main PCI Express x16 slots. The PCIe slots have reinforcements to withstand the weight of high-end cards.
Overall we have lots to chat about, let’s start up the review. Next page please. |
Mitt Romney did an interview with the Columbus Dispatch that’s getting a fair amount of attention today because he repeated his argument that the uninsured can always get care in emergency rooms.
It was pretty bad. But there’s another part of the interview I wanted to flag, in which Romney inadvertently made an eloquent case for Obamacare, in a way that’s revealing about his own approach to policy. Romney, who would repeal Obamacare, claimed he too would like to come up with a way of covering those with preexisting conditions, as the health law does, but added there’s a problem with so doing:
“You have to deal with those people who are currently uninsured, and help them have the opportunity to have insurance,” said Romney, who favors letting states craft their own plans.
“But then once people have all had that opportunity to become insured, if someone chooses not to become insured, and waits for 10 or 20 years and then gets ill and then says ‘Now I want insurance,’ you could hardly say to an insurance company, ‘Oh, you must take this person now that they’re sick,’ or there’d literally be no reason to have insurance.
“It’d be the same thing as saying, ‘Look, you’re not required to have homeowners insurance, but if your home catches fire, then you can get insurance at that point.’ That wouldn’t make a lot of sense.”
This is precisely why Obamacare has an individual mandate: Without one, it’s not feasible to require insurance companies to cover those with preexisting conditions, because it would lead people to only get insurance after they have gotten sick.
Note that Romney here says that covering those without insurance is a desirable policy goal. And yet he is vowing to repeal the law that is designed to remedy the very problem that he himself identified as an obstacle to carrying out that goal. Heck, he came up with the same remedy for this problem himself as Governor of Massachusetts.
Romney, of course, would say that he objects to Obamacare because it contains a federal mandate. Indeed, his advisers have suggested he favors states stepping in and protecting those with preexisting conditions. But this would require mandates for the same reasons. And Romney is not willing to say (these days, at least) that he thinks other states should broadly adopt mandates, either, because it would infuriate the GOP base, which has hated mandates ever since Obama adopted his.
More broadly, Romney has been badly misleading the public about his intentions towards those with preexisting conditions. When he’s talking to millions of people on television, he says his plan would protect them. Afterwards, when reporters start asking for clarification, his aides confirm that this would only apply to those with continuous coverage. At that point, of course, no one is listening anymore.
This latest iteration is even more absurd. Romney said we should take steps to cover the uninsured. But he then confirmed he would not compel insurance companies to cover many of those with preexisting conditions, correctly identifying the problems that would create. In so doing, he inadvertently made an eloquent case for the very solution to the problem that he would do away with, without coming up with any replacement solution of his own, even though the problem afflicts millions of Americans. |
Garrett M. Graff is editor of Politico Magazine, former editor of Washingtonian magazine and author of, among other works, The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War (Little Brown, 2011).
G il Kerlikowske was hoping to make it through at least his first week on the job without being awakened in the middle of the night. President Barack Obama’s new head of Customs and Border Protection, Kerlikowske could have used a week of quiet as he began to figure out the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, with its 46,000 gun-carrying Customs officers and Border Patrol agents and massive $12.4 billion annual budget. He didn’t get it. On his sixth night after taking office in March, a Border Patrol agent’s single gunshot 1,500 miles away from Washington interrupted Kerlikowske’s sleep. The gunshot itself wasn’t all that surprising; Border Patrol agents regularly open fire on suspected smugglers, border crossers and people harassing them from across the Mexican line. So often, in fact, that the agency doesn’t even bother to release details on most shooting incidents. But this wasn’t a regular shooting incident.
Early the day before, while Kerlikowske, an affable career cop who had spent five years as Obama’s drug czar, was going about his meetings in CBP’s headquarters at Washington’s cavernous Ronald Reagan Building, three Honduran women had surrendered to a green-uniformed U.S. Border Patrol agent in the Rio Grande Valley.
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That, too, was a common occurrence. “RGV,” as it’s known in the Border Patrol, has been the epicenter of this year’s “border crisis,” the latest in a long series that stretches back decades—crises that inevitably lead to calls for more money, more agents, more fences. In this year’s iteration, tens of thousands of people fleeing the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have journeyed through Mexico to turn themselves in at the U.S. border seeking asylum. Many of the refugees have been unaccompanied minors (“UACs” to the bureaucracy), a fact that strained the U.S. government response and unleashed critical 24-hour cable media coverage. RGV had been particularly flooded, and so the detention of the three Honduran women—a mother, her 14-year-old daughter and a second teen—around midday on March 12 shouldn’t have been anything other than routine.
Except that they surrendered to Esteban Manzanares.
Manzanares, a stocky 32-year-old agent who kept his head shaved short, was already under suspicion for misconduct—colleagues suspected he had let two border violators go free—but there was a huge backlog of misconduct cases at the inspector general’s field office in McAllen, Texas, and Manzanares was but one small unconfirmed red flag amid many along the southern border, so even under suspicion, he remained on duty with the Border Patrol.
Rather than detain the three Honduran women and bring them to the McAllen holding center, a 300-bed unit that some nights this spring hosted more than 1,000 people, Manzanares locked the women in the back of his Ford patrol truck—and drove them around the scrubland surrounding McAllen for an hour or two. It was a perfectly lovely South Texas day—sunny, low 70s, a bit cool for that time of year.
At 3:15 p.m., Manzanares texted his ex-wife, saying he wanted to be a good dad to their two children: “I want to help in any way I can but I am very limited.”
Then he stopped his truck in a wooded area. He raped both the mother and the daughter. He slit the mother’s wrists and tried to break the daughter’s neck, leaving them for dead in the brush.
He drove off with the third woman bound in his green-and-white heavy-duty Border Patrol truck with a red-and-blue light bar on top, a Department of Homeland Security logo on the door and a U.S. flag on the hood. Somewhere out in the borderlands, the agent left his third prisoner hidden, bound with duct tape.
Manzanares wrapped up his scheduled shift a little after 4 p.m. and returned his truck to the motor pool at the McAllen Border Patrol station, a huge new 68,000-square-foot facility constructed for $22.4 million as part of the agency’s influx of new agents and money over the past decade. Only at 5:45 p.m., his paperwork for the day completed, did he finally pull out of the Border Patrol station. His apartment was just three miles straight down the highway, past South Texas College and then a right turn at the Exxon station, but he wasn’t going straight home.
It was just around that time that other Border Patrol agents made a horrifying discovery, spotting one of the women Manzanares had left for dead wandering past a security camera—one link in the huge post-9/11 network of electronic eyes and sensors that now monitors the border region. Agents responded to the scene and after a brief search located both the injured mother and daughter, took them to the hospital and began looking for their attacker; the women described him as wearing green, so the agents suspected they were looking for one of their own.
Esteban Manzanares, a Border Patrol agent based in McAllen, Texas, was already under suspicion for misconduct when, in March, he kidnapped three Honduran women he had detained at the border. After raping them and attempting to kill two of them, Manzanares shot himself. | Left: Todd Heisler/New York Times/Redux; right: Facebook
They were, and he was not far away: After leaving work, Manzanares had retrieved the third victim and brought her back to his apartment in a housing complex, the last set of buildings before the Rio Grande that demarcates the two countries. The complex was home to a number of his Border Patrol colleagues—including his next-door neighbor and one across the hall. They all joked about how safe it was. Border Patrol agents seemed to be everywhere in McAllen these days, as the agency since 9/11 had become one of the region’s largest employers, a boon for one of the poorest metropolitan areas in the country. There were now some 3,200 agents in RGV—driving along the border, patrolling by boat, flying overhead in helicopters, working interior checkpoints, watching cameras, staffing the Border Patrol’s new overhead surveillance blimp, the latest high-tech toy cast off by the Pentagon and repurposed to protect the border.
Back inside his apartment, Manzanares stripped his teenage prisoner naked, bound her to a chair, stuffed a sock in her mouth and raped her.
By 7 p.m., the Border Patrol, having questioned the first two victims, had realized there was a third victim, notifying the FBI that a kidnapping had occurred and that the girl was probably being held by a Border Patrol agent. The magnitude and horror of the crime were unusual, but the potential perpetrator wasn’t. The FBI in McAllen had gotten used to investigating assaults and misconduct among Border Patrol agents; it had become the field office’s top criminal priority.
It took only hours to narrow down a suspect: When investigators examined the truck Manzanares used on his shift, they found blood and duct tape.
By 12:39 a.m., FBI agents knocked on his red door, Apartment 1513, and shouted, “FBI—federal agents.” At first, there was no response. Then, the agents heard a single gunshot as Manzanares took his own life. When a SWAT team broke down the door, they found the teen inside, still naked and bound, but alive.
Now it was definitely time to tell the new commissioner.
Kerlikowske had already known that the Border Patrol was troubled, of course: It had taken 1,870 days into the Obama administration before he even became the first Senate-confirmed commissioner of the Obama era, and he was well aware he didn’t have much time to right an agency that was beset by corruption problems and excessive force complaints, the unfortunate legacies of a massive hiring surge that had doubled the force’s size in just a few years after 9/11. That lying and obfuscation had often accompanied the scandals was no real surprise either.
“We had a history of not addressing things as directly as we should,” Kerlikowske told me when we met this fall in his office at the Reagan Building.
Open In New Window OPTICS: Inside the Border Patrol's post-9/11 surge. | Photos by David Taylor
Kerlikowske wanted to use the Manzanares attack as an opportunity to show that on his watch, the agency would be different—more forthright and transparent. But it wouldn’t be easy: He wrote a first draft of a statement he wanted to send out immediately, but CBP officials blocked their own new commissioner. They were nervous about admitting fault so quickly. CBP’s longstanding policy had been to hold off for days, weeks, months and even years before addressing publicly any misconduct incident.
The CBP leadership was so concerned about Kerlikowske’s statement that he finally had to turn to the new secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, and the new DHS general counsel, for their approval.
Two days later, CBP released Kerlikowske’s statement, the first since his swearing-in as commissioner. “I consider these actions, if true, to be reprehensible and I know they are not representative of the agents of the U.S. Border Patrol,” it said. “I am deeply sorry that this incident occurred and am committed to doing everything in my power to prevent incidents like this from occurring again.”
Anywhere else it would hardly have seemed like a controversial thing to say under the circumstances—but this wasn’t anywhere else. And Kerlikowske had to start somewhere.
***
The United States today spends more money each year on border and immigration enforcement than the combined budgets of the FBI, ATF, DEA, Secret Service and U.S. Marshals—plus the entire NYPD annual budget. Altogether, the country has invested more than $100 billion in border and immigration control since 9/11.
It has paid for quite a force: Customs and Border Protection not only employs some 60,000 total personnel—everything from desert agents on horseback to insect inspectors at airports—but also operates a fleet of some 250 planes, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles like the Predator drones the military sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, making CBP both the largest law enforcement air force in the world and equivalent roughly to the size of Brazil’s entire combat air force.
The Border Patrol wing of this vast apparatus has experienced particularly dramatic growth: By the time the Bush administration left Washington, the fiercely independent agency—part police force, part occupying army, part frontier cavalry—had gone from being a comparatively tiny, undermanned backwater of the Justice Department to a 21,000-person arm of the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. |
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Aleppo, Syria – Many Americans have a hard time understanding how sanctions are an act of war, since they are guarded from the consequences of sanctions that their government carries out against other nations.
According to a survey conducted in the midst of the first war in Iraq, it was determined that 4% of Iraq’s population, a total of roughly a half million people, died as a result of US sanctions. The sanctions made it impossible for people to get clean water and decent food, creating a body count that seems “natural” and is not often considered an official casualty of war.
More recently, in Syria, US sanctions are killing in large numbers yet again, and leaving children with cancer to suffer without adequate treatment.
According to a report from RT, the health care sector in Syria has been crippled by sanctions, and children with cancer are suffering and dying as a result. At Cancer Care Syria, many children with simple types of cancer that would be easily treated are not getting the help they need because of sanctions enacted by the US and the EU.
Muzzna Al-Ulabi, head of Cancer Care Syria, told RT that most of the children to die under their care recently could have been saved by supplies, food and medicine that was blocked by sanctions.
“Almost all the children who died of cancer did so because of European sanctions. We ask the European Union and humanitarian agencies to lift these sanctions and let cancer medicine in because children are suffering,” Muzzna Al-Ulabi said.
“When the war began, we dreamed of opening a specialized children’s cancer hospital – but we don’t have that sort of money. We don’t even have $6,000 dollars a month for medicine for the children. The children need enough food, or they won’t survive. It’s what all the mothers think about – having enough food for the children,” Al-Ulabi added.
The way humans interact with each other on a macro scale has changed very little since the middle ages, and this is very apparent with war and sanctions.
In the middle ages, there were people who held dominion over large areas of land and everyone who inhabited that land. These people were essentially slave masters, although they went by different names, such as king, duke, pope, lord and a variety of other titles.
We may no longer live in straw huts with dirt floors, but geographical land masses are still divided in this same way, with the same relationship between slave and slave master existing on every piece of land in the world.
As we saw in the middle ages, sometimes the lords of these separate land masses would get in disagreements, and they would force their slaves to fight one another as the primary way of resolving these disputes.
Again, today, nothing has changed, people who live in different geographical locations are still forced to interact this way when their rulers get into disagreements.
One wartime tactic that has been used since the dawn of history is to weaken the enemy by cutting them off from their food supply.
In the past, invading armies would burn the crops of their opponents, and surround their city so they were unable to access any of the resources that they needed to survive.
This was how “economic sanctions” worked in the middle ages, and that is exactly how they work today, but the human costs are now much easier to hide because cutting off trade to a particular area doesn’t offend people as much as an in your face “scorched earth” type approach. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, both strategies have the same result. |
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — An agreement Monday has resolved a lawsuit over plans by the city of New Orleans to enforce a "clean zone" where the use of banners, signs and flags would be restricted during Super Bowl week. The agreement, which must be approved by a federal judge, would allow the city to enforce some limits on commercial activity in the French Quarter and surrounding neighborhoods. The filing says the city can prohibit "off-site and mobile advertising," such as signs attached to a vehicle or worn by a person.
However, American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana's Executive Director Marjorie Esman said the city has agreed not to restrict other forms of commercial or non-commercial speech in the "clean zone." She said local businesses, for instance, will be free to hang signs advertising their wares.
The ACLU sued the city last Thursday on behalf of an activist and a street preacher. They claimed the "clean zone" limits, spelled out in a new city ordinance and a code enforcement guide, would trample on their free speech rights and limit their activities leading up to the title game between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers.
"The city has essentially eliminated all of the problems with the original drafting" of the ordinance and guide, Esman said of the settlement Monday.
Last Thursday, U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt issued a temporary restraining order that said the city can only enforce the limits in an area near the Superdome, where the game will be played Feb. 3. The ACLU and city on Monday asked the judge to dissolve that order.
Esman says other Super Bowl host cities have enforced similar rules in recent years at the NFL's request, but they had never been challenged in court before.
The new measures took effect Monday and are scheduled to end on the evening of Feb. 5. The city said the settlement clarifies that the "clean zone" is not intended to affect non-commercial speech.
"The clean zone addresses issues such as certain types of signage, outdoor vending and erecting structures and tents that the city already permits," the city said in statement. "It is an additional temporary designation that seeks to protect the quality of life for residents and assists businesses in thriving during the Super Bowl."
The ordinance, passed last month, said that the content of any temporary signs approved by the city must consist of at least 60 percent Super Bowl or NFL branding. But the settlement bars the city from enforcing that provision.
The city, Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas were named as defendants in the suit. The plaintiffs are Tara Jill Ciccarone, an Occupy NOLA member, and Troy Bohn, pastor of a religious congregation that regularly preaches on Bourbon Street. |
Yesterday, we were treated to another preliminary injunction on a product due to patent trolling. Over the past few years, some companies have resorted to patent trolling instead of competing on merit, using frivolous and obvious software and design patents to block competitors – even though this obviously shouldn’t be legal. The fact that this is, in fact, legal, is baffling, and up until a few months ago, a regular topic here on OSNews. At some point – I stopped reporting on the matter. The reason for this is simple: I realised that intellectual property law exists outside of regular democratic processes and is, in fact, wholly and utterly totalitarian. What’s the point in reporting on something we can’t change via legal means?
I’m sure some people are shaking their heads in disbelief by this point, assuming this is yet another one of my usual overreaching nonsensical hyperboles just to drive some otherwise reasonable point home. In all honestly, I wish it was a hyperbole. The reality, however, is that thanks to the World Trade Organisation and something called the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), we, the people, have no democratic control over intellectual property law in any way, shape, or form.
First, a short history lesson. In 1886, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works was first accepted, the first worldwide treaty with the intention of unifying and internationalising the various individual states’ copyright laws. Three years prior, in 1883, the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property was first accepted. In 1893, the Bureaux Internationaux Réunis pour la Protection de la Propriété Intellectuelle (BIRPI) was set up to oversee these two treaties. The BIRPI was superseded in 1967 by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).
This is where things start to go wrong. The WIPO is actually one of the 17 specialised agencies of the United Nations, and this posed a ‘problem’ for the United States, the European Union, Japan, and several other developed nations, because being a UN agency, every member state’s vote counted equally. This meant that in matters related to IP, the world’s developing nations could exert far more influence than developed nations. You know, democracy at work at the international state level.
To address this ‘problem’, the developed nations shifted IP regulation out of WIPO and into the World Trade Organisation with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, in 1994. This is essentially a re-implementation of the Berne and Paris Conventions, but coupled with international trade, and under an organisation more easily controlled by the developed world.
You may wonder – where’s the bad part? Countries can just decide not to sign TRIPS, right? Well, no, not exactly. The most brilliant move corporations in the developed world have ever made is that they managed to get TRIPS tied to membership of the World Trade Organisation. In other words, signing and implementing TRIPS is a requirement for membership of the WTO. Since membership of the WTO is essentially a requirement for participating in international trade, not being a member is not an option for any modern country. Leaving the WTO is a death sentence for your economy.
The end result is simple. Even if a majority of voters in a country want a drastic reduction in IP rights to modernise IP law and adapt it to modern times, it simply cannot be implemented. This effectively means that copyright law, patent law, trademark law, and all other associated laws, exist in a protected legal bubble over which we, as voters, have zero democratic control. In other words, current IP law exists entirely outside of the democratic process – effectively making it totalitarian.
The moment you realise this, the moment you let it truly sink in that this far-reaching and incredibly complex set of legal constructs that affect almost every sector of our economy exists entirely outside of the democratic process and is, in essence, totalitarian – that’s the moment it dawns on you: we’re in a war we cannot win, because we already lost it decades ago.
This is why I stopped reporting on these matters rather abruptly. A free and open press (OSNews is a blog, but the point still stands) has a crucial role to play in the democratic process, but when something exists outside of that democratic process, what’s the point of a free and open press? Am I supposed to write with starry eyes about how we should change our current insane IP regime when I know full well this is impossible? Am I supposed to ignore reality, or worse yet, lie to you?
Call it pessimism – I call it realism. Barring a cultural collapse or a world war, our current system where trade is intermingled with IP will not significantly alter or change. In fact, things like ACTA or SOPA? The next step is that they will simply be introduced as part of the WTO, just like TRIPS, or even as an amendment to TRIPS. Outside of any democratic control, they will be enacted in such a way that individual states cannot resist it, because doing so would endanger your WTO membership.
That’s why I stopped reporting on these matters. You often hear people say, “If you don’t like our current IP regime, change it! You live in a democractic country, right? Make your vote heard!” You can vote for all the pirate parties in the world, but it won’t matter. It won’t change anything, because it cannot be changed. Democracy is all fine and dandy, but when it endangers the corporate bottom line, they will find a way to circumvent it.
IP law is undemocratic and therefore unethical, and hence, there is zero reason for anyone to respect and abide by it. Do not what this unethical law tells you to, but do what your own sense of ethics compels you to. I have been doing so for a decade now, and I still buy virtually all of my content – TV, video games, music – because I want to reward those that created it.
The next time a patent troll blocks a product – don’t worry. There’s nothing you can do. Jump up, jump down, shake your fist, vote with your pencil or your wallet, but it won’t change a single, damn, thing. |
In Colorado, weed is more popular than President Barack Obama.
More people voted for Amendment 64 -- which legalizes and regulates recreational use of marijuana -- than voted for the president.
As of Thursday morning, with 100 percent of precincts reporting their results, 1,291,771 votes in favor of Amendment 64 had been tallied. Obama received 1,238,490 votes, 53,281 fewer than the amendment.
After the amendment passed on Tuesday evening, Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, cautioned Coloradans not to celebrate just yet.
“The voters have spoken and we have to respect their will," Hickenlooper, who opposed the amendment, said in a statement on his website. "This will be a complicated process, but we intend to follow through. That said, federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug so don’t break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly."
Obama took the state's nine electoral votes, beating out Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, by just over 110,000 votes.
Click here for more on Amendment 64.
Via Ryan Grim on MSNBC. |
Sochi is to Putin what Berlin in 1936 was to Hitler, says Garry Kasparov
The former world chess champion and Russian opposition figure Garry Kasparov has launched a scathing attack on the Sochi Winter Olympics, comparing the event to Berlin's 1936 Summer Games in how it revolves entirely around the personality of one man.
Kasparov, a bitter rival of Vladimir Putin who has been detained during opposition rallies in Moscow, said the two-week event was all about Putin's personal glory in the same way that the Berlin Olympics exalted Adolf Hitler.
"Anyone who thinks that is an exaggeration is forgetting a very important factor. Hitler in 1936 was seen as a thoroughly respectable and legitimate politician," Kasparov said in an interview.
"Moscow (1980) and Beijing (2008) were games that authoritarian systems established to generate propaganda for their country and for themselves, the ruling party," he added. "Sochi, as Berlin, stands under a different sign: these are games which revolve entirely around a single man. In Berlin, it was Hitler. In Sochi, it was Putin. It's about a personality cult.
"For him it's about getting himself celebrated, making a legacy for himself," Kasparov said. "It's a one man circus."
Garry Kasparov (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty)
But Kasparov said that though this may have worked in the 1930s, it would not work in the modern era. "What Putin has brought about is a poor imitation of 1936. His Olympic project will fail dramatically. If only because in Sochi a large part of the money did not flow into the Olympiad but was stolen by corrupt officials and businesspeople.
"Given all the problems and failings that we know of it's hard to believe that everything will go smoothly. I just fear that it might be a disaster. I only hope that nothing happens to the sportsmen and women. The logistics have been a catastrophe. Many hotels weren't ready as guests arrived. Putin must be quite shocked at the moment. Propaganda isn't as easy as it was in 1936, or even in Beijing in 2008."
He vilified the foreign dignitaries attending, who include the Chinese president Xi Jinping, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Japan's premier Shinzo Abe and other Asian leaders.
"No upstanding politician can come to these games," Kasparov said. "Particularly interesting [is] the role of Thomas Bach, the president of the Olympic committee. He's a German and as such he should have learned something from history. Instead he's cosying up to Putin."
As for the sport, even there Kasparov couldn't resist a sideswipe. "Most of the gold in Sochi will go to Switzerland, but into secret bank accounts." |
Rapoport: Week 9 game rankings What's the best game on the Week 9 slate? The worst? Ian Rapoport provides a pecking order in his Rap Sheet Rankings.
What's the best game on the Week 9 slate? The worst?provides a pecking order in his Rap Sheet Rankings. More ...
The Carolina Panthers' defensive front has one plan to try and slow down rookie sensation Robert Griffin III: Attack.
"We've got to attack him. I think that's going to be his downfall," defensive end Greg Hardy said Wednesday, according to the Charlotte Observer. "He's young. If you're going to give him a chance to make plays, he's going to make plays. If you sit back on your heels, he's going to attack you because that's all his instincts. That's all he's got."
Hardy's summation is correct: RG3 has proven he can pick apart a defense if you give him time, assuming his receivers actually catch the ball. The Panthers' defensive line destroyed the Chicago Bears' front last week, piling up six sacks in the first half and causing two fumbles from quarterback Jay Cutler.
Griffin is a completely different quarterback, but Hardy said the Panthers' plan remains the same.
"If you put him on the ground, you hit him in the face, I feel like he's going to go into his shell a little bit, and he'll have to think about it," he said. "He's a quarterback. That's what they do."
Even when defenses get after RG3, he often still finds a way to make a play -- just ask the New York Giants. He's also shown extraordinary toughness, returning after taking several big hits already this season.
The Panthers understand what sort of player they will try to attack Sunday.
"I just watched film today, and that guy looked good. He looked real good," Panthers defensive end Charles Johnson said. "He looked fast, athletic. We've just got to get after him."
"He's fast," Hardy said. "I personally haven't played anyone like him. I can't recall right now."
Follow Kevin Patra on Twitter @kpatra |
Mike Masnick
TechDirt
June 19, 2011
This is really no surprise, but the same Senate Judiciary Committee that unanimously approved the PROTECT IP Act, despite worries frominternet experts and major media about how it would break the internet, has now also unanimously approved the anti-internet streaming bill that makes it a felony to stream certain videos online — potentially putting people in jail for embedding YouTube videos or just putting up YouTube lip synching videos.
What’s really troubling here is that the media and plenty of concerned citizens have directly raised the issues about the unintended consequences of this law. And while Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons continue to insist that (of course) the law is not intended to be used against such people, they have made no move to fix the bill. Even supporters of this bill, who insisted that we were wrong about what the bill allowed, eventually conceded that our argument was accurate and that this bill could be used to put people in jail for embedding a YouTube video or doing a lip synch video.
And that’s a huge, huge problem. Of course, no one thinks the bill is for that purpose directly or that it’s going to be widely used for such purposes. However, the bill, as written, clearly allows law enforcement to charge people with a felony for that, assuming it meets a few other conditions. But those conditions are pretty minimal (ads on your page? you’re in trouble…). The risk here of abuse is a serious risk, and it’s incredibly troubling that Klobuchar, Cornyn and Coons failed to change or adapt the bill, and worse that the rest of the Senate Judiciary Committee allowed the bill to move forward in such a broken state. They were clearly made aware of problems with the bill, but directly chose not to make any changes. How do you explain that other than incompetence or corruption?
Read More at TechDirt
OPPOSE the PROTECT IP Act HERE |
Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump widened his search for a new national security adviser this weekend amid concerns in Washington that the forced resignation of Michael Flynn leaves the White House unprepared to face any sudden foreign policy crisis.
Flynn's short tenure ended when he was asked to resign after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his pre-inauguration calls with the Russian ambassador.
Trump interviewed several candidates to replace Flynn on Sunday, according to White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.
"He did several interviews and in-depth meetings that are still ongoing as of this afternoon talking to different candidates for the national security adviser position," she told reporters.
On Saturday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters that Trump planned to speak to former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, acting national security adviser Gen. Keith Kellogg, West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who directs the Army Capabilities Integration Center, and "potentially more" candidates.
Sanders confirmed those four men had been interviewed, adding: "We may have some additional names tomorrow and he may also meet with a couple of those people again."
Two other candidates, former Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal and former CIA Director David Petraeus, are no longer in the mix, sources told CNN Friday night. The front-runner for the post, Vice Adm. Bob Harward, dropped out of consideration apparently over concerns that he could not bring his own staff to the National Security Council.
Sanders refuted that Sunday, saying reports that candidates were told they could not bring on their own teams were false and that it has "been made clear" to the new candidates "that they can bring on their own teams."
There were signs of strong support inside and outside the administration for Bolton. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told CNN in an interview that the foreign policy veteran would make a "very, very, strong" national security adviser because he understands the threat from "radical Islamic terrorism."
Bolton, a controversial figure who had to secure a recess appointment to serve as President George W. Bush's ambassador to the United Nations after failing to win Senate confirmation, is emerging as a strong favorite among political staffers on the NSC.
While there is a lot of affection for Kellogg, the current NSC chief of staff, supporters believe that Bolton brings a mix of anti-establishment credentials that fit Trump's political temperament and in-depth knowledge of Washington and how the foreign policy process works, a senior administration official said.
The official said Bolton is close to both CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Pence, who is "extremely powerful at this point" and so may have some sway on who gets the job. In the end, however, it will be up to Trump to decide who he is most comfortable working with. Should Bolton get the job, political staffers want Kellogg to stay on as NSC chief of staff.
The sense of limbo is causing concern among lawmakers and foreign policy experts who understand how the National Security Council corrals rival foreign policy power centers in the government and its crucial role at a time of crisis.
"There is no doubt after the departure of Flynn and everything that led up to it that the NSC is in a little bit of chaos," Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois told CNN Friday. GOP Sen. John McCain also questioned the state of White House foreign policy earlier in the week.
Every presidency brings change and uncertainty to American foreign policy. But Trump's arrival in the White House has been especially disorientating for US allies, since he adopted positions on the campaign trail -- for example, questioning the value of US alliances in Europe and Asia that have underpinned post-World War II peace -- that appeared to threaten wholesale upheaval in the international system. Adding personnel uncertainties to that mix is underscoring the sense of instability that Trump has brought international relations.
As they await their new boss, national security staffers are hunkering down and forging ahead with their work.
One senior administration official strongly refuted claims that the NSC was in chaos, arguing that it is functioning exactly as it should be, despite Flynn's departure, and is primed for any crisis that would arise.
"It is dead wrong," said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. "The NSC was instrumental in the rollout of the Venezuela drug kingpin designation, the NSC arranged a meeting with Venezuelan dissidents with the President. The NSC is instrumental in setting up, prepping and briefing all the President's foreign leader calls of which there are a couple every day."
"Everyone is carrying on as normal," the official said, pointing to a string of successful meetings between Trump and foreign leaders in recent weeks.
Harward's decision not to take the job revealed the fact that potential candidates will likely have to agree to keep on staffers already brought into the NSC.
In a statement to CNN, the former Navy SEAL cited family reasons for his decision. But a friend of Harward said he was reluctant to sign up because the White House seems so chaotic. A Republican official told CNN that Harward was not convinced he would be able to bring in his own staff.
Trump's top aides have made clear that candidates that most of the top political appointees who came in with Flynn will stay -- in a bid to avoid disarray.
"We are in an unprecedented situation," the official said. "Somebody coming in is going to have to understand it is not going to be the way it would have been had they been picked November 10 and had a whole transition to pick their staff."
The visits of British Prime Minister Theresa May, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, however, sent reassuring signals to US allies.
One senior member of one of the delegations said that Trump and those around him had pleasantly surprised their visitors with evidence that they were beginning to understand the complexity of foreign policy and managing alliances, despite their inexperience.
Internal tensions
Normally, a vacancy for a national security adviser would spark intense jockeying for position throughout the national security establishment in Washington -- given the job's proximity to the President and central role as the White House's foreign policy first responder.
And Trump's failure to find a quick replacement for Flynn is shining a spotlight on the internal tensions in his administration.
Harward's decision revived Washington scuttlebutt about the extent to which political influences are weighing on the national security team in the White House following Trump's executive order reserving a spot for his controversial adviser Steve Bannon in NSC principals committee meetings.
"If I had been in his position, being offered the top job in national security, a job that anyone in that profession would want, I would want to make sure I had control over the staff and that the NSC was not being influenced by the President's political advisers," said Tony Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser for President Barack Obama.
"I suspect that Bob Harward, looking at this job, looking at this possibility would have said, 'Yes, but that has to stop,' and if he didn't get those assurances, he is probably right not to do it," Blinken told CNN's Brooke Baldwin.
Bannon is not the only member of Trump's political team who has carved out a sphere of influence on foreign policy. The President's son-in-law Jared Kushner emerged as the key interlocutor between foreign leaders and the new president during the transition period and early in the new administration, diplomats said.
Trying to keep security council stable
The official said the White House is concerned that the council -- an organization that is already in an uneasy position after Flynn's early exit -- would be further destabilized if the top staffers in the organization were asked to resign in order to make room for the next national security adviser's staff.
"They don't want to see big changes at the NSC and therefore that is going to be a condition for anybody taking the job," the official said.
But military officers especially, one White House aide said, bring with them a host of people, so encouraging staff stay could run counter to what the next National Security Adviser would want.
Harward's decision not to accept the job also raised eyebrows because of the unspoken military code that when a President calls, service personnel salute and accept the mission.
Who has Trump's ear?
The Defense Department has also welcomed the somewhat looser oversight being conducted by the Trump White House, which has had a lighter hand so far than the former Obama administration.
That new regime has also been noted at the State Department, where one official said that there was little "connective tissue" between Foggy Bottom and the West Wing.
Former Obama administration State Department spokesman and White House Communications Director Jen Psaki warned that a prolonged vacuum on the NSC would soon start reverberating around the world.
"If you are working in an embassy or in a diplomatic role for countries around the world, you are wondering who has Trump's ear, who is speaking on behalf of the United States," Psaki said on CNN International on Friday.
Still, one of the ironies of the uncertainty surrounding the NSC is that foreign policy -- at least as far as it relates to visits by key foreign leaders -- has been one of the smoothest areas of the administration so far.
CNN's Ryan Browne, Elise Labott and Jim Sciutto contributed to this report. |
Katherine Jackson claims AEG Live was negligent in superstar's death because it hired his doctor, Conrad Murray
A judge has rejected a bid by Michael Jackson's mother for a new trial in her lawsuit claiming the promoter of her son's ill-fated comeback concerts was negligent in his death.
Superior court Judge Yvette Palazuelos ruled in Los Angeles on Monday that jurors were given proper instructions and there were no errors in her trial rulings that would warrant a retrial.
A jury decided in October that AEG Live was not liable for Jackson's June 2009 death despite hiring the doctor who was convicted of giving the superstar an overdose of a powerful anaesthetic.
Katherine Jackson's lawyers argued that jurors were given an improper verdict form that was contrary to state law and didn't allow them to consider all the issues in the case after five months of testimony last year.
AEG's lawyers argued that there was no mistake in the verdict form and the motion for a new trial should be denied.
Attorneys for the Jackson family matriarch say they will appeal to a higher state court.
Jurors decided the case on a question about whether evidence showed former cardiologist Conrad Murray was unfit or incompetent to serve as Jackson's physician while he prepared for a series of 50 concerts at London's O2 Arena. Katherine Jackson's attorneys argued the question unfairly restricted deliberations, but Palazuelos disagreed.
"Question Two does not restrict jurors to the consideration of Dr Murray's competence at the time of hiring only," the judge wrote.
She also determined that there was no evidence that the panel was confused by the verdict form, noting that jurors often wrote her notes about scheduling concerns and to ask for supplies during deliberations.
"The court finds no jury confusion based on the admissible evidence," Palazuelos ruled.
AEG Live's attorney Marvin Putnam praised Monday's ruling. "We were confident that the court would uphold the jury's verdict," he wrote in a statement. "This is also fantastic news for the taxpayers of California, who won't have their hard-earned money wasted retrying plaintiffs' baseless claims. Enough is enough."
Kevin Boyle, an attorney for Katherine Jackson and her grandchildren, said the case was far from over.
"We believe there are numerous ways that we can win on appeal," Boyle wrote in an email.
Katherine Jackson sued AEG Live on behalf of herself and her son's three children, accusing the concert promoter of hiring Murray and creating a conflict of interest in his care of the pop superstar.
Murray, who was deeply in debt, was expecting to be paid $150,000 a month to care for Jackson while he prepared for a planned series of comeback concerts in London's O2 Arena. The singer died on June 25, 2009, after receiving an overdose the anesthetic propofol, which Murray was giving Jackson as a sleep aid.
Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 2011 and released in October after serving two years.
The trial offered a look into Jackson's personal life as well as his routines as an entertainer and medical treatments for a variety of ailments.
Jurors who spoke after the verdict said their verdict did not mean they thought Murray was ethical in his care of Jackson. But they determined he was fit and competent to serve as the singer's doctor when he was hired.
AEG Live executives denied any wrongdoing throughout the trial and said there was no way they could have known that Murray was giving Jackson propofol in the bedroom of his rented mansion. |
This show marks the start of Gregory Doran's six-year plan to present the entire Shakespeare canon. It's fair to say that his own beautifully crafted, richly detailed production sets a high standard for himself and others to aim at. David Tennant, in a mesmerising performance that grows in power as Richard's authority declines, also reminds us that the Royal Shakespeare Company is an ensemble that paradoxically needs stars.
It's a sign of Doran's care that he makes clear the complex back-story that illuminates Shakespeare's play. An audience needs to know that Richard's original sin lies in sanctioning the murder of his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. Michael Boyd began his 2007 production by having Richard stepping lightly over the corpse of the dead duke. Doran, even before Richard's entry, shows us elaborate funeral rites with three sopranos singing religious anthems in the upper galleries and the Duchess of Gloucester bent in grief over her husband's tomb. This is clearly a court steeped in mourning.
The prelude also gives Tennant a vital context in which to work. His Richard, with his brocade gown and Christ-like hair, initially affects an air of listless boredom as his burly barons hurl accusations of treason at each other. But there's a thrilling moment when Tennant gives the banished Mowbray a piercing stare as if daring him to spill the beans about the king's part in Gloucester's murder. Tennant combines inner guilt with a careless disregard for realpolitik as he seizes the land and goods of John of Gaunt after his death: a point reinforced here by the fact that we see tuns of treasure being bodily transported.
Tennant's strengths, as we know from his Hamlet, are a capacity for quicksilver thought and an almost boyish vulnerability. And, even if he might do more to convey the patterned lyricism of the language, what he brings out excellently is the fact that Richard only learns to value kingship after he has lost it. In his decline, Tennant casually tosses the crown away and, at one point, skittishly places it on the head of his adored Aumerle. But in the Westminster deposition scene, where Tennant is at his best, he challenges Bolingbroke to "seize the crown" and, when his rival rises to the bait, immediately inverts it to suggest a falling bucket. Tennant's great achievement is to attract our sympathy to what the gardener calls a "wasteful king" who abuses power when he has it and who achieves tragic dignity only in his downfall.
But this production, which combines period costumes with back-projections in Stephen Brimson Lewis's elegant design, is emphatically no one-man show. Nigel Lindsay's Bolingbroke is a palpably dangerous figure who treats Richard's remission of his initial banishment with surly disdain and openly scorns the deposed king's self-conscious theatricality. It is also good to see a number of RSC veterans operating at top form in key roles.
Oliver Ford Davies is brilliant as the Duke of York in that he highlights both the comedy and pathos of a man torn between ancestral loyalty to the crown and a recognition of Bolingbroke's power. Michael Pennington's John of Gaunt is also a fine study of a dying man bursting with intemperate rage at Richard's betrayal of his country. And Jane Lapotaire turns the Duchess of Gloucester into a silver-haired figure whose widowed grief manifests itself in a burning appetite for revenge.
The packed houses for this production's run in both Stratford and at the Barbican may have much to do with Tennant's star presence. But this is the strongest company the RSC has fielded in years, and what Doran's production brings out is the rich complexity of a play that raises the eternal question of at what point it becomes legitimate to unseat a manifestly flawed ruler. Shakespeare's play may be set in 14th-century England. It remains, however, a timelessly political work.
• Win a pair of tickets to see Richard II on 12 November. For more, go to theguardian.com/extra |
"I can leave my family, I can leave Pakistan, but I can never cut my mustache again," said Afridi [EPA] Mustache elicits Taliban death threats Even being kidnapped and exiled by militants hasn't scared Malik Afridi into shaving his impressive bristles
This may be the mustache that launched a thousand death threats, yet a Pakistani man, Malik Amir Mohammad Khan Afridi, is still refusing to shave the 30-inch soup strainer that recently got him into trouble with some local militants.
According to Al Jazeera, militia group and Taliban ally Lashkar-e-Islam deemed Afridi's whiskers to be "un-Islamic" and demanded $500 in "protection money," which he refused to pay. The group then kidnapped the 48-year-old businessman and held him hostage in a cave for a month until he finally shaved.
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Last year, Afridi, unafraid, grew it back -- spending up to 30 minutes a day waxing, combing and fortifying his facial furniture -- and the death threats began again. To keep his wife and ten children safe, he left his hometown and family behind, and once again took to the road. He now sees them only rarely. The cocktail of oils, soaps and ointments he uses to keep his follicles fabulous cost around $150 a month -- but Afridi receives help from the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa administration, which pays him a "moustache bursary" of $50 a month as a symbolic gesture of the state's appreciation for the bravery and virility supposedly associated with the manly growth.
Islamic teachings on facial hair are far from clear-cut, and the range of clean-shaven and beard-sporting Muslims indicates that texts on such matters are subject to cultural interpretation, just as wearing the hijab is also not universally accepted.
While his family is still waiting for him to return from exile, Afridi says his decision is about more than just keeping the luscious handlebars that would have made even Dalí jealous.
"I don't like smoking. I'm not fond of snuff, or drinking. This is the only choice in my life," he said. "I'd even sacrifice food, but not the mustache. It's my life. It's not part of my life. It is my life." |
(May 20, 2015, The Auk: Ornithological Advances)—It takes a lot of nutrients to build an egg. One of the big questions among researchers who study the eggs of migratory birds is where those nutrients come from—does the mother make the egg directly out of what she eats during the breeding season, or does she save up nutrients consumed on her wintering grounds? The answer appears to be both for Common Eiders (Somateria mollissima), large, sea-going ducks that breed in the Arctic.
Storing nutrients during the winter and carrying them to the breeding ground is called “capital breeding.” It’s a way around the problem of limited food availability during the short Arctic summer, but the added body weight during migration costs a lot of energy. Keith Hobson of Environment Canada and Kim Jaatinen and Markus Öst of Åbo Akademi University analyzed the carbon and nitrogen isotopes found in the eggs of Common Eiders breeding in the northern Baltic to trace the elements in the eggs to their origins. Their results, published this week in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, show that proteins in the egg yolk, which is produced first, include nutrients that originated at the eiders’ wintering ground off the coast of Denmark. However, the albumen or egg white is made almost entirely from nutrients consumed locally on the breeding grounds.
The fact that Common Eiders use nutrients from both locations in their eggs means that they are neither true capital breeders nor true “income” breeders, as birds that rely entirely on food sources at their breeding grounds are called, but something in between. “The demonstration that protein in eider egg components comes from different sources makes the capital versus income breeding story much more interesting,” says Robert F. Rockwell, an American Museum of Natural History expert on Arctic waterfowl.
Because Common Eider eggs link together both ends of their range, they need quality habitat in both the winter and the summer to produce healthy chicks. “The important take-home message is that the investment strategy is potentially dictated by events occurring on both wintering grounds and breeding grounds. So, sea ice cover and the health of winter mussel stocks in winter will influence eider body condition in spring. Ice conditions and food availability upon arrival on their breeding grounds also interact then to influence how much reserves can be put into eggs and when egg laying can start,” says study lead author Keith Hobson. “This seasonal interaction between wintering and breeding grounds is important for conservation of eiders since it emphasizes that conservation efforts need to be matched throughout the annual cycle.”
Differential contributions of endogenous and exogenous nutrients to egg components in wild Baltic Common Eiders (Somateria mollissima): A test of alternative stable isotope approaches is available at http://www.aoucospubs.org/doi/full/10.1642/AUK-14-294.1. Contact: Keith A. Hobson, [email protected].
About the journal: The Auk: Ornithological Advances is a peer-reviewed, international journal of ornithology that began in 1884 as the official publication of the American Ornithologists’ Union. In 2009, The Auk was honored as one of the 100 most influential journals of biology and medicine over the past 100 years, and it currently holds the top impact factor among ornithological journals. |
Charter 08 is a manifesto initially signed by 303 Chinese dissident intellectuals and human rights activists.[1] It was published on 10 December 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopting name and style from the anti-Soviet Charter 77 issued by dissidents in Czechoslovakia.[2] Since its release, more than 10,000 people inside and outside China have signed the charter.[3][4][5]
In 2009, one of the authors of Charter '08, Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment for "inciting subversion of state power" because of his involvement. A year later, Liu was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian Nobel Committee. Seven years later in July 2017, he died of terminal liver cancer in the prison after having been granted medical parole.
Demands [ edit ]
Many of the original signatories were prominent Chinese citizens inside and outside the government, including lawyers; a Tibetan poet and essayist, Woeser; and Bao Tong, a former senior Communist Party official, who all faced a risk of arrest and jail.[6] The Charter calls for 19 changes including an independent legal system, freedom of association and the elimination of one-party rule. "All kinds of social conflicts have constantly accumulated and feelings of discontent have risen consistently," it reads. "The current system has become backward to the point that change cannot be avoided." China remains the only large world power to still retain an authoritarian system that so infringes on human rights, it states. "This situation must change! Political democratic reforms cannot be delayed any longer!"[6]
Specific demands are:
The opening paragraph of the charter states:
“ This year is the 100th year of China's Constitution, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 30th anniversary of the birth of the Democracy Wall, and the 10th year since China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. After experiencing a prolonged period of human rights disasters and a tortuous struggle and resistance, the awakening Chinese citizens are increasingly and more clearly recognizing that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal common values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, a republic, and constitutionalism constitute the basic structural framework of modern governance. A "modernization" bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives humans of their rights, corrodes human nature, and destroys human dignity. Where will China head in the 21st century? Continue a "modernization" under this kind of authoritarian rule? Or recognize universal values, assimilate into the mainstream civilization, and build a democratic political system? This is a major decision that cannot be avoided.[8] ”
Response [ edit ]
China [ edit ]
Protest in Hong Kong against the arrest of Liu Xiaobo
The Chinese government has said little publicly about the Charter.[9] On 8 December 2008, two days before the 60th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Liu Xiaobo was detained by police, hours before the online release of the Charter.[10] He was detained and later arrested on 23 June 2009, on charges of "suspicion of inciting the subversion of state power."[11][12] Several Nobel Laureates have written a letter to President Hu Jintao asking for his release;[9] in response, the Chinese government has suppressed them:[13] at least 70 of its 303 original signatories have been summoned or interrogated by police while domestic media have been forbidden to interview anyone who has signed the document.[13] Police have also searched for or questioned a journalist, Li Datong, and two lawyers, though none have been arrested.[9] State media has been banned from reporting on the manifesto.[14] A blogging website popular with activists, bullog.cn, which may have had ties to the Charter, has been shut down.[15] On 25 December 2009 Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" activities by the court. On 8 October 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China".
Outside of China [ edit ]
A number of governments, including those of the United States[16] and Germany,[17] as well as the opposition in Taiwan,[18] have condemned the harassment of supporters of Charter 08 as well as hailing the Charter. Western press has generally covered the Charter positively, and international NGOs have supported its message.[19][20][21] Other international figures, including the Dalai Lama, have also voiced their support and admiration of the Charter.[22] There were also protests in Hong Kong demanding the release of Liu Xiaobo and other signatories.
Signatories (selection) [ edit ]
See also [ edit ] |
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, April 2, 2009 Thursday, April 2, 2009
The British authorities seemed to have little problem with allowing a group of violent black bloc anarchists to smash up the RBS building while provoking police yesterday, despite the group announcing their target in advance, yet a legitimate anti-poverty organization has had its “accreditation” to protest at the G20 removed on the orders of Downing Street.
This once again underscores the completely undemocratic power of the government to decide who is allowed to protest against them and who is not. When you have to get permission from the government to exercise a God-given right, as in China or Russia, then we know we are already living in a police state. The freedom to protest is not one that has to be “accredited” by the state, a license to protest as it were, it is an innate human right.
Apparently, if you wear black hoods and scarves, smash up private property and provoke police, then that’s absolutely fine and you’ll be left largely untouched. But God forbid if you’re a middle of the road anti-poverty group that just wants to peaceably march down the street.
“An anti-poverty group expressed “outrage” after its accreditation to attend Thursday’s G20 summit was suddenly withdrawn on Wednesday,” reports the Telegraph.
“The World Development Movement said it had no idea why the decision was taken but claimed it was on the orders of 10 Downing Street.”
“The group, which was part of last weekend’s huge (and peaceful – ed) Put People First Alliance which held a rally in London, said the Foreign Office received a note from 10 Downing Street telling it to revoke the accreditation.”
Benedict Southworth, the group’s director, said that the decision was part of the government’s plan to “stage-manage events and prevent voices of dissent and disagreement being heard.”
The black bloc anarchist assault on the Royal Bank of Scotland building yesterday certainly had an air of being stage-managed. The target was announced in advance, the authorities knew that the building was a prime target, and yet it was the only one in the street not boarded up. A cafe across the street was boarded up and yet the RBS building was left completely vulnerable to attack.
Stage-managed? Press photographers outnumber anarchists as the RBS siege is perfectly “produced” for a live television audience.
Cue a relatively small gaggle of black-bloc anarchists, followed by an similarly sized press corps to photograph every angle of every smashed window, and you have the makings of a stage-managed event to instantly be consumed by the watching middle classes thus enlisting their support for a police state crackdown. In this instance, the police stood back and let them do pretty much whatever they liked, which is highly suspicious within itself, but the week is far from over and a wider crackdown could ensue now that public acquiescence has been garnered through repeated footage showing the hostility of the anarchists.
We’re not saying for a minute that every anarchist group is working at the behest of the authorities as provocateurs, nor that the majority are not legitimate protesters expressing their right to free speech, but as we have documented, this particular black bloc sect are at best completely infiltrated by provocateurs who can routinely be relied upon to provide the media with violent footage with which to demonize legitimate protesters at every major global summit stretching back nearly two decades.
To emphasize our point that a lot of these people are merely hired thugs, whenever someone asks them what they are actually proposing to replace the evils of capitalism, they have no idea, as the video below highlights.
Meanwhile, people who actually have a defined cause and merely want to exercise their right to free speech as a public platform to draw attention to the issue, and have already proven they are a peaceable group, are barred from doing so by the government removing their “accreditation” to protest.
[efoods]
Why are the authorities so keen on stifling peaceful protesters while giving free reign to people who dress up like terrorists, attack buildings and provoke cops? Whose interests do the violent actions of the black bloc benefit? The interests of the general public in using free speech as a means of political change? Or the interests of the authorities in providing the perfect pretext with which to crush and outlaw that free speech?
You can’t overthrow the entire system by smashing one bank and starting a bonfire. Real political change takes generations of struggle, decades of building respected educational platforms, and a gargantuan grass-roots movement focused on taking power on the local level and expanding upwards. Throwing a brick through a window isn’t going to achieve anything other than making the vast majority of the general public despise you even more, and support the very systems of power that you are supposedly opposing.
We have documented numerous different occasions where the leadership of the black bloc anarchists were actually working with the authorities to provide a pretext for a police state crackdown.
Following the SPP protests in Canada two years ago, Quebec provincial authorities were forced to admit that three rock-wielding black mask-wearing “anarchists” were in fact police infiltrators used to gather information on protesters.
Video shows two of the provocateurs pick up rocks and try to incite violence before they are outed as cops by legitimate demonstrators. The two thugs then tried to slip behind police lines before their fellow officers were forced to stage their arrest. Again, the fact that they were cops in disguise was later admitted by authorities. Watch the video.
Alex Jones’ film Police State 2: The Takeover exposed how the black bloc anarchists were completely infiltrated and provocateured by the authorities during the violent 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.
The authorities declared a state of emergency, imposed curfews and resorted to nothing short of police state tactics in response to a small minority of hostile black bloc hooligans. Police allowed the black bloc to run riot in downtown Seattle while they concentrated on preventing the movement of peaceful protestors. The film presents clear evidence that the black bloc anarchist group was actually controlled by the state and used to demonize peaceful protesters. Watch the video below.
At the WTO protests in Genoa 2001 a protestor was killed after being shot in the head and run over twice by a police vehicle. The Italian Carabinere also later beat on peaceful protestors as they slept, and even tortured some, at the Diaz School. It later emerged that the police fabricated evidence against the protesters, claiming they were anarchist rioters, to justify their actions. Some Carabiniere officials have since come forward to say they knew of infiltration of the so called black bloc anarchists, and that fellow officers acted as agent provocateurs.
At the Free Trade Area of Americas protests in Miami in late November 2003, more provocateuring was evident. The United Steelworkers of America calling for a congressional investigation, stated that the police intentionally caused violence and arrested and charged hundreds of peaceful protestors. The USWA suggested that billions of dollars supposedly slated for Iraq reconstruction funds are actually being used to subsidize “homeland repression” in America.
The leadership of the black bloc has been completely usurped by the authorities and anyone who still professes to be a member of the group is either supremely naive or completely stupid. To dress up like terrorists, all in black with ski masks and bandanas (like the police) immediately sends out a negative message to the watching public and demonizes legitimate protesters.
More violence is expected throughout the rest of the week in London and if the police are ordered to institute a brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators then we can thank the black bloc anarchists, both the provocateurs and the useful idiots who ape their violence, for providing them with the perfect pretext to do so. |
Who Needs Handmade Pasta? Aziz Ansari Goes to In-N-Out After His Master of None Emmy Win
Aziz Ansari‘s Master of None character loves gourmet pasta. But after winning an Emmy for his writing on the Netflix comedy, he celebrated at fast foot burger joint In-N-Out.
Twitter user @aritweets caught the actor, 34, ordering at he counter after Sunday night’s awards show. “So this just happened, looked to my left. Saw an Emmy. Looked up, saw @azizansari,” he wrote. “CONGRATS MAN!!”
Ansari and costar Lena Waithe took home the outstanding writing for a comedy series honor, marking his second Emmy win and Waithe’s first. The 33-year-old is also the first-ever black woman to receive an Emmy for comedy writing.
So this just happened, looked to my left. Saw an Emmy. Looked up, saw @azizansari CONGRATS MAN!! pic.twitter.com/Gtz4ePCzM3 — aritweets (@aritweets) September 18, 2017
“I see each and every one of you,” the Chicago native said during her acceptance speech. “The things that make us different — those are our superpowers. Every day when you walk out the door and put on your imaginary cape and go out there and conquer the world, because the world would not be as beautiful as it is if we weren’t in it. And for everybody out there that showed us so much love for this episode, thank you for embracing a little Indian boy from South Carolina and a queer black girl from the South Side of Chicago.”
For full Emmys coverage, click here.
The episode she and Ansari won for, “Thanksgiving,” is based on Waithe’s experience growing up in an all-female home and coming out as a lesbian to her loved ones. Ansari’s Dev, a first-generation Indian-American, joins for the traditional November holiday, used to mark the progress Diane (Waithe) makes in understanding her sexuality over the years.
And while Ansari’s post-show plans brought him to the beloved West Coast fast food establishment, Waithe stopped by the Governors Ball and Netflix’s after parties, where she showed off her statue on the dance floor. |
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This is an excerpt from Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. Over the next few weeks, we'll be running a series of NSA-related excerpts from the book here on The Compass.
**
The effectiveness of the special programs of the NSA is a mystery. There are a couple of cases where they provided real assistance to investigators. But the FBI claims that early on the NSA added needless complications to the bureau's efforts to determine whether sleeper cells actually existed inside the United States. It was difficult to segregate data that came from the special programs from data that came from normal NSA FISA intercepts. Today, the NSA is more judicious with the information about domestic targets that it provides to the FBI.
Operationally, the NSA keeps secret what internal checklist must be satisfied before it asks telecommunications companies for stored data sets; how quickly it can drill down on a target after identifying it; how, precisely, it uses target and link analysis (also known as data mining) to develop probable cause; what equipment it uses; what auditing tools it uses; and more.
What is known is that the NSA's special programs are larger than they were when they first existed as a presidentially authorized intelligence collection tool. Inside the government there is a consensus that the programs are critical to national security. This consensus did not come easily, and from a civil libertarian standpoint the checks and balances are insufficient. It could be that the Justice Department, the courts, and Congress previously objected to the program only because they weren't let in on the secret. Now that they're in on it, they're willing participants in its perpetuation and expansion.
In the days after September 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney and David Addington, his legal counsel, both of whom intimately knew the habits of Congress and the executive branch, had assumed the opposite would be true. They ordered that details of the special programs remain so tightly compartmented that lawyers for the NSA were forbidden to discuss the matter with lawyers from the Justice Department. The barest minimum number of congressmen received briefings. So tightly stretched was the secrecy blanket that even the National Security Council's legal team was kept in the dark, as was the president's chief homeland security adviser and the Justice Department's chief liaison with the FISA court.
Only one attorney in the Justice Department's internal legal office, John Yoo, was providing the legal guidance. Yoo had no one to help him. He was formerly a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with a strong interest in national security. At Justice, he wrote several opinions that read like law articles but in practice would serve to justify a wide range of practical actions. His boss, Jay Bybee, had been confirmed but could not assume his post as head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) until his teaching term ended. But he would never be read in to the program. Nor was his boss, the deputy attorney general. When this later came out, it appeared that Cheney and Addington had hand-selected someone they knew would be sympathetic to their case. But the truth is more prosaic: Yoo was simply the go-to guy for national security in OLC at the time. Had Bybee been at his Justice desk, he would have been the one to decide who would formulate the opinion.
At the NSA, Hayden immediately consulted his general counsel. "Here's what the president wants me to do under 12333," he told Robert Deitz, referring to the executive order authorizing intelligence collection. "Can we do it?" This was a Thursday. Deitz spent a sleepless night trying to figure it out, but came in on Friday morning with an answer: There was no constitutional question at stake — but yes, the NSA could probably do this either under an implicit exemption in FISA, or, if not, the act itself had suddenly revealed itself to be unconstitutionally constraining on the president's power. As Deitz read court opinions going back decades, he noted that even where judges explicitly limited the president's reach, they always tacked on a footnote implying that nothing in their opinion was designed to constrain the president's ability to perform his main Article II functions. Deitz and Hayden agreed on two things: If the programs were revealed, they wouldn't lie to Congress about them, and Hayden would inform at least the chief of the FISC and the Gang of Eight from the start. Both used the same metaphor: They wanted to make Congress "pregnant," too. The programs were legal, in Deitz's view, but very close to the line.
Hayden then asked his SIGINT chief, Maureen Baginski, to figure out how many people would be needed to run the programs. Given the sensitivity involved, he had a hand in personally selecting everyone who would participate. Early the next day, a Saturday morning, Hayden, Deitz, and about 50 unsuspecting NSA analysts and engineers filed into a conference room in the main headquarters building. Hayden has several times since recounted the directive he gave to the staff: They would carry out only what the president authorized "and not one photon more." At the time he did not know, he now concedes, how realistic that promise was, given that the NSA had never attempted this type of thing before. But he knew that it would send a message to those who would operate the program: overcollection (which is inevitable) in a program like this is more than a minor sin.
Before 9/11, there was plenty of secrecy associated with the FISC. Its decisions were never public, and the subject of the surveillance would be — so far as the government was concerned — blissfully ignorant. In 1999, engineers brought a program to Hayden called ThinThread. It looked quite promising to an agency that was struggling to keep up with its core intelligence-gathering mission. Hayden's analysts were hearing a lot of chatter about millennium-related terror plots, and ThinThread was a $20 million computer system that could do what the NSA admitted it needed to do better — tap into the ever-changing global telephonic and network architecture.
One thing that the NSA could not do without a court order was acquire — the verb is important — communications that did not fully bypass the United States. If both ends of the conversation came from sources outside the United States, the NSA could intercept it, even if the wires through which the electrons and photons flowed physically went through the United States. But it was very hard to segregate these conversations from domestic traffic, and the NSA couldn't collect everything and then segregate it. That the NSA had the authority to do this at all was itself a necessary secret, and it remains redacted in official NSA regulations from the 1990s and the early part of the 2000s that were obtained by the authors under the Freedom of Information Act.
ThinThread's proponents believed they had figured out a way to intercept conversations without technically "acquiring" them, where one terminal might indeed be in the United States. NSA signals intelligence operations managers believed that by subjecting the content of these communications to encryption they could analyze the metadata for suspicious patterns. The response from the NSA's lawyers was unanimous: The agency could not acquire communications inside the United States without a warrant whether they were encrypted or not. The lawyers had asked the Justice Department for its view; President Bill Clinton's team found no basis in law for it. Therefore, the neat technology of ThinThread was not something the NSA could use. After the special programs began, the NSA used a program called Trailblazer to do link analysis on the data provided by telecoms and other sources. Trailblazer did not encrypt communications, which raised a red flag for many NSA SIGINT teams who weren't read in to the program. Why wasn't ThinThread being used? Trailblazer, by comparison, seemed more Orwellian and more expensive.
The reason was that Hayden now had the authority to acquire communications inside the United States (where one terminal was reasonably believed to be outside the United States) without an order. From his perspective, he didn't need ThinThread. And in any event, his software engineers told him that it wouldn't scale. It would later emerge, as Hayden acknowledges, that the system ultimately used to acquire U.S. communications didn't work as well as it could have, but that was no reason to replace it with an untested, entirely different system.
Next: The secrets the White House kept from everyone
More Deep State excerpts: |
One of the motivating factors behind Russia's decision to intervene in Syria — aside from the obvious one, "the adults need to stop this" — is that Moscow could not allow extremists from Central Asia and the Caucasus to return home and start their own "moderate" uprising.
Besides, the Russians have a moral obligation to turn CIA/Saudi weapons and training into ash.
'Moderate' rebel flattener
And that's exactly what they did:
The Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed al-Nusra HQ near Aleppo killing at least 67 terrorists, including 19 field commanders. On February 28, the headquarters of the al-Nusra terrorist group near Rasm al-Eis village, 28 kilometers south-west of Aleppo, was destroyed by a KAB-500 guided bomb launched by an Su-24 fighter jet of the Russian Aerospace forces, Lt. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi, the chief of the Russian General Staff Main Operational Directorate, said on Friday. "As a result, 67 terrorists, including 19 field commanders — natives of the North Caucasus and Central Asia, were eliminated. 104 militants were injured," Rudskoi said.
Okay, we rounded up from nineteen. (We included the CIA contractor-trainer that Moscow was too polite to mention in its tally.)
Despite several "rebrandings", al-Nusra has never been able to hide the fact that it has received direct and indirect support from the CIA.
Keep at it, Russia. A job well done.
Here's a video for those who enjoy watching "moderate" rebel whack-a-mole: |
Hristo Stoichkov says his former Barcelona coach Louis van Gaal is "destroying" Manchester United, and warned Pedro Rodriguez not to move to Old Trafford.
Stoichkov won five La Liga titles and the 1992 Champions League as a Barca player but left the Camp Nou shortly after Van Gaal's arrival in 1997.
The Dutchman went on to win two La Liga titles and a Copa del Rey in his first spell as Barca coach, which ended in 2000, but his second stint, in the 2002-03 season, was much less successful and was marred by a row with Rivaldo.
Stoichkov, now a radio pundit in Spain, told radio show "Al Primer Toque" that Van Gaal could not get on with top players.
"[Van Gaal] makes the players suffer, as he was such a mediocre player himself," the former Bulgaria international said. "He is destroying all the players, as he is so mediocre -- look at the players who have left because of him. First he destroyed Barcelona in that era, then it takes many years to rebuild."
United have invested heavily over the last two summers, but Stoichkov said he was unimpressed with their performance in Saturday's Premier League opener against Tottenham, when a Kyle Walker own goal gave them a 1-0 win.
"Now [Van Gaal] is spending €200m, and the other day I saw their first game in the English league -- disastrous," he said. "They won 1-0 with an own goal and he is happy."
United are expected to sign Pedro from Barca this summer after selling Angel Di Maria to Paris Saint-Germain.
The forward did not arrive at Barca until after Van Gaal's departure, though, and Stoichkov said the Spain international would damage his career if he moved to Old Trafford.
"I would never let Pedro leave, never, because if he goes there he will stop being a player," he said. "I hope Pedro listens and says: 'I'm staying at Barcelona.'"
There have been conflicting reports as to whether the €30m release clause in Pedro's contract can be triggered this summer, but it has been suggested that Barca were willing to cash in to balance the books after spending over €50m on Arda Turan and Aleix Vidal this summer.
Stoichkov, though, said that La Masia graduate Pedro's commitment to the club was more important than any financial concerns.
"Barcelona does not need money -- it doesn't matter if it is €20m, €30m or €50m," he said. "Pedro is a symbol of barcelonismo, Pedro is a guy who never ... I would never sell a guy who is so committed, a guy with energy, who fights to be a great player." |
Police were called to a scuffle at a Toronto-area hotel in what Skate Canada calls an unruly celebration involving figure skaters.
Peel police Sgt. Pete Brandwood says officers were called to the Delta Meadowvale hotel in Mississauga around 5 a.m. Sunday when eight Skate Canada members got into a fight on the second floor.
He says police sent those involved back to their rooms, adding that one man had his cheek cut in the melee but that the injury was minor and didn't require medical attention.
Skate Canada says there was a celebration at the hotel that "got out of hand," and that skaters didn't hush up when hotel staff confronted them over a noise complaint.
Brandwood says the incident wasn't criminal in nature and that police were there mainly to help the manager on duty quell the unrest.
Skaters from across the country had been competing at the Canadian figure skating championships, a week-long event held in Mississauga that wrapped up Sunday. |
The Philadelphia Flyers traded captain Mike Richards and forward Rob Bordson to the Los Angeles Kings on Thursday in exchange for winger Wayne Simmonds , center Brayden Schenn and a second-round pick in the 2012 Entry Draft.The move marks the second massive trade of the day by the Flyers, who have also dealt Jeff Carter to the Columbus Blue Jackets for Jakub Voracek and two 2011 draft picks -- the No. 8 pick in the first round and a third-round pick.Richards signed a 12-year, $69 million contract extension in 2007. During the past three seasons, the 26-year-old Richards has 84 goals and 124 assists while missing just four regular-season games. Richards had 7 goals and 16 assists in 23 playoff games in 2010 as the Flyers fell two wins short of a Stanley Cup."We felt at this stage of the franchise it was time to make a significant move for an impact player," Kings President and General Manager Dean Lombardi said. " Mike Richards is not only one of the top players in the league, he's also universally recognized as one of the finer leaders in the game and one of its elite competitors. Additionally, given that he's only 26-years-old and he's on a long-term contract, he fits our plan now and for the long-term future."In Simmonds, the Flyers grab a player who is less experienced but far less expensive. The 22-year-old Simmonds just completed his third season in the NHL, posting 14 goals and 16 assists in 80 games. Simmonds earned $525,000 last season and is now a restricted free agent.Schenn, 19, was the fifth pick of the 2009 draft. He played in eight regular-season games with the Kings last season, picking up 0 goals and 2 assists during his time in the NHL. Schenn spent most of last season splitting time between the WHL and AHL.By making these moves, the Flyers freed significant money that allowed them to sign free-agent goaltender Ilya Bryzgalov to a deal reportedly worth $51 million over nine years. The Phoenix Coyotes traded the exclusive rights to negotiate with the goaltender to the Flyers, who had until July 1 to work out a deal before the start of the free-agent period. |
BARNEGAT -- A package containing a small arsenal's worth of guns arrived at a home on Deer Run Drive South last month, allegedly the result of a mix-up at a package sorting facility.
Now the man who police say received that package is in trouble with the law.
An investigator with shipper UPS notified police Wednesday that the shipment from Ruger Guns in Connecticut ended up at a local home instead of its intended destination, a Ruger dealer at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. The package containing eight handguns and three rifles was damaged and when the weapons were repackaged at the UPS facility in Secaucus, an incorrect address label was placed on the new box, the investigator told police. The package arrived in Barnegat Nov. 25, police said.
An investigation by Sgt. Gary Larussa and Ptlmn. Richard Carr turned up all the weapons and also led to the arrest of Kevin Nagle, 33, of Barnegat. Nagle was being held on $100,000 bail at the Ocean County Jail on charges of theft by failure to make proper disposition, unlawful possession of handguns and unlawful possession of rifles.
Paul Milo may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter@PaulMilo2. FindNJ.com on Facebook |
Australian doctors should be mindful about the needs of refugees, many of whom are likely to be confused by an unfamiliar health system, say the authors of a new study.
Although people on refugee visas have the same Medicare and social benefits as other permanent residents, many have mental health issues and illnesses that may be unusual in Australia.
This, together with language and cultural barriers, means they may not receive the medical help they need.
Australia welcomes more than 20,000 refugees a year, but there are serious inconsistencies in care, according to the study.
"Refugees face profound and complex health and social problems," said lead author Professor Grant Russell, Director of the Southern Academic Primary Care Research Unit at Monash University.
He gives an example of man from Somalia who ruined $5000 worth of medicine because a pharmacist did not realise he could not understand refrigeration instructions.
"There is a big need for interpretation and for continuing support until refugees understand the health system," Prof Russell said.
"The system is patchy. West Australia and Northern Territory have worked out good systems for ensuring co-ordinated care. But the risk of refugees falling through the cracks is high in some other areas.
"Nearly all refugees have had a fairly traumatic experience before coming to Australia. They would not be refugees otherwise," Prof Russell said.
"Ironically psychologists and other allied health professionals do not have access to the same free translation services as GPs."
The report suggests refugees receive six months of focussed care and support, after which they could be integrated into mainstream health services.
The idea is not to create parallel systems, said co-author Dr I-Hao Cheng, a Melbourne GP who works with refugees.
Service providers would benefit from education on how to communicate with refugees and to be sensitive to their needs, he said.
"GPs should use interpreters and be mindful of the particular health needs of refugees."
This could mean extra help with setting up appointments or better explanations about how a prescription is used.
"In Afghanistan, for example, community health is based on workers who go into people's homes, who engage with them on the street or in markets. But in Australia people need an appointment at a GP or a clinic.
"The Commonwealth government needs to work closely with the states and territories to develop a strategic and integrated approach to health care." |
"Last year, I needed to get open heart surgery," Aldomar adds. "She kept me calm."
Each vote costs $1 and the federation has already raised more than $9,600 of its $20,000 goal. The funds will go toward the federation's cat welfare program, increasing access to low-cost spay/neuter programs as well as helping shelters raise cat adoption rates. Voting ends at 9 p.m. June 30.
According to the federation, Canada has a cat overpopulation crisis. With 10.2 million cats in the country, they are our most popular pets, yet are much less likely than dogs to receive veterinary care, have permanent identification or be reunited with their owners if lost. They're also twice as likely as dogs to end up abandoned in a shelter. The problem, Cartwright says, lies in our belief that cats can fend for themselves.
"As a culture, we treat them as throwaways," Cartwright says. "We need to start looking for ways to increase the value of cats."
In Canada, 600,000 cats are rendered homeless or placed in shelters each year, Cartwright says. Of those who find their way into shelters, only 44 per cent find permanent homes. For every dog that's euthanized, five cats are put down.
"We're crushed under the weight of unwanted and abandoned cats," Cartwright says. "We want cats in homes and not being euthanized … We need more men adopting cats."
Back in Sunnyvale, more than a third of the park's cats died during this year's harsh winter, DeCoutere says.
"Spay your cats, neuter your cats and be awesome to them.
"Bob Barker's been saying it for years, and he can't be lying," Bubbles pipes in.
"The price is right, Bubs."
To enter or vote in the Cats & Bros contest, visit www.catsandbros.com. The contest closes on June 30 at 9 p.m.
Toronto Star |
Photography Credit: Elise Bauer
Many baking recipes call for “softened” butter, or room temperature butter. The reason for using softened butter is that you want to beat the butter (also called “creaming the butter”), either with sugar or without, and it’s very hard to beat a cold stick of butter.
The best thing to do to soften your butter is to put it out on the kitchen counter for an hour before you have to use it. But sometimes we don’t think that far ahead. One popular solution is to put the cold butter in the microwave for 10 to 20 seconds. The problem with microwaving butter is that the microwave can heat the butter unevenly, and tends to over-soften or even melt the butter in places. You want pliable butter for beating, not almost melting butter.
Here’s a simple trick to soften butter quickly using some wax paper and a rolling pin. |
Apple's Steve Jobs conspired on e-book price-fixing, lawsuits say
"We allege that these executives knew full well what they were doing. That is, taking steps to make sure the prices consumers paid for e-books were higher," she said in announcing the federal suit.
The collusion began in 2009 and price fixing took effect with the launch of the iPad in early 2010, boosting the average cost of e-books by $2 to $3 each "virtually overnight," said Sharis Pozen, the acting head of the Justice Department's antitrust division.
WASHINGTON -- Former Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs and top executives at five major book publishers illegally conspired to raise the prices of e-books, costing consumers tens of millions of dollars, federal and state officials alleged in antitrust suits filed Wednesday.
This post has been corrected. See note below.
"'The customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway,'" Pozen quoted Jobs as saying at one point in the negotiations with publishers.
The suit said Apple proudly described the price-fixing plan -- which gave the iPad maker a guaranteed 30% commission on each e-book it sold through its online marketplace -- as an "aikido move," referring to the Japanese martial art.
The suit, and another by 16 state attorneys general, was filed against Apple, Simon & Schuster Inc., Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan and Penguin Group.
Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster reached a settlement with the Justice Department that would require them to allow retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble to reduce the prices of e-books they sell from the publishers, the Justice Department said.
The settlement, if approved by a federal judge, would restore competition to the e-book market, Pozen said.
In addition, Hachette and HarperCollins agreed to settle the states' lawsuit and pay a total of about $51 million in restitution to e-book customers nationwide. The states are still negotiating restitution with Simon & Schuster.
Apple, Macmillan and Penguin did not agree to a settlement, and Pozen promised the Justice Department would purse the case against them vigorously.
Macmillan CEO John Sargent denied the charges in an open letter posted Wednesday on Tor.com, one of the publisher's imprints.
"Macmillan did not collude," he wrote.
An Apple spokesman said the company had no comment on the suits.
Amazon cheered the lawsuits and the settlements. The suit portrayed Amazon, which makes the Kindle e-reader, as a victim of the price-fixing because they could not charge lower prices and ostensibly lost e-book sales to Apple.
“This is a big win for Kindle owners, and we look forward to being allowed to lower prices on more Kindle books,” the company said.
The federal suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, alleged that the publishers began illegally working together in the summer of 2009 to raise prices in response to Amazon's offering of e-books for $9.99 each.
They joined with Apple in 2010 to create a system that boosted the prices of books to $12.99 or $14.99, the suit said. |
Media Molecule’s PS4 Project Made Shuhei Yoshida’s Mind ‘Stop Functioning’
Though Shuhei Yoshida, President of Worldwide Studios is featured a lot on PSLS (he’s so cute!), he won’t replace Kaz as #1 in our hearts. But, if keeps up his awesome streak via his Twitter account, Kaz could be dethroned one day.
During his time in the UK for the Develop Conference right now, Shuhei had a chance to check out Media Molecule’s upcoming PS4 project. After being initially jealous, we read what he had to say about it:
Thanks for sharing the latest and hottest that you are [working] on. My mind was slightly blown and stopped functioning 😉
Shuhei didn’t stop his reign of brilliance at just Media Molecule though, as a fan asked him “when will we know the [actual] ps4 release date?” Yoshida responded with the perfect, “Before it happens.”
Finally, on the subject of Octodad for PS4, Shuhei originally said, “To tell the truth, I don’t know if Octodad is going to be a great game, but I’m in love with it at first sight.” He quickly followed this up with, “I’m slightly worried if [Media Molecule’s] new game can beat Octodad.” With Octodad skyrocketing to fame after the PS4 reveal, it has a lot to live up to, but so far, it seems like it will deliver.
What do you hope Media Molecule is creating on PS4? Let us know in the comments below. |
From the Los Angeles Times:
Driver's ed in Mexico City: White knuckles all the way Mexico City doesn't require adults to pass an exam for a driver's license, but there are driving schools for 'nervous people' who are afraid of the wild roads.
STORY AND PHOTOS BY RICHARD FAUSSET REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY
Pedro Cervantes was speaking with his teaching voice. It was clear and almost mystically calm — the kind of voice you'd want talking you through the emergency landing of a passenger plane: This is the steering wheel, he said. Hands at 10 and 2. This is your gas gauge. Cervantes was in the passenger seat of a red, four-door Nissan compact from the Harvey Driving School, giving Patricia Sanchez, 52, her first lesson in how to drive. Or, more specifically, how to drive in Mexico City, a seemingly infinite maze of daredevils and incompetents, of axle-bending potholes and curb-hugging taco stands, of signless seven-way intersections and baffling multidirectional traffic circles, of tamale vendors on tricycles and cops hungry for bribe money.
My dad and I drove around Mexico City in 1975. One day we tried to get to the Palace of Fine Arts, a vast marble theater so heavy it had sunk two dozen feet into Mexico City's dry lakebed since it was built in the mid-1800s. We could see it looming over the lesser buildings, but the randomness of the street layout made it hard to approach. Finally, we discovered a six lane boulevard leading directly to the Palace. As soon as my dad turned on to it, a policeman blew his whistle. Suddenly, six cars abreast came roaring at us—it was a one-way street.
The traffic cop was standing right under where the One-Way sign should have been. He, or a predecessor, probably took it down to increase business. Police sergeants auction off the most lucrative corners in Mexico City, so the lowly patrolmen who win the rights to a tourist-heavy spot like this have to be enterprising just to break even on bribe rake-offs, much less turn a profit.
It's a place with 4.5 million motorized vehicles, a place where someone is killed or injured in a traffic accident every hour, yet adults don't have to take any sort of exam to receive a driver's license.
... After an out-of-control gas truck crashed and exploded May 7, killing 26 residents of suburban Ecatepec, newspaper columnist Sergio Sarmiento suggested that Mexicans, who are understandably fixated on the drug-cartel-fueled culture of violence in the country, should also focus on the culture of negligence. ... But Sanchez, a retired social security agency worker, soft-spoken, with pink lipstick to match her nails, was looking for some peace of mind. On the side of Cervantes' Nissan, blocky yellow letters spelled out: "ESPECIALISTAS EN PERSONAS NERVIOSAS." Specialists in nervous people. ... In Mexico City, driver's exams for adults were phased out in 2001 after widespread corruption was discovered among test administrators. These days, aspiring license-seekers can simply show up at a government office with an ID, proof of residence and 626 pesos, or about $50.
Robert Kaplan wrote in the Atlantic once about how he was surprised to find in Eritrea in northeast Africa that you couldn't bribe anybody to get your driver's license, you had to take a rigorous driver's ed course then pass an honest driving test.
But, when he thought about it, Eritrea's high level of honesty and competence made sense because Eritrea is sort of the Prussia of Africa, a small country that fought Ethiopia for its independence for three decades and then fought a couple of tank wars with Ethiopia mostly because it liked war and liked the nation-building effects of war.
Eritreans treated each other as fellow citizens in a perilous joint enterprise. Mexico, in contrast, has been independent for 200 years, and there's little point in fighting either America or Guatemala.
City officials recently announced that an exam of some kind will again be required for adult applicants next year. That should be good for business at the capital's 29 licensed driving schools. For now, many of their customers are adolescents, who must show they took a driving course to qualify for a license. The rest are adults like Sanchez, the personas nerviosas. She had paid 1,000 pesos, or about $80, for three two-hour lessons, consisting of a one-hour review of the controls, five hours of hands-on driving and a photocopied sheet of paper with basic, seemingly random tips: "Don't look at airplanes," "Don't put your faith in good luck."
Harriet Doerr's acclaimed memoir/novel, Stones for Ibarra, about a WASP couple moving to Mexico (played in the movie by Glenn Close and Keith Carradine) to restart a family gold mine lost in the Revolution is basically about how:
A. Mexicans always put their faith in good luck.
B. Mexicans never have good luck.
Just about every chapter ends with some poor Mexican getting maimed or killed, and somebody else saying, "Oh, that happens at this fiesta every year. It's tragic, but what are you going to do?"
Traffic laws were not part of the curriculum, Cervantes said. There simply wasn't time. Basically, it is "a course in how to survive," the instructor said, laughing. ... It's unclear whether the return of the driving exam for adults will have any effect on Mexico City's driving culture. What would be considered bad driving in other countries — the rule-bending, bumper-riding and lane-drifting — is simply business as usual here....
Pedro Hoth, Mexico City's former international affairs coordinator, believes that Mexico City's driving style is rooted in the age of conquest, when only the Spanish and their allies had the right to ride a horse. Having a horse meant having a special claim to power. "Today the automobile is the substitute for the horse, but the attitude is the same," Hoth wrote in a recent email. "It's a kind of Jekyll and Hyde syndrome, this arrogance that many drivers experience once they get behind the wheel. The inside of the car becomes a space of arbitrary power."
This kind of automotive caballeroism is pretty common around the world. Driving around the English Cotswolds — the most genteel landscape in the world—was pretty harrowing in 1987, with normally polite Englishmen tailgating and honking on the winding lanes, transformed into The Humungus and Wez by the act of getting behind the wheel, liberated at last from the stifling class system.
The one place back then that automotive caballeroism didn't seem common was in my native Los Angeles. Angelenos drive fast, but other than maybe on Mulholland Drive, with its impatient Porsche drivers, there was little sense that owning a car made you better than the common man.
That's because practically everybody in the Los Angeles of my youth owned a car: capitalist egalitarianism, Henry Ford's dream. It turned out that some minimum level of general prosperity, Los Angeles in 1962, say, is actually conducive to safety, public order, manners, and responsible behavior.
Our elites have been trying to fix that problem ever since. |
Taipei, May 28 (CNA) Six female volunteer soldiers are to be posted on remote Taiwan-controlled islands in the South China Sea, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said Tuesday.
The six women, aged between 19 and 24, will be the first female Taiwanese soldiers ever to serve on the Dongsha (Pratas) Islands and Taiping Island in the Spratly Islands, according to the administration.
They are among some 21 volunteer soldiers who are receiving training for service on the two South China Sea islands, a CGA official said.
"Three of them are preparing to work on the Dongsha Islands and the other three are going to Taiping Island," the official said.
At present, 100 soldiers and officers are serving on Taiping Island, the largest islet in the Spratlys, while 150 officers and enlisted men are working on the Dongsha Islands.
"All of them are men," the CGA official said.
The six women are scheduled to begin their service on the islands in late June, the official said, adding that relevant facilities, including female dormitories, have been set up in preparation for their arrival.
Taiping Island lies 1,600 km to the southwest of Kaohsiung, while the Dongsha islands are 450 km to the southwest of the southern port city.
As Taiwan has decided to move from a conscription to an all-volunteer military by the end of 2014, the CGA has been carrying out a recruitment drive since the beginning of this year.
(By Liu Chien-pang and Sofia Wu)
ENDITEM/J |
A black Mississippi high school graduate sued her school district this week after being forced to share valedictorian status with a white student who had a lower GPA.
Jasmine Shephard, a 2016 graduate of Cleveland High School, filed the lawsuit against her Mississippi school district, The Washington Post reported Friday.
The school named Shephard and the white student “co-valedictorians” the day before graduation, the lawsuit claims.
“Prior to 2016, all of Cleveland High School’s valedictorians were white. As a result of the school official’s unprecedented action of making an African-American student share the valedictorian award with a white student, the defendants discriminated against,” the lawsuit alleges.
Sherry Shepard, the student’s mother, said that her daughter had to speak after the white student. Shephard was supposed to walk behind the white student, but her mother put a stop to it, Sherry told WaPo.
“A child, when they earn honors, they are entitled to receive them,” Sherry said. “There is no inclusion in the Cleveland school district. When the district wants something, they just take it.”
The Mississippi school district denied the allegations, calling the lawsuit “frivolous.” Both students had the same GPA, Jamie Jacks, an attorney for the district, wrote.
“As such, under school board policy, they were both named valedictorian of their graduating class,” Jacks said to WaPo. “The district’s policy is racially neutral and fair to students.”
Shephard and her mother have launched a “Justice for Jasmine” Facebook page which details Sherry’s fight against the local school district.
“I am humbled by support you have shown to Jasmine and her courage to stand in spite of the Goliaths in this sensitive matter! The outpouring of good wishes and prayers have brought encouragement at some of the most darkest hours,” a recent post reads.
The lawsuit seeks an unknown amount of money and wants Shephard to be declared the only valedictorian.
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Last Friday I did a stream to try out my new channel and the capabilities of my new computer. Thankfully setting up a Picarto account and stream is very straightforward, so I had plenty of time to get into some serious art. With no real ideas I was just making random scribbles, when suddenly a coincidental spirally thing inspired me to make a horse vortex, which then turned into a horse tornado. A horsenado.
I realize I hardly ever draw the mane six together. The only other piece in my gallery with all off them is two years old. Usually I find it too much work to draw six characters. It helps that they're only partly visible here.
Created with Gimp and Wacom Bamboo tablet.
Creative Commons 3.0 – BY NC ND
Mane six from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (c) Hasbro |
About a 45 minute drive from where we are in Tomball north toward Montgomery is the Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary. We did not know about it at all until this past Saturday when they held their open house. It is a fascinating place, housing thirteen wolves (at least when we were there) in a variety of enclosures. They are a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and the annual open house is their big yearly fund raiser.
There are a number of ways to visit the sanctuary, almost all (except the open house) are by appointment only (link here). I highly recommend visiting by an arranged appointment vs. the open house…there were tons of people at the open house, and the road to get to the Sanctuary had cars backed up quite a ways and parked on the side of the road for a long way.
The sanctuary consists for about seven enclosures which have two wolves each. There are two “ambassador” wolves (Tala and Meeko, who is jet black) that were out for pictures as part of the open house. The wolves were, for the most part, lounging (except for Romulus, pictured above, who shared enclosure #7 with snow white Rafiki who never left the house). When they brought Meeko back from his photo ops and took Tala out, most of the wolves got up and paced.
That’s Rajah and Lapua (enclosure #5) greeting their neighbor Meeko, who shares enclosure #6 with Tala who was taking her turn with the photos. The video below is the wolf being taken out.
I’m not sure why all the wolves get excited when one of their number comes back or gets taken out, other than the obvious concepts of greeting, wanting to be let out, or some other pack-like emotion.
The highlight of the open house was Romulus, who stayed close to the fence in spite of (or perhaps because of) the large number of people…including young kids howling, hoping to elicit a response. For the most part, he just sat there, but he did get up and pace. One of the volunteers who was talking to visitors said that the younger wolves were kept toward the end where Romulus and the ambassador wolves were kept, so it makes some sense that the younger ones would be more active.
Below is a picture of enclosure #4, home of Echo and Achilles. You can barely see one of them close to the hut, but the picture gives you a good idea of what the wolves enclosure look like.
The Sanctuary has an on-going fund raiser to move to a new sanctuary location, which plans for a much larger enclosure. The relocation fund and the plans for the enclosure and new location can be found here.
For those of you driving from Houston, I suggest using Waze (someone has added the location and it took us right to it) or following the directions on the Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary’s web page.
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Large areas of southern Australia at higher risk of bushfires this summer
Updated
Bushfire researchers say vast swathes of Australia face above average chances of grass fires and bushfires this summer, after months of above average temperatures.
The Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre has released its seasonal bushfire outlook for the south of the country.
It found recent warm weather, coupled with generous rainfalls has led to a build up of dry fuel in grasslands and forests.
The last 12 months have been the warmest on record, according to the weather bureau, and most states recorded their warmest winter since records began.
Large parts of southern Australia, especially along the east and west coasts extending inland, face above normal fire potential this fire season.
However, fire authorities said the at-risk area is not as extensive as last season, when the danger zone extended right across the south of the country.
Victoria
The risk of fire is above average throughout Victoria's heartland and in the east, including east Gippsland.
"Forests are expected to be more flammable than normal due to the lingering effect of last summer's extreme dryness and heat," Bushfire CRC's outlook said.
"Strong drying of soils and fuels has also commenced in east Gippsland, which may result in early bushfire activity if this trend continues."
Fire authorities say spring rainfall patterns will dictate the severity of the fire risk and grass growth is being closely monitored.
"Certainly western, central and north-east Victoria would appear at this stage to be the highest risk areas," said Victoria's Fire Services Commissioner Craig Lapsley.
"We have got areas that are forested and grassland environments that will be significantly impacted by the spring rains which will see growth and which brings additional grass in the grasslands that will dry out.
"The summer months are the critical periods for Victorians to be focused on fire."
A normal fire season is expected in the Mallee, west and south Gippsland and coastal parts of south-west Victoria.
New South Wales
With the exception of north-eastern coastal areas and the far west, NSW is expecting above average bushfire conditions this season.
Above average rainfall over the past three years has led to a build up of grass fuel across parts of the state.
The Rural Fire Service says it has already had to deal with a significant number of bushfires after one of the state's warmest winters on record.
The areas of most concern include the Tablelands, the Upper Hunter and west of the Great Dividing Range.
Forested areas on the central and southern NSW coast and ranges have been drying out due to below average rainfall since July.
"The areas around Tamworth and Taree and the Upper Hunter, as well as some parts of the southern part of the state around Shoalhaven, have brought forward the bushfire danger commencement to the beginning of September so obviously they're seeing an increase in fire activity already," said RFS Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers.
"If you have a prolonged period of warming it tends to dry out the fuels more and it makes the fuels more readily burn.
"Fires take hold quicker and obviously it's more difficult then for brigades to suppress.
"Particularly if there's some of those extreme temperature days like we saw in the last summer, where we saw some records broken in temperature, that's obviously of concern to us too, particularly if it's very dry."
The far north coast and north coast are also at a higher risk of fire. But the risk could be eased if there is above average rainfall.
Normal fire conditions are likely in the far west of the state.
South Australia
Above normal fire potential is predicted in the North West Pastoral and Flinders districts due to abundant rain and the growth of grass fuels.
The rest of the state, including the agricultural areas, can expect normal levels of fire activity.
The Bushfire CRC outlook raises concerns about adequate fire-fighting resources in SA.
"The North West Pastoral and Flinders districts may pose resourcing issues this fire season, as was experienced in the North West Pastoral district last season, where firefighters and aircraft were committed for lengthy periods," it said.
Tasmania
Normal fire activity is expected across Tasmania this season, but small areas in the Derwent Valley and the mid-east coast are currently drier than usual.
Most of the state has experienced average or above average soil moisture, reducing fire activity for the moment.
But it also provides ideal conditions for growth, which may be a trigger for large fires in the new year if it dries out.
Fire ecologist Professor David Bowman, from the University of Tasmania, says people need to stay alert.
"If we had heatwaves like we saw last summer in Tasmania we can have very quickly evolving fire weather conditions which go from fairly benign to quite extreme," he said.
"I would urge everybody who that's in bushland settings to be very, very conscious of bushfires."
He said fuel management is a critical tool, but not the only tool.
"As we're going into a warmer world we will be looking at other options that will be probably more targetted vegetation management, clearing, creating safer spaces around houses, maybe changing the vegetation types, changing the vegetation types, changing the sorts of houses we have," he said.
Western Australia
High rainfall across the mid west and desert regions has led to high rate of grass growth and high fuel loads, and consequently, above average fire potential.
Above normal bushfire potential is also forecast in the south west.
A normal fire season is expected for the Wheatbelt, the Nullarbor, east of the Fraser Range.
Queensland
An above normal fire potential has been predicted for areas between Dalby and Warwick, south to the NSW border and west to Goondiwindi.
Also at a heightened risk is the area to the west between Wallumbilla and Dulacca, south to St George and an area extending from the Sunshine Coast hinterland, into the western areas of the Wide Bay Burnett region.
Despite large-scale fires in the northern and western areas of Queensland during the last fire season, there are still vast areas with moderate to abundant grassland fuels and low stock levels that could experience large-scale, fast-running grass fires.
Northern Australia
The seasonal outlook for the north of Australia is released mid-year, ahead of the dry season.
This includes the Northern Territory, as well as northern Western Australia and northern Queensland.
Topics: fires, safety, weather, australia, act, nt, qld, sa, tas, vic, wa, nsw
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Buy Photo One of the trails at Scenic Hudson's new High Banks Preserve in Ulster Park takes you to the edge of Esopus Lake. (Photo: John Ferro/Poughkeepsie Journal)Buy Photo
It's time to lace up the hiking shoes and head out to the trails.
The vast majority of the Dutchess-Ulster county area is at peak foliage color, according to the New York Fall Foliage Report.
Since 2015, I've asked local scientists, preservationists and other folks who get out a lot to give up their favorite spots.
Combined with my own research, here's my third annual list of 10 less-frequented walks you don't want to miss.
High Banks Preserve, 132 River Road, Ulster Park: This new Scenic Hudson Preserve opened Oct. 15. So only a few have set foot on its 3 miles of trails.
The site used to be a summer camp where, I was told, a young Sandy Koufax once worked as a counselor.
The trails take you past bluffs overlooking the Hudson River and to the shoreline of sparkling Esopus Lake.
Some of the paths are on old camp roads, so you don't need to be a Sherpa.
Pack a lunch and snack there, or take it to nearby Esopus Meadows Preserve, where you can watch the birds swoop over the Hudson River.
John Burroughs Nature Sanctuary, Floyd Ackert Road, West Park: This spot is back for a third year because it offers so much and will always remain comparatively deserted because it's hard to find.
Here, blazed trails pass through rolling forests and alongside a scenic, two-acre pond. And of course, there's Slabsides, the cabin where John Burroughs, the naturalist, wrote many of his works.
Slabsides, the house built by John Burroughs in 1865. (Photo: Lauren Kopchik/Courtesy photo)
The cabin typically is closed, but you can peer through the windows, sit on the porch and let your imagination do the rest.
There is no lot, but you can park on Burroughs Drive or Floyd Ackert Road.
Dover Stone Church Nature Preserve, Route 22, Dover Plains: This incredible site makes my list for the second time in three years.
Last year, officials opened five miles of additional trails.
The trails complement the preserve's centerpiece: a natural, stream-fed cavern that served as a Native American hideout in the 17th century and a popular tourist destination in the 19th century.
Buy Photo Julie Hart, senior manager of stewardship and education with the Dutchess Land Conservancy, walks along Stone Church Brook at the Dover Stone Church Preserve in Dover Plains on Monday, June 1, 2015. (Photo: John Ferro/Poughkeepsie Journal)
And like some of the others on this list, it's a little tricky to find.
Best thing is to park at Dover Elementary School and walk up Route 22. The preserve's entrance is located on the west side of Route 22, just south of the Mill Street stoplight, where a gravel driveway passes two houses.
The stone tower at Buttercup Farm Sanctuary in Stanfordville. Also known as "Martin's Folly," the tower was built by the previous landowner, Alastair Martin, who donated the land to Audubon New York. A folly is a Scottish word for tower. (Photo: Larry Federman/ Courtesy photo)
Buttercup Farm Audubon Sanctuary, 6862 Route 82, Stanfordville: Imagine rolling farmland, marshy woodlands, scenic overlooks and old railbeds.
That's what you get on 6 miles of trails at this 641-acre site.
A scenic overlook offers views of Stissing Mountain and the valley below. Trails on the west side of Route 82 are wheelchair accessible.
There is a box where you are asked to leave a donation.
If you can't make it this fall, come back in May, when as many as 80 species of birds can be spied.
Lime Kiln Trail, Rosendale: The Mohonk Preserve's trails are great, right? But this time of year, they are heavily trafficked and parking can be a problem.
Not this one. The 1-mile in-and-out trail is accessed off of the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, just south of the Rosendale trestle bridge.
Park at the large rail trail lot on Binnewater Road, enjoy a stroll across the trestle and continue south for a few hundred yards until you see the signs on the right. (Access does require a day-pass or a preserve membership.)
What do you get? Deep forests and dramatic views of the Rondout Valley. Rare plant species and native animals. Old lime kilns from Rosendale’s cement industry. And boulder fields of rock fragments from the Shawangunk Mountains.
The habitats of the Pawling Nature Reserve include woodlands, overgrown fields, meadows and swamp. Volunteers maintain wooden planks that serve as a foot path over the wet grounds. (Photo: By Sarah Bradshaw/Poughkeepsie Journal file)
Pawling Nature Reserve, 29 Quaker Lake Rd., Pawling: This 1,060-acre wonderland was donated to The Nature Conservancy in 1958.
It's size provides habitat for larger animals — and plenty of solitude on its 10 miles of trails, including one along Hammersly Ridge (elevation 1,053 feet).
Habitats include swamps, overgrown fields, wet meadows and fern glens. And there is an impressive gorge near the entrance.
Franny Reese State Park, Macks Lane, Highland: How do you resist a walk that comes with Hudson River views and creepy ruins? You don't.
Dr. Charles H. Roberts, a Poughkeepsie dentist, built his estate here in the 19th century after discovering a form of painless dentistry. (Then he smartly invested in railroads).
All that remain are stone walls, foundations and 2.5 miles of trails through rolling forest, with views across the Hudson and a head-on overlook of the Mid-Hudson Bridge.
Thompson Pond and Stissing Mountain, 335 Lake Rd., Pine Plains: Yes, the fire tower here offers views from 1,400 feet above the surrounding valley.
But the real treasure is Thompson Pond, which serves as a headwater of the Wappinger Creek.
The pond, according to The Nature Conservancy, was carved more than 15,000 years ago by a melting ice chunk.
The Conservancy says the basin's pond, cattail marsh, swamp and upland forest "support a wondrously diverse array of wildlife." There are several trails around the pond with the loop connected by a bog bridge.
Nyquist-Harcourt Wildlife Sanctuary, 140 Huguenot St., New Paltz: How romantic is this ox-bow combo of meadow, forest and Wallkill River frontage?
Well, I proposed to my wife here a quarter-century ago and she hasn't thrown in the towel yet.
The trails are flat, easy and you're just a stone's throw from the stone houses in the Huguenot Street historic district.
There is no parking at the sanctuary. But if you make a right off of Main Street onto Huguenot, there is a parking area two tenths of a mile in on your left. Hoof it from there to the sanctuary.
Orange Trail 2, Thompson Lane at Margaret Lewis Norrie State Park: OK, so maybe the name doesn't move you to tears. But this easy 1.85-mile trail opened just a year ago.
Buy Photo Steve Hesse of Poughkeepsie, left, and Christine Welker of Rhinebeck take in the view from the scenic overlook at the end of the new Greenway trail in the Town of Hyde Park on Oct. 23, 2015. (Photo: John Ferro/Poughkeepsie Journal)
It heads south through forests, wetlands, streams and rock slabs to a stress-melting Hudson River overlook. Two benches here allow you take it all in, including, perhaps, your favorite sandwich.
The entrance can be found in a grassy field that is on the immediate left of Thompson Lane.
"Out There" appears every other week in My Valley. Reach John Ferro at 845-437-4816; [email protected]; Twitter: @PoJoEnviro
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The BMW 8-series turned 25 this year, and the German automobile powerhouse made a comeback for the vigorous high-end driving machine: the new BMW 8-series concept. But before the BMW 8-series was revealed, they made a car that got an M8 variant of a Grand Touring coupe of the ‘90s. However, that car never made it to the masses.
The 8-series first revealed in 1989. The E31 chassis was a genuine rarity, a clean sheet design from top to bottom. But the CSi was something special, which is – as BMW proudly puts it – “the future in the past”. The supreme vessel of this line is the 850CSi. With its advent in the 90s, BMW introduced one of the most powerful 8-series editions and became the first car company to make the V12 available. The 8-series was so advanced for its time that the architectural design was drawn entirely on computer. Back then it had quite a low drag coefficient – 0.29 – the same as a Porsche 918, thanks to those swoopy, wedgy shapes developed in wind-tunnel testing.
The BMW 850CSi is a typical luxury Gran Turismo fit for long cruising though right now we’re looking at the most sporty CSi version ever manufactured. The 850CSi was built on the regular 850 with boosted performance and handling. Only 1510 units were made, making it one of the smallest production runs in BMW’S history. The 850CSi was only available with a 5.6L-V12 engine matched to the first ever six-speed transmission in the 90s. This was simply a match made in heaven. The BMW 850CSi produced 375HP. The engine that makes a huge impression was developed in collaboration with the engineers of the M division. They souped-up the engine, the suspension and the brakes, and despite its significant weight and comfort, this car was made a fashion star with the M treatment. One can always feel the heavy engine under the hood, unlike other luxury cars that give performance and comfort but can’t offer the joy of superior control of the car. BMW painstakingly took every effort to make the 850CSi one of the most high-tech cars of all time.
In the wake of building this, the McLaren needed a motor for their F1, so they sought help from BMW. This is the journey of the McLaren engine that went to F1 in the long run. That’s a contribution that can’t be ignored. Driving a CSi feels like a high-performance car as the suspension and the steering ratio is tighter. With 375 horsepower under the hood, CSi has a really good record and can claim to be the rarest production engine in BMW road cars.
The E31 and to be precise the 850i was known to be “nose-heavy” which was lacking the Bavarian driving experience. But its descendant was made to perfection by solving these issues, making 850CSi near to perfect.
It’s very understandable if someone who doesn’t know the 8-series, looks at it thinking it’s a car from future. The popup headlights, smooth, curvy and aggressive wedge design gives the 850CSi an unmistakable and timeless look.
In 1996, stricter emission guidelines were put in place which prematurely ended the production of the iconic 850CSi. The design of the 8-series was unlike any other cars that BMW has made. From every angle, the car looks beautiful both from the interior and exterior just like other BMW creation. But something is amazingly unique about this car because it was timeless. There is a reason why they call the 850CSi The “Best Failed Experiment”.
Disclaimer: Images used in this articles are sourced from various websites. Auto Rebellion does not hold any rights on the images used in this articles.
Car enthusiast. True JDM lover. Die cast collector |
Friends and fans of James Gandolfini remember him and his impact on New Jersey. Pat Battle reports. (Published Friday, Jan. 2, 2015)
Flags across New Jersey will be lowered Monday in honor of James Gandolfini, the late "Sopranos" star who was born and raised in the Garden State.
Gandolfini died Wednesday in Italy of a heart attack.
"Sopranos" Star James Gandolfini Dead at 51
Gov. Chris Christie ordered flags to fly at half-staff "to recognize the achievements and contributions" of Gandolfini, his office said in a statement.
NY, NJ Friends, Fans Remember James Gandolfini
An autospy is now underway into the death of "Sopranos" actor James Gandolfini. His friends, family and neighbors in New York and New Jersey are remembering the man who touched so many. Pei-Sze Cheng reports. (Published Friday, June 21, 2013)
"James Gandolfini was an iconic actor and will be remembered for the timeless impact he left upon television and film in the state of New Jersey and across our nation," the governor's office said.
Copyright Associated Press / NBC New York |
By now you have probably heard of Bryan Caplan’s “rational irrationality.” The idea is that if the cost of holding irrational beliefs is low enough, there may be more irrationality demanded. Indeed, if holding an irrational view makes someone feel better about himself or keep membership in some in-group—but holding the view doesn’t directly harm the holder—she may very well stick with that view.
Caplan contrasts this with the idea of “rational ignorance,” which is more familiar to our readers. That simply means the cost of acquiring enough information to have a truly informed opinion about some issue is generally high, so people remain ignorant.
Both of these behaviors certainly play a role in the preponderance of dumb policies and dumb views. But are there corollaries in debate tactics?
Most libertarians find they’re arguing in social media these days. So they’re not only finding new people on whom to test their ideas, they’re finding new fallacies in response. And sometimes these fallacies work, despite being fallacious, which is probably why they’re so commonplace. This is especially true on social media, where one can quickly learn that the real point of these exchanges is to play to the audience, to provide them with an excuse to withdraw into whatever biases they already hold. Still, maybe it’s possible to raise the costs of employing these fallacies—at least a little.
We’ve decided to offer you a fun list of them, which you can use as a handy guide in the process of engaging in well-mannered, reasoned discourse online.
Argument ad KochBrotherium: This fallacy is a cousin to the genetic fallacy and guilt by association. The twist, of course, is that anything that the Koch Brothers ever say, said, fund, funded, might fund, came close to funding, could have funded, will fund, walked by, looked at, support, think about, or mention is invalid by virtue of, well, “Koch Brothers! Boo!”
The Unicorn: You’ll recognize this fallacy from the question, “Why does no libertarian country exist anywhere in the world?” Embedded in the question is the assumption that libertarian countries don’t exist because they are fantastic creatures, like unicorns. Of course, just because something doesn’t exist yet does not mean it can’t exist. Indeed, the Internet in 1990 and the American Republic in 1775 beg to differ. And the unicorn fallacy fundamentally confuses the libertarian worldview with some “L”ibertarian platform that might be the product of some electoral processes—processes most libertarians reject. Michael Lind and E. J. Dionne have brandished this fallacy rather shamelessly, and have had it parried rather effectively by better minds.
Nut-Picking: This fallacy has nothing to do with Jimmy Carter. In this style of argument, the arguer finds the kookiest or most insane person who self-identifies as libertarian and then ascribes all of that person’s beliefs or claims to all libertarians. (This one could also be called the Alex Jones fallacy.) This is a tough one to counter simply because there are plenty of nuts to pick from, and plenty of them use the L-word.
Must Be Scared/Have No Answer: This one’s pretty simple really, and a unique creature of “debate” via social media. The libertarian leaves his computer or signs off for a while and the opponent accuses the libertarian of not being able to answer his or her Facebook claims, which the libertarian simply never saw or had no time to answer.
The Tin Man: This fallacy was identified and named by Cole James Gentles (here), who inspired this article. With the tin man the arguer either concludes or falsely assumes that the libertarian “has no heart” because she argues against some favored policy. This cousin of the straw man (scarecrow) fallacy assumes a direct line between sympathies and outcomes. Any failure to support some means amounts to a failure to support the wished-for end.
The tin man fallacy is rooted in the assumption that one’s opponent, often a libertarian, has no heart. Unlike the straw man fallacy, in which the debater needs to mischaracterize their opponent’s position, the tin man fallacy allows the debater to build a sturdy-looking, if hollow, general facsimile of their opponent’s position (“You are against state mandated universal health care?”), but not give him a heart (“Then you don’t care about poor people who don’t have access to affordable, quality insurance, or people with pre-existing conditions!! You heartless monster! WHY DO YOU HATE THE POOR?!” Heard that one before?)
The frightening part of this fallacy is that its wielder usually thinks exitus acta probat.
Availability Cascade: Something big and bloody happens on the news (or goes viral), so the arguer implies or concludes that it’s a widespread occurrence.
Example: A mass shooting has occurred, which points to an epidemic of gun violence.
It’s not clear that if gun violence is at a multidecadal low point, the incident reflects an “epidemic.” The ready availability of some story leads one to conclude that a problem is widespread and demands a drastic response. Cass Sunstein, known for his work on “nudging,” gets credit along with Timur Kuran for identifying this phenomenon. (An availability cascade doesn’t always have to involve specious reasoning, but it very often does.)
Man on the Moon: Remember Rachel Maddow standing in front of the Hoover Dam? She’s trying to convince her viewers that the government (which she calls “the country”) must tax and build some major make-work project in order to revive the economy (or whatever). Maddow is employing a form of the man on the moon fallacy, which takes the form, “If we can put a man on the moon, we can do X.” But it misconstrues any reservations about big, awe-inspiring State projects as doubts about “America’s” ability to do big things. It’s just assumed that anything requiring extensive collaboration must be done via State power for it to count. Questions of the value, cost, or feasibility (or some combination thereof) of any particular project are sealed off from the word “if.” And of course “we” is never carefully unpacked.
The Gap: I wrote a whole book about why the following involves fallacious thinking. The fallacy goes something like this: “The free market widens the gap between rich and poor.” Now, strictly speaking that claim might be correct. But so what? I’ll pass over the problem that the “free market” has probably already been attacked with the unicorn fallacy at some prior point in the same hypothetical conversation. In any case, because economies are dynamic, the “rich” and “poor” change from day to day, and measured in quintiles, we don’t know whether the “gap” will be greater or smaller from one day to the next, even assuming a free market. The real problem with such reasoning is the built-in assumption that a gap itself is a bad thing. Suppose a really tall man moves into my neighborhood. Apart from my suddenly wishing I were taller, does the presence of the tall man make me worse off somehow? Of course not. The existence of the rich person doesn’t make me worse off, either, unless he got rich by using political means to transfer money from my pocket to his. This happens all the time. But such transfers have nothing whatsoever to do with free markets.
Measuring an asset gap in and of itself tells us little. Indeed, without the functional story of how any gap came to be—stories, not snapshots matter here—we can’t make any judgments about it whatsoever. “Gap” talk is just a fetish that ignores how much better off the poor are thanks to the existence of innovators and entrepreneurs who got rich by creating value. And the unstated assumption is that if any group of people has more wealth at any particular point, the people with less are somehow being wronged simply because the other group has more. The gap fallacy is also meant to preempt debate, usually in the service of another agenda (which is rarely more than reinforcing the opponent's opinion of himself as a good guy).
The Two-Step: Some opponents will simply change the subject in the middle of a discussion, leaving the original claim by the wayside. Usually neither party notices the two-step. For example, the opponent may refuse to answer the libertarian’s direct question and instead respond with another question. Or the debater may slide into one or another irrelevant point that has no bearing on the original point at issue. This process can go on for a while unless the libertarian rigorously brings the opponent back to the original point. The red herring, ad hoc, and non sequitur are similar enough fallacies, so the two-step may also be classified as an evasive tactic.
Panglossian Fallacy: Because the military-industrial complex was somehow involved in developing aspects of what later became the commercialized Internet, it follows that government funding is indispensable for such wonderful things to appear—and that all the things that go along with the funding (and revenue-collection) apparatus are therefore also acceptable. This variation of the post hoc fallacy is seductive particularly because we can never know what would have happened in the counterfactual private sector. Form: If it happened, it must be the best of all possible worlds. (See also the “The Government R&D Canard.”)
Your Side: Also known as tarring with the same brush, this fallacy has a couple of related forms (see No. 1 and No. 3). An opponent may accuse the libertarian of being a Republican or Tea Party conservative because he or she happens to agree with a majority of Republicans on some particular issue. One hears: “Your side thinks . . . ” when in actuality the libertarian doesn’t have a “side” per se. It works even better as a tactic if there is really no connection at all apart from being something the opponent’s “side” would never say. The “your side” fallacy allows the opponent to appeal directly to tribal biases, which are more immediate and powerful than any argument. When it’s intentional, this rhetorical maneuver is meant to appeal to others who may be watching—the hope being that they’ll swerve into the ditch that is their own biases.
The We/Society Fallacy: This common form of hypostatization occurs when the user ascribes rational individual agency to “society” and conflates or confuses society with the State. Both usually happen immediately, or somewhere hidden, before the opponent even speaks. The opponent wants his moral position or emotional state to be reflected somehow in the organization of society. Although “we” or “society” is a useful ersatz word that appears to confer legitimacy on some aspect of the opponent’s claim, it is almost always an intellectual sleight-of-hand. Only individuals can act. Groups must work through processes of either collaboration or coercion. (Note: “The market” is often misused this way by both supporters and detractors.)
Deus ex Machina/Market Failure: People is people. And yet opponents sometimes think that it’s enough to argue that governments, by dint of largess and force, have the power to fix certain kinds of problems, which they label “market failures” because they happened outside the purview of State action. Note that this only works in one direction: Problems in any area covered by the State are usually chalked up to being problems merely of execution, whereas “market failures” allegedly reflect an inherent deficiency. Even if one agrees that one set of people working in voluntary cooperation cannot solve some problem (or at least haven’t yet), it does not follow that another group of people—“the government”—can. Indeed, greats like James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock have given us very good reasons why government is not likely to solve problems and will likely make matters worse.
The Organic Fallacy: Such arguments take the form, “It’s organic, therefore it’s good or good for you.” Or similarly, “It’s not organic, therefore it’s bad or bad for you.” One hears this rationale to demand regulations and food labeling. And while there may be independent reasons to justify such regulations or labeling, these are not justified by the organic fallacy. It’s not clear that Socrates would argue for the health benefits of natural hemlock, nor would people with thyroidectomies argue they should go without Synthroid. I would add that, until there is more evidence to the contrary, there are plenty of GMOs that are good for me. (Note: Plenty of libertarians commit this fallacy too. Just because Monsanto is a rent-seeker doesn’t mean all its products are bad.)
Nobel Fallacy: You may recognize the form “X has a Nobel Prize in economics, who are you to argue against his claims?” I don’t care whether Krugman or Stiglitz has a Nobel Prize, they’re wrong about just about everything. And the truth or falsity of one’s claim doesn’t depend on his credentials. (Meanwhile Nobel Laureates James Buchanan, Vernon Smith, Elinor Ostrom, Douglass North, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek are mostly always right. I mean, that’s like 6–2 for the good guys. [*rimshot*])
No Parks for You: Snarkier opponents of libertarianism rhetorically ask why libertarians avail themselves of all the goods and services government happens to provide. “If you’re going to live by your principles, you can’t use X or Y” (insert: state universities or public roads). Of course, it does not follow that one should not avail himself of some good or service he thinks should be provided by other means. Indeed, one could argue that he is more than justified in consuming some good or service he has been forced to pay for against his will.
The Self-Exile Fallacy: Snarkier still is the opponent who argues that “If you don’t like it, why don’t you just leave?” Implicit in this question is the suggestion that there is some positive duty for one to leave a condition he doesn’t like and/or that by one’s staying, he his implicitly consenting to whatever the system is. By this “logic,” if you have just bought a house with an ‘80s bathroom, instead of improving, changing, or upgrading it, you should just take a bath in the kitchen sink.
Somalia: Opponents love to tell you that Somalia must be a “libertarian paradise.” Everyone laughs. If you respond with a phrase like “comparative institutional analysis,” everyone’s eyes glaze over and you lose, despite being correct. Somalia has been better off on most dimensions without a central government than it was under a brutal, centralized regime—warlordism notwithstanding.
Social Contract: Rousseau left a terrible intellectual legacy. And progressives use his “social contract” to justify anything under the statist’s sun. Of course, there could be a real social contract, but libertarian opponents prefer the one that allows them to justify anything under . . .
Start Somewhere: You’ve slogged through the data. You’ve offered a completely rational response. You’ve explained the ins and outs of why your opponent’s policy X won’t work and why it may even make things worse. The response? “We’ve got to start somewhere.” The idea here is that it’s better to do, well, anything—even if it might result in calamity. And, of course, the State must do that potentially calamitous thing. (See also No. 23.)
Social Darwinism: “The free market is just social Darwinism!” This is actually a pretty old meme. It was used by progressive academics in the 1940s to smear the work of Herbert Spencer. Spencer was a biological Darwinist to be sure. And he also thought the market and social phenomena like institutions and ideas would be subjected to analogous evolutionary forces. But the unit of survival in markets is the business, not the individual. In other words, businesses that fail to create value for customers die. But advocating for free people to engage in voluntary exchange is not advocating that people leave the weak, poor, or vulnerable to suffer. Quite the contrary. Most advocates of the free market believe a robust philanthropy sector is part and parcel to a system of voluntary exchange. Herbert Spencer thought so too. He writes: “Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated.”
Argumentum Ad Googlum: This fallacy proceeds when the libertarian makes a good point or builds a stellar case, or asks a question the opponent can’t answer. The opponent disappears for a while, frantically Googling away. The opponent comes back with a series of links that stand in for argument. To be fair, this isn’t always a fallacy, as some will use links to support their claims. But often the tactic is used to thrust the burden of debate back onto the libertarian who is expected to read through the links and infer some point. At best, it’s bad form.
We’ve Got to Do Something!: Related to the “start somewhere” fallacy, “We’ve got to do something!” is an argument that really means (a) the State has to do something, and (b) State action is preferable to both no action or private action. Numerous examples of this fallacy appear when opponents think any action riding on good intentions is good enough, consequences be damned. Often, however, it can be demonstrated that it is better for government to do nothing and to stop doing what it’s already doing. (Examples include stimulus spending, regulation, and other forms of intervention.) For government to do nothing is rarely presented as premise subject to debate and evaluation. Someone genuinely open to ideas would ask, “What should be done about this?” and “Who should do it?” Someone genuinely interested in answers would have the courtesy to make explicit what they already believe: “The government has to do something, which is beyond debate. Here’s what I think that something should be.”
Empirical Fallacy: A familiar opponents’ refrain of late is: How do we know X isn’t going to work until we try it? We have to wait and see the empirical evidence before calling X a failure. With such reasoning we should let monkeys go to Washington and type randomly into a big machine that spits out statutes at random. Well, we already do this in a manner of speaking, but it might be a good idea to look at some well-established economic theory and economic thinking before sallying forth into legislative adventures that could have both predictably perverse and unintended consequences. More importantly, the opponent presumes it is the prerogative of the State—and, by extension, any governmental group within the State apparatus—to experiment on those under its auspices, and that it is the duty of the subjects in that jurisdiction to submit to the experimentation. (Also called the Pelosi Fallacy.)
No True Libertarian: Ever heard of the no true Scotsman fallacy? Usually it’s applied by someone in a group to question another’s membership in that same group in terms of their ideological purity. Libertarians are famous for saying to each other, “If you think X, you’re no libertarian.” But libertarians’ opponents use a variation of this too. They’ll say something like, “Libertarians believe in X. If you don’t, you’re no libertarian.” (X might be natural rights, collective non-State action, a social safety net, etc.) The no true Libertarian fallacy is a way of trying to force the libertarian to choose between a subtle variation in his argument and his own doctrine. It implies the libertarian lacks credibility: “This clown doesn’t know what he thinks!” Of course, such a tack has no bearing on the truth or falsity of either party’s claims, or the validity of their arguments. Libertarianism is a diverse school of thought. It is not a monolith. One need only demonstrate the consistency of his argument.
Fascist Ignorance: This one should be familiar: Libertarian opponents were outraged—OUTRAGED—when John Mackey pointed out quite correctly on NPR that Obamacare is a fascist policy. Fascism is, of course, a doctrine that calls for significant State control over private industries, to be carried out in the service of State ends. So the fallacy of fascist ignorance is a form of ad hominem in which a libertarian opponent refers to the libertarian or his views as “fascist” despite, strictly speaking, holding fascist views herself. (One might also refer to this as the “chicken calling the cow ‘poultry’” fallacy.) In the interests of good discourse, however, it’s probably not wise for anyone to evoke the power of the “F” word at all, given how much baggage it carries.
Just One Life: The emotional appeal, grounded in nothing substantive, is meant to be a moralistic shutdown card. It goes “I’m sorry, but if we can save just one life with this policy, it’s worth it.” What does that even mean? Does it mean that every life has infinite value? Does it mean that saving lives at the expense of others and all other considerations is the purpose of government? Or does it mean that “worth it” is completely vague, but you just care a lot? It’s a heroic-sounding sentiment, but it demonstrates only the speaker’s commitment and earnestness—not any analysis of the policy itself.
Consensus: This hybrid of the bandwagon and appeal to authority fallacies infects lots of discourse. It takes the form, “Lots of really smart and educated people believe X, therefore it’s true.” From the USDA food pyramid dieticians to macroeconomists, authorities are not always right. There are limits to any individual’s ability to understand all the nuances of a given issue. Prediction and forecast are even more difficult. Political decision-makers must confront the same cognitive limitations as mere mortals, which is why they, like libertarian debate opponents, rely far too heavily on expert “consensus.”
Logo-phallo-euro-centric: Opponents accuse libertarianism of being hostile to women, minorities, homosexuals, and other marginalized groups. The fallacy lies in the idea that if your doctrine doesn’t acknowledge that groups deserve special, State-sanctioned treatment at the expense of other groups or individuals, it’s tantamount to some ism. Some even go as far as to say that if you use certain language some construe as racist, sexist, or homophobic, it invalidates libertarian doctrine. While many libertarians act like idiots and should probably not overreact to collectivist PC victim narratives with foul language, libertarian doctrine is at root a doctrine of anything peaceful—voluntary cooperation, decentralized power, and radical community formation. The heroes of libertarianism (of all races, sexes, and ethnic backgrounds) know that collectivism and Statism are interdependent world views: It takes evoking collectivism and inventing group rights (or wrongs) to justify most State actions, and the State has historically had the power systematically to prop up or tear down people by group.
Who Will Build the Roads?: This familiar duck has a thousand variations, but the idea is that because the opponent has never seen it nor can imagine it being done without the State, it follows that it can’t. But of course, it (roads, aid, education, and the rest of it) can. (See also No. 13.)
I encourage readers to add more to the comments section below.
Note: huge credit to Cole James Gentles, Jeff Ellis, Sarah Skwire, and Zach Spencer for their assistance in compiling these fallacies. Thanks also to Michael Nolan for help in fleshing these out.
Find a Portuguese translation of this article here. |
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