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I had this same type of sword years ago, but it was broken when I moved and I missed having it... Ironic that it is the same exact one I purchased before from the same place xD it's fate!! Also the video is quite enjoyable as I love watching sparring like this and it teaches you techniques too. | {
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The Wish app is a shopping app for iPhone and Android that lets you order cheap goods online with major savings. Most items ship straight from China, a growing number ship from the U.S. for faster delivery and you can even pick up select items locally in minutes. The app and service have changed dramatically since it first launched, so it may be worth checking out again.
Wish is a shopping service that puts consumers directly in touch with sellers to buy clothing, electronics, home items, gadgets, and more at a steep discount. There are some knockoff products and some lookalike products. Sometimes you may see a real brand name product on Wish, but they aren’t as cheap and often sell out.
Shoppers can use the Wish website or the app that is available on most major platforms to shop through an array of items. Here are some of the most surprising things you can buy on Wish. Keep in mind that some Wish items take weeks to arrive, and in many cases, you will need to pay attention to the size of shoes and clothes. You’ll also want to remember that if a deal is too good to be true it probably is.
Wish is nearly five years old and it’s growing in popularity and in some cases also in quality. Shipping times and selection are still varied based on what you are looking for, but there are more Wish app reviews that can help you get a good deal and avoid bad purchases. We bought a 70-inch TV, and received a bracelet worth 17 cents instead, so smart shopping is important.
The big question is always, “Can you tell if something on Wish is real or fake?” That’s something that Good Mythical Morning explores in the video above, where Rhett and Link must decide if something is real or from Wish.
While the Wish app is proving popular for shopping in 2020, there are some things that users need to know about this app before placing an order. Here is what savvy shoppers need to know about the app on iPhone, Android, and other platforms.
Add HBO, STARZ and More to Amazon
What is the Wish App?
The Wish app connects mobile users to the Wish website, where they can buy clothing, accessories, gadgets, and more at steep discounts. There are a lot of various items for sale, including products that look a lot like name-brand versions — but are not the same.
For example, there are loads of listings for Airpods for $5 or so, but they are not the real AirPods. There are many other similar style deals with smartwatches, selfie sticks, jewelry, and more. In addition to the normal savings, there are also daily and hourly deals.
Shoppers can download Wish for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, and Amazon Fire.
You Need an Account to Use Wish
Like many shopping apps, you need a Wish account to use the Wish app. Until you register you cannot see any of the deals, so you’ll need to sign up to figure out if you want something that they sell. Unlike some commerce apps, you cannot even browse without an account.
Even when you go online, you will need to create an account before you can see what the service sells.
What’s the Wish App Catch?
The biggest catch with the Wish app is that you will not get most items fast. Shipping ranges from 11 days to 22 days for many items, which means it can take a month to get your item. You can find some items that arrive in 5-7 days under the fast shipping option. These items ship straight from China, which is why things are not arriving in two or three days as you get from Amazon and other retailers. Some options include U.S. shipping and a newer option is picking up some items the same say at a local store. Not all items are available for pickup locally.
The other catch is that the size of clothes and the actual finished product may not match the product images, you may get the wrong color or may not get what you expect. It’s more important to read the reviews and look for user photos on Wish than it is on Amazon and other websites.
Keep in mind if you get a defective item it may take up to two days to hear back from Wish customer support. From there you can ask for a refund or exchange. Check the reviews for information about shipping times before you order.
Try TIDAL Free for 30 Days
Look for Reviews and Actual Photos
As you look for items to buy in the Wish app, you can read reviews to see what other people say about the quality of the items. This is especially important if you plan on doing buying gifts on Wish. You can also read the Store Ratings to see how that store is overall before placing an order.
The best thing to do is skip past the product photos that the seller uploads and look at user photos of the products to see how the actual product looks and what users have to say about it. In the video below you get a good idea of how the products compare to what you see on the website. Some items are great, while others don’t match the fit described or the colors shown on the website.
Watch some video reviews of the Wish purchases on YouTube to see what people think of what they get. There are a ton of users who post Wish hauls and reviews on YouTube to help show off what the actual products look like and how they fit.
If you plan to buy technology, make sure you also look into the reviews before you buy it. As you can see in the video below, there are some good finds.
You can see many reviews of the products and you will hear from users about the shipping, which can take months in some cases.
Wish App Shipping
Many of the items that you buy in the Wish app ship for free from China, which is a pretty impressive deal. That’s why it takes up to three weeks for some items to arrive.
You can see the shipping cost and estimated arrival for each item as you shop. If you buy from different stores you may need to pay various shipping charges.
Make sure you check this before purchasing, especially if you are buying heavy or bigger items. Some amazing looking deals are no longer a good deal when you factor in shipping.
If you are shopping with Wish for a specific date or holiday, you may find that items will arrive in time, but you won’t have time to do any exchanges if something isn’t as you expected.
Read: Get the Best Gaming Chair You Can Buy
Wish App Refunds
The Wish website offers a return policy that allows you to request a refund within 30 days of delivery. You need to use the app or website to start the return and you should hear back within 72 hours.
You are responsible for paying shipping and all related fees for returns. The upside is that many times you just need to prove that something is wrong with a photo and they will refund without asking you to ship the item back.
When I tried to return a Wish item that was blatantly not what I bought they ended up needing the packaging information which I had already thrown away. Do not discard anything until you have the refund processed. Wish customer service is not always helpful.
Wish Scams
One thing you need to watch out for is Wish scams. I recently found what looked too good to be true, but purchased it just to see what I would get. I bought a 70-inch 4k TV on Wish for free with $2 shipping. The item shipped the next morning and the seller switched the product description to be for a pair of headphones.
According to Wish, over 10,000 people bought this, so the seller pocketed $20,000 or more in a day for headphones in the hopes that people will forget, or perhaps they will close up shop before it is due to arrive.
Check out the video below to see what arrived when our 70-inch TV landed on our doorstep.
The same seller offers an “Ultra-thin Quad-Core Laptop 14” Screen Display 1366*768 pixel 4G+64G Windows 10″ device for sale but the description now shows it is just a keyboard skin, not a laptop.
It’s very important to read the descriptions of items on Wish, especially if they look too good to be true.
What Can You Buy on Wish?
There are all kinds of items on Wish from no-name items that are as good as what you will find in a store at a much higher price to really odd items like toilet paper, fake police badges, swimming pools, boats, and much more. If it’s made in China, you can probably buy it on wish.
29 Surprising Things You Can Buy on the Wish App | {
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About Us
Kim Anh Vietnamese Submarines offers not only a mouthwatering assortment of cold cut submarines, but also a delectable variety of salad rolls and satay entrees.
Order from Kim Anh Vietnamese Submarines, in Calgary, for pickup or delivery, through SkipTheDishes.com!
Hours
Mon – Tue: 11 AM – 12 AM
Wed – Thu: 11 AM – 2 AM
Fri – Sat: 11 AM – 3 AM
Sun: 11 AM – 11 PM | {
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The blender market has certainly seen a spike in popularity in late years using organizations bringing out their very own versions, and all promising to be the ideal.
Nevertheless, as you're informed, their advertising department is going to state that they are the most effective, but the actual reality is simply seen in customer testimonials and comparisons by individuals with no established schedule or taste for a name.
Thus, if we maintain that particular point in mind, it means people can compare with the Nutri Ninja and Nutribullet manufacturers to determine what type comes on top.
Magic Bullet vs Nutribullet Reviews: 2019 Comparison Table Keep reading to see our favorite nutribullet reviews and pick one out for yourself! When it regards the selection of blenders that they need readily available, then it's really is Nutri Ninja that come on top.
Keep reading to see our favorite nutribullet reviews and pick one out for yourself! Nutribullet has just produced three different versions, the original Nutribullet, the Pro Model, as well as the RX.
However, Nutri Ninja has many different models offered and as we will observe when we consider what they are able to do, that they include a range of different options.
I caliber a blender with multiple different types but the most important for me personally really are scared of usage, reliability/durability, reliability and overall output quality (preference, size ). I've recorded the top.
The categories to the Nutri Ninja Vs Nutribullet 2019 contrast buyers guide are:
Nutribullet Pro 900 Overview: 13-Piece High-Speed Blender/Mixer | {
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Here is a quote from Jonathan Foley, the executive director of the California Academy of Sciences, currently published in Scientific American Magazine online.
Politically active scientists on the left are increasing the intensity of their already frantic anti-Trump propaganda. While they wage a war on truth, they accuse us of waging war against science.
Note his hysterical tone. He says, "Make no mistake: the War on Science is going to affect you, whether you are a scientist or not. It is going to affect everything – ranging from the safety of the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the kind of planet we live on. It will affect the kinds of diseases we get and the medicines we can use."
War on science? Who does he say is waging such a war? Read on.
The article begins with an attack on "the new EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt[, who] unveiled the new language of this war – a subtle, yet potentially damaging form of science skepticism. Manmade climate change, he [Pruitt] says, is "subject to continuing debate."
And what is wrong with continuing debate in science? Read more.
Foley continues with an attack on "[t]he systematic use of so-called 'uncertainty' surrounding well-established scientific ideas[.]"
Is there no uncertainty in science? Has science finally produced gospel truth?
Okay, I am starting to feel a sense of frustration. The executive director would have us believe that we, who question the pronouncements of politicized scientists, are to keep our mouths shut and our minds closed. If they say that the climate is changing – if they say that we are causing it – if they say that we are all going to burn the planet, or freeze it, or flood it (they don't seem to be sure which of these will happen), then we must obey their edicts or else.
And what are the commandments these enlightened, elite scientists are issuing? Do they involve open-minded debate, based on facts? Apparently not. Do they involve empowering private individuals to devise innovative solutions to environmental concerns? It seems not. Or do they involve creating an ever larger government, ever higher taxes, and ever more centralized control of our lives? You decide.
One thing seems certain. If you ask forbidden questions, you may subject yourself to punishment. This is no exaggeration. Some have called for putting people on trial for rebutting the claims of climate-change preachers. Meteorologists have been threatened with loss of their licenses for pointing out flaws in the "established scientific ideas." Professors could have their tenures challenged for thinking independently.
At least Foley gets this part right: "... the War on Science is so deadly serious." This is precisely why we must vigorously hold strictly accountable him and his fellow true believers. | {
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Keskustan eduskuntaryhmän puheenjohtajan Antti Kaikkosen mukaan pääministeriä ymmärtää, jos haluaa ymmärtää.
Juha Sipilä kertoi kuulleensa ensimmäisen kerran ”jotakin mietintää” uuden eduskuntaryhmän perustamisesta sunnuntaina 11. kesäkuuta eli samana päivänä, kun valtiosihteeri Samuli Virtanen vieraili Kesärannassa. Kokoomuslähde pitää Sipilän ilmaisua vähättelynä. AOP/JARNO KUUSINEN
Pääministeri Juha Sipilän (kesk) toiminta kesän hallituskriisin sekä sen jälkipyykin hoitamisessa on herättänyt hämmästystä hallituskumppani kokoomuksen riveissä.
Iltalehden haastattelema, asian herkkyyden vuoksi nimettömänä pysyttelevä kokoomuksen kansanedustaja kuvailee Sipilän ajatusta hallituksen erokirjeen toimittamisesta lentokoneella tasavallan presidentille ”turhaksi julkisuusnäytelmäksi”, jossa oli ”kesäteatterin aineksia”.
Astetta vakavampi kysymys on se, puhuiko Sipilä totta sanoessaan eduskunnan edessä 19. kesäkuuta, että ”olisihan se ennenkuulumatonta miettiä puolueen puoluekokouksen mahdollisia lopputuloksia ja tehdä siihen suunnitelma etukäteen”.
- Nämä ovat ihan mielikuvitustarinoita, joita lehdet kirjoittavat ja te täällä toistatte. Tällaista keskustelua ei ole ollut olemassa, Sipilä sanoi eduskunnassa.
Kokoomuslähteen mukaan ”jokainen ymmärtää, että se, mitä Sipilä sanoi, ei voi olla totta”.
- Tai sitten se olisi tosi epäammattimaista, että ei ollenkaan mietitä, mitä (puoluekokouksen lopputuloksista) seuraa. Sipilä ilmaisi itseään huolimattomasti ja sananmukaisesti tulkittuna virheellisesti.
Hän ei silti usko Sipilän antaneen väärää tietoa tahallaan.
- Sipilän pitäisi myöntää, että hän käytti ilmaisuja huolimattomasti.
Toinen kokoomuslainen kansanedustaja kertoo Iltalehdelle, että Sipilän kommentteja ihmeteltiin jo tuoreeltaan.
- Eivät hallituspohjaa koskevat keskustelut olleet edes salaisia. Olisi typeryyttä, jos hallituspohjan muutokseen ei varauduttaisi.
”Ei todellinen vaihtoehto”
Keskustan eduskuntaryhmän puheenjohtajan Antti Kaikkosen mukaan pääministeriä " kyllä voi tässä asiassa ymmärtää, jos vain haluaa ymmärtää " .
- Sipilän puheet eduskunnassa 19. kesäkuuta pitää katsoa kokonaisuudessaan, Kaikkonen korostaa.
Kaikkonen nostaa Sipilän puheenvuorosta erikseen esiin kolme kohtaa, joissa Sipilä viittaa Kaikkosen mukaan nimenomaan perussuomalaisten hajoamiseen.
Esimerkiksi SDP:n eduskuntaryhmän puheenjohtaja Antti Lindtman kysyi Sipilältä, " voitteko todella vakuuttaa, että hallituksen piirissä ei puhuttu sanaakaan näistä suunnitelmista ennen tätä viikonloppua? "
Kun Sipilä vakuutti, että hän ei ole ollut hallituksen piirissä ”sellaisissa keskusteluissa, joissa tällaista suunnitelmaa olisi tehty”, Sipilä viittasi Kaikkosen mukaan keskusteluihin, joissa olisi tehty suunnitelma sen varalta, että perussuomalaiset hajoaisi kahteen puolueeseen.
Sipilä tähdensi perjantaina Helsingin Sanomille, että hän ei ollut varautunut perussuomalaisten halkeamiseen kahdeksi eri puolueeksi, ja sanoi vastanneensa nimenomaan tätä koskevaan kysymykseen eduskunnassa kielteisesti.
Antti Kaikkonen, oliko ajatus perussuomalaisten hajoamisesta esillä keskustan sisäisissä keskusteluissa ennen perussuomalaisten puoluekokousta?
- Ei tämä isomman ryhmän eroaminen kyllä minään todellisena vaihtoehtona ollut esillä etukäteen, Kaikkonen muotoilee.
Kokoomus varautui täysillä
Vaikka Sipilä kiisti eduskunnassa perussuomalaisten puoluekokouksen lopputuloksella spekuloimisen, Sipilä kertoi HS:lle, että hallitus oli varautunut siihen, että Jussi Halla-aho valitaan perussuomalaisten puheenjohtajaksi.
- Ei tämä yllätyksenä tullut. Tiistai-illasta asti olen pitänyt tätä todennäköisempänä vaihtoehtona. Olen osannut varautua tähän hyvin, Sipilä totesi STT:lle jo 10. kesäkuuta eli samana päivänä, jolloin Halla-aho valittiin perussuomalaisten johtoon.
Sipilä paljasti HS:lle perjantaina, että hallituksessa oli pohdittu hallituspohjan venyttämistä perussuomalaisista hallituspuolueisiin mahdollisesti loikkaavilla kansanedustajilla.
- Ajatuksemme oli se, että jos Halla-ahon kanssa keskustelu johtaa siihen, että hallitusyhteistyö perussuomalaisten kanssa päättyy, ja jos edustajia muutamakaan siirtyy hallituspuolueisiin, hallituspohja voisi olla mahdollinen kristillisdemokraattien ja RKP:n kanssa, Sipilä sanoi.
Kokoomuksen puheenjohtaja, valtiovarainministeri Petteri Orpo kertoi Iltalehdelle torstaina, että kokoomus teki " 2-3 viikkoa töitä ennen perussuomalaisten puoluekokousta ja valmistautui erilaisiin tilanteisiin " .
Kokoomuksessa varauduttiin siihenkin vaihtoehtoon, että perussuomalaiset ryhtyvät Halla-ahon johdolla yhteistyöhön keskustan kanssa ja pelaavat kokoomuksen ulos.
Kokoomuksen järjestelmällisestä varautumisesta uusiin hallitusneuvotteluihin kertoo se, että perussuomalaisten puoluekokouksen vaikutuksia käsiteltiin eduskuntaryhmän kokouksen lisäksi ainakin kolmessa kokouksessa, joissa oli paikalla kokoomuksen johtoa.
- Me jopa mietimme, minkälaisia myönnytyksiä kristillisille ja RKP:lle tulisi suhteessa hallitusohjelmaan tehdä, kokoomuslähde valottaa. | {
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Meet Tutt - KY
APPLICATION REQUIRED - go to www.greatlakesbengalrescue.com to complete online application; adoption fee is $100.00.
Tutt is a F2 male Savannah who is at least 10 years old and has never had a home where he can truly flourish. He was either locked in a room by himself or roughed house with like he was a dog. According to his foster, he is a loving, playful boy and is not a lap cat but likes to be around you and to follow you around. He loves to give you head-butts and to talk to you. He absolutely LOVES to play with toy mice. One of his favorite things is for you to throw them to him so he can leap and jump after them.
He is being fostered in a home w/ 4 other cats and 4 dogs – he has not cared to socialize, instead he will hide when he comes in contact with a dog or another cat. He would do best in a home with no other pets. It must be a home that will give him the attention and time that he needs/craves. Because he sometimes plays rough he needs to be in a home with children 12 or older. | {
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Police have seized cash and TV and computer equipment in raids in North and West Belfast in an anti-piracy operation.
They removed a total of £77,000 in notes plus set-top boxes, computer equipment and mobile phones during raids on two business premises and two homes.
Detective Chief Inspector Gary Reid, who leads the PSNI’s Intellectual Property Crime unit, said: “People think these are victimless crimes and wonder what harm it does to buy fake goods or pirated services.
"It is not harmless and there are real victims as a consequence of people’s actions in buying such products such as inadvertently supporting organised crime gangs and criminals through what might seem harmless purchases.
“Police need the support of the community to help tackle this hidden crime.”
The raids carried out by detectives from the PSNI's Reactive and Organised Crime Branch took place on Wednesday.
And they were part of an ongoing investigation into Intellectual Property Crime involving FACT – a UK intellectual property protection organisation - and the PSNI.
During the investigation aimed at preventing counterfeiting goods and services, officers seized a number of set-top boxes.
These smart set-top boxes act as a digital media receiver that can access videos, audio, photos and other content from internet-connected apps suitable to be screened on a TV.
Some even have a web browser and access content from connected devices in the house such as computers.
The smart set-top box then sends the content to display on a connected HDTV, or plays over a connected audio system.
Detective Inspector Pete Mullan said: “Officers seized a number of set top boxes and computer equipment as well as mobile phones and £77,000 in cash. This planned operation demonstrates our ongoing commitment to disrupting crimes involving copyright, counterfeiting and piracy.”
Kieron Sharp, Director General of FACT, said: “Illegal TV set-top boxes are becoming a growing issue for the creative industries.
"Many people don’t realise that buying these illegal TV devices will have damaging consequences to the thousands of people working in the TV, film and sports sectors as well as the UK economy.
"Combatting these unlawful devices is one of our biggest priorities and so we would like to thank the PSNI for their swift action in disrupting this criminality.” | {
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Since 2004, the logistics division of the United Parcel Service (UPS) has instructed delivery drivers to avoid taking left turns. The company’s engineers researched the issue extensively and determined that left turns add travel time, fuel cost and accident risk to the equation. Coupled with other optimizations, this change reportedly helped the company save “around 10 million gallons of gas and reduce emissions by the equivalent of taking 5,300 cars of the road for a year.”
Time and fuel aside, left-hand turns can be dangerous in terms of oncoming traffic and pedestrians. Federal data shows that over 50% of crossing-path crashes involve left turns while only around 5% involve right turns. A study in NYC concluded that left turns are three times as likely to cause a deadly crash involving a pedestrian than right turns.
Given their various risks and disadvantages, why not rework intersections to get rid of left turns entirely? It sounds like an improbable solution, but that is precisely the thinking behind the Michigan Left (also known as a “boulevard turnaround” or “Michigan loon” or “ThrU Turn intersection”). In the same left-free family as the “bowtie” and the “jughandle”, this alternative intersection design eliminates lefts at intersections in favor of a U-turn and right turn.
The Michigan Left
Instead of adding a turn signal phase or forcing drivers to cross oncoming traffic, the Michigan Left sends them right through the intersection. Drivers then turn across the median at a designated spot (generally within a few hundred feet) and wrap back to make a right turn onto their desired road (going the same direction they would as if they had taken a left at the intersection).
Studies suggest these intersections significantly reduce left-turn collisions, as one might expect. They also reduce the total time needed for traffic light phases and improve pedestrian safety — walkers and cyclists no longer have to worry about drivers failing to notice them while rushing to squeeze in a turn. Of course, Michigan Lefts also increase travel time and distance for left-turning drivers, but this seems a small sacrifice for improved safety.
The Bowtie
The bowtie is basically the same thing as a Michigan Left except that it swaps U-turns for roundabouts on either side of the primary intersection (see also: the “hamburger roundabout“).
Drivers crossing an arterial street from a minor cross street are sent straight through then instructed to circle back via a roundabout on either side of the major-road intersection. To understand why it is called a “bow tie” just rotate the above diagram 90 degrees.
The Jughandle
A jughandle intersection (also known as a “Jersey left”*) likewise addresses the left-at-intersection question by avoiding it entirely – one of the multiple configurations of this turn type is shown to the left.
On the plus side, jughandles take left-turning vehicles out of traffic lanes and can break pedestrian crossings into smaller increments (by eliminating left turn lanes). On the downside, this design strategy can confuse drivers and effectively add an additional crossing for pedestrians (where the jughandle rejoins the road). Peer the diagram, it also does not completely eliminate left turns (just moves them out of intersections).
None of these approaches is without its problems — all of them require more space than a conventional intersection and some come with unique dangers. Unfamiliar drivers or pedestrians, for instance, may not know how to handle them at first. Still, where time and space permit, there is something to be said for doing away with left turns.
[*Editor’s note: be careful — the term “Jersey left” also has an alternate meaning in popular parlance: it can refer to quickly (generally illegally) turning left and cutting ahead of oncoming traffic at the start of a green light cycle. AKA: Boston left, Massachusetts left, Rhode Island left or Pittsburgh Left.] | {
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Google Home Voice Apps Grow to 568, Tightly Integrates Google Assistant for Discovery
Google Home voice apps grow to 568 and there is now deeper integration with Google Assistant in terms of Assistant app discovery. As a side note, Google uses both the term Assistant Apps and Actions interchangeably which are both really just voice-first apps that other voice platform vendors call skills or apps.
Regular Voicebot readers will note that Assistant apps totaled just 468 10 days ago. The 100 Assistant apps rise is a 21% increase in just a few days. However, most of that difference is accounted for in the 83 “Home Control” category for Assistant apps. Home automation apps were not previously listed in the Assistant apps “discovery” section of Google Home. So, real Assistant app growth has been 3.6% over the past 10 days. We welcome this addition of the home automation category as it provides a better comparison with Amazon Alexa which has always included these in its skill categories.
App Category Breakdown
The new categorization by Google has enabled us to more easily see the relative distribution of voice apps on the platform. Just under 50% fall into just three of the 17 categories. Games and Fun leads the way with 20.4% followed by Home Control and Education and Reference at 14.6% and 14.1% respectively. All of the others range between 1.2% and 7.4% of the total. When you combine the entertainment-oriented categories you come up with about 29% of the total.
Finding Google Assistant Voice Apps
Most people don’t spend much time in their Google Home app. Even if they did, it was previously very hard to find Assistant apps to browse. Voice app discovery is a known problem. Amazon has had more time to work on this and has a more extensive store and search capability both online and on mobile. However, there is still widespread dissatisfaction among developers on the tools available to surface their Alexa skills to users. Google Home / Assistant developers had even less visibility the update this week has changed that.
For those of you that weren’t familiar with the old model, it was accessible only through menu>more settings>Assistant Apps under the “Services” section. Very few people knew this was there and all Assistant apps, or Actions on Google if you prefer, we listed alphabetically as cards. If you have the Google Home app version 1.24.374 or earlier, you can still likely browse the Assistant apps in this manner. However, if you have updated you app to either 1.24.512 or the more recent 1.24.526, this option is no longer available.
Instead users that have Google Assistant installed now have a new option in their menu that says “Explore.” If you don’t have Google Assistant the upper part of the menu won’t be there. Your first item will likely be “Devices.”
Once you tap “Explore” you are then taken to Google Assistant, but you likely won’t know it and just assume you are in another tab or page in the Google Home app. No matter, you are now in Google Assistant and will see the Discovery screen to the far right. From there you can scroll down to see categories such as Business & Finance, Music & Audio, Shopping and Weather. In each category you can scroll / swipe horizontally to see multiple Assistant apps in each category.
Enabling Better Google Home Voice App Discovery
This is a significant change for Google and well worth exploring. No doubt this will make it easier for many consumers to find some of the Assistant apps for Google Home that have previously been well hidden. Also, you can navigate to this catalog directly through the Google Assistant app. Just tap the blue circle in the upper right corner of the app screen.
Google Adds Some Voice App Discovery on the Web
Google added another resource just today. It published a new web page, Apps & Partners, specifically related to Google Home. However, this page only has five of the seventeen categories you can see through the Google Assistant app. It also only highlights 69 of the 568 Assistant apps. Why the shorter list? No idea. Maybe, they just didn’t get to it.
However, this page does have one category that doesn’t exist on the Google Assistant app catalog. It includes a sixth category called “Streaming Devices.” There are 10 listed including Nvidia Shield, Philips, Toshiba and Vizio in addition to two Chromecast devices.
Tighter Integration Between Google Home and Assistant Mobile Apps
These changes have offered everyone from consumers to developers much better visibility into the third party applications supporting Google Home. This should help drive usage for many of them. It also points to much tighter integration between the Google Home and Google Assistant apps. You could potentially see all of this migrate to Google Assistant one day. Google’s portfolio of voice applications from the voice search icon in the mobile chrome browser to Allo, Google Assistant and Google Home apps has led to a good deal of confusion. Why so many apps all with similar functions if different capabilities? The move to integrate Home and Assistant apps looks like the first step in rationalizing that portfolio.
Follow @bretkinsella
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In 1988, Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3 were released. The first Metal Gear was ported to the NES. Square Enix came out with Final Fantasy II, the second Zelda was brought to the US, and Mega Man 2 was published in Japan. A budding industry’s greatest hits were surfacing as consoles came into their own and series loyalties were set. The same year as all of this, French publisher Coktel Vision released a small game for the PC entitled Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness.
Freedom, the brainchild of Martinican artist and engineer Muriel Tramis, shows little resemblance to its Irish twins. Instead of Link or Mario, it stars one of four enslaved men and women on a plantation in Martinique; instead of rescuing the princess, they seek to break their own chains. The fantasy role-playing standard that had been set by Ultima (1981) and Rogue (1980) was of little concern. A review in Computer + Video Games from 1989 showed breathless enthusiasm at the premise:
“I must admit that at the time Freedom arrived on my desk, I was fed up!! I had played sword-wielding macho white male barbarians in almost every role playing game that had been booted up on my computer, and to be honest I was getting sick and tired of them. But after reading the introductory bumpf on the Freedom cover, I felt my Role Playing buds tingling once again.”
Hang on. Surely the desire for diverse stories in gaming is a modern one. Was it not born in the crucible of unsatisfied Anita Sarkeesian fans, ungrateful for the place at the table afforded to them out of the generosity of a white male industry’s hearts? Could it have existed—pause for dramatic effect—more than 20 years ago, during the birth of the medium?
instead of rescuing the princess, they seek to break their own chains
I digress. We’ve been able to answer these questions because the evidence is still there, trapped in digital limbo, waiting to be unearthed by the few DOS preservationists working to immortalize these games, which by and large remain forgotten in the corners of basements or garages. Free sites like the Internet Archive allow anyone to upload older media that may never be re-released by publishers, and dosnostalgic’s efforts are just one part of a grassroots attempt to make sure that that these games are recorded before they disappear entirely.
Like any half-decent librarian would tell you, preserving the past comes in handy. Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness continues to be relevant today, in the way any game this bold is: it’s a story that gaming has never told. Slaves show up in games, sure. They’re commonplace in fantasies that attempt to parallel real-world conflict. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2001) contained the slavery of the in-game races of Argonian and Khajiit, where you could join an abolitionist network or crush a budding rebellion in equal measure, not to mention stroll boldly through the slave market in the city of Tel Ahrun. It’s peppered through open-world games like Mass Effect (2007), Dragon Age (2009) and Fable (2004), presented as the cold reality of an unjust world, degrading and reprehensible but a fact of life. It also takes the story away from those still suffering its repercussions today and puts it in the clean, safe hands of fiction.
Next to these examples, a game by an Afro-Caribbean woman about a violent slave revolt on the plantations of Martinique is frightening in its honesty. “It was my duty to remember,” Tramis said in an interview with Tristan Donovan for Replay: The History of Video Games (2010). 25 years later and that idea still seems shocking, as if games are somehow exempt from the calling of every other artistic medium: to tell the story of humanity, without censorship and in a way that can be understood. The desire we see for truth now is no different than it was in 1988 when Tramis told this story. These stories can be diluted, given new names and new colors, set on new planets in new galaxies with new perpetrators, but the story they tell was born on Earth, with people who are still alive today, looking for faces they recognize.
You can emulate Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness for free on archive.org.
H/t The Obscuritory
Update: A paragraph was added to note the importance of software preservation. | {
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The Boston Licensing Board could decide Thursday whether to punish China Pearl, 9 Tyler St., for what was promoted as a 4/20 dinner at which guests could enjoy roasted pig garnished with their choice of THC or CBD oil.
Boston licensing officials say they warned potrepreneurial caterer Sam Kanter twice, in February and on April 19, not to go through with the event on the restaurant's third floor, which they said was advertised on Instagram. The evening, meant to honor the Chinese Year of the Pig, also got an editorial push by Boston Magazine - although without a mention of the specific location, because Kanter doesn't actually advertise locations and only tells people who have paid to get on her mailing list where to go shortly before the event.
The state currently does not allow pot-infused dining, although the state Cannabis Control Commission last week voted to begin drafting regulations that could lead to marijuana cafes.
BPD Sgt. Det. William Gallagher told the licensing board at a hearing this morning that at 7:37 p.m. on April 20, he walked up to the third floor of the restaurant and found a serving station with a chef carving off slabs of pig and then letting diners decide just how much of a tincture to apply to it. He issued the restaurant a citation for "premise allowing an illegality to take place."
Restaurant manager Brian Moy said that, as far as he knew, the tincture was limited to CBD, which is available at smoke shops across the state, and that no THC, which is the cannabinoid that gets people high, was used. "To our understanding, it was all CBD," doled out in 5-mg drops, he said.
But he and his sister Patricia, also a manager, and on duty in the restaurant's first floor that night, acknowledged they had no direct control over Kanter's event and that they had been trying to help her get her business off the ground.
Although Kanter ran the event, the Moys are the ones facing possible sanctions, which could range from a simple warning to having their restaurant shut for a set number of days, because they own the food and liquor licenses and so are legally responsible for whatever happens in the restaurant.
Moy said China Pearl actually took a loss on the event, for which he said 30 to 40 diners paid $135 each, with most of that going to Kanter. He said the restaurant itself sold 16 or 17 beers and a total of about one and a half bottles of wine.
Kanter also attended the hearing, but said nothing when board member Liam Curran asked the Moys about the use of THC.
Brian Moy said he contacted the licensing board three or four times, starting last spring, to ask about the legality of such an event and that he always got "somewhat vague and not concrete" answers - like check with the state - from whoever answered the board's phones.
He said he also asked a couple of lawyers and pot consultants, he knew and they thought he'd be OK; he acknowledged the discussions were casual and that he did not actually hire a lawyer to research the issue.
Board Chairwoman Kathleen Joyce seemed surprised that Moy would get such answers from her staff. But she said there's no question that Kanter should have known better - because the board very specifically warned her against holding her canaibis dinner series" in Boston.
In addition to the specific warnings to Kanter, the board recently sent a more general advisory to restaurant owners in the city not to serve anything laced with marijuana products. | {
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A Review of The Overstory by Richard Powers, by Sarah Holst. Originally published in Geez 54: Climate Justice. Last year, during the enormous, bursting green of Minnesota in July, my partner and I welcomed our first baby into our arms and into the cradle of the Tischer Creek Watershed.
Somewhere within those first months of the strange unveiling upheave of being a mama, I learned to read a book with one hand while balancing a baby sleeping on my chest. We were fortunate to welcome a stream of loved ones into our home in this time, and one of them brought with her The Overstory, a book travelling on the relational lines of beloveds deeply embodying lives of meaning in a time of climate catastrophe (like adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy before it).
Reading in the nursery with the world sleeping on my chest, stones from Lake Superior sometimes holding down my pages, I savoured The Overstory for months. Its wide, wide arch reminded me of God’s speech from the Whirlwind in the book of Job. The scope of this novel is both radically nonanthropocentric and grounded in the absurd hope that individual human lives can shape a story of salvation from our current systematic desecration, if they can be awakened by relationship with trees. The novel is imperfect; I longed for a more robust lens of environmental racism and a resolution less entangled with technology, but it does hold a rare power to awaken ecological interconnective imagination within the biographies of human life.
Roots trace the lives of nine people through the lens of their familial and personal relationship with trees – one of the most devastating and absorbing collections that I have ever read. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that a force larger than (or maybe precisely the size of) a cluster of redwoods is drawing these folks together, guiding them into messy actions of resistance and renewal. Many times within this expansive story – both alarmingly intimate with and also nonchalant about human suffering, the way a vast ecosystem which relies on death for life must be – I found myself holding the baby tightly, remembering my own childhood connection to a tree, silently gasping out sob after sob.
If you dare to pick up this novel, be ready to have the wind knocked out of you. Be ready to see yourself through the eyes of cottonwood fluff riding on the wind – “that’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water . . . Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.” Be ready to fill your lungs with mystery and majesty. Be ready to long to strap yourself to a giant conifer older than scripture.
It’s the kind of book that begs to be shared. To be answered. “Sunlight and water are questions endlessly worth answering.” “The only dependable things are humility and looking.” “The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing – nothing at all, and do it for less time than you think.”
Sarah Holst is mama to one-year-old baby Sage, a final-year masters of divinity student at United Theological Seminary, and the Practicum Coordinator for EcoFaith Recovery. | {
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Opposition to President Trump’s still-to-be-unveiled Taliban peace plan is growing, with top diplomats wary of signing off on the agreement and fresh U.S. casualties in Afghanistan and Taliban terrorist strikes threatening to turn public opinion against it.
Even as the deal seemed close Thursday, the Taliban carried out yet another suicide bombing near the U.S. Embassy in the heart of Kabul, killing an American service member, a Romanian soldier and at least 10 civilians. It was the latest in a string of relentless attacks during the U.S.-led talks with Taliban leaders and marked the fourth American death at the hands of the radical Islamist group over the past two weeks.
The government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has long complained that it has been shut out of the talks, led by U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and held in Qatar. A report said even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo harbors doubts about the proposed agreement. Mr. Khalilzad was reportedly rushing back to Qatar in the wake of the Kabul attack for more talks with Taliban leaders.
In Afghanistan and Washington, frustration is mounting over the U.S. strategy of negotiating with a partner that regularly kills American military personnel, indiscriminately targets civilians and publicly boasts about returning Afghanistan to the pre-9/11 era.
Waheed Omer, Mr. Ghani’s director of public and strategic affairs, told reporters in Kabul that concerns are “very high” in the government and among the people of Afghanistan about what the U.S. accord contains.
“Afghans have been bitten by this snake before,” he said, according to an account by The Associated Press. “They have seen the results of hasty deals, of deals they and their voices weren’t part of.”
Military observers and regional analysts say there is an increasing realization that the deal as constructed, especially with the Taliban showing little good faith, may die.
“This deal amounts to a humiliating capitulation,” said Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has tracked the 18-year-old Afghanistan war extensively.
“I believe, at least among U.S. policymakers, military and intelligence circles, there is a rising tide of disapproval,” he said. “I’m wondering if anyone wants to put their name on this deal because history will record them signing a humiliating American defeat in Afghanistan.”
Indeed, Time reported late Wednesday that Mr. Pompeo is refusing to sign off on the agreement that Mr. Khalilzad negotiated.
Under the deal, roughly 5,400 of the 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan would be withdrawn and five military bases in the country would be shuttered in short order. In exchange, the Taliban would guarantee that Afghanistan will never again be used as a base from which terrorist groups can attack the West.
The deal reportedly does not require an end to the Taliban’s brutal attacks or explicitly call for a U.S.-backed government in Kabul to remain in full control of Afghanistan.
Mr. Pompeo and other officials also reportedly object to the Taliban’s insistence that the U.S. recognize the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” — the nation’s formal name during the Taliban’s five-year reign leading up to the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Trump has made a major policy goal of winding down the deployment and chafes at U.S. military officials’ arguments for a long-term role in Afghanistan. Mr. Pompeo, who publicly backs the president, argues that the U.S. has largely accomplished its mission.
“If you go back and look at the days following 9/11, the objectives set out were pretty clear: to go defeat al Qaeda, the group that had launched the attack on the United States of America from Afghanistan,” he told The Daily Signal in an interview published late Wednesday. “And today, al Qaeda … doesn’t even amount to a shadow of its former self in Afghanistan.
“We have delivered,” he said.
Mr. Khalilzad said earlier this week that the two sides had reached a deal “in principle.”
A lack of clarity
On Capitol Hill, key lawmakers say Mr. Trump and Mr. Khalilzad have been less than forthcoming about details of the peace plan. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot L. Engel, New York Democrat, sent a letter Thursday to Mr. Khalilzad demanding testimony before Congress.
His blunt letter, which suggests that Democrats will subpoena Mr. Khalilzad if he doesn’t agree to appear on Capitol Hill soon, underscores how lawmakers have been largely kept in the dark.
“I understand your team has established a framework agreement with the Taliban, and that a copy of this agreement has been disseminated among officials in the Trump administration and shared with [the government in Afghanistan],” Mr. Engel wrote. “Similarly, the American and Afghan people deserve to know what the administration’s diplomatic strategy is for Afghanistan.
“After nearly two decades of war, we all want to see the fighting in Afghanistan come to an end. But we want to make sure we are negotiating a peace and not simply a withdrawal,” Mr. Engel added.
Opposition among the beleaguered U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan also is building. After the attack Thursday in Kabul, Mr. Ghani said the U.S. cannot continue talks as long as the Taliban are targeting civilians.
“Peace with a group that is still killing innocent people is meaningless,” he said.
The suicide car bombing was the latest in a series of attacks by the Taliban, who have made clear that they believe violence is a way to extract more concessions from the U.S.
The most recent incident resulted in the fourth death of an American service member in the past two weeks. NATO’s Resolute Support Mission confirmed the deaths but did not identify the service member.
Surveillance cameras captured the bomber’s vehicle approaching a checkpoint in a crowded diplomatic area of Kabul near the U.S. Embassy, The Associated Press reported. The vehicle then exploded.
In addition to the 12 deaths, at least 42 people were wounded.
Pressed at an Oval Office event Wednesday about the Afghanistan talks and the trustworthiness of the Taliban, Mr. Trump provided little clarity beyond his desire to wind up a fight in which he said the U.S. military was functioning as “policemen.”
“We’re talking to the Taliban, we’re talking to the government,” Mr. Trump said. “We’ll see if we can do something. It’s been a long time. We have great warriors there, we have great soldiers. But they’re not acting as soldiers.”
Some analysts say the lack of security guarantees in the draft deal, coupled with the Taliban’s refusal to tamp down attacks, could sway even the most ardent supporters of a negotiated peace agreement, including the Afghan-born Mr. Khalilzad, who has spent countless hours negotiating with the Taliban and has seemed personally invested in brokering peace.
“If there is a severe backlash like I believe we’re starting to see, he might not want to sign it either,” Mr. Roggio said.
If the administration moves forward, he said, the results will be disastrous and could ultimately end with the Taliban trying to fully overthrow the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.
“They’re granting approval to the Taliban to go on a rampage after the U.S. leaves,” Mr. Roggio said of the administration’s approach.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
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Copyright © 2020 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. | {
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“The amount of time physicians like me spend with a patient has trended downward, and new physicians may be spending as little as eight minutes with each patient," he said. "Time is eaten up filling out electronic forms, instead of really interacting with the patient, and many of us find ourselves spending more time looking at a computer screen than we do at the person we are caring for. Also, many of the organizations that employ physicians are applying pressure to work faster, driven at least in part by a desire for more revenue.”
Becker reports that his practice has never dropped below an average visit of 15 minutes per patient visit, but to sustain it, he has paid a substantial price. “I spend two to three hours a day outside of patient care on paperwork and phone calls,” Becker told me. In order to preserve what time he has left, he has had to spend more money. His small practice has had to hire a full-time employee just for billing and coding. It also invested in a new electronic health record system, which requires maintenance and annual upgrades.
When I asked Becker if anything has gotten better over the past few years, he had to give it some thought. “Well, I guess it is making me a better typist. And I do have to admit that the electronic health record does make it easier and quicker to find some kinds of patient data.” He quickly added, “But make no mistake about it. In my mind and the minds of many of my colleagues, the loss of time and attention has harmed the individual patient at the point of care.”
So Becker is shifting to a new style of practice, sometimes called concierge or retainer medicine. With the help of a company that has been helping physicians make such shifts for over 13 years, he will cease caring for a total of 2,500 patients and instead cut back to about 600. These patients will pay an annual fee of $1,650. In exchange, they will receive a two-hour annual visit with a complete physical exam, same-day appointments, 24-hour physician phone access, and personalized, web-based resources to promote wellness.
When patients get admitted to the hospital, Becker will remain their physician, and their health insurance will still pay for much of their care. Will it make more money for physicians? Becker doubts it, but if it does, he plans to plow any additional income he might derive back into his group practice, helping to lessen the economic pressures on his colleagues.
The concierge model of practice is growing, and it is estimated that more than 4,000 U.S. physicians have adopted some variation of it. Most are general internists, with family practitioners second. It is attractive to physicians because they are relieved of much of the pressure to move patients through quickly, and they can devote more time to prevention and wellness. | {
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Should the EU fight to save the WTO when the US seeks to dismantle it? We argue that the only way for the EU to decide that is to first understand the US’s strategy (as distinct from its tactics) and then make up its mind in terms of how much of a threat it perceives China to be.
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is pivotal in enabling and protecting trade between countries. The recent US failure to appoint a judge at the WTO’s appellate court has meant that it will no longer be able to intermediate trade disputes. This means that the WTO, is at least partially, dead. The EU, while acknowledging its faults, ultimately wishes to save it.
But what is the best way of protecting the multilateral system?
Should the EU fight to save the WTO or is that equivalent to fighting the last war? Should it instead aim for a substantial overhaul of the system, in recognition of the fact that it needs to function in a world that looks very different to the one for which it was originally designed? Who is in charge of writing this new global rule-book and how does the EU ensure that it, too, holds the pen?
Before the EU can answer these questions, it needs to understand why the US wishes to dismantle WTO operations and openly antagonise all its global partners. And understanding the US position requires looking beyond the tactics and understanding the underlying strategy, which may be founded on arguments that transcend presidential quirks and remits.
The US perceives the recent Chinese economic rise and increasing global dominance built on unfair practices. From excluding US firms from its domestic markets (Facebook, Google) all the way to subsidising the creation of giants, China may respect the letter of the WTO but it does not respect its spirit. Here the US and the EU are in full agreement. But when these giants operate in digital technology, the US views China as a threat to its own security. This has justified a ‘logic’ of decoupling: decreasing US dependence on Chinese markets and technology. The EU is less concerned (at least on the face of it) with the implicit Chinese “security threats” and is less willing to exclude Chinese technology firms from its domestic markets.
But US antagonism does not stop with China. The US has actively threatened the EU with trade wars and has single-handedly put global multilateralism at risk, destroying the system that allows countries around the world to engage with each other.
Why would US interests be better secured with a dissolved WTO and no credible alternative? The EU believes that the US tactic of provoking global trade wars, alienating historical allies and actively destroying global institutions, is counterproductive and misplaced. However, the objective here is to stop China’s dominance from expanding any further. But the US realises that it cannot do it alone. It needs to stop others from engaging with China (by dissolving global multilateralism) and it also needs its European allies to do their fair share in securing the west’s military supremacy. It remains to be seen whether such tactics serve the strategy well.
The EU can make progress in terms of what it wants from the global multilateral system, by looking beyond American tactics and understanding American strategy.
Aimed at continuity, EU actions so far have been a response to US tactics: engaging in talks with the US, advancing bilateral trade agreements across the globe, taking proportional retaliation measures to deal with US aggression. Early this summer, and in anticipation of America’s recent failure to appoint a judge, the EU signed an interim appeal arbitration agreement with Canada, to establish some continuity. In the joint statement made “Canada and the EU (were) proud to have demonstrated leadership in the creation of this interim arrangement” and they hoped that others will opt in to prevent the demise of global multilateralism. It remains unclear whether China will sign this agreement but it will certainly not have any incentive to do so if it proved to be more restrictive than the current WTO dispute settlement system. If it is equivalent to the current one, it may wish to sign, but then none of its inefficiencies would have been resolved. Either way, the system continues to function but remains ineffective.
But what about the strategy? Does the EU believe that the US objective of containing China is also misplaced? The EU will be unable to address such questions until it has a firm position on China.
Can the EU continue to engage with China under the WTO without jeopardising its own industries?
Are China‘s Belt and Road and 17+1 initiatives about anything more than just investment relations?
Is Chinese 5G dominance a threat and why?
How can Europe ensure that opening up its markets to Chinese firms does not distort the level playing field and damage its own firms?
Can EU industries have access to Chinese markets on fair and transparent terms?
How can the EU coordinate its actions so that member states do not pursue actions that serve their narrow economic interests that come at the detriment of EU unity?
Salvaging the WTO requires understanding the US strategy. And that requires the EU to make its mind up about China. | {
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This speech from Rep. Lee Zeldin, who happens to be a Republican and a Jewish member of Congress, spit fire in his explanation for why he voted no on the Democrats’ silly resolution condemning hate. Of course, the media and the Left are already out there claiming the Republicans who voted no on the resolution support hate, deliberately missing the point on why they voted no.
Zeldin kicked a*s and took names.
Watch.
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), who is a Jewish member of Congress, explains why he did not vote for the Democrats' resolution condemning hate This is a must watchpic.twitter.com/Kocwj1WPZm — Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 8, 2019
Hot. Damn.
His points are all valid.
If Omar was a Republican her name would be in the resolution, it would specifically and aggressively target anti-Semitic comments, and she would have lost her committee seats. Since she’s a Democrat they watered it down to address all hate speech and completely ignored the REASON they have to do this in the first place. It was so meaningless that Omar herself voted FOR IT, which means zero consequences for her behavior. And zero change in it.
But hey, at least now Democrats can pretend Republicans oppose condemning hate speech.
Everything. Is. Stupid.
Articulated well. There needs to be consistency regardless of party affiliation — Dan R Kunio國 Sparkman (@DanRSparkman) March 8, 2019
Bingo. Anti-Semitism doesn’t have a party. Well, the way Democrats like Nancy Pelosi are trying to find excuses for it maybe it does …
Nailed it — Joff Barbash (@JoffBarbash) March 8, 2019
I disagree with Congressman @leezeldin on just about everything, but here he was correct. And to his credit, he mentioned the Democrats who were supportive of his cause. Zeldin served in the military in the Middle East. I dare anybody to say that he has "foreign allegiances." pic.twitter.com/3wMZED6JIj — Russell Drew (@RussOnPolitics) March 8, 2019
Total mic drop moment.
Related:
‘STOP asking WOC questions!’ Steven Crowder politely asks AOC a question about discrimination and her cult FLIPS OUT
DANG it! Mollie Hemingway DROPS Vox journo claiming she’s kept her role at Fox News a secret with her own TWEET
Truth HURTS! Tammy Bruce’s ‘silver lining’ in Democrats winning the House is BRUTAL and it will totally piss them OFF | {
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Despite sagging approval ratings, Kathleen Wynne says she will lead the Liberals into the next provincial election. There was speculation Wynne was going to step aside to give the grits a more popular leader for the 2018 election campaign. Wynne’s rating has dropped to a record low of 14 per cent. The Liberals have won the last four Ontario elections, one by Wynne and three by her predecessor Dalton McGuinty.
If you have found a spelling error, please, notify us by selecting that text and pressing Ctrl+Enter. | {
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Cher unveils a new Fountains of Bellagio show choreographed to her song 'Believe' on Jan. 17, 2018 in Las Vegas.
Cher, avid Tweeter, let a major update slip in between political thoughts on the social media platform: she has new music on the way, and it could be here before the end of the season.
After expressing her dismay over the current drama surrounding the Supreme Court, the pop icon and social media enthusiast switched gears and revealed that her new album will potentially be dropping in September.
Think album will be out in sept. -------- — Cher (@cher) July 1, 2018
Cher hasn't released new music since her 25th studio album, 2013's Closer to the Truth, which found a No. 1 single on the Dance Club Songs chart in "Woman's World."
She's got a busy summer ahead of her before the hypothetical album release: she'll play Meryl Streep's mother in Mamma Mia 2, which opens nationwide July 20, and will perform a run of dates at Washington, D.C.'s Theater at MGM National Harbor Aug. 4-12. | {
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Helle there, My name is ShannenI was born on August 30 1992, wich makes me 25 years old at the moment. ^^I come from the Netherlands so English is not my native language, please forgive the mistakes I make...I try my best! ^^I Love everything fantasy related but most of all I love Dragons and Pokemon(And ofcourse my loving Boyfriendhaha )I love making friends, please feel free to send me a message!I might not respond super-duper-fast all the time as I work full-time, but please don't get down if I don't respond immediately. I DO read your message..Love~Princess-Shannen | {
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The matchup for Super Bowl 50 will be determined in Sunday's conference championship games, which feature the 17th -- and possibly final -- meeting between Tom Brady and Peyton Manning.
The New England Patriots will have to beat the Denver Broncos in the Mile High City for a chance to defend their Super Bowl XLIX title.
The last "Brady-Manning Bowl" was during the 2014 regular season, when New England walloped Denver 43-21 at Gillette Stadium. However, Manning defeated Brady in their last playoff matchup at the AFC championship game two years ago in Denver. In the postseason, the series is tied 2-2, but Brady leads overall 11-5.
In the late game, the Arizona Cardinals are on the road against the Carolina Panthers, who held off a comeback from the Seattle Seahawks in the divisional round. The win kept the Seahawks from returning to the NFC championship game for the third year in a row.
While Carolina scored 31 points, the Panthers only won by a touchdown after Seattle shut them out in the second half while putting 24 points on the scoreboard.
Meanwhile, the Cardinals come into North Carolina on the heels of a thrilling overtime win against the Green Bay Packers. Larry Fitzgerald rushed into the end zone on the opening drive in overtime to deny Aaron Rodgers from putting on another display of the "Hail Mary" magic that kept the game going.
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Sunday
New England Patriots vs. Denver Broncos
Kickoff: 3:05 p.m. ET
TV: CBS
Online: CBS Sports will stream its coverage starting with "The NFL Today" at 2 p.m. ET, which can be seen on computers and tablets at CBSSports.com and on the devices Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku and Xbox One.
Arizona Cardinals vs. Carolina Panthers | {
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The number of doctors who applied for documentation to work abroad surged by over 1000 per cent the day Jeremy Hunt announced he would force a new contract on them, new figures show.
300 doctors applied for Certificates of Good Standing on Thursday 11 February – up from an average of 26 a day in February before the announcement.
Each junior doctor costs taxpayers around £300,000 to train – meaning that on just the day of Mr Hunt’s announcement alone doctors who had received £90 million worth of training took concrete steps towards emigrating.
The surge of doctors thinking about leaving has continued since the announcement, with 109 doctors requesting certificate the day after it, and figures on the weekend over double the previous weekend.
Certificates of Good Standing, also known as Certificates of Current Professional Status, are a note from the GMC that there are no fitness to practise suits against a doctor.
The certificates are required to get a doctors’ job abroad and can only be sent directly to another appropriate body overseas – meaning some level of contact must have already established with employers aboard.
The number of doctors applying to go abroad before the announcement already represented a significantly higher level than under Mr Hunt’s predecessors.
In 2015, when the industrial dispute began, 8,627 certificates were issued to doctors – up from 4,925 in 2014 and around 5,000 in the previous three years to that. The annual increase amounts to additional doctors with over a billion pounds in training looking to leave a year.
Junior Doctors Contract
Junior doctors, bewildered by the Government’s new contract, have threatened to leave the country or the profession altogether if the plan goes ahead.
The Government says the new contract will improve patient care at the weekends but junior doctors say it will incentivise unsafe staffing rosters and put patient care at risk.
The Health Secretary makes his announcement in the House of Commons (Crown copyright)
Two days of unprecedented strike action by junior doctors took place in the first months of this year, while the Health Secretary has set up an urgent inquiry into the morale of junior doctors.
An unweighted survey reported by the Independent last week recorded around 90 per cent of junior doctors having misgivings about remaining working in the UK.
The Royal College of GPs, the professional association which represents family doctors, warned after Mr Hunt’s announcement that it would almost certainly become more difficult to recruit enough doctors for the NHS under the new plans.
Labour’s shadow health secretary Heidi Alexander has warned of a “fundamental breakdown in trust” between the Government and junior doctors.
She accused Mr Hunt of acting as a recruiter for Australian hospitals.
“These figures show how let down junior doctors feel with the way Jeremy Hunt has handled this dispute,” she told the Independent.
“Medical experts have warned that the decision by the Tories to impose the junior doctors’ contract could lead to a mass exodus of NHS staff to other countries.
In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Show all 10 1 /10 In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK 20,000 Junior Doctors marched through central London in protest at the new contract changes the government is trying to impose which they say will be unfair and unsafe In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Junior doctors protest in London In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK 4 year old Cassius takes part in a demonstration in Westminster, in support of junior doctors over changes to NHS contracts, London In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Protest over proposed changes to junior doctors' contracts, Leeds In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Junior doctors and NHS staff protesting against the health service cuts and the proposed contract changes offered by the government outside Parliament In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Junior doctors and NHS staff protesting against the health service cuts and the proposed contract changes offered by the government outside Parliament In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Over 5000 junior doctors rallied in Waterloo place, before marching through Whitehall and onto Parliament Square, in opposition to Jeremy Hunt's new working conditions for doctors In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Demonstrators listen to speeches in Waterloo Place during the 'Let's Save the NHS' rally and protest march by junior doctors In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Junior doctors marched in London to highlight their plight In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK A protester at a demonstration in support of junior doctors in London
“Jeremy Hunt needs to come clean and explain to the public how he intends to be training the junior doctors and consultants of tomorrow when he is behaving like a recruiting agent for Australian hospitals.
“This whole sorry saga could have been avoided if Jeremy Hunt had decided to negotiate with junior doctors, rather than pick a fight with them.”
The apparent exodus follows predictions by leading medical figures, including doctor, TV presenter, and Labour peer Robert Winston, who said the NHS was “losing some of our best and brightest”.
The General Medical Council, the public body that regulates the medical profession, said the request of a certificate was an indication that a doctor as thinking about leaving the country but that not all doctors ended up leaving.
A 2012 Department for Health-commissioned study by academics at the University of Kent found that it costs £343,361 in total investment to train an average registrar, £269,527 to train a foundation level one doctor, and £294,164 in total investment to train a foundation level two doctors.
All three of these classes make up the “junior doctor” category. These costs include tuition over lengthy training programmes, clinical placement costs, as well as salaries for on-the-job training years.
A Department of Health spokesperson said: “Medicine is an attractive career and the NHS is one of the best healthcare systems in the world. This is a fair, safe, reasonable contract – 90 per cent of it agreed with the BMA. | {
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Former Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel (now John Manziel based on what he told radio host Dan Patrick earlier this week) is becoming well traveled and that's not necessarily a good thing from a career standpoint. Manziel has now been with six different football entities since 2013 beginning with the Aggies where he won a Heisman Trophy, the Cleveland Browns beginning in 2014 after he was selected in the first round of the NFL Draft, the South roster in the NFL's 2018 Spring League the Hamilton Tigers-Cats and Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League where he spent the fall of 2018, and then the Memphis franchise of the now defunct Alliance of American Football.
Even though Manziel hasn't come close to living up to his A&M days since his departure from College Station, the memories have been enough to get both teams and fans as a whole interested in seeing what he has left in the tank. With the fall of the AAF, everyone has turned their eyes to the next spring football that intends to begin play in 2020, Vince McMahon's XFL, and now have begun to wonder if the next phase of his career is with that league. Appearing on Monday’s #PFTPM podcast from Pro Football Talk, XFL Commissioner Oliver Luck was asked about the possibility of Manziel joining the league. Luck didn't rule it out when asked about it and even tended to make it sound like the door was open for him to have the league look at him.
“If he is able to meet our standards and if our coaches think he’s one of the top quarterbacks out there that can help us,” Luck said. “Certainly we have no reason not to believe he couldn’t be in the mix. But again it’s really up to our coaches in terms of the quarterbacks they wanna take a look at.”
Manziel lasted just two seasons in the league after being a first round draft pick of the Cleveland Browns with the 22nd selection of the 2014 NFL Draft. Manziel struggled on the field to recreate the same magic he displayed as a Heisman Trophy winner and finalist in his two seasons of playing football with the Aggies. In Aggieland, Manziel worked in the spread which played to his strengths which included his vision and mobility. In the league, he worked in a version of the West Coast offense which tended to tie him down in the pocket and asked him to throw timing routes as opposed to improving on the move. It didn't help that Manziel had off the field issues which resulted in his eventual release by the Browns and then a stint in a four team spring league.
Manziel's time in the CFL was welcome from a public relations standpoint as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats had ESPN and several other outlets at a CFL training camp which is a rarity. However, Manziel never had a chance to win the starting job in Hamilton with only a couple of pre season game appearances and never appeared in a regular season game for them. He was eventually traded to Montreal Alouettes where he appeared in eight contests. Manziel posted a 64.5 percent completion rate, throwing for 1,290 yards with five touchdowns and seven interceptions before the league and he parted ways and he headed south to the AAF. | {
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The deadly Amtrak derailment this week spawned a frenzy of sleazy opportunism on social media as lefties rushed to declare—before any evidence of the cause of the accident was available—that it clearly showed the need for more federal billions to subsidize Amtrak.
As the official investigation has released actual information, it seems likely that the real cause was excessive speed: the train was traveling at more than 100 miles per hour as it entered a tight curve where the safe limit was 50 miles per hour. How is more government spending supposed to prevent this kind of operator error?
Oh, and contrary to the media’s “Amtrak fan fiction,” as Sean Davis calls it, Congress just authorized $1.4 billion in new subsidies to Amtrak less than five months ago. So there goes that narrative.
There is obviously something unseemly about this—far more unseemly than a violinist distraught over not being able to retrieve the source of her livelihood. This is a tragedy in which people were killed and injured, yet many a media hack’s first thought was about how to score political points against Republicans.
To be sure, this kind of partisan opportunism is not a unique product of the social media era. They did the exact same thing back before the Internet, it’s just that you had to wait longer for the newspaper to come out. And this kind of partisan jabbering is mostly meaningless, fueled by speculation based on political bias rather than facts. But for precisely that reason, it is psychologically revealing. In the rush to invent a self-flattering narrative for any new event as it happens, the social media crowd reveals more about themselves and their own assumptions than they do about the events on which they are commenting.
For example, Mollie Hemingway brilliantly exposes how this amounts to a secularized theodicy in which bad things happen to good people because we have failed to propitiate the gods of the federal budget.
As the narrative has developed, it has taken on a more specific and sinister character. Complaints about lack of funding to Amtrak have begun to focus, not just on those evil Republicans and their (supposed) general animus against government, but on the fact that Republicans tend to hail from districts where people don’t use Amtrak.
As the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump writes:
Ridership is heavily centered in the Northeast, in the corridor between Boston and Washington where Tuesday’s accident occurred. But more than that, ridership is unevenly distributed politically,. Data from the National Association of Railroad Passengers shows the number of passengers that get on or off the train in any given congressional district, and reveals an obvious reason why Republicans might not be too concerned about funding the system…. There are 184 congressional districts in which not one person got on or off a train in 2014…. Of those 184 districts, 116 are currently represented by Republicans. On average, ridership in Republican districts was about 41,000 in 2014—compared to 261,000 in Democratic districts.
Well, surprise, surprise, surprise. Here’s an update for those who live in the DC-New York-Boston “Acela Corridor.” Outside that area, Amtrak passenger trains are usually distant and are generally known for being dirty, having really bad food, being chronically, unbelievably late on their schedules, still being pretty expensive, and generally being a far less attractive option than driving or flying.
So it’s no surprise that most of the country views Amtrak as a white elephant that is not worth their tax dollars. It’s almost as if the federal government doesn’t exist to serve the needs of the DC-to-Boston corridor.
But that’s not how the mainstream media is trying to spin this fact, and that’s what is revealing. They view this, not as evidence of Amtrak’s failure to serve most of the country, but as the country’s failure to serve Amtrak. So here is how Bump tries to steer his conclusion: “[M]any conservatives consider the idea of a federally funded transportation program to be anathema. And since so few of their constituents actually use the system, there’s little incentive to want to offer political support. Tuesday’s disaster could shift that thinking.”
But what if it’s not our thinking that needs to be shifted? What if it’s the mainstream media that needs to shift its own thinking?
When they see this information, does it not even occur to them to think: Oh, so Amtrak passenger rail only serves, well, us. (Philip Bump, for example, lives in New York and works for the Washington Post, which gives us a pretty good guess at how often he takes the train from one city to the other.) Did it ever appear to them that maybe passenger rail is a merely factional, local concern that the rest of the country shouldn’t be paying for?
The left is always dabbling in fictional dystopias where there is a yawning chasm between rich and poor, where the country is riven by racial conflict, and where the whole nation has to be impoverished to serve the power and vanity of the Capitol—and yet somehow this is the system they always create when they’re in power, in places like Baltimore and Chicago. Given this information about how little the rest of the country relies on Amtrak, the only conclusion is that all of us are being asked to support a system that mostly benefits a minority of relatively wealthy elites in the nation’s political and financial capitals. We are all being asked to send tributes to the Capitol.
And here’s the crazy thing. The rest of the country might not really be paying for regional Northeast corridor train service. In fact, that’s the only part of Amtrak that might conceivably make money, even with the system’s notorious inefficiency—though Amtrak’s dubious accounting makes it impossible to say for sure. I think the Northeast corridor folks would be better off privatizing and letting competition and innovation come up with ways to deliver faster and better service in an area where it might actually make money. It would be like Uber, but for trains. But I’m also willing to say that they can do whatever they want with their little regional rail system, since they live there and use it—so long as they’re willing to pay the subsidies themselves.
But that’s not what they’re asking for. To preserve a government monopoly in their own corner of the country, the DC and New York elites want to preserve the fiction that Amtrak serves the interests of the entire country. So they force us to subsidize sparse, poor-quality, money-losing service across the rest of the country, just so the Northeast corridor elites can have a fig leaf for their vanity.
That’s the sort of thing they inadvertently reveal when they’re in a rush to score political points off a tragedy.
Follow Robert on Twitter. | {
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Last week, construction workers on San Francisco's new Transit Terminal unearthed a skeleton 60 feet underground. The life of the person whose bones they found reveals a lot about how rising water levels have changed life in the Bay Area over the past few thousand years.
The skeleton found last week hasn't been dated yet, but San Francisco blogger Burrito Justice points out that a skeleton found in a similar area, 15 feet lower, was dated at about 5,000 years old. Like the skeleton found last week, this earlier skeleton belonged to a Native American who lived in the San Francisco area when sea levels were very different from today.
Burrito Justice writes:
San Francisco Bay as we know it is relatively new — as the ice age ended, sea levels rose dramatically. 18,000 years ago, to get to the beach you would need to take the N-Judah past the Farallons, which were once hills by the sea. The Bay was a valley with a river running through it, and the Golden Gate was a waterfall . . . But as the waters rose the Farallons were cut off . . . Around 10,000 years ago, the sea breeched the Golden Gate and continued to rise rapidly, filling the valley we now know as San Francisco Bay. There must have been settlements by the water — imagine each generation having to pull back, each high tide greater than the last.
Apparently the local Ohlone tribe told a story about how the port of San Francisco, currently facing the Bay, was long ago an oak grove. Could this piece of storytelling actually be an oral history of what it was like to live in the Bay Area when the region was a valley with a river running through it? Burrito Justice notes that geologist Brian Atwater wrote:
No known archeological site in central California appears much older than 5,000 years… One way to approach this problem is to assume that traces of the earliest central Californians have been covered by the rising sea. Given the rapidity of changes in sea levels and shorelines 5,000-10,000 years ago, sites of habitation located at that time along the shores of estuaries must now lie beneath mud and tidal water.
It's possible that the skeleton discovered last week is from one of these groups who lived in the San Francisco Bay during a time when there was no Bay at all. Sea level rises have transformed the human communities in this area for thousands of years. When rising waters force San Francisco to retreat inland over the next century, it will just be the latest phase of the Pacific Ocean burying evidence of human habitation.
Read more at Burrito Justice
Map of sea level rise by Lynn Ingram | {
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Jose Mourinho will take his Manchester United team to Manchester City on April 27 after the two clubs agreed to stage their re-arranged derby clash at the Etihad Stadium on a Thursday night, sources have told ESPN FC.
City had been due to host the 174th Manchester derby on Feb. 26, but United's involvement in the EFL Cup final against Southampton at Wembley on the same day forced the Premier League game to be postponed.
City's involvement in the FA Cup and Champions League until last week's elimination at the hands of AS Monaco, alongside United's Europa League commitments, had left the date of the rearranged fixture in doubt.
But with the final midweek of April scheduled to be a week without European football, City and United have agreed to meet on April 27.
With City facing Arsenal at Wembley in the FA Cup semifinal at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 23 -- the same day as United's league trip to Burnley -- Pep Guardiola has got an extra 24 hours recovery time for his players, securing a Thursday date rather than Wednesday, to safeguard against the prospect of extra-time and penalties against the Gunners.
United manager Mourinho has complained about the workload facing his team and lack of assistance provided by the Premier League to help the club pursue success in the Europa League -- United face Belgian league leaders Anderlecht in next month's quarterfinals.
The Premier League have ruled out extending the season to allow United extra time to arrange their game at Southampton, which was postponed earlier this month due to FA Cup commitments.
If United progress to the Europa League final, they will face having to play a further 17 games this season in the space of two months prompting Mourinho to claim his club have 'many enemies' blocking their way to success.
City, meanwhile, are now expected to put back their away game against Middlesbrough, originally scheduled for April 29, by 24 hours to April 30. | {
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Last weekend, Vitor Belfort was supposed to have his retirement fight at UFC St. Louis. Unfortunately, his planned opponent, Uriah Hall, suffered a bad weight cut and was removed from the card for medical reasons, leaving Belfort without a dance partner. Belfort quickly pivoted, announcing a desire to rematch former middleweight champion Michael Bisping at UFC London in March. Bisping himself has stated a desire to have his retirement fight at that event and a rematch between two future Hall of Famers would seem to make a lot of sense for both fighters, but there’s one problem: Bisping isn’t interested.
Speaking on his Believe You Me podcast recently, Bisping categorically shutdown any talk of him possibly fighting Belfort in his retirement fight.
“I’m not fighting Vitor Belfort in London,” said Bisping. “I’m not fighting Vitor Belfort in London. I am not fighting Vitor Belfort in London. 100 percent, I’m not fighting him. Zero percent chance.”
Bisping and Belfort previously headlined UFC on FX 7, where Belfort knocked out Bisping with a head kick and punches. At the time, Belfort was granted an exemption to use Testosterone Replacement Therapy and the head kick ended up detaching Bisping’s retina from his right eye, two circumstances that Bisping has not forgotten. When explaining why he had no intention of rematching Belfort for his farewell bout, Bisping pointed to this incident as a key reason why.
“I may or may not have one more fight,” explained Bisping. “So here’s the thing. I don’t like Vitor Belfort. People looking at this video are probably saying, ‘Look at his eye, he’s a f**king mess.’ It is part of the reason why I never wanted to do a video podcast before, because my eye is a mess and it was Vitor Belfort that did it and he was roided out of his mind. He’s a known drug cheat. I don’t like the guy. I find him to be a hypocrite. It’s his last fight and he’s probably going to juice like crazy again anyway because who gives a f**k. ‘Oooh, I failed. So what? Retired. Done. Gone.’”
But it’s not just his history with Belfort that has Bisping disinterested in battling the “young dinosaur;” as his career draws to a close, Bisping is mostly concerned with going out in a fashion that he can look back fondly on. “The Count” says he wants his final fight to be a tribute to the fans and not an emotionally charged blood feud that would have people remember him for “being a d**k” instead of for being one of the most successful fighters ever.
“And not just that,” said Bisping. “For me, the main reason is I don’t like the guy and I just don’t want to be associated with him and I know if we were to fight, it would just turn into a typical Michael Bisping performance of trash talk and all this type of thing at the weigh-ins and the press conference and all that stuff. I’d be talking s**t and I don’t want to do that.
“This is my - if I fight in London - it’s my last ever fight, and I want to handle myself the way I handled myself the majority of the time. I don’t want it to be some bitter rivalry with a guy that has caused me lasting disfigurement and that I’m emotionally charged up against. I’d rather go out there, put my best foot forward, enjoy the moment, fight somebody that I respect, fight somebody that’s gonna be a challenge but I have a lot of respect for, and do it in a classy way.
“I don’t want to be remembered for being a d**k, and I feel that Vitor Belfort would bring out that side of my personality. It’s my last ever fight, I want to go there and enjoy it. I want to embrace the moment, I want to live in the moment, I want to be respectful towards my opponent, basically thank all the fans of Great Britain for always supporting my career. . . not lunging and arguing and swearing and going at the guy and acting regrettably because years later I would look back and I would regret that.”
MUST-READ STORIES
Lie detector. Jon Jones took a polygraph test to prove innocence for recent drug test failure.
Big event. Cris Cyborg is open to fight with Amanda Nunes, but only on a major event.
Rematch. Vitor Belfort tells Michael Bisping to “stop finding excuses” and rematch him at UFC London.
Broken. Paige VanZant’s coach explains why he let her fight with a broken arm.
Bellator. Scott Coker says network made decision on Bellator 192 television lineup.
VIDEO STEW
The MMA After Hour with Ric’s picks.
Embedded.
Stipe interview.
Ngannou discussing Stipe’s comments about promotion.
Chris Lytle still got it.
Thanks to @_koz for the tip. I’m now devoting my life to covering Calcio Storico.
LISTEN UP
Obviously Fight Talk. Previewing UFC 220 and Bellator 192.
The Co-Main Event. Discussing UFC St. Louis and looking ahead to UFC 220 and Bellator.
The MMA Circus. UFC St. Louis recap and UFC 220 and Bellator previews.
SOCIAL MEDIA BOUILLABAISSE
This is honestly shameful. Weeks to go and they just copy-pasted Yoel in. C’mon, UFC.
The UFC does seem to be giving Ngannou a real push.
He's coming. #UFC220 A post shared by ufc (@ufc) on Jan 16, 2018 at 4:18pm PST
Vitor gonna keep trying.
OSP looking for a short-notice replacement, possibly at heavyweight.
. @Latifimma is hurt & out of our scrap next Sat in Charlotte, NC #UFConFOX27 who wants to step up and scrap? I’m even open to going up in weight if NO guys in my division will step up? Looking for someone to do what I do: step up and fight... pic.twitter.com/lvznRvE22I — Ovince Saint Preux (@003_OSP) January 17, 2018
Seriously. Daniel Cormier does not get enough respect for how good he is at almost everything. Just a remarkable person human being.
(Old) Reliable! This guy has been so stable for the UFC, as a champion, a fighter, a promoter, a color commentator. And he is elite at all of it. Truly one of the all-time greats and looking forward to seeing @dc_mma compete in my hometown. #TheJungle ☘️ https://t.co/3VrKBoIHiN — Jon Anik (@Jon_Anik) January 16, 2018
He even squashed his beef with the wrestlers.
I apologize for the hate you have gotten. I have received a ton too. It’s not one way. I am in the middle of fight week and get get agitated easily. I apologize. I wish you nothing but continued success. From all I see you guys are doing amazing. Good luck in the future. DC https://t.co/DHkb6poyIt — Daniel Cormier (@dc_mma) January 16, 2018
Quarry pointing out some flaws with White’s assessment of star-making.
W/out any photos or videos from any of your fights
Without any sponsors being able to advertise during the one time u get international exposure
Just be from a country the UFC wants to expand its presence in and they will promote the hell out of you.
Or be really hot. https://t.co/HEgo660uAu — Nathan Quarry (@NateRockQuarry) January 16, 2018
Sounds like it’s gonna be a crowd pleaser.
Good fight or not I’m not acknowledging my next opponent after the final bell. Who am I kidding. @maxPAINmma we not going to decision. And wrestle fights suck. #KillOrBeKilled Only ! #DangerFights ! #FuckWrestling #DontHugMe — Platinum Mike Perry (@PlatinumPerry) January 15, 2018
That we never got Bisping-Romero is a tragedy.
My only flaw is my English but I am getting good at that too #ynuevo #ufc — Peoples Champ (@YoelRomeroMMA) January 16, 2018
Good catch. The UFC isn’t playing around.
Mario Yamasaki gets caught slipping in his Nike gear.....
Reebok don’t play that shit... pic.twitter.com/HlxRYZcjuZ — MMA Raw & Uncut (@mma_uncut) January 16, 2018
FIGHT ANNOUNCEMENTS
Jordan Johnson (8-0) vs. Adam Milstead (8-1, 1 NC); UFC 222, March 3.
TODAY IN MMA HISTORY
2009: Mauricio Rua earned his first win in the UFC, stopping Mark Coleman in the third round at UFC 93.
2016: Dominick Cruz finally reclaimed his UFC bantamweight title, winning a split decision over T.J. Dillashaw at UFC Fight Night 81.
FINAL THOUGHTS
If Bisping wants to fight a guy he won’t have beef with, but is still a legit middleweight, I honestly have no idea who he has in mind. Vitor makes all the sense in the world, though I understand wanting to end your career on a happy note and not a contentious one. I guess we need to get Rich Franklin back for one more go around.
That’s all for today folks. Take it easy and see y’all tomorrow.
EXIT POLL
Poll Who should Michael Bisping end his career against? This poll is closed. 20% Vitor Belfort (408 votes)
20% Bring Hendo back for one more (402 votes)
9% Tim Boetsch (196 votes)
17% Sure, Rich Franklin (337 votes)
31% Other (621 votes) 1964 votes total Vote Now
If you find something you'd like to see in the Morning Report, hit me up on Twitter @JedKMeshew and let me know about it. Also follow MMAFighting on Instagram, add us on Snapchat at MMA-Fighting, and like us on Facebook. | {
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A Tesla Model S is displayed during the London Motor and Tech Show at ExCel on May 16, 2019 in London, England.
According to a notice published on Tuesday, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation into Tesla over a possible defect in Model S and Model X battery packs that could cause "non-crash fires."
A defect petition submitted to NHTSA by consumer attorney Edward Chen prompted the investigation.
Chen filed the petition on behalf of Tesla owners, including his client David Rasmussen, after Tesla pushed over-the-air software updates to some vehicles, which reduced the range the electric cars could travel on a single charge, owners said.
The petition complained that the software updates, which started in May 2019, were not an appropriate fix for batteries that could ignite in non-crash scenarios.
Chen wrote, in a letter submitted to the Department of Transportation and NHTSA, accompanying the petition: "Tesla is using over-the-air software updates to mask and cover-up a potentially widespread and dangerous issue with the batteries in their vehicles."
Following the investigation into the battery fire and throttling issues, NHTSA will either decide to issue a recall-- which would be financially burdensome to Tesla and could tarnish its reputation-- or is required to publish its findings in the federal register if a recall is not necessary.
Tesla is striving to reduce the costs of its batteries. In the past two years, the company struggled with waste and quality control at its giant battery plant, the Gigafactory, outside of Reno, Nevada.
Representatives from Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that he believed most safety complaints filed to NHTSA were "fraudulent" and suggested such complaints were part of a broad conspiracy to thwart his electric vehicle company.
Musk tweet 1
Tesla's new Smart Summon feature (which allows drivers to bring a car out of a parking spot to where they are standing without a driver behind the wheel) also caught the attention of NHTSA this week. The agency said it became aware of some reports of accidents involving Smart Summon but declined to confirm whether it has launched a formal investigation into Smart Summon.
Here's the full petition: | {
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Oliver Stone looks overwhelmed. It is May 2015, and we are in Munich on the penultimate day of shooting his drama about Edward Snowden. At lunch, the director seems anxious and weary, eyes heavy, shoulders stooped, energy sapped. When the idea of Snowden was proposed, he explains, he had strongly resisted. Then, slowly and reluctantly, he was drawn in. Today, he sounds as if he might regret that decision. There have been problems with finance, with finding distributors, in portraying something as dull as the cyberworld that Snowden inhabits.
“A director has to say everything is great, things are wonderful,” he says, exasperated. “Every day on a set is a potential disaster. Every day on a film set is the hope that it is turning out well, but the truth is it is just a slog all the way through. It’s the bulldozer going through a treeline. It is not easy. It has never been easy.”
This film, in particular, was not easy. “Every movie I have made is a challenge. But from day one, every day seems to have its obstacles, whether it is computers or the technology being arcane, difficult to understand, or the character of Snowden, who has a strong, robot, nerd quality. It is a drawback. He is not the active type.” As Stone headed back to the set, his final comment expressed his limited ambition for the movie at that time: “I don’t want to do anything that will hurt Edward Snowden.”
Almost a year later, I meet Stone again, in London. The tiredness is gone. This is a man full of enthusiasm for life and his movie. The editing has gone well, he feels; the previous week a positive reaction had met an early preview in Idaho – despite his sense of dread.
“As a director, I think the film has a power beyond its details,” he says, beaming. “Maybe no one will come. But those people that come will see something they have not seen before. There are no chases. There are no murders. I love tension but there is a different kind of tension … What Snowden did in history, I believe, will make a difference. I don’t think it is going to go away.”
It was a few months after the story first broke in summer 2013 that Stone was approached by Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s lawyer in Russia, about making a movie about his client. It caught him, he says, at a low point. A project about Martin Luther King had failed to come to fruition. He didn’t fancy embarking on another complicated proposition unlikely to make it to the multiplex. Nonetheless, he went to Moscow, met the man himself, and was sufficiently intrigued to do further research and buy up film rights to Kurcherena’s fictional account of an American whistleblower, Time of the Octopus, as well as Guardian correspondent Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files.
I first met Stone six or so months later, when he visited the Guardian. I was called into the office of the then-editor, Alan Rusbridger, and was pleased at the prospect, never having met a Hollywood director before. This was also one whose films I had enjoyed. There were a handful of us in the room and we chatted for about hour. The reason I was there was that, along with fellow journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, I had met Snowden in Hong Kong, where he handed over tens of thousands of top-secret US and British documents to us – one of the biggest leaks in intelligence history – before going into hiding. Stone wanted to hear the account firsthand. At that point, I wasn’t sure what to make of the director, but I was impressed by the detail he had already accumulated about Snowden.
Oliver Stone on the set of his film Snowden. Photograph: Jürgen Olczyk
I met him next in December 2014, alone over lunch in London. I was half-an-hour late but he did not make a fuss: there was nothing of primadonna to him. Instead, he cracked on with his questions. There were a lot of them. They were followed up with emails and phone calls. I liked this obsessiveness, more journalist than film director; a stubborn pursuit of the unanswered in an effort to complete a picture. In the end, Stone and his co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald interviewed almost everyone involved. He spoke to lawyers, journalists and former members of the NSA. He went to the Ecuadorean embassy in London to talk to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. And he met Snowden’s partner, Lindsay Mills. He went to Moscow at least eight times to meet Snowden.
Too much research, Stone says. About 80% had to be ditched. Not time wasted though, he says – it gave him the clarity he hankered after. We are now back in Munich, two days after the UK general election: a time of great industry and excitement in a newspaper. Filming, by contrast, is boring. I had never been on a movie set before and I am glad I had the chance to see behind the scenes. But I had somehow imagined it might be a bit like a stage performance. It was not. The experience is dull and repetitive. That morning was dominated by Stone shooting Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Snowden, looking out of a hotel window. This was meant to be in Hong Kong; Snowden’s bedroom at the Mira hotel having been recreated in Germany. Gordon-Levitt was filmed looking left to right and then down to the street. Over and over again. Different lighting. Different angles. Different shots. The scene makes it into the movie but only lasts a few seconds. It took four hours.
When not looking out of glass, Gordon-Levitt was happy to chat. By then, he had already met Edward and was accurately reproducing his slow, precise speech. The son of west coast liberals, he had fostered an intense interest in Snowden and the arguments around surveillance. Unafraid of public declarations of political intent, Gordon-Levitt was preparing to be an advocate for privacy issues in the press commitments ahead. He has already donated his earnings from the movie to the American Civil Liberties Union, one of whose lawyers is Snowden’s chief representative.
Watching the shooting in the mocked-up Hong Kong hotel, I spotted on Snowden’s cluttered table an empty can of Tsingtao beer. But there were never any empties in that room. None of us was drinking at the time; Snowden is teetotal. But I didn’t have the heart to mention it because it was already so far into the shooting and the idea of subjecting them to more hours reshooting felt unimaginable. In the end, though, I can’t remember seeing the stubbie in the final cut.
There are other, bigger quibbles. Parts of the film are pure Hollywood. Stone devotes much of the movie to the romance between Snowden and Mills. The way Snowden smuggles data out of the NSA headquarters in Hawaii in a Rubik’s Cube is almost certainly the stuff of thriller fantasy. It is also a straightforward biopic, following Snowden from a failed attempt to join US special forces to a successful career as an NSA computer specialist, through disillusionment and then to being a whistleblower.
Yet the broad direction of Snowden is more faithful to the truth than might be expected from Hollywood. Stone is quick to insist he is not a political director or an activist, but a dramatist. A surprise to me, maybe to others also familiar with his work. Yet perhaps what he meant was that he does not want to make anything that would be dull. The film isn’t. But I’m an interested party: I’m depicted in it, and so I hope it does well.
I’m most interested in the film’s capacity to shift public opinion about the man whose story it portrays. Attitudes in the US tend to be polarised between those who view him as a traitor and those who see him as a hero. Stone’s film can reach people with little prior knowledge. It humanises its subject, makes complex arguments about the balance between privacy and surveillance immediately understandable. Even those who argue that they are not bothered about potential intrusion into the private lives will likely squirm at a scene in which the central couple are having sex – but then Snowden hesitates, spotting an open laptop, wondering if anyone might be watching through the webcam. (The incident is based on an interview with the Guardian in which Snowden said surveillance agencies do engage in such voyeurism.)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden and Shailene Woodley as his girlfriend Lindsay Mills in Snowden. Photograph: Allstar/Open Road Films
Will Snowden shift opinion? “I hope so,” Stone says, a touch uncertain. “It is tricky,” he qualifies. In fact, his film may give some of the more zealous anti-surveillance campaigners pause for thought. One of the more unexpected subtleties in the film comes with its portrayal of the NSA, where differing views about the balance between privacy and security are permitted – embraced, even.
“Ed never revealed real people to us,” said Stone. “But he gave us ideas about real people and events from which we could draw and make – with dramatic licence – conclusions that would not be too far-fetched. We tried over many drafts to make it as realistic as possible.
“The NSA have human souls,” he added. “They are not all James Bond villains.” He was not smiling; he meant it.
Yet his own allegiances lie with the whistleblower; his undoubted aim is to caution the unaware about what he calls “the surveillance state”. “I think we are all facing problems of an Orwellian super–organisation that is running the world,” he says. “But that is politics!” He is disappointed that the issue has surfaced so little in the US election campaign so far – its sole appearance at that point was in a Democratic candidates’ debate. Stone backed Bernie Sanders (and is also a fan of Jeremy Corbyn). “Hillary Clinton has no mercy in her soul for Snowden,” he says, also murmuring uneasily about her “hardcore warmongering tactics”.
Snowden will be released in the US two months before a new president is elected, and a day after Stone’s 70th birthday. Its fate will be decided then. But what of the most important opinion, that of Snowden himself? His instinct when he worked at the NSA was to keep a low profile – presumably he would have been mortified at the prospect of a movie about him. And he remains an essentially private person, happy to talk about technology and surveillance, but guarding details about his own life. The world of the celebrity is not one he would be comfortable with.
Stone hints that Snowden liked the movie – and his cooperatation suggests he is onside. His real pleasure in it, though, may be like mine. In April, the trailer was released. Snowden tweeted: “For two minutes and 39 seconds, everybody at NSA just stopped working.”
His accent is good, if more Edinburgh than my Glasgow glottal stop
Ewen MacAskill meets Tom Wilkinson, the man who plays him in Snowden
Tom Wilkinson as Ewen MacAskill in Snowden. Photograph: Allstar/Open Road Films
After seeing the Oscar-winning movie Citizenfour, a Guardian colleague offered up his verdict: “The guy playing you is rubbish.” It was a joke, I hope; the guy playing me is me, as Citizenfour is a documentary.
Released in 2014, Citizenfour recorded a meeting between NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden with three journalists, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and myself, in Hong Kong in 2013. Oliver Stone’s Snowden is different. Actors take most of the roles, including Tom Wilkinson as me.
Throughout my career, I have been comfortable with a low profile, hiding behind print. That has not survived the Snowden story, which has so far spawned three plays, several documentaries and now a Hollywood movie.
My part in all of them is relatively small. Even so, the first time I went to see myself played by an actor – Jonathan Coy, in James Graham’s Privacy at the Donmar Warehouse in 2014 – I felt a mixture of both embarrassment and dread, not least because I had to write about it. But Coy did a good job and I began to relax after he delivered the first of his lines. I had met the actor before on what I thought was a social occasion – in fact, he was scoping me, picking up mannerisms.
It gave me a strange taste for this strangest experience. When I flew to Munich to visit the set of Snowden, two things were uppermost in my mind. The first: would my small role survive the final cut? The second: would I keep my Scottish accent? Stone might have opted for American, or even English.
In a break on set during a thunderstorm, I met the man playing me: Tom Wilkinson. He confirmed he stuck with Scottish. “It is always an accent I have never had any problems with,” he said. “I am good with accents in a way and Scottish is apparently one of them.” And his accent is good, if a little more Edinburgh than my Glasgow glottal stop. Plus, he refers to Snowden in the movie as “laddie”. Not a term I would ever employ.
One of the biggest differences between being portrayed on stage and on film is that the language in the play was mine, recorded verbatim, while that in Snowden is invented.
At one point in the real meeting in the Mira hotel, Snowden covered himself and his laptop with a red hood. He wanted to hide his password from any hidden cameras, he explained later. Even at the time it seemed odd behaviour and myself and Glenn are caught in Citizenfour exchanging puzzled, uneasy glances.
In the movie, I offer up a quip as Snowden pulls the hood over his head, something like, “Do we all get under that?”, which I did not say. Stone repeatedly stressed to me he was making a movie and had to make it interesting. Me just taking notes in a chair, he said kindly, just wasn’t particularly exciting. He needed action.
There’s another striking line in which I call the Guardian to tell them that “The Guinness is good” – a pre-arranged signal that the whistleblower was genuine, not a crank. In fact, I did say that in real life. And, oddly, it was scripted, the brainchild of then-Guardian US editor Janine Gibson, who is played here by Joely Richardson.
The film shows me nodding off. This is accurate, too – but it happened later than the scenes shown. Neither Glenn, Laura or myself got much sleep for a week. It was only when Snowden went into hiding that I began to relax and started falling asleep all over the place.
As for Wilkinson, he was less exercised by the themes behind the film than his director or co-star, but he recalled with excitement the coverage in the Guardian when the story broke, and is sympathetic towards the man. “I don’t think he is a traitor,” he says, quiet and considered. “You need someone like that. I think all people who put themselves out on a limb to the extent to which he has have a simplicity of outlook that eludes the rest of us.”
Earlier in the summer, I saw a preview of the film with my colleague Luke Harding, on whose book much of the movie is based. Afterwards, I asked him how accurate he felt the Wilkinson portrayal was. A fearless foreign correspondent confronting the powerful forces of the US and British intelligence services – right? Luke’s verdict: “You looked a bit dopey.”
• Snowden premieres at the Toronto film festival on 10 September, opens in the US on 16 September and in the UK later in the year | {
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Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
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Calls your party a sausage fest In your mother's vagina | {
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Night after night, Batman faces Gotham's most fearsome criminals: gangsters, lunatics, and supervillains. And while he may take the occasional pummeling, he manages to survive those long nights. Or does he?
Inspired by Kim Kardashian's gluteal photoshoot, Comics Should Be Good made "Break the Internet" the theme for this week's The Line It Is Drawn drawing challenge. Commenters were invited to come up with ideas for comic book plot twists that would "Break the Internet" and the contributing artists illustrated the various ideas.
BigBearSpeaks submitted this idea, which was drawn by artist Nick Perks:
Yep, just like Hank and Dean Venture, Batman dies on a regular basis and is replaced by a fresh Bruce Wayne clone. Twist!
Head over to The Line It Is Drawn for more imaginary plot twists, involving Catwoman, the Green Goblin, Squirrel Girl, and more.
The Line it is Drawn #216 – Breaking the Internet! [The Line It Is Drawn] | {
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Irony is routinely deplored these days, with a David Foster Wallace essay from way back in 1993 continuing to provide much fodder for its detractors (although irony's defenders have also spoken up). Jedediah Purdy, an earnest advocate for earnestness, even wrote a whole book on the subject, "For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today," in which he made it very clear that irony is the antithesis of trust and commitment. That's why one chapter in particular of Marie Luise Knott's wonderful new book, "Unlearning With Hannah Arendt," piqued my attention.
Knott, a journalist and author living in Berlin, set out to explore how Arendt, a German Jew and one of the 20th century's great political and moral thinkers, made sense of her times. As Knott puts it (in David Dollenmayer's supple English translation), Arendt's experiences in Nazi Germany forced her to deploy certain ways of thinking to find "escape routes from the dead ends of existing traditional conceptions of the world and the human being." One of those intellectual tools was irony, or, as Knott also calls it, "laughter."
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Considering that Arendt's most famous work, "Eichmann in Jerusalem," concerns the trial of the high-level Nazi administrator in charge of organizing the genocide of Eastern Europe's Jews, the notion of applying irony, let alone laughter, to such subjects still has the capacity to shock. This and other aspects of Arendt's report on the trial (initially for the New Yorker magazine) led many prominent Jewish figures to repudiate her. Yet Knott maintains that irony was an essential element of Arendt's approach to understanding just what Nazism meant. She needed it to grapple with such seeming paradoxes as the fact that a man capable of Eichmann's enormities would appear to be a rather average, unthinking careerist, a "random buffoon," as Arendt put it, swept up in "the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique." This potent insight lay behind the phrase for which Arendt may be best remembered: "the banality of evil."
I reached Knott at her home in Germany to ask her more about Arendt's use of irony. Despite her own reservations about her proficiency in English, she offered some illuminating insights into Arendt's ideas.
Your book argues that in her work, and especially in her writings about Adolf Eichmann and the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt had to use a set of intellectual tools to "break" old ways of thinking about morality and history. What was inadequate about the old ways of thinking?
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When I first read an essay by Hannah Arendt in 1983, I was deeply impressed by her free way of thinking things through. I only realized later that her thinking and writing were nourished by the insight that existing intellectual tools had turned out to be powerless vis-à-vis totalitarianism. To give you one striking example: the idea that there must be a reason for or a logic to treating someone as an enemy. This tradition of Western thought had shown itself to be powerless. Her main question became: How do we confront the reality of totalitarianism, when it surpasses our understanding? That is where her thinking started, at the place where the knowledge she had did not help her understanding.
One of the most important of the tools Arendt employed is what you call "laughter," particularly irony. Why was irony so essential when she was confronted with a figure like Eichmann?
In my book I wanted to deal with a subject that nobody had worked on: How and under which conditions did Arendt "change her mind." I was not so much interested in whether she was right or not. Karl Jaspers, one of her teachers, calls her work -- especially the Eichmann book -- a defiance of "life-sustaining lies." We all (including Arendt) live with life-sustaining lies, both private ones and public ones.
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The life-sustaining lie that Arendt had hung onto for years was that the Nazis, and especially the Nazi murderers, were demons, because of their furious anti-Semitism. Seeing Eichmann in his suit and hearing him speak his bureaucratic German was a shock. What she confronted in this trial was -- to put it much too simple -- a totally new and totally shocking phenomenon ("Erscheinung"): Could it be that people can turn into murderers without having a real inner motive? Could it be that Eichmann could as well have followed, with the same ferocity, other ideologies and could have murdered other people? What she understood was: Maybe evil is banal. Maybe evil is rootless. That was a phenomenon she had to think through. So she had to think about it in a new way. She had to overcome her own life-sustaining lie. I think we know from our daily life, how much laughter can bridge a situation that words cannot express.
Some have argued that the subject of the Holocaust is too terrible to ever admit anything like humor. Obviously, Arendt was not laughing off atrocities, but she was attacked for some statements she made ironically -- such as noting that Eichmann resembled a "Zionist" for suggesting that Bohemian and Moravian Jews be resettled in a specific area -- and for the implied laughter in what she wrote about Eichmann. Why do you think that bothered people so much?
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Of course Hannah Arendt knew that Eichmann was an anti-Semite, an SS officer and the organizer of the murder of millions of Jews. What unsettled and shocked her was to hear this anti-Semite dressing up his testimony with whatever came to mind, even going so far as to call himself a philo-Zionist.
But what worried Arendt most fundamentally was the "totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused ... not only among the persecutors but also among the victims." She also worried about the consequences of this collapse, the model and possible future heralded by the Nazi policy of extermination. The fact that she saw the collapse among the persecutors but also among the victims was not due to any desire to offend.
Arendt insisted on defending the existence of a common, shared world. As a Jew she had experienced the triumph of the Nazis and the way their ideology had permeated, step by step, every aspect of life and language in Germany. The collapse she discerns is the collapse of the fabric holding human beings together in this world, the fabric of laws and traditions and ideas that had in the past kept the world from falling apart, the idea of solidarity and of humans negotiating the present and the future together. “The totality of the moral collapse” meant for her that the Nazi perpetrators could perversely twist the Christian precept "Thou shalt not kill" into the command "Thou shalt kill." It meant moreover that parts of mankind (first the mentally ill, then the Jews, then ...) had been declared superfluous and step-by-step conditioned to fit the Nazis’ image of them, to be and behave like victims. They found themselves in a situation of total lawlessness and total powerlessness and were thrown out of the human world, i.e., murdered.
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To come back to the life-sustaining lies that disguise our understanding: After the war Germans found it easy to declare that the Nazis were radically evil. Germans liked to think of themselves as good people. The persecutors, the perpetrators, the Germans who deported the Jews to the camps and killed them – those were “the others,” the beasts, the barbarians, the demons. This was a way for Germans not to deal with the darkest chapter in their murderous history, a way that in fact also denied the Jews any scope for action. In her Eichmann reportage, Arendt, who was a theoretician of political action, was concerned with the threats to the human ability to act. She asked herself whether there are times under a totalitarian regime when non-action, i.e., the refusal to act, becomes itself an action.
You make the important point that fascism, like other forms of totalitarianism, imposed a "monocausal" and "rigidly fixed" idea of meaning on its citizens. Irony typically involves holding more than one meaning in your mind at the same time. For this reason, perhaps, it still makes people uneasy. In America, it is common for people to object to irony as the antithesis of sincerity and authenticity, of a toxic detachment. The late novelist David Foster Wallace wrote that irony is an agent "of great despair and stasis" in American culture. How do you think Arendt's liberating irony is different from the pop-culture irony that Wallace worried so much about?
The question is here: What sort of detachment is aimed at and what sort of detachment is achieved? The detachment of Arendt's laughter is the contrary of the detachment that Wallace is talking about, if I understand the argument properly.
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Arendt detaches herself from her own feelings, her own prejudices that have turned out to be an obstacle to understanding the facts. She is doing this detachment by laughter to obtain the contrary of detachment, to be able to go deeper into what is at stake -- to be able to attach her mind to what is there, instead of staying attached to what she expects or hopes to see.
Wallace has a point in stating that irony can "make viewers feel smarter than the naïve public, and to flatter them into continued watching." That is a totally different phenomenon and one we have here in Germany too. This type of irony is keeping you at a distance from what is going on. Media irony is the result of a society, where people are thought of as consumers, while Arendt's irony is the contrary. She wants to get closer to reality by overcoming her own impediments of thinking. | {
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The fence
'When I'm in charge of the fence, we going to have a fence. It's going to be 20 feet high. It's going to have barbed wire on the top. It's going to be electrocuted, electrified. And there's going to be a sign on the other side that says it will kill you.' — Cain, Oct. 15, 2011, talking about the United States-Mexico border at a rally in Tennessee. A day later, he called the proposal a joke. | {
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If you have followed the Bitcoin industry’s news cycle over the past two years, you likely would have noticed an incessantly recurring trend: Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). These financial vehicles, which have yet to appear in U.S. markets, are believed by some analysts to be the catalysts that could propel this nascent market to new heights.
Indeed, an ETF tracking the leading cryptocurrency would give institutions (and possibly retail investors) their first medium for Bitcoin investment.
However, not everyone convinced that such vehicles would be the end all and be all for cryptocurrency investment.
Bitcoin ETF Hype Unwarranted
Speaking on a CNBC “Fast Money” segment last week, Brian Kelly of BKCM argued that a Bitcoin ETF isn’t essential for continued development and growth in this budding space. While many may take this statement as blasphemous, Kelly went on to back up his comment, drawing attention to the fact that there are other up-and-coming on-ramps.
The industry investor looked to Fidelity and TD Ameritrade — two giants in the American finance realm — adding that “ultimately you’re going to be able to buy Bitcoin in a regular brokerage account, or it’s going to look like a regular brokerage account. So I’m less concerned that you need a bitcoin ETF at this point in time.”
The SEC just knocked back anther bitcoin ETF. @BKBrianKelly breaks it down. pic.twitter.com/C3OfdhG2ru — CNBC's Fast Money (@CNBCFastMoney) October 10, 2019
Kelly’s comment is similar to that made by Sasha Fleyshman, a trader at cryptocurrency investment manager Arca. Fleyshman recently wrote on Twitter that the Bitcoin ETFs that are being so heavily lauded aren’t exactly needed, in that that there already custodial and investment solutions that should spark an institutional entree.
I still can't quite comprehend why this space is so incessant on having a #Bitcoin ETF. With what @Bakkt is doing (physically backed $BTC futures/custody), what @DigitalAssets is doing in terms of custody solutions, etc: why are we so hung up on an ETF for "institutional entry"? — Sasha Fleyshman (@ArcaChemist) October 10, 2019
These comments come shortly after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) slammed Bitwise Asset Management’s ETF proposal, issuing an over 100-page letter on why they believe that this market isn’t ready for a publicly-tradable fund.
Where We’re Going, There Are No Institutions
CryptoOracle founder Lou Kerner has taken Kelly’s rhetoric further.
Per previous reports from NewsBTC, the former Goldman Sachs analyst said that
Bitcoin doesn’t need institutions to succeed and rocket higher, citing the fact that a majority of the asset’s growth has been retail-based. Kerner even went as far as to say that the institutions will be the followers in this market, not the trailblazers.
Yet, he did admit that institutions will eventually make a true foray into this market, claiming they will be attracted to cryptocurrencies like apples are attracted to the ground.
Featured Image from Shutterstock | {
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TORONTO – The Toronto Blue Jays will honour the life and career of former star pitcher Roy Halladay in a pre-game ceremony before their 2018 home opener.
The Blue Jays said details of the ceremony, as well as additional honours in Halladay’s memory, will be made available in the coming months.
Halladay died Nov. 7 at age 40 when the private plane he was piloting crashed into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida.
The two-time Cy Young Award winner played for the Blue Jays from 1998-2009 and for Philadelphia from 2009-13, going 203-105 with a 3.38 earned-run average.
He pitched a perfect game and a post-season no-hitter while with the Phillies. | {
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Tampa Bay, FL- Describing himself as a “go with the flow” manager dedicated to “empowering the team by treating them as adults that can handle their own work”, sales manager Dexter Reed has requested that all of his employees send him a daily recap of every single action they perform, including work tasks, when they go on break, and what movie they’re seeing after work.
Reed, or as he prefers his employees call him, “D-Rex”, claims that he doesn’t want to micro-manage the team and that they have his full trust, despite requiring them to CC Reed on every email sent, as well as send a list of all text messages sent during the day.
“If I were getting all ‘up in their business’, then why don’t I ask them for updates on what they text after work and on the weekends?” asked a smirking Reed. “It’s because I trust and respect them, though I would love to see the ability for managers to demand access to their employees’ phones at any time added as a proposition to the next Florida election.”
Despite Reed’s self-described “chillness”, members of his team find him overbearing, with his intrusions blurring the line between work and their personal space.
“I get that he wants to know what’s going on, but he’s logging every single thing I do,” said Yvonne Alexander, an account executive on Reed’s team. “If he wants to know what projects I’m working, that’s fine, but it makes me uncomfortable that I have to let him know when I’m going to the bathroom.
“Also, no one has ever called him ‘D-Rex’, and I can guarantee that no one ever will.” | {
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Today marks the 69th birthday of one of the greatest horror authors of all time: Stephen King. Jonathan wrote a great piece last year about King’s accomplishments, so I won’t try to duplicate that here. Rather, I thought it would be fun to check on the status of all of his works in progress, be it the status of his future novels or adaptations of his previous works.
Let’s dive in to the films first. It’s no secret that King adaptations over the years have been hit or miss, but we have a lot of promising adaptations to look forward to in the next couple of years. There has been recent progress on the film adaptation of Gerald’s Game, a novel of King’s which has long been considered unfilmable. This is mainly due to the fact that the plot consists solely of a woman being handcuffed to a bed for the duration of the novel. That won’t stop Mike Flanagan (Oculus, Hush) from directing said film adaptation for Netflix though. It’s still too early to know anything specific about the project, but Flanagan initially expressed his passion for the project back in 2014, so it’s been a long time coming and after the success he had with Netflix and Hush, I think we have a special film to look forward to.
Then of course you’ve got the film adaptation of It being released next September (well, the first part of it anyway). The film went through a pretty long development period before Andy Muschietti (Mama) was finally selected to direct the film. The first image of Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) was released last month to a mixed response but it’s really too soon to judge the project. At the very least you’ve got to respect the different take the remake is taking, especially when you take into consideration that the film will be set in 1989 and present day, rather than the novel’s 1957 and 1984.
One can’t mention Stephen King without referencing the Dark Tower series. Now that is a film adaptation that has been through some development Hell. After several false starts, production on the film finally began back in March, with Nikolaj Arcel . A release date has been set for February 17, 2017, which is an interesting time to release the epic. February is known for being a genre film dumping ground, but after Deadpool’s success from the same weekend last year it’s understandable that Sony is feeling confident with that date.
Lastly, it was announced earlier this year that his novella The Mist, which was previously adapted into a film directed by Frank Darabont, would be adapted into a television series for Spike TV. The series will be premiering some time in 2017, although no official release date has been set. It does feature an impressive cast though. It will star Morgan Spector (Boardwalk Empire) and Alyssa Sutherland (Vikings).
On the book side of things, King just released End of Watch, the final installment of his detective trilogy that began with 2014’s Mr. Mercedes. King’s next novel will be a collaboration with his youngest son Owen King called Sleeping Beauties, which will be set in a women’s prison in West Virginia. It is set to be released some time in 2017.
As you can see, 2017 is going to be a pretty busy year for Stephen King fans. So in honor of Mr. King’s birthday, grab your favorite Stephen King novel and give it a read this week. Happy birthday Mr. King! | {
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Paul Singer
USA TODAY
The Republican presidential race continues to be all about Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, but Ohio Gov. John Kasich may have put himself in position to make a mark when New Hampshire votes next month.
In our weekly poll of 30 political experts — we ask who is strongest in the GOP field each week — Kasich notched sixth place this week, his highest standing in the 21 weeks we have been running the survey.
Now, it's not first place — that's still Trump. But Kasich's upward movement reflects some thought that he could score second place in the Granite State's first-in-the-nation primary. That would plant him firmly in the national headlines and give his campaign fresh life.
"This week Kasich feels like a 'positive alternative' possibility in NH, amid all the negativity between (Jeb) Bush, (Chris) Christie, and (Marco) Rubio," said University of New Hampshire professor Dante Scala. Polls in the state have consistently shown Kasich among a cluster of candidates vying for second place behind Trump, and over the weekend he picked up endorsements from three newspapers in the state.
Kasich also benefits from other candidates — namely Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson — dropping out of the top tier over the past several weeks.
"The conventional wisdom is that it's either Trump or Cruz. However, surprises occur when actual people start to vote," warned former Democratic congressman Dan Maffei.
Pollster Peter Fenn added, "The knives are out between Trump and Cruz. The question is: does this give a Rubio, Christie, Kasich or Bush a chance to come up the side and emerge as an alternative?"
Former Republican party official Frank Donatelli agreed, "Trump, Cruz and Rubio have most potential for the long run," Donatelli said. "There may be one more ticket available if Bush, Christie or Kasich can finish first or second in New Hampshire. Iowa is most important for Cruz as he is lagging in New Hampshire."
On other odd item worth noting this week: Rand Paul held his spot in eighth place despite being relegated to the happy hour debate that he refused to attend. Paul turned his relegation into a positive by launching a social media storm during the debate that garnered a lot of attention. He was among the top five candidates in growth of Twitter followers during the debate for the first time despite not being on stage.
WEEK 21 RANKINGS
1. Donald Trump (Last Week: 1)
2. Ted Cruz (2)
3. Marco Rubio (3)
4. Chris Christie (4)
5. Jeb Bush (5)
6. John Kasich (7)
7. Ben Carson (6)
8. Rand Paul (8)
9. Carly Fiorina (9)
10. Mike Huckabee (10)
11. Rick Santorum (11)
12. Jim Gilmore (12)
Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3
Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6
Week 7 | Week 8 | Week 9
Week 10 | Week 11 | Week 12
Week 13 | Week 14 | Week 15
Week 16 | Week 17 | Week 18
Week 19 | Week 20
Participants in USA TODAY's GOP Power Rankings:
Kristen Soltis Anderson, Republican pollster and author of The Selfie Vote
Henry Barbour, Republican strategist, Mississippi
Paul Brathwaite, principal, Podesta Group
Dianne Bystrom, director, Center for Women and Politics, Iowa State University
Herman Cain, talk show host and former GOP presidential candidate
Maria Cardona, Democratic strategist and CNN Commentator, The Dewey Square Group
Frank Donatelli, former RNC deputy chairman and Reagan advisor
Sara Fagen, partner, DDC Advocacy
Peter Fenn, Democratic political strategist, Fenn Communications
Denise Feriozzi, deputy executive director, EMILY’s List
Karen Floyd, CEO, The Palladian Group and former South Carolina GOP chair
Aaron Ghitelman, communications manager, HeadCount
Andra Gillespie, polling analyst and political science professor, Emory University
Nathan L. Gonzales, editor, The Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report
Lilly J. Goren, political science and global studies professor, Carroll University
Doug Gross, Iowa attorney and previous Republican gubernatorial nominee
O. Kay Henderson, news director, Radio Iowa
Ken Khachigian, senior partner, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck
Carl Leubsdorf, Washington columnist, The Dallas Morning News
Deb Lucia, Topeka 912 – the Capital City Tea Party
Matt Mackowiak, Republican consultant and president, Potomac Strategy Group, LLC
Dan Maffei, former Democratic congressman, New York
Phil Musser, chairman, IMGE digital media agency
Margie Omero, Democratic pollster, Purple Insights
Jon Ralston, host, "Ralston Live" on PBS affiliates in Nevada
Craig Robinson, founder and editor, TheIowaRepublican.com
Alan Rosenblatt, Ph.D., Sr. VP of digital strategy, turner4D
Dante Scala, political science professor, University of New Hampshire
Adam Sharp, head of news, government and elections, Twitter
Alex Smith, national chairman, College Republicans
Todd Spangler, Washington correspondent, Detroit Free Press
Kathy Sullivan, DNC committeewoman and former Democratic Party chair, New Hampshire
Special thanks to the Palladian Group for building our survey platform. | {
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AMD known as Advanced Micro Devices is progressing day by day. It is all set to introduce new technologies in the coming year. The big and enthusiastic fans of AMD would be really happy as AMD is releasing computer processor microarchitecture known for the codename’ Zen’ in the beginning of 2017. Zen features high-performance enlightenment. It offers 40% more performance than previous AMD core and has great accuracy and throughput. Recently a very significant disclosure of Zen is introduced, codenamed as AMD Naples. It is the upcoming server platform which includes the latest Zen based processors to power high-performance computing. With the help of Zen core, AMD was able to achieve performance equivalence. Benchmarks for AMD’s Zen based Naples SOC are now out on the web.
AMD’s Naples SoC 2S Dual Socket configuration with 64 Cores/ 128 Threads
SiSoft Sandra benchmarks of AMD’s Naples SoC platform leak out on the web. This is a dual-socket platform that features 32 core processors with 16 dies on each board. All these specifications and some extra features were revealed that I am going to specify came on the web. Actually, at the NewCitaviaBlog a man named, DresdenBoy posted these benchmarks and removed them after some time. I don’t know whether it was intentional or unintentional but it was quite advantageous to us because we managed to get its screen shots. This posted data contained the complete string of the processor, unlike other kinds of leaks which only contained the code of the platform.
4x AMD Diesel Platform, 2S145A4VIHE4_29/14_N, 16 C
It had the following specification:
A base clock of 1.44 GHz
A turbo clock of 2.9 GHz
Dual Socket as shown above in the name tag, there 2S specifies the usage of 32 core processors (with two 16 core dies on board).
Clear capabilities of AMD’s trademark and MCM (Multi-Chip Module) are specified here.
These screen shots also make you aware of some new specifications of Zen Architecture. These specifications are no doubted really fascinating but these do not meet the standard of 64 core setup, it may be due to the fact that the processor is not appropriately utilized by the benchmark. Zen has to make some amendments in the cryptography benchmark to overcome this issue.
Naples configuration will include 16 clusters of 512 KB L2 and 4 Clusters of 8 MB shared L3.
PCI bandwidth displayed is 310MB/s
Cryptography Benchmark’s clocking out at 170 MB/s.
AMD NAPLES
A good performance of 643.37 Mpix/s is exhibited by the Processor and Multi Media. At double precision, the processors’ financial analysis is 667,500 OPTS.
The Geekbench leaks which occurred a few days back is quite similar to this variant.
SiSoft Sandra provides an entry list of 16 cores for this processor with 4 dies in play, which is quite consistent.
The scalability of Zen Naples platform is from 16 cores to 64 cores.
A team of AMD is working really hard to overcome all the issues and making the AMD Nepal one of the biggest success of 2017 by exhibiting great performance.
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Blind Lab miraculously rescued after 8 days in Santa Cruz Mountains
Photo: Dan Estrada Dan Estrada carries Sage, a blind Lab who was lost in the Santa...
BOULDER CREEK, Calif. — A blind labrador retriever was miraculously found alive in the Santa Cruz mountains after being lost in the woods for eight days.
The Boulder Creek dog's rescue went viral on Facebook among San Lorenzo Valley residents who have weathered a wet winter and needed something positive to happen.
The sightless dog, named Sage, wandered into the forest on the night of Feb. 24 and vanished. Sage's owners mistakenly thought their pooch had been brought inside for the night.
Beth Cole said neighbors and friends helped her look everywhere for the beloved dog. But when seven days passed, hope began to fade. There were several mountain lion sightings that week, and overnight temperatures dropped.
"We'd almost given up hope," Cole said.
Then the unexpected happened.
Neighbor Dan Estrada and his friend, Victor Lopez, were out hiking with two dogs Saturday when they saw a white dog in a stream. They feared the lab may be dead.
When Sage sensed their presence, the lab perked up and lifted her head.
Estrada said he was overcome with emotion, ran into the stream, and hugged Sage. The dog had not wandered far from home, but the terrain was steep and slippery down to the stream.
Sage was too weak to walk, so Estrada carried Sage over his shoulders up a canyon.
Now the dog is doing well back home.
"We've always loved our community, but this really re-enforced what a special place this is," Cole said.
Estrada turned down a $1,000 reward from the Cole family, and instead asked for it to be donated to an animal organization.
A celebration for Sage will be held March 18 from 4-6 p.m. at Joe's Bar on Highway 9. The event is a fundraiser benefiting the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter. | {
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A senior administration official said President Donald Trump has reservations about the Equality Act. (Photo by Michael Vadon via Flickr)
With a vote on the Equality Act in the U.S. House expected on Friday, a senior administration official indicated exclusively to the Washington Blade that President Trump opposes the bill.
“The Trump administration absolutely opposes discrimination of any kind and supports the equal treatment of all; however, this bill in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to undermine parental and conscience rights,” the senior administration official said via email.
More details about Trump’s position on the Equality Act may come soon from the White House, which traditionally issues a Statement of Administration Policy when legislation comes to the floor of either chamber of Congress.
The statement is arguably a change in position for Trump. In 2000, when Trump was exploring a presidential run as a Reform Party candidate, he said in an interview with The Advocate he likes the idea of amending the Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation — a key component of the Equality Act.
“I like the idea of amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include a ban of discrimination based on sexual orientation,” Trump said. “It would be simple. It would be straightforward. We don’t need to rewrite the laws currently on the books, although I do think we need to address hate-crimes legislation. But amending the Civil Rights Act would grant the same protection to gay people that we give to other Americans — it’s only fair.”
The Equality Act, as it will come up in the House, would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act to ban anti-LGBT discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, jury service, education, federal programs and credit.
But the Equality Act goes further than what Trump said he supported in 2000. In addition to transgender inclusion, the bill seeks to update federal law to include sex in the list of protected classes in public accommodation and expands the definition of public accommodations to include retail stores, banks, transportation services and health care services. Further, the Equality Act would establish that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — a 1994 law aimed at protecting religious liberty — can’t be used to enable anti-LGBT discrimination.
The White House statement is consistent with the Trump administration’s anti-LGBT actions, such as the transgender military ban, withdrawal of guidance to schools assuring transgender kids have access to the restroom consistent with their gender identity and actions taken in the name of “religious freedom” seen to undermine LGBT rights.
UPDATE: A House senior Democratic leadership aide told the Blade after publication of this article Trump’s opposition to the Equality Act doesn’t change anything in terms of plans for a floor vote on Friday.
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Heavy fighting has broken out on the Tsorena front of Ethiopian-Eritrean border, HornAffairs has reported, quoting "multiple sources".
According to the Awramba Times, fighting is taking place in two separate fronts, Tsorena and Zalanbesa.
Addis Standard tweeted that Eritrea launched a "surprise attack on Ethiopia last night along the border" in southern Eritrea, but the government spokesperson has "no solid information as of yet".
"Reliable sources" told the Awramba Times that the Eritrean regime launched the attack after the recent report by UN Commission of Inquiry, in which it says the regime has committed crimes against humanity.
More details to follow | {
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Завдяки спогадам, особистому листуванню та описам іноземців, які подорожували нашими краями, ми можемо уявити якою була Україна в минулому.
Ми зібрали для вас цікаві цитати іноземних дипломатів, мандрівників, вчених та військових, які мали відношення до України та залишили власні спогади і враження від нашої країни, культури, традицій та людей.
1. «Київ, столиця колишньої держави русів, при річці Бористені, є одним з найгарніших і найкультурніших міст Европи, хоч його пограбовано і спустошено до краю», – писав А. Кампензе в 1534 році: (A. Campense. «Lettera d’Alberto Campense»).
2. Посол імператора Рудольфа II до Запорозької Січі Еріх Лясота в 1594 році пише, що запорізькі старшини були люди високоосвічені, поводилися, як добре виховані європейські аристократи, знали всі тонкощі європейської дипломатичної етики, взагалі, були дуже культурними європейськими ЛИЦАРЯМИ.
Про наші міста Київ, Кам’янець, Прилуки пише, що вони своїми будинками, чистотою, впорядкованістю, багатством, укріпленням можуть успішно конкурувати з найліпшими європейськими містами.
Про селян пише, що вони, працюючи на полі, мають рушницю чи шаблю при собі, щоб кожної хвилини бути готовим відбити несподіваний напад татар (Е. Lassota. «Tagebuch»).
3. «Українці є розумні, щирі, щедрі і понад усе цінять свою свободу. Вони вважають смерть кращою за рабство і тому завзято борються з поляками за свою незалежність. Будовою тіла міцні, стрункі, гарні, а на війні зухвало хоробрі і витривалі», – писав французький інженер Боплан у 1650 році. (G. Beauplan. «Description de L’ Ucraine»).
4. «У своїй Раді козаки обмірковують справи, завжди маючи на увазі загальне добро. Свої погляди висловлюють вільно, але коли бачать, що погляд опонента є ліпший, то без впертости відмовляються від свого.
Тому я сказав би, що ця Республіка могла б рівнятися Спартанській, якби козаки шанували тверезість так, як спартанці», – посол від республіки Венеція до гетьмана Б. Хмельницького А. Віміна, який був в Україні в 1650 році, (A. Vimina. «Relazione dell origine del costumi dei Cosacchi»).
5. «Войовнича нація козаків зменшується з дня на день. Вона скоро зникне з лиця землі, як зникли інші нації, що попали під владу московського скіпетру, хіба що скоро прийде якась успішна революція, яка скине з них московське ярмо.
Козаки не мають нічого спільного з москвинами, за винятком грецької релігії та зіпсованої москвинами слов’янської мови. їхні звичаї, їхній спосіб життя, хата, їжа — все цілком різне. Козаки є гарні, вродливі, високі, спритні, активні, щирі, чесні, хоробрі, не звикли до рабства.
Коротко — повна протилежність москвинам. їх зовнішній вигляд не одноманітний, як москвинів; тавро рабства не зробило їх автоматами і не спідлило, як москвинів.
Козаки є жорстокі, але лише в бою, а москвини мають вроджену холоднокровну жорстокість, безжалісну і садистичну”, – француз Ч. Масон був на службі у московського уряду в 1762–1802 роках (С. F. Masson. «Memoires secret sur la Russie»).
6. «Україна неймовірно родюча і добре загосподарена. Я ще не бачив такої країни, яка би була так подібна до найкращої провінції Англії, як подібна Україна.
Переїжджаючи через Україну, я почував себе так безпечно і вільно, як і в Англії, хоч тоді була війна з Туреччиною. Українці є дуже чесний, добре вихований, моральний народ», – писав англієць Д. Маршал, який був в Україні в 1770 році (J. Marshall. «Travels»).
7. «В Україні матері купають немовлят щоденно двічі аж до року, вважаючи, що це сприяє ростові дітей», – Ю. Вердум, що подорожував по Україні в 1670–1672 роках.
8. Україна стане колись новою Елладою (Грецією): прекрасне підсоння цього краю, весела вдача народу, його музикальний хист, родюча земля — все це колись прокинеться і повстане велика культурна нація; її межі протягнуться до Чорного моря, а її впливи геть у далекий світ»? – писав німецький філософ і етнограф Й. Гердер у своєму «Деннику» у 1769 році: (J. G. Herder. «Tagebuch»).
9. «Поборюючи Московщину, треба обов’язково враховувати силу України. Колись незалежна, вона не забула ще, чим вона була. Незважаючи на деспотію Московщини, яка душить все українське, ця козацька нація є і далі вільнолюбна.
Це був би смертельний удар по Московщині, якби вдалося підняти Україну на революцію. Тоді вона відіграла б головну роль у визволенні всіх народів, що тепер стогнуть в московському ярмі», – лист французької Амбасади до свого Міністра Закордонних Справ з 24.VII.1795. В архіві М.З.С. Франції, ч. 327.
10. “Конюшня української поштової стації на 20 коней своєю чистотою і порядком могла б успішно конкурувати з конюшнею шляхтича в Англії. Хата бідного сільського старости також чудова: кожна найменша річ там була чистенька, в порядку і на своїм місці, сміття ніде не видно.
Після Московщини це для нас було надзвичайно приємною несподіванкою. Я радше обідав би на підлозі української хати, ніж за столом московського князя», – писав англійський професор Е. Кларк (за: E. D. Clarke. «Travels in Russia»).
11. “Вони купують і продають усякого роду крам, не платячи жодних податків, крім невеликого до гетьманської скарбниці. Вони мають необмежену волю займатися, яким самі хочуть, промислом… Населення України відоме поза її межами своєю ввічливістю і надзвичайною чистотою.
Вони гарно одягнуті і свої хати тримають скрупульозно чисто. В місті Немирів найбідніша хатина о небо чистіша за найбагатший палац в Москві”, – данський посол Ю. Юст, який їздив у 1711 році в Україну (за: J. Just. «Memoires»).
12. «На жаль, я мушу закінчити свій опис неприємною рисою; я мушу сказати про ненависть українців до москвинів.
Тут часто почуєте, як вони кажуть: «Добра людина, але москаль». Але цього ще мало: вони передають це почуття навіть немовлятам, лякаючи їх «москалем». Перестрашена цим іменем, дитина перестає плакати», – писав А. Лєвшин, закінчуючи свій захоплений опис України («Пісьма із Маларосіі»).
13. “В Європі існує народ, забутий істориками, – народ Русинів, 12½ мільйонів під російським царем і 2½ мільйона під Австро-Угорською монархією. Народ цей такий же численний, як народ Еспанії, втричі більший за чехів і рівний по кількості всім підданим корони св. Стефана.
Цей народ існує, має свою історію, відмінну від історії Польщі і ще більш відмінну від історії Московщини. Він має свої традиції, свою мову. Окрему від московської й польської, має виразну індивідуальність, за яку бореться.
Історія не повинна забувати, що до Петра І той народ, який ми нині називаємо рутинами, звався руським, або русинами, і його земля звалася Руссю і Рутенією, а той народ, який ми нині звемо руським, звався москвинами, а їх земля – Московією.
В кінці минулого століття всі у Франції і в Європі добре вміли відрізняти Русь від Московії“, – французький сенатор, політик і редактор часопису “La Patrie” (“Батьківщина”) К. Делямар, XIX ст.
Джерело | {
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According to Simpson, the social media platform will be where we “can read also [his] thoughts and opinions on just about everything.” “This should be a lot of fun,” Simpson said before adding, “I’ve got a little getting even to do.”
Twitter, ever nostalgic, was there for O.J.’s entré onto the scene.
remember when you did those murders lol — bubba (@bobby) June 15, 2019
I’m sure this will only bolster Twitter’s widespread reputation for civil, nuanced discussion. — Charlotte Clymer(@cmclymer) June 15, 2019
I hope that you are making some progress in identifying the real killers. — Gad Saad (@GadSaad) June 15, 2019
And onthe final day, The Lord have OJ a Twitter account. — Jimmy’s Famous Seafood (@JimmysSeafood) June 15, 2019
Hey OJ. Big Fan. I’m in need of a pair of gloves. What’s your favorite place to purchase them from? — phillip (@MeekPhill_) June 15, 2019
Simpson’s announcement comes just days after the 25th anniversary of the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
When talking to press about the milestone, Simpson explained that he and his family want to focus on less negative apects of their lives. “I’m personally looking for the no O.J. zone,” said the former football star.
OJ Simpson speaks. On the murders 25 years ago: “The subject of the moment is the subject I will never revisit again. My family and I have moved on to what we call the ‘no negative zone.’ We focus on the positives.”
https://t.co/NbdVcVw481 — Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) June 10, 2019
Apparently, there’s still reliable wi-fi in that zone. There’s also still plenty of interest in just about everything Simpson does. In less than twelve hours, his announcement garnered over 11.000 retweets, 33,000 likes, and 8,600 replies. To the frustration of some, the account, which Simpson was sure to plug as the only “real” O.J. –despite the lack of blue-check– already has 134,000 followers.
Pretty sure Twitter will verify OJ Simpson before me. UGH. https://t.co/bv3njcyTv1 — Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) June 15, 2019
After Simpson was acquitted in the criminal case for the infamous double-homicide, he was ordered to pay $33.5 million in wrongful death damages in connection with the corresponding civil case. Kim Goldman, the sister of Ronald Goldman, recently told the Los Angeles Times that she and her family have, to date, collected less than one percent of that amount.
Twitter, rarely united in anything, seems to be having a rare moment of solidarity over its collective discomfort after Simpson’s announcement.
Me sneaking over to follow OJ Simpson tweeter account pic.twitter.com/yo4vXTOLts — UncleDtheOG (@og_dthe) June 15, 2019
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News John Alvb�ge Set for G�teborg Return by Wes Burdine on 18 July 2017
Minnesota’s first goalkeeper in MLS, John�Alvb�ge, is slated to return to his parent club of IFK G�teborg in Sweden after his loan expires on July 23. He has been struggling with a finger injury and will remain in the United States after his contract ends to have screws removed from an operation and to recover.
Alvb�ge joined Minnesota United in January as the veteran goalkeeper who would help inaugurate the MLS era. However, the early season’s defensive debacle and an injury launched Bobby Shuttleworth into the net after two matches.
The Swedish keeper returned again in a 2-2 draw with Houston when he was subbed in for an injured Shuttleworth, keeping a clean sheet for the half. However, Shuttleworth’s reemergence and the fact that�Alvb�ge takes up an international spot meant that a loan extension for�Alvb�ge was very unlikely.
FiftyFive.One has confirmed that�G�teborg expects�Alvb�ge to return to their club at the beginning of August, when his finger has had time to recover. According to one source, the Swedish club is upset that�Alvb�ge is returning injured before a full recovery.
Minnesota United’s Scandinavian outfit appears as if it is slowly being dismantled as Vadim Demidov, the initial team captain and highest paid player, has been told he is to leave the club imminently.
It is unclear if Demidov will be transferred or released, but one source indicated that it is very unlikely that the team simply pays off his contract. It may be that the Loons pay part of his wages as he transfers to a new club, as they did with Tiago Calvano in his move to Harrisburg City Islanders earlier this year.
FiftyFive.One is now on Patreon. Do you like the independent coverage of soccer news from Minnesota and beyond that FiftyFive.One offers? Please consider becoming a patron.
Tags: IFK Goteborg, John Alvb�ge, Minnesota United FC, MLS, Vadim Demidov | {
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独立リーグで生まれた縁 日本ハム・大谷翔平を支える担当広報
華のプロ野球界。その中でも「二刀流」として常に話題の中心にいる日本ハム・大谷翔平。入団当初から注目される大谷を陰で支えている担当広報の青木走野は、彼自身も大谷と同じ舞台を目指した、元独立リーグ出身の選手であった。
text By
Satoshi Asa
photo
阿佐智
高校野球で挫折を経験し、海を渡る
「いやーっ。もう比べるなんていうレベルではないですよ」
青木走野(そうや)は、数年前の自分と目の前で繰り広げられるプレーを重ね合わせて、笑いながらこう言った。
ひさびさに見た彼の姿は、いくぶんふっくらしていた。「現役」を退いてすでに4年、仕事以外で体を動かすことはすっかりなくなった。しかし、現在、裏方として支えているプロ野球の世界は、確かにあの当時、目指していたゴールだった。
野球に明け暮れていた少年は、強豪ひしめく神奈川県の名門校に乞われるかたちで入学した。目の前には、甲子園への道が開けていたはずだった。しかし、半年もしないうちに青木は野球をやめてしまう。
「なにか問題があったわけではないんですけどね。でも、純粋に野球を楽しむことができなかったんです」
当時について、青木は多くを語ろうとしない。しかし、日本のスポーツ界のある種の悪弊が、ひとりの球児の夢を摘んでしまったことは確かなようだ。
同時に青木は、高校も辞めてしまった。そして、閉塞感を打破すべく、海を渡った。
「両親には、無理をしてもらって。感謝してます」
つてを頼ってオーストラリアの高校に留学、地元クラブチームで3年間プレーした。
「勉強は大変でしたね。なにしろ最初は英語が全然わかりませんでしたから。もともと勉強も得意ではなかったですしね。でも、追加課題をこなしたりして、なんとか卒業しました」
10代にして、たった一人のホームステイ。ホームシックにもなった。それでも、卒業までこぎつけたのは、野球あってのことだった。
「やっぱり、日本で高校中退したんで、負けられないっていう気持ちは強かったですね。ここまで来て、続けなかったらどうすんだって、自分に言い聞かせました」 | {
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ZonalMarking.net's Michael Cox uses the FREE FourFourTwo/Opta StatsZone app to analyse Man City's tricky-looking cup tie at Stoke...
The dreaded visit to Stoke â irrespective of day and weather conditions â has become one of the great English football clichés, the ultimate âÂÂdifficult place to goâÂÂ.
The reality of the fixtureâÂÂs difficulty has actually varied significantly from year to year â a couple of seasons ago, the final âÂÂhomeâ league table showed Tony Pulisâ side in exactly the same position as in the âÂÂawayâ league table, yet the cliché persisted.
At the moment, as it happens, Stoke actually have a very impressive home record â until their previous fixture at the Britannia Stadium, they and Manchester United were the only two Premier League sides unbeaten at home, although ChelseaâÂÂs 4-0 win - featuring a significant helping hand from Jon Walters - brought that run to a sudden halt.
Of the Premier LeagueâÂÂs big boys, Manchester City seem to struggle more than most when making a trip to Stoke. Since the Pottersâ promotion to the Premier League in 2008, CityâÂÂs five league games have ended in a 1-0 defeat, followed by four consecutive 1-1 draws. There was also a 3-1 FA Cup fifth round replay defeat in 2010, after a 1-1 draw at Eastlands.
At home to Stoke in the Premier League, City have no such problems: 3-0, 2-0, 3-0, 3-0, 3-0. An FA Cup final at Wembley? A 1-0 win. Clearly, it will be a nervous 40-mile coach trip down the A34 for City this weekend.
So how does Roberto Mancini prepare his troops? In all likelihood, City will play their usual game, stay true to their emphasis upon short passing football, and attempt to force Stoke back into their own half. But City will spend periods without the ball, and therefore Mancini must seek to secure his left-back zone.
Look at the data from StokeâÂÂs previous two home meetings with City, and itâÂÂs clear they target City left-back Gael Clichy in the air â at 5âÂÂ9 heâÂÂs the same height as Pablo Zabaleta, but less comfortable in aerial duels. Earlier this season, Tony Pulis used Jon Walters on the right-hand side against City, while last season he used Cameron Jerome in that position. Neither are natural wingers â although Walters does a decent job there â but theyâÂÂre both perfect to get on the end of the âÂÂFlo ballâÂÂ, as ex-Norway coach Egil Olsen used to call it: a long diagonal to a tall forward challenging a small full-back.
Here are the âÂÂlong ballsâ played by Stoke in the 1-1 draw earlier this season, and the positions of CityâÂÂs aerial duels â almost always in the left-back zone, whether from long goal-kicks towards the touchlines, or more direct balls into the penalty box. In fairness, CityâÂÂs success rate is reasonably high:
But Clichy certainly struggles with these balls â his own success rate was low, although he remains useful for sticking tight to wingers near the touchlines, and winning the ball cleanly:
Interestingly, once Stoke had worked the ball into wide positions, their crosses were incredibly unsuccessful. A 5% completion rate is awful (itâÂÂs interesting how many deliveries from the right are blocked by Clichy on the edge of the penalty area), but City were generally unsuccessful with their clearances, probably because Stoke are so quick to the second balls on the edge of the box:
As well as Jerome or Walters, Peter Crouch tends to drift towards that side, too. The positions of his passes received in the fixture last season shows how frequently he patrols that side of the pitch â a zone from where he scored his famous overheard kick:
And Asmir BegovicâÂÂs distribution is also interesting. If he chooses not to hit the ball long towards that side, he never passes it towards the right-back â always to left-back Marc Wilson instead. Wilson would then exchange passes with left-winger Matthew Etherington, before thumping diagonals towards the opposite side of the pitch. Although Stoke try to work the ball towards the left-back zone, they never do so with straight balls from their own right-back zone.
This approach has caused problems in two consecutive seasons. So will Mancini adapt? As it happens, he seems to have a selection crisis on the opposite side â Maicon and Micah Richards are both out injured, but Zabaleta should be fit to return after hobbling off against Fulham last weekend. Either way, thereâÂÂs no chance of Zabaleta switching to the left.
But how about putting Joleon Lescott at left-back? Vincent Kompany and Matija Nastastic is ManciniâÂÂs first-choice centre-back partnership, but Lescott would offer more aerial power, and has played that position many times for Everton, City and even England. Mancini will be reluctant to change too much against an inferior side, but with previous meetings in mind, this might be a decent opportunity to rest Clichy.
Stats Zone is a free-download app from FourFourTwo powered by stats from Opta, updated LIVE in-play. Stats Zone is brought to youin association with FFT's bet partners Coral
Download SZ⢠Europa League SZâ¢Read more about it ⢠More SZ analysis | {
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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 35 percent more arrests nationwide in roughly the first three months under President Donald Trump compared to the same period last year, though arrests were down 23 percent over 2014, according to government data.
Nationwide, ICE made 41,898 arrests from Jan. 20 to April 29 compared to 31,128 in that period last year, according to ICE data. In addition, 26 percent of this year’s arrests in that period were of people who had not been convicted of a crime, up from 14 percent last year.
“The priorities have changed (since Obama) … there are significant differences,” Virginia Kice, ICE’s western regional spokeswoman, said Tuesday.
While the agency’s focus is still on those who pose a threat to public safety, today “anyone who is in this country in violation of immigration law is subject to possible arrest,” she said.
• RELATED STORY: Families of undocumented immigrants using GoFundMe for aid in legal fights with ICE
From Jan. 20 to April 29, 2014 during President Barack Obama’s tenure, ICE made a total of 54,584 arrests nationwide — the highest number in the last four years — with 27 percent of the total being those who had not been convicted of a crime, the data shows.
That is most likely due to the effect of the Secure Communities program, said Niels Frenzen, a law professor and a director of the Immigration Clinic at USC. The aggressive ICE program helped the government identify and ultimately take into custody non-citizens who had been arrested.
After Obama announced the end of the program in November 2014, following growing local and state resistance, the number of ICE arrests dropped significantly in subsequent years. The Trump administration resurrected the controversial program in January.
Frenzen said he “wouldn’t make too much” of the most recent data at this point since the Trump administration hasn’t yet hired additional ICE officers or Border Patrol agents. But he said this year’s increase does reflect the Trump administration’s elimination of an Obama-era policy that prioritized noncitizens for deportation who had serious criminal convictions as the administration defined those.
• RELATED STORY: Family of immigrant dad detained by ICE says he’s ‘suffering’
Frenzen also doesn’t believe there’s significant evidence that ICE is targeting non-citizens who do not have criminal convictions. However, when an ICE officer today encounters someone who previously would not have been a deportation target, they are much more likely to move forward with removal proceedings or execute a removal order against that person, he said.
“The gloves are being taken off,” Frenzen said. “Individual officers are being given freer range, broader authority to make arrests regardless of the circumstances.”
ICE’s L.A. Field Office, which covers the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura, made only 5 percent more arrests in the first three months of Trump’s administration compared to the same period last year. It made a total of 2,273 arrests from Jan. 20 to April 29, up from 2,166 in the same period last year.
Only about 10 percent of the total arrests in the region this year — compared to 26 percent nationally — were of those who did not have a criminal conviction, according to the data. But that number did increase from 87 such arrests last year to 224 this year.
“While the vast majority of ICE’s immigration arrests here in the greater Los Angeles area still involved individuals with criminal histories, the uptick in noncriminal arrests in part reflects the Department of Homeland Security’s expanded enforcement priorities,” Kice said in an email.
Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union is “very concerned” about the growth of immigration arrests nationwide over last year, particularly of those who do not to have criminal convictions, said Michael Kaufman, staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. The spike of noncriminal arrests in the L.A. region is also troubling, he said.
Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly issued an enforcement memo in February that made it clear ICE was going to treat as a target “virtually everyone who is here without lawful status” regardless of their criminal history, Kaufman said.
With plans to significantly increase the number of immigration officers in the field, “the concern is the increase we’re seeing now is just the beginning of a sustained campaign to essentially have a massive deportation dragnet in this country,” Kaufman said.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies — which advocates for admitting fewer immigrants into the country — said no one should be surprised by the increased arrests under the Trump administration.
“Secretary Kelly has revised the ICE priorities so ICE officers are no longer forced to look the other way at the individuals they encounter when they are doing their job and are deportable but were not allowed to take action with the old priorities,” Vaughan said. | {
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CBS News’ Will Rahn has an opinion piece today in which he attacks the smugness of many in his own profession in blunt terms. He opens with an admission:
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on. This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
Eventually Rahn turns to the constant accusations of racism against anyone who dares to disagree:
We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession…. You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works.
Rahn also takes a shot specifically at “explainers and data journalists” who frequently “get things hilariously wrong.” Pretty sure he’s talking about Vox here, a site which is fully invested in the Trump-won-because-of-racism explanation for his victory Tuesday.
The same media that was insisting the right accept the results of the election, without hesitation, just a week ago is now trying to justify the protests which are already veering into vandalism in response to Trump’s win. Humility and a simple admission the media missed the mark doesn’t seem to be in the cards for many.
Rahn concludes his piece saying, “There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process.” That message is not getting through at the moment. | {
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We’re living in a tense political moment. Millions of young people throughout the United States and the world have already been radicalized by fascist groups. Young men in particular are susceptible to the kind of recruiting techniques popular with these ideologies. There are a lot of things to consider in this new and frightening environment, and dating is probably pretty low on most progressives’ list of priorities. But frankly, relationships are hard enough without worrying about your crush’s dangerously authoritarian tendencies. That’s where we come in. Here’s our handy guide on how to proceed if you suspect that hot guy in your chemistry class may be less open-minded than he seems.
Find out what his background is like
There’s no way for you to know what kind of environment your beau was raised in. Where did he grow up? Was he taken away from his parents at a young age? Does he even have two parents? What’s the age difference like between you guys? These are all important factors to consider.
What’s he like when you’re alone?
Picture it: You’re rolling around in a grassy field, all alone, having a friendly chat and feeling great about life. And then your boyfriend casually endorses the idea of an all-powerful ruler dispensing political judgments as he sees fit. Mood killer, huh? This is a good time to check in on your boyfriend’s one-on-one conversation skills. Does he leer at you and call you “milady”? Does he constantly complain about authority figures in his life? Raise a fuss when you make a decision without his input? If so, you may have a problem on your hands.
Disturbing dreams are a bad sign
Studies have shown that violent or otherwise traumatic dreams are a big warning sign when it comes to fascist tendencies. Left undiscussed, these night terrors can lead to endless frustration and possibly self-medication. You don’t want that old guy you work with selling your boyfriend drugs or treating him with any other crackpot nonsense. Get your man to therapy stat.
Heroes don’t always turn out heroic
Maybe you met your boyfriend when he broke up a fight nearby, or stopped a mugging, or helped you escape an otherwise difficult situation. Hell, maybe he thwarted a bounty hunter’s attempt on your life! The point is, none of these are a license to trust implicitly. A lot of seemingly good people have darkness lurking beneath the surface. Keep an eye out for warning signs of dark thoughts or actions.
Secret weddings are asking for trouble
Let’s say you’ve ignored all the warning signs and you’re just throwing caution to the winds. Everybody has their little weird personality traits, right? He’s been good to you and you love him. You’ll make it work. But then he tells you that no one can know about your wedding. Like, not even your parents. Only his weird tiny mechanic friend and your butler are allowed to be there. This is bad news. Your fiance may already be a member of some kind of cult. Confront him on the matter and tell him you won’t stand for it.
Does he have violent outbursts?
It’s a classic situation: You’re visiting his family, just getting to know everyone and their quirks. You think everything’s going great. Your boyfriend goes to pick his mom up from work, returns without her, and you can tell something’s wrong. You pull him aside and ask him if everything’s okay, and he drops this bombshell: He just murdered an entire village of native people after finding his mother dying in captivity there. Everybody makes mistakes, right? Wrong. Get the hell out of there.
Watch for signs of radicalization
Is that creepy old guy from work hanging around the house wearing a hood? Is your husband developing some kind of eye infection that makes him look hella sinister? Is he asking you to call him something weird and German-sounding? Are you hearing scary stories about him from work? Stories like “He murdered every child in the building and now I’m on the run, please tell me where he is so I can stop him before he kills again”? Girl, your man is probably a fascist. Run away.
Did he choke you to death with his mind while you were pregnant with twins?
This is the big one. If your husband is doing this, he’s definitely a fascist. I’m sorry, but you brought this on yourself. Literally all of the warning signs were in place. | {
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The topic of John Hagee’s Sunday sermon was “Faith Under Fire,” and he spent a good deal of time ranting against all of the things in our culture that are undermining the Christian faith and turning America into a pagan nation.
“Secular humanism is a pagan God,” Hagee said, blaming it for everything from drugs and mental illness to rape and domestic abuse. “America is becoming a pagan society; we are in a moral free-fall,” he thundered.
“When the Boy Scouts of America are censored and penalized for refusing to accept homosexual scout leaders, we are a pagan nation without shame,” he declared, adding that “we have endorsed sodomy and called it an alternative lifestyle. It’s not an alternative lifestyle; it was, is, and always shall be an abomination unto the Lord”: | {
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Station
Code, or name, to designate a particular seismic station | {
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Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
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If christianity prohibits violence, what the hell were the crusades? | {
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Slipknot / Stone Sour vocalist Corey Taylor is expanding his artistic horizons. In addition to being a musician and author, he's adding acting to his repertoire. He's set to appear in the feature film 'Fear Clinic.'
It began as a horror series for FearNet, with Robert Englund ('A Nightmare on Elm Street') playing a 'fear doctor' who treats patients with crippling phobias. The film version will also star Englund as Dr. Andover.
Here's a sneak peek at the plot: "The film opens with a tragedy that launches five people into the public eye and enlists Dr. Andover to lend his expertise to help them overcome trauma-induced phobias. A year later, terrifying ‘aftershocks’ rattle the survivors, leading to them finding their way back to the fear clinic seeking answers. As they line up for another turn in the chamber, Dr. Andover believes that something more sinister may be at work."
Taylor says, "Really looking forward to being a part of the Fear Clinic movie with Almost Human and co! And the great Robert Englund! Pinch me!"
Taylor will play Bauer, an employee of the clinic who struggles to keep things under control when all hell breaks loose. Also appearing in 'Fear Clinic' are Thomas Dekker ('Heroes,' 'Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles'), Kevin Gage ('Heat,' 'Blow'), Fiona Dourif ('True Blood') and Felisha Terrell ('Days of our Lives').
'Fear Clinic' is scheduled for a Halloween 2014 release. To follow the progress of the movie, you can check out its Facebook page. | {
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Ryan has always wanted his guitar collection mounted on wall hangers – for easy access – and to make his space feel like more of a “man space”. Unfortunately, we’ve never lived anywhere long enough for him to have his own space…until…. NOW!!
Last week, I sacrificed a workspace of my own, for Ryan to have his own, full out, man room. So, I built him guitar hangers on the wall, just like he always wanted… love you xoxo
DIY Wall Mount Guitar Holder
First Step: Go to Home Depot and gather your materials.
– Heavy-duty screws & anchors
– Heavy-duty utility wall hooks -found in the garage organizer section (make sure it won’t damage the finish of your guitar).
– Some sort of wood! Ryan bought these bull-nose caps, used to cap edges of stair treads. They were quality wood, cheap, and the perfect size. Just over $2 bucks apiece.
– Paint – whatever you have laying around. I used some black spray paint – House&Canvas Chalk Finish Furniture Paint works as well!
These things are just $2 bucks at Home Depot
I chopped the wood pieces in half using my chop saw. They weren’t all a perfect length, and some had round edges, some have straight edges. It really doesn’t matter since the guitar will be hiding the wood piece. I am soooo not a perfectionist!!!
Then I painted them black – you may prefer Shadow.
Then I drilled holes for the screws. I measure about an inch and a half from the end.
Then I drilled massive holes to fit the wall hook. I wish I had a drill press for this, but my handheld drill did its job eventually. You can see where the wood split a bit on the edge of the holes. I just sanded it out nice and gave the pieces another coat of paint.
I love using painters tape to measure out hanging the hardware on the wall. I spaced the hooks about 18″ apart.
First I screwed the wall hook into the piece of wood. Then to get them on the wall, I drilled a pilot, hammered my anchor into the wall, and screwed the piece in place. Make sure to use a level to ensure it’s straight.
Yup, looks good. Three more to go. This particular wall hook is a bit big but it holds a standard guitar just fine. Make sure that the wall hook that you get has adequate padding – an alternate step is to buy vinyl tubing from Home Depot and slide it on the hook – then cut to size. On some more expensive guitars, it might be with the extra care to make sure the goop that sometimes occurs with wall hooks – stays off the guitar.
So, here they are all up on the wall. You can snap a chalk line or use a fancy laser lever. I just used a 4-foot level and painters tape to line up the tops – and then used the level to get the wall hook support bracket (the black spray-painted piece of wood) – level from side to side.
Rock Star…
My son James: yells “MOMMY! The guitars are hanging up!” He was seriously astonished. Confidence booster for me. Who cares if it comes from a 4 year old!
They look awesome from the hallway!
That’s it! I never said it was rocket science!! Way cheaper than the store-bought wall hangers and they look just as good!
Each wall-mount cost less than $4 bucks to make – add another $1 if you are going to be cutting the vinyl hose to fit over the hook (highly recommended to protect the neck of the guitar from getting goop on it). These retail at the store anywhere from $20-45 – the store-bought units do have the added security of locking automatically when the instrument is placed on it – some swivel – which can be important if you are hanging a collection of guitars. The DIY wall hanger is a cheap and easy way to get your guitar collection up on the wall – once you live with them you may want to upgrade to the fancy expensive ones!
DIY Guitar Wall Hanger – Update 2019:
So after mounting these hangers my husband added 4 more. They work great. As mentioned in the above tutorial – depending on the type of wall hook you buy you will benefit from vinyl hosing or some other solution (perhaps black duct tape) to ensure that your guitar, banjo, or whatever else you hang doesn’t get damaged. With a standard home depot “grip tape” type hook, humidity changes cause the glue and grip tape to get all over the neck of your guitar. Test out different hooks at home depot – keep in mind that your instrument is going to go on and off that hook a number of times – make sure little bits of gooey stuff is not a problem by examining a few different hooks.
We had these hanging in our house until early last year. My husband ended up buying guitar wall hangers from a music shop – they lock and swivel which is important for him and his collection – after 4 years he took down the DIY hooks and upgraded to Hercules “auto grip” wall mounts. He also bought a 5 guitar display stand because he likes having a few “laying around”. The five guitar stand could have easily been built with PVC piping for half the cost. Possibly an idea for a future DIY post!
If you are going to buy a hook from home depot to build a DIY wall mount. I recommend one with a vinyl coating like the one by Everbilt. The DIY wall mounts work great – just make sure you don’t skimp out on a quality hook – your instrument will thank you! | {
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Civic counts TokenMarket as one of its first partners, given that they advised our very own token generation event in June 2017. We’ve matured as two brands in the ICO space and have seen each other’s successes and milestones over the past year. Given the trajectory of both companies, we wanted to come come together to discuss our evolution, share expertise about decentralized security solutions, and also partner.
Why partner?
Since the launch of Civic’s reusable know-your-customer (KYC) tools for Token Sales and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in February 2018, we’ve enabled numerous ICOs and Token Sales to comply with KYC regulations.
Similarly, TokenMarket will be releasing KAI, a smart contract technology that will increase ease and speed for ICOs by combining KYC/AML and Accredited Investor details in one place. TokenMarket will leverage Civic’s reusable know-your-customer (KYC) technology in the process. In the words, says Mikko Ohtamaa, TokenMarket CTO, “Civic will be our KAI’s launch case.”
We’re proud to have both emerged as leaders in our respective categories– TokenMarket as the go-to advisory for ICOs and token sales, Civic as the premier identity verification solution in the market. That TokenMarket reached for Civic to augment its ambitious roadmap is a testament to the respect and trust that exists between us.
Looking ahead
KAI marks TokenMarket’s foray into more automated solutions to expedite the ICO process. Please join us on Thursday, June 28 at 9:30am PT / 4:30pm GMT for a joint webinar from Civic and TokenMarket where you can learn more. You can still RSVP here. | {
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Former Tory minister, who knows the family of the alleged 17-year-old suicide bomber, criticises a policy of ‘disengagement’ with Muslim communities
Lady Warsi, the first Muslim to serve in cabinet, has warned that radicalisation of British Muslims represents a “generational challenge” that the government is failing to tackle amid fears for three sisters and their nine children who are believed to have travelled from West Yorkshire to Syria.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the former Conservative minister for faith and communities said her ex-colleagues were fuelling the problem by “disengaging” with Muslim communities.
Warsi, who is from the West Yorkshire town of Dewsbury and knew the family of 17-year-old Talha Asmal, who killed himself in a suicide attack in northern Iraq, according to the extremist group Islamic State.
She said it was important to keep the problem of radicalisation in perspective, but added: “Having spoken to Talha’s father, one person is one person too much.”
She added: “Let’s first of all be very clear about finding the evidence base of what are the drivers to radicalisation. It may make for uncomfortable reading but it is only when we start to have that honest conversation that we unpick what is now becoming a generational challenge.”
Appeal issued for three sisters and their children missing after Saudi Arabia trip Read more
She urged ministers to reach out to Muslim communities rather than disengage with groups as she said they have been doing for the past seven years.
Warsi said: “We continue to hear these calls for the Muslim community, quite rightly, to do more with dealing with this issue of radicalisation. But the British Muslim communities will be able to do that better with a government stood alongside it and collaborating with the community … Sadly over the last six or seven years there has been a policy of disengagement with British Muslim communities.”
She added: “It is incredibly odd and incredibly worrying that over time more and more individuals, more and more organisations are considered by the government to be beyond the pale and therefore not to be engaged with … Unfortunately the coalition government carried on that policy. It is now time to end that policy of disengagement and start speaking to the British Muslim communities, and empowering them to do more.”
Her comments follow the launch of an urgent appeal to track down three sisters and their nine children who travelled from Britain to Saudi Arabia for an Islamic pilgrimage and did not return.
The 12 members of the Dawood family from Bradford, West Yorkshire, are aged between three and 34 and had been due to come back to the UK last Thursday, having left for Saudi Arabia on 28 May.
Balaal Khan, a solicitor, said there were serious concerns that they may be heading for Syria and it was possible they had travelled there via Turkey. “The suspicion and main concern is that the women have taken their children to Syria,” he said. “One of the possibilities is they travelled to Turkey to travel to Syria.” This is understood to be one line of inquiry being pursued by police.
Sadly over the last six or seven years there has been a policy of disengagement with British Muslim communities Lady Warsi
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said: “We are in contact with West Yorkshire police and Turkish authorities and are ready to provide consular assistance.”
Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West, said she had spoken to two of the fathers of the children and said they had had no contact with the women or children. She told BBC Breakfast: “I asked them if there was any indication and they said absolutely not – it was a shock to them, it came out of the blue. The men are very, very distraught. They are confused and did not know what was happening or why it was happening.
“At this time there is no contact, absolutely zero contact with the women or children. The last contact was a few days ago when they were due to leave [Saudi Arabia].”
The group were supposed to fly to Manchester following their pilgrimage but the fathers reported them missing when they did not return, Shah said.
A resident on the street where the Dawood family used to live said they were normal and quiet. The man, who did not want to be named, said: “They were a big family and you never had any trouble from them. They were just nice and normal.
“I’m just so shocked to hear the news. Three women and nine children – it’s unbelievable.”
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Folia stretch znajdująca się w naszym asortymencie posiada szerokość 50 cm, grubość 0,023 mm oraz standardową rozciągliwość sięgającą 160%. Parametry te doskonale oddają między innymi to, jakie wyzwania stawia się współcześnie przed rozwiązaniami zabezpieczającymi transport ładunków. Folia stretch to również możliwość tworzenia opakowań i zabezpieczania przesyłek za pomocą ręcznego owijania, jak i przy użyciu maszyn automatycznych i półautomatycznych, które są w stanie zrobić to za Państwa.
Folia stretch – przeczytaj więcej
Oferta: Producent opakowań foliowych, opakowania foliowe, torebki foliowe, folia stretch | {
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Patrick Vieira and Tata Martino’s teams meet this weekend and they both provide a look at the future of football in the US
When New York City FC host Atlanta United on Sunday at Yankee Stadium, it will mark the first ever meeting between the clubs and an opportunity to show just how much MLS has developed. Two teams, filled with depth, diversity and ambition, are the perfect advertisement for Major League Soccer and if there was ever a fixture that can speak for the face of America, this is it.
Here’s why.
NYC FC have made significant strides since their beginnings in 2015, and in their third season they are a legitimate contender for MLS Cup. Meanwhile there has been strong home support for Atlanta United – last week’s home they broke the MLS attendance record for the first three matches of a season. A combined total of 147,230 fans have attended Bobby Dodd Stadium so far, showing soccer is alive and well in Georgia’s state capital.
On the field, the football from both teams hasn’t been too shabby either. On one side you have Tata Martino’s pressing game and a determined squad built to entertain: Atlanta have already scored 18 goals in eight matches, only Portland Timbers have a better offensive record (20). And then there’s the aesthetically pleasing NYC FC, where possession governs the land and Vieira’s triangular passing and play-from-the-back mentality are the rules to follow, for better or worse.
The real beauty of this fixture, however, and what it can do for the league – both domestically and internationally – is that this is more than just a clash of football philosophies. Essentially, this game also speaks to the American Latino fútbol fan and the manner in which these clubs represent their communities.
MLS is the most diverse sports league in North America, with players from more than 60 countries in the league. In addition, there are more than 110 Hispanic/Latino players who call MLS their home and for NYC FC and Atlanta United, the Latin influence is overwhelming, on and off the field.
In the front office, Claudio Reyna and Carlos Bocanegra (once USMNT team-mates) have been instrumental towards the identity of their clubs and how they speak for their cities. It was Bocanegra himself who made big strides in order to secure Martino’s appointment and the overall makeup of the team, while Reyna – who left his post as US Soccer’s youth technical director to join NYC FC – has been working hard with his youth coaches in order to strengthen the club’s academy program. So far, the work has been paying off – last month NYC FC U16’s won the Generation Adidas Cup in the Premier Division.
Both first-team squads also have a clear Latin American and Hispanic identity. NYC FC, with the 2017 additions of Alexander Callens, Rodney Wallace, Shannon Gómez, Miguel Camargo, Yangel Herrera and Maxi Moralez, have a host of players with a Latin/Hispanic background. Atlanta, meanwhile, have nine, including Greg Garza, Miguel Almirón and the wonderfully gifted Josef Martinez (who won’t play this weekend due to injury.) Not forgetting el jefe, Martino.
To the non-Latino fan, this may seem like a trivial statistic. But for Latinos who live in Atlanta and New York, there is pride that their club reflects their culture. On Sunday, for example, the stadium will hear me loud and clear when the Peruvian Callens’ name is called out.
US soccer is transitioning and as the country becomes more diverse, it’s imperative that the nation’s domestic league stands up for the different faces that inhabit it. This game is a perfect opportunity to cheerlead the beautiful game and how far we have come. | {
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Shows such as EastEnders and Coronation Street are to be monitored for diversity following the launch of a new system that measures the ethnic, gender and sexual orientation makeup of British television.
The BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky are taking part in Project Diamond, which will gather data about the background of those working on all UK programmes.
All key staff, from actors to sound technicians, will be asked about their gender, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation and gender identity via a confidential, encrypted computer system.
The organisation behind Diamond, the Creative Diversity Network, is also looking at making public how shows such as EastEnders measure up.
CDN executive director Amanda Ariss said it is “one of the things we are looking at at the moment”. However, while it might be possible to monitor some of the most-watched programmes individually, she said the project does not have the resources to do it for all shows.
Speaking ahead of the launch of Diamond at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Ariss said it will help to “create an accurate picture” of the makeup of television today: “This is a big tool to help us speed up diversity and do it better. Everyone agrees the more detailed the data is the stronger the driver for action is.
“The whole point of Diamond is about transparency. It’s unprecedented the amount of details that will be in the public domain – it’s far more than for any other industry.”
As soon as a show is commissioned then Diamond is triggered, with its workforce emailed the diversity questions. If their details are already on the system they are automatically updated.
Project Diamond was created in response to Lenny Henry’s rallying call two years ago for an improvement in the number of black, Asian and minority ethnic people on-screen and behind the camera.
Early results are due to be unveiled in around six months, depending on how quickly a sizeable amount of data has been collected. In the first stage, drama, entertainment and factual shows will be monitored, with news and sport covered from next year.
The technology behind Diamond has taken months to create in order for it to be secure enough to ensure people are happy to reveal personal information such as their sexual orientation.
Some actors had been unsure about Diamond as they did not want casting directors to be able to get hold of some personal information.
Aries said that although some producers and union Bectu wanted the makeup of all programmes revealed, as “we’re going to be monitoring pretty much every UK programme for all the channels who are UK broadcasters … we think it will be very difficult to report at programme level with other than a very small selection” without great expense.
New minister for digital and culture Matt Hancock said: “Whilst BAME representation in the UK’s creative industries is increasing twice as fast as the rest of the UK workplace, we want to see greater social mobility and diversity across this and across the arts sector.
“The launch of project Diamond is a clear example of how the UK’s broadcasting industry is leading the way. Together with industry we want to see diversity continuing to improve both on and off screen, and this world-first initiative is a step forward to achieving that.”
If the project proves a success, other countries have said they may buy the technology. CDN chair John McVay, who is also chief executive of producers’ alliance Pact, said “Diamond is an incredibly ambitious project – as far as we know no other broadcasting industry anywhere in the world has developed a cross-industry data collection and publishing process like it.” | {
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Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash
Data pipelines and/or batch jobs that process and move data on a scheduled basis are well known to all us data folks. The de-facto standard tool to orchestrate all that is Apache Airflow. It is a platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows. A workflow is a sequence of tasks represented as a Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG). As an example, think of an extract, transform, load (ETL) job as a workflow/DAG with the E, T, and L steps being its tasks. You configure a workflow in code using Python. This allows you to version your workflows in a source control system like Git, which is super handy.
All in all, Airflow is an awesome tool and I love it. But, I initially used it the wrong way, and probably others also do. This misusage leads to headaches, especially when it comes to workflow deployments. Why? In short, we use it for both orchestrating workflows and running tasks on the same Airflow instance. In this article, I gonna tell you why this is an issue. For sure, I will also show you how you can easily fix that. I hope this leads to reducing your Aspirin consumption in the future as it did for me:)
Airflow the Bad Way
I start this article with a short story about myself and Airflow.
When you create a workflow, you need to implement and combine various tasks. In Airflow, you implement a task using Operators. Airflow offers a set of operators out of the box, like a BashOperator and PythonOperator just to mention a few. Obviously, I heavily used the PythonOperator for my tasks as I am a Data Scientist and Python lover. This started very well, but after a while, I thought
“Hm how am I gonna deploy my workflow to our production instance? How are my packages and other dependencies installed there?”
One way is adding a requirements.txt file for each workflow, which gets installed on all Airflow workers on deployment. We tried that but my tasks required a different Pandas version than a colleague’s task. Due to this package dependency issue, the workflows cannot run on the same Python instance. And not only that, I used the Dataclasses package which requires Python 3.7 but on the production instance, we only had Python 3.6 installed. That’s not good.
So I went on and googled a little bit to find another solution suggested by Airflow which is named Packaged-DAGs. This says: “Package all your DAGs and external dependencies into a zip file and deploy that.” You can follow this link for more details. To me, this does not sound like a great solution. It also doesn’t solve the Python version issue.
Another possibility, offered as an Operator, is wrapping your task inside a PythonVirtualEnvOperator. I have to say, I haven’t tried that out, as it still doesn’t solve the Python version issue. But, I guess it might be rather slow if you have to create a virtual environment every time you execute a task. Apart from that, it has a couple of other caveats mentioned in the documentation.
Damm, three tries and still no satisfying solution for deploying tasks written in Python.
Last, I asked myself how can I write a task using other languages than Python? Can that step become language agnostic? Can even someone implement a task who doesn’t know the specifics of Airflow? And how do I deploy and integrate such a task into Airflow? Do I have to compile it and install the result with all dependencies on each worker to finally invoke it through the BashOperator? That sounds like a painful deployment and development experience. Furthermore, this might again lead to clashing dependencies. Altogether, this does not sound very satisfying.
But I want to use Airflow!
So, can we fix it?
Taken from https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/292809-obama-hope-posters
Airflow the Good Way
Whenever I hear things like “dependency clashes”, “version issues”, or “I want to be language agnostic” I immediately think about containers and Docker. Luckily, Airflow offers a DockerOperator (and also one for Kubernetes) out of the box. This allows us to invoke isolated docker containers as tasks from Airflow.
That was quick :)
But now, a bit more in detail. In the following, I show you how the process from developing Docker-based tasks and DAGs to deploying them looks like end-to-end. For each step, I highlight the respective issues solved.
Task Development and Deployment
Develop and test your task in any language and version of the language you want. This allows you to test and develop tasks in isolation from Airflow specifics and other tasks. It reduces the entry barrier for new developers as they can choose the language they are most comfortable with. Package the artifacts together with all dependencies into a Docker image. This solves issues with dependencies and version clashes. It heavily contributes to reducing your headaches. Expose an Entrypoint from your container to invoke and parameterize a task using the DockerOperator. This enables you to use your images from Airflow. Build your image, tag it, and push it to a central Docker registry. Ideally, that is automated and part of your CI/CD pipeline. From the registry, Airflow pulls the images to the machines executing the tasks. This facilitates deploying tasks. Again a headache reduction step. Furthermore, it allows you to have multiple versions of the same task. Last, having a central registry enables you to share and reuse tasks across your organization.
DAG Development and Deployment
Build your DAG using the DockerOperator as the only operator. Use it to invoke various tasks available from your Docker registry. For me, this made my DAG definitions small, clean, and readable. I also did not have to learn any specific Airflow operators other than the DockerOperator. Put your DAG into a version control system. With this, deploying your DAG is just a git push and pull away. Again, this should be automated and be part of your CI/CD pipeline.
I hope that sound reasonable and you get the many advantages it offers. All you have to do is learn Docker if you don’t know it yet and you are ready to go.
Now, we know what to do. In the next paragraph, let’s go through an example to see how to do it.
Example
Let’s quickly step through an example DAG where I only use the DockerOperator. With this DAG, I simulate an ETL job. Note that the DAG definition file does not reveal that it is just a simulated ETL job. It could be a super complex one or just a dummy one. The actual complexity is taken away from the DAG definition and moved to the respective task implementations. The resulting DAG definition file is concise and readable. You can find all the code in my Github repository. You not only find the DAG definition there but also how to build and run a corresponding Airflow instance using Docker. You also find the simulated ETL task implementation together with the Dockerfile. But now, let’s get concrete.
The Code
First, let’s import the necessary modules and define the default arguments for our DAG.
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from airflow import DAG
from airflow.operators.docker_operator import DockerOperator
d_args = {
"start_date": datetime(2019, 11, 14),
"owner": "shawe",
"depends_on_past": False,
"retries": 1,
"retry_delay": timedelta(minutes=5),
}
Nothing fancy here, but you see that I have only imported DAG, which is always required, and the DockerOperator. We need nothing else at this stage from Airflow.
Before we build the DAG, some more words about the DockerOperator and what you gonna see. All my tasks use the same Docker image named etl-dummy tagged with latest. The image offers a CLI named etl. This CLI has 3 sub-CLIs namely extract, transform, and load. The sub CLIs have different arguments. To run for example the transform task, you need to call
etl --out-dir /some/path transform --upper
To invoke a Docker image from the DockerOperator, you just have to specify the image name as name:tag, and the command you want to invoke. Note that my image is stored in my local Docker registry. With this, my etl dag definition looks like
si = "@hourly"
with DAG("etl", default_args=d_args, schedule_interval=si) as dag:
def etl_operator(task_id: str, sub_cli_cmd: str):
out_dir = "/usr/local/share"
cmd = f"'etl --out-dir {out_dir} {sub_cli_cmd}'"
return DockerOperator(
command=cmd,
task_id=task_id,
image=f"etl-dummy:latest",
volumes=[f"/usr/local/share:{out_dir}"],
)
extract = etl_operator("e-step", "extract --url http://etl.de")
transform = etl_operator("t-step", "transform --lower")
load = etl_operator("l-step", "load --db 9000://fake-db")
# Combine the tasks to a DAG
extract >> transform >> load
I just added a small helper function to create the DockerOperators. To me, this looks nice and clean.
Final Notes and Tipps
If you host your images in a remotely accessible Docker registry, you have to pass the image name as registry-name/image-name:image-tag. Furthermore, you have to provide a docker_conn_id to enable Airflow to access the registry. This docker_conn_id references a secret managed by Airflow.
Another feature you can add is storing the image name and tag as variables in Airflow. If you want to update your DAG, all you have to do is push another image to your registry with a new tag, and change the value of the variable in Airflow.
Finally, I want to repeat that you can find all the code including Airflow on Docker and the example Docker image in my Github repository.
Wrap Up
I hope this article was useful for you, and if you had headaches in the past, I hope they will go away in the future. Thank you for following this post. As always, feel free to contact me for questions, comments, or suggestions. | {
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Police say no foul play after body found near casino
BATON ROUGE - Police said they do not suspect foul play after a body was found Friday morning along the Mississippi River near the Belle of Baton Rouge Casino.
Cpl. L'Jean McKneely said the body was found along the river's embankment between the casino and the base of the I-10 bridge over the river. The parish coroner identified him as Larry Grant.
Investigators said the man was employed by the casino and cycling to work, where he was supposed to arrive at 5 a.m. Police said he somehow lost control of his bike, and possibly died from a medical issue.
McKneely said the man's family had been notified, and confirmed he had suffered from some kind of medical issue.
The coroner's office said an autopsy has been scheduled for Monday. | {
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The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is asking Ontario’s top court to impose a 15-day cap on solitary confinement for inmates and to bar the practice altogether for youth and other vulnerable groups.
The association says a lower Ontario court didn’t go far enough in ruling that isolating inmates for more than five days in a practice known as administrative segregation is unconstitutional because the system lacks proper safeguards.
It argues the judge erred by finding inmates in solitary confinement could be monitored and pulled from isolation if they show signs of harm.
In a hearing in Toronto on Tuesday, the association said knowingly exposing inmates to harm and then removing them when harm occurs amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
Last December, Ontario Superior Court Justice Frank Marrocco gave the federal government a year to change its law, noting that doing so immediately could put inmates and staff at risk.
The deadline is Dec. 18 and the association says it will oppose Ottawa’s request for an extension, which is expected to be heard by the court of appeal this week.
The group says the federal government only introduced legislation that deals with solitary confinement last month, knowing it wouldn’t pass in time to meet the deadline.
It also says the bill fails to address the constitutional issues raised in the case.
A court in British Columbia also struck down the federal law earlier this year but went further than the Ontario court, ruling that indefinite solitary confinement of prisoners is unconstitutional and causes permanent harm.
That ruling also imposed a 12-month deadline for making changes.
The government is appealing in that case, saying it needs clarity from the court because of the differences between the two rulings.
Inmates are placed in administrative segregation to maintain security in the event an inmate poses a risk to themselves or others if no other reasonable alternative is available. They are to be released from administrative segregation at the earliest possible time, but no time limits have been set.
Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...
Meanwhile, disciplinary segregation is used to punish prisoners for violating prison rules for a maximum of 30 days.
Those in segregation are restricted to two hours outside their cells and cannot interact with others or access programs. | {
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is a Online First Person Shooter that runs directly in your Browser, without needing any plugins (It uses a new technology called WebGL which provides a full 3D experience).The game features a vast array of Maps and Weapons to ensure a long lasting gaming experience.New weapons and items can be purchased using, which is the name for in-game currency.on the other hand stands for Experience Points, which are gained during gameplayXP is gained during the game and corresponds to the amount of Cash that is also added, but unlike Cash, XP cannot be spent, it is used for player ranking instead.You can consult your Cash and XP by visiting your profile page.Now, there is couple of ways to get Cash:- By playing the game and gaining XP- By selling weapon skins ( Click here to learn more)- By purchasing Cash with real money ( Click here to visit theTo configure game Controls and other Settings click Options.You are free to embed Warmerise on your site by using the code provided on this page If you have any questions feel free to post them on forum or use a contact page to contact us directly. | {
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Fox Sports talking head Colin Cowherd criticized how SEC teams, particularly Alabama and Arkansas, schedule non-conference games during an episode of The Herd Tuesday. Cowherd complained that both teams had too many inferior opponents in between tough matchups, which he deemed “time off.”
Cowherd failed to mention that Alabama will face Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas A&M, LSU and Mississippi State in four consecutive games in October and November, or how the Razorbacks will face seven consecutive SEC teams to end its season.
Once again, Cowherd is focused more on hearing the sound of his own voice rather than making an accurate, fact-based point. | {
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The US Embassy in London is warning Americans to “keep a low profile” when President Donald Trump visits the UK from July 12 to 14.
Here’s why: Protesters who disagree with the US president’s policies are planning to stage multiple demonstrations during Trump’s trip. Most are set to take place on July 13, when Trump meets UK Prime Minister Theresa May and Queen Elizabeth.
And while this might sound extreme, it’s actually not. There are two reasons why.
“There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the alert. We send these out all the time,” Courtney Austrian, a spokesperson for the US mission in London, told me.
That practice dates back to 1988, when a terrorist blew up Pan Am Flight 103 in an incident now known as the Lockerbie bombing. (The plane exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.) There were allegations afterward that the US government told employees it had intelligence of a terrorist attempt, which prompted officials to change their flight plans. It’s unclear if those claims were true or not.
But since those allegations, US embassies around the world now give the same warnings to citizens as they do to employees, says Austrian. She added that embassy staff gets warnings like this all the time for mass demonstrations, which is why there is a warning now for all Americans.
Wherein the US Embassy in London advises Americans to “keep a low profile” while Trump is in the country pic.twitter.com/DRQSYYZdSr — Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) July 10, 2018
The second reason the warning is not a big deal is that people in the UK have protested other US presidents when they visited in the past.
When President George W. Bush visited the UK in November 2003, he had to contend with large-scale anti-war protests. Bush, along with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, led the effort to invade Iraq. President Barack Obama also faced protests when he visited the UK, in part over his alleged crimes against Muslims in the Middle East. The embassy sent out similar messages of caution in those situations as well.
“Even demonstrations intended to be peaceful can turn confrontational and possibly escalate to violence,” a State Department spokesperson told me. “The Department routinely advises citizens to be aware of heightened risks to safety and security, including potential protests.”
The US mission in London anticipates having to send a similar message soon, depending on how the World Cup turns out on Wednesday: “If England gets into the World Cup, I expect we’d send an alert out as well,” says Austrian.
“He’s extremely unpopular here”
Even if the warnings are not out of the ordinary, there is certainly a growing British resistance to Trump.
As Madeleine Ngo wrote for Vox, British citizens crowdsourced more than $23,000 to buy a plump orange balloon that resembles an angry baby Trump wearing a diaper to display in London. However, Trump plans to avoid the British capital for much of his four-day trip to the UK.
Trump may have to turn the radio off, too. Protesters also started a campaign to get people in the UK to buy and stream the Green Day song “American Idiot” so when Trump lands on Thursday, the song will be at the top of the music charts.
It seems to be working: The single is already number one on Amazon UK’s bestseller list, and as of Tuesday, it’s climbed to number 18 on the UK’s official charts.
There’s a simple reason all of this is happening: “He’s extremely unpopular here,” Austrian tells me about Trump.
The embassy’s warning to Americans, then, may be normal — but the resistance to Trump in the UK looks very out of the ordinary. | {
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Watch 27 Years of ‘Old’ Arctic Ice Melt Away in Seconds
The total amount of Arctic sea ice is near record low for this time of year. The amount of ice isn’t the only big story, though. A video from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows a disturbing trend in the age of Arctic ice.
Since 1988, Arctic sea ice is getting younger, and young ice is not a good thing. In 1988, ice that was at least 4 years old accounted 26 percent of the Arctic’s sea ice. By 2013, ice that age was only 7 percent of all Arctic sea ice.
Credit: NOAA's climate.gov
Watch the 59-second video above and you can see the older ice do a vanishing act as it’s replaced by newer ice.
The vanishing act is occurring because climate change is helping warm the ocean waters in parts of the Arctic. Those warmer temperatures are whittling away at older sea ice during the summer melt season.
Replacing this thicker, harder old ice with young ice, which is generally thinner and melts more easily, is also contributing to the steep decline in summer sea ice extent and could trigger a feedback loop. That’s because less ice means more dark ocean water is exposed to the sun, which absorbs more of the incoming sunlight than white ice. That means warmer waters, which could in turn mean even less old ice and ice cover with each passing year.
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Study Sounds ‘El Nino Alarm’ for Late This Year | {
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Justin Trudeau at an announcement of new jobs at Amazon in Vancouver. Photo: Jeff Vinnick / Getty Images
Justin Trudeau at an announcement of new jobs at Amazon in Vancouver. Photo: Jeff Vinnick / Getty Images
Share Where could Canada possibly have found such large numbers of highly-skilled, entrepreneurial workers?
Where could Canada possibly have found such large numbers of highly-skilled, entrepreneurial workers? In 2016, Toronto added more jobs in technology than New York City and the San Francisco combined
In 2016, Toronto added more jobs in technology than New York City and the San Francisco combined According to one estimate, Canada will be 220,000 skilled tech workers short by 2020
Cities around North America are waiting with bated breath as Amazon decides where to place its second headquarters. “HQ2” will be a $5 billion facility, generating 50,000 high-paying jobs.
On the shortlist of 20 locations there’s just one non-US city: Toronto, Canada.
The tech scene north of the border is quietly booming. In 2016, the Toronto region added more jobs in technology than New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area combined. It already has a major AI research centre, Google’s Sidewalk Labs and Thomson Reuters’ new tech hub.
Over in the west, Vancouver’s tech sector now employs 92,000 people, and Amazon is planning to bring 3,000 new tech jobs to the city by 2022. It is also home to Hootsuite, a social media management platform which has millions of users around the world.
So how has Canada fuelled this growth? Where could they possibly find such large numbers of highly-skilled, entrepreneurial workers?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is immigration.
Immigrants in Canada make up around 20 per cent of the population but fill half of all STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) jobs. Over the past few years, tech firms have seen their international job applications double or even triple, as the tech boom creates thousands of vacancies.
Workers from the United States to India are taking note of Canada’s rise, and the Canadian government is doing their best to attract them.
Through the Express Entry visa, a points system introduced in 2015, Canada hopes to welcome a quarter of a million skilled workers from 2018 to 2020. Meanwhile, the new global skills visa programme means that fast-growing firms can bring in international workers within just two weeks. In its first ten weeks, the fast-track visa brought 1,600 high-skill tech workers to the country.
Canada’s open immigration policy is in stark contrast to the US, where H-1B visas for skilled workers – which were already very restrictive – have been under attack by President Trump. He is trying to slash numbers, pile on extra bureaucratic requirements, and block extensions for thousands of skilled workers in the country. Even before this, in 2016 Canada was admitting nearly six times more skilled workers per capita than their neighbour.
Despite Canada’s promising tech rise, America remains the heavyweight. Silicon Valley, for example, is home to 23,000 start-up companies. Canada is very much the new kid on the block.
This is reflected by the numbers of workers born and educated in Canada that end up in American tech. Some 350,000 Canadians reportedly live in Silicon Valley, while around one in four STEM graduates – including two-thirds of software engineering grads – move south of the border.
Working in the US, they expect to receive 20-30 per cent more pay, and can find jobs with some of the most famous companies in the world. Giants like Facebook and Apple promise a huge variety of exciting roles and responsibilities, far more so than smaller Canadian firms.
America’s famous tech companies are also quite a bit sexier, from social media and dating apps through to holiday property rentals. Canada meanwhile, is developing a reputation for fintech, digital solutions for the energy sector, and artificial intelligence. While these are clearly vital areas of work, they hardly make the headlines abroad and are unlikely to top the list of career choices for young tech grads.
The exodus of Canadian tech workers southwards makes immigration all the more important. And for native-born workers still in Canada, it’s not like there’s a shortage of jobs. In 2016, one estimate projected that the country would be 220,000 skilled tech workers short by 2020. There is no way that the Canadian population as it stands could make up those numbers.
The coming years could be extremely significant, whether or not Toronto strikes lucky with Amazon’s HQ2.
Canada has been creating the right infrastructure in its biggest cities to promote start-ups. Several “tech hubs” have been popping up and thriving, for example, such as the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto which has become the world’s largest innovation lab.
As we’ve seen in Silicon Valley, once tech companies are successful they tend to breed other start-ups. Big successful investors put their money into more start-ups, and the process continues. Canadian companies are often bought by US giants before they get to this stage, but the exceptions to the rule are increasing – Ottawa’s Shopify, an e-commerce platform, is now valued at $5 billion.
If the Canadian tech scene continues to thrive, fuelled by new workers from abroad, it could be genuinely transformative for the economy. No wonder, then, that Canada’s government is so open to immigration. Perhaps some other countries should take note.
Jack Graham is a political commentator and Lead Writer for Apolitical.
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Towards the year 1926, France saw what is perhaps one of the most enigmatic books of all times came to light: The Mystery of the Cathedrals (Le Mystère des Cathédrales ) written by an even more mysterious, anonymous author who signed off only with the pseudonym of Fulcanelli.
The book was a modest edition of 300 copies, sumptuously illustrated by the painter Jean Champagne.
The prologue was signed by a young man named Eugène Canseliet, who called himself a disciple of the author.
The Books
Although the first edition did not have much impact, sales skyrocketed phenomenally with a second and third edition, just about when Paris was invaded by interest on occultism and alchemy.
The book, which addresses the issue of Gothic cathedrals from these perspectives, was then a true commercial success.
The two books by Fulcanelli are:
Le Mystère des Cathédrales (The Mystery of the Cathedrals), written in 1922 and published in Paris in 1926.
Les Demeures Philosophales (Dwellings of the Philosophers), published in Paris in 1929.
Who was Fulcanelli?
That remains debated until today. No one really knows who the mysterious author was. However, most scholars agree that he was likely a Frenchman educated in the ways of alchemical lore, architecture, art, science as well as languages.
Fulcanelli penned down two books that were published only after he disappeared in 1926 after his disappearance in 1926,
The name Fulcanelli, as noted by Mark Stavish in his work ‘The Path of Alchemy’, seems to be composed by two words: Vulcan, the ancient Roman god of fire, and El, which is a Canaanite word for God, hence translating the name to Sacred Fire.
Interestignly, the sacred fire of Vesta was a sacred eternal flame in Ancient Rome.
One theory argues that Fulcanelli was one or another famous French occultist of the time: either a member of the former Royal Family (the Valois), or another member of the Frères d’Heliopolis (Brothers of Heliopolis, a society centered around Fulcanelli which included Eugène Canseliet, Jean-Julien Champagne, and Jules Boucher).
A sacred code embedded in Cathedrals
For Fulcanelli, cathedrals in general, and especially Notre Dame, gathered all the knowledge of medieval alchemy.
Although in an encrypted manner, the principles of hermetic wisdom were exposed to the view of all, through inscrutable symbols for the public not initiated in these arts.
For example, the author points out a link between the seven medallions of the Virgin, on the facade of Nôtre Dâme, with the seven metals of the alchemical process to obtain gold.
Fulcanelli essentially teaches the reading of Gothic art of Notre Dame facades, using the abundant symbology of alchemy.
To such a point it is so, that it forces us to ask ourselves how much of the hermetic knowledge the master builders knew and where they got it from.
Alchemy, Fulcanelli, the Elixir of Life
From the labyrinth that the cathedral monks walked to the stained glass that transmutes the properties of sunlight, everything in Notre Dame is part of an alchemist codex, according to the anonymous author.
However, to this day, the greatest of the mysteries is perhaps not concerning the secrets embedded within Cathedrals, but around the figure of Fulcanelli, of unknown origin and mysterious disappearance.
In Seville, Spain, many of his disciples claimed to have seen him in the 1950s, looking much younger than his age, evidence for many that he had seen in his own flesh the effects of the elixir of life.
One of the anecdotes pertaining to his life retells, in particular, how his most devoted pupil Eugène Canseliet performed a successful transmutation of 100 grams of lead into gold in a laboratory of the gas works of Sarcelles at the Georgi company with the use of a small quantity of the “Projection Powder” given to him by his teacher, in the presence of Julien Champagne and Gaston Sauvage.
According to Lous Pauwels, one of the authors of the book “The Morning of the Magicians”, Fulcanelli survived World War II and disappeared completely after the Liberation of Paris. Every attempt to find him failed.
You can read ‘The Mystery of the Cathedrals‘ translated into English by clicking here. | {
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Germany produce Electricity using solar panels even though its not so sunny at winters
Solar panels line Germany’s household roofs and top its low-slung barns. They develop in orderly rows along train tracks and cover hills of coal mine tailings in what used to be East Germany. Old Soviet military bases, too polluted to use for anything else, have been turned into solar installations.
Twenty-two percent of Germany’s power is generated with renewables. Solar provides close to a quarter of that. The the southern part of German state of Bavaria, population 12.5 million, has three solar panels per resident, which adds up to more installed solar capacity than in the entire United States.
With a long history of coal mining and heavy industry and winter gloom, Germany is not the country you’d naturally think of as a solar power. And yet a combination of canny regulation and widespread public support for renewables has made Germany an unlikely leader in the global green-power movement—and created a groundswell of small-scale power generation that could upend the popularity of traditional power companies.
In 1991, German politicians from across the political spectrum quietly passed the (renewable energy law), or EEG. It was a little-heralded measure with long-lasting consequences.
The law guaranteed small hydroelectric power generators—mostly in Bavaria, a politically conservative area I like to think of as the Texas of Germany—a market for their electricity. The EEG required utility companies to plug all renewable power producers, down to the smallest rooftop solar panel, into the national grid and buy their power at a fixed, slightly above-market rate that guaranteed a modest return over the long term. The prices were supposed to balance out the hidden costs of conventional power, from pollution to decades of coal subsidies.
Investors began to approach solar and wind power as long-term investments, knowing there was a guaranteed future for renewable energy and a commitment to connecting it to the grid. Paperwork for renewables was streamlined—a big move in bureaucracy-loving Germany. The country invested billions in renewables research in the 1990s, and German reunification meant lots of money for energy development projects in the former East.
Now German companies lead the world in solar research and technology. The selection of companies that make inverters, the devices that reverse the flow of electricity and feed power from rooftop solar panels back into national grids, are almost all German. On a sunny day last May, Germany produced 22 gigawatts of energy from the sun—half of the world’s total and the equivalent of 20 nuclear power plants.
The “feed-in” laws and subsidies pushed innovation to the point where solar panels are cheap enough to compete on the open market in Germany and elsewhere. The price for solar panels has fallen 66 percent since 2006, and the cost of solar-generated power may be competitive with coal in a few years, according to a study by UBS. Already, solar projects are thriving in places like India and Italy despite a lack of government subsidies or support, and a recent Deutsche Bank report predicted “grid parity” in Bavaria by next year.
You might think Germany would be smug about all its solar success. But, as usual, folks here are full of doubts. Part of the reason solar panels are getting cheaper is competition from China, which is threatening to push more expensive German producers out of business. Last year, German conservatives tried to end solar subsidies entirely, arguing that plummeting prices were encouraging too many people to install solar panels. They said that the subsidies come at the expense of city dwellers without solar-ready roofs, low-income electricity consumers, and investments in other forms of renewable energy. Even environmentalists have begun to grumble about the solar boom, which sucks up half of Germany’s funding for renewables but provides just 20 percent of green power.
The proliferation of privately owned solar has large power companies in Germany worried. For two decades, they’ve been forced to facilitate and finance their competition, helping turn customers into producers. Soon, rooftop solar and other small-scale, locally owned renewables could upset the market for coal and nuclear power.
Here’s why that’s a problem: Renewable energy sources like wind and solar generate power intermittently, dependent on the sun or fickle breezes. Until researchers can find a way to store energy at a large scale, coal and nuclear plants—which can’t simply be switched on and off at will—must be kept running to guarantee a steady stream of electricity when the sun isn’t shining.
That means overproduction of power during daylight hours, as the country’s ample solar energy floods onto the grid along with electricity produced by power plants. Power companies traditionally charge more during the day, when offices are full and manufacturing plants are in full swing, so the glut of daytime solar power reduces their profit. The proliferation of solar panels on homes also takes high-margin residential customers off the grid at peak hours. And the energy surplus has driven prices for traditional coal and nuclear power down, even as renewables are still guaranteed more-than-competitive rates. As power companies try to pass the costs to consumers in the form of higher bills, that just encourages more people to put solar panels on their roofs.
Already, Germany’s power companies are closing power plants and scrapping plans for new ones. Germany had a national freak-out after the Fukushima disaster and decided to abolish nuclear power by 2023. Meanwhile, energy prices continue to sink, and solar installation continues to grow. By decentralizing power generation, the renewables boom could do to the power industry what the Internet did to the media: Put power in the hands of the little guy, and force power companies to rethink how they do business. As soon as the sun comes out, that is.
Germany makes 50% electricity by Solar a reality! | {
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Why Kubernetes will disappear
The prize of ubiquity is invisibility
I have an idea about the trajectory of Kubernetes. Instinct tells me it will both win and, simultaneously, become irrelevant to software delivery organisations.
I’ve been listening to conversations about Kubernetes (k8s) and trying to identify the recurring themes that polarise debate on whether it’s a “good” or “bad” idea. Ther are sensible points of view on both sides of the debate. It seems, like most of our ambiguous collective debates, that these are parallel conversations. Moving beyond binary opposition to a “yes, and” integration is one of the greatest human skills. It’s not binary and it’s worth considering what happens if both things are true.
Photo by David Kovalenko
Opinions
Everyone’s got one, so I’m looking for trends and points that resonate, even where I don’t personally agree. I’ve seen some good thinking that I nonetheless have reservations about. For example, other than the word “practical” (for me it glosses over hard problems) both these points seem valid:
In short, it’s a “universal language” and a “declarative” (rather than imperative) way to build systems. That’s interesting.
So, here are some key perspectives I’ve seen expressed.
The architect
The enterprise/architect view of Kubernetes is that a generic, common standard, across multiple clouds, plus private datacentres, means Kubernetes is “good”. I agree in theory.
This view hinges on a belief that “generic” is good
This is sometimes true. However (to my ears) the scale of effort required to actually achieve this, especially across multiple clouds, is like saying that nuclear fusion is the best source of clean energy. I agree in theory. But I don’t believe anyone has yet built a reactor that reliably and consistently generates more power than it consumes.
The developer
The view in developer teams is characterised by two beliefs.
One set of people I talk to believe that having a generic, reliable platform to deploy software to is “good”. They’re not wrong. They see the potential and it’s tantalising. But there’s a yin to this yang.
The other belief, held perhaps by those who’ve had to deal with production problems (especially ones of their own making, where there’s no one else to blame) understand that simplicity is the prime directive for workability. To quote Baz Luhrman:
The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4 PM on some idle Tuesday.
This is close to my own instinct: that complication is intrinsically a killer — in and of itself an exponential risk to your chances of success. From this perspective, k8s is “bad” because the complicatedness will absorb more than all of your energy. Unless you have deep pockets and a dedicated platform team, time, budget and stakeholder patience will run out before meaningful value can be delivered.
The operations team
I sense the operations view might be the most grounded. After all, these are the people who tend to be up at stupid o’clock, dealing with the fallout of the cans that architecture and delivery teams kicked down the road under pressure from senior stakeholders. The buck stops at operations. It’s rarely of their making and there’s often too little of an empathy feedback loop to achieve workability.
In that situation, a generic platform that maintains healthy separation of workloads from infrastructure is “good” because it creates a clearer separation of root causes and helps to push back. Standardising the way we package, run and monitor workloads is pain-relief. Simultaneously, there’s an acknowledgement that complicated systems are “bad”: they’re a recurring nightmare to keep going and, critically, create nebulous, multi-layered nests of unclarity that can comfortably obscure thundering security risks for undefined periods.
When a cluster is working, it feels like magic.
The problem is understandability when a cluster isn’t behaving as expected. Being able to comprehend it is like reading The Matrix code and seeing “the woman in the red dress”. A swirling maelstrom of intricate, verbose, interlaced yaml that drives an Alice-in-Wonderland-like rabbit hole of of master and worker control and data plane behaviours. Sure it’s declarative but it can feel like a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
Integration
It’s clear that Kubernetes is big. It’s both complex and complicated. That’s one thing everyone agrees on. If your team can understand and manage that, then it’s probably going to be “good” for you. Using GKE or EKS means you’ll be able to externalise a proportion, but a rump of the cognitive load will remain in your court. There’s still a lot of yak to shave.
If you’ve got a full time platform team of a dozen people dedicated to running Kubernetes you’ll do pretty well. But here’s the thing: running generic platforms and services adds no specific value. It’s an externality and as such ultimately will be externalised. We know this because that’s exactly what cloud is: externalising the hard problems of running reliable, fault-tolerant generic infrastructure.
Disappearance
Infrastructure is the endangered species of software delivery organisations. Where once there were racks of computers in locked rooms with impressive and mysterious blinking lights and lots of whirring fans, now a co-working space and a laptop are all you need to conduct an orchestra of thousands.
As the need for IT infrastructures has balooned, so has it disappeared from our places of work.
That very need is what has driven externalisation. Building infrastructure was too hard, too slow and too complicated. Constrained by the basic physics of office and data centre space and the mechanics of buying, racking, networking and tending to machines whilst handling failures with grace.
And this is why I think Kubernetes will disappear. It’s so generic that there’s no reason to do it yourself. Few organisations operate on a scale where it makes sense to run datacentres. The practical friction of running Kubernetes creates a similar dynamic. Like reliable infrastructure, it’s too hard, slow or expensive to justify doing it really well yourself, but there probably is value in paying for that as a service from a cloud provider.
Commodity
In the end, precisely because it’s generic and because running a deployment platform is an undifferentiated hard problem, it can and will be commoditised. Fargate and Cloud Run (Knative) are already barrelling down this road. If you remember what Maven did for the Java world, you’ll understand that accepting a little opinionation delivers a lot of productivity.
There will always be exceptions, but I think they’ll prove the rule: that if Kubernetes manages to conquer the mainstream then for the majority of software delivery organisations it will quietly slip below the waterline of commodity. | {
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Brotherhood Without Manners is back with another full spoiler reread of A Song of Ice and Fire series. This time we are reading the final Tyrion Lannister chapter in Game of Thrones, Tyrion 9.
The Warden of the West, Tywin Lannister has called a council with his bannermen and trusted Lords,to discuss the outcome of the Battle of Whispering woods.
We see Tywin treat Tyrion in a way we have yet to see.
Tywin makes his battle plans to counter Lord Robb Stark, including unleashing Gregor Clegane.
Tyrion is sent to the capital to rule, and hopefully bring Joffrey back to a normal sanity level.
As always we give our chapter inductees and read listener write-ins.
All Music credits to Ross Bugden
INSTAGRAM! : https://instagram.com/rossbugden/ (rossbugden)
TWITTER! : https://twitter.com/RossBugden (@rossbugden)
YOUTUBE! : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kthxycmF25M | {
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On Dec. 20, 1943, a young American bomber pilot named Charlie Brown found himself somewhere over Germany, struggling to keep his plane aloft with just one of its four engines still working. They were returning from their first mission as a unit, the successful bombing of a German munitions factory. Of his crew members, one was dead and six wounded, and 2nd Lt. Brown was alone in his cockpit, the three unharmed men tending to the others. Brown’s B-17 had been attacked by 15 German planes and left for dead, and Brown himself had been knocked out in the assault, regaining consciousness in just enough time to pull the plane out of a near-fatal nose dive.
None of that was as shocking as the German pilot now suddenly to his right.
Brown thought he was hallucinating. He did that thing you see people do in movies: He closed his eyes and shook his head no. He looked, again, out the co-pilot’s window. Again, the lone German was still there, and now it was worse. He’d flown over to Brown’s left and was frantic: pointing, mouthing things that Brown couldn’t begin to comprehend, making these wild gestures, exaggerating his expressions like a cartoon character.
Brown, already in shock, was freshly shot through with fear. What was this guy up to?
He craned his neck and yelled back for his top gunner, screamed at him to get up in his turret and shoot this guy out of the sky. Before Brown’s gunner could squeeze off his first round, the German did something even weirder: He looked Brown in the eye and gave him a salute. Then he peeled away.
What just happened? That question would haunt Brown for more than 40 years, long after he married and left the service and resettled in Miami, long after he had expected the nightmares about the German to stop and just learned to live with them.
“A Higher Call,” the new book by Adam Makos with Larry Alexander, tells the incredible true story of these two pilots. Franz Stigler was 26 when he was conscripted into Hitler’s Luftwaffe in 1942, a former commercial airline pilot whose father and brother had both died while serving their country. Stigler had been assigned to Squadron 4 of the German air force, and was initially stationed in Libya.
On his first day on base, he was taken aside by his commanding officer, Lt. Gustav Roedel, who would have a profound impact on his life during and after the war.
On the afternoon of his first mission, Roedel decided he’d join the young pilot. Before takeoff, they talked. “Let what I’m about to say to you act as a warning,” Roedel said. “Honor is everything here.”
“Every single time you go up, you’ll be outnumbered,” Roedel said.
Stigler nodded, but said nothing.
What did Roedel mean by that? Stigler was overwhelmed. There never seemed to be a right way to respond, and the irony that he couldn’t, above all, trust his fellow soldiers was not lost on him.
Roedel kept on: “What will you do, for instance, if you find your enemy floating in a parachute?”
How to answer? How to answer? A hedge.
“I guess I’ve never thought that far ahead,” Stigler said.
“If I ever see or hear of you shooting at a man in a parachute,” Roedel said, “I will shoot you down myself. You follow the rules of war for you — not for your enemy. You fight by rules to keep your humanity.”
Roedel was not alone in this philosophy, and not just among the Germans. Most of these young men now at war — American, British, German — had grown up on the stories of the great World War I fighter pilots: the American Eddie Rickenbacker and Manfred von Richthofen, the German Red Baron.
These were men who fought by a code, who would look each other in the eye mid-air, who would never strafe an enemy plane that was already going down. They had been taught that they very well might survive the war and, if they did, they needed to know that they had fought with honor and as much humanity as possible. It would be the only way they would ever be able to live with themselves.
Franz Stigler had been on the ground in Oldenburg, Germany, smoking a cigarette while his plane, a Messerschmitt 109, was getting re-armed and refueled. At first it sounded like a high pitch, off in the distance, and then it was crushing, like a multitude of drums, a low-flying aircraft.
Here it came, just a few miles out, this American bomber that dropped no bombs. Then, suddenly, it was over them and gone. No one said a word. The crew unhooked the hoses, Franz flicked away his cigarette, saluted his sergeant and was gone, off in pursuit of the American plane.
If he could down this one, Stigler would have his 23rd victory, and he’d be awarded the Knight’s Cross, the highest honor for a German soldier in World War II and one that symbolized exceptional bravery.
Within minutes, Stigler, alone, was on the B-17’s tail. He had his finger on the trigger, one eye closed and the other squinting through his gunsight. He took aim and was about to fire when he realized what he wasn’t seeing: This plane had no tail guns blinking. This plane had no left stabilizer. This plane had no tail-gun compartment left, and as he got closer, Stigler saw the terrified tail gunner himself, his fleece collar soaked red, the guns themselves streaked with it, icicles of blood hanging from the barrels.
Stigler was no longer energized. He was alarmed. He pulled alongside the plane and saw clean through the middle, where the skin had been blown apart by shells. He saw these terrified young men attempting to tend to their wounded. He drew equal to the B-17 and saw that the nose of the plane, too, had been blown away. How was this thing still in the air?
At first, Charlie Brown didn’t notice the small German plane to his right. He was thinking, thinking, thinking. He had six wounded men in the back. Some were strong enough to jump out, but the critically injured would never survive the German forest. He’d have to keep flying, try to make it to England, but the others should jump — the chances that this plane would make it much farther were minuscule.
Brown’s co-pilot, Pinky, re-entered the cockpit. “We’re staying,” he said. “The guys all decided — you’re gonna need help to fly this girl home.”
Brown wasn’t listening. He was looking past Pinky, frozen. Pinky turned to his right, and saw the German.
Brown finally spoke. “He’s going to destroy us,” he said.
Stigler, too, was panicked. This plane was going down, and its crew was paralyzed. Stigler pointed to the ground, and, finally, a reaction: The Americans shook their heads. They’d rather die in flames than be taken prisoner by the Nazis.
Stigler was exasperated. As it was, he was risking his own life: Everyone knew the story of the German woman who, just one year before, had been gunned down by the Nazis for telling a joke against the Third Reich. If Stigler’s plane were to be spotted by a civilian alongside a B-17, and if that civilian wrote down the number on his tail and reported him, he was as good as dead.
Then Stigler remembered what Roedel had told him, that to shoot the enemy when vulnerable went against the code of chivalry and honor. Stigler felt he had to do what was right.
Near the Atlantic wall, flak gunners spotted the two planes approaching, the American and the German. They were stunned — they’d never seen anything like this, the enemy flying alongside a German plane, both seeming to be in sync, neither one firing or in pursuit or dodging or spiraling.
Stigler had thought of this and pulled away right before he was spotted — he knew that if his compatriots could identify his 109, they’d never shoot one of their own. How would they ever know what was really going on in his mind?
To the Americans, though, Stigler was death. Brown couldn’t take it anymore, and that was when he snapped out of it, yelling at his gunner to get in the turret and take aim.
That’s when the German saluted and finally disappeared.
Against all odds, Brown landed his B-17 in England. He served right up until the beginning of the Vietnam War and eventually settled with his wife in Miami. Stigler — who spent months after Dec. 20, 1943, living in fear that he’d be found out — served through the end of World War II and, unable to ever feel at home in Germany, relocated to Vancouver, Canada, in 1953.
Aside from telling their wives, both men had rarely spoken of that encounter: In Stigler’s case, it was an act of treason, punishable by death. Brown had actually told his commanding officer but was instructed to treat the event as classified: No one wanted to humanize the enemy.
Brown, who was still deeply traumatized by the incident, thought about searching for the German until finally, in January 1990, knowing the odds were against him, he took out an ad in a newsletter for fighter pilots, looking for the one “who saved my life on Dec. 20, 1943.” He held back one key piece of information: Where the German pilot had abandoned his B-17.
At home in Vancouver, Stigler saw the ad. He yelled to his wife: “This is him! This is the one I didn’t shoot down!”
Franz had always wondered if the great risk he’d taken had been worth it, if the American had made it home. Brown had always wondered what the German had been planning to do to him, and why he had let him go.
He immediately wrote a letter to Brown.
Brown was too impatient to actually read it. He called the operator and had her look up Franz Stigler’s number, then place the call immediately.
“When I let you go over the sea,” Stigler said, “I thought you’d never make it.”
“My God,” Brown said. “It’s you.”
Tears were streaming down his face. Stigler had answered Brown’s secret question without Brown having to ask it.
“What were you pointing for?” Brown asked.
Stigler, too, was crying. He explained everything: that he could tell that Brown had no idea how bad the plane was, that he was pointing first to the ground, to Germany, and then pointing away, mouthing “Sweden,” that he was trying to escort them to safety and that he abandoned them only when he saw the gun swing from the turret.
“Good luck,” he’d said to Brown from his cockpit. “You’re in God’s hands.”
The two men, in many ways, had parallel lives. Stigler had one daughter; Brown, two. Both were Christians, and in combat, Stigler kept rosary beads in his left pocket, the paint stripped bare from terror. Brown flew with a Bible in his pocket, and in moments of extreme fear he’d pat it “so that my prayers would beam up faster.”
Both felt that they should tell their story to as many people as would hear it, not for money but to make people realize that there’s always another way, that the world could be infinitely better than it was.
Stigler and Brown both had heart attacks and died in 2008, six months apart. Stigler was 92; Brown, 87.
In their obituaries, each was listed to the other as “a special brother.” | {
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It is by no means clear even that staunch Marco Rubio supporters should want Ted Cruz out of the 2016 presidential race.
It is now conventional wisdom that the best way for Republicans to avoid nominating Donald Trump is to have all but one other candidate drop out of the presidential race—and the sooner, the better. Then the anti-Trump vote can consolidate into that remaining candidate.
Conventional wisdom also holds that, among the three leading candidates—Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio—Cruz is the one who should exit (or at least fade into irrelevance), as Rubio is the candidate with the best chance to consolidate the anti-Trump vote.
This conventional wisdom, however, appears to be wrong. Regardless of who might ultimately prevail as the GOP nominee, the party’s best shot of stopping Trump seems to be having a strong Cruz competing in the contest.
The main flaw in the conventional wisdom is that it’s based on an unduly optimistic assessment of Rubio’s chances of beating Trump head-to-head. So far, Rubio has an uninspiring medal haul of two silvers and one bronze (to Trump’s three golds and a silver, and Cruz’s gold and three bronzes).
Yes, this is partly because Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Chris Christie have gotten a lot of potential Rubio votes. Still, to date, Rubio, Bush, Kasich, and Christie have received only a combined 38 percent of the vote. Trump, Cruz, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul have received a combined 60 percent (with the remaining 2 percent split among other candidates).
Cruz Competes Better against Trump
Trump himself has gotten 33 percent of the vote to date. To win an outright majority from this point forward, he would need to win only 37 percent of the non-Trump, non-Rubio vote. Rubio, meanwhile, would have to win 63 percent of the non-Trump, non-Rubio vote. Having to win more than five-eighths of that vote, while Trump needs less than three-eighths, would be a big challenge for Rubio—a challenge compounded by the fact that most (57 percent) of the non-Trump, non-Rubio vote to date has gone to Cruz or Carson. Does anyone really think that, among current Cruz and Carson supporters, Rubio would completely dominate Trump?
Does anyone really think that, among current Cruz and Carson supporters, Rubio would completely dominate Trump?
Even in an imaginary world in which Cruz—who so far has won more votes, more states (one to zero), and the same number of delegates as Rubio—Kasich, and Carson all went “poof” and immediately disappeared from the race, Rubio’s prospects would hardly look great. In that scenario, say Rubio could get the votes of 60 percent of Cruz and Carson supporters (perhaps an optimistic tally) while Trump got the remaining 40 percent. Rubio would still need to get the votes of more than two-thirds (68 percent) of the other candidates’ supporters to start outpacing Trump from that point forward.
That would be possible, but certainly not easy. Keep in mind that, among the one-sixth of South Carolina voters who called themselves “moderate”—that’s the group with which Bush and Kasich, in combination, did the best—Trump beat Rubio by 11 points (34 to 23 percent).
Immigration Makes Rubio’s Path Harder
Moreover, the difficulty of Rubio’s task in a two-man race would be compounded by two things: One, he hasn’t yet shown he can go toe-to-toe with Trump, as each has avoided the other. Two, Trump and Rubio represent something close to the party’s two poles on the important issue of immigration, and the center of the party is likely nearer to Trump.
Trump and Rubio represent something close to the party’s two poles on the important issue of immigration, and the center of the party is likely nearer to Trump.
Some supporters of a loose immigration policy viewed the results of the South Carolina exit polling—which found that 53 percent of Republican voters would give illegal-immigrant workers a path to legal status, while 44 percent would deport them—as suggesting that most Republicans are with them on this issue. In truth, those results showed the opposite and made Rubio’s challenge appear all the more daunting.
First off, the question asked only about illegal immigrants who are working in the U.S., not illegal immigrants generally. Second, the 53 percent didn’t want to grant them eventual citizenship, which is Rubio’s position, but rather “a chance to apply for legal status.” Third, the answer most people would presumably prefer to give for illegal immigrants who are working—leave them alone but don’t give them legal status—wasn’t even provided. Fourth, when given a choice between making them legal or booting them out of the country, almost as many people said they’d send them packing as would let them stay. That does not bode well for Rubio.
Indeed, the prospect of having the candidate who is most like Chris Christie in manner take dead aim at Rubio for his wildly unpopular (among GOP voters) efforts on this issue should not make the Republican establishment feel confident of victory.
Rubio Should Help Cruz Tank Trump
Then again, this would be the same Republican establishment that helped fuel Trump’s candidacy in the first place (by refusing to fight on much of anything or heed Main Street concerns), assured everyone that Trump wasn’t a serious threat, and now thinks the only thing needed to beat Trump is to get Cruz (and Kasich) out of the race.
Far more so than with Trump and Rubio, Trump and Cruz are competing for the same voters.
Rather than rooting for the establishment’s preferred scenario, those who would like to avoid a Trump nomination would presumably be better off hoping for another result. A more plausible scenario for beating Trump would be to have Cruz remain in the race and have him perform well.
Far more so than with Trump and Rubio, Trump and Cruz are competing for the same voters. If Cruz can pry some of those voters away from Trump, especially by emphasizing more effectively than he has to date how a Cruz presidency would undo much, if not most, of the Obama presidency—thereby portraying himself, rather than Trump, as the agent of change—that would help not only Cruz but also likely Rubio.
If Cruz also, with some overdue help from Rubio, could knock Trump down a peg or two, to where he is no longer claiming a third of the vote, then the Donald presumably wouldn’t become the nominee. In that scenario, Rubio or Cruz would prevail by June, or else the result would be decided at the convention.
In short, it is by no means clear even that staunch Rubio supporters should want Cruz out of the race. Better to have Cruz battle Trump, have Rubio finally start to train some of his fire on Trump, and let the best man win in a three-way contest. | {
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The results from the fifth installment of my totally normal and not insane 51 week study of the top three movies from each state are IN. Remember everyone got three votes, so the percentages reflect how many times they appeared on every individual vote. For the Golden State, this is what y’all chose.
6. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Yes, I wanted to post the pool scene but I’m not trying to get in trouble. Fast Times is a classic coming-of-age movie and definitely has a very Cali vibe to it. Spicoli is a quintessential stoner character that became the archetype for a ton of high school movies that came after this as well. Also a great 80’s soundtrack:
5. Point Break
Oh hell yea, I’m just mad this didn’t place higher. Johnny Utah is an all-time cop character that would for certain be in my personal Mount Rushmore, and Bodhi is one of the best 3D bad guys. Especially considering that era of action movies where bad guys were singularly evil.
4. Back to the Future
Always a virtual lock to place, ‘Back to the Future’ is one of the best science fiction movies ever that seamlessly weaved in coming-of-age and humor elements to make it more mainstream. Hill Valley, CA, is definitely one of the more recognizable fictional towns as well. What’s Crispin Glover been up to, man? Loved him in ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’.
3. Training Day
“I run shit here, you just live here!” Such an outstanding rant, ‘Training Day’ is a defining LA movie. The first of the Antoine Fuqua/Denzel Washington team up movies (The Equalizer, The Magnificent 7), it was a insanely well paced story with incredible action, suspense and dialogue.
2. The Big Lebowski
The Dude abides. One of the best Coen brothers movies, ‘The Big Lebowski’ is one of the more intricate and funny stories ever put to screen. It’s infinitely quotable and has a heavy dose of California influence. I hate even talking about it because I had to stop what I was doing and watch every single clip from it I could find from it on YouTube.
1. Pulp Fiction
It’s still my favorite Quentin Tarantino movie and for good reason. It’s such a mysterious and deranged story, and the dialogue is obviously quotable to an extreme degree. There’s a ton of Cali influence throughout the entire movie, which is why I’m not surprised it gets the number one spot.
Here’s the breakdown:
I will say I definitely expected both ‘L.A. Confidential’ and ‘La La Land’ to place higher. This was such a loaded poll, though, so its not outrageous or anything. I will note that ‘Pulp Fiction’ was about 10 points behind ‘The Big Lebowski’ until around Friday, where there was a huge swing. Anyway, we’re on to The Centennial State, Colorado. Google automated some solid choices for the big ass square territory, and I’d be shocked if ‘The Shining’ doesn’t win. If the embedded form doesn’t work on your device, click here.
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Don’t forget to subscribe to Lights, Camera, Pod, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram and join in on the conversation on our Reddit. Also, I’ve started a AFC West Recap blog if you’re into that kind of thing. Oh and I’m doing AFC West recap blogs, if you’re into that kind of thing. | {
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Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The footage shows The Beatles, pictured here in New York, during a playful interview in 1965
Lost footage of The Beatles from the 1960s has emerged after being found in a bread bin in Wales.
The film, which has been valued at £10,000, was found during a clearance of a house and shows the band being interviewed in Cardiff in 1965.
The find comes a day after a woman found signatures from the Fab Four that had been left in a cupboard.
Paul Fairweather, from Omega Auctions, said the lost reels were a "great find".
In the footage, the band are seen joking with a journalist attempting to interview them, with John Lennon saying Paul McCartney has five children in Swansea and Ringo Starr joking their next film would be a Western.
They also break into a rendition of There's No Business Like Show Business, and pull funny faces throughout the interview.
Other footage, from 1967, shows spiritual guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and The Beatles being questioned about their adherence to his teachings.
Lennon says in the clip: "Of course it's not a cult and if we didn't take it seriously we wouldn't be here."
A third sound recording captures Lennon giving an acoustic rendition of his post-Beatles song God, and has also been valued at £10,000.
Mr Fairweather said: "All four Beatles are in fine form throughout both of the Cardiff films, laughing and joking, while the interviewer tries to remain serious.
"The sound and image quality is fantastic. I expect these have never been seen since 1965." | {
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Hindu nationalism has been a rising political force in India in recent decades, “eroding” its secular nature, a U.S. Congressional report has claimed, as it warned that social media platforms provide “both tacit and overt sanction” for rising incidents of “majoritarian violence” in the country.
In its report, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) — an independent and bipartisan research wing of U.S. Congress — mentioned specific areas of alleged religiously-motivated repression and violence. including cow protection vigilantism and perceived assaults on freedom of expression.
The report, titled ‘India: Religious Freedom issues’, said: “Religious freedom is explicitly protected under its Constitution. Hindus account for a vast majority (nearly four-fifths) of the country’s populace. Hindu nationalism has been a rising political force in recent decades, by many accounts eroding India’s secular nature and leading to new assaults on the country’s religious freedom.” | {
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On this episode, we talk with David Freund, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. David is the author of Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America, an award-winning book that tracks how the language of racial exclusion was re-coded in terms of markets, property, and citizenship in the post-World War II era. Throughout the conversation, David speaks to his research on the history of public policy and economic ideology in the United States, and the role that heterodox economic thinking has played in shaping his research agenda. We talk at length about Colored Property, as well as his current book project, State Money, which offers a history of financial policy and free market ideology that unveils the repressed role of the state in the making of modern America. David Freund recently published a chapter in the edited collection Shaped by the State, titled "State Building for a Free Market: The Great Depression and the Rise of Monetary Orthodoxy" More info here: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo31043679.html?fbclid=IwAR1oUDodC6uWVbLo_f71OUBqmCcuVRZhlaOGZfdzF9npqaj-mRNz7Ouxlkk Freund also recently publish a piece on the role of money in historical inquiry for The Metropole: https://themetropole.blog/2019/05/21/money-matters/
Speaker 1:
0:05
[inaudible]
Speaker 2:
0:10
were listening to money on the left, the official podcast at the monitor money network humanities division or mmn h d . Today we're chatting with David [inaudible] , associate professor of history at the University of Maryland and author of colored property, state policy and white racial politics in suburban America and award winning book that tracks how the language of racial exclusion was recoded in terms of markets , property and citizenship and the post World War II era. We speak with David about his research on the history of public policy and economic ideology in the United States and the role that heterodox economics thinking has played in shaping his research agenda. We talk at length about colored property as well as his current book project state money, which offers a history of financial policy and free market ideology in the moderate United States. Thanks to David for joining us and to Alex Williams for producing episodes . Okay, David Freind , welcome
Speaker 3:
1:23
the money on the left. Thank you. Very nice to be here. You start us off by giving us a brief summary of your personal and professional background. Sure. I am a child of , um , Los Angeles. In the 1970s, the suburbs of Los Angeles. I went to college at Berkeley. I worked in publishing and journalism for a little bit and food service. And then I , um, started a phd program in history. Um, I started in Europe. I switched to the study, the United States and wound up writing a book about go figure the politics of white suburbanization , um, white flight and racial segregation. And one thing that is , uh, that might be of interest is that I was a , I guess technically trained as a cultural historian. I was studying in the 1990s when the field of what's now called whiteness studies was taking shape. Uh, but I had a really deep interest in political economy, which stemmed in part from my , um, longterm interest in the origins of capitalism. And that has clearly come to the fore in my work. Um, both in my first , uh, uh, book and in the new project on the new project, which is called state money. Okay. So since then , um, I've been working on , um, since writing , um , the book on white suburbanization. I've been working on the history of a financial policy, the history of money and powerful myths about money in the state. That's really kind of the, the anchor of what I'm doing right now. Cool. So you sort of referenced it there, but we're wondering what questions or problems in historical research brought you to the study of money? And two , heterodox economics in particular. Write my first book. It's called colored property. It's centered on a story about the federal government's role in creating a racially segregated housing market in the United States after World War II. Uh , many people might be familiar with the story of the Federal Housing Administration and red lining it sexually in recent years become a to become a public discussion about it, which is actually pretty exciting for those of us who study it. Um, and ultimately that's a story about debt instruments, mortgage lending, mortgage instruments in particular, and how debt is created. So while I'm writing this book, I was really struck by conventional treatments of debt, specifically economists, and most historians described debt and still do as distinct from money. And meanwhile they argued that neither money nor debt were essential to the productive process. In other words, they insisted that growth economic growth was a product of a bunch of real sector variables like access to resources, technology demand and the like. And that money just help people organize those variables by facilitating the exchange. So money in their narrative is a commodity token. And meanwhile, debt help helps people make contractual arrangements to exchange these tokens. And so in this conventional story that I was seeing while writing this book , um , I saw the real action in the economy was coming from individuals choices about what they wanted to make buy and sell. Whereas financial instruments that the mortgage instruments that I was studying, but the mortgage contracts I was studying, those instruments themselves were sort of like props in this story. And if their supply is just right, it makes the, the real sector processes go smoothly. Now, I'm not trained as an economist, nor was I trained as an economic historian. And so as I was encountering those , um, those treatments of it, that story about money and debt, it seemed really odd to me as a student of this subject. The documentary evidence that I was encountering showed me that government policy was creating debt instruments and that those debt instruments were then creating conditions under which new homes were literally being built. So public policy was creating wealth. Meanwhile, I saw how those policies explicitly channeled that new wealth primarily to white people, especially to white men, people of color and single women. We usually denied these new mortgages and this was by federal mandate. So to me that suggested that the government was creating wealth for some and not for others. Again, I'm just , uh , you know , uh, uh , modest historian, I'm not an economist, right? Um, but economists and plenty of were disagreeing with me and they still do. They argue that by ensuring loans, federal policies where merely helping to unleash market forces that produced wealth in housing, and they argue this again because they insist that money and debt are not intrinsically productive. So that's the origin story of my current project. Um , since completing colored property, I become a student of monetary theory , um, 20 century monetary policy and the relationship between financial policy and again and popular ideas about money. And I'm arguing in this new book, it's called state money that are persistent myths about money are deeply intertwined with the politics and policy of finance. One more note on my, on my first book to clarify that. So when colored property, I, I basically argued that myths about housing segregation , um, the myth that it's not about race but rather about economics, right? That those myths have been created in large measure by the very policies and politics that segregated housing in the first place. And so in this new book, I'm exploring as a comparable dynamic now on the larger topic of popular myths about money.
Speaker 4:
7:07
So just to follow up and clarify, is it, is your sense that both , um, um, historians who don't necessarily foreground their politics and more critical or even Marxist historians all fall into this trap of, of seeing the histories that you're tracing in this particular way
Speaker 3:
7:31
a qualify a qualified most I would say , um, there is , there are traditions of historical writing that are very, very attuned to monies , credit function, especially , um , historians of the long 16th century, most famously people like gum, Pernod Bardell . Um, there are economic historians who've written about this and always been kind of held on the margin. People like Charles Kindleberger and um, John Kenneth Galbraith. Um, and there's a new generation of scholars, for example, Chris Desanz making money is essential reading on this subject. And there's a group of early Americanists and historical sociologists who are doing very exciting work on debt markets, banking in popular protests over currency reform. Along the way. There've been people who have documented this story about credit money but not called it that. Um, but those are the exceptions to the rule. And by and large, especially people who are writing about 20th century economic history in the u s and development, they are very much wedded to what I call an orthodox or neoclassical model of money. Yes. It seems like you're pretty convinced that the historians of all stripes can learn from heterodox economics. Do you think they can
Speaker 2:
8:55
learn it, especially from, or, or what do you think they can specifically take away from , um, things like post Keynesianism and modern monetary?
Speaker 3:
9:07
Hmm . That is a big one. Uh , and it is potentially boundless. It is what I think about most of the time when I'm not thinking about other things , um, is a , as you folks probably know. Um , okay. Um, and it's the case because historians, like I said, generally work from Orthodox or neo class , neoclassical assumptions about the economy all the time, even when they're not citing the work of economists are invoking their , um, their, their findings. It's sort of the, you know, it's the pool that most people swimming intellectually. Um, but I, I can't , I think suggests maybe two big takeaways that maybe will be useful to answer that question. Um, did to get historians who recognize why it's important at the very least to consider these challenges. And the first one is my standard appeal to historians, which is that Orthodox economic models are grounded in a story about finance that did not happen and that should really upset them as Dorian's . Um, we cannot document, I'm not telling you folks something here , um, that you don't know, but we cannot document historically the origins story about money and credit that undergirds basic textbook economics. Um, again, economist insists that money has its origins in barter and that credit forms developed later to further facilitate this butter like exchange. Yet we know that this is not true. Archeologist sociologist a core like I mentioned of European historians , um, and a bunch of historically minded economists have persuasively documented this for generations , um, as focused on money . The left, no, it turns out that money has its origin and debt instruments. Uh , basically an IOUs. And when Orthodox economists are presented with this evidence, they say in effect, well , Nah , money must have had his origins and barter because well, that's what all the models are based in. So we're sticking with it. So again , uh , the historian should not pay their, put their trust in an economic, conceptual universe that's grounded in a fiction about money. That just doesn't make sense. So that's my first sort of, that's how I generally try to appeal to historians who've have not been introduced to this. Um, these debates. The second big takeaway , um, hits home I find because so many, because scholars , um, it speaks to so many people's research agendas and that is that economic heterodoxy and you know, we could talk about the , the ranger debates within post Keynesianism and um, but we don't have to. Um, but economic heterodoxy in general explores this very fluid boundary between the so called public and private sectors. It demonstrates, and that's really, that's just so important for scholars in so many subfields. Um , it demonstrates that modern economic systems are inseparable from state structures. Um, again, we can talk later about my current work on American financial policy and maybe I can explore some of that. But the larger point is really in escapable never in the history of capitalism have there been purely free markets for anything that's pretty profound and challenges a lot of conventional wisdom, right. Um, state authority. And Moreover, state resources have always been integral to capitalist growth and the allocation of its benefits. So these heterodox traditions of economic thought , um, have always reckoned with this. And they provide tools, I think with which we can better understand that, that fluidity and expose it. Um, so that's a , that's a way of answering your boundless question in sort of categories rather than with , with specifics. Cause it's really, I mean, seriously, we could just talk for days about that.
Speaker 2:
12:53
Oh, boundless and motivated. I got to say, you know , I'll speak for myself, but, but the, the, the very two points that you've described, I think I've found, you know , uh, irrelevant and considering in my own writing and research on this stuff. Um, and, and another aspect of it , um, you know, in, in the field of rhetoric and another, I'm sure it's true also in , in histories , um , sort of making a compelling case about what heterodox economists can learn in turn from historians and rhetoricians .
Speaker 3:
13:22
Oh, humanists. Well, that one is, yeah. Um, similarly about Julie , do you want me to speak to that please? I'll, I'll again, boundless, I'll answer this one with an anecdote in my pretty extensive discussions with , um, hydrox economists , um, in for now almost nine, 10 years , um, having to read my stuff and certainly studying their stuff and , and especially those who are , who have written about , um, the history of, of central banking and financial markets. I've discovered a few places where they have blind spots because they are more focused on the mechanics of contemporary financial markets. And sometimes they have overlooked what I think are , um, historically really , um, key transitions or formative moments. And for, in my case, it's the question about the , the creation of , um , federal debt. Uh , I'm sorry, the, the, the expansion of federal that during World War One and how this helps to lead to this kind of fundamental transformation in the way the Fed operates. It's not that they don't know about this. It says that they actually haven't devoted that much time to it in their accounts of, of , um, the history and the workings of the Fed in part because they're just focused on a different set of questions. So it's one of the shirt, you know , kind of countless places where , um, heterodox economists can learn from us. And um, there's a really, there's a, there's a huge debate among folks who work on this, about the relate does the other thing that keeps me up at night, so he's hiding , I get no sleep because all these things keep me up. Um, is the relationship between the public and the, and the private, which I already mentioned , um, between public and private money. And I'm still sort of , um, sort of battling that out sometimes in real time , sometimes in my head with MMT years . Um, so I think there's a , there are a lot of , um, there are a lot of places where we can learn from each other. Is that diplomatic? It was, hold on .
Speaker 5:
15:27
Wait till I give my money. You buy ,
Speaker 6:
15:32
I had a dream. I could fly my way. There had been when I woke with Mitt that on a neck so bad. I'd be back 10 seconds , man. It's so hard. That's act reckless . The home. What's is ? Get the money tested, get arrested, get some silly, get the message off. Throw the precedence on the [inaudible] and what I do, act more stupid. Well , more to leveque more Louie v my mama couldn't get through to me. The drama people still with me. I'm on TV talking like assists you with me. I'm just saying you're happy. Oh Man . I wanted to cause the Zygote to heal, man. I guess the money city chase them. I get to sit up , forget whack .
Speaker 7:
16:18
So to dive in a little bit to your first book, which you've glossed really nicely already , um , call it property, state policy and white racial politics in suburban America. To say it again. Um, I was wondering if you could explain for us and for our listeners how your attention to money and debt instruments in the book complicate our understandings of Mid 20th Century American racism specifically.
Speaker 3:
16:47
Right. Interesting. Um, and this is great. My answer to that question now is far more developed than it was when the book appeared in 2007. Um, at the time I presented it in sort of lay terms, again, arguing that federal programs by ensuring debt created wealth for whites while simultaneously popularizing the narrative that government assistance was not creating wealth, that it was not segregating neighborhoods. Um, and it was not impoverishing people of color. So basically argued that the programs mask to the racial assumptions that structured a new market for housing. Since I have taken the deep dive into the world of , um, financial markets and understanding the mechanics of money, I can now put a lot more analytical meat on those bones. Sorry for that metaphor. Um, you can, you can take that one out if you'd like. Um, basically, and here's how I would describe it now. Um, federal credit policy. These are called selective credit programs. And the FHA, the federal housing administration was the most prominent, the best known these policies, manufactured financial assets, namely home loans that otherwise would not have been created. They enabled private lenders to create checking deposits, right? And that's how money is created by private institutions. Um , and they did that by promising to pay off those loans should the borrower default. So the u s treasury promised to cover bankers losses. And so naturally bankers said, okay, I'll take that risk. Right? It wasn't much of a risk along the way. Bankers obviously made a lot of money. So did home builders. So did all the suppliers and materials that helped construct the modern suburb from oil and plastics through appliances and home furnishings. And finally, millions of Americans got access to home ownership for the first time because the terms of these new mortgages were very generous. They had low down payments, they were amortize the federal government, restructured the mortgage market as it insured it. We don't need to go into the details of that, but that's what made it, made it. So , um, that's what made it viable and so profitable. So again, that happened only because the federal state made a certain kind of home loan on very specific terms, right into a very liquid investment. They asserted state power and they use state resources to secure those investments, value and marketability. So that is the, that is where , um, money is fundamentally changing the way that resources are being distributed by race. And here's, here's the second part of that. Because magically they also, by embracing Orthodox economic ideas about money they described what they were doing is purely market-driven . They insisted and many historians still buy this line, that government mortgage programs did not create wealth because all they did was help money circulate more efficiently. Again, the story is that they unleashed pent up demand and let the real sector of the economy do the heavy lifting. Now again, that story only holds up if you imagine that money and credit are distinct. And if you believe that credit is not economically productive, and if you buy that story, then you can erase the fact that the modern housing market in America is literally hardwired to be racially discriminatory. The housing economy as I write in the book was, I call it racially constructed and we, so we thinking money and debt helps us to see how this was achieved. And it really brings home the larger point that racism is not a sentiment of misplaced belief system, but rather a structure that is embedded in modern life. Clearly you're not the first scholar a and first historian to be telling the story of , uh , 20th century American racism in a systemic way. Oh, no, no, no, no long tradition. Indeed. So my question is how does money and debt as system potentially change or problematize other stories of 20th century systemic racism that have been researched and told and taught? Wait, oh, that's another, that's another huge one. Um, for example, for , let me think about , um, I mean one of the places that I've been , I've been really focused on that is the relationship between the, this , um, story about federal policy and federal sort of debt creation and um , local so much or the work on the structures of racism has, well the , the earth to the degree that I move in so-called urbanist circles. So much of that work is local case studies about local and , um , state level politics. So one of the things that I'm really curious about and I really haven't thought it through yet is how thinking about , um, money as a systemically , uh , as created and distributed in racially kind of discriminatory ways then translates into the circulation of his monetary instruments in local economies. I don't have anything profound to say about that, but I do think and, but there are people doing absolutely stunning at work on things like , um, local real estate markets , um, and , um, like the history of , um, of , um, of uh, slumlords and , um, the politics of local bond financing that ultimately, if we can integrate sort of a heterodox understanding of money as a credit instrument, I think that's going to raise some really important questions about that dynamic. Again, between the kind of, the level of the level of the monetary sovereign and the level of how people , um, use , um, money instruments locally. The other one, and this is again, pretty wide open, is that there's this huge, it's really exciting literature about , uh, discrimination within so-called , um, welfare programs on the one hand and also in , um , federal spending for the allocation of , um, for the creation of , um, um , holy industries in postwar America. I mean , the sunbelt is in large part our creation of federal spending , um , in the military industrial complex. So there are , um, I mean, there's so many, again, that's a pretty big one. There's so many. Um, there's so much literature that extent literature on those structures of discrimination that I think could be , um, warrants to be revisited in light of the idea that again, that money is not , um, is not just a circulating medium, but it's kind of a productive force. That was a less eloquent answer.
Speaker 7:
23:49
That's so interesting. Cause it seems like specifically with the example of the local case study along the more urbanist model that your framework in a broader heterodox monetary framework perhaps will open up the question of institutional and structural racism to more Federal Democratic , um, contestations. Is that your sense of perhaps where the integration of this sort of monetary lens is , is pointing towards when you say Federal Democratic contest station? What do you mean by that? So in the sense that for example, local bond holders are a local real estate market is always integrated into the federal federal structures of banking regulation , finance in ways that are more influential and , and perhaps even more causal than some. I mean certainly that I've read have suggested
Speaker 3:
24:50
no, I think that's right. I think that's, I think that's spot on. You answered that question very well. Thank you. No, seriously. I think that that is, that is the , um , that's the place where , um, we're one of the places that people can explore this. I mean, I will say as someone who's written a book that's both about federal policy and local places , um , the second half of colored property is a local case study. Oh boy. It's exhausting. It's really tiny . I mean, it just kind of to end, it takes forever. So I'm hoping that there's , um, that we can create , um, you know, the incentives for people to bring those two stories together. I think there's a , there's a practical reason while people why people have often segregated those two in addition to the important interpretive angle that heterodoxy brings to that.
Speaker 2:
25:35
Even . I'm curious to, to know the extent to which, and you're studying this history and colored property ,
Speaker 1:
25:44
um ,
Speaker 2:
25:45
you got a sense that whether you got a sense that, that, that the very people who are being discriminated against or , or who were most effected negatively or maybe even positively by, by the discriminatory policy that's baked into a policy that was presenting as non-discriminatory, right extent to which those people recognized and , and talked about and, and , uh, you know, tried to do something about what was happening and, and, and, you know. Okay. So I guess my question is, were there people speaking up against this at the time and clearly identifying it and, and were , were their voices suppressed or what happened?
Speaker 3:
26:21
Yeah, that's a huge story. It's a, I'm a subplot of my book, which is really about the way that white people interpreted it, right? I have that very, very brief discussion of the amazing work that was done by , um, by activists and scholars , um, both black and white to challenge programs. And that's a , that's a really well developed , um , story. Um, I can point you to people who've written really , um, uh , brilliant stuff about that. So a lot of people reacting to it , um, and critiquing it. And there are some early critiques of it that if you break it down like Robert Weaver's , um, work before he took over at HUD. Um, and um, and Charles Abrams and a bunch of 'em housing activists and civil rights activists were sort of developing a, what you might say is a kind of heterodox understanding of the role of state power. Um, that is not the center piece of my work. And there are scholars who are doing really amazing stuff. We creating those stories. What I did find, and this is part , um, partly because it was my focus and I really went in and tried to understand why white people didn't understand , um, the origins and dynamics of their own kind of structural privilege. That was the kind of starting point for this project. And you know, the big takeaway that I have, and I've debated this, this with people for a long, long time , um, I continue to , um , is that the vast majority of white people became convinced by and kind of deeply invested in the Mitt this mythology that was spread, that this was not about race, that this was about some kind of pure , um, uh, choice driven market dynamic. So one of the stories I track in there is about how sort of, you know, average folks in the suburbs of , um, of Detroit. That was my local case study, how they responded in the postwar era. Every time someone said, hey, look, we have segregation. This is unfair. The government's involved. And what I was able to reconstruct was that they, they told a narrative about sort of meritocracy and the colorblind narrative in part, in large part by just literally grabbing onto the very tools, the very systems , um, market mechanisms that had been created by the federal government. So they literally turn to the FHA manual and said, look, no, no. Just like the FHA says, this isn't about race. This is what FHA officials were arguing. I believe that they convinced themselves of that. There were certainly some people who I'm certain, you know, on the side we're saying, well, good thing for this because we really don't want to live near those near those folks. But this was the master narrative and this is, I reconstruct reconstructed this not just in, in public statements. I recall, I looked at the correspondence between civil rights activists and FHA officials and the FHA officials always responded to the same line, look , look, we don't shape the market. So, so the, the study to kind of sum that up, I argue here that, you know, in that the abroad swath of the, of people who, who consider themselves white in postwar America , um, uh, drank the Koolaid, right? They bought it. It was, it was really in their interest to believe that they were not complicit in this. Um, and that it , um, shut down. It helps shut down a lot of the great activism and the pushback for , um , the fair housing activism that was , um, that was , um, being driven by these facts of discrimination. I mean, we know that [inaudible] housing activism because sort of a national platform finally during the civil rights movement, but there's, you know , another story to be told about enforcement of the civil rights of the Fair Housing Act. Um, and I would argue that the pushback against that enforcement and eventually the , um, disassembly of those mechanisms which are still underway , um, are fueled by this same kind of willful ignorance that people really want really believe that there are these market forces that are , that operates separately from , um, people's ideas about people, about place, about who should live with who.
Speaker 4:
30:35
So I'd like to shift the discussion to your exciting book in progress state money , uh , where you seem to be unearthing a kind of a definitely more expansive , um, story that encompasses the one you've already been working through in terms of a racialized property. Um, and in the book, as I understand it, you're tracing a pretty fundamental broad shift in the way that American money is structured and the role of the state in, in that restructuration. Um, so I guess to start , uh , I just want to invite you to , to tell us a little bit about that story and then, you know, reflect upon how this , um , puts pressure on the ways we've , um, whether it's in from Orthodox perspectives or even heterodox perspectives, how we've thought about American money.
Speaker 3:
31:36
Hmm . Yeah. The narrative part of the, I should say, I, you know, I promised myself after writing colored property that my next project would be more, I don't know, modest and contained Taha yeah, exactly. Joke was on me. Um, and then I got this bug and I went deep. I took the deep dive into finance and you know, it's, the rest is the rest is what it is. Um, but so the narrative of this book is about that. Um, I should say briefly, the book is kind of two parts. One is it's trying to introduce historians to the long history of money and heterodoxy. So there's kind of a preparatory section that does that. And then it turns to this case study to show how, if we change the lens through which we , we look at money and finance it reshapes familiar stories . So I look at a familiar story. Um, it's about , um, it works on many scales, on many scales, but the essential transformation is one that's really well documented by standard , um, uh, conventional histories of finance and the state. It's about the creation of the Fed and the transformation of its operations in its first 20, 25 years, culminating in the new deal legislation, which sort of rebooted the Fed and turned it into kind of a different animal. Um, and the story that's kind of the hook here is one that is like, like so, right? It's the kind of thing that makes people's eyes glaze over when you tell them that you're working on it. So it's about the reinvention of treasury debt. Ooh , you get mad. Like they, like the kids in class are like, oh, please tell me more. Um, but , um, but what I mean by, by what I mean by that is, is the following, right? So before World War One, investors did not go out of their way to purchase us treasury bonds and d they were seen as risky investments. Experts counseled bond buyers in, in, in manuals that were published at the time to avoid buying US government bonds like the plague. Stay away from that. You gotta be crazy. Jump ahead to the 1930s and that's ancient history. Treasury bonds by then are an essential component of the American financial system and they are deemed to be as liquid as commercial debts, which are commonly called commercial paper. And this is the, these are the traditional debt debt instruments that banks , um , collected in order to lend money. Now by the 30s. Everyone's like, oh, the treasury bond. That's just as liquid as, you know, a promise of an inventory or future production of goods. So what I'm asking is how did this happen? Um , it's a really complicated story. It takes me on this pretty deep dive into the weeds of finance and policy. But the short version, sort of my Haiku version is that, and this won't be in proper form, sorry, it's not like a five 75 accrue , but it's basically like, you know, the u s government went deep into debt firewall grow one. The Fed helped it market those debts. It's something we know about, but historians have magically kind of erased from the story in part, which means, which means what they love . When you say to market, they literally created the money that people then use to buy that people in banks use to buy the debt. That's why the money supply increase . So it wasn't like people had saved up and bought treasury bonds. Um, this is wonderful. I'm a quote, what James Grant says that , um, the Fed was very generous with sabers who happened to not have money, right? So they literally put the , the created the, the um, the, the keystrokes that allowed banks and individuals to have this really complex series of proxies to by about 2020 some, you know, whatever million billion, I can't remember number of dollars of debt. Um, so the US government goes into debt. The Fed mill helps make it hot possible. And in the twenties and thirties, a series of banking and policy interventions elevate those debts to their new prominence. And they have a version of that prominence ever since. The markets have changed considerably since World War II. We won't get into that, but um, but they , they, they continue to be kind of a centerpiece of the American financial system. The other part, the meanwhile, the other part of my narrative is how experts argued over the meaning of this transformation. And I show how they reached kind of a rough consensus by the 1930s that yeah, it was okay for the nation's banking system to be heavily collateralized by federal debt. Right. They just completely turned the , the conventional wisdom about the value of treasury debt and the nature of, of monies asset base on its head in 30 years. Why do they make that argument? And here's the kind of the punchline because in their view, money's just a commodity token that helps the private sector operate at its full capacity. So they basically embraced and refined this long intellectual tradition of viewing money this way. And by doing so they could explain away the new state capacities and new state power over finance. There's a dissenting view. You're asking about dissenting views and I talk about , um, I think you guys have seen the shorter piece, but I , this is central to the book too. I talk about the dissenting sort of real bill's view that um, that the challenge that, and we can talk about that about that later, but um, that the, the criticism of his transformation was kind of shut down by this kind of reassertion of monetary orthodoxy. Again, it's in this view, money isn't essential to economic growth. And so the federal state's new role in backing the money supply was neither here nor there. It was just kind of a management move that protects banks and the public. So the new trade, it basically portrays this new trade and treasury debt and repeated expansions of that debt burden. Right. The U s government stat has only increased, well is, is increasing decrease, but it is, is it has been steadily been increasing over time, over the long run. Um, they , those become wholly compatible with this supposedly free market for finance in this , um, in this new model. Now once you look at this again familiar story about the transformation of the Fed and the role of federal debt and the role of treasury debt. If you look at it through basically a Heterodox Lens, this raises a bunch of questions about the way that we understand federal policy in the 20th century and it's power to shape economic outcomes, right ? It fundamentally challenges many of the conventional templates that scholars employ to discuss topics such as so-called big government, federal spending, welfare programs, partisan politics , um, because even before the federal government got big in a conventional sense, right during the new deal, even before that it had powers to shape markets that many economists are reluctant to acknowledge. So that's kind of the first big, you know, way that a challenges our conventional views of political economy. And once the Great Depression expands vastly state capacity as we know it did, it means that federal financial and fiscal policy are at the heart of understanding both prosperity and precarity in the modern United States. They're not, it's not a discussion about when should we talk about when, when the government should act or when it shouldn't . The government. It's always there and it's always acting on these two fronts. It's, again, it's really baked into the way that , um, um, the, the modern political economy functions.
Speaker 8:
39:03
Wow .
Speaker 1:
39:42
[inaudible]
Speaker 7:
39:43
I was wondering if now , um , perhaps we could take a deeper dive into the , the real bills doctrine to 19th century and perhaps, maybe , um , you could reflect on the limits and possibilities of rebels doctrine versus the later , um , paradigm centered on Treasury debt,
Speaker 3:
39:59
right? Yeah. This is , um , did I mention things that , that keep me from sleeping. Um , add this to that list. Um, this really gets at the most complicated part of the project. At least the, the, if the project is born at the story about the mechanics of finance and want a story about that kind of intellectual and political , um, negotiation of that change. This is really the most complicated part of that intellectual, political side of it. Um, and to be frank, I'm still sorting through it as I'm writing these chapters, but , um , I can sort of see the answer visually, but I'm not, I'm still trying to find a way to articulate it, but it basically goes something like this. Um, real bills was simultaneously , um, regressive and progressive, right? A real bills believed. Um, for those who don't know about rebills real bills was the, the conventional wisdom among bankers and among a lot of monetary theorists that if a bank only issued a loan when the borrower gave it a so called real bill, which was a promise of a commercial good. Again, it could be an inventory that they're going to sell. It could be the promise to build something and sell it. The theory was that then banks wouldn't issue too much money because you know, nine times out of 10 or whatever , um, they were creating monetary instruments that would be used productively in the economy. That's a sort of a short course in real bills. Um, and they believed in what them kind of regressive is that they actually still believed in the commodity theory of money. And in many ways they are very much part of that neoclassical tradition. But what was interesting and makes them relevant for this story is that they , that real bill's model acknowledges the primacy of credit extension to the productive process. They do it and really different terms than Heterodox and post Kansan folks do. But they were at least saying, look, this, that that's really, really central to how things are made and exchanged. Right? That's why real bills advocates freaked out when the Federal Reserve assumed all these new powers over currency between World War One and the Great Depression. They saw that the federal state was assuming the power to basically stand behind monetary issue. Um, a government promise was now standing in for a commercial promise to extend alone . That's again, that's why they, you know, they're , they're sort of on my map and I think they're very interesting historically, but again, they mistakenly insisted, and again, this is where their orthodox, he showed , um , that monetary sovereigns could not create productive capacity without distorting this mythical free market for goods. Uh , and so real bills was wrong to be sure, but it was also kind of a canary in the coal mine, again , at least for students of heterodoxy because it sounded the alarm about the consolidating , um, federal power over finance, the paradigm that won the battle over fed policy by contrast , um , is even more complicated. Um, of course, it helped to validate our current system, right? In which the Fed operates as a true central bank with lender of last resort powers and critically with the authority to finance u s government expenditures, right? It literally injects federal spending into the economy. Um, it manages the treasuries account. Um, and it couldn't do that at least as seamlessly as it does if it had not reinvented itself between World Rwanda , the 1930s. And so in the most practical sense, the existing paradigm allows the federal government , um, explains how the , the federal government can manage and at its best sustain the domestic economy. But the big problem with the, again, the Orthodox treatment of this , um, this , um, new paradigm is that it masks again, that it masks the federal states generative power. And this will sound a little bit like a broken record here, but you know, economic orthodoxy insists that the modern fed helps insulate a market for private financial instruments. And at this private market alone drives economic outcomes. Again, in that model, in this model, money's primary task is to circulate private wealth, which is then represented by money tokens , um, to support this reading. Again, Orthodoxy insists upon these two , you know, overarching myths. Again, one money isn't productive. And so then it's issue by a sovereign is not wealth creating, which I'm sorry, that's just, that's just plain goofy. Um, and to , um, that the existence of all this treasury debt and the active trade in that debt, that that is again , so it becomes so central to American , um, finance and policy that these are just kind of conveniences. It's a convenient instrument that enables monetary authorities to make these necessary adjustments to the supply of currency. Again, in this Orthodox view, it didn't know way distorts or does supposedly private market activity. And , and so I think what the Heterodox , um, challenges introduce and MMT has been especially effective at this, is that it helps people recognize first that finance is essential and economically productive, right? Money literally makes production and trade possible. And second, it highlights the central role of monetary sovereigns in sustaining modern monetary systems. Right? And if you put those two together, you get a result. That's really important for understanding, you know, contemporary politics, which is that both federal monetary management and federal spending are essential to making our marketplaces function.
Speaker 4:
46:02
Can you now connect the dots between your central thesis in your first book and what seems to be a key thesis in this book in Progress of yours? It seems like they are homologous and that the second book is kind of zooming out. Um, and um, yeah, I agree. I'm just kinda curious if you have thoughts
Speaker 3:
46:28
about that. I do. I thought that the second book was going to , um, take up like cast the net wider and show the range of ways in which , um, federal financial and credit policies have fundamentally restructured the American economy, especially since the new deal that was the original plan. Um, it was originally going to be a postwar study. Um, I then learned how much there was to learn and to do on the earlier period of my book now, and it's with World War II , um, in part because the, the, the telling the story for the Post War I think is even harder and I'm, I'm in awe of the people who are doing really stunning work , um, in economics and in policy circles and a handful of historians who trying to actually reconstruct the dynamics of the postwar financial system. Um, so, but what it turned into actually is, is something that's both narrower and broader. Maybe this is the answer your question. It's narrower in that it's really just, it's literally just about, you know, in the, in the , um, in the simplest sense, it's about this transformation of , of the Fed and what it did to American money. So it really, it, it drills down much deeper. Um, and like where's the, the first book was really a case study in, you know, mortgage lending. Although the book also veered off into all these other topics about zoning and property law and good stuff like that. Um, this case study is really about the, you know, you and I , and I struggled, I struggled to get people to get excited about mortgage markets. Whoa. Now I get to get them to like, you know, this , I think, oh look, let's talk about the fit . Let's talk about , um, liquidity and how it , ideas about liquidity have changed over time. Shall We? Like you, you know, people's just literally start walking away. Um, so in a , in a sense it's gotten even more obscure, like in terms of the narrower subject, but the , where it's gotten broader is that, I'm trying to highlight how any of these case studies, the case studies in this case, you know, looking at the transformation of , um, the Fed practices and banking and banking practices in this period. In the first book, the case of looking at a , you know, a discrete set of federal programs that financed , um, housing construction . If you look at any of these case studies in context of this fundamental heterodox challenge, right? And in the context of the fact that actually money is debt, it kind of changes everything. So it , you know, in a, in a way it's , um, it's gotten both narrower in a conventional sense. And , uh , but I'm also trying to , um , link it with these first two chapters of the book. Um, wish me luck, which you're going to like, you know, try to sketch out , um, the broad contours of this debate, introduce historians to this stunning , um , tradition of heterodox work in economics and history and sociology, which have documented , um, monies , you know, real world history. Um, and then say, okay, take a deep breath. Now let's look at a familiar story and how can we, and what it asks, ask the reader, what are some other stories? Kind of like your question before about , um, other ways to think about like structures of racial inequality. What are other stories that we can rethink in light of this? Yeah. And it seems to me that both of the books are about an office location and a naturalization of monies designs , Zack , that and that, that, that law that is behind American processes of unjust racialization that is behind so many other , um, problems and possibilities. And I guess in that way, I see this as one larger evolving. Right. That's really nicely put. I appreciate that. And what you've done is articulated a connection that is there in the work, but one that I couldn't or I didn't , I couldn't articulate it in those terms. When I was writing colored property, I knew that there was an [inaudible] going on. I knew it was broadly about, you know, the federal role and credit markets. But what you, what you've identified is in fact the link, which is the mechanisms of monetary creation and debt creation are really at the center of both projects. And yes, I agree. They are , um , at the center, a lot of our , I think they will help us understand a lot about , um , systemic , um, systemic inequality in the modern world. So thank you for that. I appreciate it. Yeah. So what has
Speaker 2:
51:10
working at the intersections of American history and Heterodox Economics , um, how , how has that changed the way you think about the relationships between empirical research on one hand and theory and speculation on the other
Speaker 3:
51:23
[inaudible] that is very interesting. And I'm , I think, I think that the, the lesson I take away from it really applies to tall interdisciplinary work. I, again, I came , um, I came up at a moment of the, the , uh , aggressive cultural turn in the humanities , um, and I was , uh , swimming in that pool and learned a lot from it. Um , but also it became critical of what I saw as some of its excesses, which was often when it sort of , uh, ignored political economy and ignored the social. Um, and the , you know, the lessons I took away from that is that , um, that I'm one of those historians who thinks that good theory is always grounded in evidence. Um, theory is only speculative in that it suggests [inaudible] fresh or maybe hidden interpretive frameworks for understanding social reality. So I think it helps people take interpretive leaps of faith and us to break out of what you could call a hegemonic intellectual constructs. And so the best theoretical work I think on gender, on sexuality, on race is grounded in lived experience and the documentary record. So I used to write about theories of racial difference and I think the best work on that , um, was informed by scholars and by activists who demonstrated historically that there is no thing called race, but rather that there's this constellation of power structures and practices that have invented and reinvented racial categories. Right? They came up with the supportable theory [inaudible] excuse me, because the theory was fashioned out of a documentable past and present. And I think it's the same with economic theory. Heterodox traditions are, for lack of a better term, fact-based and inherently, inherently inductive. I'm in a lot of ways, there are throwback to the days before the marginal revolution in economics when so-called political economists or institutional economists drew upon real world evidence to draw conclusions about economic processes. So not surprisingly, there are much more attentive to the power of institutions. Um, whereas by contrast, neoclassical economics is for the most part of deductive science. It imagines a world of individual consumers who have perfect information. It posits that this world, if it existed, would or if we could achieve it, would operate efficiently and produce resources fairly. And then explains why we don't have it and how we can use policy hopefully to get closer to it. So let me, let me put that another way really briefly. I think we all have theories of how the world works. I don't think their objective or theory free explanations of social phenomenon . Um, and that the task is to use history to determine if your theory is supportable.
Speaker 1:
54:13
Okay .
Speaker 2:
54:14
Oh , I'm sticking with that. Hmm. Speaking of theory just a bit longer, are there any other historians working with other heterodox economic traditions , um, and sort of recognizing the critique of neoclassicism but coming to different conclusions by different paths than , than you are with your work?
Speaker 1:
54:34
[inaudible]
Speaker 2:
54:35
oh yes. There's so, yes, that is a really, really hard question to answer. I'm asking in part because it , it's , it's, it's true I think also in , in , in other fields as well. Like there are, you know, Marxists are autonomous Marxists, different strands of that. And, and I'll, I'll seem to contain a critique of neo classes .
Speaker 3:
54:54
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, I think that, I mean, again, I, I see , um, heterodoxy , um, kind of all over the place. Um, I think that there are , um, long traditions of, again, both activism and scholarship that are basically making the equivalent of , um, hydrox economic analyses . Um, you know, I think back to , um, let me think about that some more, but so there are, there are so many , um, really smart interpretive traditions, some based in Marxist political economy. Some again built in , um , working from institutionalists, the , the kind of institutional economists of the Early 20th in 20 century that have reconstructed some of these stories. Did they, did they put the, did they, you know , um, uh , have a laser focus on, on monetary instruments? No. Um, but I think that they're speaking to , um, the same again, the way that these things are kind of baked in structurally and the way that institutions are basically shaping , um, the allocation of resources. Again, that's a , that's a huge one. It's really, really interesting question. I appreciate it. And I'm afraid I don't have a , a more spot on answer, but there's so many things kind of bounce around in my head about, again, both political and and intellectual traditions that have, that have done that kind of work. So if listeners haven't already recognized,
Speaker 7:
56:24
you've been in dialogue with these largely obstetric obscure schools of heterodox economics for quite a long time now. And um, I was wondering what it , what it's like to see MMT in particular become increasingly relevant and debated in the midst of what seems to us to be a paradigm breakdown specifically for the neoliberal consensus. Right, right .
Speaker 3:
56:48
Yeah. This has been a pretty head spinning time for a lot of us. So I, you know, I began reading , um, explicitly post Kinsey and economists while I was writing colored property. I stumbled upon a book by Robert Gutman . I went to his footnotes and I took it from there. And I've been doing it ever since. Um, and I quickly learned that this was part of a generations old minority report, basically among economists, sociologists and scholars , um, in , in several disciplines. I learned about their runners , the threads. There's some really interesting threads of Hetero, what could be called Heterodox and credit money theory, for example, in classical economics writings. And finally , um, I learned about and became a student of a lot of the posts Kenzie and scholarship that , um, sort of consolidated in the decades after World War II. I have enormous respect for those scholars who stuck with it. And yeah , it goes without saying, I literally could not do this work , um, both without their published work and the fact that they are helping me understand this stuff in real time. Um, and I know both from reading the debates over heterodoxy and from again, discussions with some of its , um, uh , prominent practitioners that they are held in contempt by the mainstream economics profession. I mean, that is not an understatement. Um, but basically they've been keeping alive a tradition of inquiry. And I think recently it made stunning contributions to that tradition, which has the potential to transform the conventional wisdom about the relationship between the public and private sectors. Right. Um, so in some respects, given that long history of sort of, you know, push back and repression of these ideas, it's been a surprise, yes. To see these debates kind of crash into the public sphere in the last year or so . Um, it is fun to be able to tell people who I've bored to tears with discussions on monetary there . Hey, look, why don't you just open a Bloomberg and see this exchange that's going on in there? And this is some of the stuff I've been talking about, but anyway , um, but at the same time it kind of makes sense that it's happened. Um, I think probably for two reasons. First one is a big, a big , uh , sweeping, you know, point about, we know that movements, moments of political and economic crisis have always created openings for dissenting perspectives, right? That's central to understanding progressive victories in US history, for example, right ? You think about the labor movement, racial justice movements, LGBTQ movements, and others. I descending voices are always there and they're usually organizing. All right. Then moments of crisis help those voices gain some leverage. It gives their protest efforts some traction, it creates an opening for more people to rethink. Uh , they're common assumptions, right? It creates that space that I mentioned before, right? When an analytical framework can be challenged and maybe even transformed. And needless to say, we have been in during an economic crisis for a long time and now a crisis of political legitimacy. Um, I think that those things combined has made it possible for a new conversation to about economy, economic and policy alternatives to emerge. The second reason that it's not that much of a surprise is he's , you know, kind of related to that broader story activists and hit her docs . Economists have long been working hard to make these issues a topic of public concern. Right. Um , again, I'm thinking about your other question about, you know, traditions non economists have been exploring what might be called heterodox theory forever, right? Like, it's been central to civil rights organizing. Just take a look at , um, you know, terrain Hamilton's 1967 blind power or the more recently like the mission statements of groups like , um, um, um, uh, uh, BYP, right? Um, is BYP black youth project. Right. Great . I'm sorry, I'm 100 Gabby white people. 100. I mean this , it's so much. It's so, it has always been central to , um , certainly to , um , black organizing. Meanwhile, Hendricks economists especially those associated with APMT have very effectively leveraged the internet and increasingly electoral politics to get people talking about the importance of these supposedly arcane subjects, right. To understanding our contemporary political struggles . So as you know, you know, they, they've been very involved in recent congressional campaigns. Um , Stephanie Kelton's been an advisor to m d was an advisor to , um, uh, Bruni's presidential campaign. So if you put all these ingredients together, right, crisis and all the hard work of descent , it makes sense that Stephanie Kelton and Paul Krugman are duking it out in the pages of bumper. Again, New York Times, or that Randy Ray is being interviewed by major press outlets, which, you know , gives me, you know, so much joy. Um, but it is , it's still very disorienting. Sure. Uh , someone who's been, you know, a student of this for 10 years, those people who've been doing it their entire lives, I'm sure that their like, you know, pinch me. Right. Um, so it's disoriented , disorienting, sure. But I think there's an historical logic to it nonetheless. Well, David, Fran , thank you so much for coming on our show. Thank you so much for having me. It's really a pleasure and I'm , I'm a big fan of your program.
Speaker 1:
1:01:57
[inaudible] I work all day. Pay The deals . Hey Amy . It's sad and steer the nervous seems to be your single penny left for me. Best to bear in my jeans . I have five. The wealthy man [inaudible] around edible [inaudible] . | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
By all accounts, Americans want a more transparent food system. Recent polling suggests the majority of Americans favor labeling that tells them exactly how and where their food is produced. And yet, several bills are currently moving through Congress that could make it much harder to learn about the source of our food.
These bills would prevent state and local governments from requiring labeling of GMOs; remove country-of-origin labeling (COOL) requirements for most of the meat we buy; and make it harder to know where pesticides are used. The international trade agreements now being negotiated also include provisions that could make such information less available to consumers.
The food industry is spending an enormous amount of money to promote and lobby for this legislation. Food companies may have shelled out over $100 million* in the first six months of 2015 alone, according to federal lobbying disclosure reports.
Businesses and trade groups promoting these policies say putting more information on food labels will send the wrong message about food safety, add costs, and pose barriers to trade. And in some cases, they worry it will open U.S. food producers and other companies to punitive import-export taxes.
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But good food advocates disagree. “This is basic transparency,” says Patty Lovera, assistant director of the advocacy group Food & Water Watch. “We’re not saying anything’s unsafe,” says Environmental Working Group (EWG) policy analyst Libby Foley. “We’re saying it’s about consumer choice.”
Here are the numbers the food industry doesn’t want you to see:
GMO Labeling
So far this year, food and beverage companies have spent $51.6 million on a series of lobbying efforts to defeat GMO labeling laws such as the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015 (H.R. 1599), which opponents have dubbed the “Deny Americans the Right to Know” or DARK Act. According to a recent analysis by EWG, nearly a quarter of this money—$12.6 million—comes from just six companies: Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Land O’Lakes, and PepsiCo.
Other big spenders in these efforts include the Grocery Manufacturers Association ($5.1 million); American Farm Bureau (nearly $1 million); and the National Restaurant Association ($2 million). Many state farm bureaus have also chipped in—among them, Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, and Oregon. Big name food producers, including Campbell Soup, Mars, Inc., Mondelez, Nestlé, OceanSpray, Safeway, and Unilever, are all spending significant amounts money on this issue as well.
In addition to direct lobbying of members of the House, Senate, and other federal policy-makers, some of the groups lobbying for H.R. 1599 have come together as the Coalition for Safe Affordable Food, running a consumer-oriented website, as well as television ads and a social media campaign. And the money tallied by EWG was spent specifically on federal lobbying so it doesn’t include the millions spent last fall to defeat state GMO labeling measures—like those in Colorado and Oregon or on the ongoing legal challenge to the GMO-labeling bill passed in Vermont.
H.R. 1599 passed the House on in July. No companion bill has yet been introduced in the Senate.
An additional $4.1 million has been spent so far this year by companies to promote genetically engineered salmon, with most of this coming from the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which is also supporting H.R. 1599. There’s also plenty of lobbying going on to keep GE salmon out of Pacific coast waters, where salmon fishing is big business.
Meat Labeling
Many of the same companies and organizations spending heavily to block GMO labeling requirements have also been lobbying to repeal existing country of origin labeling (COOL) requirements for beef, chicken, and pork through the Country of Origin Labeling Amendments Act of 2015 (H.R. 2393).
Among them are the Grocery Manufacturers Association, Campbell Soup, Cargill, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, and Unilever. They are joined by others in the meat business, including Tyson Foods, Smithfield, Hormel, the National Pork Producers Association, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, as well as Walmart and the big-spending U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Together, the supporters of this bill have spent at least $54.2 million.*
Those spending money to repeal COOL argue that labeling meat with the country of origin would increase costs for producers and therefore for consumers—with the threat that tariffs could be levied against U.S. producers if the labeling is found in violations of World Trade Organization (WTO) provisions.
Canada and Mexico have argued that COOL labels hurt sales of their meat by signaling to U.S. consumers that the product is somehow less safe or desirable. While the Obama administration is defending the existing policy, meat and other food producers fear that if Canada and Mexico prevail, those countries would impose costly tariffs that would harm U.S. exports. H.R. 2393 passed the house in June, but its companion Senate bill, S. 1844 has not yet had a committee hearing.
And a heads up: Provisions in the TTP and TTIP could facilitate similar policies to those of the WTO—making it possible, not only for countries but also individual companies to file objections to labeling if it harms trade.
Pesticides
Yet another bill that would curtail access to agricultural information is the Sensible Environmental Protection Act of 2015 (S. 1500). It would eliminate permits now required to discharge pesticides into rivers, lakes, streams, and other bodies of water regulated under the Clean Water Act.
CropLife America—a trade association for agri-chemical producers and users—explains that the bill is designed to reverse a 2009 federal court decision that directed the EPA to require permits from pesticide applicators who spray over “navigable waters.” Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) has called S.1500 “a far-reaching bill that is dangerous to people” that would “would allow pesticides to be sprayed where kids are swimming, which would expose them to substances that are known to be toxic.”
Pesticide Action Network (PAN) says the bill would remove the EPA’s ability to monitor and take action on waterways contaminated by pesticides. This, said PAN spokesperson Paul Towers, would leave both the EPA and the public “in the dark” and put “the health of waterways and public health in jeopardy.”
Because the bill was just introduced in June, a good accounting of lobbying on its behalf is not yet available through Congressional disclosure filings. But when virtually the same bill was introduced in 2013, it garnered support from agribusinesses and agricultural organizations and trade associations including the American Farm Bureau, CropLife America, Agricultural Retailers Association, Missouri Farm Bureau, Monsanto, North Carolina Farm Bureau, National Council of Farmer Co-ops, and the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association. These groups spent more than $11 million lobbying for the bill during 2013 and 2014.
The fate of all these bills is uncertain given the limited time before Congress adjourns for the year. But given how contentious these issues have become—and what food producers and agribusinesses perceive as high financial stakes—it’s unlikely that they will disappear.
One note of optimism for transparency-in-food-production advocates, but disappointment for Idaho dairy groups, is the ruling earlier this month by the U.S. District Court in Idaho striking down the state’s so-called “ag-gag” law—formally the “Agricultural Security Act” that made illegal undercover documentation of farming operations. Citing First Amendment free speech protections, Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled the bill unconstitutional.
So where does this leave consumers? Right now, the only way to be sure the food you buy doesn’t contain genetically engineered foods is to seek out the USDA’s certified organic and Non-GMO Project‘s GMO-free label. As for meat and fish—if it is not cooked or prepared before it reaches store shelves, its country of origin is probably still labeled. But that could change. And if the new trade agreements go into effect, these and other labeling provisions could be open to challenge.
Meanwhile a sizable fortune is being spent trying to keep this information off food labels. “This has turned into a bigger fight than either side anticipated,” says EWG’s Foley. And that may be one point on which both sides can agree.
*This estimate is based on lobbying expenditures listed on disclosure forms filed with the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Secretary of the U.S. Senate and compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. It is only a partial accounting as this represents spending by 20 of the approximately 100 members of the COOL Reform Coalition that signed a June 8 letter to Congress voicing support for H.R. 2393. This is the same source—and method—that EWG used to estimate spending to oppose GMO labeling bills.
* Because of the limitations of the Lobbying Disclosure Act, the numbers in this post are all estimates. | {
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Hawk eyes:
A blue sheet:
Fort Knox:
The history:
Why keep it secret?
NEW DELHI: The secret mission started on Monday as the Narendra Modi government got down to prepare its first budget of its second term. North Block , which houses the finance ministry, will be in 'quarantine' from today (out of bounds for visitors and media) until the presentation of the budget on July 5.During the 'quarantine' period, all the entry and exit points of the ministry will be guarded by security personnel while the Intelligence Bureau personnel, assisted by Delhi police, will keep a close watch on the movements of those entering the rooms of officials involved in the Budget-making process. Electronic sweeping devices have been installed and private e-mail facilities to most computers in the ministry blocked.A secret sheet known as Blue Sheet (as the colour of the sheet is blue) is maintained during the budget preparation process and contains the key economic numbers that form the basis for the budget's calculations and is updated as new data come in. It's one of the biggest secrets of all the budget's elements. Only the joint secretary (budget) is given custody of the secret paper and not even the finance minister is allowed to take it outside the ministry premises.It gets even more secretive when the printing of budget papers starts. During this two-week period, those who oversee the printing aren't even allowed to go home, remaining sequestered within the North Block basement area where the presses are kept. To prevent any cyber theft, the computers inside the press area are delinked from the National Informatics Centre (NIC) servers. By the way, leaking of budget documents is punishable under the Officials Secrets Act.While an element of secrecy was there in almost all Union budgets, it became even more stringent after a certain portion was leaked in 1950 when the printing of the budget used to take place at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The same year, the printing venue was moved to a government press in Minto Road and then since 1980, the basement in North Block has become the place for budget printing.Some experts say that this level of secrecy isn't needed given that major government announcements including indirect tax rates (GST) are not part of the budget anymore. In some countries, the budget is put in the public domain up to three months before it is presented. But then the meticulous secrecy is also a well-preserved British legacy like the budget briefcase that the finance minister carries on the budget day. | {
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In a video reportedly obtained by The Sun, an American Army commander makes a startling admission in what’s been referred to as the U.K.’s Roswell incident.
The Rendlesham Forest incident, as its known, took place in December 1980 near Suffolk. Army staff stationed in the area reported seeing a metallic triangle that seemed to be dripping a molten metallic substance. They also saw a light that looked like a large red eye. The sighting was documented via voice, and the senior soldiers also drew images afterward of what they had seen.
In recently uncovered video footage, former base commander Charles Halt admits to the possibility that it was a true UFO encounter. The footage comes from a 2010 documentary on the Rendlesham Forest incident that never ended up airing. In the video, Halt says that the two personnel involved, Staff Sgt. Jim Penniston and Airman John Burroughs, “may have been abducted.” They were “unaccounted for” for hours. The statements seem speculative, merely admitting the possibility of a UFO encounter.
However, given recent developments in the UFO realm, it doesn’t seem as crazy as it may have in the past. The Pentagon recently admitted to having a secret UFO program, the $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which looked into reports of unidentified flying objects from 2007–2012 (and perhaps still does so today). As many on Twitter pointed out, in a year of strange government moves and resulting headlines, this was one of the more tame government revelations of 2017.
Many UFO incidents have ended up having completely logical explanations, though. In the Rendlesham Forest incident, for example, evidence of the UFO’s landing on the ground was said to be simple rabbit holes. And a November UFO over Southern California turned out to be a test launch of a Trident II missile by the U.S. Navy.
Still, maybe it’s appropriate to dig out that old X-Files “I Want to Believe” poster again.
H/T Metro.co.uk | {
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I’m glad to share a new project called Python for Android. The goal of this project is to package your python application into an APK.
https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android
The project is under the umbrella of Kivy organization, but is not designed to be limited to Kivy only. Read the documentation to correctly install the NDK/SDK Android, and set the needed environment variables.
The packaging is done in 4 steps:
1. Ensure you have Android SDK/NDK downloaded and correctly installed
2. Ensure you have some environment set
3. Create a Python distribution containing the selected modules
4. Use that distribution to build an APK of your Python application
Creating the python distribution is as simple as that:
# create a simple distribution with python + PIL + Kivy ./distribute.sh -m "pil kivy" # create a distribution with python + openssl + pil + kivy ./distribute.sh -m "openssl pil kivy"
A directory dist/default will be created, including the result of the whole arm compilation.
Available libraries as for today: jpeg pil png sdl sqlite3 pygame kivy android libxml2 libxslt lxml ffmpeg openssl.
The second step is a little bit harder, since you need to provide more information for Android:
cd dist/default ./build.py --package org.test.touchtracer --name touchtracer \ --version 1.0 --dir ~/code/kivy/examples/demo/touchtracer debug installd # --package: java name of your application # --name: title of your application # --version: version of your application # --dir: location of your application containing the main.py
Then you’ll get a nicely bin/touchtracer-1.0-debug.apk
Pro:
A blacklist.txt file that can be used to exclude files in the final APK
Reusable distribution for other applications
Modular recipes architecture
Be able to build independents python distributions
Cons:
You need a main.py file that will be used for starting your application
Only one java bootstrap available, using OpenGL ES 2.0.
Only Kivy toolkit is working. I’m sure that other people can enhance it to add other toolkit recipes. But for example, pygame is not gonna to work because the android project is OpenGL ES 2.0: pygame drawing will not work.
I hope you’ll like it 🙂
We would like to thank Renpy / PGS4A for its initial pygame for android project | {
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(Reuters) - Tesla Inc TSLA.O Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk indicated in a tweet on Sunday that the electric carmaker received 200,000 orders for its electric pickup truck within three days of its launch.
Musk, who has been regularly tweeting about the Cybertruck’s features since its launch late Thursday, has also been updating his followers with the number of orders the company has received.
In an earlier tweet, Musk said the company had received 146,000 orders for Cybertruck, and tweeted again on Sunday saying “200K” - an apparent reference to the number of orders.
The company’s website shows that an immediate payment of $100 is required to reserve an order for the Cybertruck, which has a starting price of $39,900.
The launch of its futuristic pickup on Thursday suffered a setback when the electric vehicle’s “armored glass” windows shattered in a much-anticipated unveiling. The overall look of the electric vehicle had worried Wall Street on Friday, driving the automaker’s shares to close 6.1% lower.
During the launch, Musk had taken aim at the design, power and durability of mainstream trucks, only to be shaken when his boast about his new vehicle’s windows backfired.
Separately, Musk said the Cybertruck is Tesla’s last product unveil for a while.
Tesla plans to start manufacturing the Cybertruck around late-2021. | {
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Bryan Alexander
USA TODAY
The filmmakers behind The Lego Movie have created a hair diva.
Grant Freckelton, production designer for the animated hit, reveals all in this Blu-Ray/DVD extra. He says that his team tried out 150 hair designs for the lead character, Emmet. Those are Jennifer Lopez-type numbers.
Directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord wanted to make sure they got the right look for the regular-guy hero.
"Chris and Phil loved the first version we did," Freckelton says. "It was Emmet who kept changing things."
Those Hollywood stars — they are so plastic.
Emmet ended up with a look that featured a noticeable double-pronged cowlick. | {
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It sounds too good to be true, and there are certainly reasons to be skeptical. There's a working prototype (needed by the US patent office), but we've yet to see a practical demonstration -- we've asked for one and will let you know if we get it. Also, Radient is planning to license the concept to device makers, rather than designing physical components it can sell. It's easy to promise a revolutionary product if you're not the one who has to mass-manufacture millions of units. If the reality comes anywhere close to the hype, though, the invention will either extend the battery life of phones or allow for smaller batteries without taking a hit to longevity. | {
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As the Standing Rock Sioux tribe was mounting opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline last spring, the pipeline company told federal officials that its final route skirting the reservation would not impact any minority or impoverished community.
A confidential environmental justice analysis comparing the original proposed route north of Bismarck and the final one upstream of the Standing Rock reservation was sent by Dakota Access LLC employees to senior officials at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Its counterintuitive findings appear to have been largely incorporated into the Corps' final environmental assessment of the Standing Rock route last July, but weren't given to the tribe or made public.
The 11-page memo, made available through court records, concludes that the pipeline's original path near Bismarck would have "more direct and more disproportionate" impacts to minorities. Those communities surrounding Bismarck are 96 percent white and only 2 percent of residents live below the poverty line.
Standing Rock by contrast ranks as one of the nation's poorest communities. The project will run just over a half-mile upstream of the reservation under Lake Oahe, a Missouri River reservoir used by the tribe for drinking water, irrigation and fish. Three-quarters of its population is Native American and 40 percent of its 8,200 people live in poverty.
The "route does not disproportionately affect low-income or impoverished populations," the memo said.
The document gets at the heart of the issues in ongoing lawsuits and demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline, which opponents believe was unjustly sited near the reservation.
"They've gerrymandered the things they are comparing in the analysis to reach an absurd result, which is that the selection of the Oahe crossing instead of the Bismarck route doesn't have environmental justice implications," according to Jan Hasselman, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice. The organization is suing the Army Corps and Dakota Access on behalf of the Standing Rock tribe.
The main complaint is that the company excluded the reservation from the analysis as a result of how it chose census tract data.
"It seems that the analysis and methodology that was set up was designed intentionally to somehow minimize and mask the impacts of this project on the Standing Rock community," said Robert Bullard, dean of Texas Southern University's School of Public Affairs who is known as the "father of environmental justice."
The memo is dated April 12, 2016, less than one month after the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies raised serious environmental justice and other objections to the Standing Rock route. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), agencies must consider environmental justice implications of major infrastructure projects.
"I have not seen anything like this," said JoAnn Chase, director of the EPA's American Indian Environmental Office under President Obama, referring to the Army Corps' use of a confidential analysis. "This seems to run counter to everything that I believe is part of an informed process."
The Interior Department's top lawyer, solicitor Hilary Tompkins, issued a legal opinion in early December opposing the use of the memo in the analysis.
"The United States cannot fulfill its trust responsibility if it makes decisions with such potentially significant impacts on tribal treaty rights based on confidential, adversarial analysis that the opposing tribe cannot independently review," Tompkins wrote.
The Trump administration suspended that opinion in February as it prepared to approve the pipeline and halt additional review.
Dakota Access LLC and the Army Corps declined to comment.
Geography as Destiny
While there is no universal methodology for carrying out demographic analyses for infrastructure projects, the company's approach is controversial. It considered census tract data within a half-mile radius of where the pipeline's boreholes are being drilled to cross the Missouri River.
When applying that distance to the Lake Oahe route, two census tracts fell into consideration. The Standing Rock reservation was not one of them because it falls just outside that half-mile circle, but it's just another 80 yards, or 0.05 miles, further from the construction. The "impacted" two tracts, largely upstream of the project, are almost entirely white and more affluent than people living on the reservation. The EPA had warned that a spill could especially affect water supplies of Standing Rock and other communities downstream, and that the environmental justice analysis should reflect that.
"They put [the pipeline] 0.55 miles upstream of one of the poorest communities in America that is overwhelmingly Native American and then say there is nothing within 0.5 miles that we need to worry about," Hasselman said.
Bullard said there was no justification for using the half-mile radius for the Lake Oahe crossing.
"There is nothing to say that this is standard procedure and is acceptable in the literature, methodology and design," he said. "And even if it were the case, common sense would say look 80 yards down the road, there is a community that would be your prototype environmental justice community, a reservation."
In its analysis of the original pipeline route, which would have been constructed under the Missouri River 10 miles north of Bismarck, the pipeline company considered data from census tracts that pass through the construction site and extend 10 miles or more downstream to communities surrounding the city of Bismarck.
Dakota Access has said it rejected the Bismarck route for a number of factors, including more road and wetland crossings, a longer pipeline, higher costs and close proximity to wellheads providing Bismarck's drinking water supply. The environmental justice finding reinforced its conclusion, the memo said.
The Army Corps' final environmental assessment from July (which was the project's approval) does not cite the memo but only a prior case in which a half-mile radius was used to analyze a liquified natural gas project. Attorneys for the tribe have said that in comparison the environmental justice assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline used a distance of 14 miles downstream from where it crossed waterways.
The Council on Environmental Quality, a federal agency that offers guidance to other agencies on environmental analyses, states, "the selection of the appropriate unit of geographic analysis may be a governing body's jurisdiction, neighborhood, census tract or other similar unit that is to be chosen so as to not artificially dilute or inflate the affected minority population." It calls for special consideration to be given to Native American tribes.
A Not-So-Public Analysis
Chase, formerly of the EPA's American Indian Environmental Office, said she has seen a number of controversial environmental justice assessments, but the underlying documents were public and the assessment's conclusions always subject to public comment. That way, outside experts, including those from other federal agencies and affected communities, could weigh in to help shape the final analysis, she said.
Chase, who had not seen the confidential assessment prior to her resignation from the EPA on Jan. 20, said it raises questions about the permitting process.
"Did the Army Corps rely on this?" she asked.
Hasselman told ICN the tribe didn't receive a copy of the document until November, when it was entered into the administrative record by the Army Corps in the tribe's lawsuit against the agency and the pipeline company.
According to the memo, the company said its analysis was not intended to be included with the environmental assessment, a public document, but should instead be considered "supplemental information" that could be referenced as a "confidential addendum." It said it should be confidential because information it contained, including water intake locations and plume travel times, are not information that is made public.
In the final weeks of President Obama's tenure, the administration halted construction of the crossing beneath Lake Oahe to carry out a more rigorous environmental review, including considering an alternative route away from Standing Rock. President Trump's Army Corps approved the final easement on Feb. 7, however, ending that review. Construction is running ahead of schedule.
The pipeline, which will pump crude oil 1,200 miles from North Dakota to Illinois, could begin operations as early as this month.
Standing Rock and other Native American opponents continue to try to block the project's completion. There are four ongoing lawsuits including one by landowners in Iowa, all seen as longshots.
Hasselman said the memo could play a role in the legal battle against the Army Corps. He has already used it to argue that the Army Corps failed to give proper consideration to environmental justice in its favorable assessment from July.
"The memo reveals how thin the support is," Hasselman said. "This is the kind of thing that should have been subject to the light of day so other agencies, the public, and the Tribe could have seen it and commented on it. Instead, the whole thing took place behind a curtain." | {
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Andrew Anglin
Daily Stormer
September 19, 2016
Just ran across a weird YouTube channel. White British guy married to a Black woman, they’re carrying a baby around the world.
I’m not really triggered by miscegenation if the mixer is a male, because it doesn’t really make any difference, biologically. With a woman, there is a lot of anger, because it’s OUR WOMB – that’s right, it doesn’t belong to her, it belongs to the males in her society – that is being used to produce an enemy soldier. Our race isn’t going to run out of sperm any time soon, so when it’s a man doing it, it’s just sort of like “lolwut?”
I mean, it’s that way with a Black woman. When you see White men with Asian women it’s just like “oh he’s beta” or “oh he just can’t take it anymore.”
But a Black woman?
What is this?
Is it just some kind of weird fetish?
Or is it like, he’s so cucked that he feels like he’s gotta signal super-hard to show how much better he is than his peers by creating and raising a monkey child? Is it to seem more interesting? Maybe he’s playing the long game, so that like, in the future when his son is committing robbery and rape, he can be like “oh my god, it’s because of racism” and people will feel sorry for him?
He’s not bad looking. And he’s got money to fly around the world for this YouTube channel.
So what’s the deal?
I guess it’s so rare that it is just some sort of weird thing that is going to happen based on the number of people there are.
There’s a movie coming out soon about the legalization of mixed-race marriages in Virginia. The case that the Jew ACLU lawyer used to get it passed was a WMBF relationship. Jews are clever like that. There is virtually no chance that a BMWF marriage ever would have made it through. But since it was a White guy with a Black woman, no one was really that angry, they were just like “huh?”
Men who produce children with non-Whites should absolutely be mocked and ostracized. And it shouldn’t be legal. Although when we take over the system, it won’t even be possible, unless these guys want to fly to Africa to do it, because they’re all going back. But it doesn’t trigger the same visceral reaction when you see it, because in terms of the survival of the race, it doesn’t make any difference if some men go have kids with non-Whites. It is, however, gross and weird.
But yeah, when you see women with non-Whites, it’s a biological response that you’re having. It’s the same response that creates white knighting, and this whole idea of “women and children first.” Women’s eggs are infinitely more valuable than men’s sperm. So there is an inborn drive in men to constantly protect women. And when you see them with non-Whites, you immediately respond negatively.
A recent study – which I’ve been meaning to write about for several days now – found that people have an instinctual trigged reaction to interracial couples. Interestingly, all the examples they give are non-White male with White female. It would be interesting to see the difference between the tests if they included the gender of the couples (I’d also be interested in the differences in the responses of the males vs those of the females involved in the tests).
The article is entitled ” Most say they’re okay with interracial marriage, but could the brain tell a different story?” It’s a TOP KEK when the liberals admit this stuff is biological and then imply we have to somehow change biology with brainwashing.
The Conversation:
Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision ruling bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional. While the ruling in Loving v. Virginia (1967) was controversial at the time – in 1958 just 4 percent of Americans approved of marriages “between white and colored people” – today polls indicate that most Americans (87 percent) accept interracial marriage. Yet incidents of overt prejudice – even violence – against interracial couples keep cropping up. In April, a Mississippi landlord evicted a family after he found out the couple was interracial. Then, this past summer, a man stabbed an interracial couple after seeing them kiss in public.
Both incidents were BMWF.
As a social psychologist, I’ve often wondered: are these types of incidents aberrations? Or are they indicative of a persistent, underlying bias against interracial couples – something not captured by self-reported polls? To test this, my colleague Caitlin Hudac and I designed a series of studies to examine how people really feel about interracial relationships. Insights from the insula Through the early 20th century, many Americans reacted to the idea of interracial marriage with revulsion. For example, Abigail Adams reportedly said that “disgust and horror” filled her mind when she saw dark-skinned Othello touch pale-skinned Desdemona in the theatrical production of Othello. Yet even though attitudes have supposedly changed, contemporary commentary on interracial marriage will still refer to a “gag reflex” that some people continue to feel – as The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen noted a few years ago. This feeling – disgust – is the one we decided to zero in on. First we asked a predominately white sample of college students to report how disgusted they feel by interracial relationships between blacks and whites. We also had the participants tell us how accepting they were of interracial relationships between blacks and whites. Consistent with polling data, we found that participants claimed to be largely accepting of interracial relationships. We also found that disgust and acceptance were highly correlated; the less accepting people were of interracial relationships, the more disgusted they were by them. The problem with asking people to report on their own attitudes about sensitive topics like race and gender, however, is that people are often either unaware of their own biases or unwilling to report them. For example, although most white Americans self-report little to no racial bias against black people, they’ve been shown to possess robust implicit, or nonconscious, biases.
That link is to another study that proves racism is biological.
To get around this problem, we conducted a second study in which we measured participants’ brain activity – not their own reports. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain, we recorded the brain waves of a predominately white sample of college students while they viewed 100 images of black-white interracial couples and an equal number of same-race couples (black and white). We wanted to see what would happen in an area of the brain known as the insula, which has been shown to become activated when people feel disgust. In other words, would the insula of participants light up when viewing interracial couples? We found exactly that: overall, participants showed a heightened level of activation in the insula when looking at interracial couples relative to looking at same-race couples. Although the insula is not exclusively linked to disgust, taken with the results of our first study these findings suggest that people do tend to be more likely to experience disgust when viewing interracial couples.
So basically, everything that you think and feel is a result of your biology. It’s a strange feeling to be consciously aware of that. Totally meta, brah. But it will help you in your life if you are consciously aware of it, keep you in control of yourself. | {
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Sean Connery was the first actor to portray James Bond in the EON produced 007 films, and the Scot has been living the Bond Lifestyle ever since, from taking residence in the Bahamas and playing golf wearing his Slazenger sweater to driving a fast BMW. Connery also lend his image to promote Louis Vuitton, several whisky brands, and Citroën cars.
Bahamas
Although he proudly is a Scotsman and a strong supporter of (an independent) Scotland, Sir Sean Connery has taken up residence in sunnier (and more tax-friendly) places, most notably in the Bahamas. Connery lives in the plush Lyford Cay neighbourhood on New Providence Island, surrounded on three sides by Clifton Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.
The Bahamas is a classic Bond location: many Bond scenes have been filmed here, including for Thunderball (1964) and Never Say Never Again (1983) both starring Connery, Licence To Kill (1989) and Casino Royale (2006) and subaquatic scenes were filmed for You Only Live Twice (1965), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), For Your Eyes Only (1981) and The World Is Not Enough (1999).
Louis Vuitton
Combining two Bond elements, celebrity photographer Annie Leibowitz shot a Louis Vuitton campaign on the Bahamas with Sir Sean himself posing on a dock with a Louis Vuitton bag.
The caption of the ad reads:
There are journeys that turn into legends. Bahamas Islands. 10:07
Sir Sean Connery and Louis Vuitton are proud to support The Climate Project.
Other celebrities that participated in the campaign include Madonna (who also performed the title song for Die Another Day), Keith Richards, Sofia and Francis Ford Coppola and Bono.
See some footage of Connery and Leibowitz in this "Making of" video below:
James Bond has been using Louis Vuitton bags in several movies, for example some suitcases in The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) and the bags and suitcases in A View To A Kill (1985).
Marbella, Spain
Sean Connery lived in Marbella, a town in the south of Spain, for many years from the early 1980s until 1999. He enjoyed playing golf on one of many courses in the sunny area and relaxing in the luxury villa near the ocean.
See more images of Connery in his Marbella home in 1983 on Corbis.
Connery sold his villa in Marbella in 1999, after which 72 luxury apartments were built on the spot, getting him involved in a real estate fraud scandal. In 2014 the Spanish court said there was no evidence Connery had been involved in any illegal real estate dealings and dismissed all charges against him, but 50 others were convicted. Many other celebrities own properties in Marbella, George Clooney recently acquired a house in the seaside town.
BMW
James Bond may have only discovered BMW in GoldenEye (1995), but original Bond Sir Sean Connery is said to have owned a BMW 635 CSi when he lived in Marbella in the 1980s and 1990s.
Through an eBay auction in 2008 it became known that Sean Connery's vehicle of choice was an Alpine white BMW 635 CSi with blue leather interior.
According to the eBay seller, Connery was the first and only owner and drove it around in the Costa del Sol from 1986 to 1997. At the time Connery owned a house in Marbella. The seller acquired the car at an auction in London in 1998. The Spanish Registration Document apparently proves the BMW was Connery's (although this brings to mind the Seinfeld scene about Jon Voight's LeBaron). The BMW sold on eBay for only £7,212. If anyone knows the whereabouts of this car today and can show the original paperwork, please send a message.
Golf
Even though Connery grew up in Scotland (a country famous for the many old golf courses), Sean Connery's love for the golf didn't start until he played the game for the movie Goldfinger (1964).
"I never had a hankering to play golf, despite growing up in Scotland just down the road from Bruntsfield Links, which is one of the oldest golf courses in the world. It wasn’t until I was taught enough golf to look as though I could outwit the accomplished golfer Gert Fröbe in Goldfinger that I got the bug. I began to take lessons on a course near Pinewood film studios and was immediately hooked on the game. Soon it would nearly take over my life." says Connery in his autobiography Being a Scot.
The golf opportunities in the sunny South of Spain was one of the reasons he lived in Marbella for many years. Connery played several celebrity games, for example Bing Crosby’s showbusiness amateur teams against professional golfers in America and the Michael Jordan celebrity tournament in 2005 on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.
Slazenger
In the movie Goldfinger, Sean Connery famously wears a burgundy Slazenger v-neck sweater, but it is not well known that he also wore Slazenger sweaters later in his life while playing golf.
The burgundy Slazenger sweater was recently reissued by Slazenger heritage - get it exclusively at the official Slazenger Heritage website (use code JBLSH10 to get 10% off).
Recently more colors of the sweater were released, including one in Marl Grey, a color worn by Sean Connery, also available on Slazenger Heritage (use code JBLSH10 to get 10% off). Several other famous golf players including Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller wore Slazenger golf sweaters.
Whisky
With so many great Scottish whisky brands and Connery being so proud of his Scottish heritage, it is curious that Connery has mostly promoted whisky from other countries. At the time of You Only Live Twice, Connery appeared in ads for the American bourbon brand Jim Beam.
In the early 1990s Connery promoted the Japanese whisky Suntory (a whisky actually consumed by Bond in You Only Live Twice). Read more about Suntory whisky (and about Bill Murray's James Bond impression) in this article.
In 2004, Connery finally lends his image to Scotch whisky, in the Dewar's 12 Special Reserve campaign called "Some age, others mature". The commercial features the younger Sean Connery as James Bond meeting an older Sean Connery recommending him a Dewar's.
Citroën
Another commercial where a young and old Connery are combined is for French carmaker Citroën. Shots of a young and an old Sean Connery are mixed with either a Citroen C5 and a C6.
Although not particularly a Bond car, a famous Citroën was seen in a James Bond film: a yellow 2CV owned by Melina Havelock in For Your Eyes Only (1981).
Sources: CarPictures, The Telegraph, SeanConneryOnline, Anthony Sinclair, BBC, TheLocal.es | {
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Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
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Police were left with a £300 clean-up bill after a prisoner pleasured himself in a cell and defecated in a police station shower.
Reginald Roach had been arrested on November 16 over another offence and was in custody at Caernafon police station.
While being held, he defecated in the shower in the custody suite, forcing the police to have to bring in professional cleaners.
He also pleasured himself in a cell, meaning cleaners had to be brought in again, and urinated in one during the time he was being held at Llandudno magistrates court.
In total, the bill for cleaning up after him ran to more than £310.
Roach, of Market Street in Holyhead , had denied a charge of spitting at a custody officer, but changed his plea just before he was due up before magistrates in Caenarfon on Friday morning.
Magistrates were told by prosecutor Angharad Mullarkey that a detention officer, Adam Lavender, had gone to check on Roach at around 4.30am on November 19.
When he looked through the hatch on the cell door Roach spat at him. The saliva landed on Mr Lavender's shoulder.
Defence counsel Ryan Rothwell said Roach had pleaded guilty to some of the charges at an early stage and accepted he had committed the other offences before trial.
He added Roach suffered from mental health issues and was receiving treatment.
The court heard Roach was also in breach of a conditional discharge imposed last March following an incident in Holyhead, when he was seen to approach the Labour party offices in Thomas Street with a tin of white paint which he threw at the building.
He was handed a four week jail term for this incident to be served concurrently with the 20 week sentence he was given for the damage to the cells and spitting at the custody officer.
Roach was also ordered to pay £115 victim surcharge but no order of costs or compensation was made.
After the hearing, Caernarfon Custody Sergeant Rhys Gough said: “Roach’s behaviour is totally unacceptable.
"We will not tolerate assaults and police officers and will always seek to prosecute those responsible as we are determined to enforce our commitment to protect the protectors." | {
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A former burial ground thought to contain the remains of slaves has been identified on a Louisiana property where a massive plastic production complex is sited to be built. Human remains along with evidence of grave shafts were identified on land in the St. James Parish where a subsidiary of the Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics Group intends to build 14 facilities to produce plastic bottles, bags, car casings, and synthetic turf, among other products. Many residents of the area, known as “Cancer Alley,” already oppose the construction of the almost 2,400-acre complex on the west side of the Mississippi River on the grounds that it will double the dangerous amount of toxic chemicals in their air and emit more than 13 million tons of carbon pollution each year, making it the biggest new source of greenhouse gas emissions from a petrochemical plant since at least 2012. The discovery of the burial site adds another layer to their outrage. “That’s sacred ground,” said Sharon Lavigne, 67, of the plot now covered with sugar cane where people were laid to rest years ago. Lavigne has lived in the area all her life and founded the community group RISE St. James last year to combat the presence of polluting industrial facilities in the parish. “They’re saying they don’t care about your ancestors. They’re slapping us in the face.”
Like many other African American residents in the area, Lavigne believes that she is the descendant of slaves who worked on nearby plantations. Yet because of the lack of documentation of the lives — and deaths — of enslaved people, she doesn’t know the specifics of where they labored or were buried. St. James resident Gail Leboeuf was able to track down the grave of only one of her grandparents. She found out that her maternal grandmother was buried on the former Monroe plantation, which is now occupied by a Shell Refinery. She visited the site last year when an African American museum held a ceremony to honor the people buried there. Because some of the graves were marked with stones, it seems likely that they were dug after the Civil War. While it brought some relief to know where her grandmother was laid to rest, Leboeuf said she found it galling that a giant petrochemical company is at once polluting the area and restricting access to her family’s remains. “My grandmother wasn’t a slave. But she’s a slave now on the Shell plantation.” In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Shell acknowledged that there are two cemeteries on Shell’s property adjacent to the refinery and said that “for the safety and security of both visitors and the agricultural farmers on the adjacent property, visitors are asked to contact the Refinery for access to the property for visitation. Since Shell dedicated the cemeteries nearly two years ago, there has not been a single person denied access to visit.” In an emailed response to questions from The Intercept, Janile Parks, Director of Community and Government Relations for FG LA LLC, a subsidiary of Formosa Plastics, wrote that “Upon confirmation of the Buena Vista burial site’s location, and per direction from [State Historic Preservation Office], FG fenced in the identified area to protect it. Pending permit approvals and throughout project construction, FG will remain in compliance with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, SHPO and all other applicable state and federal requirements to ensure the site remains protected.” Parks also wrote that “FG is respectful of the historical burial ground on its property and remains committed to cooperating with the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) to protect it. In regard to the Buena Vista site and the possible Acadia site, FG has worked with the proper state and regulatory authorities every step of the way and will continue to do so.”
Sharon Lavigne, center, the director of RISE St. James, sits with her brother, Milton Cayette Jr., at Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality’s public hearing on whether to approve the 15 air permits for Taiwanese company Formosa Plastics in Vacherie, La., on July 9, 2019. Photo: Julie Dermansky
The records of the slaveowners are far more clear. The giant chemical complex, which Formosa is calling the Sunshine Project, is to be built on several former plantations, including Acadia, whose long series of white owners is traceable through land use records, and Buena Vista, where the number of hogs that Benjamin Winchester and his wife, Carmelite Constant Winchester, raised in the 1840s was carefully documented (between 600 and 700). The burial site is on what was the Buena Vista plantation and was confirmed in a June report written by an environmental consultant hired by Formosa Plastics Group called TerraXplorations Inc. and obtained through the Texas public records law by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal group that is representing RISE St. James. The consulting company did an archaeological investigation of two sites on the Formosa property and found that the Buena Vista cemetery contained evidence of four human remains, eight potential grave shafts, and 14 posts or post holes. Among the objects found at the site were bones (including a crushed skull), wood fragments, and coffin nails. The consulting company did not find human remains on the other site and concluded that any possible burials there “have been destroyed by previous land use activities.” Because there are records of the plantations’ owners being buried elsewhere, the people who were buried at the Buena Vista cemetery are thought to be the slaves who worked on the plantations. While the report confirmed the existence of the burial site in June, a consultant for the Formosa Plastics Group appears to have known that cemeteries of enslaved people were likely on the site as early as July 2018, according to emails the Center for Constitutional Rights obtained from the Louisiana Division of Archaeology. That month, an archaeologist for Cox/McLain Environmental Consulting Inc., which was serving as a consultant to Formosa, emailed with Louisiana State Archaeologist Charles McGimsey about a 1877-1878 map the state had obtained from an independent researcher that showed evidence of two burial grounds on the Formosa site. In August 2018, an attorney for Jones Walker named Marjorie McKeithen who was representing Formosa laid out two possible options for the company, according to the emails. The company could fence off the area and mark it with a plaque to prevent any further construction disturbance or remove the human remains and relocate them to another cemetery. McKeithen acknowledged that fencing off the area “would mean that portions of the planned Utilities Plant may have to be relocated, which makes this a very difficult option” for Formosa. In comments submitted to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality on Wednesday, the Center for Constitutional Rights argued on behalf of RISE St. James that prior knowledge of the burial site — and the fact that Formosa didn’t share it with community members or the St. James Parish Planning Commission, which approved Formosa’s land use application in 2018 — is justification for the state environmental agency to deny Formosa the 15 final permits the company needs to begin construction of the complex. The comments submitted to LDEQ raised concerns that there are additional burial grounds on the Formosa site. If there are — and they were destroyed by the construction of the plastics complex — “it would cause immense, irreversible harm to the human dignity of historically enslaved people and would be an unforgivable affront to their descendants and communities in the region, including RISE St. James.” The Center for Constitutional Rights demanded that LDEQ deny Formosa’s permit applications, thoroughly investigate the possibility of additional slave burial grounds on the site, and attempt to identify the human remains that have been found “as custodians of the legacy of locally enslaved people and carriers of their remarkable stories of survival and unbreakable human dignity against unspeakable odds.”
“The vast majority of the industrial facilities in ‘Cancer Alley’ are on the grounds of former plantations.” | {
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A reader named Darren commented on my last post:
I have this feeling that this whole P and NP thing is not only a profound problem that needs solving, but something that can be infinitely curious to try and wrap your mind around… Thing is- there’s a whole world of great minded, genius hackers out here that can’t understand one iota of what anyone is talking about. We’re not your traditional code-savvy hackers; we’re your inventors, life hackers, researchers, scientists… and I think I can speak for most of us when I say: We would love to take the time to really dive into this thread, but we ask that someone (you) write a blog that breaks this whole thing down into a rest-of-the-world-friendly P/NP for dummies… or at least explain it to us like we’re stupid as hell… at this point I’m really okay with even that.
I’m of course the stupid one here, for forgetting the folks like Darren who were enticed by L’Affaire Deolalikar into entering our little P/NP tent, and who now want to know what it is we’re hawking.
The short answer is: the biggest unsolved problem of theoretical computer science, and one of the deepest questions ever asked by human beings! Here are four informal interpretations of the P vs. NP problem that people give, and which I can endorse as capturing the spirit of what’s being asked:
Are there situations where brute-force search—that is, trying an exponential number of possibilities one-by-one, until we find a solution that satisfies all the stated constraints—is essentially the best algorithm possible?
Is there a fast algorithm to solve the NP-complete problems—a huge class of combinatorial problems that includes scheduling airline flights, laying out microchips, optimally folding proteins, coloring maps, packing boxes as densely as possible, finding short proofs of theorems, and thousands of other things that people in fields ranging from AI to chemistry to economics to manufacturing would like to solve? (While it’s not obvious a priori, it’s known that these problems are all “re-encodings” of each other. So in particular, a fast algorithm for any one of the problems would imply fast algorithms for the rest; conversely, if any one of them is hard then then they all are.)
Is it harder to solve a math problem yourself than to check a solution by someone else? [[This is where you insert a comment about the delicious irony, that P vs. NP itself is a perfect example of a monstrously-hard problem for which we could nevertheless recognize a solution if we saw one—and hence, part of the explanation for why it’s so hard to prove P≠NP is that P≠NP…]]
is a perfect example of a monstrously-hard problem for which we could nevertheless recognize a solution if we saw one—and hence, part of the explanation for why it’s so hard to prove P≠NP is that P≠NP…]] In the 1930s, Gödel and Turing taught us that not only are certain mathematical statements undecidable (within the standard axiom systems for set theory and even arithmetic), but there’s not even an algorithm to tell which statements have a proof or disproof and which don’t. Sure, you can try checking every possible proof, one by one—but if you haven’t yet found a proof, then there’s no general way to tell whether that’s because there is no proof, or whether you simply haven’t searched far enough. On the other hand, if you restrict your attention to, say, proofs consisting of 1,000,000 symbols or less, then enumerating every proof does become possible. However, it only becomes “possible” in an extremely Platonic sense: if there are 21,000,000 proofs to check, then the sun will have gone cold and the universe degenerated into black holes and radiation long before your computer’s made a dent. So, the question arises of whether Gödel and Turing’s discoveries have a “finitary” analogue: are there classes of mathematical statements that have short proofs, but for which the proofs can’t be found in any reasonable amount of time?
Basically, P vs. NP is the mathematical problem that you’re inevitably led to if you try to formalize any of the four questions above.
Admittedly, in order to state the problem formally, we need to make a choice: we interpret the phrase “fast algorithm” to mean “deterministic Turing machine that uses a number of steps bounded by a polynomial in the size of the input, and which always outputs the correct answer (yes, there is a solution satisfying the stated constraints, or no, there isn’t one).” There are other natural ways to interpret “fast algorithm” (probabilistic algorithms? quantum algorithms? linear time? linear time with a small constant? subexponential time? algorithms that only work on most inputs?), and many are better depending on the application. A key point, however, is that whichever choices we made, we’d get a problem that’s staggeringly hard, and for essentially the same reasons as P vs. NP is hard! And therefore, out of a combination of mathematical convenience and tradition, computer scientists like to take P vs. NP as our “flagship example” of a huge class of questions about what is and isn’t feasible for computers, none of which we know how to answer.
So, those of you who just wandered into the tent: care to know more? The good news is that lots of excellent resources already exist. I suggest starting with the Wikipedia article on P vs. NP, which is quite good. From there, you can move on to Avi Wigderson’s 2006 survey P, NP and mathematics – a computational complexity perspective, or Mike Sipser’s The History and Status of the P vs. NP Question (1992) for a more historical perspective (and a translation of a now-famous 1956 letter from Gödel to von Neumann, which first asked what we’d recognize today as the P vs. NP question).
After you’ve finished the above … well, the number of P vs. NP resources available to you increases exponentially with the length of the URL. For example, without even leaving the scottaaronson.com domain, you can find the following:
Feel free to use the comments section to suggest other resources, or to ask and answer basic questions about the P vs. NP problem, why it’s hard, why it’s important, how it relates to other problems, why Deolalikar’s attempt apparently failed, etc. Me, I think I’ll be taking a break from this stuff. | {
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Facebook must stop President Trump from “mislead[ing] the American people,” says the Democratic National Committee. Demands from Democrats that social media platforms “fact-check” or otherwise censor political ads and posts are rapidly accelerating this fall and having an impact. Twitter responded two weeks ago by banning political ads altogether.
These attacks on free speech from the left are chilling but sadly predictable. What’s surprising is that more and more conservatives are calling for top-down intervention — by the government no less — into social media content.
Among the loudest voices on the left are the presidential contenders. Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris is urging Twitter to suspend the president’s account, citing tweets that “baselessly discredit the [Ukrainian] whistleblower and officials in our government.” Other 2020 contenders have echoed her calls.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign demanded that Facebook and other platforms remove a “false” Trump ad accusing him of pressuring Ukraine to benefit his son while serving as vice president. Never mind that the Biden campaign simultaneously ran a Facebook ad with the unproven claim that Trump is “pressuring the Ukrainian president to work with Rudy Giuliani to smear Joe Biden.” (RELATED: Trump Delivers The Google-Facebook Reckoning That Obama Refused)
Facebook, whose policy is to not fact-check politicians’ ads or posts, denied Biden’s request. The company has emphasized the inappropriateness of it refereeing political debates or censoring politicians.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s protests have drawn the most attention. Her Facebook ad claims that the company “already helped elect Donald Trump once. Now, they’re deliberately allowing [him] to intentionally lie to the American people. It’s time to hold Mark Zuckerberg accountable.” Presumably, Warren would exempt her claims from the fact-checking she urges.
Even if the fact-checking were done by dispassionate robots — it won’t be anytime soon — platforms would be put in the impossible position of refereeing virtually every political debate in the nation despite the thin or non-existent line between misinformation and a point of view we disagree with. Even if Facebook were to send an investigatory team to Ukraine, it would have zero chance of satisfying both sides. What Warren and her ilk are demanding is both a hopeless task and a dangerous concentration of power in the big tech companies they distrust.
The good news is that Facebook, Democrats’ favorite target, is resisting the pressure. In remarks last month at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg lamented that “Increasingly, we’re seeing people try to define more speech as dangerous,” while no longer “trust[ing] their fellow citizens … [to] decide what to believe for themselves.” He emphasized that “this is more dangerous for democracy … than almost any speech” and concluded that “people should decide what is credible, not tech companies.”
Conservatives should embrace that sentiment and remind Zuckerberg of it if Facebook falls short. But instead, some conservatives want the government, not the people, to be the monitors of social media content.
Most prominently, many conservatives are supporting a bill introduced by Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley that would hold hostage the law that allows social media to flourish by shielding websites from liability for user-posted content. The bill would strip big platforms of that protection unless they can prove to the federal government — specifically the Federal Trade Commission — that their content moderation has no political bias.
I thoroughly share Hawley’s concern for instances of conservative bias on tech platforms. But his big-government solution is worse than the problem. In fact, it would require the FTC to monitor social media content in ways similar to what Democrats are demanding of Facebook and Twitter.
Much like the left’s demands, Hawley’s bill is premised on the idea that top-down control is needed because individuals can’t be trusted to evaluate social media content – in this case, to weed through bias. If that were true, Donald Trump would never have been elected.
Moreover, the FTC would be put in the impossible position of refereeing virtually every accusation of platform bias with all the subjectivity that entails. The Commission would be asked to essentially read the minds of platform employees to determine whether political bias informed each content moderation decision, with little chance of satisfying activists on the right or left.
Worse yet, Warren and company would get the fact-checking they’re clamoring for because you can’t evaluate bias without first determining whether the content allegedly subject to bias is truthful or not.
The Hawley bill would create an even more dangerous concentration of power than the self-censorship Democrats want, because the censor would be the biggest monopoly of all, the federal government.
Even those conservatives ready to cast limited-government principles aside should consider that Hawley’s idea would prove disastrous for them given that the left is much better at playing victim and using the media to pressure government officials. On top of that, the FTC staff that would do most of the bias detection work leans left — like all federal bureaucrats — even under GOP administrations.
Proposals like Hawley’s play into liberals’ regulation-happy hands. If free speech on the internet is legislated away, it will likely be Republican votes in Congress that enable what Democrats cannot do alone.
Curt Levey (@Curt_Levey) is president of the Committee for Justice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rule of law and constitutionally limited government. Before attending law school, he worked as a scientist in artificial intelligence. | {
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Dopo aver fatto almeno un migliaio di volte il giro del globo con lo slogan “Che mondo sarebbe senza Nutella” oggi la crema spalmabile alla nocciola della Ferrero lancia una nuova campagna e sfida gli appassionati alla ricerca dell’anima gemella, non l’altra metà del cuore, forse, ma il solo vasetto identico di una special edition di un milione di coppie uniche di confezioni Nutella sparse nei negozi e supermercati di tutt’Italia.Ogni vasetto - dal design colorato e allegro con i colori dell'arcobaleno - ha un solo gemello e per trovarlo bisogna usare il codice sul retro della confezione. Inserendo il codice su www.nutella.it e seguendo il percorso sul sito si potrà scoprire chi possiede il vasetto gemello. I due sconosciuti che si incontreranno virtualmente in questo modo possono essere sicuri di avere almeno una cosa in comune: la passione per la Nutella firmata Ferrero. Ogni connessione sarà segnata su una cartina d’Italia aggiornata di giorno in giorno. E il gioco della Ferrero si porta dietro anche un messaggio: «Per Nutella le differenze sono un valore, ci rendono unici e speciali», spiegano dalla multinazionale di Alba. | {
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MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina/BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - A sound detected on Monday in the South Atlantic, near where an Argentine navy submarine with 44 crew went missing five days ago, is not believed to have come from the ill-fated vessel, a navy spokesman said.
The sound detected by probes initially raised hopes that crew members aboard the ARA San Juan submarine, which disappeared after reporting an electrical malfunction, may have been intentionally making noise to attract rescuers.
But an analysis by Argentine authorities, on the fourth day of a search-and-rescue mission, showed that it was highly unlikely it had come from the German-built submarine, navy spokesman Enrique Balbi told reporters in Buenos Aires.
“It does not correspond to a pattern that would be consistent with bangs against the walls in morse code,” Balbi said. He described whatever had been detected as “a continuous, constant sound.”
The disappointment followed another letdown earlier in the day, when the navy said satellite calls detected over the weekend did not in fact come from the vessel. (tmsnrt.rs/2zQ8HGZ)
The vessel reported an electrical problem and was headed back to its base in the port of Mar del Plata when it disappeared on Wednesday, the navy said. Storms have complicated search efforts as relatives wait anxiously.
More than a dozen boats and aircraft from Argentina, the United States, Britain, Chile and Brazil have joined the search effort. Authorities have mainly been scanning the sea from the sky, as storms have made it difficult for boats.
Slideshow ( 17 images )
The navy said on Monday night that two boats belonging to French oil company Total SA, which has offshore operations in Argentina, arrived at the Patagonian port of Comodoro Rivadavia to transport rescue equipment the U.S. Navy brought to the country, including a remote-operated vehicle, a mini-submarine, and a submarine rescue chamber.
ELECTRIC MALFUNCTION
Gabriel Galeazzi, a naval commander, told reporters that the submarine had come up from the depths and reported the unspecified electrical malfunction before it disappeared nearly 300 miles off the coast.
“The submarine surfaced and reported a malfunction, which is why its ground command ordered it to return to its naval base at Mar del Plata,” he said.
The malfunction did not necessarily cause an emergency, Galeazzi added. The craft was navigating normally, underwater, at a speed of five knots toward Mar del Plata when it was last heard from, he said.
“A warship has a lot of backup systems, to allow it to move from one to another when there is a breakdown,” Galeazzi said.
Slideshow ( 17 images )
One of the crew is Argentina’s first female submarine officer, Eliana Maria Krawczyk, 35, who joined the navy in 2004 and rose to become the master-at-arms aboard the ARA San Juan.
The families of crew members have gathered at the Mar del Plata naval base awaiting news. They were joined on Monday by President Mauricio Macri.
“We continue to deploy all available national and international resources,” to find the submarine, Macri said on Twitter.
Intermittent satellite communications were detected on Saturday and the government had said they were likely to have come from the submarine. But the ARA San Juan sent its last signal on Wednesday, according to Balbi.
The calls that were detected “did not correspond to the satellite phone of the submarine San Juan,” he said on Monday, adding that the craft had oxygen for seven days. After that, he said, it would have to surface or get near the surface to replenish air supply.
The ARA San Juan was inaugurated in 1983, making it the newest of the three submarines in the navy’s fleet. Built in Germany, it underwent maintenance in 2008 in Argentina.
That maintenance included the replacement of its four diesel engines and its electric propeller engines, according to specialist publication Jane’s Sentinel. | {
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Pro-democracy protests continue at Hong Kong campus In Hong Kong, the siege of a top university is now in its seventh day as police surround a small number of anti-government protesters holed up inside. Police say they will not try to storm the campus again after violence last weekend. This comes on the eve of local elections, the first public elections since the pro-democracy movement began. Ramy Inocencio reports from Hong Kong. | {
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Los Angeles Union Station Master Plan community workshop Aug. 1
Couldn’t attend last night’s community workshop for the Union Station Master Plan? Above is the presentation given at the meeting and here is a 27-minute video that includes the presentation and commentary from Master Plan staff.
So what do you think of the emerging plan? Any alternative or particular slide that you like or have strong opinions about? Comment please.
Like this: Like Loading... | {
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Sérgio Dutti Henrique Meirelles também afirmou que "não se arrepende de nada" de sua campanha
Em entrevista ao jornal O Estado de S. Paulo, Henrique Meirelles projetou seu futuro, já que optou por não oferecer apoio no 2º turno das eleições presidenciais: vai virar “youtuber”.”A minha primeira medida concreta será a criação de um canal digital no qual vamos veicular conteúdos, com uma série de especialistas de diversas áreas para falar com todo esse público. Nas pesquisas que fiz, saí com boa imagem da eleição. Isso, de fato, me dá uma possibilidade muito grande de influenciar o debate”, afirmou Meirelles, que obteve apenas 1,2% dos votos. | {
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F1 Development Special
Anna Woolhouse is joined by former Head of Race Engineering for Ferrari Steve Clark and technical analyst Craig 'Scarbs' Scarborough to analyse the opening testing session in Jerez. | {
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Apple
The Mac Pro, Apple’s marquee desktop machine, hasn’t been refreshed since 2013. But lest you think it was forgotten, the diminutive black obelisk is top of mind at Apple these days — specifically how to reimagine it in a way that will appeal to professionals frustrated by its seemingly stalled evolution. To that end, there is officially a new Mac Pro in the pipeline, but it's going to be a while before it arrives. “We are completely rethinking the Mac Pro,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of worldwide marketing said during a recent roundtable with a handful of reporters at the company’s Machine Shop hardware prototyping lab. And it won't just be the computer. “Since the Mac Pro is a modular system, we are also doing a pro display. There’s a team working hard on it right now.”
Brooks Kraft / Apple Apple executives Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi
That's good news for anyone worried that Apple’s lost interest in its highest-end desktop, but there’s a caveat per Schiller: "You won’t see any of these products this year."* The team working on them has been told to take its time and to design a system that can deliver a wide range of performance — one that can easily and efficiently be upgraded with the latest technologies for the pro audience for which it's intended. That upgradability is crucial, because it’s lacking in the current Mac Pro — a feature Apple unwittingly sacrificed when it bet on a striking, and strikingly clever, design. Sadly for Apple, the “can’t innovate any more, my ass” quip with which Schiller unveiled the Mac Pro to the world in 2013 was applicable in a more literal sense four years later when the company found that the machine’s design restricted its ability to upgrade it.
"We’re sorry to disappoint customers."
“We designed ourselves into a bit of a corner,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering said of the current Mac Pro’s unique arrangement of pro computer innards around a triangular heat sink inside a cylindrical chassis. “We wanted to do something bold and different. What we didn’t appreciate completely at the time was how we had so tailored that design to a specific vision that in the future we would find ourselves a bit boxed in — into a circular shape.” John Ternus, Apple’s VP of hardware engineering, offered a similarly fun-while-it-lasted assessment of the Mac Pro. “It served its purpose well,” he said. “It just doesn't have the flexibility we now know we need to have.” And Schiller offered something even rarer: an apology. "The current Mac Pro ... was constrained thermally and it restricted our ability to upgrade it," he said. "And for that, we’re sorry to disappoint customers."
Though not unprecedented, these are rare admissions for Apple, which has historically taken a “people don't know what they want until you show it to them” approach to product design. So too was the mechanism in which that admission was delivered: an afternoon roundtable in one of Apple’s inner sanctums. The Machine Shop is simultaneously ripe with Mac history and the possibility of Mac history yet-to-be-made. It's all glass cases of old Macs and QuickTake camera prototypes in the outside hallway, and computer-driven precision-cutting machines inside — many with their contents hidden by drapes of black fabric. It’s exactly the kind of place meant to give critics pause if they had been questioning Apple’s commitment to the Mac Pro.
Brooks Kraft / Apple The Machine Shop at Apple's Product Realization Lab. | {
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