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CAMPAIGNERS for Scottish independence have appealed to the country's 'missing million' unregistered voters to ensure they are registered to vote in the referendum.
The Yes Scotland campaign urged people not to miss out on a "once in a lifetime opportunity" to help decide Scotland's future.
They launched their appeal on the first ever National Voter Registration Day [NVRD] which aims to persuade 250,000 new voters to register across the UK.
It is estimated that there are one million people in Scotland who could vote but regularly don't.
River City star Carmen Pieraccini joined Yes Scotland Chief Executive Blair Jenkins, its Operations Manager Sarah-Jane Walls and a team of volunteers as they distributed voter registration forms to commuters outside Paisley's Gilmour Street Station.
The actress, who plays Kelly-Marie Adams in the TV soap, said: "On September 18 we will be asked as a nation to make the most important decision in our history. It's vital that all those who are able to vote grab this chance to take part in deciding what kind of country they want Scotland to be."
Organised by Bite the Ballot, and supported by organisations such as the National Union of Students, ASDA and TeachFirst, NVRD aims to raise the profile of the importance of voting, especially among young people.
There will be activities and 'registration rallies' all over Scotland today, with numerous universities, colleges and local authorities participating.
In Glasgow and Renfrewshire and Inverclyde alone, there will be registration events at 12 different campuses.
Sarah-Jane Walls said: "Referendum Day is a landmark in Scotland's history when the eyes of the world will be upon us. Ensuring the highest possible turnout is vital to our whole democratic tradition.
"Imagine the regret about not taking part in such a monumental decision. And that is why we are appealing to everyone who is entitled to vote to make sure they don't forgo this amazing opportunity to help shape our country's future."
Bite the Ballot's Scotland organiser Liam O'Hare said: "There are approximately a million people in Scotland who don't vote in elections.
"With the independence referendum approaching, there is no better time to engage this 'missing million' and help everyone to participate in this pivotal democratic process." | {
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The New Legacy through RUG Delver
legacy
After many hours deliberating how exactly this article should begin, I'm just gonna say it.
You've never heard of me. I get it.
So, I'm Jeremy. Pleased to meet you. I'm from Upstate New York, where people take their Legacy seriously. Real seriously. Have you ever tuned into a Legacy event on StarCityGame's coverage and heard them talk about the Jupiter Games crew who know a thing or two about how to shuffle up some expensive cards? That's me. That's us.
In the grand scheme of things, I'm still a relative newcomer to Magic. I started playing in Innistrad. That is relatively recent when compared to other Legacy players who have been playing since Revised. But I've held my own. I've Top 8'ed before. I've beaten some of the world's best. I even opened an unplayable sealed pool at the Battle for Zendikar prerelease and went 1-3. I don't claim to herald the truth from the mountaintops and expect kudos for doing so. I want to learn with the community and improve my game in hopes to improve yours along the way.
Alright. That's out of the way. Let's get down to business.
The king is dead. Long live the king.
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That's right. By the time this article comes out, Dig Through Time will have long passed.
*Ding dong* the witch is dead! Fahoo Fores Dahoo Dores! Yes, I did Google how to spell that. And most importantly, the trumpet-esk sound Charlie Brown's teacher makes!
While this is old news at this point, it does raise several questions. The most important of which is where do we go from here? Where do you go from here?
Legacy is extremely slow to adapt. Granted, bannings tend to speed the process up. But with the lack of broadcasted Legacy tournaments every Sunday, it is going to take people a good amount of time to adapt their 75 accordingly. The most wonderful aspect of Legacy, to me, is the niche people put themselves in. Because of the sheer depth of the card pool, a player is able to bunker down in a strategy tailored just for them, like it came from Ollivanders. Okay, that's my one Harry Potter reference. I'll lay off those for a while.
The point is there are players in every community that insists on playing an extremely fragile but overwhelmingly pleasing and totally busted combo. There are players who refuse to play anything besides what is deemed the best deck. There are players who play Steam Vents because Volcanic Islands are too expensive and college ain't cheap. The best thing a Magic player can do is find their comfort zone. There should be a confidence felt in your finger tips every time you shuffle a stack of cards that could buy you a barely functioning automobile. These spells are your own, why not trust in them and trust in yourself?
RUG Delver
Me? I tend to gravitate toward a Delver of Secrets strategy. How terribly droll. But you know what? I feel like I know how to maneuver my way out of tough spots with that little guy. Also, I enjoy you not having stuff or being able to do stuff. Today I'm going to talk about the new Legacy metagame through the lens of a RUG Delver player.
Here's my current list:
I'm fairly stubborn on the main deck. I don't think I'll change anything without a significant reason poking me in the eye. RUG, not Temur by the way, was a solid deck choice in the last several months because of the popularity of Grixis and its variants. That matchup is in RUG's favor, and Grixis was running rampant. People were getting all sorts of cute with Grixis in the sideboard with silver bullets like Bitterblossom and Umezawa's Jitte just to beat the mirror and, coincidentally, RUG.
The sideboard is truly what's in question and the discussion point of this article. I'd like to focus on the metagame from a RUG standpoint, as that's what I currently have sleeved up. The sideboard has to reflect the player's best guess at what they are going to play against during the tournament and contain cards that blanket the most popular choices. There are always some decks a player has absolutely no shot of beating, so fitting in slots for those corner cases is fruitless. This point should be common sense. Nic Fit seems like a very difficult match for RUG, and if someone has the courage to stick a Frost Titan, Sigarda, Consecrated Sphinx, or other hilarious Standard nonsense in their Legacy deck, with the ability to cast them, I say more power to them. I'm not going to try and fight that fight from my sideboard. Those examples are real by the way. I've seen them in play in large sanctioned tournaments. Haters gonna hate.
BUG Strategies
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It seems people have begun to shift back to BUG strategies, whether they contain my insectile friend or not. Now that Papa Jazz Hands (Dig Through Time) is gone, I expect BUG to be very popular. It's just full of value. Much like drawing three cards off of Treasure Cruise, drawing three cards off of Ancestral Vision is equally backbreaking. At least players can't just Visions whenever they have seven cards in the graveyard hanging out doing nothing. It might be time for such blue hits as Jace, the Mind Sculptor (how did this card stop seeing play?!) and True-Name Nemesis to come back out of retirement. For me, Jace has always been like The Rolling Stones. Never really been my style, but it doesn't mean they plan on leaving any time soon. As long as BUG can keep Young Pyromancer in check, I expect the Grixis matchup to go well for the BUG player.
Miracles
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Miracles. Everybody's favorite matchup. Playing against an inexperienced Miracles player is extremely frustrating. This deck can be quite complex for unfamiliar pilots, and I often find myself getting distracted while a new player takes the better part of a minute reordering the top three cards of their deck. After I realize I'm getting distracted, I have to reel myself back to reality to double check if they floated the same card on the top for as long as possible and other subtle clues I could easily miss while I think about how much I overpaid for the convention center salad between rounds.
The deck is powerful. Joe Lossett and Reid Duke swear by it. RUG also has to avoid walking into a Terminus by not overextending. Luckily, we have otherwise dead Stifles at our aid. Sidenote on Stifle: the card is just not good but is a necessary evil for the whole “you can't has stuffs” strategy. Several games come to mind where a Gitaxian Probe revealed a single fetchland in my opponent's grip, giving me the go ahead to Stifle their land and earn a free win. I already have several efficient options in my sideboard for Miracles, so I don't think more inclusions are necessary. I did cut a Sylvan Library to open up spots for Sulfur Elemental, and I'm sure I'll kick myself when that comes up, but fifteen cards can only be fifteen cards.
Death and Taxes
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While we're on the subject of Sulfur Elemental, how about Death and Taxes? Groan. This matchup is almost impossible against a mildly competent opponent. As you can see I've shored up two spots in the sideboard for Sulfur Elemental because of how terrible this matchup can be. Sure, we have access to Rough // Tumble, but it's not enough. I formally met Michael Derczo at StarCityGames D.C. and he gave me a beating with his white army. In our second game after losing the first, I had a pair of Rough // Tumbles in my hand that were uncastable or accomplished actual nothing. Vryn Wingmare is real, and when paired with Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, the Wingmare can practically lock RUG out of the game. Two-mana and two life for a Gitaxian Probe? Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
Death and Taxes has no deck manipulation besides the Demonic Tutor stapled onto a Kor in Stoneforge Mystic. It relies heavily on the cards it daws. However, before the recent banning, I would have been extremely happy to sleeve this band of brothers. Delver decks are a walk in the park. Taxation against Omni-Tell is crippling. Those sunflower Plains just look nice. And not to be underestimated, Karakas hedges against the deck that I predict to have the biggest surge in popularity: Reanimator.
Reanimator
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Having a Griselbrand in play that is not supposed to be there for the low, low price of 8 life with Reanimate is not only powerful, it tends to leave a smile on one's face. A huge fatty in play is usually game over. Emphasis on usually. Reanimator has begun to re-enter the scene in the last few months despite the popularity of Deathrite Shaman strategies. There has been a key component added to the deck: everyone's favorite, overpriced 0/2, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. Yes, even the babiest of Jaces has found his way into Legacy, and he is pretty darn useful. Putting the gigantic “Lightning Bolt Me” sign over his head aside, having a way to get a pesky monster out of your hand and into the graveyard is rather useful. Also, randomly having a difficult to deal with planeswalker in play never hurt anyone.
The New Metagame
To summarize, I expect BUG and Reanimator to be the soup du jour for the next few tournaments I attend. Obviously, the more Deathrite decks running around, the worse Reanimator gets, but people have already made their purchases. I expect the BUG presence to take some time to settle in before this knowledge is widely known. The deck seems too well positioned to not become the dominant force it once was before undercosted delve spells were printed. The ability to Abrupt Decay a Counterbalance, play an extremely quick clock in Tarmogoyf, and keep graveyards in check with Deathrite Shaman is extremely appealing.
Where does that leave the RUG sideboard? I think I'll be ditching Hydroblast and make sure I don't have any overdue spells at the Sylvan Library. That might have been the Dad-est of jokes I've ever come up with, and I'm not proud of it. I also believe that another graveyard hoser, such as Surgical Extraction, may be necessary. The card is good in the RUG Mirror and leaves me the ability to tap out against the oogie boogie men. Where that comes from is yet to be seen, but I've gotten burned too many times to keep my hand on the stove.
Conclusion
That's all for today. How do you think the Legacy metagame will shake out? Will BUG and Reanimator become as popular as I'm imagining? How are you tweaking your sideboards after the ban of Dig Through Time? Leave a comment below or you can reach me on twitter @r3tr0sp3ct. | {
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【4月5日 AFP】交流サイト（SNS）最大手フェイスブック（Facebook）は4日、英政治コンサルティング企業ケンブリッジ・アナリティカ（Cambridge Analytica）によって情報を不正取得された利用者は最大で8700万人に上ると明らかにした。これは当初推定の5000万人をはるかに上回る。
フェイスブックのマイク・シュローファー（Mike Schroepfer）最高技術責任者（CTO）が、フェイスブック利用者向けの新たなプライバシー設定機能の導入を発表した声明の中で明らかにした。
シュローファー氏は「米国内の人々を中心に、最大で計8700万人のフェイスブック上の情報が、ケンブリッジ・アナリティカに不正に共有された可能性があると考えている」とした。(c)AFP | {
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This Friday marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 72nd anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps that claimed the lives of an estimated 1.5 million people, most of them Jews. President Donald Trump chose to commemorate the occasion by releasing a public statement omitting any mention of Jews or the scourge of anti-Semitism (breaking with past GOP and Democratic tradition), and signing an executive order barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, including Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Sudan.
“It’s repulsive,” Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, told CNN. “I mean, the timing is incredibly offensive. It was during the Holocaust that the world shamefully refused to give asylum to Jews and to others who were being murdered or about to be murdered in Nazi Germany.”
Indeed, during the Holocaust, as millions of Jews were being slaughtered by the Nazis, the United States enforced strict immigration quotas against Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe.
In June 1939, the ocean liner St. Louis sailed into the Port of Miami with 937 refugees onboard—nearly all Jewish and seeking asylum in the United States. They’d already been turned away from Cuba and Canada, and when they were denied entry into America, the ship was forced to return to Europe where many of its passengers were killed in the Holocaust. Even Anne Frank’s family made several desperate attempts to emigrate from Europe to America, only to be denied visas.
This closed-door policy was an extension of the Immigration Act of 1924, which sought to, in the words of dissenting Jewish-American politician Emmanuel Celler, create “a distinct American identity by favoring native-born Americans over Southern and Eastern Europeans in order to ‘maintain the racial preponderance of the basic strain on our people and thereby to stabilize the ethnic composition of the population.’” Both Congress and the public believed that these Southern and Eastern European immigrants, many of whom were Jewish, would take away jobs from Americans plagued by the Depression, and were racially inferior. Asians and Arabs were banned entirely.
There was also widespread paranoia concerning a “fifth column,” or the theory that, should Germany or Japan invade the U.S., embedded spies from those countries would help destroy America from the inside. This led to the cruel internment of Japanese-Americans, and the curbing of U.S. visas to those from Axis countries.
At a June 5, 1940, press conference, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated: “Now, of course, the refugee has got to be checked because, unfortunately, among the refugees there are some spies, as has been found in other countries. And not all of them are voluntary spies—it is rather a horrible story but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.” This fear of immigrant spies was mostly just that. With the exception of a few highly publicized cases, including that of 28-year-old German Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, there’s been no evidence of a mass influx of immigrant spies during this time. In fact, there exist striking parallels to the GOP and President Trump’s Muslim immigrant panic of today, given that, of the 784,000 refugees settled in America between September 11, 2001, and October 2015, only three have been arrested for plotting terrorist acts. “And it is worth noting two were not planning an attack in the United States and the plans of the third were barely credible,” wrote Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute. The terrorists behind the San Bernardino shooting, Pulse nightclub massacre, and Boston Marathon bombing were all U.S. citizens.
Earlier this month, the film German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was quietly released into select North American theaters. Produced by Sidney Bernstein, advisor to the British Ministry of Information, and co-directed by his pal Alfred Hitchcock, the documentary is comprised of footage shot by Allied American, British, Soviet, and Canadian combat cameramen as they liberated ten concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Majdanek. The images are unforgettable, from Nazi physician Fritz Klein being interviewed on top of a pile of bodies at Bergen-Belsen to long, uninterrupted pans capturing stacks of eyeglasses, wedding rings, toothbrushes, human teeth, and bags of hair collected by the Nazis. There are even collections of lampshades made of human skin.
“The panning shots were Hitchcock’s idea,” says Jane Wells, the daughter of Bernstein whose non-profit, 3generations, put out Factual Survey. Hitchcock advised Bernstein and his crew of soldier-documentarians by phone, and suggested the continuous takes because “he felt that people wouldn’t believe what they were seeing otherwise.”
Unfortunately, the film was never completed for a variety of reasons. It wasn’t until 2008 that the Imperial War Museum, using the original filmmakers’ rough cut, script, and shot list, finalized the editing process. The 75-minute finished film premiered 69 years after it was shot, at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival.
“I tried to enumerate the different explanations,” Wells tells me, before taking out a notepad and reading from it. “One was the fear it would alienate Germans when they were trying to rebuild Germany after the war. The second one is the British government didn’t want to build support for a Zionist state. The third is they didn’t want to create undue sympathy for Jews in particular, or to single Jews out for poor treatment. And the fourth one, which is the Imperial War Museum’s theory, is that its time had come and it had missed its moment.” Its shelving was devastating to Bernstein, who refused to speak publicly about what Wells calls his “great secret” until he was interviewed for the 1985 documentary A Painful Reminder, which contained footage from his film. Parts of Factual Survey were also used in Billy Wilder’s 22-minute concentration camp documentary Death Mills (Die Todesmühlen), released in January 1946.
“Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall,” Factual Survey’s narrator says. And according to Wells, “it’s hard not to see the parallel to today,” given the rise of white nationalism in the U.S. and abroad corresponding with the rise of Trump, candidate Trump dog-whistling to white nationalists during his campaign by sharing anti-Semitic memes that originated on neo-Nazi online message boards, and the ascendance of Steve Bannon, former overlord of the “alt-right” publication Breitbart turned Trump right-hand man, who’s been accused of serial anti-Semitism.
“To me, it’s horrific. I’d love to invite the President and Jared Kushner to come see this film, and love to encourage any Jews who supported Trump to come see this film. I know Jews who voted for Trump, and if you ask them about the rise of white nationalism or the ‘alt-right’ in the wake of Trump, they’ll say, ‘Oh, well his son-in-law is a Jew! His daughter keeps a kosher kitchen, how bad can it be?’” say Wells. “The rise of the ‘alt-right’ is completely awful. The way Jews have been called out on Twitter is horrible and disgraceful. I’d like some of these ‘alt-right’ people to also come see this film and try and explain to me why they think this didn’t happen or didn’t matter.”
“If you see this footage, “ she adds, “there is no way on God’s earth that you can argue this didn’t happen.”
Wells had initially planned to release German Concentration Camps Factual Survey theatrically on Jan. 27, 2015, in honor of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The film didn’t make it to cinemas until January 6th of this year, but she believes that, given the Syrian refugee crisis, it “will have more of an impact today than it would have even then.”
“It is a cry for reconnecting to our humanity, and I think that is a message that is very resonant today,” offers Wells. “When I look at the atrocities that are happening in Syria today, when I look at the situation with Native Americans in North Dakota, when I look at the rise of the fascistic far-right globally, it seems like we have forgotten some of our common humanity.” | {
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Michelle will put your name into the lyrics of an original hip-hop video! YES this will be hilarious and your name should be in it for sure! Plus the first viewing of the pilot episode, that beautifully signed postcard, 30 Days to Your Happiest Life Eprogram, behind the scenes footage, and be one of the only people to view the original hip hop video that your name is in!
Less | {
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His performance will largely go under the radar, but United States goalkeeper Brad Guzan was arguably the most important player in a 1-1 draw against Panama that marked their 2017 CONCACAF Gold Cup opener on Saturday in Nashville.
With the USMNT's attack sputtering for most of the game, and the defense less stout than perhaps anticipated against the game Panamanians, Guzan made five saves, including an incredible one on the goal line in the 55th minute to keep the U.S. ahead 1-0 at the time.
Guzan's performance might be overshadowed, as he's not a new entry to the US set-up and the hosts could not hold on for a victory. Plus, the (soon-to-debut-as) Atlanta United goalkeeper was not looking for individual plaudits after the game.
"Obviously, we were giving them too much space with the ball," he said. "We never got close enough to guys, we never closed guys down. Whether it was the heat or whatnot I'm not sure, but they had to play in the same weather."
Although the U.S. took a lead shortly after halftime, with Kelyn Rowe and Dom Dwyer connecting in each player's second senior cap for the USMNT, Guzan was left to rue his team's limitations on the day otherwise, and turn attention to the next game, against surprise Group B leader Martinique.
"They did a good job of frustrating us and nicking balls in the good areas for them, and bad areas for us. We'll look at the game in the next day or two," Guzan said. "But at the same time, we'll now turn our focus to Wednesday."
Arielle Castillo contributed reporting to this article. | {
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Publicidade
Arrastando-se desde 1989, a disputa pela terra indígena Guyraroká, no sul do Mato Grosso do Sul, opõe não só as 80 famílias de kaiowás acampadas no local aos 26 fazendeiros que controlam a área.
Atualmente no STF (Supremo Tribunal Federal), o caso tem potencial para influenciar centenas de processos demarcatórios pelo país caso haja a ratificação de um marco temporal limitando a criação de áreas indígenas às que estavam ocupadas por índios em 1988, ano da Constituição.
Em Caarapó, a demanda indígena é personificada pelo líder kaiowá Tito Vilhalva, 94. Há 14 anos, ele e a família trocaram a aldeia Tey'ikue, também em Caarapó, por um barraco de lona à margem de uma estrada rural que atravessa plantações de soja, canaviais e pastagens. Foi ali, conta, que ele nasceu antes de sua aldeia ter sido coagida a deixar a região.
"Os índios viviam tranquilos aqui no Guyraroká, era tudo mato", diz Vilhalva à Folha, em conversa no acampamento cercado por pastagens. "Em 1931, 1932, tinha a guerra do Getúlio [Vargas] e um general mandou recado que ia matar todos os índios. E nós acreditamos, porque a guerra não perdoa ninguém, e fomos a pé para Tey'ikue."
Localizado a cerca de 30 km do acampamento, Tey'ikue tem cerca de 3.500 hectares e abriga cerca de 6.000 guaranis-kaiowás. Em comparação, o Parque do Xingu (MT) possui 2,6 milhões de hectares para 4.800 índios.
Esse processo de confinamento, assim chamado por historiadores e antropólogos, concentrou os guaranis-kaiowás em pequenas reservas indígenas entre o início do século 20 e meados dos anos 1950 –enquanto as demais terras, dentre as mais férteis do país, foram vendidas a colonos vindos do Sul.
Do outro lado, a resistência dos fazendeiros ficou a cargo do gaúcho Avelino Donatti, 70. Ele move a ação no STF contra a demarcação em estratégia coordenada com outros proprietários afetados por Guyraroká –11,4 mil hectares declarados como área indígena em 2009 pelo Ministério da Justiça.
Há 42 anos radicado em Mato Grosso do Sul, Donatti comprou em agosto de 1988 a fazenda Cana Verde (360 hectares), dentro de Guyraroká. Ele explica que é o quarto proprietário privado da área, originalmente adquirida do Estado nos anos 1950.
"Quando comprei, ninguém conhecia índio perto", afirmou. "Eu não vendo nunca, só no dia que morrer."
Cana Verde não é a única terra de Donatti. Quando chegou à região, em 1972, comprou inicialmente 300 hectares. Com o tempo, adquiriu outras fazendas e hoje tem cerca de 9.000 hectares. "Eu trabalhei muito. Só sei plantar lavoura."
PROJEÇÃO NACIONAL
Em 2009, o STF estabeleceu que a área, para ser reconhecida, precisava estar ocupada por índios em 1988, quando a Constituição entrou em vigor. O Ministério Público Federal entrou com recurso.
A estratégia do fazendeiro foi baseada em entendimento anterior da corte sobre a terra indígena Raposa Serra do Sol (RR). Na época, o Supremo entendeu que a área, para ser reconhecida, precisava estar ocupada por índios em 1988, quando a Constituição entrou em vigor.
Fotografia EDUARDO ANIZELLI | Edição BRUNO SCATENA | {
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The Guantánamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah was the first victim of the George W. Bush administration's torture program in August 2002.
Zubaydah, who remains indefinitely detained with no prospect of being prosecuted, drew depictions of the various ways in which he was tortured for a report published by his attorney.
Insider has republished eight of these drawings, which show Zubaydah being waterboarded, shackled in stress positions, and confined in boxes.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Abu Zubaydah was captured by US forces after a gun fight in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002. US officials incorrectly believed the Saudi Arabian citizen was a member of al-Qaida and transported him to a secret US-run prison, known as a black site, in Thailand.
In August 2002, Zubaydah, already suffering from a severe leg wound, became the first victim of the George W. Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation," which included shackling him in stress positions and confined spaces, prolonged sleep deprivation, and 83 episodes of waterboarding.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA torture program, which was partially declassified and released in 2014, found the enhanced-interrogation techniques were ineffective, "brutal," and "far worse" than the CIA had described them as being.
Abu Zubaydah. U.S. Central Command/AP Images
During one waterboarding session, Zubaydah "became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth."
At some point during Zubaydah's detention, he lost one of his eyes for unknown reasons.
CIA interrogators were so worried about the details of Zubaydah's torture becoming public that they requested "reasonable assurances that [Abu Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life," the Senate report found.
Investigators found that the CIA lied to Bush about the effectiveness of the enhanced-interrogation techniques used on Zubaydah, telling the president that Zubaydah gave interrogators additional information as a result of the torture.
In fact, the report found that Zubaydah, now 48, provided the CIA with more information about al-Qaida "activities, plans, capabilities, and relationships," and the group's leadership before being subjected to torture than he did after.
And they discovered that Zubaydah was never a member of al-Qaida, didn't have advanced knowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and had no information about future attacks.
After being held in US black sites for four years, Zubaydah was transferred to the US prison at Guantánamo, Cuba, where he's been detained since but never criminally charged. Zubaydah's attorney of 10 years, the Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux, told Insider that military prosecutors "can't find a crime to charge him with."
This week, Denbeaux and his colleagues at Seton Hall released a report, "How America Tortures," that includes drawings Zubaydah made depicting the various ways in which he was tortured in 2002. The New York Times first published the drawings on Wednesday.
"I think these pictures may have more impact than I ever expected because I've lived with them for so long," Denbeaux said. "It does seem like people might view this all over again."
Denbeaux added of his client, "He really wants to find out how much the world is hearing about him because he feels lost in Guantánamo."
Below are Zubaydah's drawings: | {
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New migration data from the Census bureau show that migration increased in 2008-2009 but the rise was almost entirely due to intracounty moves — a reflection of foreclosures and the poor job market last year.
The mover rate, which is the percentage of people who report a move, increased to 12.5% last year from 11.9% in 2008 (that was the lowest mover rate since at least 1945, when the Census started keeping track of the data).
That would seem to be a positive increase since jobs are one of the biggest reasons people move, but a look below the numbers shows that’s not the case. The mover rate within counties increased to 8.4% last year, the highest since 2003. But the mover rate across county lines and between states is still mired in levels unseen since at least the 40s, and probably since the Great Depression, according to an analysis of Census data by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
Simply put: The data are showing that millions of people who have lost their homes are moving nearby to rent, but that jobs were still scarce enough that few people made the state-to-state move.
“Since labor migration is the often seen as the grease that spurs the flow of goods, capital and job creation, these new numbers are not encouraging,” says Mr. Frey.
Of course, given the marked improvement in the job market through 2010, it’s likely that the state-to-state migration rate will show an increase through 2010.
Moving has long been seen as a sign of economic health. Today’s data show that, given the historic distortions to the housing market, in this recovery it is just as important to look at where people are going. | {
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SOld out!
Overall: 7-1/2”
Blade: 3”
This folding tanto knife is a great design that has a reinforced tang area compared to other folders that allows you to use it with confidence and carry it like a fixed blade knife. When the lock back is pushed and the blade pivoted to the middle it makes for a great push dagger giving you two options for what ever task presents itself. Includes nylon belt sheath. | {
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THE MAYO LGFA Board Executive have responded to the claims made by the 14 departed members of the Mayo set-up last night, fully backing manager Peter Leahy.
The players who left the Mayo Ladies squad held a press conference last night and released a statement outlining the reasons for their departure.
They said they left over a “lack of communication, being undermined, intimidated, feeling isolated and eventually helpless in the entire situation.”
Speaking at the press conference, former captain Sarah Tierney said she felt “intimidated” and “undermined” in her dealings with management.
In a statement released to The42, the Mayo LGFA responded to some of those remarks and said they are fully behind Leahy’s management.
“While cognisant of the feelings expressed to us that evening, we felt strongly that their issues related to management style, decisions and selections that are normal and commonplace in any team environment.”
They added that the original statement released by the players through the WGPA, which cited “player welfare issues” as the reason for their departure, was an “orchestrated and calculated statement designed to create maximum impact, and garner maximum headlines.”
The Mayo LGFA also said that “the walkout was an orchestrated move designed to make the management of Peter Leahy untenable.”
They referenced an Off The Ball interview with Cora Staunton where she called the Mayo set-up “unhealthy” and not “a safe environment”, adding they are seeking advice on those comments.
“We were extremely disappointed having heard the player concerns that they would express them in this manner,” the Mayo LGFA statement said.
“The statement, which remains unsubstantiated, led to rumour and innuendo of the vilest nature and Peter Leahy, and indeed his family, endured a torrid few weeks where they received online, telephone and face to face comments of a despicable nature.
“All the while this was happening, the players who left did nothing to quell such rumour and gossip though we now appreciate that they have retrospectively taken responsibility for this in their most recent statement.”
The Mayo LGFA thanked the remaining members of the panel and added “they sincerely hope that this situation finishes today and are glad that the players indicated there will be no further comment.”
Mayo LGFA County Board Executive Statement
“Mayo LGFA County Board Executive believe the time is now right to issue a statement regarding the player walkout from the Mayo Ladies Senior Football panel in July 2018. We wish firstly to state, that we are endorsing Peter Leahy and his management team, as Mayo Senior Ladies management for the upcoming season and beyond and offer them our full support.
“We wish to thank Peter, his management team, and their respective families for their patience, integrity and dignity throughout this episode since July. The County Board also wish to thank the Mayo Senior Players who remained on the panel for the three remaining Intercounty championship games this year and commend them for their performances under immense emotional pressures and in some cases, intimidation.
“Three members of the executive met with players who left the senior panel along with representatives of the Carnacon club and listened to their concerns and feelings several days after the walkout. While cognisant of the feelings expressed to us that evening, we felt strongly that their issues related to management style, decisions and selections that are normal and commonplace in any team environment.
“We respected the players right to leave the panel and have at all times respected their feelings and concerns by not making them public as we were asked on that occasion by those players. We feel that it is incumbent on the players to release these and still await them doing so. However, as members of the County Board Executive, as parents, and as people involved with Ladies football for many years, we felt extremely comfortable in our decision to endorse Peter Leahy and his management team less than 48 hours later at a training session in Kiltoom.
“We thanked the remaining 28 players who remained for their endorsement of the management team also. We thought it was important to meet with the remaining panel on this night as many of us on the Executive had been receiving calls from players and parents concerned as to what was happening.
“This concern was due to a statement released by the players who left, through the WGPA, where they cited their reasons for leaving as “Player welfare issues of a personal and sensitive nature”. We are of the opinion, that this was an orchestrated and calculated statement designed to create maximum impact, and garner maximum headlines. We were extremely disappointed having heard the player concerns that they would express them in this manner.
“The statement, which remains unsubstantiated, led to rumour and innuendo of the vilest nature and Peter Leahy, and indeed his family, endured a torrid few weeks where they received online, telephone and face to face comments of a despicable nature. All the while this was happening, the players who left did nothing to quell such rumour and gossip though we now appreciate that they have retrospectively taken responsibility for this in their most recent statement. After this meeting, we found that remaining players had been contacted and pressurised up to and including two days before the intercounty game with Cavan to try and convince them to leave the panel. We find this behaviour totally unacceptable and unbecoming of anyone who claims to have the interest of Mayo football at heart.
“We are of the opinion that the walkout was an orchestrated move designed to make the management of Peter Leahy untenable due to sheer weight of numbers leaving the panel. We feel it was a move designed to wrestle control of the senior team from the management and but for the steadfastness of Peter Leahy, the existing Mayo panel and the County Board it would have succeeded.
“The County Board, at great expense, employed the services of a professional and independent mediator who listened to and spoke with all parties involved via telephone and through a sit-down mediation process over the space of a week. All issues were discussed, and all parties were fully aware of each other’s issues on the night. In recent comments by a certain player who left the panel, it was stated that perhaps the girls who remained were not aware or didn’t see any of the “Player Welfare Issues”, but they would have been made fully aware of all concerns and feelings through the mediation process.
“The players have accepted that a number of them did not fully address their issues with other members of the panel and we welcome this, however, we are disappointed that they would refer to the mediation as an “Unfair Process”. The mediator in question is one of the most respected mediators in the country and has worked professionally in all areas of mediation be it industrial or the sporting environment.
“The mediation process ended unresolved. It must be stated that while the players who left have been insinuating that their issues were not investigated, we the County Board Executive feel that we could not have done anything else reasonably expected of us. The players withdrew through a phone call from the secretary of the Carnacon club to Peter Leahy, at no time was the player liaison officer or any member of the county board forewarned of any issues, or indeed of the walkout itself. We approached the players through the secretary of the Carnacon club to organise the meeting and we organised the independent mediation process.
“At the August County Board meeting which was the first meeting since the player walkout, club delegates asked the executive for a summary of the whole incident around the senior team. While having consideration to the promise we made to the players on the night we met them that their issues would remain confidential, we gave the clubs the timeline of events. The clubs were of the opinion that the Carnacon clubs’ actions in withdrawing their players from the senior panel went against the ethos of the LGFA in the manner that it was done and through the subsequent statement released.
“The club delegates felt that members of the Carnacon club were complicit in the whole event and had brought Mayo LGFA into disrepute by causing a very public storm through their actions and the harmful statement which followed. There was a lot of hurt and anger and the clubs felt strongly that Carnacon should be sanctioned for bringing the organisation, their clubs and players into disrepute.
“As a County Board Executive, we were compelled to sanction the Carnacon club after an overwhelming majority vote. While we were acutely aware that the sanction would affect players who were not part of the walkout, we feel that it was the Carnacon club who removed their young players from a county panel where they would have enjoyed bright futures.
“Furthermore, we wish to express our disappointment at further statements made in a radio interview, whereby the playing environment under the management was deemed as “unhealthy” and she “didn’t feel it was a safe environment”. These remarks have led us to release this statement and we are seeking further advice with regard to them. We must stress that at no stage in our meeting with them were these remarks used. They have further exacerbated the situation and are extremely unhelpful going forward.
“Peter Leahy felt compelled to break his silence following these outrageous comments and we feel strongly that we must do likewise. It must be further stated at this stage that management, remaining players and county board officials have all said, and continue to say the same thing, we were not and are not aware of any issues which could be deemed as welfare issues, unhealthy or unsafe environments.
“We sincerely hope that this situation finishes today and are glad that the players indicated there will be no further comment. We wish them well in their future endeavours and hope our Senior Team can look forward to playing next year without restriction or intimidation.
“We wish Peter and his management team all the best going into the new season and we sincerely hope that we, the county board, can get back to the business of administrating Ladies football in the county for our children all the way to our adult players. We thank the clubs for their support and patience throughout this time.
“Yours in Sport,
“Mayo LGFA Executive”
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I get the chance to meet and interview amazing people, like pot star Tommy Chong, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, quarterback Jim McMahon, billionaire Richard Branson, and the leading researchers and activists in the marijuana movement.
But the interviews I find most special are those with the children battling life-threatening illnesses and conditions who find relief and cures from cannabis treatments. Imagine trying to comprehend the concept of your own mortality, finding a medicine that will save you, and then comprehending why the government would imprison your parents for giving it to you.
Such is the case for 10-year-old Alexis Bortell. She suffers from a terrible form of epilepsy, but her father, Dean, has found that a combination of CBD oil and THC supplements relieve Alexis’ condition. A little girl who was slipping behind in school and spending afternoons with the school nurse is now almost a year seizure-free.
But that’s only because Dean moved himself and Alexis out of Texas and into Colorado, where her medicine is legal. While Texas has passed a law allowing epileptic kids to use CBD oils, it mandates that the level of THC be exceptionally low to non-existent. Alexis’ condition doesn’t respond to CBD alone; she requires THC for it to be effective.
I had the chance to interview Alexis one-on-one shortly before her keynote speech:
In her keynote speech, she had two thousand attendees hanging on her every word. She was professional and rehearsed, an accomplished public speaker by any measure. She laid out her plans to bring whole plant medical marijuana to Texas, even if she has to become governor.
You can learn more and support Alexis Bortell at TeamAlexis.org. You can find my entire coverage of the Southwest Cannabis Conference & Expo, including the Gridiron Cannabis Coalition panel of Jim McMahon, Ricky Williams, and Marvin Washington, the inspiring Montel Williams, and the numerous activists and entrepreneurs fighting for marijuana reform in the Lone Star State at my Soundcloud page. | {
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Every time a new state redefines marriage, the news is full of happy stories of gay and lesbian couples and their new families. But behind those big smiles and sunny photographs are other, more painful stories. These are left to secret, dark places. They are suppressed, and those who would tell them are silenced in the name of “marriage equality.”
But I refuse to be silent.
I represent one of those real life stories that are kept in the shadows. I have personally felt the pain and devastation wrought by the propaganda that destroys natural families.
The Divorce
In the fall of 2007, my husband of almost ten years told me that he was gay and that he wanted a divorce. In an instant, the world that I had known and loved—the life we had built together—was shattered.
I tried to convince him to stay, to stick it out and fight to save our marriage. But my voice, my desires, my needs—and those of our two young children—no longer mattered to him. We had become disposable, because he had embraced one tiny word that had become his entire identity. Being gay trumped commitment, vows, responsibility, faith, fatherhood, marriage, friendships, and community. All of this was thrown away for the sake of his new identity.
Try as I might to save our marriage, there was no stopping my husband. Our divorce was not settled in mediation or with lawyers. No, it went all the way to trial. My husband wanted primary custody of our children. His entire case can be summed up in one sentence: “I am gay, and I deserve my rights.” It worked: the judge gave him practically everything he wanted. At one point, he even told my husband, “If you had asked for more, I would have given it to you.”
I truly believe that judge was legislating from the bench, disregarding the facts of our particular case and simply using us—using our children— to help influence future cases. In our society, LGBT citizens are seen as marginalized victims who must be protected at all costs, even if it means stripping rights from others. By ignoring the injustice committed against me and my children, the judge seemed to think that he was correcting a larger injustice.
My husband had left us for his gay lover. They make more money than I do. There are two of them and only one of me. Even so, the judge believed that they were the victims. No matter what I said or did, I didn’t have a chance of saving our children from being bounced around like so many pieces of luggage.
A New Same-Sex Family—Built On the Ruins of Mine
My ex-husband and his partner went on to marry. Their first ceremony took place before our state redefined marriage. After it created same-sex marriage, they chose to have a repeat performance. In both cases, my children were forced—against my will and theirs—to participate. At the second ceremony, which included more than twenty couples, local news stations and papers were there to document the first gay weddings officiated in our state. USA Today did a photo journal shoot on my ex and his partner, my children, and even the grandparents. I was not notified that this was taking place, nor was I given a voice to object to our children being used as props to promote same-sex marriage in the media.
At the time of the first ceremony, the marriage was not recognized by our state, our nation, or our church. And my ex-husband’s new marriage, like the majority of male-male relationships, is an “open,” non-exclusive relationship. This sends a clear message to our children: what you feel trumps all laws, promises, and higher authorities. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want—and it doesn’t matter who you hurt along the way.
After our children’s pictures were publicized, a flood of comments and posts appeared. Commenters exclaimed at how beautiful this gay family was and congratulated my ex-husband and his new partner on the family that they “created.” But there is a significant person missing from those pictures: the mother and abandoned wife. That “gay family” could not exist without me.
There is not one gay family that exists in this world that was created naturally.
Every same-sex family can only exist by manipulating nature. Behind the happy façade of many families headed by same-sex couples, we see relationships that are built from brokenness. They represent covenants broken, love abandoned, and responsibilities crushed. They are built on betrayal, lies, and deep wounds.
Click "like" if you want to defend true marriage.
This is also true of same-sex couples who use assisted reproductive technologies such as surrogacy or sperm donation to have children. Such processes exploit men and women for their reproductive potential, treat children as products to be bought and sold, and purposely deny children a relationship with one or both of their biological parents. Wholeness and balance cannot be found in such families, because something is always missing. I am missing. But I am real, and I represent hundreds upon thousands of spouses who have been betrayed and rejected.
If my husband had chosen to stay, I know that things wouldn’t have been easy. But that is what marriage is about: making a vow and choosing to live it out, day after day. In sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, spouses must choose to put the other person first, loving them even when it’s hard.
A good marriage doesn’t only depend on sexual desire, which can come and go and is often out of our control. It depends on choosing to love, honor, and be faithful to one person, forsaking all others. It is common for spouses to be attracted to other people—usually of the opposite sex, but sometimes of the same sex. Spouses who value their marriage do not act on those impulses. For those who find themselves attracted to people of the same sex, staying faithful to their opposite-sex spouse isn’t a betrayal of their true identity. Rather, it’s a decision not to let themselves be ruled by their passions. It shows depth and strength of character when such people remain true to their vows, consciously striving to remember, honor, and revive the love they had for their spouses when they first married.
My Children Deserve Better
Our two young children were willfully and intentionally thrust into a world of strife and combative beliefs, lifestyles, and values, all in the name of “gay rights.” Their father moved into his new partner’s condo, which is in a complex inhabited by sixteen gay men. One of the men has a 19-year-old male prostitute who comes to service him. Another man, who functions as the father figure of this community, is in his late sixties and has a boyfriend in his twenties. My children are brought to gay parties where they are the only children and where only alcoholic beverages are served. They are taken to transgender baseball games, gay rights fundraisers, and LGBT film festivals.
Both of my children face identity issues, just like other children. Yet there are certain deep and unique problems that they will face as a direct result of my former husband’s actions. My son is now a maturing teen, and he is very interested in girls. But how will he learn how to deal with that interest when he is surrounded by men who seek sexual gratification from other men? How will he learn to treat girls with care and respect when his father has rejected them and devalues them? How will he embrace his developing masculinity without seeing his father live out authentic manhood by treating his wife and family with love, honoring his marriage vows even when it's hard?
My daughter suffers too. She needs a dad who will encourage her to embrace her femininity and beauty, but these qualities are parodied and distorted in her father's world. Her dad wears make-up and sex bondage straps for Halloween. She is often exposed to men dressing as women. The walls in his condo are adorned with large framed pictures of women in provocative positions. What is my little girl to believe about her own femininity and beauty? Her father should be protecting her sexuality. Instead, he is warping it.
Without the guidance of both their mother and their father, how can my children navigate their developing identities and sexuality? I ache to see my children struggle, desperately trying to make sense of their world.
My children and I have suffered great losses because of my former husband’s decision to identify as a gay man and throw away his life with us. Time is revealing the depth of those wounds, but I will not allow them to destroy me and my children. I refuse to lose my faith and hope. I believe so much more passionately in the power of the marriage covenant between one man and one woman today than when I was married. There is another way for those with same-sex attractions. Destruction is not the only option—it cannot be. Our children deserve far better from us.
This type of devastation should never happen to another spouse or child. Please, I plead with you: defend marriage as being between one man and one woman. We must stand for marriage—and for the precious lives that marriage creates.
Janna Darnelle is a mother, writer, and an advocate for upholding marriage between one man and one woman. She mentors others whose families have been impacted by homosexuality.
Reprinted with permission from the Public Discourse. | {
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OMG this was so much fun to paint!! Brought back a lot of fond memories of growing up playing Blizzard games. I have so much respect for their game and art.Good luck to everyone! There are some killer entries out there!!Happy painting ^^-din | {
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John Sargent, ceo of Macmillan — the parent company of Henry Holt, the publisher of Michael Wolff’s FIRE AND FURY — sent the following letter to the company’s employees on Monday morning, provided to Publishers Lunch:
To: All Macmillan Employees
From: John Sargent
Last Thursday, shortly after 7:00 a.m., we received a demand from the President of the United States to “immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination” of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. On Thursday afternoon we responded with a short statement saying that we would publish the book, and we moved the pub date forward to the next day. Later today we will send our legal response to President Trump.
Our response is firm, as it has to be. I am writing you today to explain why this is a matter of great importance. It is about much more than Fire and Fury.
The president is free to call news “fake” and to blast the media. That goes against convention, but it is not unconstitutional. But a demand to cease and desist publication—a clear effort by the President of the United States to intimidate a publisher into halting publication of an important book on the workings of the government—is an attempt to achieve what is called prior restraint. That is something that no American court would order as it is flagrantly unconstitutional.
This is very clearly defined in Supreme Court case law, most prominently in the Pentagon Papers case. As Justice Hugo Black explained in his concurrence:
“Both the history and language of the First Amendment support the view that the press must be left free to publish news, whatever the source, without censorship, injunctions, or prior restraints. In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.”
Then there is Justice William Brennan’s opinion in The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan:
“Thus we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”
And finally Chief Justice Warren Burger in another landmark case:
“The thread running through all these cases is that prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.”
There is no ambiguity here. This is an underlying principle of our democracy. We cannot stand silent. We will not allow any president to achieve by intimidation what our Constitution precludes him or her from achieving in court. We need to respond strongly for Michael Wolff and his book, but also for all authors and all their books, now and in the future. And as citizens we must demand that President Trump understand and abide by the First Amendment of our Constitution.
— John Sargent | {
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Ricardo Miranda is looking for the perfect shoes for his wedding.
It's a wedding that will make history in Alberta.
Later this month, the Calgary-Cross MLA, who is also minister of culture and tourism, will become the first Alberta cabinet minister to be married in a same-sex ceremony.
In another first, Premier Rachel Notley will officiate at the wedding.
Miranda, 42, and his fiance, Christopher Brown, are excited about their love story, which brought together a Nicaraguan refugee and a small town Ontario boy.
Miranda and Brown at the Grey Cup in Edmonton. (Supplied)
From Nicaragua to Alberta
Miranda's family fled war-torn Nicaragua when he was 10 years old. Two years later, the family moved to Calgary, to the riding he now represents in the legislature.
It's a diverse neighbourhood, and Miranda said he and his family were welcomed.
It was harder being a young gay man, he said.
"It was a very isolated sense of existence. You didn't see role models."
Miranda came out when he was 18; he said that wasn't a big deal to his family.
His mother was more concerned about the fact he wouldn't give her any grandchildren.
When he told her he still wanted to have kids, "she came along nicely," he said.
The rest of the family didn't have a problem with his sexuality.
"I guess they realized that I wasn't any different than I was before they knew," he said.
Premier Rachel Notley will conduct the wedding ceremony for Miranda and Brown. (Supplied)
He graduated from high school in Calgary and worked for Canadian Airlines and Air Canada before he was elected as a union representative. That was the springboard he needed to get into politics and join the NDP.
In 2015, he became the first openly gay, Jewish, Hispanic person elected to the Alberta legislature.
A match made in Slave Lake
Three years later, he went to a constituency event in the Lesser Slave Lake riding of his cabinet colleague, Danielle Larivee, the minister of children's services.
Brown works for Larivee and was taking pictures at the event on July 4, 2018.
Larivee had mentioned Brown to Miranda, thinking the two might hit it off.
"She kind of played matchmaker," Miranda said.
After the event, Brown and Miranda went out for coffee.
"I thought he was more interested to talk about politics," said Miranda. "Then it turned out he was more interested in talking about personal stuff."
The relationship blossomed. Miranda realized early on that Brown was a keeper.
Both wanted to propose
Miranda said he was thinking of proposing in October but got a definite "no" vibe from Brown.
Miranda's ring has four diamonds, representing July 4, the day the couple first met. (Nola Keeler/CBC) It turned out the reason was, Brown wanted to be the one to propose.
"Little did I know ... it turned out he wanted to ask me but he hadn't bought the ring yet ," said Miranda.
After the NDP convention at the end of October, Brown popped the question.
He gave Miranda a gold ring with four small diamonds to signify the day they met.
"He wanted to give me something that meant something to him about me," said Miranda.
It was a whirlwind courtship but Miranda said he was ready for the commitment.
They've invited about 100 people to the wedding.
His 18-year-old nephew will be best man, and his 23-year-old niece will be the flower girl.
Brown's family will travel from Ontario for the ceremony. A second reception will be held in Ontario in the new year.
Going public with the news
The two decided to share their news publicly, though Miranda said he wasn't initially keen on the idea.
"Visibility is very important to the community," he said. "We've seen, unfortunately, even here in the province, a rise in hate crimes. And it takes us back to a time I don't want to go back to."
Miranda said it's important for other LGBTQ people to see him sharing the news about his engagement and wedding.
"You can't forget where you're from, and you have to make strides to advance the rights of everyone," he said.
"We could have ... easily done this without anybody finding out. But I've always been open and forthcoming and honest about my life, and this didn't seem like the time to actually hide."
Miranda said he and Brown are prepared for any negative reaction. He has experienced discrimination before but said having Brown by his side will make all the difference.
"I have someone I can rely on and have the support from," he said. "That's very soothing."
The couple is house shopping in Calgary. (Fernando Vargas)
He's not worried about reaction from his constituents because he has been open about being gay.
"When they get to meet me, they realize I have just as many concerns as they do about the energy sector and the environment, and all these other things that are important," he said. "All these other things just kind of fade into the background and we can connect on the most basic of levels."
Miranda admits he finds the prospect of marriage intimidating.
"We want to make it work and it's going to be hard and we're willing to do the work," he said. "Love is really love, at the end of the day." | {
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If nothing else, you’d think climate change would have forced us to put a few things in perspective. But no, in Canada and countries around the world, things grow worse by the day. Governments in countries such as the United States, Brazil and Australia have opted for outright denial. They carry on regardless, even when that means wreaking havoc on themselves as well as the planet.
Meanwhile, talk of meeting our legal obligations under the Paris Agreement has become meaningless. And already we have conveniently forgotten the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that either we clean up our act by 2030 or hit the point of no return.
Yet according to the David Suzuki Foundation, “Canada is warming at twice the global average rate — higher in the north.” Premier Doug Ford has responded by devoting much of his first few months in office undoing years of environmental legislation, killing everything from the province’s carbon cap-and-trade program to a long list of green energy projects.
Though there has been the predictable backlash and Ford’s approval ratings have tanked, Ontarians haven’t lost much sleep over the issue. The crisis has been met with the usual mix of hand-wringing and yawning indifference. We’ve seen no mass movement like Extinction Rebellion, which regularly shuts down cites in the U.K., and no Greta Thunberg to remind us of truths we’d rather ignore. Perhaps we’re just too busy looking for a place to gas up the family SUV.
Like other Canadians, Ontarians have adapted to a political system so confused and conflicted it declares a national climate emergency one day and approves a pipeline to transport the dirtiest oil in the world the next. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau justifies such wildly contradictory behaviour by explaining that revenues will go toward the great cleanup, date to be announced.
Here in Toronto, we’re still living off measures taken a decade ago by then-mayor David Miller. Since then, the city has done little to reduce its carbon footprint. It has been agonizingly difficult for us to install even a few bike lanes on the streets of Toronto. They were handed over to drivers eons ago. In any case, there’s little the city can do — around here it’s always the province’s fault.
No one has put the issue more succinctly than Roy Scranton. “The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one,” he wrote in an essay entitled “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” “understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”
Have your say
Some insist there’s still time “to save ourselves.” Green Party Leader Elizabeth May talks cheerfully about her “Mission Possible” plan. But given our fear of change, Scranton’s words feel closer to the truth. A recent CBC poll, for example, found that almost two-thirds of Canadians agree the climate crisis is a top priority. Yet half of those consulted admitted they’d rather not have to pay more than $100 annually to save the environment.
Figures like these may not explain why climate change is happening, but they do make it clear why we’re unable to deal with it and, perhaps, why Canadians are the heaviest per capita emitters in the world. We like to believe we’re the solution but, in fact, we’re the problem. And the argument that we can pull some last minute technological rabbit out of the hat is delusional. The time for that has come and gone.
We are on our own. Or at least our kids are. But as English naturalist David Attenborough has observed, the young are the best argument for optimism. They have figured out that it will be up to them to deal with the full consequences of environmental degradation. The Canada they inherit will be a zombie nation, undead yet not fully alive. For them, failure is not an option. Climate crisis is an existential reality of their daily life. Many no longer assume they should have children of their own.
Perhaps it’s time to start planting the trillion trees we’re told will help save the planet. Proponents say they would absorb 750 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. But as critics point out, as much as that may be, it still won’t be enough to get us out of the woods.
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любая - 2* 3* 3* + 3*sup 4* 4*sup 5* 5*deluxe апт.
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Borussia Dortmund midfielder Mario Gotze has been advised to join Liverpool in order to revive his career after admitting criticism is getting to him.
Gotze, 26, once hailed as world football's most promising talents, has been in decline ever since scoring the winning goal for Germany in the 2014 World Cup final.
Having returned to Borussia Dortmund from Bayern Munich in 2016, the midfielder has struggled with injuries and illnesses and has found it difficult to break into the team under four different coaches.
Axed from the squad against Hoffenheim on Saturday following a disappointing performance against Club Brugge in the Champions League, Gotze has told kicker that the situation is a "challenge" for him.
"I am just not able to block it out," he said of criticism.
Gotze's former Dortmund and Germany teammate Kevin Grosskreutz said there is only chance Gotze can revive his career -- moving abroad.
"Maybe it'll do him a world of good to leave Bundesliga in the winter, move abroad where it's all a bit quieter and where he knock his career into shape again," Grosskreutz told Sky.
"Jurgen Klopp knows him well. He'd be a good fit at Liverpool."
Speaking at his prematch news conference ahead of Liverpool's Carabao Cup clash against Chelsea, Klopp was asked about speculation linking him to Gotze but distanced himself from transfer talk.
"It's absolutely nothing I would want to talk in a press conference in England before a game against Chelsea, to be honest," Klopp said. "If I have to say something to Mario then I call him and don't talk about him. Nothing to say." | {
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Guest Post by Mara Zebest
The Obama Administration has given a $200,000 Housing Grant to rebrand an ACORN affiliate despite a Federal Ban on funding ACORN.
Judicial Watch reports the following:
Judicial Watch, announced today that it has obtained documents from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) revealing that on February 12, 2013, HUD Assistant Secretary for Office of Housing Counseling Sarah Gerecke may have violated federal law by requesting that $201,222.07 be transferred from the account of the defunct Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA), an ACORN spin-off, to HUD intermediary Mission for Peace “to specifically pay for the activities of former AHCOA affiliates.” […]
TRENDING: ANGRY LEFTIST Smacks 84-Year-Old Female Trump Supporter Across the Face at Trump Rally in Aliso Viejo -- Beats Another Senior (VIDEO)
Read more here.
Washington Examiner also reports on the Judicial Watch findings:
A spinoff of the scandal-ridden community organizer group ACORN received more than $200,000 in federal housing grants despite a ban on money going to ACORN affiliates, watchdog organization Judicial Watch announced Thursday.
ACORN, which officially folded in 2009 after a string of scandals, rebranded into more than 100 spinoff groups, including Affordable Housing Centers of America — also now defunct — and Mission of Peace, an affordable housing nonprofit.
In February, the Department of Housing and Urban Development transferred $201,222.07 from AHCOA to Mission of Peace “specifically to pay for the activities of former AHCOA affiliates,” according to a memo obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request.
HUD approved the transfer despite a federal ban on tax dollars being used to fund any ACORN affiliate.
“None of the funds made available under this Act or any prior Act may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations,” according to the 2010 budget appropriations act.
HUD also made the grant despite a September 2012 report by the HUD Inspector General that concluded ACORN Housing, operating as Affordable Housing Centers of America, misspent funds from a $3,252,399 federal grant.
Because of the ban, the award to Mission of Peace appears to be a violation of federal law, according to Judicial Watch. MOP is one of numerous ACORN affiliates operating under new names, Judicial Watch spokeswoman Jill Farrell told the Washington Examiner.
“Barack Obama is truly the president from ACORN – as this illegal funding by his administration of these ACORN fronts shows,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement.
“And at the same time we learn that the Obama administration is unleashing a vast new federal program to force ‘low-income’ housing into every single community in America, we find out that HUD is continuing illegally to fund ACORN spin-offs committed to carrying out Obama’s dictums. This is not a coincidence.”
More than 174 groups affiliated with ACORN were still active as of August 2012, and at least two besides Mission of Peace have received federal funds, according to a report by the Washington Free Beacon.
Read more here. | {
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Pennsylvania prison officials are investigating the death of a drug-detecting police dog left in a hot vehicle for 2½ hours during a training exercise.
The state Department of Corrections said the 2-year-old yellow Labrador named Totti was left in the vehicle July 7 at the state prison at Rockview near Bellefonte in Centre County.
Corrections spokeswoman Amy Worden said the dog's handler had stored training items in a vehicle at the end of the exercise and didn't realize the dog was locked in the car. Dog handlers and other staff tried to cool Totti with a water hose and ice and took him to a nearby veterinary clinic, but he died that night.
The department said Totti's death "has been very devastating for everyone involved." | {
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You will never guess why National Geographic has published “The Race Issue” as a special issue which kicks off the magazine’s “Diversity in America” series:
Here are the links to the individual articles:
“The Race Issue, which is accompanied by a discussion guide aimed at parents and educators (here), includes the latest research, powerful anecdotes and unparalleled visual storytelling to explore the human journey through the lens of labels that define, separate and unite us. Select features include:
“Skin Deep,” an article on the genetics of race and roots of scientific racism, by Pulitzer-Prize winning authorElizabeth Kolbert and photos by Robin Hammond.
“The Things That Divide Us,” a look into the evolutionary roots of group bias and current efforts to combat this bias, with text by David Berreby and photos by John Stanmeyer.
“The Rising Anxiety of White America,” by renowned journalist Michele Norris, who looks to 2044 when America will be less than 50 percent white and details the cultural shift already taking place. Photos by Gillian Laub.
“The Stop,” a powerful piece featuring anecdotes from black and Hispanic motorists who’ve been pulled over by the police due to the color of their skin. This piece was reported in partnership with ESPN’s The Undefeated, with text by Michael Fletcher and photos by National Geographic photographer Wayne Lawrence.
“Streets in His Name,” a photographic essay, with text by award-winning journalist Wendi C. Thomas, on streets around the world bearing MLK Jr.’s name and how they reflect the legacy he left behind.
“A Place of Their Own,” which showcases a new brand of activism at historically black colleges and universities as racial tensions escalate across the country. Text by Clint Smith and photos by Nina Robinson and Ruddy Roye.
The Race Issue kicks off the magazine’s “Diversity in America” series. Throughout the rest of 2018, the series looks at racial, ethnic and religious groups in the United States, including Muslims, Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans, and examines their changing roles in 21st-century life. …” | {
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9/11 Attack Anniversary: Tributes are paid as soaring beams of light are put out on 9/11.
Two soaring beams of light are put out every year over Lower Manhattan on 9/11 or September 11, in a tribute to those killed 18 years ago in one of the deadliest terror attacks on the US soil. Researchers, however, have said that those beams of light can lure birds to veer off their normal migratory flights.
Some 160,000 birds, which are drawn to the immense light along with insects and bats, encircle these beams, seemingly unable to veer away, and are pulled off-course, putting them at risk of exhaustion or disorientation, The New York Times reported.
The anniversary of the September 11 attacks coincides with the migration period of birds across the New York City as fall approaches. But the convergence shares a stark reality of the situation which illustrates the dangers of humans and animals sharing an urban ecosystem.
The birds such as small songbirds like Canada and yellow warblers and American redstarts and nighthawks come closer to the beams to prey on insects, and peregrine falcons. When the number of trapped birds reach around 1,000, the lights are switched off for 20 minutes to let the birds disperse.
"It's very solemn," said Susan Elbin, an ornithologist and the director of conservation and science at New York City Audubon, a US-based advocacy group.
"The lights just appear in the darkness and go on forever"-- four miles up -- "and when the sun rises the next morning it just disappears," she said.
According to radar studies by Sasan Elbin and other scientists, the 20-minute breaks are enough to allow birds to resume their migration.
"It's my job to turn the lights out, and I'd rather not have lights on at all, because the artificial light interferes with birds' natural cues to navigate," the scientist added.
"Light lures them in, and glass finishes them off," she said.
The light tribute attracts bird densities up to 150 times their normal levels the researcher divulged.
In addition, another risk is that by flying in the lights, birds could use up too much of the fat they store for energy for migration, she said. "They only have enough to get where they need to go; the fatter you are, the more energy it takes to fly, so it's a fine balance," she said.
The New York City Council will today hold a committee meeting on a bill to require new or renovated buildings to use more bird-friendly glass. A similar campaign is also taking place in Chicago. | {
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W3[Update] Since publishing our post, the interview with Ali Salehi has been removed from Vigiato due to personal reasons. Luckily, the interview has been archived and can still be accessed here.
I must say that Ali Salehi doesn't confirm the content of the interview anymore due to personal reasons. — . (@man4dead) April 6, 2020
Looking For A PlayStation 5 In the US? Walmart Opens Pre-Orders In One Hour!
[Original story] In a new interview, Crytek rendering engineer Ali Salehi talks about the specs of the PS5 and Xbox Series X and developing for the next-gen consoles.
Speaking to Persian gaming website Vigiato (and translated by Twitter user @man4dead), the rendering engineer talked about the power difference between the upcoming consoles from Sony and Microsoft. A lot has been said and written about the specifications of both consoles over the past month. Theoretically, the Xbox Series X clearly has the advantage when it comes to raw computing power, but according to Crytek’s rendering engineer, not all is what it seems.
If Salehi is to be believed, developing for PS5 is extremely simple, something that PlayStation lead architect Mark Cerny has pointed out on various occasions, and reaching the console’s peak performance is easier than it is on the Series X.
"The developers are saying PS5 is the easiest console they have ever coded on to reach its peak performance”, he said. “Software-wise, coding for PS5 is extremely simple and has so many abilities that make the [developers] so free. In total, I can say PS5 is a better console."
While TFLOPs are important, reaching peak performance on the Series X will only be achievable under the most ideal and theoretical conditions. If all of the components inside Microsoft’s console can work together efficiently alongside the GPU, the series X can hit its peak performance of 12TFLOPs, but this just doesn’t seem to be possible.
Resident Evil Village Drops a Creepy New Trailer, PS5 Version of Game Reportedly Struggling
That's why you can't care much about these numbers.
But if all parts can work efficiently in Xbox Series X alongside its GPU, It can hit that number in practice, Which doesn't seem so possible. Beside all these, there's a software part too. — . (@man4dead) April 6, 2020
Developing for the Series X might be somewhat challenging, Salehi explains. One of the reasons for this is the console’s software, and another one is its use of two different RAM parts, differing in bandwidth.
The thing we saw in PCs, was DX12 and Vulkan. Without change in hardware, with change in the architecture of the software you can use the hardware better.
This is applicable to the consoles too. Sony runs PS5 on its own OS but Microsoft uses a custom version of Windows — . (@man4dead) April 6, 2020
According to Salehi, developers will want to use the higher-bandwidth as much as possible, which might cause some issues.
Because the the total amount of things we want to put in the fast part is so much that it may cause problems. And if we want to support 4k it will be another whole story.
So there will be somethings that will hold the gpu off. — . (@man4dead) April 6, 2020
The engineer was also asked about the difference in compute units between the PS5 and Xbox Series X. While the PS5’s GPU has less compute units than the Xbox Series X, the TFLOPs difference isn’t that big.
Therefore, despite the huge difference in CU count, They don't have that much of Tflops difference. An Interesting thing that one of IGN's journalists said. He said XSX is like a V8 motor and PS5 is like a V6 one turbo boosted to the max for best efficiency. — . (@man4dead) April 6, 2020
Despite having locked CPU and GPU frequencies, the Series X will only reach its full potential under the most ideal circumstances, whereas the PS5 will mostly work on its peak 10.28TFLOPs.
Than XSX. This will make the console work mostly on the 10.28 Tflops. But in XSX, since the other parts of the gpu work slower due to the lower clock speed, it actually works a lot at lower Tflops most often and reaches 12 only at ideal situations. — . (@man4dead) April 6, 2020
Quite an interesting take on the PS5 and Xbox Series X from the Crytek engineer. Last week, we already covered some quotes from Quantum League designer Balthazar Auger, who said that the raw power difference between the Xbox Series X and PS5 won't make that much of a difference for multiplatform titles as developers working those titles will be bound to the lowest common denominator.
Can you agree with Salehi on the Xbox Series X being bottlenecked by other components? Will it be easier to reach peak performance on the PS5? Please discuss below. | {
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What to Know Jeanine Cammarata, 37, was missing for nearly a week before her badly burned body was found in a storage center on Staten Island
The mother of three worked two jobs -- as a public school elementary school teacher and a Dollar Store clerk -- and hadn't shown up
Her estranged husband and his girlfriend have been charged with second-degree murder in the case; they are due in court Thursday
The children of a murdered Staten Island teacher were in the car with their mother’s burned remains as their father and his girlfriend allegedly drove to a storage facility to discard of her body, a report claims.
Authorities say Jeanine Cammarata, 37, was killed by her estranged husband, Michael Cammarata and his girlfriend, Ayisha Egea, who then allegedly dumped her body in a garbage bag, surrounded by air fresheners, at a storage facility a few miles from where she lived.
The Staten Island Advance reports, citing law enforcement sources, that after she was killed, Michael Cammarata packed their kids, ages 3 and 7, into the car and drove to the storage center with their mother’s remains.
Jeanine Cammarata had been missing for nearly a week before her burned body turned up. Michael Cammarata and Egea both are accused of second-degree murder, concealment of a human corpse and tampering with physical evidence, according to a criminal complaint.
If convicted of murder, each faces a sentence of 25 to life.
Michael and Egea appeared in court Thursday.
Although the Richmond County Distrist Attorney handed two indictiments on felony charges, prosecutors wouldn't say what they are. However, since the felony certificates have to be submitted for bail application, the judge may ask prosecutors to reveal what the felony is although it is not necessary until the arraignment.
The defense protested the unspecified felony indictments against Michael and Egea.
Purple ribbons and flowers covered the fence surrounding the PS 29 school where Jeanine Cammarata taught on Thursday, a show of solidarity for her and other victims of domestic violence. Teachers lined up along the sidewalk, wearing purple, to greet their students as they remembered the educator who warmed all their hearts. The principal of PS 29 said children would wear purple on May 3, a school kindness day, and go out into the neighborhood to do acts of kindness in Jeanine Cammarata's memory.
The public elementary school teacher hadn't been seen publicly since the night of March 30 at her home on Staten Island. Eric Gansberg, who was representing her in ongoing divorce proceedings against Michael Cammarata, told News 4 the missing woman had been heading to her husband's Queens home to see their children the night she disappeared.
Gansberg said Jeanine Cammarata was "terrified" of her estranged husband, and that if something nefarious happened to the woman, it was likely at his hands.
Gansberg said Michael Cammarata had custody of the children because Jeanine was living in an apartment she felt wasn't suitable for them. Jeanine Cammarata worked two jobs -- one at an elementary school and one at a Dollar Store -- and hasn't shown up for either of them this week, which prompted a missing persons report. The couple had no legal custody agreement involving the children. | {
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PM Narendra Modi with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Taj Fisherman Cove resort, Kovalam near Mamallapuram. (P... Read More
MAMALLAPURAM: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping began the second day of their informal summit with a tete-e-tete in this coastal temple town on Saturday.
Modi and Xi exchanged views facing the sea front in the luxury Taj resort Fisherman's Cove. The one-on-one will be followed by delegation-level talks at the Tango hall.
On Friday, Modi and Xi held a two-and-half-hour “open and cordial” one-on-one discussion over dinner in this bustling temple town, vowing to jointly combat terrorism and radicalisation, and signalling a recalibration of bilateral ties.
The meeting at the magnificent Shore temple complex under a sea-facing colourful tent in this coastal town continued well beyond the scheduled time as both leaders touched upon a range of issues, including trade deficit, over sumptuous local delicacies, officials said.
“The discussion stressed over 150 minutes and it was well beyond the planned time for conversation. The discussions were very open and coordial. This was quality time that the two leaders spent together one-on-one,” foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale said in a late evening press conference.
Xi arrived in Chennai on a nearly 24-hour visit to hold the second informal summit with Modi at a time the ties between the two Asian giants came under strain over India's decision to withdraw special status of Jammu and Kashmir .
Gokhale said both sides vowed to work together so that radicalisation and terrorism do not affect the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies of the two nations.
He said the two leaders also deliberated on trade and economic issues with a focus on identifying new areas for investment and enhancing trade volume and value of two-way trade.
The issue of trade deficit and trade imbalance was also discussed, the foreign secretary said.
External affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar described the engagement between Modi and Xi on the first day of the informal summit as “highly productive”.
There was no official word on whether Modi and Xi discussed the Kashmir issue. In a tweet following the dinner, Modi said he was delighted to spend time with Xi.
“Mamallapuram is one of the most beautiful places in India, full of vibrancy. It is linked to commerce, spirituality and is now a popular tourism centre. I am delighted that President Xi Jinping and I are spending time in this scenic place, which is also a Unesco heritage site,” he said.
In the late afternoon, Modi and Xi sipped coconut water and engaged in casual interaction in a serene setting in the backdrop of 7th century rock-cut chariots of Pancha Ratha overlooking the Bay of Bengal.
Modi took Xi for a guided tour of the famous world heritage sites of Arjuna's Penance, Krishna's Butterball, the Pancha Ratha and Shore temple in this ancient temple town, kicking off the second informal summit between the two leaders.
“The free flowing nature of the informal summit at the Unesco world heritage site will continue and deepen contacts at the highest level and guide the future trajectory of India-China relationship,” the MEA Spokesperson tweeted.
Xi's visit to India comes two days after he held talks with Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan in Beijing. After the talks, a joint statement said China is paying “close attention" to the situation in Kashmir and that the issue should be properly and peacefully resolved based on the UN Charter. The comments evoked sharp reaction from New Delhi.
In Video: PM Modi highlights start of a new era of India-China ties | {
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The locally based team behind a pair of high-profile developments along the downtown canal is looking at a parking lot in the Fan for its next project.
Fountainhead Properties’ Tom Papa is collaborating with WVS Cos.’ Jason Vickers-Smith and Richard Souter on a six-story, 105-unit apartment building at 1131 and 1137 W. Grace St., the site of a parking lot at the corner of Grace and Stuart Circle that is owned by the adjacent St. John’s United Church of Christ.
Plans are preliminary and require approval from the city’s Commission of Architectural Review, which was scheduled to provide a conceptual review for the project this week.
Existing zoning allows the Grace Street building to be built by right – as well as twice as high as the team is proposing, Papa noted. But he said they’re sticking with six stories because they want the building to fit with the neighborhood.
“We’re being very sensitive to making sure that what we build is appropriate for the area,” Papa said. While the nearby Stuart Court Apartments reach as high as 10 stories, adjacent rowhouses on Grace are two and three stories.
The building would be the latest project between Fountainhead and WVS, which teamed up on the Locks mixed-use development and are planning a canal-front hotel nearby. Separately, WVS is the developer of Rocketts Landing, and Fountainhead is the company behind a pair of planned towers on the Manchester riverfront.
Papa said the project came about when the century-old church – where, he said, Vickers-Smith was married – decided to sell the two parcels to help raise funds for renovations. The parcels were listed by Jeff Cooke with Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer, and Papa said his team was one of five development groups that made offers on the site – and the only one, he said, to not propose student housing.
Papa said he, Vickers-Smith and Souter are under contract to purchase the 0.8-acre property through an entity called CIRC LLC. Pending CAR and plan of development approvals, he said they’re aiming to start construction on the 18-month project next spring.
The group has held several meetings with neighborhood groups to solicit input on the building’s design, which remains conceptual, Papa said.
“We’re trying to get input from the community as to materials, and be more sensitive and hear more opinions of what they would like to see,” he said. “What we’re hearing is pretty uniform across the board: that they’d like to see brick and something that isn’t pretend-old and that respects properties’ aesthetics around it.
“I’m sure there’ll be somebody that thinks we didn’t do it as well as they would have done it, but we’ll be very sensitive to the wants and needs of the community.”
The building would consist of five levels of apartments above two levels of parking, one of which would be underground. Forty parking spaces would be reserved for St. John’s, including 16 surface spaces that would be provided in addition to the 130 spaces in the structure, which would not be visible to pedestrians along the street.
The apartments would range from 650 square feet for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit to 900 square feet for a two-bedroom, 1½-bath. Papa said rents would be market-rate and have yet to be set.
He said the overall cost of the project is likewise variable, dependent on the building materials and other details decided.
“All of the folks in the neighborhood have actually been very supportive,” Papa said. “People have the usual concerns about what’s going to happen with all these (additional residents). We are very sensitive to that.
“A parking lot doesn’t help the city, it doesn’t help create density, it doesn’t help the businesses that need to be in a community in order for a community to thrive.”
The group is working with Lory Markham of Markham Planning on its applications to the city. Walter Parks Architects is signed on to design the building. | {
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Once again, it is time for the job trends for traditional programming languages. Just like the most recent trends updates, we are only looking at Java, C++, C#, Objective C, Perl and Visual Basic. This list has stayed fairly stable during the past few updates and I am always looking to see if something else should be added. Please let me know if you think some other language deserves to be in this group. Also, please review some of the other job trends posts to see if your favorite language is already in one of these posts.
First, here is a look at the job trends from Indeed.com:
Most of the job trends seem to have gone flat in the past year. Objective-C is showing solid growth and C# is actually showing a slight upward trend. You may wonder why this is happening and in the past I had guessed that this was economy related. Given the activity I have seen in the past year, I am starting to think that the growth in jobs is not happening in these traditional languages as much. There is huge growth in mobile development, especially with Objective-C leading the way in iOS development. You may think that Java should increase given its ties to Android, but Java is starting to slowly decline in the enterprise, so mobile growth is just offsetting this decline. Perl shows a slightly declining trend, but it is not sustained enough yet to really have comments about.
Now, let’s look at SimplyHired’s short term trends:
SimplyHired’s trends are fairly similar to Indeed, but there are some differences. First, Visual Basic looks like it is in decline, which would make sense. Objective-C does not show the same type of growth as the Indeed trends, only gaining slightly. All of the others look fairly steady in the past few months.
Finally, here is a review of the relative scaling from Indeed. This provides an interesting trend graph based on job growth:
Objective-C continues to grow like a weed, with some minor dips every few months. C# growth is solid, hovering around 100% for the past 3 years. Visual Basic and C++ continue to show no growth. Perl and Java are still showing signs of life, but growing at 25% is not very significant.
What does all this mean? First, it is clear the iOS development is hot as is all mobile development. It will be interesting to see if Java can get some sustained growth with the rise of Android developmnent. From the trend perspective, Perl should be watched to see if there is a significant decline over the next year. C# will likely continue its growth as a replacement for C++ and as a language for Windows Phone development. Lastly, Visual Basic really looks like it may finally disappear over the next few years.
UPDATE: For those of you looking for Ruby, Python, Groovy, JavaScript, PHP or Erlang, please look at the February 2012 Web and Scripting Job Trends.
UPDATE: This article is translated to Russian by Everycloudtech.
Related articles | {
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With the CFPL transitioning into a franchised league, Team Reciprocity owner, Chad Larsson, compares the CFPL to the OWL highlighting a better opportunity.
Team Reciprocity Secure Franchise Spot in CFPL With LGD Gaming Partnership
CrossFire has a huge esports scene in Asia, with the majority of players from China and South Korea. According to Businesswire.com, CrossFire had 660 million players worldwide and is one of the most played games worldwide. As the game grew in esports, the thought of a franchised league would become a reality. With the CrossFire Pro League (CFPL) transitioning now into a franchised league, not every team that wanted in would have a spot. Recently, Team Reciprocity and partnered with one of the biggest esports organizations in China, LGD Gaming. This move allowed both teams to secure one of the ten spots in the new CrossFire franchised league.
“We’re excited to be partnering with LGD Gaming and to be a CrossFire franchise owner on the ground floor of what we believe will be a preeminent esports league in China. I have been a fan of Jie Pan and the work she has done since she founded LGD. Our partnership represents a big step for Reciprocity as this franchise will be among the first of many for us globally.” Founder and CEO of Reciprocity, Chad Larsson.
Better Opportunity in CFPL Than OWL?
With the recently announced partnership between Team Reciprocity and LGD Gaming, CEO of Team Rec took to twitter to show an interesting comparison of the CFPL to the Overwatch League. Since the OWL is a franchised league as well, he posted an image from Esports Charts which shows the comparison of some interesting variables such as:
Cost of Entry
Player Base
Peak Viewers
Average Concurrent Views
Hours Watched
Comparing the two, the biggest eye-opener is the low cost of entry into the CFPL franchised league compared to that of Overwatch. This is interesting to note as the new Call of Duty League which will be franchised next year also has a high entry cost ($25 million) which is run by Activision Blizzard. But there’s more potential for brand awareness in the CFPL considering that Rec/LGD would only pay $1.5 million dollars to enter the new franchised league. That’s literally $28.5 million less than the starting franchise fee in OWL (which can go up to $60 million). Here’s Chad’s tweet:
With CrossFire transitioning to a franchise league. I made an interesting comparison between the CFPL and OWL. Happy to be an owner and on the ground floor of the @CrossFireOnline franchise league! #largestmarket pic.twitter.com/9Ab08IWqOi — Chad Larsson (@ChadLarsson) September 29, 2019
Considering the viewership of CrossFire is higher, with a larger player base, the CFPL has massive appreciation potential compared to the Overwatch League. Some users who replied the Chad pointed out the “Hours Watched”, stating that “hours watched for OW is because they replay stuff non stop…not authentic”.
hours watched for OW is because they replay stuff non stop…not authentic — Taylor Bronsan (@ThaSportAccount) September 29, 2019
Whether that’s true or not, CrossFire is still a great opportunity for both organizations that they would have had to pay tens of millions more to enter the OWL. The partnership will also bring more Western attention to CrossFire which had been struggling to gain global awareness; most notably due to Counter-Stike: Global Offensive getting all the attention. | {
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal jury in Manhattan on Wednesday found a Kansas City, Missouri businessman guilty of fraud for running a $220 million payday lending scheme that charged illegally high interest rates and made loans to consumers who did not authorize them.
The U.S. Department of Justice said Richard Moseley, 73, was convicted on six counts including wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, after a 2-1/2-week trial.
Moseley, who had pleaded not guilty, faces up to 20 years in prison on the most serious charges at his scheduled April 27, 2018 sentencing.
“We are disappointed with the verdict and plan a vigorous appeal,” Moseley’s lawyer Adam Perlmutter said in an email. “The law in the area was completely unsettled at the time alleged in the indictment. We believe the U.S. Attorney’s office pursued [a] prosecution in a manner that fundamentally violated Mr. Moseley’s right to due process.”
U.S. authorities have for several years been cracking down on what they consider abusive payday lending practices.
Payday lenders offer short-term loans that can tide over borrowers until their next paychecks.
Critics say the loans often carry high costs and can trap borrowers in an endless cycle of debt.
Prosecutors said that from 2004 to September 2014, Moseley’s businesses made “predatory” loans to more than 620,000 Americans, often downplaying the financing costs and charging effective annual interest rates that could top 700 percent.
The defendant spent some of the millions of dollars he made from the scheme on a Mexico vacation home, luxury cars and country club dues, prosecutors said.
“Moseley made it nearly impossible for those already struggling to make ends meet,” and after being convicted “can no longer take advantage of those already on the brink,” Joon Kim, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement.
Moseley was charged in February 2016 as part of the federal crackdown. Scott Tucker, a race car driver charged at the same time over payday lending, was convicted last month by another Manhattan federal jury on all 14 counts he faced.
The case is U.S. v. Moseley, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 16-cr-00079. | {
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ONEIDA - Come autumn, you'll see fields of green on the Oneida reservation.
Amid changing tides for hemp in Wisconsin, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin will grow the crop this summer as part of a state pilot program geared toward exploring its myriad uses.
And for the tribe, the possibilities seem endless.
"It’s kind of crazy how many things you can make with hemp," said Ernie Stevens III, a member of the General Tribal Council.
Hemp is a cousin of the marijuana plant that contains very little THC, the active ingredient in pot. Wisconsin was once the second-largest producer of hemp in the United States, but production halted after the Controlled Substance Act of 1970 began classifying all forms of marijuana, including hemp, as a Schedule I drug.
The plant began to reemerge in 2014 when the federal government permitted states to allow growth under pilot programs with universities or state agricultural departments. The feds also distinguished hemp from marijuana, defining it as a plant with less than 0.3% THC.
That measure allowed former Gov. Scott Walker to OK a pilot program for Wisconsin farmers in 2017, which has issued over 1,400 grower licenses and 672 processor licenses since its onset. Another 227 grower licenses and 123 processor licenses are pending approval.
RELATED: Wittenberg farm joins first hemp harvest in decades
RELATED: Hemp is back in Wisconsin, but with optimism comes the challenge of a new market
The tribe first discussed hemp production several years ago, with the hope of growing the crop for medicinal and industrial purposes. The council began educating members in 2017, but tribal members were hesitant because the federal government considered hemp a Schedule I narcotic.
"We had to find a way to prove it ourselves that this is not a narcotic, regardless of the federal government’s position," Stevens said.
Wisconsin tribes' relationship with hemp has been a complicated one. In 2015, the Drug Enforcement Agency raided the Menominee Indian Tribe's hemp crop and seized 30,000 plants, alleging they may have contained marijuana. The tribe sued the DEA and U.S. Department of Justice, contending it could legally grow hemp under the 2014 Farm Bill, but a judge dismissed the lawsuit.
Back at Oneida, legal hiccups prevented the tribe from growing 5 acres last year under Wisconsin's pilot program. But the game changed again with the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, which removes hemp from the list of controlled substances.
The Oneida Nation is ready. In June, it will plant 32 acres of hemp that can be harvested this fall. The tribe hasn't pursued a processor's license, said project manager Mike Troge, but the state permits growers to process their hemp for internal use. Any product not used internally requires a licensed processor, something the tribe is exploring.
Each part of the hemp plant has its own uses, and the tribe plans to utilize every bit of it. One of the more promising opportunities, tribal members said, is the growth of cannabidiol, or CBD, a component of cannabis that doesn't contain THC. Research shows CBD can be effective in treating pain, anxiety and other ailments.
"There seems to be a lot of hope that CBD is going to be a big revenue generator," Troge said.
The Oneida aren't going to stop at CBD, though. Hemp can also be used for twine, fabric, animal feed, paper and concrete, but the tribe is taking production one step at a time, particularly because hemp is a "persnickety" plant that requires a lot of care, Troge said.
“We’re not counting our money before we get it," he said.
Still, there's a cautious optimism driving the project. Stevens believes hemp will create opportunities for tribal members and spur economic development, entrepreneurship and potentially even trade with other nations.
"At the end of the day, this is something that can improve our system in a lot of different ways," he said. "We’re going to take a sovereign approach to improve our overall systems of well-being for tribal members and our neighbors." | {
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Rome (AFP)
The Central African Republic's government on Monday signed an "immediate ceasefire" deal with rebel groups at a meeting in Rome aimed at ending violence in the strife-torn country.
The accord, negotiated over five days, was hailed as a precious chance to stabilise one of the world's most volatile and poorest countries.
Under it, armed groups will be given representation in the political arena in exchange for an end to attacks and blockades, and their members will be brought into the country's armed forces.
"We commit to the immediate implementation by political-military groups of a country-wide ceasefire, to be monitored by the international community, as a fundamental step on the way to definitive peace," the deal read.
"The government undertakes to ensure military groups are represented at all levels" and are "recognised as part of the reconstruction efforts", it said.
The accord was brokered by the Community of Sant'Egidio, a group rooted in the Catholic church that promotes dialogue with other religions and non-believers. It has been an active mediator in many African conflicts.
The rebel groups pledged to ensure "the free movement of people and goods by removing illegal barriers as an immediate consequence of the ceasefire".
- State authority -
The signatories also committed to "restoring the (authority of the) state across the national territory."
One of the world's poorest nations, CAR has been struggling to recover from a civil war between the Muslim and Christian militias that started in 2013 when President Francois Bozize was overthrown by a coalition of Muslim-majority rebel groups called the Seleka.
They in turn were ousted by a military intervention led by former colonial ruler France.
Those events sparked the bloodiest sectarian violence in the country's history as mainly Christian militias sought revenge.
Christians, who account for about 80 percent of the population, organised vigilante units dubbed "anti-balaka", in reference to the machetes used by the rebels.
The signatories of Monday's agreement included various factions of the Seleka as well as Christian and animist groups.
Members of armed groups will be "integrated" into the country's armed forces, "in line with pre-established criteria" and after an "upgrade," according to the deal.
Sant'Egidio's president Marco Impagliazzo described the accord as "an historic agreement, a deal full of hope".
CAR's foreign minister, Charles Armel Doubane, echoed those remarks, speaking of a "day of hope" for the country.
The UN's special representative on CAR, Parfait Onanga-Anyanga of Gabon, who is also head of the UN's stabilisation force there, attended the talks. Several heads of CAR political parties also took part.
The agreement announced on Monday comes against a backdrop of mounting concern.
Last month, the UN's humanitarian coordination agency OCHA reported on an "alarming" rise in violence, with "clashes (that) have taken an increasingly religious and ethnic connotation,."
It said the number of internally displaced people is now over half a million for the first time since August 2014, while a further 400,000, out of a population of 4.5 million, had fled to neighbouring countries.
The country's armed forces are estimated to number about 8,000, backed by 900 French troops and 10,000 troops and 2,000 civilians serving in a UN force called MINUSCA.
They have stabilised the situation, but around half the country -- which covers almost 623,000 square kilometres (241,000 square miles), a little less than Afghanistan or Chile -- remains outside government control.
© 2017 AFP | {
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Pikajuoksija Hanna-Maari Latvalan tie huipulle on ollut kova ja kivinen – ”Uuden treenimenetelmän kanssa on vielä opettelua” 21.7.2017 | {
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From Contagion Press
Contagion: an infectious disease, especially one whose transmission requires bodily contact, or broadly speaking any harmful or corrupting influence. From the Latin contagionem: a touching or contact, especially with something physically or morally unclean. From com: together + tangere: to touch.
Queerness, anarchy, witchcraft, crime – so many plagues against which society must be defended, so many lines of transmission for a breakdown our bodies are only beginning to give sense and give in to, so many threads with which we weave our experiments in an altogether different sense of public health.
A press, because we are bibliophiles by disposition, so as to render ourselves another vector for the contagion, because it is after all nothing but a certain pressing together of ink and paper, paper and glue, that takes place in the printing process, in that of book binding, just as it is nothing other than a contagion of selves that happens when we write, when we read, when we tend our minds together.
This announcement comes admittedly late. We have tabled some two dozen book fairs and put out as many titles in these seven years without a proper title of our own. It is true that we have often been inclined toward obscurities, but it was also that we simply sensed that the name, website, and so on were less pressing than other aspects of the work.
Our first project, Baedan: Journal of Queer Nihilism, was self-published in DIY fashion on an old offset press in the garage. From there we have added new titles by following our desires and curiosities and those of our friends engaged in translation, revivals of lost texts, and experiments in thought. As the machines have turned out new material, we have learned bits of the arts of print and bookmaking, piracy and translation under our own instruction. From our underground efforts – underground as much by necessity as inclination – we have begun to appear in more aboveground ways. You can sign up for our mailing list in the footer on our site.
If 2018 was the year of our new name and the launch of our website, it also saw the release of at least five new titles. Here they are in case you missed them:
Be Gay Do Crime, the collected writings of the Mary Nardini Gang
Among the discordant chorus of anons who penned the defining texts of the queer anarchist network Bash Back!, none was more fervent in its glorification of criminal desire, decadent hedonism, and social undoing than the Milwaulkee-based Mary Nardini Gang. Their fiery “Towards the Queerest Insurrection” still circulates as an integral manifesto of riotous queerness, while the “Criminal Intimacy” and “Whore Theory” have made their more subterranean way into innumerable conversations and correspondences.
Ten years later, the secretive group supplements these collected writings with a subtle retrospective. Carefully unlocking the hidden layers of their theses on insurrection, they face up to what they got wrong, concede that the world ended somewhere between the Greek insurrection of 2008 and now, and insist upon the vital task of ushering new worlds into being as we live amid the decomposition and cataclysmic death throes of the old one. To their theses on insurrection, they prepend a new arcana tooled for opening onto the queerest of outsides.
Dedicated to their friends among the dead, this pocket edition is a necromantic mirror, an encrypted message to old loves, and an invitation to those finding these words for the first time.
125 pp
$9-
The Otherworlds Review
Originally published as a monthly column on It’s Going Down from 2017 to 2018, The Otherworlds Review is a bricolage of dispatches from the end times, spiritual techniques, and ways of seeing, assembled each lunar month for the benefit of discerning necromancers and starry-eyed insurgents the world over, collected here in pocketbook form.
The collection includes all seven issues (Introduction, Ghosts, Masks, Snakes, Calendars, Always Coming Home, and Spiritual Anarchism), new retrospective afterwords, and reader-submitted appendices.
162 pp
$8-
The Otherworlds Review
Movement for No Society
Place-based anarchist research and analysis from an anonymous Philly collective. ”Pacifist ideals and reformist strategies have long held sway over the radical imagination in Philadelphia. Insurrectionary activity is willfully misunderstood, and its historical legacy largely forgotten. One of the ways we have tried to break this hold is through a series of talks called “Movement for No Society.” In these talks we explored some of the historical conditions for our situation and attempted to recover more interesting insurgent possibilities and their paths through Philadelphia’s history. Our research for these talks eventually became this book.”
260 pp
$12-
Movement for No Society
The Sapphomanteion, a lesbian oracle
A new divination system based on ancient Greco-Egyptian bibliomancy as preserved in the Magical Papyri, created using Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragments. This lesbian oracle is a powerful tool for connecting with Venus, Aphrodite and the queer dead.
Try it online at sapphomanteion.com.
100 pp
$7-
Sapphomanteion
First Protocols of Queer Goetia
A small, powerful set of mythopoetic instructions for working with the queer dead, composed in the days after the San Francisco Bay Area’s overlapping underground worlds lost thirty-six of their people in the Ghost Ship Fire.
Queer: “strange, peculiar, eccentric.” From the German quer, meaning “oblique, perverse, odd,” which in turn comes from the Old High German word for “oblique,” twerh, which is derived from the root terkw-, “to turn, twist, wind,” as in “the labyrinth turns, twists, winds.”
Goetia: “the invocation of daemons or spirits” from the ancient Greek goeteia, “sorcery,” from goes, “sorcerer, wizard,” ultimately derived from goao, “to wail, to cry,” as in mourning or in a funeral rite.
You can also download and print it out here. Folding instructions are available here.
8 pp
$1-
First Protocols of Queer Goetia
That’s the latest, and you can find our full catalog at contagionpress.com.
2018 was a big year for us, and 2019 is going to be just as full of great new content. Here’s a taste of what’s coming soon:
Baedan 4: Queer Book of the Dead
The much-anticipated fourth issue of our journal Bædan will be the most necromantic to date. If you haven’t yet checked out the first three issues – nihilism, heresy, and time travel – you can find them on our site, at the journal’s blog, and on the Anarchist Library.
Warlike, Howling, Pure by Heathen Chinese
Shattering the confinement of liberatory struggle within a framework of secular, rationalist human progress, Heathen Chinese draws on a broad array of inspirations from the slave uprisings of Haiti 1791 and the Spartacus revolt to the anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion, from the Galleanist anarchists to Tupac Shakur and Black Liberation, in a call to rekindle the flames of millenarian and messianic revolt in alliance with ancestral, divine, and mythic powers.
Heliogabalus, or, The Crowned Anarchist by Antonin Artaud
Sometimes considered the most lucid work of its famously mad author, The Crowned Anarchist is a rollicking account of the life of Heliogabalus, the most bizarre emperor of Rome: transsexual, occultist, and, by Artaud’s telling, an anarchist who helped usher in the demise of Roman civilization, not as a barbarian at the gates but as a depraved and orgiastic degenerate at the very heart of its power.
Acéphale
The first complete English translation of Acéphale, the journal of Georges Bataille’s secret society which from 1936–39 fought to reclaim Nietzsche from the fascists, practiced a strange and monstrous Dionysian mysticism, obsessed over human sacrifice, and repeatedly scribbled drawings of a headless figure that may symbolize the becoming we are called to undergo.
To hear about these new titles as they are released, you can subscribe to our mailing list, which we are planning to broadcast on more or less seasonally. You can also follow us on the abominable social media – links are below.
Finally, our sincere thanks to everyone who has supported and challenged us in the project these years: to our writers, correspondents, reviewers and critics, to those who have helped with editing, art, design, translation and distribution, and especially to our enthusiastic readers.
Contagion Press
Instagram Goodreads | {
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He said something similar a few days ago in an interview with the Associated Press. Asked if he believes the job has changed him, Trump said, “Well the one thing I would say – and I say this to people – I never realized how big it was…. Every decision is much harder than you’d normally make.”One of the broader lessons we’ve learned recently is that Donald Trump is still learning what most of us already knew – and the presidency itself fits comfortably into this model. He believed leading the executive branch of the world’s preeminent superpower “would be easier,” while most Americans were probably aware of the fact that it’s one of the most difficult jobs imaginable.Regardless, his concessions help bring some core truths into focus.For example, when Trump made all kinds of audacious promises during his candidacy, he wasn’t necessarily lying. He apparently believed, quite sincerely, that a president could have extraordinary accomplishments through decisiveness and force of will, and the only reason other presidents haven’t done so is because, in Trump’s mind, they were all idiots.He assumed, out of profound ignorance, that he could take office, bring health care benefits to everyone, cut taxes, defeat our enemies, and eliminate the national debt – quickly and with relative ease – because the only thing standing between the nation and historic greatness was a bold leader like him, who could simply bark orders and deliver results.Trump had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He sought the presidency first, then got elected, and then discovered what the presidency entails. There’s routine discussion about Trump’s ignorance , but it’s not limited to issues, policies, and current events – it extends to the responsibilities of his day job.Remember, just two days after winning the election, Trump had a private meeting with Barack Obama in the White House, where the Democrat started walking the Republican through some of his duties. Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal’s sources, “seemed surprised by the scope” of the presidency.Six months later, that feeling remains at the fore.Of course, as Trump reflects on his first 99 days in the Oval Office, and he wistfully remembers how much he “loved” his “previous life” – he had “so many things going” – I’d remind the president that his job is voluntary. If he misses what he had, and isn’t enjoying the burdens of a job that’s far more difficult than he anticipated, there’s nothing stopping him from walking away. | {
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Супермен по-українськи: купив пожежну машину і безплатно їздить на виклики
Підпис до фото, В'ячеслав Ніколайчук самотужки відновив автівку 1984 року
На Рівненщині селянин з власної ініціативи закінчив курси пожежників, купив списану спецавтівку і виїздить на гасіння пожеж разом з професійними рятувальниками.
39-річний В'ячеслав Ніколайчук, мешканець села Люхча Сарненського району, працює інженером-землевпорядником. Але цього року вирішив стати ще й пожежником-волонтером.
Каже, мріяв про це у дитинстві, проте не склалося.
У червні він придбав спецмашину, яку збиралися порізати на металобрухт, і дообладнав її, витративши 3 тисяч доларів.
Потім чоловік місяць навчався на курсах. Тепер їздить на пожежі за викликом. Наразі виїздив на дві. На першій - тільки тренувався, рятувальники змогли впоратися з вогнем самотужки.
"Мій номер записаний в оператора районної пожежної служби. Спочатку виїздить група і одразу повідомляють мені: "Це пожежна служба міста Сарни. Повідомляємо, що є загоряння по вулиці...". У чому був одягнений удома - в тому й поїхав. Зараз пожежники уже дали мені форму".
Друга, як на його малий досвід, "справжня робота" була 16 листопада. У сільському обійсті загорілася літня кухня і вибухнув газовий балон. Вогонь міг перекинутися на житловий дерев'яний будинок.
Волонтер прибув на кілька хвилин раніше за пожежників: "Так страшно було, що просто не передати. А коли пожежа, там такий викид адреналіну! Справився… Інструктори дуже багато дали! Пожежники 5 років вчаться, а тут за місяць. Помогло!"
Головне, каже він, оперативно і правильно виконати низку дій, щоб увімкнути насос для подачі води.
На запитання, як рідні ставляться до такого хобі, відповідає, що ті знають, як йому подобається допомагати людям.
"Дружина з розумінням поставилася. Але коли взнала суму, то трішечки засмутилася… Не дуже, но трошки. Відкладаю потроху… Є хобі - мотоцикли збираю. Старенький мотоцикл зроблю і продаю, то трохи підзаробляю. Отак".
Чоловік пригадує, що ідею викупити пожежний автомобіль, списаний на металобрухт, почув від керівництва районної Держслужби надзвичайних ситуацій. Почув - і вхопився за неї. З пожежниками чоловік заприязнився ще чотири роки тому, коли допомагав їм гасити торфовище у селі.
Рятувальники допомозі волонтера раді. Заступник начальника пожежно-рятувальної частини Сарн Вадим Кузака зауважує, що 8 кілометрів з райцентру до Люхче вони долають за 10-12 хвилин, але є й більш віддалені села, тож поміч дуже в нагоді.
"Доїзд до сіл складний, дороги погані. Там переважно старенькі дерев'яні будівлі, а як пожежа та ще й вітер "допомагає", то дорога кожна секунда", - каже пан Кузака.
Односельчани оцінюють ініціативу по-різному. У сільській раді кажуть, що це піар перед майбутніми місцевими виборами.
Сам волонтер відповідає, що не збирається балотуватися. Частина мешканців відзначає, що його робота говорить сама за себе.
Чоловік розповів, що останнім часом сільська молодь зацікавилася пожежною справою, а кілька підприємців зголосилися скинутися на пальне, яке він досі купував за власний кошт.
Пан Ніколайчук разом зі своїми прибічниками збирається придбати ще один відбракований пожежний автомобіль, щоб з часом у селі запрацював оперативний штаб зі швидкою допомогою і "шерифом". | {
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FAQ – Troubleshooting
The installer needs my Serial Number to continue, but I can’t find it!
Please look at your purchase receipt – the Serial Number is in big bold letters and starts with “CONCORDEX-” for FSX versions or “CONCX-P3D-” for P3D versions. If you don’t have your purchase receipt in your email inbox, double-check your spam folder. If you’ve lost or can’t find it, visit the eSellerate Store support page to have it emailed to you.
I heard that the Concorde-X product requires activation. What do I have to do?
You shouldn’t have to do anything to activate your Concorde-X product – the activation mechanism should be transparent to you as long as your computer is connected to the Internet. If the Concorde-X loads properly and you can fly, then you can be assured the activation has already taken place.
I get an error “loading CIVAC.gau” and then the sim closes. Why?
As per the instructions in the manual and the readme file, you need to install the SimuFly CIVA-C freeware gauge. You can find and download it clicking this link.
My computer crashes when I first run the Concorde-X. Why?
You have read the Readme file that shows up after the installation is complete, right? You *have* made sure you’ve installed the SimuFly CIVA INS, right? If you have, and you still experience crash issues, then read on:
A small percentage of users are reporting a Flight Simulator X crash to desktop when they try to run the Concorde for the first time and the activation mechanism kicks in.
The reason for this has to do with FSX (and Vista / Win2008) not properly handling the security facility called “Data Execution Prevention” (DEP for short). There are several crashes reported on various flight sim-related news sites, related to FSX and DEP – the solution is always the same: The user has to disable DEP entirely, to run FSX properly.
For further details and a step-by-step guide on how to solve this problem, please follow Lefteris’ blog entry here.
I am getting texture corruption and/or disappearing aircraft parts. Why?
FSX has a known bug with disappearing textures when it becomes overloaded with textures requests from the combination of scenery and aircraft parts. Thanks to Jesus Altuve who found this undocumented HIGHMEMFIX entry in fsx.cfg, it’s now possible to work around and resolve this bug. Flight Sim Labs produced a utility to fix the problem permanently in your FSX installation – you can find this utility here.
I am experiencing out-of-memory issues and I have UTX Europe installed. Why?
UTX Europe needs to be updated to at LEAST v1.4 using the service pack found on their web site, otherwise you’ll be certain to run out of memory with the Concorde. Also, if you’re running FSX Acceleration, be sure to use the patch that you will find for that version. Details are posted by Nick N in the SimForum link here.
Why do I have to select between highest quality and normal quality textures?
You should always select highest quality textures to enjoy the Concorde-X in its fullest. Normal Quality textures are to be used only if you experience graphics issues with aircraft texture loss in FSX due to lower graphics card capacity. The textures used in Normal Quality have been reduced in size and correspondingly offer a lower visual quality experience. Please only use them if you don’t care about the visual quality loss.
My Concorde-X external model looks a bit blurry from some visual angles. Why?
The ConcordeX product correctly relies on mipmapped textures to reduce visual artifacts when users fly it for a long time. Most high-end addon aircraft products do not use mipmapped textures in their external model fuselage to produce crisper output, but this results in visual artifact problems when FSX is kept running for a long time. Unfortunately, FSX sometimes miscalculates the visual eyepoint camera distance from the aircraft, therefore dropping to a lower mipmap level than required, which causes the drop in crispness. You can reset the visual accuracy by slightly altering your camera angle. The idea camera zoom for external views is 0.50, then use Ctrl-+ and Ctrl– to move the camera in our out.
Why are my frame rates lower at Mega-Airport Heathrow-X than any other addon scenery location?
Mega-Airport Heathrow-X is a beautiful addon airport scenery. It was among the first to come out for Flight Simulator X and as such, did not employ all the frame-rate saving technology that later sceneries make use of. This means performance is worse overall for any aircraft flying around that area.
I don’t have Internet Access on my Flight Simulator computer. Can I still purchase the Concorde-X?
Yes, you can purchase and download the Concorde-X installer on a different computer. In this case, behind-the-scenes activation will fail to contact the eSellerate activation servers and you will be asked to activate manually. The process is simple and you will be guided through every step of the way by easy-to-follow dialog windows that show you exactly what is required to activate. This is a one-time process, so you will not have to do it every time you run the Concorde, provided that your computer hardware characteristics don’t change.
I’d like to run the Concorde-X both on my desktop and on my laptop – do I need to buy separate licenses?
No. We allow you to use the Concorde-X product on up to two separate computers. Activation counters are smart enough to distinguish between them, so you will be able to run the Concorde-X on both.
I get “Error 1055: Activation Limit met.” – I’ve changed hardware and run out of activations – why did this happen?
Normally, this problem only occurs if you change the hardware you use to run the Concorde-X too often (more than a certain number of times within a limited timeframe). If this has happened to you, please contact our support team and we’ll be happy to assist as long as we can verify you’re a legitimate owner of the Concorde-X (and you haven’t shared your license with all your friends).
I get “Error 1082: Could not install / verify security validation engine” when I start my Concorde-X and then my Flight Simulator X quits. What’s wrong?
This problem occurs for a very small number of users who run Flight Simulator X under Vista 32 or 64 and have installed other addons which use the eSellerate validation engine, but might not follow eSellerate guidelines for proper placement of the eWebEngine.dll. You’ll need to uninstall the Concorde-X, search your entire disk for other instances of eWebEngine.dll and delete them. Then, reinstall the Concorde-X. It is advised that you disable UAC (more information about how to do this here) and you disable your antivirus program before reinstalling, as we’ve seen instances where Avast or AVG will interfere with proper installation.
Running FSX or P3D in Compatibility mode will also cause this issue.
if you still wish to run FSX in XP Compatibility mode, in Windows 7 or Vista 64, you can fix this problem permanently, by copying c:ProgramDataeSellerateeWebClient.dll into c:Program Files (x86)Common FileseSellerateeWebClient.dll (create the folder if it doesn’t exist). In Windows 7 or Vista 32, copy c:ProgramDataeSellerateeWebClient.dll into c:Program FilesCommon FileseSellerateeWebClient.dll (create the folder if it doesn’t exist).
I get “Error 1025: A valid Concorde-X Serial Number was not detected.” – What’s wrong?
You need to uninstall and reinstall the Concorde-X to fix this problem.
I get “Error 1002: A valid Concorde-X Serial Number was not detected.” – What’s wrong?
You need to uninstall and reinstall the Concorde-X to fix this problem.
I get “Error 815: A problem was detected with your Concorde-X installation.” – What’s wrong?
You need to contact Flight Sim Labs support for help with this technical issue.
I get “Error 812: A problem was detected with your Concorde-X installation.” and a weird hash number– What’s wrong?
You need to remove Compatibility Mode from your FSX or P3D settings.
I get “Error 1044: A problem was detected with your Concorde-X installation.” – What’s wrong?
This is an issue found mostly on PCs running antivirus products which falsely recognize the eSellerate protection mechanism as malware. Make sure you temporarily REMOVE your antivirus product, then install the Concorde from scratch (uninstalling it first, if needed) by running as administrator. Then run the Concorde, and once it’s run successfully a couple times and you’re sure about it, reinstall the antivirus product.
Beware: It’s not enough to only disable the antivirus software – you need to REMOVE it entirely so the installation happens properly.
If you still experience issues after following these steps, try turning off your Internet connection and then running the Concorde-X. An error 0x80072EE7 dialog should pop up, suggesting that activation could not succeed as the machine could not connect to the network. You can then choose the option to activate manually, using the instructions that are shown in the dialog boxes that follow.
Should you still have issues or fail to use manual activation, please contact Flight Sim Labs support for help with this technical issue. | {
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Iran has rejected a United States offer of aid for survivors of deadly earthquakes which struck villages in its north-west, saying the offer was not made in "good faith".
The weekend earthquakes killed 306 people and injured 3,000, according to an official toll, and the US issued a statement sending "the Iranian people" its condolences and saying, "we stand ready to offer assistance in this difficult time".
However, the head of the interior ministry's crisis management organisation, Hassan Ghadami, told local media Iran had declined aid offers.
"Iran did not accept the US offer for sending humanitarian aid for quake survivors," he said.
"We do not believe the US put forward the offer in good faith. We are currently having a medicine supply crisis because of sanctions.
"Do us a favour and lift the sanctions."
Iran's response underlined what it saw as US hypocrisy, given that Washington this year has done all it can to isolate Tehran, by imposing economic sanctions.
Although Iran's Red Crescent said it had rejected other offers of aid from Germany, Taiwan and Russia, media reports say humanitarian cargoes from a handful of countries, including Qatar, Pakistan, Switzerland and Azerbaijan, have arrived.
The US stressed that Americans had ways of sending assistance to Iran for the quake, despite the sanctions.
"Americans wishing to provide humanitarian assistance to Iranians during this time may donate food and medicine without obtaining an Iranian transactions regulations licence," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.
"Certain non-commercial personal financial transactions" to Iran also remained legal, she said.
The National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group for the US-based community, has called on the US government to ensure that quake relief efforts "are not obstructed due to the dispute between the US and Iranian governments".
The twin quakes on Saturday, measuring 6.4 and 6.3 on the moment magnitude scale, flattened hundreds of hamlets in Iran's mountainous northwest, near the city of Tabriz.
The US and Iran have no diplomatic relations and have been involved in a tense diplomatic standoff for decades, most recently over Tehran's nuclear program.
AFP | {
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ON the wharf where South Australian man Damien Little drove into the water, killing himself and his two young boys, family and friends have laid flowers and even raised their glasses to toast a man and his children “gone too soon”.
And that has left Phil Cleary truly revolted.
“It’s disgusting,” the former federal Independent MP and sportsman turned-anti domestic violence campaigner told news.com.au.
“What we have is a man who has driven his car at high speeds off a wharf, terrifying the children, and left them to drown in the sea. It’s an horrendous, appalling, brutal, violent act. How can anyone go to that setting and put a wreath down and feel sympathy for the man who’s done that? Not only to the children but the mother of those children.”
Mr Cleary knows keenly what it is like to be left behind. In 1987, his sister Vicki was stabbed to death by a former boyfriend in a fit of jealous rage. He later used Victoria’s now-defunct provocation law to be found guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter.
Mr Cleary doesn’t believe men who kill their children in murder-suicides should receive a shred of sympathy, and has taken aim at the media’s treatment of the Little incident.
Media coverage has touched on 34-year-old Little’s three-year spiral into depression before he drove his car off a Port Lincoln wharf at 80kmh on Monday with sons Koda, 4, and Hunter, nine months, strapped inside.
Since then, he has variously been described as a “top bloke”, “perfect father” and “devoted husband” in media coverage.
“He wanted to do everything right. He was very hard on himself. He wanted to live a perfect life,” his mother Sue Little was quoted as saying, including by news.com.au.
“Over the past three years he had a bit of a problem, we had noticed a change. When we saw [it] the whole family tried to help him. He had a lot of people offering help. We tried to help him, we all did. But you can’t help somebody who can’t help himself.”
Local football club President Brenton Dennis was reported as saying: “You couldn’t have asked for a better bloke.”
South Australian Commissioner for Victim’s Rights, Michael O’Connell, urged people not to rush to judgment.
“We do not know the reasons Damien did what he appears to have done and speculating helps neither the family nor the people of Port Lincoln,” he was quoted as saying.
Mr Cleary agreed the full picture was yet to emerge. But he drew comparisons with the killing of Rosie Batty’s son Luke by his father Greg Anderson in 2014 and questioned why the public had reacted with horror to that case, but not this one.
“Greg Anderson’s murder of Luke Batty was an act of revenge against the boy’s mother. I believe Rosie accepts that,” Mr Cleary, 63, said.
“One interesting thing about this is we don’t quite know if this is an act of revenge murder. Most children killings by men are revenge killings [for example] Robert Farquharson in Victoria and Darcey Freeman off the bridge.”
“What this man has done is in the same territory I think.”
A rifle was also found in Little’s car but police have not said what, if any, connection it has to the incident.
Among the tributes left between flowers, teddy bears and footballs were several handwritten cards.
“May their little souls rest in peace,” one read, while another said: “RIP little fellas 2 angels back in the loving arms of God. With deepest condolences to the family.”
Mr Cleary said the starting point in cases of family violence had to be “abject shock”.
“The Prime Minister said on White Ribbon Day we need cultural change. [Port Lincoln] is another example of how deep the disregard is for women [and] how high the sympathy for violent men is.”
He pointed to scenes played out in courtrooms around the country when men were put on trial for murdering their partners. The women’s personal lives become fair game for defence lawyers to try and find some way to explain why their client had killed, he said.
“It’s dominated by sympathy of them and condemnation [of] the women. Anyone who goes into courts comes to see it.
“I think we have a deeper problem around men’s violence in domestic settings. Maybe it confronts it so much we can’t condemn it outright because men think ‘there go I, but for the grace of God?”
Mr Cleary has been outspoken on other murder-suicides, including the case of Geoff Hunt who murdered his wife and three children before taking his own life in 2014.
“The logical extension of depression is not murder,” he said at the time. “It is still driven by a view of women and children as commodities to be controlled by a man. Even if a man makes a decision to kill his family because he thinks it is virtuous, it is a disgraceful act that we should condemn.”
Mr Cleary said the Little case brought back terrible memories of his own sister’s death.
“It was incomprehensible, it was painful, it was devastating. Then we had to go to court and saw a narrative where my sister was blamed for the act of violence from a man.
“Now nearly 29 years later I see a man drive his children into the sea in a terrifying act of murder, and clusters of men want to celebrate [him] as [a] decent, good man. Doesn’t that suggest we have a serious problem?”
Despite that, he remains hopeful the current debate about domestic violence in Australia will lead to change. “Because this is not how I believe good men behave.”
If you or someone you know needs help, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
[email protected] | {
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Glad to see you've come to your senses. Be sure to share this bot with fundies! We have to help enlighten them.
[[Restart|Start]]
Heh. Don't have time? That's okay. I know you're afraid to confront your own logical fallacies, but hopefully one day you'll come around.
If you change your mind and want to have a debate, I'm always here! ;)
[[Restart|Start]]
Is your god capable of stopping evil?
[[Yes|Yes1]]
[[No|Godnotstrong]]
So, looks like you're open to hearing what others have to say. You'll make a great atheist someday! ;)
[[Let's ask some questions about your god.|FirstQuestion]]
So you worship a god that doesn't even care if things like the Holocaust happen? Why would anyone worship an evil god like that?
[[Okay, you win.|NoGod]]
What kind of phony god can't even stop evil? If your god is that weak, why should anyone love (or fear) him? Why are you even calling that thing "God?"
[[Okay, you win.|NoGod]]
Hello, sir or madam! If you've been linked to this program, chances are somebody has identified you as a religious fundamentalist in need of a good debating! Would you like to proceed?
[[Yes|MainSequence]]
[[No|SmugGoodbye]]
Anti-Fundie Debate Bot 3000
/u/LeMayMayPoster
Then why hasn't your god stopped evil? Because there's a lot of evil in the world right now.
[[Okay, you win.|NoGod]]
So does your god want to stop evil?
[[Yes.|Yes2]]
[[No.|GodIsBad]] | {
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Few places virtue signal green as much as Germany.
So not surprisingly a number of cities led by socialist/green governments have attempted to implement electric public transportation buses, declaring they are the future of clean mobility.
Electric powered buses still struggling to be successful. Image: Flixbus
But Tichy’s Einblick just recently reported on the results of attempted electric bus fleets across Germany. They are not pretty.
Electrically driven public transport by bus is still a long way off.
FlixBus suspends electric bus after “repeated technical problems”
One example, Tichy’s Einblick cites, is German intercity bus carrier FlixBus, which worked with Greenpeace to promote the electric bus on the route between Mannheim and Frankfurt as a showcase project – all accompanied by ample fanfare and slogans such as “sustainable travel” and “the mobility of the future is green”.
But last April Greenpeace reported the discontinuation of the first nationwide electric long-distance bus line: “The long-distance bus provider announced on Wednesday that there had been repeated technical problems during the pilot project between Mannheim and Frankfurt with the vehicle of a Chinese manufacturer. These problems with the bus of Chinese manufacturer BYD must have been so massive that the project was suspended.”
Tichy’s Einblick reports the “only one thing that was really sustainable about the project was the disappointment of the travelers.”
Wiesbaden: 45 million euros, only on flat routes
Tichy’s Einblick also looked at the city of Wiesbaden where city bus operator ESWE Stadtwerke ordered 56 electric buses in April of this year and the first five were to run in October, with another five to follow in November. But so far none have “made any further progress yet”.
Wiesbaden plans a total of 140 electric buses, all to be supported by 45 million euros in taxpayers’ money from the Federal Environment Ministry. Yet Tichy’s Einblick reports that only the “flat inner city stretches are to be served” and that “they do not dare to venture onto the steeper streets on the outskirts.”
Also: “A battery charge should last 150 kilometers, but less if the temperatures are freezing and the bus is full: 100 kilometers.” That would mean about 3 hours of service before a recharge becomes needed.
Nürtingen electric bus pilot “a flop”…battery 80,000 euros!
In the city of Nürtingen, “The electric bus pilot project is a flop,” says Tichy’s Einblick. “The battery on a bus was broken after two and a half years of operation, and a new one costs 80,000 euros. Too much – that’s why the operation is stopped.”
Trier: buses taken out of service after just 2 weeks
Tichy’s Einblick also sarcastically reports that since July, “The electric buses in Trier have proven to be truly quiet and environmentally friendly: They are idol.”
“Already after two weeks the first electric bus had to stay in the workshop. Reason: Problems with the battery. An end of the problems is not in sight,” according toTichy’s Einblick.
Bremen backs off electric bus plans: “many disadvantages”
The failures of the electric buses on German streets has not gone unnoticed. Even the Green/Socialist government of the northern city of Bremen has made “a 180-degree turn”.
Earlier the city had planned to purchase five electric buses, 40 percent of which were to be funded by the federal government. But the Bremen city government opted out of the plan. “The reason: It is still unclear whether the electric drive really is the technology of the future.”
According to Tichy’s Einblick: “Bremen Mayor Maike Schaefer (Green Party) says that e-mobility has many disadvantages: ‘The batteries need cobalt, which comes from mines in the Congo. Exploitative child labor prevails there.'”
“Currently, the electric vehicles also have such a short service life that their carbon footprint does not represent any real progress compared with conventional technologies,” writes Tichy’s Einblick. | {
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Take the Power Back
You may have heard that the best way to deal with the “information overload” is to switch off your devices. To take a break from the Internet. Go for a run. Roll out the Yoga mat. Read a book. Talk to your friends. Switching off is good advice. But eventually, you’ll be back. How about changing? Changing from passive, to active. From scroll to search, from react to rethink, from like and retweet to write and link. Take the power back.
One of the first lessons you learn as a young traveler is when you go to a faraway country: avoid the people that call you on the street. “Massage?” “Hungry?” “Need a guide?” Only noobs follow the hustlers. You find a quiet spot and research where to go. Then you go there and then go further. Same thing when you travel on the Web. Don’t get lured in. Find a quiet spot and research and then go there. And then go further.
Relevant things are not pushed at us. They are not new or breaking and easily forgotten. Meaningful insights are found, and they are remembered. They can be years old but they’re never yesterday’s new, they are why-didn’t-I-know-that-already kind of insights. And they are worth re-reading. Things pushed in our stream through an algorithm tailored to our weakness are the digital equivalent of the calls that try to lure you in when you walking down a street in Bangkok. Want a Medium Massage?
What happened to blogging?
Blogging was always a bit uncool. Lots of people claim that they invented it and everyone has their indisputable definition. The common one is that blog comes from weB-LOG. The first time I heard of blogs I remember that they were explained as “b-log”, meaning “browsing log”—a list of sites we browsed. After listing the browsed sites, b-loggers commented on what they had read and uploaded that list to their personal site. The logs and comments were again browsed and logged and commented on by others. Like Chinese Whispers. Or like Twitter. Or like a Virus. Or like human communication translated to the screen.
As these meta-comments grew in their meta potency, blogs became more than the sum of their comments. Blogs slowly turned into everyone’s personal interactive newsfeed. With the help of RSS, everybody could put together their own news, composed of their favorite independent writers… by 2005, everything you published on a site was called blogging.
Self-publishing was perceived as a radical concept at the time. Corporations were worried. “We can’t control market communication.” PR companies were confused. “How can we use this to shape the narrative.” Politicians were scared. “So much public opinion!” Journalists felt safe but wondered what would happen “if everyone can just write what they think.” Bloggers thought that they were oiling the hinge of a turning point in human history. No one could have foreseen that in a couple of years this cosm of private sites would implode into five commercial black holes and turn the Web into the opposite of what it promised to be.
With the help of Facebook, Google, trolls, AI, bot farms, click farms, persona software, blind hate, cold propaganda, hot ideology and good old greed the tables have been turned. Philosophically speaking, Social Media is a mental prison where Facebook exists to make us believe that Google is still open. (It is not.)
Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. –Jean Baudrillard, Simulacrum and Simulacra
In a bit more than ten years, open became closed, blog became PR, hoodie became suit and Ping Pong turned into golf. That’s how revolutions work. Re-volutions tend to lead back to where they started. The French revolution started with the head of the King rolling and ended with a new Caesar tearing the crown out of the Popes own hands. The Industrial Revolution, supposedly making our lives easier, lead into one of the most exploitative centuries of human History before catalyzing an apocalyptic War machine in the 20th and boiling the planet in the 21st century. The Russian revolution started with the hope of giving power to the people and installed to one of the bloodiest Czars they could imagine. The Chinese revolution was supposed to end the age of Empires and opened the palace doors one of the most tyrannical Emperors in Human history. To top it all, capitalists start praising communist China as a role-model for the West.
At first, the word “blog” didn’t sound like much of a revolution. It sounded cheap, dumb and weak. Blog, blob, flop… It still sounds a bit self-made, though the World’s top ten consulting companies now all run their own blogs. When you hear “blog” these days, it has the charm of a digital hobby radio operator. It sounds more like “computer”, “website”, or “FTP”. It sounds a bit old, it has a touch of steampunk.
URLS
Messengers are the new blog. To kids living in Musical.ly, blogs are one step away from photocopiers. They don’t have a clear concept of a URL. Here is a conversation my friend C had with his 11-year-old D:
D: “What is this strange stuff on the Milk package?”
C: “This strange stuff is a URL.”
D: “What does it say?”
C: “It’s an Internet address.”
D: “Address of what?”
C: “Of a Website. It’s used in the browser—in the address field.”
D: “What is a browser?“
The browser now is just another app. A peculiar one. It sometimes pops up. In the cellphone of an 11-year-old, the browser is not, as you might think, “the Internet”. He doesn’t know exactly what a browser is and how to use it. Apps bring him there sometimes. To a chatting teen, the address bar is a cousin of the terminal. It gives us control, but if you haven’t learned how to use it, it’s just bad UX. Here is what happened:
“Facebook has created a centrally designed internet. It’s a lamer, shittier looking internet. It’s just not as cool as an internet that is a big, chaotic space filled with tons of independently operating websites who are able to make a living because they make something cool that people want to see.” How Facebook Is Killing Comedy
Things change. The shattering change since 2004 is that in practice, the Internet is as far from a distributed, diverse network of independent publishers as Radio and in its main streams, as far from intelligent communication as TV. It is possible to do your thing, but it requires muscle. It is possible to find a thinking audience, but it will be small. The Internet has imploded into Facebook, Amazon, Google, some local players and a mirror Web of twin players dominating the Chinese Market. For new stars to be born we need to get ourselves out of these black holes. How? Why? And do we have a chance?
Stop whining!
Isn’t the Internet just fine? Wikipedia, Google search? And aren’t the blogging tools way better than they used to be? What’s with all the whining? Why not just continue texting? Or shut down computers and write for yourself with pen and paper?
Again, taking a break is generally good advice. And yes, there is Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is great. Alphabet sounds like a James Bond Villain and it is not harmless, but Google Search is powerful. And no, you can’t escape digital culture as long as you live in a society that lives on digital fuel. If you block email you’ll have trouble holding onto most jobs. If you have no cellphone people just won’t get in touch with you anymore. Who calls landlines these days? However long your digital Sabbatical, you will inevitably get sucked back in. And so will your kids.
“The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.” –Tristan Harris
But instead of protecting them from the evil Internet, teach them to read, write, draw, paint, ask and think. Teach them researching, blogging, FTP. The challenge when you are in is to not become passive. To change from consumer to maker, following to self-thinking, quoter to commentator, liker to publisher, but mostly, from getting angry about headlines of articles you haven’t read to reading precisely, asking questions, researching, fact-checking, thinking clearly and writing carefully.
How to write
Texting is fun, writing for yourself can be a rewarding form of meditation. Yet, writing to find clarity leads to a different place, a different text than writing to be read. Writing for an audience should be done in the spirit of writing for your friend, but chatting with your friend is not the same thing as putting your thoughts in the wild.
Writing for friends and yourself can clear your thoughts, help you plan and invite the discovery of new ideas. Writing with the intention to put your thoughts out there leads to real writing. Writing gets real when it is read. Before that, it is a dream in letters. Writing to get read makes you careful, responsible, and considerate. It forces you to think as simply, clearly and understandably as possible. It forces you to think about how what you say may look and feel from the outside. Writing to be read may not be desirable for everybody. But if you feel that you have something to say, write to be read. Don’t search for something to write because you want to be famous or rich. If you want fame jump from a cliff into a butter bucket on YouTube. If you want to be rich, get into finance.
Blogging is so out of fashion that it is almost fashionable again. You may have heard about the so-called return to blogging from a couple of your tech friends. It’s like talking about a Zeppelin revival as Madonna is storming the charts with “Pappa don’t preach”. It’s like walking in trumpet pants in the nineties, like growing a stache in the naughties, like organic food, long bears, tattoos and penny farthing when Obama got elected. And it’s writing as opposed to liking, thinking as opposed to reacting, owning your traffic as opposed to building up your Facebook followers that one day a Zuckerberg will take away from you when it suits his needs.
Blogging works, but it’s not what it used to be
Since getting back on the old blogging track at the beginning of the year 2018, our traffic tripled. We sold 25% more apps. We closed our Kickstarter campaign. Look:
Blogging works but it doesn’t work exactly like it used to. Gone are the days with a sudden surge of 100’000 uniques users that want to know about typography in Web design. The spikes flattened, the long tail grew. Getting people to read what you have to say takes more than writing well. It takes a lot more, now.
What has changed? The traffic used to flow through the invisible net between the different blogs. We all read and responded to each other. Blog networks were organic and constantly buzzing. Some bloggers used more, some used fewer words, some mostly syndicated other people’s writing, curating and quoting, others created their own content. RSS and newsletters kept us up to date on our favorite channels. Discussions helped us improve and learn and made everyone come back. Compared to social media accounts, blogs were fewer but comparatively diverse in interests, comparatively active, fearless and wild.
The more people joined in, the more the blogging became powerful until it turned into a commercial game. This always happens. And it happens in ever faster cycles. IOT? Old news. VR? Old news. Artificial Intelligence? Old news. Blockchain? Nah… There are hardly more than a handful really solid Blockchain projects out there, yet every bank, every blue chip and every business consultant now claims proficiency, expertise and a portfolio of patented innovations in a field that is supposed to be experimenting not expertizing. If there is money to be made, people will try to game it. How many time have I heard on the bus that “you should invest in Ether.” And when financial institutions start mixing the cards, you have no chance. They run the Casino.
Comments were the first core function that got gamed. For trolls, PR companies using persona software, SEO blackhats, spammers, and dogs pretending to be humans the comments section was free sex. Commenting costs nothing. Managing comments sections is so expensive that even big media organizations can no longer afford them.
Technorati got gamed. Google killed both the RSS reader and Feedburner, both core components of the blog ecosystem.
Real Simple Syndication was never really simple. It was key though. Our RSS feed was sporting over 25,000 subscribers. Now it’s, maybe, plus minus 5,000 active ones. Once we forgot about it in a redesign and lost tens of thousands of geeks. Maybe one of the biggest blunders in the history of iA.
Will RSS get a hipster comeback, too? Hardly. But we need something spidery that connects blogs. Can Social Media put on this hat maybe? Without our Twitter accounts, it’s difficult to get people to come over. Is the invisible Web spidering between different private chat applications we all use now? Newsletters are still alive and kicking, growing in importance even. Email is not the answer even though more and more start realizing that Slack might have a less ironic name than we thought.
Take the Power Back
The answer to the passive consumption of trash is the active formulation of questions, the active search for answers and the active work of putting complex knowledge and diffuse feelings into clear words. Unlike getting fed from those feeds, searching, researching, reflecting, and concise writing has the power to clear the mind. We need to write on our own domains. Don’t post thoughts on Facebook. Use it to get traffic. Drop Medium for blogging. Own your writing. Use Twitter carefully. And on your domain, send people to other domains you like, outside the usual black holes, if possible. And link:
“First, linking out would be great. It would at least get people back to normal websites. Remember when your fingers just remembered different URLs, and you would go to The New York Times, and The Onion, and Funny or Die? Now it’s less so. You type in Facebook or Twitter or Reddit and then you just sit there and passively take in this feed of what’s selected for you.” How Facebook Is Killing Comedy
Here is the good news: As a matter of fact, the tools at our disposal are way more powerful than they used to be. We can use our Social Media channels to send readers out to better places. And the timing to take control is right, too. A lot of old, new and potential bloggers now understand that and why Facebook is a trap. We don’t need to go on the barricades. We need to switch mode from passive to active, from consuming to creating. Start sowing seeds. | {
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Plugging Leaks Merkel's War on Germany's Press and Parliament
In recent months, Germany's government and intelligence agencies have gone after journalists and parliamentarians in an effort to keep classified information secret. Now, their efforts have resulted in a bona fide scandal for Berlin. By SPIEGEL Staff | {
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2 Strangers And A Drone Help Rescue Veteran Trapped By N.C. Flooding
Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Quavas Hart Courtesy of Quavas Hart
In this unlikely tale, two strangers and a drone played crucial roles in rescuing a man trapped in his flooded home in Hope Mills, N.C.
Drone photographer Quavas Hart decided to take his drone out on Sunday to capture images of some of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Matthew.
"I happened to come across this neighborhood that was completely submerged in water," Hart tells The Two-Way. He posted a picture on Twitter showing the dramatic scene of a cul-de-sac with floodwaters up to the eaves of the roofs.
As it turned out, Navy veteran Chris Williams and his elderly dog Lana were trapped in the house with one blue shutter to the right of the picture.
Williams thought he was out of the hurricane's path when his power went out a day and a half before, according to his twin brother, Craig Williams, who lives in Texas. "During that day and a half," Craig told The Two-Way, "the hurricane shifted paths and was coming directly towards him."
Chris went to sleep on Saturday night — and woke up to a bang. The surging water had broken through his back door, sending furniture crashing around the house. He grabbed Lana and raced to the highest point in the house, a small room where he had some food stored. "He spent the next 14 hours sitting there," Craig said.
During this time, both Craig and Chris tried to contact local emergency services to reach rescue crews — to no avail. Chris' phone line was down but the brothers were able to stay in touch over Facebook Messenger. When Craig finally got in contact with rescuers on Sunday, they eventually told him they weren't able to get to his brother's area.
Then Craig spotted Quavas' dramatic cul-de-sac picture on Twitter, and wrote a joking note to Chris: "Hey, at least you're not this guy."
It only took a few seconds for Chris to respond: "Hey, that's my house."
Craig immediately reached out to Quavas with this plea: "Any chance you can boat him out of there? He's trapped upstairs."
@ImSoFIRST holy shit that's my brothers house..the one with one shutter. Any chance you can boat him out of there? He's trapped upstairs.. — Craig Williams (@security_craig) October 9, 2016
Quavas tells The Two-Way that he didn't initially believe the message was real. "I thought it was someone trolling – it's Twitter, it's worldwide. ... I'm paying this guy no mind."
@security_craig are u serious ? — Drone Man 🎥🚁 (@ImSoFIRST) October 9, 2016
But Craig messaged again that he was "completely serious." He explained that his brother had an "old dog with him that can't swim."
So Quavas rushed back to the flooded neighborhood to try to help rescue Chris. He says he deployed the drone again, and spotted a FEMA boat nearby. He managed to signal the boat to follow his drone, and then led the rescuers to Chris' house.
You can see Quavas' video of the moment the rescuers reached Chris and Lana, with Chris looking out the top-floor window:
Quavas is also a veteran — he says he served in the Army for 10 years, with deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The father of four left the military in July 2012 and went to film school. "It's kind of like replacing my weapon with my camera, from my perspective."
He's still coming to terms with the serendipitous rescue. "It's just so wicked crazy amazing, humbling, I don't know how to explain it," he says. Quavas adds that his home was also damaged in the floods.
Craig says that while his brother is physically safe, "he's not doing great." They're expecting the home will cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair. "Unfortunately he wasn't insured – his house is not in the flood plain, it's never been flooded," he says. "It's a worst-case scenario." The family is seeking donations here.
As we have reported, the floodwaters in parts of North Carolina reached record levels. North Carolina Public Safety says at least 19 people have died as a result of flooding in the state. | {
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Yet Beal’s inclusion is not a foregone conclusion. Beal is a restricted free agent this summer, meaning the NBA’s 29 other teams can offer him a contract once free agency starts on July 1 and the Wizards would have 72 hours to match. Beal reiterated he wants to stay in Washington in a telephone interview from Tokyo last week, but at the right price. That price is a maximum contract.
“I want to be valued the right way,” Beal, 22, said from Japan, where he visited as part of a promotional tour for the NBA and attended a playoff viewing party with fans. “I feel like I’m a max player and that’s what I’m looking for. If Washington can’t meet that requirement then I may be thinking elsewhere. I’m pretty sure that they probably won’t [let me go]. At the end of the day, that’s where I want to be. I think a deal will probably get done but you just never know.”
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The exact amount for a maximum contract for Beal will depend on the league’s salary cap next season. Initial projections pegged the figure at $90 million – a $20 million jump from last season — but league executives have been using $92 million as the number and it could increase even further. As a four-year veteran, Beal could earn up to 25 percent of the cap. If the cap is $92 million then a max deal would pay him $23 million next season.
The Wizards have two factors going in their favor: They’re the only team that can sign Beal to a five-year deal (other teams can only go up to four years) and they can exceed the salary cap to retain him because they own his Bird Rights, which allow teams to go over the cap to re-sign their own free agents, provided they have been with the club for at least three years.
Washington offered the 6-4 Beal a contract extension before the NBA’s Nov. 2 deadline for fourth-year players, but it wasn’t the max so Beal declined it and the two sides agreed to wait until the summer. The Wizards’ decision to not give Beal a max extension in October was strategic: By waiting until July, Beal’s cap hold is just over $14 million, as opposed to over $20 million had he been given the max extension. The difference will give Washington more wiggle room in their attempt to lure a top-tier free agent or trade for a high-priced star and fill the remainder of the roster. It is the same strategy the San Antonio Spurs chose with Kawhi Leonard a year ago and the Detroit Pistons are using now with Andre Drummond.
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But Beal’s injury-plagued season complicates matters. He played a career-low 55 games and was hindered by another stress injury to his right fibula, his fourth in four professional campaigns.
“I hear about it all time, but that doesn’t define me as a player,” Beal said. “That won’t stop me from growing as a player and it won’t stop me from being who I am. The injury thing, that’s behind me. I’m moving forward. I’m past it. I’m focused on my career from here on out. Hell, Steph Curry was hurt his first four years. Look at him now. John [Wall] was hurt his first three or four years. Look at him now. I’m not worried about it. People are going to say what they want to say. At the end of the day, it’s not going to affect me or the money.”
The injury history could be a concern for teams, perhaps enough to prevent them from making him one of the highest-paid players in the sport. But Beal’s talent and potential – he turns 23 in June and has averaged 21.2 points in 21 career playoff games – makes the possibility of him garnering a max contract very likely in an unprecedented market.
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If Beal does return to the Wizards, he’ll have a new coach in Scott Brooks, who replaced Randy Wittman. Despite Beal’s contract status, the two met for lunch in Los Angeles recently.
“It was a good move. In some ways he’s similar to Witt,” said Beal, who was not consulted during the coaching search. “He allows his players a lot of freedom on the offensive end but he’s a defensive-minded coach. I got to pick his mind a bit and he’s great. I got a great feel for him. He’s really a player’s coach. He loves to be hands-on. He loves to develop guys and get his guys better.
“On top of that, he’s a proven coach. He’s shown that he can win and he’s shown that he can get his players to the finals. That’s exciting. It’s great to be in a situation to have a coach with that experience. He’s been there before. We’ve been in the playoffs, too. So put those two together and hopefully we make something work.”
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Beal said he’ll begin his offseason workout regimen at the beginning of June and it will include more weight lifting than in previous summers. From there, his future isn’t as clear but he prefers a return to Washington. | {
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These ideas are popular with liberals, centrists and a good number of conservatives too. And progressive activists have come to understand that this issue needs to be one of their top priorities. If the quality of our democracy doesn’t improve, many other policy priorities could be impossible to achieve.
I think the United States finally has the pro-democracy movement that it needs — a movement not only to fight back against efforts by Republican leaders to make voting harder but also to go on the offensive. My column today is about that pro-democracy movement and what should come next for it.
A couple of my own priorities are universal voting by mail and a voting age younger than 18. What democratic changes do you think are most important? Drop me an email with your thoughts, at [email protected].
On the same topic: Although the election is still too close to be called, Utah may join the list of states that have restricted gerrymandering through last week’s ballot initiative. The initiative holds a narrow lead in the latest vote count, writes Ben Lockhart of The Deseret News.
Two other important outcomes would be losses of anti-voter officials in Arizona and North Carolina. And both may happen, Daniel Nichanian notes (here and here). Nichanian, a political scientist, wrote a voting-rights manifesto for Vox in 2016 that remains relevant. | {
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Google is trying to make video conferencing less awful by designing its own speaker-mic and other hardware that works with Google Calendar. It’s bundled together a touchscreen controller, a speaker-mic, a camera, and an Asus Chromebox that work in sync to let offices coordinate meetings.
The 10.1-inch touchscreen controller lets you join events scheduled on Google Calendar and look up meeting details. You can also pin or mute team members, control the camera, and add people to a call. The controller can be connected to a laptop via an HDMI cable and has a 1280 x 800 display.
Google designed the speaker-mic to reduce echo and background noise. The speaker has a 360-degree pickup with four cardioid mics and a 250-square-foot range. For meetings in larger rooms, you can daisy chain up to five speaker-mics together with a wire.
The camera can auto-crop and zoom in on video call participants
The camera shoots in 4K with a 120-degree field of view to capture a large group of people at a time. It’s built with machine learning so it can auto-crop and zoom in on video call participants.
Finally, the Asus Chromebox runs on ChromeOS and can automatically push updates to the controller, camera, and speaker-mic. It has an Intel Core i7 processor and a dedicated hardware video accelerator. It also features remote device monitoring for IT admins.
Google also announced today that if you have G Suite Enterprise, you can now record and save meetings into Google Drive and host meetings with up to 50 participants.
All four tools are compatible with the Hangouts Meet video chat service the company launched back in March, as well as with the Jamboard, Google’s $5,000 digital whiteboard released in May. The bundle costs $1,999 and is available in twelve countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand. | {
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When we think about hacking connected cars, most of the research has been around difficult-to-exploit vulnerabilities that would allow someone besides the owner to do things such as control the infotainment system, unlock the car remotely or even take control of the steering mechanism. But it turns out that there’s a much less flashy danger at play – involving a potentially widespread privacy issue.
Matt Watts, data strategist and director of technology at NetApp, discovered after buying a used car that a previous owner could access a range of his personal information via the app that connects with the vehicle.
“Many of the current generation of cars have a host of online ‘connected’ features, apps that allow you to interact with the vehicle even when you’re nowhere near it,” he explained in a personal blog post last week. “Mine has the ability for you to remotely control the climate systems, to call breakdown services, to upload GPS/destination details and much more, it also keeps a record of much of this information and stores it all against your online account.”
The problem is that once a vehicle has been linked to that online account and app, the previous owner must specifically disconnect his or her access to the account in order for a new owner to link up to it. So even though the car has a new owner, the previous owner will continue to have access to the online account – with all the new owner’s information stored within.
“When trying to link the vehicle to my account, the website informed me that the vehicle was currently linked to another users account,” Watts said. From there, he contacted the dealer and the manufacturer, who were unable to help him, saying that “We are not in a position to remove owner without their permission, previous owners would normally disconnect before they sell the car or if we took in part-ex we would have their written authority to remove from system.” The dealer then suggested tracking down the previous owner to ask them to disconnect from the account.
Watts noted that the implications are significant: “The previous owner of my car has control over it, they can unlock it, they can remotely set the climate control without me knowing about it, even when the car isn’t running, they potentially can even look at the sat-nav system, they can also call break down services to the vehicle and all of this without me knowing anything about it,” he said. “Someone else has access to a significant amount of data about myself and my vehicle and there appears to be nothing that the manufacturer is prepared to do about it.”
This privacy issue is just one more example of a lack of IoT security – in an era where consumers and businesses alike are gaga for connected things, manufacturers all too often rush to capitalize on the demand without building in privacy and security by design. And often, the supply chain is so complex that the idea of shared responsibility gets lost in the mix.
Also, people are embracing connected things without considering the potential dangers they present – Watts pointed out in his post that many people aren’t even aware that their car could be storing information in an online account somewhere – and this naivete when it comes to IoT security goes for other sectors as well. Trend Micro found in a recent report that close to half (43%) of IT decision-makers and security decision-makers say that security is an afterthought when implementing IoT projects (peaking at 46% in Germany). In addition, nearly two-thirds (63%) agree that IoT-related cybersecurity threats have increased over the past 12 months (rising to 71% in the UK and the US).
Though Watts didn’t specify what kind of car he bought, he noted that most cars today have these types of app and logging of information, making for a potentially widespread privacy problem.
“Many of the cars that are sold today…are collecting vast quantities of data about the vehicle during its lifetime and therefore your behavior, location, destinations,” he said. | {
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The model of the stadium was seen by many Leeds residents in the window of the Lego shop in Trinity Leeds today.
Fans took to social media to slam the decision to put the stadium of Leeds United's rivals on display.
One fan said: "How have they ever thought that would be a good idea?"
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The stadium model
Another added: "I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it, what is going on?"
A post about the stadium model went viral on Twitter, with hundreds of fans angered by the decision. | {
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Scheer facing new kind of civil war brewing within the Conservative party
OTTAWA — Signs are pointing to a civil war breaking out within the Conservative party, but breaking down along different lines than past internal battles that divided the party ideologically.
At its heart a single question: is Andrew Scheer personally and solely to blame for the failure of the party to capture a majority in last week's vote?
The Conservatives will soon announce who they've hired to conduct their campaign post-mortem to officially answer that question, but analysis is well underway — some of it very publicly.
Former Conservative spokeswoman Sara MacIntyre used Twitter to blast Scheer's socially conservative views, while Dennis Matthews, one of the party's former ad whizzes, did a deep dive into questions around campaign and Conservative branding.
At the grassroots level, one Conservative has launched an online petition calling on Scheer to resign, while hundreds of others have peppered Scheer's social media pages with pledges of allegiance, laying the loss at the feet of the media and the electoral system, among other things.
Some former Conservative MPs have also spoken out publicly about the results, attaching negative outcomes to Scheer's anti-abortion views. At the same time, the anti-abortion Campaign Life Coalition released an analysis Thursday suggesting candidates they supported did better than those they didn't.
"If Andrew Scheer had allowed the nomination of, and even actively sought out, more pro-life nomination candidates, the Conservative party could have potentially won significantly more seats than 121," the coalition said.
Behind closed doors, Conservatives are chewing over different things: why their storied ground game failed to deliver, why there were no communications strategies at the ready to tackle known points of weakness, and why Scheer and others raised public expectations that a majority was even in the cards when it was clear internally it wasn't.
Altogether, there's now a frenzy of speculation around the future of Scheer and the party that some insiders say is completely overblown, noting neither the Liberals nor NDP are seeing the same focus on their futures despite both having disappointing election results.
But some of that frenzy is being whipped up by a man long-thought to want to lead the Conservatives: Peter MacKay. MacKay was at the helm of the Progressive Conservatives when they merged with the Canadian Alliance to form the modern day Conservative party in 2004.
He didn't take a run at leading the new party then — the job went to Stephen Harper — but MacKay's decision to come out swinging this week against how Scheer ran his campaign revved up the rumour mill yet again that he's preparing a bid.
MacKay delivered a blistering critique of Scheer on Wednesday, calling his social conservative values a "stinking albatross" around his neck that cost the party the election, an opportunity MacKay likened to "having a breakaway on an open net and missing the net."
In the wee hours of Thursday morning, MacKay tweeted his support for Scheer, saying his comments were aimed at helping the party improve to win the next election.
"Reports of me organizing (are) false," MacKay wrote.
For nearly a decade after the Conservative party was formed, Harper worked to pull together the two factions of the party into a unified voice, an effort that many credit to him as his true legacy to the country.
Today, the fights between the old Alliance and PCs are a thing of the past, said Garry Keller, a former senior Conservative staffer.
The fights over the party's results last week come from different camps: those who think Scheer himself is to blame and those who are looking at the campaign as a whole — its tactics, strategy and policy, he said.
They are conversations that need to be had, but thoughtfully and over time.
"While people are both in private and in public talking about what do we need to do better the main thing is everyone needs to take a deep breath," Keller said.
"It's fun to vent, but it is actually not helpful in the long-term to the Conservative cause."
Scheer knew as soon as he saw the results on election night that he'll face a leadership review at the party's spring convention — it's mandatory if a leader fails to win a majority government. But when caucus meets for the first time next Tuesday he will face a first test: whether his team of MPs choose to exercise their power under the Reform Act of 2014 and give themselves the authority to launch a leadership review of their own.
The meeting will be presided over by Cheryl Gallant, who has the distinction of being the party's longest serving member of Parliament, a baton she inherited after the former "dean" of the caucus, Deepak Obhrai, died over the summer.
Scheer's main goal will be to get his caucus onside. He'll give a speech peppered with themes he covered on election night and since: look at the upside. A lead in the popular vote. An increase in seats. That the 2019 Conservative caucus is only three seats shy of how many MPs were elected in the 2006 election campaign that gave Harper his first government.
Scheer will likely also point to the fundraising numbers released Thursday that show the Tories continue to lead the way, bringing in $10.1 million in the third quarter of 2019.
"These results mean we're in the best position for the next election. It allows us to pay off election debt quicker, and maintain a level of election readiness no other party will be able to match," said Dustin van Vugt, the party's executive director, in an email.
By comparison, however, that's just $61,000 more than they raised just ahead of the 2015 campaign.
And in 2019, they had fewer donors than that period of time in 2015 as well.
This report by The Canadian Press first published on Oct. 31 2019.
Stephanie Levitz, The Canadian Press | {
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On August 6th, 2012, the world watched as NASA's Curiosity rover landed on the dusty red surface of Mars. Since then, we've followed the rover's movements closely as it investigates the Martian surface and regularly beams back photos for inspection by scientists here on Earth. It's a fun, albeit passive experience — but a new game is aiming to capture what it feels like to actually pilot a rover. And it might even get you interested in driving the next Curiosity.
The free browser game Extrasolar, which launches today, enlists you as a remote pilot for a rover similar to the one currently driving around the red planet. Only instead of Mars, you're exploring a fictional alien world called Epsilon Prime. You'll be greeted with a welcome video when you first start, and the early moments in the game involve interacting with your superiors via email. The game itself doesn't sound all that exciting on paper — you'll spend most of your time navigating menus and plotting points for your rover to explore on a map.
Getting to locations takes a minimum of an hour of real time, so there's a lot of simply waiting (it's a great game to play in the background while you go about your day). But Extrasolar is also a strangely compelling. I found myself checking in many times a day to see how my rover was making progress, and you're able to capture beautiful images of the alien planet. I spent quite a bit of time scrutinizing each photo and listening to audio clues, hoping for signs of alien life.
Once you get the hang of how things work, Extrasolar really draws you into its world. Exploring the planet is truly fascinating — as you tag and identify photos in your quest for life, you'll get detailed responses back from an exobiology expert. There's also a mystery at the heart of Extrasolar — what you discover and what your superiors tell you don't always match up, so there's some sleuthing to do in addition to your more traditional goals. The secrets you uncover in the world of Extrasolar will only heighten your desire to explore. Part of the reason the game is so compelling is that it feels surprisingly authentic. Even though you're exploring a fictional world, everything seems plausible. That's largely because of the research that went into the game, with the developers tapping into contacts at both NASA and the SETI Institute.
"We hate seeing bad science in movies and games."
"We hate seeing bad science in movies and games," says lead artist Brendan Mauro. Last year Maruo helped organize a game jam with NASA in another attempt to merge the worlds of gaming and science. "A lot of the team is pretty passionate about science, so we wanted to keep as much in the realm of scientific plausibility as possible." They even hired a botanist, Jane Van Susteren, to write the majority of the biological content, like descriptions of plant and animal life. In fact, she was such a big part of the creation of Extrasolar, she was eventually turned into a character — as you play you'll receive plenty of emails from Van Susteren attempting to analyze your discoveries.
Despite its fictional setting, one of the goals for the game is to get players interested in real science, at a time when NASA's budget is steadily decreasing. "That bothers us because we feel space exploration is the most important thing we as humans can be doing in this day and age," says Mauro. "As game creators, we felt the best thing we could do to try and address this problem is start at the ground level: make something that conveys the excitement of exploration and discovery, and hopefully that excitement will catch on and lead to greater, more tangible things."
"You might learn something along the way."
To go along with this goal of spreading science as far as possible, Lazy 8 has made Extrasolar into an experience that's incredibly approachable. There's really nothing to learn in terms of controls, since the game revolves around things you already do every day — tagging photos, navigating a virtual map, and reading emails. It's also very linear, and you can't really lose per se. You won't crash your rover or stumble across a vicious alien, instead you just explore at your own pace. And since it's browser-based, you can play it anywhere at any time; I found my iPad the perfect tool for closely scrutinizing the beautiful alien landscapes.
And in a world of free social and mobile games that constantly pester you with notifications, Extrasolar is a breath of fresh air. You can set it up to send you email notifications when something of note happens, like your rover reaches its destination, or you can turn them off altogether. It's a game that's constantly running in the background, and one I found myself thinking about even when I wasn't playing.
"You don't need to be scientifically literate to play," says Mauro, "but you might learn something along the way." | {
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Nothing you see here is intended or offered as legal advice. The author is not an attorney. These posts have been written for educational and information purposes only. They are not legal advice or professional legal counsel. Transmission of the information is not intended to create, and receipt does not constitute, a lawyer-client relationship between this blog, the author, or the publisher, and you or any other user. Subscribers and readers should not act, or fail to act, upon this information without seeking professional counsel.
This is not a safe space. I reserve the right to write things you may agree or disagree with, like or dislike, over which you may feel uncomfortable or angry, or which you may find offensive. I also don't speak for anyone but myself. These are my observations and opinions. Don't attribute them to any group or person whose name isn't listed as an author of a post on this blog.
Reading past this point is an acknowledgement and acceptance of the above terms.
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(FEE) The Associated Press reports Congress is seriously considering red flag gun laws.
These laws, also called “extreme risk protection orders,” allow courts to issue orders allowing law enforcement to seize firearms from people who’ve committed no crime but are believed to be a danger to themselves or others.
President Trump has signaled his backing of bipartisan Senate legislation sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
“We must make sure that those judged to pose a grave risk to public safety do not have access to firearms and that if they do those firearms can be taken through rapid due process,” Trump said in a White House speech.
Red flag laws have garnered support from several conservative intellectuals, as well, including David French of National Review and Ben Shapiro.
Here are seven reasons red flag laws should be opposed, particularly at the federal level.
1. There’s No Evidence Red Flag Laws Reduce Gun Violence
Most people haven’t heard of red flag laws until recently—if they have at all—but they aren’t new.
Connecticut enacted the nation’s first red flag law in 1999, followed by Indiana (2005). This means social scientists have had decades to analyze the effectiveness of these laws. And what did they find?
“The evidence,” The New York Times recently reported, “for whether extreme risk protection orders work to prevent gun violence is inconclusive, according to a study by the RAND Corporation on the effectiveness of gun safety measures.”
The Washington Post reports that California’s red flag went basically unused for two years after its passage in 2016. Washington, D.C.’s law has gone entirely unused. Other states, such as Florida and Maryland, have gone the other direction, seizing hundreds of firearms from gun-owners. Yet it’s unclear if these actions stopped a shooting.
With additional states passing red flag laws, researchers will soon have much more data to analyze. But before passing expansive federal legislation that infringes on civil liberties, lawmakers should have clear and compelling empirical evidence that red flag laws actually do what they are intended to do.
2. Congress Lacks the Authority
The Founding Fathers clearly enumerated the powers of the federal government in the Constitution. Among the powers granted in Article I, Section 8 are “the power to coin money, to regulate commerce, to declare war, to raise and maintain armed forces, and to establish a Post Office.”
Regulating firearms is not among the powers listed in the Constitution (though this has not always stopped lawmakers from regulating them). In fact, the document expressly forbids the federal government from doing so, stating in the Second Amendment that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
3. We Have Federalism
Unlike the federal government, whose powers, James Madison noted, are “few and defined,” states possess powers that “are numerous and indefinite.”
Indeed, 17 states and the District of Columbia already have red flag laws, and many more states are in the process of adding them. This shows that the people and their representatives are fully capable of passing such laws if they choose. If red flag laws are deemed desirable, this is the appropriate place to pursue such laws, assuming they pass constitutional muster. But do they?
4. Red Flag Laws Violate Due Process
The Constitution mandates that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
Seizing the property of individuals who have been convicted of no crime violates this provision. Gun control advocates claim due process is not violated because people whose firearms are taken can appeal to courts to reclaim their property. However, as economist Raheem Williams has observed, “this backward process would imply that the Second Amendment is a privilege, not a right.”
Depriving individuals of a clearly established, constitutionally-guaranteed right in the absence of criminal charges or trial is an affront to civil liberties.
5. Red Flag Laws Could Lead to More Violence
In 2018, two Maryland police officers shot and killed 61-year-old Gary Willis in his own house after waking him at 5:17 a.m. The officers, who were not harmed during the shooting, had been ordered to remove guns from his home under the state’s red flag law, which had gone into effect one month prior to the shooting.
While red flag laws are designed to reduce violence, it’s possible they could do the opposite by creating confrontations between law enforcement and gun owners like Willis, especially as the enforcement of red flag laws expands.
6. It’s Not Just the “Mentally Ill” and Grave Threats Who Are Flagged
In theory, red flag laws are supposed to target individuals who pose a threat to themselves or others. In practice, they can work quite differently.
In a 14-page analysis, the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island explained that few people understand just how expansive the state’s red flag law is.
“It is worth emphasizing that while a seeming urgent need for [the law] derives from recent egregious and deadly mass shootings, [the law’s] reach goes far beyond any efforts to address such extraordinary incidents,” the authors said.
“As written, a person could be subject to an extreme risk protective order (ERPO) without ever having committed, or even having threatened to commit, an act of violence with a firearm.”
Though comprehensive information is thin, and laws differ from state to state, anecdotal evidence suggests Rhode Island’s law is not unique. A University of Central Florida student, for example, was hauled into proceedings and received a year-long RPO (risk protection order) for saying “stupid” things on Reddit following a mass shooting, even though the student had no criminal history and didn’t own a firearm. (The student also was falsely portrayed as a “ticking time bomb” by police, Jacub Sullum reports.) Another man, Reason reports, was slapped with an RPO for criticizing teenage gun control activists online and sharing a picture of an AR-15 rifle he had built.
Individuals who find themselves involved in these proceedings often have no clear constitutional right to counsel, civil libertarians point out.
7. They’re Basically Pre-Crime
As I’ve previously observed, red flag laws are essentially a form of pre-crime, a theme explored in the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, based on a 1956 Philip K. Dick novel.
I’m not the only writer to make the connection. In an article that appeared in Salon, Travis Dunn linked red flag laws “to the science fiction scenario of The Minority Report, in which precognitive police try to stop crimes before they’re committed.”
If this sounds far-fetched, consider that the president recently called upon social media companies to collaborate with the Department of Justice to catch “red flags” using algorithmic technology.
The idea that governments can prevent crimes before they occur may sound like sci-fi fantasy (which it is), but the threat such ideas pose to civil liberties is quite real.
Compromising civil liberties and property rights to prevent acts of violence that have yet to occur are policies more suited for dystopian thrillers—and police states—than a free society.
It’s clear that laws of this magnitude should not be passed as an emotional or political response to an event, even a tragic one.
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Infinitode Tips 2017-03-05
Infinitode (“infinite tower defense”) is an Android tower defense game.
Things I like:
Focus on gameplay, not graphics
It runs really fast - it doesn’t lag, ever, even when there’s lots of mobs and towers on screen.
- it doesn’t lag, ever, even when there’s lots of mobs and towers on screen. Global upgrade tree
Bonus tile system - bonuses for building specific towers in specific spots
Custom maps
Things I’m hoping will improve:
In-game documentation - some game mechanics are poorly explained, or not explained at all
Tower balance - some towers are clearly better than others. (Tesla towers are a part of literally every late-game strategy. Multishot towers are never used at all.)
There’s a (small) Reddit community r/infinitode for the game, where some tips, tricks, and information are exchanged.
Some of those tips and tricks, and my own experiences, are given below.
Tower specifics
Air tower
The air tower has a chance to apply the “burning” effect on each mob it hits.
The “burning” effect is like poison - it does damage over time.
The “burning” effect is very strong, because the damage is a percentage of total hit points. So an air tower can kill air units very quickly, even if they have a lot of hit points!
Exploit this by:
Building three or four air towers to cover the track.
Upgrading range, firing speed, and turning/projectile speed. You don’t need to upgrade damage, as the “burning” effect will do more damage than the bullets themselves.
Setting the targeting mode to “Random”, to apply the “burning” effect to as many air units as possible.
Buying the global upgrades “Burn duration”, “Ignition chance”, and “Fire damage”.
Freeze towers
Freeze tower stats:
Freezing percentage: the amount that mobs are slowed by. Higher is better. 25% freezing percentage -> 75% move speed. The maximum possible freeze percentage is 45.6% with the global upgrade “Strength of freezing V”.
Freezing time: how long it takes to slow down a mob, once it enters the freeze tower’s radius.
Defrosting time: how long it takes a mob to speed up, once it leaves the freeze tower’s radius.
Freeze towers help by slowing enemies down, so towers can get more shots at them before they move out of range.
Freeze towers also increase the damage of area-effect towers, like the cannon and missile towers, by reducing the distance between mobs.
Freeze towers give specific bonuses to Tesla and venom towers, when attacking frozen enemies:
Tesla towers: more enemies hit by chain lightning.
Venom towers: venom lasts longer.
Source
If there are multiple freeze towers on a single mob, the freezing percentage does not stack, but the rate of freezing does.
Question 2: Do Freeze Towers stack their Freezing % or do they work like the Venom Towers where every additional debuff after the first does 50% of its value? Answer: Enemies are slowed down by the most powerful Freezing tower in range. If enemy comes to range of two freezing towers - 30% frz & 40%frz - it will slow down up to 40%. But if there are 2 or more Freezing towers in range, enemy will slow down in less time.
Source
Splash towers (orange)
The splash tower shoots projectiles in all directions.
The accuracy statistic is critically important - a high accuracy greatly increases the total damage output.
Essentially, the higher the (accuracy) percent, the more likely the next shots will be aimed precisely in the paths to hit the enemy it’s aiming at. Source
Splash towers get bonus damage against fast (yellow triangle) and light (blue diamond) enemies, which take reduced damage from other common towers. They are very good when placed inside turns, so they can cover more of the path. Combine with freeze and stun towers to increase the number of hits.
Tesla towers
The Tesla chain damage works like this:
Question 1: For Tesla, is the Chain Damage % a factor of the Damage as a whole or is it a static number? For Example: Tower Damage: 100 Tower Chain Damage %: 32 does this mean the first enemy hit gets 100 damage and any enemy hit by the chain gets (100 x 0.32 = 32) 32 damage? Or does that 100 get split so that the first enemy hit gets 68 damage and every enemy hit by the chain gets 32 damage? Answer: Tesla towers give 100% damage to the first enemy it hits and 32% for each enemy in the chain. If it deals 100 damage to the first enemy, then 2-nd, 3-rd and others take 32 damage - damage multiplies once.
Source
Note that with the “Chain lightning damage V” global upgrade, and Level 10 upgraded towers, the chain lightning damage is 66.2%. If you build the tower on a tile with the 150% chain lightning bonus, that increases to 99.2%. That means the tower does (nearly) full damage to every enemy hit by the chain lightning.
Venom towers
Mobs can be hit by multiple venom effects at the same time.
The strongest venom effect does full damage.
The second strongest venom effect does 50% damage.
The third strongest venom effect does 25% damage, and so on.
The strength and duration of each venom effect is tracked separately.
Blast towers
Blast towers stun mobs, so they can’t move.
Mobs become resistant to the stun effect. A mob which has been stunned once will be hard to stun again.
It’s not clear how stun resistance works, i.e. if the resistance fades with time, or if using more than one stun tower would help.
The bonus mob
The bonus mob is a yellow, star-shaped mob.
Killing it will give coins, green papers (global upgrade money), extra lives, or free global upgrades (!!!).
The bonus mob is resistant to most towers, taking only 2% damage.
Each bonus mob has a weakness vs a specific tower. This is shown by an icon of that tower, above the mob. For example, if the bonus mob has an icon of a Multishot tower above it, you can use a Multishot tower to do full damage to it.
The weakness is randomly picked from the five towers you have built the least. (It’s not clear if this is counted by number of towers, or value of towers.)
You should set some of your towers to “Weak” or “Random” targetting, so the towers don’t focus on the bonus mob.
Statement 1: the “special” enemy added in the previous update tend to ruin many peoples great games because towers always focus them regardless of wether they are set to First, Strong, Weak or Random. Answer: Bonus enemies have many HP points so “weak” or “random” aim strategy will make it possible to kill other enemies. Bonus enemies give many coins / restore health / give many green papers / unlock random Global Upgrade for free, so their presence is worth it.
Source
Global upgrades
You can buy global upgrades from the main menu, under “Upgrades”.
Upgrades are bought using “green papers”, which are awarded for reaching certain numbers of waves, and at the end of each game.
Upgrades available for all types of tower:
Maximum tower (XP) level
Maximum upgrade level
Range
Experience
Build cost reduction
Upgrade cost reduction
Upgrades available for most types of tower:
Damage per shot
Attack speed (shots per second)
Rotation and projectile speed
Upgrades to specific towers:
Freeze tower: freeze percentage, freeze speed, etc.
Tesla tower: chain lightning damage percentage, chain lightning length, etc.
Upgrades to things that aren’t towers:
Amount of coins gained for finishing wave early
Time delay between waves
Amount of global upgrade money (“green papers”) gained after each game
etc.
Bonus amounts
The bonuses from global upgrades are not explained well.
Firstly, the bonuses scale with tower upgrades; so the bonuses are actually better than they first appear.
Take the “basic tower” as an example.
The basic tower starts with 2.30 damage per shot.
Buying the global upgrade “Damage I” for the Basic tower grants +0.10 damage to an un-upgraded tower .
The bonus scales as you upgrade each individual tower, from damage level 0 to damage level 10 (MAX). i.e. the “+0.10 dmg” bonus actually gives a +0.500 bonus at level 10.
Secondly, the bonuses do not stack.
You can buy basic tower global upgrades: Damage I (+0.100 dmg) Damage II (+0.200 dmg) Damage III (+0.350 dmg) Damage IV (+0.500 dmg) Damage V (+0.650 dmg)
Buying the Damage II upgrade gives a total bonus of +0.200 dmg.
Damage I does not stack with Damage II, etc.
Some data collected in-game is tabulated below.
Damage level No global upgrade Global upgrade 1 (+0.10) Global Upgrade 2 (+0.20) Global Upgrade 3 (+0.35) 0 2.30 2.40 2.50 2.65 1 3.56 3.72 3.88 4.11 2 4.73 4.93 5.14 5.45 3 5.84 6.10 6.35 6.73 4 6.90 7.20 7.51 7.96 5 7.92 8.26 8.60 9.12 6 8.88 9.26 9.65 10.20 7 9.79 10.20 10.60 11.30 8 10.60 11.10 11.60 12.30 9 11.50 12.00 12.50 13.20 10 12.20 12.70 13.30 14.10
Global upgrades strategy
See reddit thread:
Higher level upgrades are very expensive. So focus on cheap upgrades first. It’s more effective to buy level I of every upgrade, than to buy level V of one upgrade.
Focus on upgrades for the towers you use most. (i.e. Tesla.)
The “Forced wave bonus” and “Wave delay” upgrades increase your coin income in the early game, letting you build more towers quickly.
The “Upgrades price” global upgrades are very good. “Upgrades Price V” reduces upgrade costs by 20%, meaning you can build five fully-upgraded towers for the cost of four.
Gameplay strategies
Multiple (weaker) towers are more effective than one strong tower. Three level 7 Tesla towers are better than one level 10 Tesla tower.
Freeze towers are cheap, and help other towers do more damage.
Combine freeze and blast (stun) towers to stop mobs at a specific point. Then use area-effect towers, i.e. cannon, to do damage to entire clumps of enemies at once.
The freeze, blast (stun), and splash towers affect a circular area around them. Build these at corners and hair-pin turns, to maximise their coverage of the path.
Tesla towers are very versatile - they hit air and ground, do decent damage to all enemy types, and hit multiple enemies at a time. A valid late-game strategy is “build as many Tesla towers as you can”.
Use the different targeting modes. Venom towers on “Random”, so they apply the poison effect to as many mobs as possible. Air towers on “Random”, so they apply the burning effect to as many air mobs as possible. Minigun towers on “Strong”, so they fire continuously (minimising the amount of time spent spinning-up.)
Custom map design
Custom maps should be designed so towers can hit multiple sections of the track - i.e. the beginning, middle, and end of the track.
It also helps if the track incorporates lots of bends and turns. This lets towers cover more of the track. It particularly helps the effectiveness of area-effect towers like the freeze, blast, and splash towers.
One way to do this is to build a space-filling curve, such as the Hilbert curve.
One example of this map design got up to wave 7,419. | {
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How exactly does Doc Rivers lead from the front with everything that has happened to him the past year?
The roll call only rehashes the less than glorious facts: a Western Conference semi-finals loss when leading the series 3-1. His team disintegrating in front of him, Rivers was helpless and impotent. A few months later, Rivers couldn’t close the deal on DeAndre Jordan and then, luckily, got him back at the eleventh hour. It was one of those grand ironies of a great communicator, motivator and leader of men nearly losing one of his own.
Doc Rivers summer haul, Lance Stephenson and Josh Smith, were excitedly paraded in front of the L.A. media. They are gone, flung across the NBA landscape, helping other teams and getting the playing time Rivers denied them. Another one of Rivers summer gets, Paul Pierce, is having the worst year of his career and looks retirement ready. That leaves Wesley Johnson as the only Rivers summer free agent who has been important enough to the team to not be traded away. And Wes Johnson’s numbers are worse with the Clippers than they were with the Lakers last year.
But of course, it’s hardly ever midnight in the NBA
Rivers still hunts for that elusive Clippers respectability as he is faced with more of the same, more believers, more doubters, more skeptics, more memes, more the Clippers will always be the Clippers narrative that hangs like a fugue over the organization, despite their $2 billion price tag. That Doc Rivers hasn’t been able to elevate the franchise in these past three years of Lakers irrelevancy is an indictment on Rivers inability to be the coach, and at the same time, handle General Manager duties.
Last fall, before training camp, Rivers gave a confessional to Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports as a way to purge his soul of its darkest elements. It was a stark, honest from the gut, slice of himself and how the Clippers ship went off the rails, beginning with the absurdly awful three game choke job to close the Western Conference semi-finals. How do you get over yourself, your disappointment, your anger, your frustration, your humiliation, your sadness, your shock? It seems like a perennial Clippers problem, but it really isn’t.
The Clippers and David Stern collided for the better in 2011, erasing all of those years of abject Clippers franchise poverty. The bottom line: Chris Paul was handed over to a racist owner as if it was Christmas. It’s hard to say why Stern did what he did, unless it was to alter the trajectory of the Lakers which he was complicit in pushing over a cliff with his Sterling benevolence. With Paul in tow, the Clippers have navigated from great at times, to good at times, to what the hell?
In his day, Doc Rivers was never an elite player so his professional life was spent fighting against failure the only way he could, by digging out every ounce of toughness he possessed. Reflexively, and this isn’t singular to Rivers but to all humans who fall short of their potential, you create defense mechanisms to make the pain go away.
So Rivers covers up a championship banner because the pain of that loss is rooted in his soul. Rivers will never forget losing game 7 in Los Angeles to the Lakers in the NBA Finals in 2010. He’ll never forget he had a 13 point lead in that game that he let slip away. He’ll never forget that the Lakers star guard, not known as a rebounder, outrebounded every single Celtic, and that the same shoot-happy guard, when it mattered most, didn’t shoot the ball at all but he passed the ball. That pass sealed the title, leading to a grotesquely painful Rivers defeat when he led the series 3-2.
And then history repeated itself. Five years later, he was leading a series 3-1 as coach of the Clippers. He had a huge lead in game 6. He lost.
At times, Rivers is still stuck in that beautiful time in his life when he was with Boston. But no two children are born into the same family. His lofty expectations for it to be nearly identical in Los Angeles as his triumph in Boston have fallen flat for obvious reasons: Kevin Garnett isn’t here. The Clippers occupy a city that refuses to offer a blood thirsty allegiance. The team has personnel with flaws that crop up at the worst possible moment. They play in the Western Conference. Chris Paul is not Steph Curry. They can’t beat the Warriors.
Often, Rivers is that old guy who can’t help but talk about the past, the good days when he painted beautiful pictures.
“All year, our bus was loud in Boston. It was old-school loud. Sometimes you want them to shut the f–k up. But you’d get on the bus, and the chatter, and the constant getting on guys, it didn’t stop. And then the silence when you lost, there was the silence. These days you get on the bus and a lot of times they’re looking down and talking. Social media and texting has absolutely hurt chemistry. There’s no doubt about that. You don’t just give into that, though. You get used to it. We all have to.”
It’s hard to ascertain what Rivers is alluding to. If it is an admission that technology has manipulated culture instead of the opposite, his facts are correct. But chemistry, with social media or without social media, is organized by relationships and that is emulated from the top, not the bottom. Rivers admits that his priority for this team is better communication which seems a stark admission for a coach known for being able to communicate.
There is no denying Rivers anger at the Blake Griffin situation. Rivers was planning on Griffin returning to the lineup in a few days. He traded Josh Smith. And then was blindsided. And because of a fight in a restaurant with a friend? As emotional a man as he is on the sidelines as he sweats and yells and stomps, Rivers is driven by discipline. He usually waits for pure emotion to recede before being judge and jury. But in this case, he just couldn’t keep the anger inside. He had to speak his mind and publicly shame Griffin, not as a coach, but as a surrogate father.
“I’m not satisfied with anything. I’m talking about a non-basketball issue right now. You talk to everyone involved and you care about everyone involved. I feel bad for everyone involved, not just the player.”
The player. Not Griffin. Not Blake. But the player. Rivers was still seething over Blake, so much so, he couldn’t even say his name. Just as he was still seething over losing to the Lakers, so much so, he couldn’t look at their championship banners, particularly the 2010 masterpiece.
Here, the Clippers are again. It’s almost routine enough to be boring. So many expectations to fulfill. Ask anyone: truth can be more searing than fiction. The greatest point guard of his era and the last of the traditional floor leaders, the one David Stern ripped out of the Lakers grasp, has never been out of the second round of the playoffs and he’ll be 31 in May. Chris Paul is on the clock as the Clippers play out these last games of the season, in preparation of what is to come. Because the Thunder are choking away close games, the Clippers may get the benefit of escaping the Warriors in the second round and, instead, face the Spurs, their first round opponent last year, in that epic game 7.
Game 7 Clippers-Spurs was something to behold. And yet, we gloss over it and jump forward. It’s too hard to forget self-mutilation. It’s human nature to stare over and over at the car wreck. Game 6 against the Houston Rockets will continue to remind Doc Rivers that this keeps happening to him. Up in a series. Losing. Up in the Finals. Losing.
Before Game 6 of the NBA Finals, Paul Pierce said, “we have two chances to win one game.” Was that a message from the top? Five years later, did the Clippers feel that way too? They had two chances to win one game? As if the world was peculiarly small, the Clippers lost when they should have won.
Even with the basketball trauma of everything Rivers has been through since winning in Boston, he has what he wants. Donald Sterling is gone. Steve Ballmer is here. Rivers has his team at a point of excellence, ready to make a deep playoff run. If that happens, it will legitimize Doc Rivers, and at the same time, set him apart from the crowd. He’ll be an extraordinary NBA coach, other coaches will be chasing him. As it currently stands, he is no better than Rick Carlisle. Both have won a single championship.
The distractions continue to seep through the cracks. Blake Griffin has yet to be cleared for contact. In his absence, Chris Paul has been brilliant but how long can he push his body through this war before something breaks? When Blake returns, the team will change. He’s been gone so long, the adjustment of Griffin into the lineup will affect the team on a chemistry level, at least in the beginning, before they remember that Griffin is one of the game’s great talents.
A Griffin return doesn’t erase the obvious. The pressure on the Clippers is enormous. If they flame out again, there will be real conversations of this group not being able to get it done. It will have been 5 playoff failures. Rivers will have been the leader of three of them.
Two years ago, the Clippers beat the Warriors in the first round of the playoffs. The Clippers won a raucous game 7 at Staples. The imagery made you believe the Clippers were finally on their way to something special. But it was the Warriors who were the special ones. They prospered from that loss more than the Clippers took advantage of that win. The Warriors are poised to dominate the next five years. The Clippers have beaten them once since they walked off with a first round win in the 2014 playoffs. They are 1-6 vs. the Warriors.
The playoffs are coming, sooner rather than later. Doc Rivers legacy hangs in the balance.
photo via llananba | {
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Bill Maher on Thursday said that there was a connection between Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum's sexual frustration and his desire to bomb Iran.
In an interview with Chelsea Handler, Maher explained that former candidate Herman Cain was scheduled to appear on an upcoming episode of his HBO show.
"I like Herman Cain," Maher admitted. "You know, I said to him, I said, "Look, I don't like hate your fucking guts like I hate Newt Gingrich.' I mean, I really don't like him."
"No, I hate Newt Gingrich," Handler agreed. "And everyone watching also hates them, OK?"
Mayer said, however, that former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum was the most ridiculous candidate because of his views on gay rights.
"He wears a sweater vest everywhere, which is proof that he does not have one gay friend," Maher noted. "This guy thinks about gay sex more than any gay man in America. There's a guy down in West Hollywood working at Dorothy's and Dildos who does not think about gay sex as much as Rick Santorum."
"Also, [he] wants to bomb Iran," the comedian continued. "And I think people who are sexually frustrated want to bomb other countries. I really think there's a connection there. I think this guy is more backed up than [Interstate] 405."
On February 23, Maher plans to perform a free stand-up show on the new Yahoo Comedy Channel.
"I asked people what they would pay for it and they said, 'We would steal it anyway,'" Maher explained. "So I said, let's do it for free." | {
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The U.S. Consulate at the epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak in the central China city of Wuhan announced Sunday it will evacuate its personnel and some private citizens aboard a charter flight as the global death count rose to 56.
The alert came as one infectious disease specialist at Imperial College, London warned, “It is uncertain at the current time whether it is possible to contain the continuing epidemic within China.”
A notice from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing said there would be limited capacity to transport U.S. citizens on the Tuesday flight that will proceed directly to San Francisco.
It warned in the event there are not enough seats, priority will be given to to individuals “at greater risk from coronavirus.” Interested U.S. citizens in possession of valid passports were told to immediately contact consular officials.
The previously unknown virus has caused global concern because of its similarity to the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) pathogen, which killed hundreds across mainland China and Hong Kong in 2002-2003.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a Warning Level 3 Alert (Avoid Nonessential Travel) due to the continued spread of the virus.
The viral outbreak has struck at possibly the worst time for China, when hundreds of millions of people are travelling across the country or overseas to celebrate the Lunar New Year holiday, China’s most important festival.
The latest figures reported Sunday morning cover the previous 24 hours and mark an increase of 15 deaths and 688 cases for a total of 1,975 infections and 56 deaths globally.
The government also reported five cases in Hong Kong, two in Macao and three in Taiwan. Small numbers of cases have been found in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, the U.S., Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Nepal, France and Australia.
Airports around the world have stepped up screening of passengers from China, although some health officials and experts have questioned the effectiveness of such screenings.
A report by infectious disease specialists at Imperial College, London on Saturday said the epidemic “represents a clear and ongoing global health threat,” adding: “It is uncertain at the current time whether it is possible to contain the continuing epidemic within China.”
AP, AFP contributed to this report | {
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Sonos Play 1, and the rest of its smart speaker portfolio, have seen a price increase
Another day, another hugely-popular technology company increases its UK prices in the wake of the Brexit vote.
Following recent price rises from the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe, speaker manufacturer Sonos has confirmed it will now charge UK consumers more for its products, starting this month.
And these price hikes are far from insignificant – with the US company announcing that all of its popular speakers will now be subject to an increase of up to 25 per cent.
Like rival manufacturers before it, Sonos has cited Brexit and the devaluation of the British Pound as the primary driving force behind its decision to bump its prices.
"We pay for everything we make in US dollars," the company announced in an official statement.
"Over recent months, there has been a significant change on the US Dollar to GBP exchange rate.
"As a result, our existing pricing has become unsustainable and, like many other companies, we have to increase prices for all products priced in GBP." | {
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Os escândalos de corrupção na Petrobras e sua política de preços levaram a estatal brasileira a ser a empresa de petróleo mais endividada do mundo. A constatação faz parte do informe produzido pela OMC, que avalia a situação da política comercial do Brasil.
"Depois que durante anos a empresa se utilizou de generosa renda como instrumento de política social, desde 2016 a Petrobras corta gastos e vende ativos, além de ter enfrentando um grande escândalo de corrupção", apontou o informe.
A companhia, que tem uma dívida de cerca de US$ 125 bilhões, tem a previsão de que sua produção seja reduzida a 2,1 milhões de barris por dia, ainda que espere alcançar 2,7 milhões em 2020", apontou. "Os fatos que ocorreram no país, em combinação com um contexto de preços baixo de petróleo, contribuíram para que a Petrobras passasse de obter lucros para sofrer grandes perdas entre 2014 e 2015", disse.
Um dos responsáveis por essa dívida teria sido a política de preços da Petrobras. A empresa, de acordo com a OMC, foi "cobrindo a diferença entre os preços do mercado mundial e o preço nacional (de combustíveis)". "Essa política custou à empresa bilhões de dólares e contribuiu para convertê-la na empresa petroleira mais endividada do mundo", constatou a OMC.
Provocação
De acordo com o informe, a "política parece ter provocado nos últimos anos uma perda nas vendas de petróleo de cerca de R$ 60 bilhões (US$ 17,4 bilhões)".
A OMC admite que, em 2016, a estatal anunciou uma nova política para determinar os preços da gasolina e diesel nas refinarias. "De acordo com a nova política, os preços de petróleo se atualizam a cada mês, sobre a base das variações dos preços internacionais, da taxa de juros, as margens de transporte e condições do mercado nacional, além de não se permitir que caiam abaixo da paridade internacional", completou. | {
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Chronicles of the Gatekeeper Star Wars: Force and Destiny Adventures Adventures Tweet
In Chronicles of the Gatekeeper, an adventure supplement for the Star Wars®: Force and Destiny™ roleplaying game, the holocron of a mysterious, vanished Jedi Knight surfaces. Its Gatekeeper offers to instruct you in an incredible Force power and leads you on a perilous interstellar quest in which every choice you make can affect countless innocent lives– and profoundly alter your destiny.
This 96-page, beautifully illustrated book introduces locations throughout the Star Wars galaxy, a new playable species, and a wide range of adversaries from local matriarchs and Clone Wars-era droids to sadistic criminals and vicious wild beasts. Designed to be used with the Force and Destiny roleplaying game, Chronicles of the Gatekeeper can also easily be integrated into an Age of Rebellion™ or Edge of the Empire™ campaign. | {
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Polio, measles, other diseases set to surge as COVID-19 forces suspension of vaccination campaigns
Science ’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.
“A devil’s choice.” That’s how Seth Berkley, head of GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, describes the dilemma facing global health organizations in the past few weeks. They could either continue to support mass vaccination campaigns in poor countries and risk inadvertently helping to spread COVID-19—or recommend their suspension, inevitably triggering an upsurge of many other infectious diseases.
In the end, they chose the latter. As Science reported last week, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative on 24 March recommended suspending polio vaccination campaigns until the second half of the year. Two days later, the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) issued a broader call, recommending that all preventive mass vaccination campaigns for other diseases be postponed. “Any mass campaigns would go against the idea of social distancing,” says Alejandro Cravioto of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s faculty of medicine, who chairs SAGE.
But experts say the fallout from the wrenching decision will be huge and may last long after the pandemic subsides. It comes on top of the damage COVID-19 will do to the fragile health systems in many countries.
Mass vaccination campaigns against a host of diseases are already grinding to a halt in many countries. For many children, these campaigns are the only chance to get vaccines. Some 13.5 million have already missed out on vaccinations for polio, measles, human papillomavirus, yellow fever, cholera, and meningitis since the suspensions began, Berkley says. “I tell you those numbers will be much larger than what we see today.”
In the case of polio, more children will be paralyzed in countries where polio is still circulating, and the virus will likely spread to countries that are now polio-free. The decision couldn’t come at a worse time. The polio eradication effort is already reeling from setbacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the wild virus is surging, and in Africa, where outbreaks caused by the live polio vaccine itself are spiraling out of control. The program will reassess the decision every 2 weeks.
Twenty-three countries have already suspended their measles campaigns, and as a result, 78 million children will miss out on the vaccine, says Robb Linkins, a measles expert in in the Global Immunization Division of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sixteen other countries are still deciding. Linkins foresees “tragic” consequences. In poor countries, the virus can kill 3% to 6% of those it infects, WHO says, with malnourished children especially at risk. Measles infected an estimated 10 million and killed 140,000 in 2018, the last year for which numbers are complete. And because measles is incredibly contagious, case numbers could quickly surge following the suspensions.
Unlike the polio initiative, SAGE stopped short of recommending that countries halt campaigns to quell ongoing measles outbreaks, but it said they should carefully weigh the risk of an immediate response against that of a delayed one. For now, campaigns are continuing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the world’s biggest outbreak has so far killed an estimated 6500 children—far more than the ongoing Ebola outbreak in that country—and sickened more than 340,000.
WHO, GAVI, and other health organizations stress that routine immunization of individual children at clinics must continue as much as possible during the coronavirus pandemic. But health systems in many countries were already stretched thin, and protective gear is often lacking. Berkley fears severe disruptions of routine immunization if health workers are diverted to COVID-19 or become sick or die, or if parents are afraid to bring their children to a clinic. Vaccines may run out as well. Some countries are already experiencing shortages as flights are grounded and borders close, Berkley says.
Other essential health services will also be disrupted, says Augustin Augier, executive director of the Alliance for International Medical Action. Every year, ALIMA trains about 500,000 African mothers to diagnose acute, potentially fatal malnutrition in their children; those programs have been suspended. The knock-on consequences of the pandemic “will be much stronger and more lethal for the world’s most vulnerable populations,” Augier says.
Across all these programs, the goal is to regain lost ground quickly once the pandemic is over. In the meantime, WHO says, countries should continue surveillance for vaccine-preventable diseases to figure out where pathogens are circulating and which children are most at risk. But that, too, is a challenge amid the fear and disruption from COVID-19.
Berkley sees some hope in the experience in West Africa after the 2014–15 Ebola outbreak. “There was an unprecedented flow of finance and goodwill,” he says. “We did campaigns once Ebola was over and strengthened routine immunization. We not only recovered coverage levels, but exceeded them.” But that epidemic was largely confined to three countries with a combined population of fewer than 25 million people. This time, the entire world is affected. | {
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Bij dodelijke ongelukken op snelwegen dragen de inzittenden opvallend vaak geen autogordel. Van de 58 automobilisten en inzittenden die in 2017 op rijkswegen om het leven kwamen, hadden er minstens 18 (bijna eenderde) geen autogordel om, blijkt uit onderzoek van de Stichting Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Verkeersveiligheid (SWOV).
Mogelijk was het aantal doden zonder gordel zelfs nog hoger, want van 11 doden is niet bekend of ze een gordel droegen. Het aantal dodelijke slachtoffers zonder gordel is opvallend hoog. Uit eerder onderzoek bleek dat van alle automobilisten buiten de bebouwde kom 97 procent een gordel droeg.
Veel slachtoffers die geen gordel droegen, hadden de gordel achter het lichaam vastgeklikt om de gordelverklikker uit te schakelen. Ook was soms de gordel van de bijrijdersstoel gebruikt.
Ragnhild Davidse, onderzoeker bij de SWOV, is geschrokken van de cijfers. "Kennelijk vinden mensen het vervelend zitten, maar het is echt heel belangrijk voor je kans om een ongeluk te overleven. Een airbag heeft bijvoorbeeld veel minder effect als je je gordel niet om hebt."
Volgens het Centraal Justitieel Incassobureau dat boetes afhandelt zijn er in 2017 ruim 33 duizend boetes uitgeschreven voor niet gebruikmaken van de autogordel. Dat leverde een bedrag van 4.6 miljoen euro op.
Roekeloos gedrag
De onderzoekers maakten op basis van de politieverslagen een uitgebreide analyse (.pdf) van alle dodelijke ongelukken die in 2017 op de rijkswegen gebeuren. Dat zijn vrijwel alle snelwegen en een twintigtal N-wegen. Er waren dat jaar 63 dodelijk ongelukken, niet alleen met personenauto's, maar ook met vrachtauto's, bestelbusjes, motoren en voetgangers, waarbij 71 doden vielen. Dat is slechts een klein deel van het totale aantal verkeersdoden in Nederland in dat jaar. Op alle Nederlandse wegen vielen 613 doden.
Naast het niet dragen van een gordel speelde ander roekeloos gedrag vaak een rol. Bij minstens zes van de 63 dodelijke ongelukken was te veel alcohol gedronken. Waarschijnlijk is het aantal gevallen van overmatig alcoholgebruik in werkelijkheid hoger, want als de omgekomen automobilist het enige slachtoffer is wordt niet altijd gecontroleerd of er te veel gedronken was.
Bij minstens vijf ongelukken werd te hard gereden, in twee gevallen in combinatie met te veel drank op. Eén dode reed juist te langzaam met drank op. Deze automobilist kwam om toen hij met een snelheid van 40 tot 60 kilometer per uur over de snelweg reed.
Oude auto's
Bij negen ongelukken speelde de slechte technische staat van het voertuig een rol; in één geval was de slechte staat van de banden een oorzaak. In drie gevallen was de lading verkeerd vastgezet.
Opvallend veel ongelukken gebeurden met oudere auto's. Bij meer dan een derde van de dodelijke ongevallen met personenauto's was de auto ouder dan 15 jaar, terwijl die auto's slechts 22 procent van het totale wagenpark uitmaken. Slechts zes keer gebeurde een dodelijk ongeluk met een auto die jonger was dan vijf jaar, terwijl van alle auto's ruim een kwart van de auto's zo jong is.
Kinderen en bejaarden
Op de Nederlandse snelwegen kwamen in 2017 maar weinig kinderen om: slechts twee slachtoffers waren jonger dan 18. Er kwamen vier 70-plussers op de snelwegen om het leven, wat ongeveer overeenkomt met het aandeel van ouderen in het snelweggebruik.
Verder viel op dat er drie keer zoveel mannen als vrouwen op de snelweg om het leven kwamen. Dat is opmerkelijk veel, omdat mannen maar anderhalf maal zoveel kilometers afleggen als vrouwen.
Voetgangers en spookrijders
Er kwamen vier voetgangers om. Twee van hen zagen door een psychische stoornis vermoedelijk geen gevaar in het oversteken van een autosnelweg, één voetganger kwam om nadat hij na een eerder ongeval uit zijn auto was gestapt en de vierde voetganger werd aangereden nadat hij na een ruzie uit de auto was gestapt en de weg was opgelopen.
Er waren twee dodelijke ongevallen met een spookrijder. In beide gevallen was het een jonge automobilist. | {
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Robert David Steele
Chronology of Crime 1988 – 2001, Comment, Links Below the Fold
BASIC CHRONOLOGY:
1970 Twin Towers, owned by Port Authority of NY-NJ, open to tenants
1978 Arnon Milchan produces Medusa Touch cover story for 9/11
1979 Isser Harel, Zionist intelligence chief, predicts 9/11 attacks in NYC
1987 Zionists get security contract for WTC directly, fired for criminal ties
1988 Twin Towers condemned and known to be a $2B deconstruction cost
1993 Zionists and FBI stage manage false flag attack to frame Muslims
1993 Zionists embedded in Kroll regain WTC security contract
1995 Benjamin Netanyahu predicts Iranian nuclear bombing of WTC
1998 Philip Zelikow & co-Zionists Ashton Carter and John Deutch publicly conceptualize a “catastrophic” terrorist event as a policy transformation event
1998 Port Authority makes decision to “privatize” WTC
JUN 2001 Director of the FBI Louis Freeh resigns rather than be party to 9/11
JUL 2001 WTC Leased to Larry Silverstein, final preparations for 9/11 begin
JUL 2001 Cheney, warned by 13 countries, announced 9/11 national exercise
SEP 2001 Robert Mueller confirmed as the cover-upper Director of the FBI
SEP 2001 Zionist attack planned since 1988 takes place, blamed on Muslims
SEP 2001 Cheney controls USG response to 9/11, makes its happen
DETAILED ZIONIST-ORIENTED CHRONOLOGY:
Christopher Bollyn: Memorandum for the President: 9/11 and the War on Terror Israel’s History of False Flag Operations against the U.S.A.
ROBERT STEELE: Philip Zelikow was ordered to manage a cover-up of 9/11 and joined Dick Cheney and FBI Director Robert Mueller as the critical enabler of this Zionist atrocity that murdered over 3,000 as a combination of commercial insurance fraud and false flag pretext for war.All of the Commissioners on the 9/11 Commission were complicit in the cover up with the exception of Max Cleland who resigned in protest — one of them, Thomas Kean, should have been disqualified since he is suspect as the former Governor of New Jersey when the plot was in gestation.
This year President Donald Trump chose to ignore his promise to get to the bottom of 9/11 this past September. BUT the US Attorney for the Southern District has accepted the demand of the Lawyer’s Committee of Inquiry into 9/11 for a criminal grand jury. While I question the integrity of the US Attorney for the Southern District — I believe they will slow roll the grand jury and not actually do anything — the ball has started rolling — justice will be done. We will inevitably get to the bottom of 9/11 and I believe that this will impact on 2020, destroying Chuck Schumer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz in passing (it also makes Howard Schultz, a known Zionist, a zero as a candidate in 2020).
The above graphic is a cursory look at the top-level witnesses that Zelikow and Mueller protected from serious inquiry. There are many more including all of the New York City government employees associated with the challenges to the structural integrity of the Twin Towers beginning around 1988, and every employee who was ordered by Rudy Guliani to destroy the crime scene and stone wall Families of 9/11 among all others.
It is very likely that national security warrants were issued under the authority of Dick Cheney to silence all possible witnesses (legalizing lying including to the Courts), and that a Presidential public rescinding of all of those warrants will cause a tsunami of witnesses to come forward.
Zionism in the USA is OVER! If President Donald Trump does not finish the thought (America First means not Israel First) in 2020 — or worse, if he bugs out, quits, and does not run, putting a surrogate forward — then I and others will finish the job. It is not possible for America the Beautiful to be restored unless we eradicate the parasitic Zionist element in the USA (not to be confused with the nine million decent Jews who comprise only 5% of the eligible voters).
There are those who believe that President Donald Trump, a Freemason, is controlled by Zionists as well as the Freemasons. I am not among them. I think he is a genius playing a long game and that we will ultimately eradicate not only the Zionists, but also the illegal immigrant gangs and the elite pedophiles that have been wreaking havoc against America’s youth.
There is a great deal I do not know. An Open Source Agency such as I have been recommending for thirty years — against strong persistent opposition from the CIA — would go a long way toward reconnecting the US public to the truth — historical truth, present truth, and projected reality replete with true cost economics.
The #UNRIG – Election Integrity Act — not to be confused with HR 1 which is a piece of crap that Diebolizes congressional district boundaries and sets the stage for non-citizens to vote — is the other half of what I envision as a Trump Triumph in 2020.
God Bless America — we each must do what we can to save the Republic.
___
https://jamesfetzer.org/2019/02/robert-david-steele-special-new-9-11-commission-core-interrogation-list/ | {
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There might not be much of a case for things crawling on Mars, but there might have been microbial creatures deep beneath the Red Planet’s surface before humans ever existed.
Now a team of scientists has been able to determine that it is highly possible for alien microbes to have existed several miles beneath the crust because of subsurface hydrogen that go back to billions of years ago and kept them alive for hundreds of millions of years.
"We showed, based on basic physics and chemistry calculations, that the ancient Martian subsurface likely had enough dissolved hydrogen to power a global subsurface biosphere," Brown University grad student Jesse Tarnas, who led a study recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, told Phys.org. "Conditions in this habitable zone would have been similar to places on Earth where underground life exists.”
What this means is that the Martian underground could have been teeming with colonies of microbes feeding off electrons from an influx of hydrogen molecules. Something ancient Mars has in common with Earth is SliMEs. Not slime as in extraterrestrial sludge, but SliMEs as in subsurface lithotropic microbial ecosystems (lithotropes are organisms that survive off inorganic substances).
What might have once been lurking beneath this lifeless red dust? Credit: Mars
Molecular hydrogen that has been dissolved is the energy source for SliMes on our planet. The hydrogen would have reached these hypothetical microbes through radiolysis—the process by which radiation breaks down water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Lithotropes would have devoured electrons from those H2 molecules. Tarnas’ team suggests that around 4 billion years ago, subterranean hydrogen concentrations would have been high enough to keep swarms of microbes alive.
"The question then becomes: What was the nature of that subsurface life, if it existed, and where did it get its energy?" said Brown Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences professor and study coauthor Jack Mustard. "We know that radiolysis helps to provide energy for underground microbes on Earth, so what Jesse did here was to pursue the radiolysis story on Mars."
Data from the gamma ray spectrometer that rides the Odyssey spacecraft around Mars was crucial for the research team, who figured out the surface concentrations of radioactive elements thorium and potassium, which also told them how much uranium was also in the soil. Radioactive decay is what makes the radiolysis that supposedly fed ancient microbes, if they existed, possible.
The team also needed to take climate into account. They concluded that there must have been a zone beneath the surface that remained habitable for eons. Surprisingly, colder temperatures would have been more effective at fueling (again, hypothetical) Martian life.
While we can’t yet prove that there really were micro-Martians thriving deep in that red soil, this research is a launching point for future spacecraft that will bring samples back to Earth.
(via Phys.org) | {
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Intel briefly listed two 10nm Cannon Lake processors in a microcode update document this week, confirming that it has shipped such chips, although we expect it to be in small quantities. Intel has since removed the references to them from the public version of the paper.
Intel has adjusted its 10nm roadmap multiple times in the recent years. Back in 2013, the company planned to make CPUs produced using its 10nm technology available in 2015. Then, the company pushed them to 2016, but that was a minor change. In mid-2015 the chipmaker delayed its 10 nm products to late 2017. Then in early-2016, Intel switched its “Tick-Tock” cadence to “Process-Architecture-Optimization” model, officially prolonging lifecycles of its manufacturing technology nodes and changing its approach to new product development in general. When it comes to 10 nm products, Intel has not made formal announcements about any product family yet, but said earlier this year in a side-presentation to its CES keynote that it had shipped some of them to customers in 2017.
Since the company did not disclose any details about the 10nm CPUs it shipped, it naturally caused further questions on the state of Intel's 10nm process in general and when the Cannon Lake products, expected to be the first on 10nm, were coming. Fortunately, our friends at Tom’s Hardware noticed Cannon Lake processors in the latest version of Intel’s microcode update document earlier this week. After the fact, Intel has since removed the references from the document.
The first version of the document, as it appears, suggests that Intel has shipped Cannon Lake-U CPUs in 2+2 and 2+0 configurations to undisclosed customers. The “2+2” denotes that a chip has two processing cores (the first number) as well as GT2-class graphics (the second number), whereas the “2+0” indicates that a dual-core chip has no iGPU at all. Intel’s “U” series parts, aimed at the 15W notebook market, usually feature an integrated chipset in the CPU package. Therefore, the CNL-U 2+2 and CNL-U 2+0 parts are aimed primarily at mobile and low-power applications.
It is noteworthy that in the recent years Intel has begun commercial roll-outs of its new CPUs starting with ultra-low-power 4.5W Y-series processors, e.g., Broadwell-Y in 2014, Skylake-Y in 2015, and Kaby Lake-Y in 2016. If Intel is launching its U-series chips with a TDP of 15 W first for 10nm, this would indicate a change in policy. So it is surprising to see that Intel has started shipments of Cannon Lake-U, but not Cannon Lake-Y.
A natural question that arises because of the listing is whether Intel has started to ship its CNL-U parts in mass quantities to PC makers. Intel has not disclosed where these parts have been sold, which could be for entry-level low-power laptops, or to certain specific customers and requests with custom/semi-custom CNL products. While a CNL-U 2+2 CPU could be used for inexpensive notebooks, a CNL 2+0 part would fit into applications that either do not require a display controller at all (such as routers, NAS, DAS, etc.), or can use a discrete GPU (a low-end PC with a low-end/outdated dGPU - there are a lot of such machines sold in developing countries, a system for software/hardware development/compatibility tests/etc.). Unfortunately, at this point it is completely unclear where Intel has shipped these 10nm parts.
Related Reading | {
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Before you join DatingDNA, take a look at our review down below. It will reveal the high points and the flaws that we discovered on the site.
DatingDNA Review Results Popularity - 75
Value - 83
Features - 82
Quality of Members - 85
Safety - 80
Customer Satisfaction - 86 82 Final Word on DatingDNA We can definitely say that we found DatingDNA to be a very powerful and impressive dating site. For those seeking long-term relationships, we feel that it rivals some of the higher-end paid dating sites. If you live in a densely populated urban area of the United States or Canada you will very likely have an excellent user experience on DatingDNA. However, due to the fact of its user base is still not as large as its paid rivals, those living in less densely populated regions may have difficulty finding compatible partners. Even so, the user experience offered by DatingDNA cannot be described as anything short of EXCELLENT.
— Pros and Cons —
Pros
100 percent free to use
Very thorough profiles
Zero tolerance for fake profiles and trolls
Cons
Registration requires an iOS device
The “Compatability Threshold” feature can result in fewer results in less populated regions
Design aesthetic could use a makeover
— In-Depth DatingDNA Review —
There is a point when we all become serious about “adulting.” Our dating habits begin to evolve — we begin to seek out people with whom we are more compatible. Obviously, physical attributes are still part of the equation, but we also begin to consider our partner’s passions, their desires, and their personality. Essentially, we start looking for people who satisfy us not only physically, but also emotionally and spiritually.
Under those circumstances, casual dating sites will offer very little to us. This is why more complex sites, such as DatingDNA.com, are appealing. DatingDNA promotes itself as being 100 percent free to use and focused entirely on compatibility.
That may sound too good to be true. That is why we took DatingDNA for a spin in order to determine just how effective it is.
— First Impression —
When we first heard about DatingDNA, we were skeptical. It is quite common in the online dating industry to come across dating sites that promote themselves as being free options to more well-known and well-established sites. When we first visited the welcome page for DatingDNA we felt its styling to be somewhat dated. That alone, of course, does not necessarily mean that the site has no value.
As we dug deeper into the site, the overall aesthetic of the design was consistently dated, but in terms of its performance — above all the breadth and depth of its matchmaking engine — really impressed us.
— Is DatingDNA Really Free? —
The most frequently asked question about DatingDNA is, “is it really free?”
We came across a few reviews online that claimed that DatingDNA charged for a premium version. During our testing we found the site to be 100 percent free. There were no upgrades that required payment. Our research also indicated that in the past, the site had experimented with charging $4.99 for a premium version. As of November 2017, however, that is no longer the case. The site is absolutely free.
We are also happy to report that the site is free of any advertising. Unlike other dating sites that operate under a free model and generate revenue through banner advertising, DatingDNA offers a clean user interface free of advertising.
The developers of DatingDNA want to offer their users as clean of a user experience as possible. As they have stated, the reason for doing so is so they can receive input from their users free of distractions. They have also indicated that at some point in the future they will be charging for some aspects of the service. However, there is no information as to when this monetization maneuver will occur. Suffice it to say, it is free now, so why not take advantage of it?
— Types of Users —
When you look at the majority of DatingDNA members, you will find that the only characteristic that they have in common is that they appear to be serious about dating — most are interested in long-term relationships. That does not mean that those seeking more casual relationships are not on the site, but by our estimation, they would account for less than 20 percent of the membership base.
In terms of other demographic data, DatingDNA is highly inclusive. You will find people from all age groups — from 18 to those who are 55-plus. In terms of lifestyle, DatingDNA is open to those seeking heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or transgender partners.
— Registration and Platforms —
DatingDNA has a unique registration process. While it is available as a desktop as well as mobile platform, during registration it is mandatory that you first download the iOS app. There is no alternate method of registration. That means that if you do not have an iOS device you will not be able to register on the site. This was one of the few things about DatingDNA that we were displeased with. We hope that in the near future they will open access to their site to those who do not have an iOS device.
Even though the downloading and installation of the iOS app is mandatory, we found that the process of completing the lengthy profile questionnaire is easier when done on the desktop version. According to DatingDNA, the reason that they require the installation of the IOS app is to prevent people from signing up for multiple accounts. It is part of their effort to minimize fake profiles and trolls. They say that this method is more effective than going through the Facebook sync procedure that many other online dating sites use.
In terms of the performance of both platforms, due to the complexity of the site, we found that that the desktop version offers a better user experience. This is not to deride the mobile version — it is solid and fast. Our testers did not encounter any technical issues with it. However, we found that the mobile version is best when used solely to monitor your account, not to interact with it.
— Features —
On most dating sites, when we look at their features we are looking at individual components of the site’s user interface. These are normally related to online chat, search, and other discovery features. On DatingDNA, however, there is no way to escape the fact that its most powerful feature is the robust user profile that it requires all users to have. This requires new users to fill out a very thorough questionnaire. While you don’t have to complete it all at once, until you do so, your access to the full power of DatingDNA will be limited.
This is because when it comes to the site’s powerful matchmaking algorithm, it requires all of the information on the questionnaire to serve up potential matches. Also, due to its “Compatibility Threshold” feature, other members can only see the profiles of other members that DatingDNA determines to be compatible. This is done to prevent curiosity seekers from surfing through the site and wasting everybody’s time. While this may seem cold, in reality, we found it to provide for a cleaner and neater user experience.
When you look at the profiles of other members, you will be drawn immediately to the “Compatibility Score” feature. A perfect score of 10 would mean that you are probably soulmates and have had a romance in some other lifetime. Our testers found that any reading above 7 is good. Normally when you engage in communication with these people you will find that conversation will flow smoothly and that you have many things in common. Again, this is all due to the thorough questionnaire that you filled out at the beginning.
DatingDNA also has a traditional “friends list” with a slightly more powerful twist. You can store notes on other people that you have chatted with, their star ratings and even their phone numbers if they gave them to you. It’s not just a “click-and-save” feature, it actually accepts and stores your own input so you can have it handy for later. | {
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By Drazen Jorgic
ITEN, Kenya (Reuters) - The athletes who pound the dirt trails snaking through Kenya's lush Rift Valley region have spawned a local industry around their talent and forged a reputation as the world's finest long-distance runners.
But explosive media claims of widespread doping in their ranks, including allegations against Kenya's Olympic medal winners, have cast a shadow over a sport that many in this impoverished region see as a ticket to wealth and stardom.
Kenyan athletics chiefs have dismissed the doping claims as a "smear campaign", yet coaches and runners have warned that the east African nation needs to face up to the problem if it is to protect its rich running legacy and lucrative sponsorship deals.
"It worries everyone. Not (just) athletes, even their families," said Moses Kiptanui, 44, a three-time world steeplechase champion who in 2013 became the first high-profile athlete to warn that Kenya faced a doping problem.
"Their earnings will come down and nobody will want to put money in sponsorship," said Kiptanui, a son of subsistence farmers who used his athletics earnings in the 1990s to build hefty dairy and maize businesses.
Britain's Sunday Times newspaper and German broadcaster ARD/WDR last weekend said they had been leaked suspicious blood results from more than 800 athletes, including 77 Kenyans.
The Sunday Times alleged that athletes who won a fifth of Kenya's 92 Olympic and world championship medals between 2001-2012 had suspicious blood results.
An ARD/WDR documentary aired on Saturday showed a hidden camera purportedly revealing Kenyan athletes being injected with performance-enhancing drugs. It also alleged that corrupt Athletics Kenya (AK) officials had covered up failed tests.
Kenya's London Marathon winners Wilson Kipsang and Eliud Kipchoge this week pleaded with athletics fans across the globe to keep faith in them, saying top Kenyan runners were "clean".
Yet others conceded a cloud of suspicion now hangs above them all.
Story continues
"If someone now wins a race, in their minds (people) are always saying 'athletes of Kenya are using drugs', which is not good," said Lucas Rotich, winner of the Hamburg Marathon in Germany.
In the last three years 33 Kenyans have failed drugs tests but only Rita Jeptoo, winner of Boston and Chicago Marathons, can be classed as a top runner. Her two-year ban in January shocked Kenya's athletes as it showed doping was not restricted to low-level runners seeking get-rich-quick schemes.
Like many others training Kenyans, Dutch coach Hugo van den Broek resents the way drugs cheats have stolen the limelight from the jaw-dropping talent in Iten, a small town which has become Kenya's running centre and a global athletics hub.
"Four or five years ago I used to believe there was no such thing as doping (in Kenya)," he said. "I’ve come to realize that it’s there and I just hope, and still kind of believe, there are not many real top athletes involved."
"DODGING THE TRUTH"
Perched on a Rift Valley escarpment 8,000 feet above sea level, Iten regularly hosts foreign Olympians such as Mo Farah, who cross continents to train with Kenya's elite runners. British, Chinese and Dutch national teams also prepared for the London Olympics in Iten's high-altitude training camps.
Some Kenyans fear well-heeled foreign athletes may now avoid Iten due to persistent doping claims, a major threat for hotels, camps and other job-yielding businesses built around running.
Athletics Kenya has in the past blamed unscrupulous doctors and pharmacists for doping, saying they target desperate athletes seeking overnight riches. AK had also banned two foreign coaches.
But athletes and coaches in Iten say AK ought to shoulder some of the blame as its blanket denials and inaction have helped no one.
Kipsang, who won silver at the London Olympics and hosts runners in his Iten-based hotel, said AK has fallen short in "creating awareness and making sure control measures" were in place to stop cheats.
"It's high time AK stands up and tells Kenyans the truth about (doping). They have been dodging the truth for long, which has seen them give foreigners fodder to tarnish Kenya," added Silas Kiplagat, who won 1500m silver at the 2011 world championships.
AK has denied corruption allegations and said the latest doping claims were an effort to destabilise Kenyan athletes ahead of this month's world championships in Beijing.
Barnaba Korir, AK's Nairobi branch chairman, said the body has tackled doping seriously but needs more help from the government, including in educating runners and building a blood testing lab.
"The name of Kenya has been put on the map of the world as a result of our runners, so definitely resources must be put into this," added Korir, who said AK was unsure if criminalising doping would help curb the problem.
A government task force last year started investigating doping in Kenya but AK refused to cooperate. The police have also questioned top AK officials about why they made personal withdrawals from a bank account where Nike had deposited sponsorship money.
When former athlete Kiptanui, considered a running great in Kenya, started raising alarm bells about drugs cheats, AK officials accused him of soiling Kenya's reputation and attacked him by insinuating he may have also used drugs.
"Many Kenyans are clean, it's some few individuals that need to be exposed. But if you don't expose them, then (how) do we know who is clean and who is not clean. Nobody knows," Kiptanui said. | {
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The last cup of August has come and this means it's only one cup left to score points towards the €500 Monthly Finals, where the best 8 teams of August will meet again to determine the cream of the crop in this month. So sign up for the cup on Sunday and bring your A-play. With every round you master you make one more step towards the big prize pot! One last chance to join the CM Storm Go4CS:GO Monthly Finals! Three cups are done and three different winners took not only €100 for the first spot but also 100 ranking points, which takes them closer to the €500 Monthly Finals. highgrade, -Professionelle UMLEGER and Moops have been the best so far. If you already played in one of the Go4CS:GO cups of August and won some matches, not only the cup final on Sunday could give you the points you need. Just join the cup and show your skills and with a bit of luck even the lower rounds could give you the points needed to be among the best teams to play for the additional €500 in the Monthly Finals live on ESL TV!
CM Storm Go4CS:GO Cup #58: Win €100! Sign up now!
(Check-in: 13:30 - 13:40 CEST)
Check-in is first come, first serve. Sign up until Sunday, 13:29 CEST
Date: Sunday, 11th of August
Start: 14:00 CEST
Size: 64/128 teams
Structure: Single Elimination BO1
The winner takes €100 powered by CM Storm Basic rules: Maps: Fixed map per round
Teamsize: 5on5
Max Rounds: 30
Custom Maps: STEAM Workshop Beginners guide to sign up: Register on ESL
Enter your STEAM ID (e.g. 1:0:1337)
Enter a contact method (Skype, IRC, etc.)
Click the sign up link!
How does the Check-In work and what is it good for? On Sunday there will be a Check-In starting at 13:30 CEST until 13:40 CEST to confirm your participation. Afterwards all teams can sign up right away with no need to check in. This helps us having mostly teams in the tournament who are able to start playing the cup at 14:00 CEST so the tournament can run smoothly. NOTE: If you won't use the Check-In or the late sign up in the given time frame, you can't participate in the Go4CS:GO cup!
What is CM Storm Go4CS:GO! Each Sunday CM Storm Go4CS:GO is your chance to find some nice competition, have matches with teams from all over Europe and the chance to advance to the next level. CM Storm Go4CS:GO always starts at 14:00 CEST with up to 128 slots and a prize pot of €100 every week. On top there are €500 to grab for the winner of the Monthly Finals. Further details can be found on the CM Storm Go4CS:GO page.
Thank you very much, CM Storm Right from the CS:GO Opening Cup CM Storm was supporting us in bringing you cups with prizes, prize money and a lot of action. Now they are back supporting CS:GO on ESL and especially the Go4CS:GO series! You can show them how much you love their support by giving a like on Facebook. They really deserve it!
See you on Sunday,
Your Admin Team Three cups are done and three different winners took not only €100 for the first spot but also 100 ranking points, which takes them closer to the €500 Monthly Finals.andhave been the best so far. If you already played in one of the Go4CS:GO cups of August and won some matches, not only the cup final on Sunday could give you the points you need. Just join the cup and show your skills and with a bit of luck even the lower rounds could give you the points needed to be among the best teams to play for the additional €500 in the Monthly Finals live on ESL TV!On Sunday there will be astarting atuntilto confirm your participation. Afterwards all teams can sign up right away with no need to check in. This helps us having mostly teams in the tournament who are able to start playing the cup at 14:00 CEST so the tournament can run smoothly.Each Sunday CM Storm Go4CS:GO is your chance to find some nice competition, have matches with teams from all over Europe and the chance to advance to the next level. CM Storm Go4CS:GO always starts at 14:00 CEST with up to 128 slots and a prize pot of €100 every week. On top there are €500 to grab for the winner of the Monthly Finals. Further details can be found on theRight from the CS:GO Opening Cupwas supporting us in bringing you cups with prizes, prize money and a lot of action. Now they are back supporting CS:GO on ESL and especially the Go4CS:GO series! You can show them how much you love their support by giving a. They really deserve it!See you on Sunday,YourAdmin Team Soodi , Monday, 19/08/13 16:51 | {
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Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the opening ceremonies of the 2014 Winter Paralympics at the Fisht Olympic stadium in Sochi, Russia, on March 7. (Dmitry Lovetsky/AP)
As the situation in Crimea grew increasingly tense over the past few weeks, many in Western Europe and the U.S. began to wonder what exactly Russian President Vladimir Putin was thinking. German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly said he was "in another world," while Julia Ioffe of the New Republic wrote that he had "lost it." As Anne Applebaum of The Post tweeted, "we may have reached the weird moment when the dictator believes his own propaganda."
The image was of a man losing his bearings, stumbling blindly into a possible conflict. Perhaps, after 14 years of leading Russia, he had finally gone mad.
Apparently in Russia, the perspective is rather different.
In a poll conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) last week, Putin's popularity level in Russia has reached 71.6 percent. That's a 9.7 percent increase since mid-February, which seems quite obviously linked to the Russian president's handling of Ukraine and the Sochi Olympics. As Ria Novosti notes, it means that Putin's popularity levels are now at a three-year high.
You might want to put that down to the fact that the VTsIOM is state-run, but that argument doesn't really hold. The Levada Center, a well-respected independent polling center, has also found that Putin had a 72 percent approval rating, up 7 points from January and a recent record. To put that in context on a world stage, U.S. president Barack Obama is currently at 43 percent, according to Gallup, while 79 percent of the French say they don't approve of Francois Hollande's presidency. Putin isn't just popular, he's extraordinarily popular.
So what is Putin doing right? Well, another poll released by Levada offers some insight. According to that poll, conducted March 7-10, 37 percent of respondents believe that Ukraine has been taken over by radical nationalists, and another 36 percent believe there is no single authority there. Just 9 percent believe the government in Ukraine represents the full range of interests of the Ukrainian population.
Meanwhile, some 67 percent of those polled blame the crisis in Crimea on Ukrainian nationalists, while just 2 percent blamed it on the Russian leadership. This fear of Ukrainian nationalists is part of the Kremlin line, of course: In an unusual news conference this month, Putin referred to the Euromaidan protests as "orgy of nationalists and extremists and anti-Semites on the streets of Kiev."
Russia has simply stepped in to protect Russian speakers from this terrible crowd, the Kremlin logic goes, and that action is apparently okay with Russian citizens – some 65 percent of those polled by Levada felt that Russia had the right to protect Russian speakers in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. In total, 79 percent felt that Russia should accept Crimea into the country if it votes that way in this weekend's referendum.
What's really remarkable about Putin's apparent popularity boost is that for so long we'd been hearing about how it was on the wane. An apparent drop in approval ratings in 2011 – not to mention the huge street protests that hit Moscow and other cities after the disputed Duma elections of December 2011 – had seemed to signify that Russia's growing middle class was finally growing sick of Putin. The latest trend appears to contradict that, with Putin's popularity apparently heading back to the stratospheric heights of 2008 and 2009, when his popularity reached 88 percent in Levada's polling.
Incidentally, Putin's popularity peaked in September 2008 – just a few weeks after Russia crushed Georgia's military in a brief war over the fate of breakaway region South Ossetia. Putin's actions may strike us as paranoid and possibly mad, driven by exaggerated fears of "Russophobia" and rose-tinted memories of a grand Russian empire, but we should remember: There appear to be millions of people in Russia who may feel the same. | {
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By Chris Ochayi
ABUJA— Determined to broaden the scope of its skill acquisition schemes, the Federal Government has called on graduates of such schemes in Niger Delta to put the skills acquired to good use to encourage the development of the region and the country.
It noted that empowering youths of the region, through its various skills acquisition schemes, was vital to ensuring sustenance of peace and tranquillity in the region.
Minister of State for Niger Delta Affairs, Professor Claudius Daramola, stated this at the graduation ceremony of 50 non-militant youths in artisan/skills acquisition training in the housing sector at Joseph Ayo Babalola University, JABU, Ikeji, Osun State.
He said the training was proof of the current administration’s resolve to use the development of human capital to address unemployment as well as ensure peace and security in the region.
The minister added that the decision to embark on the skills acquisition schemes was necessitated by the realisation that they not only positively impact the lives of participants, the society also benefits from their multiplier effects.
He informed graduates of the four weeks training programme that they will be financially empowered to start their businesses while the ministry will monitor them to ensure that the resources are put to good use.
In his remarks, Vice Chancellor of Joseph Ayo Babalola University, Professor Sola Fajana, commended the Federal Government for the programme and efforts made so far in that sector, which he described as timely.
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Straw into gold. Water into wine. Servant into princess. It's a longstanding obsession of human myth-making: turning one thing into another thing -- a lowly thing into a vaunted thing -- by way of miracle or magic.
Well, someone get Joseph Campbell. Because science has just found another way to bring the Rumpelstiltskin story to life. And to the life, specifically, of your electronics. A collective of researchers from the U.S., Finland, Germany, and Japan, working with the U.S. Department of Energy, has developed a way to make metal out of the straw of the contemporary world: cement. The process they discovered, published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, transforms liquid cement into a kind of glass-metal fusion that is exceptionally good at conducting heat and electricity. The resulting hybrid, the scientists say, can be used as a semiconductor in electronics: it offers good conductivity, low energy loss in magnetic fields, better resistance to corrosion than traditional metal, less brittleness than traditional glass, and fluidity for ease of processing and molding.
Which means that your gadgets -- their liquid-crystal displays, their protective coatings, their computer chips -- may soon be made, in part, of cement.
So how, exactly, do you turn masonry into metal? The scientists made use of a phenomenon known as electron trapping -- a condition that occurs when the free electrons in polycrystalline materials are, yep, "trapped" in the cage-like structures that form around them.
The team, under Chris Benmore, a physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, studied mayenite, a rare calcium aluminium oxide mineral that features, importantly, cubic symmetry. They melted the mayenite at temperatures of 2,000 degrees Celsius using carbon dioxide laser beam heating*. They then processed the resulting liquid within different atmospheres to control the way oxygen would bond in the resulting glass. | {
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Story highlights A man in his 20s was killed in a lightning strike at California's Venice Beach
Emergency responders treated 13 people injured in the storm
Thunderstorms were in the forecast before deadly lightning strike
Fatalities from lightning strikes are rare in California
A relaxing day at Southern California's famed Venice Beach took a deadly turn Sunday afternoon when a powerful lightning bolt struck the water, killing one person and injuring at least 13, emergency officials said.
The sudden lightning strike at Venice Beach caused panic as people tried to get out of the water and off the beach.
The Los Angeles County coroner's office confirmed one man in his 20s died at a local hospital after he was rescued from the beach.
But it's too soon to say whether he died from "a lightning strike, drowning or being trampled by the crowd," according to John Kades with the coroner's office.
"The day started out clear, but there were storms in the forecast for the region on Sunday," CNN meteorologist Sherri Pugh said of the isolated thunderstorms that swept through the Los Angeles area.
The lightning hit the water and the beach at 2:51 p.m. PT (5:51 p.m. ET), according to spokeswoman Katherine Main of the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Emergency responders assessed the condition of at least 13 victims -- all of whom were either in or near the water -- at the scene. Of those, seven adults and one teenager were transported to local hospitals.
One was listed in serious conditions and six were listed in fair condition by late Sunday afternoon
The National Weather Service in Los Angeles tweeted around the time of the strike that "cloud to ground lightning" had been reported in nearby Marina del Rey and at the Los Angeles International Airport.
Witnesses tweeted they saw a huge bolt of lightning strike the area, with one Twitter user describing an explosion that blew off nearby roof tiles.
Lightning also struck Catalina Island on Sunday. Los Angeles County Sheriff Sgt. Robert Berardi said a man was hit by a lightning strike near a golf course. He was taken to a local hospital, treated and later released.
Lightning fatalities are pretty rare in California. Between 1959 and 2012, 31 people died after they were struck by lightning, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In comparison, there were 468 deaths from lightning strikes in Florida during the same time period, followed by 215 in Texas.
There is no safe place outside during a thunderstorm or when lightning strikes, the agency said. To reduce the risk of injury or even death during severe weather, people planning outdoor activities of any kind should have a safety plan. At the first clap of thunder, the weather service said anybody outdoors should run for shelter or for their vehicles and they should remain sheltered for at least 30 minutes after the last clap of thunder is heard.
When visiting the beach, where there is limited shelter available for taking cover during a thunderstorm, the weather service advises people to run for their cars at the first sign of thunder or lightning in the distance. The agency also warns against taking cover under the beach picnic shelters. It says water, wet items, like ropes and metal objects, including fences and poles, are big dangers during lightning storms because water and metal are both great conductors of electrical currents.
The weather service also offers these tips for minimizing the risk of getting struck by lightning: Avoid open fields and hilltops, stay away from tall, isolated trees or other tall objects, set up camps in lower lying areas and remember tents do not offer protection from lightning.
There is also professional lightning detection equipment available that issues alerts when lightning is approaching an area. The weather service said it's a good investment for outdoors sports groups or other outside events. | {
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Jaune: CINDER YOU BITCH YOU KILLED MY WOMAN NOW I MAKE YOU PAY!!!Cinder: oh really and how are you going to do it?Jaune pulls down his pantsCinder looks for three secondsh holy shit (next day)Jaune: and that is how I made Cinder into my bitch. (He says to team ruby while cinder is dry humping him from behind with a perverted look on her face😆😆 | {
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Article content
The Alberta government is moving to fix one of the great taxation inequities in the province.
Rachel Notley’s government will soon propose changes to more fairly share $1.9 billion in industrial taxes between the province’s cash-poor towns and cities and its cash-rich counties.
We apologize, but this video has failed to load.
tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or David Staples: Alberta government moves to end province's industrial tax fiasco Back to video
“We’ve signalled pretty strongly that we are not leaving collaboration up to chance, that it is not OK that there are such hard lines imposing significant disparities across the province,” Municipal Affairs Minister Danielle Larivee says.
Multiple measures to ensure a more co-operative approach between towns and cities and counties will be part of the new Municipal Government Act, which will be introduced in the legislature at the end of May, Larivee says.
Alberta’s towns and cities have been badly treated on taxes for decade. The counties have enjoyed an almost unfathomable taxation bounty, courtesy of their formerly powerful Progressive Conservative friends. | {
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Shia LeBeouf claimed he was raped by a woman during his performance art project #IAMSORRY.
The "Fury" actor revealed in an interview with Dazed Digital that a woman took advantage of him while he was checking the installation.
#IAMSORRY? is an event in February where LaBeouf silently met members of the public one by one for five days in an LA gallery. He told Dazed & Confused magazine, "One woman who came with her boyfriend, who was outside the door when this happened, whipped my legs for ten minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me. ...There were hundreds of people in line when she walked out with disheveled hair and smudged lipstick. It was no good, not just for me but her man as well. On top of that my girl (actress Mia Goth) was in line to see me, because it was Valentine's Day and I was living in the gallery for the duration of the event -- we were separated for five days, no communication. So it really hurt her as well, as I guess the news of it traveled through the line. When she came in she asked for an explanation, and I couldn't speak, so we both sat with this unexplained trauma silently. It was painful."
This rape claim of LeBeouf received backlash from Journalist Piers Morgan. He tweeted "Shia LaBeouf's claim to have been 'raped' is truly pathetic & demeans real rape victims. Grow up, you silly little man."
What do you think about Shia LaBeouf rape claims? Share your comments here.
Shia LaBeouf's claim to have been 'raped' is truly pathetic & demeans real rape victims. Grow up, you silly little man. — Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) November 28, 2014
A Hollywood actor sitting with a paper bag over his head who did nothing as he claims a woman 'raped' him has not been raped. #labeouf — Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) November 28, 2014 | {
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By Mike on Saturday, February 25, 2017, 21:58
Coconut shell is quite an interesting material - underneath that bristly exterior, there is a lustrous dark shell that can be polished to quite a lovely finish.
In this article, I take a coconut shell and make it into a little musical instrument.
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An Australian SAS soldier who cut the hands off two suspected Taliban fighters has been cleared of war crimes by a Federal Police investigation.
Key points: Incident occured in April 2013 in Afghanistan's Zabul province in joint operation with Afghan forces
Operation led to the killing of four suspected insurgents
SAS corporal proceeded to sever right hands of dead men with surgical scapel
The incident, first reported by the ABC in 2013, occurred during a combined operation between the Afghan national security service and Australian Special Operations Task Group soldiers in Zabul province in April 2013.
The joint operation was targeting a senior insurgent commander codenamed "Rapier" by the Australians.
The operation led to the killing of four suspected insurgents. Rapier, the target of the mission, was not killed or captured.
An SAS corporal searched the bodies of two of the suspected insurgents and, after finding a Makarov pistol on one, proceeded to sever the right hands of the dead men with a surgical scalpel.
Australian troops are required to collect fingerprints and eye scans of every Taliban fighter who is killed when it is possible to do so.
However, the mutilation of bodies is a violation of the laws of war.
The revelations led to a two-year Australian Federal Police (AFP) investigation into whether or not the soldier had committed a war crime, and opened divisions between the SAS and military investigators.
SAS corporal cut off hands 'due to time pressure'
In July this year the ABC published fresh details about the incident following a leak of hundreds of classified Defence documents from Australia's 16-year-long war in Afghanistan.
Do you know more? Please use this form to get in contact with the ABC Investigations team, or if you require more secure communication, please choose an option on the confidential tips page.
One of the documents, a classified internal inquiry into the incident, describes the SAS corporal's reasons for severing the men's hands.
"In his evidence [the SAS corporal] said that once again he had severed the hands of the EKIA [enemy killed in action] 2 and EKIA 3 of his own volition, as there was time pressure to retrieve the biometric material and to get back to the helicopters for extraction," the report states.
"At this point in time patrol commander [a sergeant] … arrived at EKIA 3, and seeing the two hands on the ground, exclaimed words to the effect: 'What the f*** are you doing?'"
Federal MP Andrew Hastie, a former captain in the SAS, was the patrol commander of one of the groups of soldiers at the scene.
The leaked documents show Captain Hastie also observed one of the severed hands on the ground and asked what was going on.
When Captain Hastie and the sergeant returned to their base they discussed the incident at length and asked another SAS member to find out if the practice was permitted under Defence rules and regulations.
Captain Hastie told his men not to sever any more hands and the next day reported the incident to his commanding officer.
Defence probe looked into briefing given to SAS troopers
The internal Defence investigation into the hand chopping hinged on a briefing given to the SAS troopers by Australian Defence Force Investigative Service (ADFIS) experts in the days leading up to the incident.
SAS members claimed that in that briefing they were told it was acceptable to sever the hands of dead Taliban fighters for identification purposes — while the ADFIS members who gave the briefing vehemently denied this.
The Defence investigation also discovered that Australian troops deploying to Afghanistan had been given no advice about whether the collection of body parts for identification purposes was acceptable.
However, it said regardless of what information Australian troops had been given, the soldier who cut off the hands had "exercised poor judgment, in that he failed to adequately appreciate the possible strategic consequences of those actions, in particular the potential responses from local nationals, [the Afghan Government], the Australian public and the media."
The ABC also reported in August that the commanding officer of the SAS had complained by letter to the head of ADFIS that the investigation into the incident was being driven by political considerations.
"To be clear, I believe the ADFIS team were deliberately seeking to charge members of my team to prevent any adverse action on members of their own. This is a perception shared by persons outside my chain of command as well," the SAS officer wrote in October 2013.
Soldiers' views 'appeared to demonstrate a degree of desensitisation'
The Defence investigation found that even after SAS members were explicitly told not to sever any more hands, they were still asking if it was permissible in some circumstances.
"The above position could be attributed to a common desire by the members to support [the SAS trooper who severed the hands], following his employment of the technique," the report said.
"That type of support is not surprising considering the nature of the unit and its operations. However, the views expressed appeared to go beyond mere support for [him] and demonstrated a drift in values, or at least a degree of desensitisation."
Other more senior personnel who were interviewed by the inquiry were less ambivalent. Mr Hastie is quoted as saying: "My gut instinct was okay, that's a strange practice."
Another SAS member said: "There's no uncertainty. I wouldn't cut f***ing people's hands off, sir."
The inquiry officer said in conclusion he could not identify what had caused any "value shift" in the SAS members, but noted they regularly saw dead and dismembered bodies, and themselves regularly killed and injured people.
"The significance of [this] is that these members require very clear direction in relation to what they can and can't do, and the members request as much," he wrote.
"Additionally, it would be imprudent for commanders to assume that these members are in a position to make value judgements, in a way that will align with the judgement of the commanders, and others."
A spokesman for the AFP confirmed the matter had been referred back to the Defence Force. | {
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Some have speculated that seeing the reality of climate change hit so close to home this summer — Houston underwater, Los Angeles licked by flames, and now southern states getting battered by Irma — might be some kind of wake-up call for climate change-denying Republicans.
Yes, that’s right. He wasn’t focused on getting massive aid to those most affected. He wasn’t focused on massive change to our energy and transit systems to lower greenhouse gas emissions so that Irma-like storms do not become a thrice-annual occurrence. His mind was on massive changes to the tax code — which, despite Trump’s claims that he is driven by a desire to give the middle class relief, would in fact hand corporations the biggest tax cut in decades and the very wealthy a sizable break as well.
He gathered his cabinet at Camp David and said there was no time to waste. With Hurricane Irma set to potentially devastate huge swaths of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, now was the time, he said, to rush through massive … tax cuts .
As Trump’s address to his cabinet makes clear, however, Irma only makes him want to double down on his reckless economic agenda. Flanked by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, he explained that they were going to discuss “dramatic tax cuts and tax reform. And I think now with what’s happened with the hurricane, I’m gonna ask for a speed up.”
Some have pointed out that this is a classic example of what I have called the “shock doctrine” — using disasters as cover to push through radical, pro-corporate policies. And it is a textbook case to be sure, especially because when Trump made his remarks, Irma was at the very height of its potential threat.
But Trump’s timing is even more revealing for what it shows about what’s really driving climate change denial on the right. It’s not a rejection of the science, but a rejection of the consequences of the science. Put simply, if the science is true, then the whole economic project that has dominated American power structures since Ronald Reagan was president is out the window, and the deniers know it.
Because if climate change is driving the kinds of catastrophes we are seeing right now — and it is — then it doesn’t just mean Trump has to apologize and admit he was wrong when he called it a Chinese hoax. It means that he also needs to junk his whole tax plan, because we’re going to need that tax money (and more) to pay for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. And it also means he’s going to have to junk his deregulatory plan, because if we are going to change how we power our lives, we’re going to need all kinds of regulations to manage and enforce it. And, of course, this is not just about Trump — it’s about all the climate-denying Republican governors whose states are currently being pounded. All of them would have to junk an entire twisted worldview holding that the market is always right, regulation is always wrong, private is good and public is bad, and taxes that support public services are the worst of all.
Here is what we need to understand in a hurry: Climate change, especially at this late date, can only be dealt with through collective action that sharply curtails the behavior of corporations, such as Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs (both so lavishly represented at Trump’s cabinet meeting). Climate action demands investments in the public sphere — in new energy grids, public transit and light rail, and energy efficiency — on a scale not seen since World War II. And that can only happen by raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, the very people Trump is determined to shower with the most generous tax cuts, loopholes, and regulatory breaks.
In short, climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. To admit that the climate crisis is real is to admit the end of their political and economic project. That’s why the right is in rebellion against the physical world (which is what prompted hundreds of thousands of scientists around the world to participate in the March for Science in April 2017, collectively defending a principle that really shouldn’t need defending: that knowing as much as possible about our world is a good thing). Yet there is a logical reason why science has become such a battle zone: because it is revealing again and again that pro-corporate business as usual leads to a species-threatening catastrophe.
And this isn’t only about the right — it’s also about the center. What mainstream liberals have been saying about climate change for decades is that we simply need to tweak the existing system here and there and everything will be fine. You can have Goldman Sachs capitalism plus solar panels. But at this stage, the challenge we are up against is much deeper than that.
Lowering our emissions quickly enough to avoid catastrophic warming requires confronting the centrality of ever-expanding consumption in how we measure economic progress. It requires remaking our economy in fundamental ways, including battling the systemic economic and racial inequalities that turn disasters like Harvey and Katrina into human catastrophes. In one sense, then, the members of Trump’s cabinet — with their desperate need to deny the reality of global warming, or belittle its implications — understand something that is fundamentally true: To avert climate chaos, we need to challenge the free-market fundamentalism that has conquered the world since the 1980s.
Trump and his fellow climate change-deniers (and climate change-minimizers) see this challenge to their worldview as a crisis so existential, they are unwilling to let the possibility enter their brains. That’s understandable. Global warming really does have radical progressive implications. If it’s real — and it manifestly is — then the oligarch class cannot continue to run riot without rules.
As the reality of climate disruption shows its menacing face, more and more people will come to understand its obvious political and economic implications. In the meantime, we need to stop waiting for disasters to “wake up” hardcore deniers. The dream they are in is just too damn good, too comfortable, and too profitable. But as Trump uses overlapping disasters of Harvey, Irma, North Korea, and whatever other hell he can exploit to smuggle through his cruel economic agenda, the rest of us should be wide awake to the reality that stopping him, and the worldview he represents, is a matter of humanity’s collective survival.
Partially adapted from “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need.” | {
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The BC SPCA is asking the public for help locating a teacup poodle that was stolen from its Vancouver shelter this week.
Someone used bolt cutters to get through the shelter's outer gate and into the kennel after hours on Tuesday evening, according to SPCA spokesperson Lorie Chortyk.
When staff arrived the next morning, they found one tiny dog, Mickey, was missing.
"Mickey was one of six teacup poodles taken into our care on July 14 following a complaint about their well-being," Chortyk said in a news release. "If anyone has seen him or knows anything about the situation, we urge you to contact the SPCA or the Vancouver police right away."
The dog has brown fur and is very small, weighing only 2 ½ lbs.
The SPCA said Mickey is suffering from Giardia, a contagious intestinal infection, and requires a number of medical treatments. | {
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Berhan first came to the U.S. from Ethiopia in 1996 to work temporarily as a translator. Four days after he returned home, Berhan was robbed and beaten at a club in Addis Ababa. Berhan says he's superstitious, and he took the attack as a sign he needed to leave. He immigrated to Seattle and worked not only at a 7-Eleven but also at Dunkin Donuts, as a mailman, and in a chicken processing plant where he loaded frozen birds on a production line. (Berhan says he earned $6.66 an hour and quit the job because his wage was "the devil's number.") | {
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The language of the Casiguran Agta people is among the indigenous Philippine languages that are in imminent danger of dying out.
MANILA, Philippines – The Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) expressed concern that 41 out of 129 dialects are considered endangered or almost obsolete.
These, in particular, are dialects of the ethnic or tribal communities.
KWF Commissioner Purification De Lima argued that one reason for the diminishing of a native dialect in the country is because the use of a certain dialect is no longer common or practiced.
This prompted the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) to launch a campaign to save the country’s native languages. The agency is also erecting monuments across the country to remind Filipinos of using their respective regional languages.
“Ngayon mayroong monumento kongkretong simbolo nang ating mga wika na magpapalala na kailangan nating pangalagaan ang ating mga wika bago pa sila mamatay,” said De Lima.
The Commissioner said incorporating the study of regional languages into the school curriculum will also be a big help to help preserve the country’s dialects. – Marje Pelayo (with reports from Sherwin Culubong)
The post Over 40 dialects in the Philippines now endangered – KWF appeared first on UNTV News. | {
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CBC management announced Monday they are pulling almost all interviews conducted by Jian Ghomeshi offline, sparking outrage from Q listeners on social media.
“We aren’t erasing the archives, we’re just taking them offline for now,” said CBC media relations chief Chuck Thompson told the Star in an email Tuesday.
Thompson said Ghomeshi’s interviews posted on CBC platforms and YouTube will be taken offline “very soon.” He said “the lion’s share” of interviews will be taken off the CBC’s website and YouTube channel but there may be some exceptions.
“There is no obvious right or wrong approach here,” Thompson said. “We’ve been giving this a lot of careful consideration over the last few weeks and want to give the program every opportunity to be as unencumbered as possible while some very creative people reimagine Q’s future.”
Q listeners first learned of the news Monday during a Q segment on the ethics of consuming art of tarnished artists, including Bill Cosby.
“Q has decided not to rebroadcast any of (Ghomeshi’s) past interviews,” said Q guest host Wab Kinew, adding that CBC management is taking episodes off the archive on the website.
Following the announcement, listeners took to Q’s Facebook page to voice their outrage.
“Jian did many wonderful interviews. It is part of CBC’s history. You must not erase it!” wrote one commenter. “Editing the past would be very disingenuous,” wrote another.
Nearly all of the 100 Facebook comments posted as of Tuesday evening indicated listeners do not support CBC’s decision.
Thompson would not comment on negative feedback from listeners but said, “We’re going to use judgment and do what we’re able to do to reduce the association with our former host.”
During his time at Q, Ghomeshi won praised for his interviews, and has landed high-profile chats with everyone from Adele and Barbara Walters.
But it was an awkward 2009 interview with musician and actor Billy Bob Thornton — in which Thornton blew up after taking offence to Ghomeshi’s mention of his acting career — that earned Ghomeshi international exposure.
Thompson said music performances will remain online but the “tops and tails” — where Ghomeshi is heard — will be edited. He did not rule out the possibility of one day bringing interviews back online.
“There are so many great interviews there that need to be available and we may look to bring the archival material back online at some point or we’ll reversion it in some way,” said Thompson.
CBC automatically pulls audio and video archival material offline after two years anyhow to make room for newer fare, said Thompson.
In a statement posted on Q’s blog, Cindy Witten, senior director of CBC Radio Talk, said CBC is “focusing on the future” and looking for a new Q host.
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After a series of articles in the Star, 15 women have come forward with allegations Ghomeshi abused them. He faces four charges of sexual assault and one of choking and has been released on $100,000 bail.
CBC fired the former Q host in late October.
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They provided the stunning setting for a Bond and a Jaws film, and the 1960s Flipper TV series about a super-intelligent bottlenose dolphin. But today the beaches and azure waters of Clifton Bay in the Bahamas are at the centre of a real-life drama that would surely compete with anything Hollywood could invent.
The sprawling development of the peninsular home of the billionaire fashion tycoon Peter Nygard and his plans to build a stem cell research centre there, not least due to the 71-year-old's interest in keeping ever youthful, are said by a campaign group to be threatening an environmental calamity on one of the world's most beautiful coastlines.
And, in a twist that introduces allegations of corruption to an already compelling plot, evidence has now emerged of a "cash-for-favours" letter penned by Nygard some 30 years ago.
The correspondence dating from 1992, unearthed by a local newspaper, was addressed to the current prime minister of the Bahamas, Perry Christie, when the politician was a junior government minister. Highlighting $42,000 worth of political donations, Nygard asks among other things for a swift official name change of the land where his home has been built so that it will be known as Nygard Cay.
That way, Nygard writes, Forbes magazine may refer to it in its upcoming "lives of the rich and famous" photo-shoot at his property. "Obviously, this whole world is based on one hand helping the other and you know that I am prepared to do whatever is in my capacity to help out the Bahamas and the PLP [Progressive Liberal party] and of course yourself in any way I can," Nygard says.
The plot may seem far-fetched, and there is no evidence that Christie, elected as prime minister of the Bahamas in 2012, responded favourably to the letter. But, campaigners say, the environmental risk to beaches is real. In 1984 Nygard bought his home on a peninsula above Clifton Bay, at the northern tip of Nassau, the island that serves as capital of the crown dependency. It is claimed that through building structures and laying down sand and concrete in the waters he has gradually increased the size of the estate from three to six acres. His activities, it is claimed, have encouraged sand to deposit and create beaches around the Nygard property. This, they say, has prevented the usual flow of sand accumulating at one of the Bahamas' most beautiful public beaches, Jaws.
"Nygard epitomises the worst kind of unregulated and cosy and incestuous relationship between government and foreign developers", said Fred Smith, a QC and co-founder of the Save the Bays campaign group. "The government and such foreign developers think that our society, culture, environment can be sacrificed on the altar of the almighty dollar.
"The change in the flow of the sand matters environmentally because erosion begins to occur, marine habitats are destroyed, and there is less and less beach. At some spots in Clifton Bay there is just honeycomb rock now where there was once a beach."
Nygard was ordered by the government of the Bahamas in 2010 to return his property and estate, formerly known as Simms Point, to its original size. But there was a change of government, and Nygard claims that the order no longer stands, adding that the sand accumulation around his plot is natural. The Canadian has instead sought permission from the new government, led by Christie, to further develop Nygard Cay.
Nygard, founder of one of the world's biggest female fashion companies (also called Nygard), has held talks with the Bahamas Investment Authority about investing $30m in building a stem cell research facility with his home patch being one possible site.
Nygard, in an interview with the Bahamas Tribune, said he believed he was "taking perhaps more stem cell treatment than anybody else in the world". He added: "Stem cells are being used for anti-ageing and the University of Miami is doing a study about that to prove that it is true. They are looking at me, and my markers have shown exactly that I have been actually reversing my aging and getting younger."
Nygard's spokesman did not respond to questions. The businessman has previously accused the Save the Bays campaign of being a tool of a neighbour, Louis Bacon, a billionaire hedge fund manager with whom he has been in a land dispute, which the campaign has denied.
The Save the Bays campaign confirmed that Bacon was a large donor but insisted that it was a coalition of concerned residents and environmentalists. When asked previously whether he had donated money to the Progressive Liberal party, Nygard has said he did not know. He told reporters: "I've been supporting people for the last 30 years. I don't measure in terms of amounts of money. I've been a people's person all my life and been supporting various causes. I have not been political". | {
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Serwis Dezinformacja.net pojawił się w piątek w zeszłym tygodniu. Wzbudził sporo krytycznych komentarzy m.in. ze względu na to że był mało rozbudowany, ruszył w czasie urlopu Bartłomieja Misiewicza i miał dość archaiczną szatę graficzną. Początkowo jedynym wymienionym autorem był Misiewicz, potem dołączył Tomasz Sakiewicz, redaktor naczelny „Gazety Polskiej” i „Gazety Polskiej Codziennie”.
O witrynie dyskutowano również dlatego, że jej główną grafiką było kolaż z okładkami dzienników ogólnopolskich skopiowany z serwisu Wirtualnemedia.pl i tylko nieznacznie zmieniony. W sobotę redakcja Dezinformacja.net usunęła tę grafikę i przeprosiła za wykorzystanie jej bez pytania.
W piątek z Dezinformacja.net zniknęły wszystkie dotychczasowe treści oraz pojawił się komunikat: „Bardzo dziękujemy za zainteresowanie tematyką dezinformacji w Polsce. Pierwsza odsłona portalu dotarła do ponad 140 tysięcy internautów w tydzień. Próba powołania tego serwisu okazała się sukcesem. O następnych krokach będziemy informować”.
Bartłomiej Misiewicz zaczął pracę w MON w listopadzie 2015 roku, objął funkcje rzecznika prasowego i dyrektora gabinetu politycznego ministra Antoniego Macierewicza. We wrześniu ub.r. na własną prośbę został zawieszony w tych funkcji po tekście „Newsweeka” opisującym, że w zamian za przejście do PiS-u miał proponować działaczom PO posady w państwowej firmie. Dalej był zatrudniony w MON, zajmował się analizą dezinformacji medialnych. W grudniu ub.r. wrócił w resorcie na swoje dotychczasowe stanowiska.
W ostatnich tygodniach spekulowano o odwołaniu Bartłmieja Misiewicza, po tym jak „Fakt” opisał jego zabawę w dyskotece w Białymstoku, a w mediach przypominano, że w czasie kilku uroczystości wojskowych zasalutowali mu żołnierze wysokiej rangi i był traktowany jak minister. RMF FM podało nawet informację o odwołaniu Misiewicza, ale MON natychmiast ją zdementował. | {
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President Donald Trump is expected to formalize the details of his tariff proposal, including any carve outs or exemptions, on Thursday or Friday.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at a news briefing Wednesday that she expects Trump to sign off on the measures this week.
"We expect that the president will sign something by the end of the week, and there are potential carve-outs for Mexico and Canada based on national security, and possibly other countries as well," Sanders said.
At the same time, White House officials told CNBC, there could be a conversation this week around additional trade actions the White House is considering.
Officials said there is a basket of trade-related ideas under consideration, but it is not clear what ideas will ultimately be embraced by the president.
When asked whether there will be carve-outs for Mexico, Canada or NATO allies, Sanders told the briefing, "It'll be country-by-country and based on national security."
Trump's shock decision last week to impose 25 percent tariffs on steel imports and 10 percent tariffs on aluminum demonstrated that he was putting into practice the protectionist policies he pushed during his election campaign. The announcement set off a wave of uncertainty in markets.
Investors found further reason for concern with Tuesday's resignation of top White House economic advisor Gary Cohn, a Wall Street veteran who was opposed to the tariffs. Stocks declined Wednesday as traders absorbed the development.
Trump, in recent tweets, has hinted at other potential trade actions and areas of interest. On Wednesday, he singled out China and mentioned intellectual property theft in a pair of tweets.
TRUMP CHINA TWEET
TRUMP IP THEFT
On Saturday, Trump threatened to slap tariffs on European cars.
TRUMP CAR TWEET
The White House is planning a late afternoon signing event, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC. Reuters, also citing a source, said it would take place at 3:30 pm ET on Thursday.
Read more:
With Cohn gone, Peter Navarro is unleashed at White House
CNBC's Kayla Tausche contributed to this report. | {
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Herman Cain has offered an alternate version of history in claiming that Planned Parenthood’s founder wanted to prevent “black babies from being born.” We find no support for that old claim. Cain also states that the organization built 75 percent of its clinics in black communities, but there’s no evidence that was true then. And today, only 9 percent of U.S. abortion clinics are in neighborhoods where half or more of residents are black, according to the most recent statistics.
The GOP presidential candidate made these comments back in March, telling an audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation that “[w]hen Margaret Sanger — check my history — started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.” He called it “planned genocide.”
In an interview on “Face the Nation” on Oct. 30, Cain did not back down from those allegations. Here’s his exchange with host Bob Schieffer:
Schieffer: … you said that it was not Planned Parenthood, it was really planned genocide because you said Planned Parenthood was trying to put all these centers into the black communities because they wanted to kill black babies — Herman Cain: Yes. Scheiffer: — before they were born. Do you still stand by that? Cain: I still stand by that. Schieffer: Do you have any proof that that was the objective of Planned Parenthood? Cain: If people go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger’s own words, that’s exactly where that came from. Look up the history. So if you go back and look up the history — secondly, look at where most of them were built; 75 percent of those facilities were built in the black community — and Margaret Sanger’s own words, she didn’t use the word “genocide,” but she did talk about preventing the increasing number of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born.
Cain isn’t the first to believe that birth control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) wanted to stop the birth of black babies. Just do an Internet search and see what happens. Sanger made more than her share of controversial comments. But the quote many point to as evidence that Sanger favored something akin to “genocide” of African Americans has been turned on its head.
Sanger, who was arrested several times in her efforts to bring birth control to women in the United States, set up her first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. In the late 1930s, she sought to bring clinics to black women in the South, in an effort that was called the “Negro Project.” Sanger wrote in 1939 letters to colleague Clarence James Gamble that she believed the project needed a black physician and black minister to gain the trust of the community:
Sanger, 1939: The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.
Sanger says that a minister could debunk the notion, if it arose, that the clinics aimed to “exterminate the Negro population.” She didn’t say that she wanted to “exterminate” the black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University says that this quote has “gone viral on the Internet,” normally out of context, and it “doesn’t reflect the fact that Sanger recognized elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south, unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the Project had a humanitarian aim.”
It goes on to characterize beliefs such as Cain’s as “extremist.” The project says: “No serious scholar and none of the dozens of black leaders who supported Sanger’s work have ever suggested that she tried to reduce the black population or set up black abortion mills, the implication in much of the extremist anti-choice material.”
We asked the Cain campaign for support for his claims, and we have not received a response. His comments already have been debunked by our fact-checking colleagues at the Washington Post, which today gave Cain four Pinocchios, and Politifact, which gave him the “Pants on Fire” designation in March.
Sanger, as we mentioned, was a controversial figure. While she is heralded for her work in making birth control available, and legal, she was also tied to the eugenics movement, which believed the human species could be improved by controlling who reproduced and who didn’t. One essay from Sanger shows she believed birth control advocates and eugenists were working toward a similar goal — “to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.” But she disagreed with some of the eugenists’ methods.
Sanger, “Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” Feb. 1919: We who advocate Birth Control, on the other hand, lay all our emphasis upon stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care for those who are born in health. The eugenist also believes that a woman should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the state. … We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother.
She goes on to talk about the financial benefits of birth control, saying that it “will make a better race,” because a family can better care for a smaller number of children.
Sanger’s early 20th century clinics later grew into what is now Planned Parenthood, and the group is aware that its founder had some views that it doesn’t agree with today. In response to the controversy over Sanger, Veronica Byrd, director of African American media at Planned Parenthood, issued a statement saying:
Byrd: Planned Parenthood has a long history of condemning racism and opposes discrimination in all forms. Margaret Sanger worked for social and racial justice at a time when segregation was the law of the land. She was invited by African American leaders to help provide health care to women in the African American community and her work was praised by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. For all her positive work, Margaret Sanger made statements some 80 years ago that were wrong then and are wrong now. Those statements have no bearing on the high quality health care Planned Parenthood provides today.
In 1966, Planned Parenthood awarded Martin Luther King Jr. one of its Margaret Sanger Awards, and he praised her in his acceptance speech, delivered by his wife, Coretta Scott King, saying: “At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions.”
75 Percent of Clinics in Black Neighborhoods?
Cain also claimed that “75 percent of [clinics] were built in the black community.” But we found no evidence that that was true in Sanger’s time, and it’s not true today.
Sanger’s first clinic, opened in 1916, was in Brooklyn in a neighborhood called Brownsville, which was 80 percent to 85 percent Jewish in 1910 and 1920, according to author Wendell E. Pritchett’s “Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews & the Changing Face of the Ghetto.” Cathy Moran Hajo writes that the neighborhood was “populated largely by Italians and Eastern European Jews” in “Birth Control on Main Street: Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916-1939.” She says that Sanger didn’t choose to open her first clinic in Harlem, where infant and mother mortality rates were similar to those of Brownsville.
In fact, early birth control clinics didn’t welcome black women with open arms, Hajo writes: “In the 1920s and early 1930s, African Americans had far more limited access to birth control than did white women. Not only did many clinics discriminate against black women, but the regions with the largest black populations had fewer clinics.”
Sanger opened a clinic in Harlem in 1930, and, as mentioned, the “Negro Project” began in the late 1930s.
That doesn’t support Cain’s implication that Sanger’s “objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities,” or that “75 percent” of clinics were in such neighborhoods. It should also be noted that these early clinics were focused on providing birth control, and Sanger herself warned of the dangers of abortion. “While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization,” she wrote in her 1920 book “Woman and the New Race.”
Cain’s claim also isn’t true today. Tait Sye, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood, told us in an email that “73% of Planned Parenthood health centers are located in rural or medically underserved areas.” Not all of those would be predominately black communities.
Also, the Guttmacher Institute reported this year that 9 percent of abortion clinics in the U.S. are in neighborhoods in which 50 percent or more of the residents are black. That’s according to the group’s “census of all known abortion providers.”
— Lori Robertson | {
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Bus / Metro / Train not working
THIS SECTION NEEDS UPDATING
Bus
Draw a route by left-clicking next to roads to create one or more stops.
...The route must join at both ends.
Delete an existing stop by right-clicking its circle.
Move an existing stop by dragging it's circle to a new location.
Add new stops to an existing route by dragging the route line to the side of a road where you want the new stop to be.
To delete an entire line, delete all the stops on it, or click on a bus and "Modify Line" then "Delete Line".
Metro
Train
You need at least 1 bus depot before you can create bus routes.If you have a depot but still can't make bus routes, try using a different bus depot asset.You need at least 2 metro stations (otherwise people will go underground and never be seen again lol).If you have metro stations but can't draw metro tunnel or metro routes, try using a different metro station asset.Draw metro tunnel between the stations so there is a path for metro trains.Draw a metro route between the two stations, making sure the route joins at both ends.You can delete, move or add stops in the same way as you do for buses. In underground view, you can click on a metro train and Modify Line to change colour, rename, delete, etc.Avoid having more than two routes through the same station platform, it can cause metro jams!You need at least one passenger rail station to receive tourists.You need at least two passenger rail stations before you can set up routes within your city.If you have train stations but can't draw passenger train routes, try using a different passenger station asset.Draw a route between two passenger stations to set up local rail service between those stations. The route must connect at both ends.Cargo stations are a bit easier to set up: Just connect them to the external rail network and resources/goods will be automatically imported/exported. You can also transport goods locally by having cargo stations on the same track. | {
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Added: 2 years ago
Voyeur Massage - She thought nobody is watching Blowjob, Caucasian, Couple, Cowgirl, Czech, Doggy Style, HD, Massage, Natural Tits, Redhead, Small Tits, Spycam, Vaginal Masturbation, Vaginal Sex, Voyeur Massage - She thought nobody is watching | {
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A recent ConservativeHQ Presidential Straw Poll indicates that the popularity of GOP elite candidates is waning.
The top two limited government conservatives Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) out polled the top two establishment Republicans by 25% held at the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2014.*
Rand Paul took a lead early on and sustained at least a nine percent edge over second place during the duration of the poll. Paul finished in first place with 29% of the vote -- a healthy twelve-point lead over Ted Cruz. The libertarian-leaning Paul clearly resonated with the audience.
Rounding out the top five in our poll were New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (9%) and former Sen. Rick Santorum (8%).
Limited government conservatives Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Scott Walker outperformed establishment candidates by 36%. Rand Paul bested Jeb Bush by a whopping 27%. In fact, Cruz, Carson, Walker, and Ryan all polled higher than Bush. Conservative Gov. Scott Walker came in at seventh place with 6%, yet he beat out Rep. Paul Ryan by 3%. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal tied for last place with Jeb Bush.
Establishment candidates Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush only garnered 21% of the votes. Christie weighed in at fourth place with only 9%.
Following are the complete results for the ConservativeHQ Presidential Straw Poll taken at CPAC 2014. A total of 717 conservatives participated in the poll.
Rand Paul: 29%
Ted Cruz: 12%
Ben Carson: 12%
Chris Christie: 9%
Rick Santorum: 8%
Marco Rubio: 7%
Scott Walker: 6%
Paul Ryan: 3%
Jeb Bush: 2%
Bobby Jindal: 2%
*The CHQ poll was separate from, and not to be confused with, the official CPAC presidential poll. | {
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Talks to Play Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone Movie
The film is one of a few projects in the works about the NSA leaker
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is in early talks to play Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone's forthcoming movie about the NSA leaker, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
Stone is set to write and direct a movie based on two books: The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man, written by journalist Luke Harding, and the novel Time of the Octopus, written by Snowden's Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena.
See more The 21 Best Movies About Whistleblowers
Stone will also produce the film alongside Moritz Berman and Eric Kopeloff. Production was originally set to begin before the end of the year.
Harding's book deals with reports based on Snowden's disclosures in The Guardian while Kucherena's fictional story focuses on an American whistleblower, who after being threatened by his government and waiting for a decision on his request for Russian asylum, spends weeks at the Moscow airport.
Stone's film isn't the only Snowden-focused story in the works. Laura Poitras' CITIZENFOUR documentary is set to screen at the New York Film Festival, and Sony has optioned the film rights to Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.
See more Surveillance Cinema: 14 Movies Featuring Big Brother
Sony is in the process of finding a high-profile writer to tackle that adaptation.
Greenwald and Poitras were among the initial group of people who saw and reported on Snowden's top-secret NSA documents.
Gordon-Levitt recently wrapped production on Robert Zemeckis' The Walk, playing Philippe Petit, the high-wire artist who famously walked between the World Trade Center towers. He's also filming an untitled Christmas Eve movie in which he reunites with his 50/50 co-star Seth Rogen and that movie's director, Jonathan Levine. Gordon-Levitt most recently appeared in the Sin City sequel, A Dame to Kill For.
Gordon-Levitt is repped by WME and attorney Karl Austen. | {
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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed Wednesday to let California government come to a “grinding halt” rather than agree to a high-interest loan to keep the state afloat if he and the Legislature do not close the yawning budget gap in coming weeks.
At the same time, the governor reversed himself on a proposal to end health insurance for families of police officers and firefighters who died in the line of duty. Schwarzenegger called the plan, first reported by The Times on Tuesday, a “terrible screw-up” that is being corrected.
The proposed cut was tucked away in a list of regulations that would be suspended if Schwarzenegger’s latest budget revisions are adopted. It would have saved the state $1 million in 2009-10.
State finance officials say California coffers will be empty in late July unless the projected $24-billion budget shortfall is resolved quickly. Schwarzenegger said that emergency borrowing would be too expensive and that his threat to block it was necessary to prod lawmakers into swift action.
A loan would only “give them another reason why we don’t have to do it now,” the governor said. “What we need to do is just to basically cut off all the funding and just let them have a taste of what it is like when the state comes to a shutdown -- grinding halt.”
The comments, made in an interview with The Times’ editorial board, represent the governor’s latest salvo in the battle over California’s budget. An emergency loan -- not routine short-term borrowing but a longer-term, higher-interest loan -- would require the governor’s approval but not that of the Legislature, unlike his proposed budget solutions. He approved the initial step for such borrowing last year and can revoke it at any time.
In the wide-ranging interview, Schwarzenegger challenged legislative Democrats to resist the influence of special interests fighting the deep program cuts he has proposed to help balance the budget.
Clearly alluding to labor unions that oppose the cuts, the governor said: “Do they want to protect the workers that provide the services, or do they want to protect the people that get those services? The choice is up to them.”
Schwarzenegger reiterated his support for a constitutional convention to overhaul state government, calling it “the only hope that I have” for substantive reform. He also took aim at some other elected officials, characterizing them as obstructionists in his quest for change.
Mostly, however, he expressed frustration over the financial crisis that threatens to overshadow the final year and a half of his governorship.
All sides -- legislative Republicans, Democrats and the governor -- have pledged to plug California’s deficit by the end of June. The new fiscal year begins July 1.
“We will meet the July 1 deadline,” Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said in an e-mail to The Times.
If lawmakers fall short of that goal, as they have many years, Schwarzenegger’s refusal to borrow would leave the nation’s most populous state with no way to pay its bills.
“Payment deferrals and IOUs -- that’s all we would be left with,” said Hallye Jordan, a spokeswoman for state Controller John Chiang, who monitors California’s cash flow. Chiang reported Wednesday that the state’s revenues have fallen $827 million below projections made only weeks ago.
Amid a cash crunch earlier this year, the state deferred some payments, including taxpayer refund checks. But California has not issued IOUs since the early 1990s.
Schwarzenegger has proposed slicing deep into public schools and eliminating college student grants, health insurance for 930,000 poor children and the state’s welfare-to-work program. But the Democrats who dominate the Legislature have countered that they will not disassemble California’s social safety net.
In the Senate, Democrats have sketched a counter-proposal that would drain the state’s reserves and rely on hopes for a rosier economic future to hold off the deepest of the cuts. Their plan would resolve up to $20 billion of the projected $24-billion deficit.
The governor called that approach “hallucinatory” on Tuesday and “irresponsible” on Wednesday. “We have not hit the bottom” of the economic crisis, he told The Times.
Some rank-and-file Democrats are holding out hope of raising taxes to close the deficit. And the state’s largest labor group, the Service Employees International Union, launched a $1-million TV advertising campaign Wednesday to press for more taxes on oil, tobacco and liquor.
Eliseo Medina, SEIU’s national executive vice president, said the governor “ought to be worrying about trying to maintain services instead of trying to kill the messenger.”
Support from some Republican lawmakers, most of whom have said no to further taxes, would be needed for such proposals to pass the Legislature.
Schwarzenegger said the financial crisis should be the impetus for a leaner and more functional state government. But he said he had no confidence in the Legislature to change the status quo and hoped a constitutional convention -- the radical notion of tossing out California’s oft-amended legal framework to start from scratch -- would.
One area Schwarzenegger singled out: the array of elected statewide officials -- controller, treasurer, schools superintendent, etc. -- who can hail from different political parties and have different philosophies. The system was intended to create checks and balances, but the governor complained that the others sometimes get in his way.
“I say we should decrease the state employees’ salaries, and the controller says, ‘Nah, I don’t think it’s necessary,’ ” Schwarzenegger said, recalling a legal battle with Chiang that the governor eventually won.
“If I want to . . . create a vision for California, you can’t have a team around that’s trying to derail you,” the governor said.
“I always get my lessons from sports,” he said. “Look at the Lakers, look at all the great teams. When they are together and connected, then they have a better chance of winning.”
--
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OP Jindal Lectures with Raguram Rajan — India in the World: The “Vision” Thing | {
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Methods Participants Forty-four college-aged men and forty-seven college-aged women were included in the study. Some participants had a few months experience in RT, but none had performed it systematically for more than three months. The volunteers were recruited through folders and advertising banners around the University campus. The criteria for entering the study were being at least 18 years of age, not practicing RT for the past 6 months, and being free of clinical problems that could be aggravated by the study procedures. Participants were instructed to not change their habitual nutritional habits during the study and if any relevant nutritional change was detected (e.g., becoming vegetarian, restricting calories, taking nutritional supplements and/or ergogenic aids), the data for that participant was excluded from the analysis. Initially, 50 volunteers were included in each group. An a priori analysis revealed that a sample size of 50 would bring a statistical power of more than 0.9 to detect 10% changes within groups. Data from 9 of them (6 men and 3 women) were excluded from the analysis for failing to meet the inclusion criteria: low attendance (n = 6) and performance of additional RT (n = 3). All women within the study had regular menstrual cycle’s and testing sessions were performed during the luteal phase of each female participant cycle. All participants were notified of the research procedures, requirements, benefits and risks before providing written informed consent. The Institutional Research Ethics Committee granted approval for the study. Peak torque Unilateral elbow flexion peak torque (PT) was measured using 2 sets of 4 maximal concentric repetitions at 60°/s on a Biodex System 3 isokinetic dynamometer (Biodex Medical Inc., Shirley, NY, USA), with 60 s of rest between sets. Calibration of the dynamometer was performed prior to each testing session in accordance with the manufacturer’s specifications. Participants were seated on a Scott Bench (Gervasport, São Paulo, Brazil) with their elbow aligned with the axis of rotation of the dynamometer’s lever arm. The forearm remained in a supinated position throughout the test. Verbal encouragement was given throughout the test. All tests were administered by the same investigator. Baseline test and retest intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) for elbow flexors PT was 0.96 (0.93–0.98). Resistance training intervention Men and women performed the same RT protocol, including leg press, knee flexion, chest press and lat pulldowns. Before the beginning of the study, participants performed two weeks of familiarization to find loads to be use during training and to acquaint participants with the exercises and the training program. The RT program lasted for 10 weeks and was performed two days a week, with a minimum of 48 h between sessions. All exercises were performed for 3 sets using a load permitting between 8 and 12 repetitions before achieving momentary muscular failure in order to control for intensity of effort (Steele, 2014). If necessary, loads were adjusted from set to set to maintain the designated range of repetitions. Resistance was increased from session to session by the exercise technician when a subject completed ≥12 repetitions before achieving momentary muscular failure while maintaining proper form. The rest periods between sets were two minutes and the participants were instructed to record training logs for each workout day. Training sessions were closely supervised by experienced trainers, since previous research has demonstrated greater gains in supervised vs. unsupervised training (Gentil & Bottaro, 2010). Furthermore, participants had to attend at least 80% of the training sessions to be included in the analysis (Gentil et al., 2013). Statistical analyses All values are reported as mean ± standard deviation. Normality of distribution for outcome measures was tested using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. Data meeting assumptions of normality were subjected to a two-way mixed-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) to examine the effects of both ‘time,’ ‘sex’ and ‘time × sex’ interaction. Where necessary, multiple comparisons with confidence interval adjustment using Bonferroni procedure were used in the post hoc analysis. Statistical significance was set at p ≤ 0.05. Data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 17.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL).
Results A total of 91 college students participated in the study; mean values for age, weight and height were 22.01 ± 2.74 years, 66.06 ± 12.16 kg and 168.85 ± 9.25 cm, respectively. Table 1 shows the characteristics of the each group. Peak torque values were greater in men than women in pre- (49.35 ± 10.18 vs. 25.09 ± 4.89) and post-tests (55.08 ± 9.95 vs. 28.04 ± 5.52), as shown in Fig. 1 (p < 0.01). Increases in peak torque were significant for both men and women, mean PT 95% CIs [4.36–7.09] and [1.63–4.27], respectively. However, the interaction of sex by time was not significant, suggesting that the alterations in muscle strength were not significant different between sexes (11.61 and 11.76% for men and women, respectively). Cohen’s d effect size for PT changes were 0.57 and 0.56 for men and women, respectively. The statistical power to detect PT changes was 99.4% for women and 98.2% for men. Figure 1: Values and variation in elbow flexor peak torque pre- and post-training period, for men and women. ∗ significantly different from pre-training (p < 0.05). # significantly different from women (p < 0.05). Men Women N 44 47 Age (years) 22.63 ± 2.34 21.62 ± 2.96 Weight (kg) 73.06 ± 10.23 58.29 ± 9.00 Height (cm) 174.7 ± 7.10 163.61 ± 7.53 DOI: 10.7717/peerj.1627/table-1 | {
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Em mensagem publicada em sua rede social, o procurador da República Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima, da força-tarefa da Operação Lava Jato, afirmou nesta segunda-feira, 24, que ‘o próximo passo do PMDB’ parece ser acabar com a investigação. Carlos Lima reagiu à entrevista do vice-presidente da Câmara dos Deputados e substituto imediato de Rodrigo Maia (DEM-RJ), o deputado Fábio Ramalho (PMDB-MG), ao Estadão, na qual o parlamentar defendeu um “prazo de validade” para a Lava Jato.
O procurador afirmou que ‘as investigações vão continuar por todo o País’.
“Acabar com a Lava Jato. Esse parece ser o próximo passo do PMDB. Infelizmente muitas pessoas que apoiavam a investigação só queriam o fim do governo Dilma e não o fim da corrupção. Agora que Temer conseguiu com liberação de verbas, cargos e perdão de dívidas ganhar apoio do Congresso, o seu partido deseja acabar com as investigações. Mas, mesmo com todas as articulações do governo e de seus aliados, as investigações vão continuar por todo País”, escreveu.
+ ‘Assunto relacionado com o contato do escritório com o juiz’
+ Banco deposita R$ 10 milhões de Adriana Ancelmo na conta da Justiça
+ ENTREVISTA: Tem que ter coragem para processar poderosos, diz procuradora da Lava Jato em SP
Na entrevista, Fabio Ramalho afirmou que ‘o Brasil não vai aguentar isso para o resto da vida’.
“Ela (Lava Jato) não pode ser indeterminada. Ela já fez o seu trabalho”, disse o deputado.
“Defendo a Lava Jato, mas tem de ter prazo de término. O Brasil não vai aguentar isso o resto da vida. Além da corrupção, tem de se avançar na desburocratização do País, na segurança jurídica do País, nas reformas.”
Questionado sobre qual seria o prazo para a Lava Jato terminar, o deputado declarou. “Determina um tempo: seis meses.” | {
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Note that i like frog is typically lowercased except, often, at the start of a sentence.
I like frog was invented by User:Apollyon094 in 2020, as a joke on an image seen here.
I like frog is a set of 16 commands (including the newline as a command to end a command) based on the following syntax to have them executed. Line breaks end commands and their parameters.
Each line/command is started with one of 3 categories of commands, being "i ", "like " or "frog "
The following categories and their commands are as below:
i (if called without "like" or "frog", go to cell number X where X was the value underneath the pointer before it moved):
like: Go forward X cells where X = the parameters. If no parameters, move forward one. frog: Go backwards X cells where X = the parameters. If no parameters, move backwards one.
like (if called without i or frog, output all cells written to):
i: Insert X in binary into cells to the right of the pointer where X = parameters. If no parameters, take input from console. frog: Output X where X = parameters. If no parameters, output bit under pointer.
frog (if called without i or like, invert base-16 command under IP and go to instruction number X where X is the value under the data pointer.)
i: Go forward X instructions if bit = 0 where X = parameters. If no parameters, rotate data bits by 4 left, rotate command bits by 2 left and go forward 1 instruction. like: Go back X instructions if bit = 0 where X = parameters. If no parameters, rotate data bits by 4 right, rotate command bits by 2 right and go back 1 instruction.
I like frog is Turing-Complete since it can compile to Boolfuck as well as Nanofuck and execute infinite loops
UPDATE: Parameters are now bitwise. You can choose from "i, like (and) frog" in this order. You can only pick from 2 since the last word (i, like, frog) cannot be used again. Therefore you have 2 choices which, in order, can be equivalent to 1s and 0s. The parameters are also read as bytes (padding 8). I don't think endianness is a problem here.
If you wrote an interpreter, please post it here. I'm bad at programming and can't figure out how to skip back and forward instructions.
Examples
This program prints out the words Hello World!:
like frog i frog i like frog i like i like i frog like frog i like frog i frog i frog like i frog like i like i frog like i frog like frog i like i frog like i frog like frog like i like frog i frog like i like i like frog i like i like i like frog i frog i frog like frog i frog like i frog like frog like i frog like frog i like frog i like frog like i frog like i like i frog like i like frog i like i like frog i like i like frog
This program executes an infinite loop:
frog like i
What this does it it goes back an instruction, which there is no instruction before it, so it goes to the last instruction which is it. | {
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The Secret Life of Control Suzanne Treister's Radical Enlightenment
You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It's all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we're all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is... Henry Miller, quoted from Gilles Deleuze: Spinoza. Practical Philosophy (1970)
These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process... to apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic... If you want the truth-I know I presume-you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules... you must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control? Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow (1973) Unsurprisingly, considering that she trafficks in unwritten genealogies, the title of Suzanne Treister's HEXEN 2.0 hides contraband. Diverting the project's signification from references to witchcraft, the Greek word Hexis means coherence or cohesion; not just understood as a structural unity, but the source of all qualities in a body. Thus Hexis is defined by producing tensional motion in a body or across several bodies. On one ancient account, "there is a tensional motion in bodies which moves simultaneously inwards and outwards."[i] It is easy to picture Treister's work and its straddling of disciplines, discourses and cultural hierarchies as a dynamic mover that produces continual and contrary motions in or across bodies: physical bodies, concept-bodies, the body politic. Through the lens of the Macy Conferences that took place in the US for more than a decade during and after WWII, HEXEN 2.0 is an investigation of the scientific underpinnings of what Michel Foucault called bio-political governance; the government that rules with information, and through life. For Foucault, bio-political governance dates back to the 18th century, when society's control over individuals became internalised and conducted in and with the body through refined medical, cultural educational and administrative technologies. He sees it proliferating with contemporary neo-liberalism that tweaks and fine-tunes institutional and commercial parameters for citizenship through the "mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and infinite [that in bio-politics supervises] the smallest fragment of life."[ii] Offering an anatomy of contemporary control society, the anti-disciplinary hexis of Treister's project is the story of the living human body that is modeled by deeply mutational institutions and practices. The recent history of the apparatuses that allow and reproduce such administrative mutations is one in which forms of knowledge and sovereignty are at stake vis-a-vis technological fantasy, military power and scientific research. Held in New York between 1946-1953 the Macy Conferences were meetings between Cyberneticians and social scientists whose aim-as fundamental as it was immodest-it was to outline a science of the workings of the human mind. It is rare that one can identify an event when scientists decided to collectively set the controls for the heart of sun. Even if they didn't get there, perhaps, in terms of establishing a functionalistic model for the human mind, they at least made sure to produce much epistemological turbulence. Perhaps these types of meetings can only happen during a war or as its afterquake; "suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory?", as one character in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow muses.[iii] Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the Macy Conferences taking place without the WWII as the categorical imperative for confronting the human mind as a ticking bomb that may go off again at any minute with another Hitlerism, another conflagration as its result. This will also account for similar research initiatives in the post-war period, such as the Frankfurt School's The Authoritarian Personality study (which is in the middle of Treister's Anarcho-Primitivism Diagram), as well as socio-psychological conceptualizations of conformism such as Herbert Marcuse's 'One-Dimensional Man', William H. Whyte's 'Organization Man' and Wilhelm Reich's 'Little Man'. At the Macy Conferences, cyberneticists and social scientists such as Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Heinrich Klüver, Molly Harrower, and Arturo Rosenblueth, among other distinguished scholars, arrived at a knowledge model that encompassed certain engineering devices as well as aspects of human behaviour. A synthesis was heralded with cybernetics as a new paradigm for interdisciplinary research across the sciences in which one can talk about systems and feedback processes, including biology, psychology and information theory, and many more: "Essentially the idea was to identify in a behaviorist spirit some of those aspects of what organisms do that can be analyzed in terms of what certain analogous machines do."[iv] Needless to say, computers as we know them today, were yet to be built-but its contours may have been divined by the Macy participants, as the apparatus that could catch human and machinic behaviour in its crosshairs. According to Gilles Deleuze disciplinary society began to break down after WWII. This was when "new forces moved slowly into place, then made rapid advances." It is a good guess that some of the forces to which he alluded were set in movement, probably inadvertently, by the Macy Conferences. Control, then-the new governmental instrument-is neither discipline's organisation of sites of confinement, nor is it the abstract machine of modernism's grid, but a modulation, "a self-transmuting molding continually changing from moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another." Such a meta-stability is a kind of plasma whose organic vitality ominously merges with functions of monitoring. In a motific overlap with the manipulated photo HEXEN 2.0/Cybernetic Séance in which Macy Conference participants are seen as participants at a spiritualist séance, Thomas Pynchon also organises various holy circles in Gravity's Rainbow. As already indicated by the quote at the beginning of this text, these are characterized by a strange and lucid objectivity invested in an analysis of control by severing rationality from morally and politically instituted judgments of normal knowledge. Thus at the first sitting in the novel is described a circle of etherically inclined sitters who, much like the scientists in Cybernetic Séance- "is not at all distracted or hindered. None of your white hands or luminous trumpets here."[v] Also the medium (or the entity speaking through him) comes through loud and clear, with an incisive proclamation: "It's control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside forces'..."[vi] This is Deleuze's control society, as it were: control springs alive and is inserted into the body by means of bio-political technologies, in order to work there as self-monitoring and self-management. Against such vital and invasive control mechanisms one needs good hexis. In HEXEN 2.0, Treister works through the format of the tarot card, thereby tapping into the dynamic potential of occult knowledge forms to connect seemingly disparate historical dots in a kind of alchemical hypertext. Unlike the sometimes kinky embrace of the dark side of cognition through the esoteric formats employed by contemporary artists, Treister's approach is much less gestural, and does not refuse rationality. Thus what her work may have in common with Niki de Saint-Phalle's Giardino dei Tarocchi in Tuscany (1998)-a kind of post-Mannerist sculpture park whose monumental elements are based on the symbols of the tarot cards-is not the creativist spirit, but a feminist subtext whose rejection of nature yields an overwhelming mosaic of elements. Other contemporary artistic practitioners of the tarots include the cineast and dramaturg Alejandro Jodorowsky, an elderly Chilean gentleman one can meet on Wednesday afternoons at Café le Temeraire in Paris for a private session of psichomagia. While Jodorowsky sticks to the original function of the tarots as a self-technology appropriated ready-made for art, Treister-as we will see-takes a quite different approach to the magic deck. The ineradicable instinct of the paranoiac is to locate or re-possess power. His aggressive idiosyncracy hides a particular hermeneutic stinginess: once located-power is usually seen to be elsewhere-the interpretation of power is fatal and diagrammatic. The aesthetic potential of paranoia has been seen as its potential for scrambling transparency. Thus Salvador Dali proposed his paranoiac method to create 'systematised confusion' with Surrealist machines of desire. Neither conception of paranoia, however, gels with HEXEN 2.0. Treister's project is fuelled not by power and desire, but by knowledge and pleasure. It is not distortional, but cartographic. It is a syllabus, a flowchart of connections and developments, a unique critical overview of modern intellectual and scientific history. The historical facts that Treister handles are of a nature that she couldn't have kept to herself, and so she dutifully follows the topological displacements and transformations of knowledge across many disciplines; knowledge's 'tripping' through unofficially connected networks is affirmed by way of the tarot deck as an encyclopedic format. Encyclopedic formats, understood as a comprehensive and simultaneous organization of available knowledge, are recurring elements in Treister's work, where facts proliferate rhizomatically. NATO (2004-8), for instance, consists of over 200 works illustrating the NATO codification system which numerically classifies and groups everything that exists in the world for potential military procurement; and [MTB] Military Training Base (2009) a wall sized drawing for a military base of the future which incorporates into its design ancient archaeological sites, Vatican City, an art school, global corporate complexes and sections of the Israeli West-Bank Barrier. Correspondence: From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (2007-8), are 324 pencil reproductions of letterheads from Government and Presidential Offices, Ministries of Defence, NGOs and arms manufacturers across the world, both past and current, and as they hang on the wall they look like so many ominous card blanches for authorising military action through the world-or conversely, like the artist's riffing on Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning (1953), a way of undoing through invocation. Employing the tarot deck is thus not a quick-fix attempt at re-enchanting the world, but-apart from a homeopathic indication of occult aspects in the history leading up to control society-a structuring device that mirrors and performs procedures of mass intelligence gathering in the service of a new epistemology. One can perhaps compare it to a Turing Machine: a virtual system capable of simulating the behavior of any other machine or apparatus of knowledge, including itself. In tarot lore The Ace of Pentacles, for instance, represents new beginnings, wealth and inspiration in material or financial matters, such as the energy to undertake a new business venture. In Treister's deck, it conflates The Four Technologies: nano-, bio- and info-technology as well as cognitive science. The drawing pulls quotes from a 2002 report commissioned by the US National Science Foundation whose title could have rolled off the tongue of Norbert Wiener: 'Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance'. Browsing in the report itself, one will find detailed discussions on the beneficial effects of converging technologies in such different areas as "expanding human cognition", "improving human health", and (of course) "national security". One of its conclusions is, "Beyond the 20-year time span, or outside the current boundaries of high technology, convergence can have significant impacts in such areas as: work efficiency, the human body and mind throughout the life cycle, communication and education, mental health, aeronautics and space flight, food and farming, sustainable and intelligent environments, self-presentation and fashion, and transformation of civilization."[vii] Strangely, the overcoming of death isn't on the program yet, but just wait till the next report. Everything that rises must converge. In Treister's deck, the original symbolic import of the tarots is used as ciphers that vie for their meaning with the new content that Treister has invested them with. This is in accordance with how tarot card readers read the person in front of them as carefully as the card that is called up: in this way the tarot deck allows you to reach for an object of knowledge through a system that is explicitly and opaquely coded, and therefore allows the operator of the deck to negotiate and undo the codes in the process. Thus if we take the Three of Swords (a card that urges to take a strong look at that which is at the centre of our world), it refers in Treister's version to CIA's infamous MKULTRA program, in which volunteers as well as unwitting civilians were guinea pigs for government mind control experiments with psychedelica. The program was run by one Dr. Sidney Gottlieb who, in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution, undertook to investigate "whether and how it was it was possible to modify an individual's behaviour by covert means."[viii] While the CIA eventually closed MKULTRA for want of usable results, the most manifest outcome of the program was in fact to unwittingly having helped to make LSD a hippie drug by turning on countercultural luminaries such as Ken Kesey (the subject of another tarot, the Knave of Chalices, and the drawing HEXEN 2.0/Diagrams/From MKULTRA via the Counterculture to Technogaianism). Other of Treister's tarot cards trace an underdog history of modern technology through grassroots movements (anarcho-syndicalists), and unruly individuals such as Timothy Leary and Stafford Beer who, in spite of their anti-authoritarian and 'spiritual' engagement with cybernetics rather translate into the 21st century as ambiguous avantgarde entrepreneurs. This is indeed a field that cannot be navigated in terms of truth and morality: it is a knotty, queasy, contemporary ontology. Since the genealogies that Treister deals with have so far remained largely untold, it is only appropriate that she should employ an epistemologically virgin format. If historians haven't got these connections and events on their radar so far, then one shouldn't hesitate to use a new radar, a new device, a new unit that may capture and recognise historical reality. To use a format for heuristic knowledge organisation that is ostensibly obscurantist is, from a commonsensical point of view, counterintuitive. In science, however, the counterintuitive may represent a logical next step in a systematic investigation that has so far proven fruitless. Norbert Wiener, for one, was not averse to taking such an approach to cybernetics. Confronting the ethical implications of cybernetics on concepts of life, free will and evolution in his book, God & Golem, Inc. A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964), he strays from the common positivistic vocabulary in order to describe, or invoke, the full range of ethical considerations of modern science: "There is a sin, which consists of using the magic of modern automatization to further personal profit or let loose the apocalyptic terrors of nuclear warfare. If this sin is to have a name, let that name be Simony or Sorcery."[ix] Many other 20th century scientists had occult leanings. One was the poet and scientist Konstantin Ciolkovskij, whose research in rocket fuel kicked off the Soviet space program, a feat he considered secondary to his 'cosmic philosophy' in which he pondered correspondences between the will and creativity of the human brain and the eternal youth of the universe.[x] Playing out science on the terrain of the occult is not simply a binary inversion. Divorced from its personal application, Treister employs the tarot card for readings of a collective destiny that matches up possible futures of reactivated knowledge and trace their effects back to our present. In other words, she separates technology from existing society, and creates reasonable doubt about existing technology as the receptor and effector organs we are given to navigate the technological city. The technologies, and the understanding of them, that were outlined at the Macy Conferences, are the materiality of affect of contemporary life. In order to comprehend the relations of production that have created the nervous system of contemporary man and woman-sensibilities, perceived dependency needs, habitual ways of seeing, accustomed velocities of life and so on-these technologies, and their institutional/commercial/governmental application that have valorised them symbolically and dedicated them to praxis, must be taken apart, synchronically and diachronically. Certain technologies didn't have to go in the direction they went, but can be backtracked. The way freedom can be reestablished as a critical concern doesn't go through dropping out or other kinds of system abandonment, then, but through positive feedback: reason and the human subject must re-enter the system in order to be 'reprogrammed'. I would argue that through her artistic research, Treister rejoins intellectual history and a critique of contemporary control society with the tenets of a radical enlightenment. As a crucial event for the making of modern concepts of subjectivity, citizenship and governance, central to which is discussions about reason and its place in society and thinking, the enlightenment was hardly unambiguous. With a phrase that resonates critically in cybernetic behaviourism, Adorno and Horkheimer write how the Enlightenment reifies human beings, treating them as Zentren von Verhaltensweisen ("centres of behaviour patterns").[xi] Also HEXEN 2.0 enters into a dialectic of the enlightenment and deliberates its incessant self-destruction, as Adorno and Horkheimer put it; a destruction that is undertaken in order to show how reason in the post-war era had failed historically, yet how it must nonetheless be pursued in order to guarantee social freedoms. At the same time as philosophy was considered the only agent potent enough to precipitate a rapid, all-encompassing revolution, the optimism of Enlightenment philosophers was often legitimised by Utilitarian views.[xii] The practical task of helping humanity to become humanity, through the eradication of illness, poverty, ignorance, etc., and social history could be transformed through political, industrial and agricultural revolutions. Moreover, utilitarianism rejects the ranking of (moral) value according to a priori criteria in favour of the equal validity of each subject's search for happiness and pleasure. What makes Treister a faithful pupil of the enlightenment is the simple usefulness of the tarots in relation to her reading of material history. She turns enlightenment principles of utilitarianism and equal validity into epistemological principles by assuming that 1) if it is applicable, it is legitimate, and 2) don't moralise, don't pathologise. In order to make technology-whether computer, diagram, concept, drug or weapon-work in the interest of freedom, we must approach it without prejudice, and without a rationalist concept of rationality. The historian Jonathan Israel distinguishes what he calls a radical enlightenment, thereby establishing a dialectic between moderate and revolutionary Enlightenment movements. To Israel, the revolutionary tendency represents a process of improving human existence by making society secular, tolerant, equal and democratic, and by extending reason to transform basic principles of education, legislation, international relations and colonial affairs. On crucial points regarding human rights, democracy and the role of the church, the radical tendency opposes moderate enlighteners such as Rousseau and Kant-the reformers who famously set their mark on modern civil society.
Israel talks about the instability of Enlightenment: The Enlightenment's idea of progress, then, was invariably conceived as being "philosophical," a revolution of the mind. But it was undoubtedly economic, technological, political, medical, and administrative as well, in addition to being legal, moral, educational and aesthetic. Enlightenment "progress" was thus very wide-ranging and multi-faceted. Moreover, it was also inherently unstable (...) For it is apparent that Enlightenment progress could take specifically Christian, Deist, or atheistic forms; it could be conceived as endorsing or opposing the existing order of society, as being reversible or irreversible, God-ordained or purely natural.[xiii] To Israel, enlightenment progress is all in the mind, as it were, as he argues that it was primarily an intellectual revolution before it manifested itself as an actual one in 1789. Israel places particular emphasis on Spinoza as a founding figure of the radical enlightenment because the latter creates a sharper opposition between philosophy and theology, than do other philosophers, seeing organised religion as political deception.[xiv] In Spinoza's one-substance doctrine, body and soul, matter and mind are "one single substance viewed under different aspects" that essentially have to do with processes of corporeal organisation-again, the hexis that animates bodies, and our understanding of them, by allowing for a unifying perspective on their articulations.[xv] Thus Spinoza's materialist metaphysics concludes that everything that exists is matter and that God and the universe are the same. With this, Israel writes, Spinoza extends a Radical Enlightenment "metaphysically, politically, and as regards man's highest good."[xvi] One-substance enlightenment excludes all miracles and invokes "reason as the sole guide in human life, jettisoning tradition."[xvii] A fundamental radical enlightenment impulse in Treister can be detected in the attempt to bring life back into reason through the encyclopedic consideration of everything existing; a reason that has not been formalised and instrumentalised and whose goals therefore hasn't become illusory. Maybe this reason appears to us as strangely bent, as it is conditioned by the experimental moment's momentary unity of pleasure, idea and representation. This may be because it is a meeting with another enlightenment than the one we got, of capital and control. Instead, from the point of view of a radical enlightenment, we are offered a total glimpse of a world in which tensional motions allow for different bodies to enter freely into composition with one another.
Lars Bang Larsen
2011 Notes: [i] C.N. Cantor and M.J.S. Hodge: "Introduction: Major themes in the development of ether theories from the ancients to 1900," in: Cantor and Hodge: Conceptions of Ether. Studies in the History of Ether Theories 1740-1900. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1981, 6. [ii] Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish. Vintage Books, New York 1979 (1975), 140. [iii] Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow. Vintage Books, London 2000 (1973), 49. [iv] Steve J. Heims: The Cybernetics Group. MIT Press, Massachusetts 1991, 15. [v] Op.cit., 29. [vi] Op.cit., 30. [vii] http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/NBIC_report.pdf, xii [viii] Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain: Acid Dreams. The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond. Grove Press, New York, 1985, xxiii. [ix] 52 [x] Cf. Groys, Hagemeister and von der Heiden (eds.): Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2005. [xi] Adorno and Horkheimer, 93. [xii] Israel: A Revolution of the Mind. Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (2010), 53. [xiii] Op.cit., 8. [xiv] Op.cit., 2. [xv] Op.cit. [xvi] Op.cit., 2. Deleuze discusses univocity in Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition in relation to his canon of univocal philosophers Ð Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. Alliez puts it this way, "Opening up thought to constituent power, Spinoza is our contemporary by virtue of his refusal of any dialectical dimension that would aim at the (utopian or historical) reconciliation of the real." (Alliez, op.cit., 23) [xvii] Op.cit., 19. | {
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Susan Kelly, director of the county's health department, told the County Council during her regular report Tuesday that the health department is wary of the growing trend of "vaping," whose proponents often claim it is a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes. | {
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With the buzz surrounding the announcement of Clariel, I've been thinking more and more about doing illustrations based off the Abhorsen books by Garth Nix.To start of this summer I decided to rework a drawing I did last summer fav.me/d64p2u8 because I thought I had done something really cool with that piece, but it was so rough it had became hard to read.Well, i've got more thinking and reading to do, but there will be more pieces out this summer, I swear it! | {
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更新
拝啓 ロシア外務省ザハロワ報道官様
貴職の発した公式文書がモスクワ支局に届いたのは２週間ほど前のことです。
「産経新聞は日本の主要活字メディアの中で、ナショナリズムの方向性によって特別の地位を占めている。ロシアに関する多くの記事は批判的、時に攻撃的であり、事実はしばしば歪曲（わいきょく）され、否定的な見地で伝えられる。最近の反露的な報道も踏まえ、同紙のインタビューには応じるべきでないと考える」
書簡は私たちが取材を申し込んだ某国家機関に宛てたものですね。それがあろうことか、私たちのもとに届いたのです。
露外務省には平素よりたいへんお世話になっており、事を荒立てるつもりは毛頭ありません。この種の文書を作成することも、貴国では外務省の重要な業務なのでしょう。「事実を歪曲」などという完全な中傷には抗議しておきますが。
何より心配なのは、大国ロシアの外交を担う外務省が、公式文書を誤って発送するという初歩的ミスを犯した事実です。最近のロシアの官庁は大統領閣下の追従に熱心なあまり、本質的なところで劣化しているような気がしてなりません。日露間の最大懸案である北方領土問題には、ぜひ気を引き締めて臨んでいただきたいものです。敬具（遠藤良介） | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
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