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Washington (CNN) Rudy Giuliani says President Donald Trump might be coming around on the idea that he should resist sitting down for a wide-ranging interview with special counsel Robert Mueller.
The President has consistently said in public that he's like to sit down with Mueller, which his legal team has long opposed.
"This is me talking -- but I think he has accepted this idea it can't be wide-ranging. But he still wants to do something," Giuliani, the President's attorney and former New York City mayor, told CNN.
As recently as Wednesday, Trump has expressed interest in sitting down with Mueller. The President told CBS News' Jeff Glor that he has "always wanted to do an interview" with the special counsel.
"My lawyers are working on that. I've always wanted to do an interview because, look, there's been no collusion," the President said.
Read More | {
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Friends often ask me to opine on the Greek debt crisis. They are looking for some insight into what is going on and why the country is at the brink of bankruptcy. I suppose they think my heritage makes me more qualified to offer such insight.
The Greek crisis in many ways is a simple story; the predictable outcome of policies and cultural idiosyncrasies. So here is an attempt to tell the story with a few charts:
Define it. Why is Greece in trouble?
Source: OECD data
2. Did Greece get in trouble because Greeks don’t work hard (“you know, with those long siestas over lunch”), kind of like the Germans? No.
Source: OECD data
3. So, if the Greeks work so hard, how come they don’t produce enough to cover their obligations?
Source: OECD data for 2014
4. Why is productivity so low? Over the years, politicians have grown the size of government. They also love to regulate. Over the last 30 years they have passed 4,000 new laws and issued about 110,000 ministerial directives. You need a lot of people to enforce these laws. Public servants in Greece get lifetime tenure!! Politicians loved growing the government to curry favor with voters.
Source: “The Greek Puzzle” by Kruhøffer & Johansen, 2012
5. At the same time, Greeks love to strike to fight for more benefits. Politicians were happy to offer more.
Source: General Strikes in Western Europe, 1980–2008 by John Kelly and Kerstin Hamann
6. Speaking of state favoritism, how about corruption in general? Greece ranks at the bottom within the EU.
Source: Transparency International
7. On top of that, on average Greeks retire earlier…
Source: OECD estimate derived from the European and national labour force surveys.
8. And thus have a higher dependency support ratio (ratio of number of people aged over 65 plus kids up to 15 per 100 persons of working age between 15–65). In reality, this significantly underestimates the true dependency ratio, since the country suffers from high rates of youth unemployment and many people retire before the age of 65. In other words, too many people depend for their livelihood on the too few who work.
Source: Eurostat
9. At the same time, the government is not bringing in enough revenues. How do we know this? Greece has the largest - as percentage of the economy - shadow or underground economy.
Source: Institute for Applied Economic Research at the University of Tübingen
10. How can they escape taxes? Most of the people work for tiny businesses who conduct private cash transactions that can more easily be hidden.
Source: Structural Business Statictics Database (Eurostat)
11. And by the way, the number of those businesses in going down…
Source: Eurostat
12. While the VAT taxes remain high relative to others in Europe…
Source: Bloomberg
13. So, to sum it up Greece doesn’t seem to be a great place to do business.
Source: The Heritage Foundation & Dow Jones Company
14. How bad? One group ranks the country 130th in the world…
Source: The Heritage Foundation and The Dow Jones Company, 2015 Index
15. OK, so catch me up. What has happened to date?
Source: edited from BBC News
16. Has Greece actually accomplished anything during this process? Greece actually grew during the first 3 quarters of 2014.
Source: National Statistical Service of Greece
17. Say, what happened in Q4 of 2014? Looking at Chart 15 you might appreciate why Greeks were fed up with ongoing non-stop austerity measures. So they decided to elect a radical left coalition party that promised to undo the former policies. However, it seems consumers don’t have much confidence that the new leftist government will be able to reach an agreement with its eurozone partners.
Source: Bank of Greece via Bloomberg
18. As fears also grew among investors, the cost of borrowing from the markets spiked…
Source: Bloomberg
19. What does Greece need to do? Here is a list of policy recommendations from OECD for sustainable recovery, similar to the spirit of the reforms proposed by Greece’s EU partners.
Source: OECD
19. To date, the Syriza government has not shown any signs of agreement with the eurozone partners, choosing instead to comply with campaign promises of undoing many reforms by the prior government. Some in the left coalition government are openly advocating a default, exit from the Euro and return to the drachma. In fact, there are some economists who say this would be best for Greece as it would enable it to become competitive in global markets. While good in theory in an open well-functioning economy, the first time Greece elected a socialist government that followed similar policies, the drachma had quite a ride, downwards…
Source: Casey Research
20. In this era of uncertainty, businesses and investors have postponed investments and reversed economic growth, prompting the European Commission to slash growth estimates.
Source: European Commision
At this point, the future is indeed uncertain. Will the Syriza government agree to EU/IMF conditions for further loans and implement the program or choose to gamble with an exit from the Euro? We are days or weeks away from finding out. | {
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Arriving for the first time on stunning High Definition Blu-ray with English 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio on July 29th, this comprehensive collection contains every episode from the complete television series; both the U.S. and international versions of the series' Pilot; the North American Blu-ray debut of Lynch's follow-up feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me; and nearly 90 minutes of deleted and alternate scenes from the film. The set also features newly transferred Log Lady introductions for each episode; picture upgrades to many shots in the TV series; a new featurette with Lynch and the actors who portrayed the Palmer family which includes a mesmerizing return to the lives of their characters today; and hours of never-before-released material that dives into the fascinating story behind the celebrated pop culture classic.
Along with a newly transferred version of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, created from a 4K scan of the original negative, Twin Peaks - The Entire Mystery Blu-ray box set boasts the long-awaited missing pieces from the original version of the film - nearly an hour-and-a-half of deleted/alternate scenes from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - often referred to as the 'holy grail' of Twin Peaks fandom. This feature-length experience has been directed and edited by Lynch exclusively for this release. Capping off more than 30 deleted/alternate scenes is an epilogue providing a fascinating glimpse beyond the cliff-hanger finale of the TV series.
Twin Peaks - The Entire Mystery is loaded with special features. In the two-part feature 'Between Two Worlds,' Lynch himself interviews the Palmer family (Leland, Sarah and daughter Laura) about their current existence in this life and the next, and follows up with a discussion with the actors who portray them. Twin Peaks - The Entire Mystery also features 'Moving Through Time: Fire Walk With Me Memories,' an exclusive retrospective documentary featuring interviews with cast and crew who recount the making of the Twin Peaks movie and working with David Lynch. The collection also features high-definition versions of the Log Lady episode introductions, transferred from recently unearthed 16mm film negative, a selection of newly discovered deleted scenes and outtakes from the television series, and three Twin Peaks photo galleries with over 130 behind-the-scenes images from David Lynch's personal never-before-released collection. Also new to this release are 10 vignettes of iconic Twin Peaks themes called 'Atmospherics.' Each features a unique montage of music, dialogue and video (including some rare outtakes) that appear as both menu backgrounds and as their own textless experience to further immerse fans in the mysterious world of Twin Peaks.
Additionally, the set features a massive collection of pre-existing special features, some of which have been re-mastered in high definition exclusively for this release, including the award-winning four-part documentary 'Secrets From Another Place: Creating Twin Peaks,' and a newly extended version of the Gold Box featurette 'A Slice of Lynch,' featuring the complete and uncut conversation between David Lynch and actors Kyle MacLachlan and Mädchen Amick. Additionally, this 10-disc set houses an extraordinary archive of special features culled from the entire history of Twin Peaks on home video, including featurettes, cast and crew interviews, promotional reels, archival deleted scenes...and much, much more.
Twin Peaks - The Entire Mystery will be available in 1080p with English 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio (Series and Feature), original English Stereo 2.0 (Series and Feature), Latin American Spanish Mono (Series), Latin American Spanish Stereo (Feature), Brazilian Portuguese Mono (Series), French Mono (Series), French 5.1 (Feature), Italian Mono (Series), Italian Stereo (Feature), German Mono (Series), German 5.1 (Feature), Castilian Mono (Series), Castilian Stereo (Feature), Japanese Mono (Series), and Japanese Stereo (Feature). The 10-disc collection also includes English SDH, Latin American Spanish, French, Italian, German, Castilian, Japanese, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish subtitles (Series and Feature).
Episodes Comprise:
Disc 1:
Pilot: Original Version Alternate International Version
Episode 1
Episode 2
Disc 2:
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Disc 3:
Episode 8
Episode 9
Episode 10
Disc 4:
Episode 11
Episode 12
Episode 13
Episode 14
Disc 5:
Episode 15
Episode 16
Episode 17
Episode 18
Disc 6:
Episode 19
Episode 20
Episode 21
Episode 22
Disc 7:
Episode 23
Episode 24
Episode 25
Episode 26
Disc 8:
Episode 27
Episode 28
Episode 29
Special Features:
Disc 1:
Log Lady Intros (HD)
Preview and recaps on select episodes (HD)
Disc 2:
Season 1 Image Gallery
Twin Peaks Sneak Peeks (HD)
Log Lady Intros (HD)
Previews and recaps on select episodes (HD)
Disc 3:
A Slice of Lynch: Uncut (HD)
Season 2 Image Gallery
Promos (HD/SD)
Log Lady Intros (HD)
Preview and recaps on select episodes (HD)
Disc 4:
Series Deleted Scenes
Series Deleted Scenes (HD)
Outtakes (HD)
Log Lady Intros (HD)
Preview and recaps on select episodes (HD)
Disc 5:
Return To Twin Peaks
Location Guide
The Glastonbury Archives: 17 Pieces of Pie: Shooting at the Mar T (AKA RR) Diner Mark Frost Interview with Wrapped in Plastic Learning to Speak in the Red Room An Introduction to David Lynch Lucy Bumpers 1-900 Hotline Production Documents Image Galleries
Log Lady Intros (HD)
Preview and recaps on select episodes (HD)
Disc 6:
Postcards From The Cast
Twin Peaks Sneak Peaks (HD)
Log Lady Intros (HD)
Preview and recaps on select episodes (HD)
Disc 7:
Cast And Crew Interviews
Log Lady Intros (HD)
Preview and recaps on select episodes (HD)
Disc 8:
Secrets From Another Place: Creating Twin Peaks: Northwest Passage: Creating the Pilot Freshly Squeezed: Creating Season One Where We're From: Creating the Music Into the Night: Creating Season Two
Log Lady Intros (HD)
Preview and recaps on select episodes (HD)
Disc 9:
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
The Missing Pieces: Deleted/Alternate Scenes (HD)
Archival Interviews
Disc 10: | {
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Este fin de semana trascendió una nueva y fuerte denuncia contra el youtuber uruguayo Yao Cabrera, quien ahora fue acusado de intentar drogar y abusar en grupo de la mexicana Caeli.
La joven de 29 años publicó un video en su canal de YouTube en el que relata crudamente cómo él y su team gestaron un plan para vulnerarla psicológica y sexualmente.
Titulado 'Que no te pase a ti', esta publicación ya lleva más de 3,6 millones de reproducciones y contando. Allí, entre lágrimas y duros silencios, la muchacha cuenta que hace diez meses salió de fiesta con este grupo de chicos y que todo fue de mal en peor.
Debido a que se encontraba en otro país grabando para una serie, Caeli -cuyo nombre verdadero es Patricia Caeli Santaolalla López- decidió juntarse con ellos, a quienes consideraba sus amigos. El episodio más grave se dio durante una fiesta en una casa ajena donde ella descubrió que le habían estado colocando algún tipo de droga en el agua.
"Mi primera reacción fue decirles como riéndome 'Ay los caché que me querían poner algo en la bebida eh', no enojada porque no quería enojarlos, me sentía insegura. Ellos decían 'No' como espantados. Se veían súper nerviosos -contó- Quería guardar la botella porque si yo me salía con esa botella de la fiesta era prueba de que me estaban poniendo algo en la bebida y si no, no tienes prueba y no tienes manera de enseñar nada. Que es lo que yo no tengo, nada".
A partir de ahí, la chica enumera varios intentos de estos jóvenes de quitarle la botella y los suyos de pedirle ayuda a alguien. Finalmente logró llamar a un amigo: "Cuando supe que de verdad algo malo estaba pasando fue cuando le dije (a la persona con la que hablaba) el nombre de los tres (youtubers involucrados). Su expresión fue súper exagerada. A los 5 minutos, me dicen 'Ya nos vamos'".
"Ahí, se empezaron a salir todos al balcón, todos eran amigos de mi 'amigo', lo protegen porque aparte es un youtuber que tiene sus seguidores y aparte ya han escuchado cosas malas de él que seguramente son reales".
Si bien esas personas se habían ido, aún quedaban otras veinte en la casa y Caeli se "sentía atrapada": "Lo más asqueroso de todo esto es que las personas de la fiesta empezaron a acercarse cada vez más a mí. Estaban esperando a que me hiciera efecto lo que me dieron. Yo me sentía con el tiempo contado. Iban acorralándome. Tenía que terminar la llamada. Le mandé mi ubicación y le dije que me ayudara y llamara la Policía de allí porque yo me sentía tan insegura. Pensé: 'No lo voy a lograr'".
Uno de los momentos críticos del video es cuando la joven youtuber rememora el haber pensado en tirarse del balcón: "Como la Policía no llegaba y estos se me quedaba mirando de una manera asquerosa y se me estaban acercando más, yo estaba sola. Mi primera opción era brincar del primer piso. El miedo que tenía en ese momento como para en mi lógica pensar 'tal vez me salve más de algo más feo que me puedan hacer si brinco'".
Finalmente llego la Policía pero el calvario no termino allí: cuando los efectivos preguntaron si alguien había llamado, ella tuvo que salir a gritar que se encontraba en peligro. Debido a que era propiedad privada, le pidieron a ella que baje sola. Inmediatamente, lxs presentes comenzaron a insultarla, patearla y golpearla.
"Yo iba tratando de quitarme a todos. Pasé la sala y el comedor, y en las escaleras me aventé. Ahí se pone un tipo enfrente de mí, ya nada más me faltaba cruzarlo a él. Al policía lo veía. Se puso el tipo gigante y me dijo 'No vas a salir'. Un tipo y una tipa en la escalera se ponen a gritar 'Qué vamos a hacer, no la podemos dejar salir'. No sé exactamente pero algo malo iba a pasar. Yo doy gracias a la vida porque no sé cómo logré salir de esa. Cuando escuché eso supe que en verdad algo muy malo iba a pasar", siguió.
Al llegar a su hotel y hablar con la persona que había llamado a la Policía, una integrante del staff de la producción de la serie que estaba filmando, ella le contó "y no saben cómo lo minimizó. No saben cómo me hizo sentir. No saben lo feo que fue". Automáticamente renunció.
"Realmente no puedo ni acusar a estas personas ni levantar algo legal porque para mucha gente esto que yo cuento es como 'pero no te pasó nada'. Es lo más triste que sea visto de esta manera".
A la medianoche de este domingo, el propio Yao Cabrera -cuya cuenta oficial de Instagram fue denunciada hasta el hartazgo y suspendida- compartió una historia en un perfil secundario asegurando que subirá un video "desmintiendo a Caeli con pruebas reales".
La historia de Instagram en la que Yao Cabrera adelanta que desmentirá a Caeli.
Recordemos que no es la primera acusación de este tipo que enfrenta Yao. | {
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Officers are still processing the house and the wife and daughter have not returned home, according to Nygren. Though authorities continue looking for the assault rifle, think they may know the general location of where it may be, possibly in the water behind the house, Nygren said. | {
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The Democratic Party pounced on Wagner's claim that he was just visiting a business and had nothing to do with the long-controversial church. Wagner turned testy when asked about the event during a town hall meeting Wednesday in Westmoreland County, accusing the questioner of trying to embarrass him. | {
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Os cortes de verbas destinadas ao Ministério da Educação (MEC) e ao Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovações e Comunicações (MCTIC) anunciados pelo governo federal têm provocado grande insegurança quanto a capacidade das instituições de pesquisa brasileiras darem continuidade ao processo de melhoria da sua produção científica observada nos últimos anos.
A produção científica pode ser avaliada de forma absoluta, contabilizando o número de artigos científicos publicados, e relativa, contabilizando o número de vezes que um artigo científico é citado em outras pesquisas publicadas na literatura científica mundial.
Uma forma de avaliar conjuntamente a quantidade e a qualidade da produção científica de uma instituição ou país é contabilizar quantos de seus artigos científicos estão incluídos entre os artigos científicos mais citados no mundo.
O ministro da Educação, Abraham Weintraub - Pedro Ladeira/Folhapress
O Leiden Ranking, calculado pela Universidade Holandesa de Leiden, se baseia nas informações disponíveis na plataforma Web of Science e permite medir a performance científica dos países através do desempenho de suas principais instituições de pesquisa.
As 23 universidades brasileiras analisadas pelo Leiden Ranking são públicas. No período de 2009 a 2017, o número de publicações destas instituições que foram classificadas entre os artigos científicos top 10% (grupo que compreende os 10% de artigos científicos mais citados no mundo), aumentou de 4.659 para 11.240, cerca de 141%.
Essa tendência também é expressa entre os artigos top 1% (classificação mais conservadora que considera o 1% de artigos mais citados no mundo), onde o número de artigos aumentou de 415 para 1.309, crescimento de 215%.
A desigualdade da produção científica entre as 23 instituições, medida pelo coeficiente de variação, também diminuiu. Considerando os artigos top 10%, a desigualdade no período analisado reduziu de 140% para 118%; para os top 1% a queda foi de 142% para 125%.
A redução na desigualdade científica ocorreu devido ao aumento da contribuição relativa de artigos top 10% e top 1% publicados pelas universidades das regiões Nordeste, Centro-Oeste e Sul.
É inegável que, comparativamente, a performance científica das universidades brasileiras esteja ainda aquém da produção científica das principais universidades do mundo.
Entretanto, ao analisarmos a evolução das universidades brasileiras, o progresso é evidente e se deve, em grande parte, aos investimentos federais em educação feitos em anos anteriores, como a criação e ampliação de novas universidades públicas, contratação de professores e aumento do número de vagas e bolsas de estudo para estudantes de graduação e pós-graduação.
Assim, embora exista muito o que melhorar na nossa ciência, temos apresentado progresso. Como mais de 90% da pesquisa brasileira é realizada nas universidades públicas, ela depende de verbas do MEC e do MCTIC, que são destinadas a agências como Capes e CNPq, por exemplo.
Os cortes de recursos para essas instituições são, portanto, uma real ameaça à continuidade do progresso da ciência brasileira. | {
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Im Fall des mutmaßlichen Berlin-Attentäters gibt es weiterhin offene Fragen. Jetzt haben Ermittler in Amris Rucksack eine niederländische Sim-Karte gefunden. Außerdem soll der Tunesier im Ruhrgebiet gut vernetzt gewesen sein.
Die italienischen Ermittler sind überzeugt, auf diesem Foto am Mailänder Bahnhof Anis Amri identifiziert zu haben. Bild: dpa/Italian Police Press Office Handout
Nach dem Tod des mutmaßlichen Attentäters von Berlin haben die Ermittler Medienberichten zufolge eine Sim-Karte aus den Niederlanden in dessen Rucksack gefunden. Diese stamme aus einem Bestand an Sim-Karten, die zwischen dem 20. bis 22. Dezember in Zwolle, Breda und Nimwegen in Kaufhäusern verteilt wurden, berichtete die italienische Tageszeitung „La Repubblica“ am Mittwoch.
Ob dies bedeutet, dass Amri auf seiner Flucht über Frankreich nach Italien auch Halt in den Niederlanden gemacht hat oder auf andere Weise an die Karte gekommen ist, ist nach Informationen der Nachrichtenagentur dpa aber noch unklar. Von der Bundesanwaltschaft gab es auf Anfrage keine Stellungnahme dazu.
Mehr zum Thema 1/
Am Mittwoch wurde außerdem bekannt, dass Amri im Ruhrgebiet deutlich besser vernetzt war, als bislang angenommen. Nach Recherchen des WDR besuchte der Tunesier während seiner Zeit in Nordrhein-Westfalen ein Dutzend Moscheen im Ruhrgebiet. Er soll zudem sehr gute Kontakte nach Dortmund gehabt und einen Schlüssel zu einer Moschee besessen haben, in der er übernachtete. Seit Ende 2015 sei er regelmäßig zwischen Berlin und dem Ruhrgebiet gependelt.
Amri wurde in der Nacht von Donnerstag auf Freitag von italienischen Polizisten in Sesto San Giovanni nördlich von Mailand erschossen. Statt bei der Personenkontrolle seinen Ausweis zu zeigen, zog er eine scharfe Pistole aus seinem Rucksack und eröffnete das Feuer auf die Beamten. Diese schossen zurück. Nach Informationen der Nachrichtenagentur dpa befindet sich die Leiche weiterhin in der Gerichtsmedizin in Mailand, da die Obduktion noch nicht abgeschlossen ist.
Haben die nordrhein-westfälischen Behörden versagt?
Amri soll verantwortlich sein für den Lkw-Anschlag auf einem Berliner Weihnachtsmarkt, der zwölf Menschenleben forderte und Dutzende Personen schwer verletzte. Nach dem Anschlag hatte die Polizei unter anderem eine Flüchtlingsunterkunft in Emmerich durchsucht, einen weiteren Einsatz gab es in Dortmund.
Der Tunesier war nach Angaben des nordrhein-westfälischen Innenministers Ralf Jäger (SPD) 2015 nach Deutschland eingereist, er hatte nach seinem Aufenthalt in Nordrhein-Westfalen seit Februar 2016 überwiegend in Berlin gelebt. Die Opposition im nordrhein-westfälischen Landtag wirft den Behörden schwere Fehler bei der Überwachung des als Gefährder eingestuften Tunesiers in Nordrhein-Westfalen vor. | {
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The Australian Taxation Office says no taxpayer information has been compromised after a hardware failure brought down its website and online services.
However the website won't be back online until Tuesday.
The ATO announced on Twitter just before 9.30am AEDT on Monday its services were down.
"We're investigating issues with our online services, portals and our website as a priority," the office said.
"Apologies for the inconvenience. Stay tuned for details."
An ATO spokesman told AAP no taxpayer information had been compromised.
It is understood the problems stem from "hardware issues" and not caused by any external factors.
"All available resources are working to resolve these issues as a priority," the spokesman said.
On Monday afternoon, the ATO advised specialist staff were still working to resolve issues.
The office was working towards having systems back up on Tuesday,
Shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh made light of the website problem on Twitter.
"I know the Turnbull Govt opposes tax transparency, but this is ridiculous," he tweeted.
The ATO ran two days of scheduled maintenance earlier this month during which time the system was taken down.
In November last year it released a consultation paper in which it flagged a shift to a digital-first strategy. | {
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The goal of the Crittenton Services for Children and Families Community Engagement Office is to provide both our clients and volunteers opportunities to build positive experiences with one another, and help our agency create a lasting bond with our local community.
Our volunteers provide advocacy, emotional support, and a variety of enrichment opportunities for the children and youth in our care. By volunteering you not only provide a lifeline to children and families’ experiencing crisis, but it also serves as a helpful foundation to increase your knowledge and understanding of Crittenton’s mission and values.
We thank all community members interested in joining our mission, and truly value your time and support. There are a number of ways you can take part as a Crittenton volunteer that may work around your needs and schedule. | {
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Coming by a true bottomless brunch -- a/k/a, an endless flow of mimosas or Bloody Marys with your waffles and omelet -- can be difficult to come by in Philadelphia. The state's quirky liquor laws lead many restaurants to skip the option altogether, while others will offer happy hour-style discounts, rather than a flat fee for all-you-can-drink orange juice and champagne.
In Center City, such a deal was initially offered at Harp & Crown when it rolled out its brunch menu in 2017, offering five brunch cocktails for $15. The deal has since been nixed.
Other spots like Passyunk's Brigantessa, Market East's Jones, and the Moshulu on Penn's Landing are a select few restaurants in Philly that offer a true-to-its-name bottomless brunch option. Starting this weekend, another will join the ranks: the modern Indian bistro Veda, at 19th and Chestnut streets.
Veda will offer bottomless mimosas for $15 a person Saturdays and Sundays from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. The deal is part of Veda's entirely new brunch menu, where you can expect Indian-influenced takes on classic brunch dishes. Some à la carte menu items include the masala omelet, made with chilies and served with naan and shrimp tacos, served with kachumber and sweet chili aioli.
Veda/Cashman & Associates Brunch offerings at Veda.
Veda/Cashman & Associates Veda/Cashman & Associates Veda's new brunch menu includes a masala hummus platter served with garlic naan.
The new menu debuts this weekend. While the bottomless brunch deal is $15, if you want to upgrade to the good stuff, Veda is offering bottomless Moët & Chandon, this weekend only, for $65 a person.
Check out the full menu here. | {
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Liam Fox, international trade secretary, has suggested that Britain could agree with partners to roll over or adopt existing EU agreements to ensure business as usual
South Africa dealt a blow to the government’s plans to forge new trade deals yesterday, saying that a new agreement would have to be negotiated and that it would push for enhanced access to Britain for its agricultural sector.
Rob Davies, South Africa’s trade minister, will meet his counterpart Liam Fox next week in London. He will say that while he is hopeful a new agreement could be ready by the time Britain leaves the EU in 2019, there will have to be a renegotiation of agricultural quotas and sanitary standards.
Dr Fox has suggested previously that Britain could agree with partners to roll over or “adopt” existing EU agreements to ensure business as usual.
Negotiations over quotas, with a limit on the amount of | {
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The midfielder was delighted to have held the Premier League leaders to a 0-0 stalemate at St Mary's, and it was an achievement he was even more pleased with given the quality of the opposition.
"It's not only that they move the ball quickly," said Højbjerg. "They also have fast players, and with the ball they are very good one against one.
"I played in Germany against Bayern Munich and Dortmund, I played against Manchester City in the Champions League, but I must say this is maybe the best team I have ever played against.
"It's unbelievable how they move, how they stand, how they work together – it's like a symphony.
"We should be happy with the one point, but it's not that I say this is not our level. We can come up here and we have something to say up here and we showed that today."
Højbjerg added: "As always, the best is to win, but against a fantastic team like Liverpool you have to realise that a point is a fantastic result.
"They have a fantastic team and I must say the tempo of the game was unbelievably high, but with the support of the fans, with the bravery of the team and the good spirit we had a solid performance and that's what it's all about." | {
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Former GP3 champion and Macau Grand Prix winner Lynn switched from the ranks of the Red Bull Junior Team to an association with Williams last year, before entering GP2 for a rookie campaign.
The Briton won two races, ending up sixth in the standings, and remained in the series for a sophomore season this year with the DAMS squad.
Williams is yet to name its 2017 line-up, as uncertainty surrounds its current drivers Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa - with options like Jenson Button, Sergio Perez and even F3 driver Lance Stroll in the frame.
Lynn admitted his own chances fully depend on whether the Grove-based squad sees enough potential in him, despite a tough GP2 season so far.
"I hope Williams sees enough potential in me to give me the chance, that's all I ask," Lynn told Motorsport.com.
"F1 chances are like gold dust. It's hard to say, because what you need to get into F1 is someone to believe in you and someone giving you the opportunity."
GP2 difficulties
Lynn has so far scored two GP2 wins in 2017, including in Hockenheim's sprint race last weekend, but is only ninth in the championship standings.
"We're not in the best situation at the moment, but we're working really hard to find that form again," said Lynn. "It’s down to me to lead the team and to turn things around.
"We’ve had a very difficult to the start of the year, but we've made progress [since Hungary] and now it’s about continuing to push.
"At the moment, we're not quick enough to win the championship. All we can do is keep turning up, keep pushing, keep improving."
Asked if he felt the Williams chance was possibly slipping from his grasp, Lynn added: "It won’t be due to any bad performances, that’s for sure.
"I’ve been on it in testing, and working extremely hard in the factory. They’re well aware of my abilities and they’ve been nothing but extremely supportive." | {
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This is a late thank you, but an extraordinarily great one to my gifter! She sent 30 2GB flash drives for my Tech Ed students to check out from the computer lab!
This is a major help for my students and this class because of the ongoing district changes in internet policies. All of the students are thrilled, and the drives will be checked in for this classroom to ensure this lab keeps them as long as possible.
From the students to the principal, we all thank you! | {
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I think it's a new dynamic we haven't explored before, and it combines them into teams, so that they're working with the same people again and again. That's really interesting, because it usually switches back from double to single; you don't know who you're working with. So the nature of the relationships continues to change. Here, very much like in the real world, you get with a group and you have to work with them to complete your goal week after week. That's super cool. The dynamic is more accurately representative of what it's like to work on a film, you know, you're with the same team during the whole shooting of the show. | {
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座席は詰めてスワローズ――。思わず「ダジャレかよ！」とツッコミたくなる、東急電鉄のマナー啓発ポスターがじわじわと話題を集めている。駅での掲出開始から2週間以上たった今でも、ネットには「思わず二度見した」「こういうの大好き」などといった書き込みが絶えない。
東急電鉄のダジャレポスターが話題に
プロ野球・東京ヤクルトスワローズとコラボしたこのポスターは、2015年7月25日から東急線全駅で展開されている。
野武士のような風体で知られる畠山選手を中心に、スワローズの人気選手の凛々しい姿を切り取ったデザインは、一見洗練されてクールな印象を受ける。それだけに、上部に大書された「座席は詰めてスワローズ」というフレーズの脱力感が、より強烈なインパクトを持って迫ってくる
「頭から離れない」「眠れない」...都市伝説も登場？
あまりに直球すぎるこのダジャレに、ハマってしまう人も続出しているようだ。ツイッターには、「中毒者」となってしまったユーザーが以下のような投稿を寄せている。
座席は詰めてスワローズってポスターが頭から離れない - もりけん (@moriken1022) 2015, 8月 8
また、このポスターからスワローズにまつわる都市伝説を思い浮かべた人も多かったようだ。
この広告はヤクルトのチーム名が当初コンドルズからスワローズになるきっかけの一番最初の話からしなきゃいけなくなる広告 - へいへ (@simoheihe182) 2015, 7月 24
なかには、今シーズンの観客動員数が下から2番目（8月12日現在）に沈んでいるスワローズにとって、耳が痛くなるようなツッコミも。
ところで、スワローズの本拠地である神宮球場の最寄り駅は、東京メトロ銀座線・外苑前駅とJR中央線・信濃町駅などで、東急電鉄の駅はない。神奈川県東部に路線を展開する東急であれば、むしろ横浜DeNAベイスターズとコラボした方が自然に思える。まさか、「ダジャレ」のためだけにスワローズとコラボしたのでは――。
この疑問について東急電鉄に直接うかがってみると、
「いやいや、ダジャレのためだけにコラボするわけがないじゃないですか（笑）」
と一蹴された。東急電鉄は2014年にスワローズが企画した試合前イベントにも参加しており、その縁で今回のコラボポスターが実現したという。 | {
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Monster Hunter World: Iceborne is once again teaming up with Aloy in a second Horizon Zero Dawn collaboration. This one is specifically centered around Aloy’s Frozen Wilds DLC, since both of them are ice themed.
Monster Hunter World: Iceborne and Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds Event 5 IMAGES
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Capcom released a new trailer for the Monster Hunter World: Iceborne x Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds collaboration today during Gamescom. The trailer shows Aloy wearing her Frozen Wilds armor, as she readies up to venture into icy new Monster Hunter area. You can watch the new trailer above.When Monster Hunter: World was first released, Capcom and Guerrilla Games announced a limited-time Horizon Zero Dawn event where you could play as Aloy and user her bow and armor set. The Iceborne and The Frozen Wilds collaboration looks to be similar to the previous one, except players can probably expect to wear Aloy’s Frozen Wilds armor set, and instead of a bow you can user her bowgun as a weapon.Monster Hunter World: Iceborne is the first major expansion to Monster Hunter: World. Hunters will venture to a new area called Hoarfrost Reach where they will track and take down several new monsters who thrive in this icy locale. Meanwhile, The Frozen Wilds was the first expansion for Horizon Zero Dawn and introduced a new area for Aloy to explore in Guerrilla's massive open-world.Capcom has not revealed a release date for the Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds collaboration in Monster Hunter World: Iceborne but check back with IGN for all the latest updates. Check out our Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds review and Monster Hunter World: Iceborne preview
Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN. You can reach him on Twitter | {
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I am often asked the question, “So, how did you get into this?” I can answer that I was interested in this career since my earliest memories, and that I went into education intending to change it. But that’s not what people are looking for. What they’re really asking is, “Why so pushy?” How did I come up with these ideas, and then push so hard to implement them?
It happened in phases.
The Parent
Here’s what lit that fire. While fighting to keep other people’s kids from falling through the cracks, my own daughter was being dangled over a deep ravine.
The call came from my daughter Cass’s speech therapist. Cass was born tongue-tied, had surgery at age three, and was wrapping up her speech therapy by first grade. The therapist informed me that Cass had been put into a special education reading program by her teacher, and the therapist was correct in suspecting that I hadn’t even been notified, let alone consulted.
“I don’t think she belongs there,” the therapist said.
I agreed. More than agreed, I worried. I saw what happened when kids were tracked into resource and similar education programs.
And I felt guilty. I was helping other people’s kids get “off track” to reach full potential. How could my own kid now be there? What did I fail to do as a parent?
I also felt betrayed. This was my school district, and I worked hard for them. I now had the parent perspective of being blindsided and somehow dismissed in major decisions regarding my child.
So why was Cass in there? Cass had been labeled ADHD and dyslexic by her teacher. Yes, Cass did have a high energy level, making rapid connections from one topic to another. And yes, let’s just say she is “visually gifted.” To top it off, sometimes she talked funny; speech therapy takes time. However, the reading class was doing nothing to address these traits. It was just a place to put her.
I had been enjoying the success of designing personalized learning programs for students and watching them grow – both academically and emotionally. I had just been trained in reading recovery methods, and I combined that with my learning styles research in an effort to help Cass.
I had two weeks.
Over winter break, I taught Cass to read using methods that worked for her. It required taking over the living room. We needed space and textured carpet for the whole body and tactile-touch approaches. Textured paper and medium point pens, writing with eyes closed. Elephant-nose letter writing in the air. Feeling the sounds as they were spoken by her, then by me.
It worked. After only two weeks, Cass was retested and transferred out of the special education reading class. We were then approached about having her tested for Gifted and Talented Education (GATE). Seriously.
She was tested the following year, scoring 99% on the assessment. By third grade she was reading at a college level. She started college at age 14.
A remarkable young woman, she gives me many reasons to be proud. But I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t had the training I did. How differently might her path have been?
The Teacher
She is not an isolated case. With this experience in mind, I continued employing personalized education strategies, with encouraging results. My “enthusiasm” was not always matched by my colleagues, even the supportive ones. This changed one particular fall after the school received the test scores from the previous spring.
I taught six sections of middle school language arts, class sizes in the 40s, and I endeavored to tailor learning to be competency-based and adjusted to their learning styles. My principal, a very nice guy, told me that he believed that kids often learn in spite of us. In other words, he appreciated my efforts, but stop working so hard. It probably wouldn’t make that much difference.
The message changed next fall: “Keep doing what you’re doing.”
The language arts department was called into a meeting to review the test scores from the last spring. Anger and anxiety dominated the room. The administrators were coming down hard on the group for the abysmal results. I was so confused. Sad. And more confused. Okay so maybe we didn’t spend much time on test-prep, opting for more authentic approaches. I had used formative assessments throughout the year, and I knew the kids were learning. At least, I thought I knew. Had I been wrong?
We were then provided with the details showing the scores for each grade level. Sixth grade scores dropped. Eighth grade dropped too. However, the seventh graders, my wonderful seventh graders, had such an increase that the school average as a whole didn’t drop. It flat lined, but it held steady. I thought the vice-principal was exaggerating when he said, “You single-handedly saved the school” – and I still do because test scores shouldn’t have that much power (but that’s a topic for another time).
However, the scores were impressive. My students gained between 10 and 30 percentile points on average depending on the category. Statistically staggering. “Resource” students became “regular” and “regular” became “honors” (much to the chagrin of some honors parents – but that’s yet another topic). It worked! But boy was I tired. I needed to make better use of technology to facilitate what I was doing. I had ideas of how that could happen, and I had the ear of the administration for sure.
However, those ideas came to a halt with the district’s response to legislation titled No Child Left Behind. They adopted a beautiful curriculum set that I was looking forward to implementing. However, it came with a lesson plan book that was pre-filled for the entire year. It also came with scripts. Yes, scripts of what to say. We were supposed to put the whole district on the same track to see how well the curriculum worked. If I did anything different, I would throw off the results of their study. But you already know how I feel about tracks. There’s also the issue of ethics. While I had one administrator suggesting that I could close my door and do my thing, a newer vice principal would come in and scold me.
I increasingly felt the urge to jump ship. And I did, right into the charter schools and other opportunities to continue developing personalized learning approaches. I earned the nickname “curriculum guru” and enjoyed invitations to review products and approaches. The homeschool families I mentored and my own daughters were excellent guinea pigs, and we would discuss ideas for a dream school.
The Administrator
In looking for options for my youngest daughter Heather, I began writing down what that model program might look like based on my previous experiences and reviewing hundreds of studies. I also tapped back into my previous experiences, from piloting a personalized learning program for “at risk” kids in 1997 to helping start a state-wide online school in 2006. What worked? More importantly, what didn’t?
I couldn’t find a school that met all of the criteria. The day finally came to gather all of my research, resources, and contacts with other change agents, and create a model school. I had been synthesizing everything I learned and created the Personalized Education Philosophy as part of a university course. I began connecting with key people I worked with in the past, including one who I took on as a business partner since he had a degree in business and experience as an administrator in personalized learning programs. With a small group of educators passionate about the philosophy’s tenets, we implemented a learning model based on the philosophy to create Christa McAuliffe School of Arts & Sciences.
Okay, so that is definitely the short version of the story. It went through many steps, required slaying dragons in the form of unethical administrators, criminal CFOs, and really confused school boards. In spite of these extra challenges, we created a private school in 2009 so we could maintain quality control to show how the model worked, and we then opened our doors to public schools to use what we created so that all students could potentially benefit.
We were the “freaks” during that initial accreditation review, but the piles of research and some supportive people who believed in us resulted in them taking a chance on us, and I will be forever grateful for that. By the year of re-accreditation, the school had been named in the top 5 of online diploma-granting schools, and it was spotlighted in a booklet put out by iNacol as a model program for personalized learning. From freaks to a model program, the school had arrived. I had my large-scale proof of concept, and it was helping so many people. However, as is typical, the program also felt a stuttering in the momentum in that it had gone as far as it could go in this way.
So now what?
The Patient
Well first there was therapy. Some things had happened that belong in a different post than here. Vaguely-speaking, a combination of a near-death situation that took months to heal from, combined with a personal betrayal of somebody who was sabotaging the work of several people including mine, put me in the “caterpillar as goo” phase of metamorphosis. It was painful. And beautiful. To get through it, I had to also address a childhood that left me with complex PTSD. This led to a post-traumatic strength that I could never have experienced had I not gone through this double-whammy life event.
I am grateful.
However, one does not get to the other side of such a thing without being unchanged, and this has made me all the more “pushy” – at least when it comes to things that matter to me.
The Facilitator
It became clear that the next step was for me to return “out in the world” to catch up with the latest, and it was amazing how many invites I received to gatherings the moment I hinted at doing this – from big education conferences to a consultant meeting on using VR technology for PTSD. With so many options, what should I do?
I took a deep breath and reflected on what makes my heart sing.
I’m eager to be in the service of helping others who have a gift or idea to share. This has included mentoring people in instructional design of their own courses and programs; providing teacher training in personalized learning; and – coming full circle to something close to my heart – supporting homeschooling parents.
It can be beyond the field of education though.
Broadly-speaking, I enjoy facilitating others in finding their voices, healing as needed, and in creating their own paths to their own dreams – especially when this is an individual or group actualizing a potential unique to them. It’s not about “education” so much as about empowering personal agency, self-expression, and self-actualization – hopefully in a way that makes the world a better place.
It also means being a little less pushy; perhaps gentle nudging is better, or advising while stepping back and allowing others come into a knowing on their own. It is their journey, after all.
Here’s to you and your journey!
~*~
Original version published February 2, 2013. Updated with new information.
Read an update on my daughter Cass:
My Daughter Wants to be Neil Gaiman, and I’m Good with That | {
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広告大手、電通の新入社員だった高橋まつりさん（当時２４）が２０１５年１２月に過労自殺した問題で、高橋さんの遺族と電通は２０日、再発防止策や慰謝料などの支払いに関する合意書に調印した。電通は今後、再発防止策の実施状況について年１回、遺族側に報告することを約束した。
まつりさんの母、幸美（ゆきみ）さん（５４）と代理人の川人博弁護士らがこの日、記者会見して明らかにした。合意書の調印には、２３日に引責辞任する電通の石井直社長が出席。「会社における働き方を根本から改善したい。遺族との合意事項を着実に実行することを誓う」と述べたという。
合意の主な内容は、電通がまつりさんの自殺について深く謝罪する▽１８項目の再発防止策を講ずることを明確にし、遺族側に実施状況を毎年１２月に報告する▽「慰謝料等解決金」を支払う――など。再発防止に向け、電通が川人氏を講師とする管理職向けの研修を３カ月以内に開き、幸美さんが発言する時間を設けることも盛り込んだ。
再発防止策には電通がすでに打ち出した内容も含まれるが、川人氏は「遺族側が毎年報告を受けることについて約束した。本当に再発防止策が実施されるのか懸念されたので、報告をきちっとするよう強く要求した」と合意の意義を強調した。幸美さんは、合意に踏み切った理由として、電通がサービス残業をなくすこと、パワハラの防止に全力を尽くすと約束したことなどを挙げ、「強い決意を持って改革を実行していただきたい」と強く求めた。
電通はこの日、「改めて高橋まつりさんのご冥福を深くお祈りするとともに、ご遺族に心よりおわびする。二度と同じような出来事が起こらないようにするため、すべての社員が心身ともに健康に働ける労働環境を実現するべく、全力で改革を進めていく」とのコメントを出した。 | {
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FIFA to limit loan deals
By Football Italia staff
FIFA have announced strict restrictions on the number of loan deals that clubs can hold per season, down to just eight in and out.
This could be devastating for many Italian clubs who have dozens of loans or operate using loans with obligation to buy, a method of stretching out payment to a different financial year.
The limits will come into force next season, starting at eight both in and out of the club, then reduced to six from 2022-23.
This applies initially only to international loans with players aged 22 or over.
The FIFA Council still needs to approve the plans, with individual leagues given three years to come into line with similar rules.
Watch Serie A live in the UK on Premier Sports for just £9.99 per month including live LaLiga, Eredivisie, Scottish Cup Football and more. Visit: https://www.premiersports.com/subscribenow | {
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There’s been a lot of talk lately about encouraging Disney to move beyond its myopic standards. But one photographer may have just opened the eyes of the 91-year-old company to the range of beauty it has neglected.
While searching for the perfect red-haired “Ariel” to pose for her mermaid-themed photo shoot, Kari Lane recently spotted MacKenzie Clare sitting at dinner with her boyfriend at a Leesburg, Va., restaurant, myFOXdc.com reported. Lane unabashedly approached the 19-year-old stunner, and was surprised when she realized Clare was using a wheelchair.
Lane wasn’t the least bit discouraged. In fact, she realized in that moment that Clare’s disability could help turn the shoot into something “phenomenal.”
Though Clare had always dreamed of modeling, she figured those hopes were dashed when she was 10 years old and a reckless driver slammed into her family’s car, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.
But as the breathtaking shoot on Saturday demonstrated, Clare is pretty much capable of accomplishing anything she sets her mind to.
"It made me feel so special and good about myself and strong and proud,” Clare told the news outlet.
While Lane didn’t originally set out to subvert the standard depiction of the fair complexioned, able-bodied Disney character, she’s one of a number of artists who have now succeeded in painting these princess characters in a different light.
Artist TT Bret, for example, changes the skin colors and cultures of classic cartoon characters in a project she’s dubbed “Racebent Disney.”
Her own version of Ariel is of Indian descent. | {
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Michele Berra joins today’s show to discuss the following:
Previewing week 7
A look back at week 6
What worked? What didn’t?
Can OKC turn this around?
Does Billy need to be fired?
And much more!
Thanks for listening and subscribe on iTunes!
Today’s episode is brought to you by Andy’s Frozen Custard!
Author | {
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Researcher Explains How Santa Delivers Presents in One Night
Don’t believe in Santa Claus? Magic, you say? In fact, science and technology explain how Santa is able to deliver toys to good girls and boys around the world in one night, according to a North Carolina State University researcher.
NC State’s Dr. Larry Silverberg, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, can explain the science and engineering principles that allow Santa, also known as Kris Kringle or Saint Nicholas, to pull off the magical feat year after year.
Silverberg was team leader on a first-of-its-kind visiting scholars program at Santa’s Workshop-North Pole Labs (NPL) last year. He blogged his field notes, which are available here. “Children shouldn’t put too much credence in the opinions of those who say it’s not possible to deliver presents all over the world in one night,” Silverberg says.
With his cherubic smile and twinkling eyes, Santa may appear to be merely a right jolly old elf, but he and his NPL staff have a lot going on under the funny-looking hats, Silverberg says. Their advanced knowledge of electromagnetic waves, the space/time continuum, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and computer science easily trumps the know-how of contemporary scientists.
Silverberg says that Santa has a personal pipeline to children’s thoughts – via a listening antenna that combines technologies currently used in cell phones and EKGs – which informs him that Mary in Miami hopes for a surfboard, while Michael from Minneapolis wants a snowboard. A sophisticated signal processing system filters the data, giving Santa clues on who wants what, where children live, and even who’s been bad or good. Later, all this information will be processed in an onboard sleigh guidance system, which will provide Santa with the most efficient delivery route.
However, Silverberg adds that letters to Santa via snail mail still get the job done. “While he takes advantage of emerging technologies,” Silverberg says, “Santa is, in many ways, a traditionalist.”
Silverberg is not so naïve as to think that Santa and his reindeer can travel approximately 200 million square miles – making stops in some 80 million homes – in one night. Instead, he posits that Santa uses his knowledge of the space/time continuum to form what Silverberg calls “relativity clouds.”
“Based on his advanced knowledge of the theory of relativity, Santa recognizes that time can be stretched like a rubber band, space can be squeezed like an orange and light can be bent,” Silverberg says. “Relativity clouds are controllable domains – rips in time – that allow him months to deliver presents while only a few minutes pass on Earth. The presents are truly delivered in a wink of an eye.”
With a detailed route prepared and his list checked twice through the onboard computer on the technologically advanced sleigh, Santa is ready to deliver presents. His reindeer – genetically bred to fly, balance on rooftops and see well in the dark – don’t actually pull a sleigh loaded down with toys. Instead, each house becomes Santa’s workshop as he utilizes his “magic bag of toys” – a nano-toymaker that is able to fabricate toys inside the children’s homes. The presents are grown on the spot, as the nano-toymaker creates – atom by atom – toys out of snow and soot, much like DNA can command the growth of organic material like tissues and body parts.
And there’s really no need for Santa to enter the house via chimney, although Silverberg says he enjoys doing that every so often. Rather, the same relativity cloud that allows Santa to deliver presents in what seems like a wink of an eye is also used to “morph” Santa into people’s homes.
Finally, many people wonder how Santa and the reindeer can eat all the food left out for them. Silverberg says they take just a nibble at each house. The remainder is either left in the house or placed in the sleigh’s built-in food dehydrator, where it is preserved for future consumption. It takes a long time to deliver all those presents, after all.
“This is merely an overview, based on what we learned at the NPL, of Santa’s delivery methods,” Silverberg says. “Without these tools, it would be impossible for him to accomplish his annual mission, given the human, physical and engineering constraints we face today.”
-shipman- | {
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Julian Assange's security over the diplomatic cables, which he once described as worth at least $5m to any foreign intelligence agency, seemed less than watertight. At Ellingham Hall, the Norfolk country house where he is staying while on bail, Assange was seen handing over batches of them to visiting foreign journalists, including someone who was simply introduced as "Adam".
"He seemed like a harmless old man," said one staffer, "apart from his habit of standing too close and peering at what was written on your screen." He was introduced as the father of Assange's Swedish crony, journalist Johannes Wahlström, and took away copies of cables from Russia and post-Soviet states. According to one insider, he also demanded copies of cables about "the Jews".
This WikiLeaks associate was better known as Israel Shamir.
Shamir claims to be a renegade Russian Jew, born in Novosibirsk, but currently adhering to the Greek Orthodox church. He is notorious for Holocaust denial and publishing a string of antisemitic articles. He caused controversy in the UK in 2005, at a parliamentary book launch hosted by Lord Ahmed, by claiming: "Jews … own, control and edit a big share of mass media." Internal WikiLeaks documents, seen by the Guardian, show Shamir was not only given cables, but he also invoiced WikiLeaks for €2,000 (£1,700), to be deposited in a Tallinn bank account, in thanks for "services rendered - journalism". What services? He says: "What I did for WikiLeaks was to read and analyse the cables from Moscow."
Shamir's byline is on two previous articles pillorying the Swedish women who complained about Assange. On 27 August, in Counterpunch, a small radical US publication, Shamir said Assange was framed by "spies" and "crazy feminists". He alleged there had been a "honeytrap". On 14 September, Shamir then attacked "castrating feminists and secret services", writing that one of the women involved, whom he deliberately named, had once discussed the Cuban opposition to Castro in a Swedish academic publication "connected with" someone with "CIA ties".
Subsequently, Shamir appeared in Moscow. According to a reporter on Russian paper Kommersant, he was offering to sell articles based on the cables for $10,000 (£6,300). He had already passed some to the state-backed publication Russian Reporter. He travelled on to Belarus, ruled by the Soviet-style dictator Alexander Lukashenko, where he met regime officials. The Russian Interfax news agency reported that Shamir was WikiLeaks' "Russian representative", and had "confirmed the existence of the Belarus dossier".
According to him, WikiLeaks had several thousand "interesting" secret documents. Shamir then wrote a piece of grovelling pro-Lukashenko propaganda in Counterpunch, claiming "the people were happy, fully employed, and satisfied with their government".
Assange subsequently maintained he had only a "brief interaction" with Shamir: "WikiLeaks works with hundreds of journalists from different regions of the world. All are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and are generally only given limited review access to material relating to their region."
One can only speculate about whose interests Shamir was serving by his various wild publications. Perhaps his own personal interests were always to the fore. But while the newspapers hammered out a deal to handle the cables in a responsible fashion, Shamir's backstairs antics certainly made WikiLeaks look rather less so. | {
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By The Herald Editorial Board
This one isn’t Donald Trump’s fault; it’s on the Associated Press.
In referring to the Associated Press’ Aug. 23 analysis into meetings of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with those who made or pledged donations to the Clinton Foundation, Trump at a rally Wednesday in Tampa said, “Now it looks like it’s 50 percent of the people that saw her had to make contributions to the Clinton Foundation.”
If you read the story, that’s not what the AP analysis showed, but Trump appeared to take his understanding of the report not from the story itself but from one of the AP’s own tweets: “BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.”
Trump got the tweet right. The AP didn’t.
What the AP reported — and what Trump and its own tweet failed to put into context — was that in an analysis of 154 visits with people who were not federal employees or foreign government representatives, 85 had donated or pledged money to the Clinton Foundation. The full analysis looked at records covering about half of Clinton’s tenure as secretary and totaled more than 1,700 meetings in person or by phone, meetings that the AP didn’t include because they would have been part of her official or diplomatic duties, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported Thursday.
But that context wasn’t included in the tweet or the lede paragraph of the article, but in the eighth paragraph. Nor does the original story say that Clinton was involved in pay-for-play, as Trump and others are alleging. But, based on the tweet, that would seem to be an assumption that many might make.
Tweets like that are a problem, just as misleading headlines are a problem for news organizations. And for the purposes of newspapers and other news outlets tweets serve as headlines, directing people to click through and read the full story. But not everyone reads past the headline or the tweet.
A study by Columbia University and the French National Institute earlier this year found that 59 percent of links shared on Facebook had never been clicked (or read) by the person sharing the linked story, which led one satire site online to post a story filled with nonsense faux Latin under the headline: “Study: 70 percent of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.”
An American Press Institute study in 2014 found that 3 in 4 Americans reported reading, watching or hearing the news daily, but that only 4 in 10 said that they read or paid attention beyond the headline.
That means that those who rely on headlines and tweets rarely are getting the full story, especially when those headlines and tweets are at best incomplete and at worst misleading.
But the harm may go even deeper. Another study from 2014, this one by Ulrich Ecker, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Australia, found that misleading headlines might be coloring the ability of a reader to accurately recall the details of the story, as Maria Konnikova reported in The New Yorker magazine.
In two separate trials Ecker had subjects read stories where the only variable was the headline, one accurate and one misleading. In stories topped by misleading headlines, the researcher found, the readers had difficulty making accurate inferences about what they had read.
“Even well-intentioned readers who do go on to read the entire piece may still be reacting in part to that initial formulation,” Konnikova wrote.
Headlines, and now tweets, require some skill and attention to detail, remaining accurate while drawing a reader into the story.
Obviously, with so few bothering to read or click through to the full story, an engaging headline or a “click-bait” tweet serves a purpose. But headlines and tweets that are misleading, even inaccurate, misrepresent the issue for those who don’t read the full story are a disservice to those who do. | {
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A leaked top-secret National Security Agency document indicates that Russian hacking efforts around the US presidential election were much broader and more pervasive than originally known—and certainly state-sponsored.
The intelligence document was published by online news outlet The Intercept, just hours before the Justice Department announced charges against a 25-year-old government contractor named Reality Winner for leaking the information.
The document, which was heavily redacted during the process of the Intercept verifying its authenticity with the DoJ, indicates that Russian Military Intelligence executed several spear-phishing attempts against at least 100 state and local voting officials in the week prior to Election Day. It also mounted a cyberattack on at least one US voting software supplier.
Officials speaking on background to the Intercept noted that there is no evidence that actual election outcomes were affected by the meddling. However, the document concludes that the situation "raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results."
The report said that the Russian plan was to gain access to systems at an e-voting vendor, in order to gather information needed to convincingly pose as a representative from that company. From there, the hackers would send spoof emails purporting to be from the vendor, in an attempt to trick voting officials into opening infected Microsoft Word documents. Those documents in turn would execute malware that would have given the hackers control over the local voting division’s network.
The report reads:
“Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.”
The news comes shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers may have been behind the election-season hacking. However, the CIA and other organizations have said that it’s clear that the Kremlin was directly involved—a claim the NSA document backs up.
“The insider threat landscape usually breaks down into three pieces: Malicious insiders, negligent insiders and compromised insiders,” said Morgan Gerhart, vice president at Imperva, via email. “To mitigate the risk, corporations should ask themselves where their sensitive data lies, and invest in solutions that directly monitor who accesses it and how.”
Winner, meanwhile, was arrested in her home over the weekend. The NSA contractor admitted to printing out the document and mailing it to the Intercept. She was easy to track down, being just one of six individuals who had printed the document. She faces a single charge of "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information."
“According to reports, the leaker was identified because of strong audit trails of who accessed what,” said Gerhart. “They can invest in solutions that help them pinpoint critical anomalies that indicate misuse of enterprise data stored in databases, file servers and cloud apps and that also help them to quickly quarantine risky users in order to proactively prevent and contain data breaches. This approach works across careless, compromised and malicious insiders.” | {
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The Latest Littoral combat ship, LCS5, USS MILWAUKEE arrived in Halifax overnight on her way to her home port. This Variation of the LCS is built in the great lakes built by Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisconsin and commissioned on 21 November 2015.
So far each of the Ships has stopped in Halifax (Freedom in 2008, Fort Worth in 2012) on their way to thier home port. USS Milwaukee’s Home port is San Diego, California.
Shes currently riding at anchor, and is due to move to a navy pier tomorrow. | {
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According to the British newspaper, the spokesperson for Jamatul Ahrar, who is wanted for an assassination attempt on Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousufzai and has a $1 million bounty on his head, has 69 connections on LinkedIn.Ehsan does not hide his associations and promotes himself as spokesperson for Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan faction, TTP-Jamaat Ahrar (TTP-JA).With skills listed as "jihad and journalism," Ehsan describes himself as ‘self-employed’ and has his photograph for his display picture.Further, providing details of his school, employment and language skills, he has listed himself as spokesperson since January 2010 and TTP-JA as his ‘current employer.’The disclosure that Ehsan has an open profile on LinkedIn is potentially embarrassing for the networking site. Previously, other social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been criticised for failing to clamp down on hardliners using their sites to promote extremism.However, after being approached by The Telegraph, LinkedIn took down Ehsan’s account.A spokesman said the company’s security team had decided to “restrict it”, meaning it was no longer in operation. But the spokesperson added that it was not clear if the account belonged to Ehsan or was a fake account, established by another party.Further, the spokesperson said, the IP address of the account, indicating where in the world it was set up, suggested it was fake. The “lack of Taliban recruiting messages” was another clue, the spokesperson added.“[I] Can’t say for certain that it is someone else … But I can say that our security team has a high degree of confidence that it is a fake account, which is reason enough to restrict it. [I] Also can’t say for certain who might have set it up if it is fake.” | {
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The NSA's spying targeted the private computer networks of Google, among others. Report: NSA spied on Google
The National Security Agency’s spying targeted the private computer networks of Google, a company that facilitates most of the world’s international bank transfers and Brazil’s state-run oil firm Petrobras, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a Brazilian TV report said Sunday night.
There were no details in Globo TV’s report about what information the NSA may have obtained.
All three companies are included in what the report said is an NSA training manual for new agents on how to target the private computer networks of big companies. They are Google, Petrobras was the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, better known as SWIFT, the Belgium-based company that facilitates most international bank transfers in what are thought to be secure transactions.
Earlier reports based on Snowden’s documents revealed the existence of the NSA’s PRISM program that gives the agency comprehensive access to customer data from companies like Google and Facebook. Separate reports last week in the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica, also based on Snowden’s leak, indicated the NSA and its British counterpart had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s computers by 2012, but the documents didn’t indicate how extensive the project was or what kind of data it could access.
Director of National Intelligence James Klapper said in a statement that “it is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing.”
The NSA collects the information “for many important reasons” such as could provide “the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy,” his statement added. “It also could provide insight into other countries’ economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets.”
Klapper went on to underscore that the NSA has had “success in disrupting terror networks by following their money as it moves around the globe.”
“What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”
He said the intelligence community’s “efforts to understand economic systems and policies and monitor anomalous economic activities is critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security.”
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who received thousands of documents from Snowden and was the first to break stories about the NSA’s extensive program to collect Internet and phone data, worked with Globo for its report. It came a week after Greenwald and the network said NSA documents showed that U.S. spy agencies had monitored the president of Brazil as well as Mexico’s new president prior to his election.
Offices of the Petrobras oil company and Google’s Brazil offices were closed Sunday and officials could not be reached for comment. An emailed request for comment from SWIFT wasn’t immediately answered. | {
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Bill Maher did it again this morning, he accidentally admitted something that his fellow liberals and Democrats definitely don’t want to admit.
From the Hill:
“The more I read about this … no, I don’t think he was doing something terrible in Ukraine,” Maher said of the younger Biden during a panel discussion on “Real Time” on Friday night.
“But why can’t politicians tell their f—ing kids, ‘Get a job, get a goddamn job!'” he continued. “This kid was paid $600,000 because his name is Biden by a gas company in Ukraine, this super-corrupt country that just had a revolution to get rid of corruption.”
The liberal comedian and host added that it “just looks bad.” | {
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Jonathan Gruber, the mastermind behind Romneycare, provides his perspective:
The number of people covered by employer-based health-care plans is dropping by a percentage point a year. The system is falling apart. So you put in a new safety net. That means a few more people are going to come in. If you’re not willing to risk making some things worse, you’re never going to make anything better. My estimate is that 80 percent of the people are not going to feel any change at all, and that 17 percent or so are going to find that things are better, and that about two or three percent will be worse off, and those are the people who benefit from the discriminatory nature of health-insurance at the present time. If health-insurance companies can’t discriminate any more, those people will have to pay a little more. When we decided that people couldn’t discriminate in what they paid black people or women any more, people had to pay more because employers couldn’t discriminate in what they paid black people and women. Was that a bad thing?
The thing that staggers me about the Republican hatred of this law is its abstract quality. They never address the real problem of our massively inefficient private healthcare market, which is a huge burden on the economy. They never address how to help the millions of uninsured adults get the care all human beings need. They appear to regard a Heritage Foundation, free-market-designed, private healthcare exchange system as some kind of communist plot. They do not seem to believe there is any pressing problem at all. And they have nothing constructive to offer.
This is not about Obamacare. It is not even about politics. It is about a form of revolt against the very country they live in. | {
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ISTOCK, VDVTUTUnconscious bias can lead to inequitable outcomes in grant-funding competitions, especially when applicants’ leadership potential is explicitly evaluated, a new study preprint published on December 12, 2017, in bioRxiv shows. But unconscious bias training for reviewers can mitigate this effect and lead to a more equitable allocation of funds, the science funding organization found. That may pave the way for strategies and policies to improve equity in science at the highest levels—a stubborn problem in spite of the large number of women and minorities entering science graduate programs.
In 2009, women made up about 12 percent of full professors in natural sciences and engineering in Canadian universities, about 20 percent of associate professors, and 28 percent of assistant professors, according to a National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) report (see Fig 3.10). From 2010 to 2016, the number of female full professors across all academic disciplines rose 28 percent and the number of female associate professors rose 18 percent, but the number of female assistant professors fell by 12 percent, according to a Statistics Canada report.
The Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) analyses show that overall, women and men experience comparable success rates in CIHR grant competitions, but gender inequities exist in certain CIHR programs. (The data for funding-success rates in different CIHR programs is freely available on its website.)
In 2014, CIHR phased out traditional grant programs and launched two new programs to reduce the administrative burden on investigators and grant reviewers. One, called the Foundation Program, takes a “people, not projects” approach to funding and explicitly evaluates the caliber of the principal investigator (PI). It contrasts with the new Project Program, which is focused on evaluating the proposed research projects. These funding programs together account for approximately three quarters of total CIHR funding, which is $1 billion CAD.
Unconscious bias seems to operate more strongly when evaluating the leadership potential of the applicant.
To see how women fared under these new funding arrangements, researchers conducted an analysis of PIs’ success rates. They found that in the Project program, men and women were funded at equal rates—around 15 percent succeeded in getting an award.
“So the good news is that when we evaluate research proposals based on the science, it doesn’t matter if you are a male or female applicant, you can have an amazing idea and have the same chance of getting funded,” says Cara Tannenbaum, scientific director of the CIHR Institute of Gender and Health and a coauthor of the study.
But in the Foundation scheme, the authors found signs of a gender bias, Tannebaum says. The funding success rate for male applicants was 4 percentage points higher than that for female applicants. Unconscious bias seems to operate more strongly when evaluating the leadership potential of the applicant, Tannenbaum adds.
CIHR’s attempt to curb unconscious bias
Even before Tannenbaum’s results were published, she and her colleagues at CIHR were already considering ways to address potential gender disparities under these new funding schemes. One idea was to remove the name of the applicant and do a blind review, but they found that there is something about the language in the way people write their own applications and reference letters that allows gendered stereotypes to emerge, Tannenbaum explains.
So instead, in 2016, they created an unconscious bias training module for peer reviewers. When CIHR ran the 2016-2017 grant competition, all reviewers were required to do this training before reviewing the proposals. And this time, the success rate between male and female applicants equalized in the Foundation program, suggesting that the unconscious-bias training was an effective intervention, Tannenbaum says. The researchers plan to collect data on several more rounds of competition to confirm this preliminary finding.
I congratulate the authors on this elegant study and hope NIH and others take note.—Molly Carnes,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
The results are promising enough that in the meantime, CIHR has made the unconscious-bias training module mandatory training for all peer reviewers in CIHR’s largest open grant competitions. “We’re being really upfront and quite aggressive about it, to be honest with you,” Tannenbaum says. Furthermore, because the initial gender disparities in the Foundation Program seem to occur at Stage 1 (during the assessment of the applicant), CIHR instituted a policy to ensure that the proportion of female applicants in Stage 1 will equal the proportion of female applicants moving to Stage 2 (the assessment of the science), the CIHR policy team writes in an email to The Scientist.
Molly Carnes of the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has extensively researched implicit bias in science notes similarities between Canada’s Foundation Program and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award—a program focused on evaluating a scientist’s leadership potential. In its first year, 2004, no women were among its nine awardees, and in 2017, just one woman (among 11 men) was an awardee.
“I congratulate the authors on this elegant study and hope NIH and others take note,” Carnes writes in an email to The Scientist. “There are several programs at NIH that focus on the investigator—it will be important to follow the gender distributions of the awardees.”
Emma Wojtowicz, a public affairs specialist at the NIH, points out that the proportions of female awardees of the Pioneer Award reflect—or even exceed—the proportions of female applicants each year. “Since 2005, 23 percent of the applicants and 28 percent of the awardees have been women,” she writes in an email to The Scientist.
Canada’s spotlight on gender equity
In recent years, Canada has launched a number of initatives to retain women in STEM, many spearheaded by Canadian Science Minister Kirsty Duncan, who decided to make the issue a priority for Canadian science when she was appointed in November 2015.
You have to make [bias] explicit. You’ve got to draw attention to it for people to learn to see it.—Vianne Timmons,
University of Regina
Since her tenure began, she has asked universities to set and meet specific, transparent equity targets for hiring women, racialized groups, people with disabilities, and aboriginal peoples as researchers at Canadian universities—or risk losing funding for a prestigious tri-agency program called the Canada Research Chairs. The three Canadian science funding agencies involved are CIHR, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Through the Canada Research Chairs program, universities can apply for support to hire exceptional faculty, but now, continued support to the universities is contingent on their ability to meet their equity goals in the applicants recruited and nominated for these chairs.
“The minister really pushed universities to step up and deal with [bias]. I give her a lot of credit for it,” says Vianne Timmons, president of the University of Regina in Saskatchewan and co-chair of the tri-agency Advisory Committee on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Policy. “It is something I’m glad we are tackling,” Timmons adds. “I think we’re at a turning point in society.”
Through Universities Canada, Canadian university presidents collectively participated in unconscious-bias training in spring 2017, Timmons explains. The experience was so valuable to her that she brought a facilitator to the University of Regina to train her senior leadership team as well. “You have to make [bias] explicit,” she says. “You’ve got to draw attention to it for people to learn to see it.”
Senior leadership in the Canadian federal government also has showed a commitment to pursuing gender equity by hosting the Gender Summit in Montreal in November 2017. The summit brought together advocates of gender equity across the country to outline actionable, concrete steps to eliminate disparities. “There have been a few institutions or groups that have been working on advocacy for a long time,” says Imogen Coe, Dean of the Faculty of Science at Ryerson University in Toronto who attended the summit. “But this was a national stage and an expression by the federal funding leaders showing their commitment to this issue.”
Correction (January 24): The article incorrectly referred to the Canada Research Chairs program as the Canada Exellence Research Chairs. The Scientist regrets the error.
Update (March 9): The article includes additional data on the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award and a comment from the NIH press office. | {
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Accelerated melting of two fast-moving outlet glaciers that drain Antarctic ice into the Amundsen Sea Embayment is likely the result, in part, of an increase in sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean, according to new University of Washington research.
Higher-than-normal sea-level pressure north of the Amundsen Sea sets up westerly winds that push surface water away from the glaciers and allow warmer deep water to rise to the surface under the edges of the glaciers, said Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences.
"This part of Antarctica is affected by what's happening on the rest of the planet, in particular the tropical Pacific," he said.
The research involves the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, two of the five largest glaciers in Antarctica. Those two glaciers are important because they drain a large portion of the ice sheet. As they melt from below, they also gain speed, draining the ice sheet faster and contributing to sea level rise. Eventually that could lead to global sea level rise of as much as 6 feet, though that would take hundreds to thousands of years, Steig said.
NASA scientists recently documented that a section of the Pine Island Glacier the size of New York City had begun breaking off into a huge iceberg. Steig noted that such an event is normal and scientists were fortunate to be on hand to record it on film. Neither that event nor the new UW findings clearly link thinning Antarctic ice to human causes.
But Steig's research shows that unusual winds in this area are linked to changes far away, in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Warmer-than-usual sea-surface temperatures, especially in the central tropics, lead to changes in atmospheric circulation that influence conditions near the Antarctic coast line. Recent decades have been exceptionally warm in the tropics, he said, and to whatever extent unusual conditions in the tropical Pacific can be attributed to human activities, unusual conditions in Antarctica also can be attributed to those causes.
He noted that sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific last showed significant warming in the 1940s, and the impact in the Amundsen Sea area then was probably comparable to what has been observed recently. That suggests that the 1940s tropical warming could have started the changes in the Amundsen Sea ice shelves that are being observed now, he said.
Steig presents his findings Tuesday (Dec. 6) at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In another presentation Wednesday, he will discuss evidence from ice cores on the history of Antarctic climate in the last century.
He emphasized that natural variations in tropical sea-surface temperatures associated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation play a significant role. The 1990s were notably different from all other decades in the tropics, with two major El Niño events offset by only minor La Niña events.
"The point is that if you want to predict what's going to happen in the next fifty, one-hundred, one-thousand years in Antarctica, you have to pay attention to what's happening elsewhere," he said. "The tropics are where there is a large source of uncertainty."
###
Other researchers involved with the work are Qinghua Ding and David Battisti of the UW and Adrian Jenkins of the British Antarctic Survey. The research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the United Kingdom's Natural Environment Research Council and the UW Quaternary Research Center.
For more information, contact Steig at 206-685-3715, 206-543-6327 or [email protected].
To view a NASA video of the crack in the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, see: http://bit. ly/ uPFruW
In October, 2011, NASA's Operation IceBridge discovered a major rift in the Pine Island Glacier in western Antarctica. This crack, which extends at least 18 miles and is 50 meters deep, could produce an iceberg more than 800 square kilometers in size. IceBridge scientists returned soon after to make the first-ever detailed airborne measurements of a major iceberg calving in progress. (Credit: NASA/Goddard/Jefferson Beck) | {
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ASHBURN, Va. -- Washington Redskins corner Josh Norman called Eric Reid's comments earlier in the week a slap in the face to the Players Coalition, criticizing the Carolina Panthers safety Thursday.
Reid went after Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins Sunday, first on the field during the coin toss and then with his postgame comments, claiming that Jenkins and the coalition had "sold out" to the NFL and had co-opted the message from Reid and Colin Kaepernick.
"To hear Eric come out and do what he did it's almost like, wow it's a slap in the face," Norman said, "because Malcolm has been nothing but stand-up in the Players Coalition, like nothing but stand-up, and everyone knows that.
"For him to take a shot like that ... he's not only taking a shot at him, he's taking a shot at everyone in the Players Coalition."
Norman spoke to the media for 16 minutes, 46 seconds Thursday, with more than nine minutes devoted to what happened Sunday between Reid and Jenkins. Norman's first response -- to a question on whether he had a comment on what happened -- lasted approximately four minutes. Norman referenced an article on The Undefeated that laid out the issues between Reid and Kaepernick in particular and the coalition. Reid said Sunday that Jenkins had "co-opted" the movement that Kaepernick began.
The Undefeated article spelled out the reasons for the conflict, starting with the owners meeting in Dallas last November. The coalition was going to meet with the owners to discuss social justice issues and eventually received $89 million to help with its causes. Reid and Kaepernick did not attend. Other players broke from the coalition as well, partly because they wanted Kaepernick, whose initial pregame actions in 2016 started the dialogue, to represent them to the league.
Redskins cornerback Josh Norman said Thursday that Eric Reid's criticism of Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins was 'a slap in the face' to the Players Coalition. Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
"Our take was I'm sorry, but if guys voted for him to be that then OK so be it, but it wasn't that," Norman said. "He started something at that time in which everybody saw but what did he do with that? Where was the ball carried from that? What is it doing now to the point where someone can get behind?
"If that's your agenda, to have someone who is the leader of something, I don't feel like the leader is being backed by one person. A leader has to be backed by everyone. And if they decide they don't want to go that route, then hey, you're not going to show up? We don't know what direction you're trying to go in. We're all trying to go in the direction of helping people. That is the main objective here. It's not who gets this or -- it's not a parade here."
Norman also didn't like that lawyers got involved last year, such as when one of Kaepernick's attorneys formally requested that Jenkins admit that Kaepernick had not been invited to an October meeting between some players and owners, an assertion that was contradicted by Jenkins and other members of the coalition.
"I can't respect that as a man," Norman said. "You've got to come and talk to us directly."
Norman pointed to the community work done by players in the coalition such as Jenkins, Demario Davis and Anquan Boldin, among others. Kaepernick has been active as well.
Norman said he called Reid twice this week, but never talked to him. A week before facing the Eagles, Carolina played at Washington. There was no confrontation between Reid and Norman.
"Eric knows his stuff," Norman said. "I'd tell him the same thing. He saw me the week before everything he did. He could have said that. But I just feel like that all is for show.
"If you want to be a parakeet: 'What you say, Kap?' 'What you say?' You can say that all you want, but the thing is, you can't tell another man what they doing if they're not gonna come in here and be a man about themselves and tell us the direction of what you want to do."
Norman said he wasn't trying to shun Reid, but that he wanted the facts to emerge regarding what happened last November.
"At the end of the day I don't really care about all that outside stuff," Norman said. "That's all for the shows and the glamour and the Instagram and what you take pictures on. No this is all realistic stuff here.
"What's your agenda? Is it to play football or is it to go in someone's face about what you feel like happened to you?" Norman said. "In that case you could have burned me last week, I'm part of the group. He didn't do that. Like I said you have your own agenda about what you want to do, follow that, whatever, do your own thing, be merry with each other, that's cool, be merry, run around the merry-go-round.
"Best to him and his homeboy Kap and whatever they got going on. Best to them. Whatever."
For Norman, it comes back to leadership, and he likes the direction Jenkins has provided -- and did not like what he described as the lack of leadership previously.
"I can't follow you into the abyss," Norman said. "I mean you got to have a plan, you got to have something in motion." | {
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LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Unikrn, one of the world’s leading esports brands, is proud to announce a partnership with MGM Resorts International to bring live competitive gaming and esports tournaments to LEVEL UP inside MGM Grand Hotel & Casino. In 2018, Unikrn will host tournaments on Fridays and Saturdays from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Each tournament will offer competitors exciting prizes including cash and UnikoinGold tokens, among others, as well as exclusive experiences at select MGM Resorts properties.
Unikrn has cemented itself as a global leader in esports by bringing tournaments, professional coverage, regulated betting and interactive gaming to esports audiences throughout the years. The company is best-known for its deep roots in the esports community it services, as well as the high-level experiences it provides.
Since its opening in December 2016, LEVEL UP, located between Hakkasan Nightclub and the MGM Grand Race & Sports Book, has changed the way Las Vegas views lounge entertainment. The addition of bi-weekly esports competitions will enhance the diverse offerings within the venue, providing additional interactive opportunities for guests within this skill-based adult playground.
“There's never been a partnership quite like this fusion, and we're pumped to be in the center of it,” said Rahul Sood, CEO Unikrn. “Traditional entertainment destinations have a lot of room to grow in appealing to esports and gaming fans, and MGM Resorts International is leading the way, with Unikrn, by bringing regular esports tournaments to LEVEL UP -- this is thrilling.”
Lovell Walker, executive director of interactive gaming development for MGM Resorts International, said, “LEVEL UP was designed to attract both the next generation of players and current players seeking innovation, making this partnership with Unikrn a great fit within the space. With our commitment to the future of esports and increased focus on enhancing our guests’ entertainment experience, we know Unikrn will be a tremendous partner.”
ABOUT UNIKRN
Established in 2014, Unikrn is leading the world of bookmaking for esports and video games and has become woven into the fabric of the esports community. Their contributions and assets include team ownership, tournament series, multiple original content platforms, sponsored community creators and a group working with casinos to bring in modern gaming audiences. The company’s close relationships with gambling powerhouses such as Tabcorp, Australia’s largest betting company, have positioned them as the definitive bridge between the new world of competitive gaming and the old world of sports bookmakers and casinos.
In 2015, Unikrn raised $10M in venture finance from Ashton Kutcher, Elisabeth Murdoch, Guy O’Seary, Mark Cuban, Shari Redstone, Binary, Hyperspeed, Indicator Ventures, and Tabcorp. Their UnikoinGold Crypto Token which was backed by Alphabit, Blockchain Capital, CoinCircle, ConsenSys, DCG, Pantera and many others recently broke records by surpassing $30,000,000 and became the largest token sale in video games and esports ever.
About MGM Resorts International
MGM Resorts International (NYSE: MGM) is an S&P 500® global entertainment company with national and international locations featuring best-in-class hotels and casinos, state-of-the-art meetings and conference spaces, incredible live and theatrical entertainment experiences, and an extensive array of restaurant, nightlife and retail offerings. MGM Resorts creates immersive, iconic experiences through its suite of Las Vegas-inspired brands. The MGM Resorts portfolio encompasses 27 unique hotel offerings including some of the most recognizable resort brands in the industry. The company is expanding throughout the U.S. and around the world, developing MGM Springfield in Massachusetts and MGM COTAI in Macau, and debuting the first international Bellagio branded hotel in Shanghai. The 77,000 global employees of MGM Resorts are proud of their company for being recognized as one of FORTUNE® Magazine's World's Most Admired Companies®. For more information, visit us at www.mgmresorts.com. | {
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The one where Eren and Steph talk about how some “born-Muslim” tokenize converts and metaphorically “get off” on our stories.
*The show is produced by Mosaic Sound Design (sound engineering by Ombor Mitra).
FROM THE PODCAST:
Steph’s comic convert-story: www.lovegoddiversity.com/about/my-convert-story/
Eren’s blog: www.erenarruna.com
Amina Wadud’s Quran and Woman
Dr. Aaidh Ibn Abdullah Al-Qarni’s You can be the Happiest Woman in the World
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Could the 2016 Star Trek movie be a repeat for Benedict Cumberbatch? Well according to the actor, it’s possible. Find out what Cumberbatch (and Zachary Quinto) are saying at San Diego Comic-Con about the return of Khan.
Cumberbatch Talks Thawing Out Khan For 2016 + Quinto’s Khan Comments
The big secret revealed in last summer’s Star Trek Into Darkness was that Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘John Harrison’ character was actually Khan Noonian Singh. The film ended with him captured and returned to his cryogenic pod, but could he come back in the sequel? According to Cumberbatch it is possible. While at San Diego Comic-Con to promote his role in the animated movie Penguins of Madagascar, he talked a little Trek with MTV, saying:
Maybe [Khan could come back]. He is in freezer…we have all defrosted chicken in our day…Set the toaster to defrost and he will come out all bad and angry again. I don’t know. It depends on what direction they are going to take. There is definitely room for him to come back in some shape or form.
Cumberbatch at Penguins of Madagascar panel
The actor also discussed that that he did talk to Into Darkness director JJ Abrams about maybe rejoining him on Star Wars Episode VII, however in the end "It made sense not to do it."
MTV also talked to Zachary Quinto who said he was "really excited" about the Star Trek sequel. Specifically on the notion of Cumberbatch returning as Khan he said:
Any chance to work with Benedict…But I don’t know if it is now or later. I don’t know what they have in store for Ben? I would love to have him back.
Quinto also confirmed that he "doesn’t think" he will be part of
Quinto also said he doesn’t think he will be returning to the role of Sylar for NBC’s upcoming Heroes Reborn.
POLL: Defrost Khan for Star Trek 2016?
Weigh in on bringing back Khan in the comments below and the latest poll
POLL
[poll id=”734″]
Could Khan get thawed out for next Star Trek? | {
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« Attention, ceci n’est pas une blague. Facebook est en train de censurer tout le contenu humoristique sur l’affaire Benalla. » L’administrateur du site parodique belge Nordpresse.be ne décolèrait pas, dimanche 22 juillet, et le faisait savoir, après avoir reçu des signalements d’internautes l’informant que leurs partages de certains articles ont été retirés du réseau social. Il a ainsi relayé plusieurs de ces témoignages, captures d’écran à l’appui.
Attention, ceci n'est pas une blague. Facebook est en train de censurer tout le contenu humoristique sur l'affaire… https://t.co/1EnvWeNp6p — Nordpresse (@Nordpresse)
Le Monde a par ailleurs pu constater qu’un message d’erreur s’affiche lorsque l’on tente de partager un article de Nordpresse.be sur le réseau social dimanche : « Téléchargement impossible ». Il reste possible de publier un message, affichant simplement l’adresse Web du lien (URL) sans image ni titre. Cela vaut pour les différents canulars du site en lien avec l’affaire Benalla, mais aussi, selon nos essais, pour l’ensemble de ses publications sur tous types de sujets.
Sur Facebook, le site a d’ailleurs précisé que « au-delà de l’affaire Benalla, ce sont quasiment tous les liens renvoyant vers notre site qui ont été dégagés de Facebook ».
Il est impossible de partager un article de Nordpresse.be sur Facebook dimanche 22 juillet. FACEBOOK
Plusieurs observateurs ont mis en cause le réseau social, l’accusant de procéder à une forme de censure politique. L’avocate et chroniqueuse Raquel Garrido, ancienne porte-parole de La France insoumise, a fustigé sur Twitter une « censure (…) absolument intolérable », réclamant des explications de « Facebook » ainsi que de « l’Elysée ».
La journaliste Aude Lancelin, qui travaille notamment pour Le Média, a elle aussi adressé son soutien au site satirique, « dont les contenus sur l’affaire Macron-Benalla ont été placés en indésirables. Comment nomme-t-on un régime qui met l’humour hors la loi ? », écrit-elle.
Facebook dément
Facebook a démenti dimanche avoir cherché à bloquer la diffusion de contenus du site parodique, invoquant des « problèmes techniques » pour expliquer des difficultés d’internautes à partager ces contenus. « Les contenus » de Nordpresse « sont autorisés sur Facebook », a fait savoir le réseau social dans un communiqué diffusé dimanche en fin d’après-midi.
En revanche, « nous avons identifié un problème technique empêchant l’affichage d’un aperçu » lorsque les internautes cherchaient à partager un lien sur le site de Nordpresse, a ajouté le réseau social. Ce problème « est en train d’être réparé, et nous nous excusons pour la gêne occasionnée ».
Les messages des internautes qui ont partagé des articles du site retirés par la suite indiquaient simplement que ces publications étaient « indésirables » au sens du réseau social, sans autre précision.
Pendant la nuit, Facebook fait le ménage. https://t.co/yUyt8YVRMX — KatellFavennec (@Katell Favennec)
Il n’est donc pas possible de savoir en l’état les raisons qui ont amené Facebook à bloquer le partage des articles de Nordpresse.be. Ce manque de transparence dans la mise en œuvre de telles décisions éditoriales de la part de l’entreprise est régulièrement critiqué en France comme ailleurs dans le monde.
Concernant les accusations de « censure politique » à l’encontre du réseau social, il faut néanmoins préciser qu’elles se heurtent au fait qu’aucun autre site, qu’il soit satirique ou non, n’a vu, à notre connaissance, ses publications partiellement ou totalement bloquées de la sorte par la plateforme dans le contexte de l’affaire Benalla.
Une chose est sûre : si l’on se fie aux règlements de Facebook, le contenu de Nordpresse.be n’a pas pu être supprimé parce qu’il s’agissait de « fausses informations », comme l’ont supposé certains observateurs sur les réseaux sociaux comme Sophia Chikirou, ancienne présidente du Média.
FACEBOOK
Un site « satirique » aux pratiques parfois douteuses
Par ailleurs, le site Nordpresse.be est connu pour se jouer des limites entre satire et tromperie. Ainsi, il s’était targué d’avoir piégé la rédaction du Parisien en pleine campagne présidentielle pour lui faire diffuser une fausse information. Il s’agissait en réalité d’un canular pour le moins douteux, qui avait écorné l’image du journal auprès de certains lecteurs du site parodique – quand bien même l’information visée, à savoir le soutien de Manuel Valls à Emmanuel Macron, était avérée.
Une bonne partie du contenu de Nordpresse.be relève par ailleurs plus de gros titres de tabloïds que de l’humour. « Très souvent, Nordpresse.be n’est pas dans la satire, mais dans la “fake news trash” », constatait, en octobre 2017, Sébastien Liebus, l’un des auteurs du Gorafi. Parfois comparées, les démarches des deux sites sont en réalité fondamentalement différentes à son sens.
D’autant que Nordpresse.be utilise parfois d’autres ficelles qui brouillent encore plus la ligne entre satire assumée et tromperie. Il utilise régulièrement des adresses qui ressemblent à celles de vrais sites d’informations comme LeCanardEnchaine.net ou FranceInfoTele.com, pour partager ses canulars. En faisant cela, les internautes qui ne cliquent pas sur la publication peuvent croire qu’ils sont face à l’information d’un site « sérieux ».
FACEBOOK
Résultat : il n’est pas rare de voir des internautes piégés par des articles du site et les relayer au premier degré. Le 16 juillet, Jean Messiha, membre du bureau national du Rassemblement national (ex-FN), prenait au sérieux un canular évoquant douze morts à Paris après la finale de la Coupe du monde de football.
Qu’on les apprécie ou non, les canulars de Nordpresse.be n’ont en tout cas pas disparu bien longtemps de Facebook. L’administrateur du site a déjà annoncé son retour sous un nouveau nom, NordInfo.be. | {
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Apple has announced, via Twitter, that it’s working with Consumer Reports to nail down what happened to its MacBook and MacBook Pro hardware. The announcement came from Phil Schiller, who reports the company is “Working with CR to understand their battery tests. Results do not match our extensive lab tests or field data.”
There’s a great deal of smoke around this issue (everyone being off for the holidays probably hasn’t helped), but not much in the way of new data just yet. What we know is that some Apple buyers have reported abnormally low battery life ever since the new MacBooks launched. At first, these issues seemed like they might be limited to the 15-inch MacBook Pros, which use AMD discrete GPUs, but later testing has shown this is not the case. Consumer Reports is not the only publication to report that Apple’s battery life: 9to5 Mac reported relatively low figures for their own tests (6-8 hours).
There are several intersecting issues that, I think, are collectively feeding the issue here. First, there’s the fact that Apple’s battery life estimates are typically extremely good. No manufacturer is 100% accurate, because use models change so much between people, but Apple has a reputation for delivering most of what it promises. For Apple systems to be dropping so dramatically (and even 8 hours when Apple says 10 hours isn’t good), it implies that something else is going on here. Second, there’s the sheer erratic nature of Consumer Reports’ results. If Apple or Dell says that a laptop should get 10 hours of battery life and you regularly get 6, it implies that the company’s battery estimate methodology is poor. If your laptop lasts two hours in one test and 9 hours the next, all while you’re performing exactly the same amount of work, it implies something altogether different.
Third, there’s the fact that modern power management has gotten exceedingly complex. Some of you likely remember when Intel’s SpeedStep technology debuted. The idea of a CPU that could self-adjust its clock in response to workloads and the need to conserve battery life was a huge boost for laptop manufacturers and consumers. Over time, power management technology has advanced considerably; AMD’s implementation of Adaptive Voltage and Frequency Scaling (AVFS) system uses hundreds of sensors embedded around the SoC to gather real-time information about the SoC’s temperature and power states, and adjusts the chip accordingly. Intel hasn’t adopted AVFS for its own chips, but it has added new technologies like SpeedShift to allow its CPUs to move in and out of idle states more quickly and to adjust clock speed dynamically. But all of these changes and technologies come with their own complexities. Some are entirely transparent to the operating system, while others require explicit OS support.
Fourth, as CPU improvements have largely stalled, software, not process node improvements, is increasingly responsible for power savings. This, in turn, makes it more likely that software can screw up. If Intel releases a new CPU that uses 30% less power than the previous generation, that gain should show up in every test case. Now, imagine that Intel uses a combination of better codec offload, GPU processing, and more aggressive CPU frequency scaling to cut power consumption. Suddenly, gains that were previously due to improvements to underlying technology are highly dependent on what the end-user is doing. If you compare battery life in video decode scenarios, the results may look great. Switch to a CPU-centric workload that doesn’t give the chip any time to drop into a lower power-state, and they suddenly show no improvement at all. In fact, the newer CPU may use even more power than the old one if it has a higher max clock.
There are a number of odd things about the Consumer Reports’ results. The variation is extremely strange. The fact that Chrome is reported as returning much better results than Safari is strange. It’s possible that this issue is related to an extremely specific bug or errata that causes a problem in Safari that results in the CPU sometimes not dropping into sleep states properly, or pegs GPU usage where it shouldn’t, or that some particular issue related to GPU acceleration in web pages is causing problems. Apple’s decision to remove the “Time Remaining” metric from its laptops could be evidence that the company knows it has a problem and wants to reduce consumer complaints while it deals with it — or it could be completely unrelated.
Right now, it’s all a bit of a muddle and rather unclear. | {
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Australians are one step closer to being able to buy a car that emits only water vapour from its tailpipe. Now we’re waiting for the hydrogen superhighway.
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This story was first published in November 2019, but it has now been updated with current information on hydrogen fuelling potential in the Australian market. The car that emits only water vapour from its tailpipe – the Hyundai Nexo hydrogen-powered vehicle – is officially ready for Australian roads. The electric car that runs on hydrogen has been formally certified by the Australian government, cleared for use on local roads, and scored top marks in the latest crash safety tests. The Hyundai Nexo will be on sale from next year but initially will only be available on lease to governments or fleets that have access to a hydrogen refilling station.
The Australian Capital Territory is poised to take delivery of the first of 20 Hyundai Nexo “fuel cell” cars early next year once the installation of its hydrogen refuelling station is complete. The Queensland Government will add five Hyundai Nexo cars once its hydrogen station in Brisbane is operational by the middle of 2020. Toyota in partnership with the Victorian Government will open a hydrogen refueller in Melbourne by the end of 2020. Hyundai says hydrogen stations in South Australia, West Australia and Tasmania are due to follow but are yet to be announced.
For now there are no hydrogen refuellers locked in for the nation's biggest population centre, although there are preliminary discussions about an installation in western Sydney. To date, the only hydrogen refuelling point in Australia is behind Hyundai’s Sydney head office for its use only. Toyota Australia has a hydrogen refueller on the back of a truck so it can test its small fleet of fuel cell cars in remote areas. “The future is now,” said Scott Nargar, Hyundai’s senior manager for future mobility and government relations. “We really need infrastructure on the forecourts of service stations, we need infrastructure in shopping centres, we need infrastructure in the home.” The Hyundai executive said “the transition is starting to happen, it’s just a matter of catching up with what’s happening in Europe and North America”.
“Our vehicles are on the roads here now,” said Mr Nargar. “Our fuel cell vehicle is certified and we’re ready to start selling it, leasing it, we’re just waiting for the infrastructure to catch up.” He said it was time for governments to “consider the technology that’s coming in from ourselves and some of our competitors. We need to work together”. Hydrogen-powered cars have the advantage of being refuelled in about five minutes, a similar amount of time to refuelling a petrol car. The hydrogen powers what is best described as a built-in power station – or fuel cell – that creates electricity that, in turn, charges an onboard battery pack which runs the vehicle’s electric motor.
The advantage is that it doesn’t take as long as an electric car to refuel from empty. The downside is that hydrogen refuelling stations are scarce and the fuel is more volatile to transport. To hedge its bets, Hyundai says it has all four options covered: petrol-electric hybrid, plug-in hybrid, pure electric, and hydrogen power. “No matter what the automotive landscape may look like in the future we are confident we will have a solution that will suit our customers’ needs,” said Mr Nargar. HOW IT WORKS Hydrogen-powered "fuel cell" cars effectively have an onboard power station that generates its own electricity to charge an onboard battery pack which, in turn, powers an electric motor which drives the wheels.
The vehicle's hydrogen tank can be refilled in about the same time as it takes to refuel a petrol car. This means drivers don't need to change their behaviour and can avoid the long recharging times of pure electric cars. The hydrogen is processed by a "fuel cell" which creates the electricity required to charge the onboard battery pack, and/or power the electric motor which drives the wheels. For now there is only one permanent hydrogen refuelling station in Australia (located at Hyundai's Sydney head office), but outlets are being built in Canberra and Melbourne, and a commercial hydrogen refueller is planned for the greater Sydney metro area in the next 12 months to two years. Other states are due to follow. MORE: Hyundai Nexo news, reviews, comparisons and videos
MORE: Everything Hyundai | {
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Tony Parker believes he can play as many as 20 years with the San Antonio Spurs, similar to the longevity of Kobe Bryant with the Los Angeles Lakers.
“Why not?” Parker said. “The way I play, I think I can definitely play that long.”
“When I see (Lakers point guard) Steve Nash being an All-Star at 38, I feel like I've got the same kind of game,” he said. “Neither one of us jumps that much. We're sort of like the kings of layups and great pick-and-roll players, so I can see myself playing that long, too.”
Parker plans to play for France in the 2016 Olympics, which he promised will be his last international competition to Gregg Popovich.
Parker's current deal with the Spurs expires in 2015 and won't turn 32 until May.
“It all depends on what Coach Pop and the Spurs are going to decide with the team, but me, I'd like to play a long time,” said Parker. “I feel like I'm in my prime and my body feels great.
“I take care of my body, and I've already told Coach Pop that after 2016 I will be done with the (French) national team. So I think I can play a long time.” | {
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Photo : Streeter Lecka ( Getty )
It’s not enough that the Houston Rockets have to whine that they lost Game 1 because the refs didn’t take their signature gaming of the “landing zone” rule as seriously as usual. They elected to follow that snit with what is perhaps the most pathetically lame sports media leak of all time, as ESPN miraculously got its hands on a report made by the Rockets that details 81 questionable calls in Game 7 of last year’s Western Conference Finals. That absurdly comprehensive list of grievances, which was initially made possible because the NBA gave Houston a full-game version of their typical last-two-minutes referee report, is accompanied by a memo that the Rockets reportedly never sent, because they conveyed its message during in-person meetings with the league.
I don’t know who delivered the Rockets’ message, but if his in-person complaints sounded anything like the memo, I hope someone from the NBA took him into a private corporate bathroom and gave him the swirlie of a lifetime. The memo’s smug conclusion, clearly based in Logic and Facts, frames the failure of the Rockets to hit any of 27 straight threes, and the failure of Chris Paul’s hamstring to stay healthy, as less significant than those 81 disputed calls. It is, the memo insists, a league-wide crisis of the highest importance.
“Referees likely changed the eventual NBA champion,” the memo says. “There can be no worse result for the NBA.”
Elsewhere, the Rockets patronize the referees by arguing that many of them simply aren’t sophisticated or advanced enough to call a Houston Rockets basketball game in the way it needs—nay, deserves—to be called. It’s the veteran referees, they say, who “exhibit the most bias against our players.” They add:
“The reason we are in this situation,” the memo says, “is the efforts made to improve the referees have been too slow, not extensive enough, and have been held back by entrenched referees who are resisting reform.”
The dubious and annoying reasoning that Houston gives for these condescending conclusions is grounded in the team assigning a point value for every “potential infraction” the league identified. By heroically stretching the meaning of the word “potential,” the Rockets awarded themselves an additional 18.6 points in their 101-92 loss. Like so:
With about 10:40 left in the third quarter, Eric Gordon lost the ball when he dribbled it off Curry’s foot. In the game, it was a live-ball turnover. The league deemed it a “potential infraction” kicked ball on Curry, according to Houston’s analysis—meaning it might have been a kick, but there is no way to tell conclusively. The Rockets counted that as 1.1 points lost, using what appears to have been an estimate of their average half-court points per possession, according to league sources. (They used that 1.1 figure for all such plays that ended Houston possessions.)
That is somehow not even the most exhausting attempt at a correction:
With about 8:55 left in the third quarter, Kevon Looney rebounded a Klay Thompson missed 3-pointer. As Looney went up for a putback, Gordon made some contact with him that went uncalled. Looney missed. Looney jumped to try to tip the ball in, and Harden leaped to block Looney’s shot—making some contact with Looney’s arm and upper body. Again, no call was made. The loose ball ricocheted to Curry, who passed it to Kevin Durant for an open 3-pointer which went in. The league cited Harden’s attempted block as a potential infraction—a possible foul, but one the league could not say conclusively was a foul even upon review, according to Houston’s analysis. Houston concluded that the non-call cost them two points.
The Rockets got those two points, in their estimation, because Durant wouldn’t have had a chance at the three, and because Looney is a 61 percent free throw shooter. Oh, and obviously because taking the phrase “potential infraction” in the worst possible faith helps the memo make they case that the Rockets were robbed by the fraudulent Warriors and the brainless officials. This is the lawyer’s equivalent of flopping, basically.
It’s all pretty embarrassing, but there’s a certain cynical strategy behind it. Houston clearly decided after that Game 1 loss that its best move would be to dredge up petty gripes from last year and then feed them to both The Athletic and ESPN in the hope that this would put intense pressure on the NBA to not make it look they’re boning Houston out of the postseason one call at a time. In that way, it’s something like the NBA equivalent of a political campaign complaining about biased media coverage. But in another, more specific way, it’s a basketball team making itself look silly and sad by marshaling all available shreds of evidence to the effect that they are in fact actually smarter and handsomer and more talented than the Warriors. Thankfully the NBA does not make a habit of overturning playoff outcomes on appeal. I hope Golden State sweeps these clowns back into the toilet.
[ESPN] | {
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For Lars Fogt er noget nær det tætteste, man kan komme på et beviseligt dumt svin. Alligevel arbejder Lars Fogt på B.T., hvilket fortæller meget om B.T. Alligevel formidler det danske pressekorps rutinemæssigt hans historier videre, hvilket fortæller meget om det danske pressekorps.
Det var dét, der skete, da Lars Fogt besluttede sig for at begå karaktermord på Uffe Elbæk. Karaktermordet er en specialitet, som Lars Fogt har udviklet gennem en lang karriere. Måske skal man se lidt nærmere på afsenderen?
I november 2010 skrev Søren Pind (V) på Facebook at Lars Fogt er ”en uvederhæftig, løgnagtig bedrager”. Dengang havde Lars Fogt skrevet kritisk om Søren Pinds aktiviteter i ejendomsselskabet Nordicom. Søren Pind udtalte senere til Politiken: ”Jeg har fremsat et udsagn, der er bevidst injurierende, og hvis B.T. eller Lars Fogt ikke agter at imødegå det, må det jo stå til troende.” Søren Pind sagde også: ”Hvis man siger sådan, som jeg gør, og B.T. og Lars Fogt ikke kan vinde et injuriesøgsmål i retten, er det fordi, jeg har ret.” | {
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Valhalla is a martial arts gym located in Irvine, California. We provide a safe environment for adults to learn the grappling and take-down concepts found in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Judo, and wrestling. Our members vary from first-timers, advanced learners, college students, to working professionals.
Valhalla was founded by A.J. Albert in 2012. He is a black belt under Tim Cartmell. A.J. has over a decade of martial arts experience.
Reach out to arrange a free introductory class!
Address: 4213 Campus Drive, Ste P166C (Inside Elite Fitness Taekwondo in University Center)
Irvine, California | {
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Article content
The CEO of Leamington cannabis producer Aphria — under siege from short-sellers claiming that backroom deals enriched insiders — said the company will release a report next week addressing every allegation.
Vic Neufeld said Aphria’s response will rebut the barrage of accusations levelled Monday that mostly focused on the company’s recent acquisitions in Latin America.
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“You will find all of the 20-some allegations, line-by-line, point-by-point with pictures — real pictures, truthful pictures — on what we have called LATAM asset acquisition,” Neufeld told the Star on Friday. “Every point will be very informative and will shed the real light on the story.”
He said that rebuttal will likely be released Wednesday. Aphria announced Thursday it had appointed an independent committee to review the company’s recent acquisition of its Latin American holdings and confirm it was on the level.
What I don’t want to do is waste shareholder money and executive management time on something that could end up with a realization of zero.
Neufeld said Liberty Health Sciences, a company backed by Aphria that was the target of a second round of allegations, will likely release its own response on Monday.
He said the possibility of litigation prevents him from addressing specific details of the allegations until the official response next week.
“I am not hiding,” he said. “We’re just very focused on getting it right in terms of all of the facts — those that have been disclosed and those that we’re going to have to disclose — to make sure that we’re not pre-emptively giving selective disclosure.”
But he said it will be “proven by further forensic legal work” that no insiders were enriched at the detriment of unwitting shareholders.
That was one of many allegations from Quintessential Capital Management and the forensic analysis firm Hindenburg Research, who took aim at Aphria on Monday, calling it a “shell game” and a “black hole.”
Both Quintessential and Hindenburg were reportedly short-selling Aphria stock. A short-seller can profit if a security’s price declines.
They claim Aphria diverted funds into inflated investments held by insiders, and that its recent Latin American transactions are worthless. Hindenburg claimed the official registered office of Aphria’s $145-million Jamaican acquisition “is an abandoned building that was sold off by the bank earlier this year.” | {
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It seems not uncommon for gourmands to be bibliophiles and, for those of who combine these interests, it's not unusual to find the odd trace of someone else's snack sandwiched between the pages of an old volume.
Most of us, curled in our favourite reading chair with a steamy mug of something reassuring will have come across a previous reader's biscuit trail, crushed into the page gutter. There's something lovely about the connection with others who have loved the same book, sitting in their own chairs with their own mug, who knows how many years ago.
In terms of acceptability I realise this ranks alongside an admission that I pick my nose and eat it, but I can never resist tasting the crumbs. I know, I know: it's vile and unhygienic but I've got books here going back to the 17th century. I'm not going to miss the opportunity to taste a Jacobean hobnob.
But according to The Argus newspaper, a Worthing librarian has gone one better than mere biscuitry, discovering a rasher of bacon in a returned library book.
Unfortunately, the Argus report goes on to list other things found in library books rather than pursuing the obvious and far more exciting culinary angle. Was it smoked? Was it streaky or back? Did the reader place it raw into a heavy hardback, perhaps flattening it to wrap a tiny terrine; or was it cooked and sandwiched between the absorbent pages of a pulp work on bodily self-improvement in an attempt to soak up unhealthy fats? We need to know.
The bacon bookmark has, however, got us wondering. What's the weirdest and most inappropriate use you've encountered for a food? | {
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Give ideas of what articles you want contributed to the site, or grab one of the ideas presented and write an article yourself! This is NOT the place to ask questions, but rather more of a wish list for articles you want to see written (and contributed) on the main CodeGuru site. | {
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BERLIN (Reuters) - A Berlin court ruling that permits the parents and siblings of a 16-year-old Syrian migrant to join him in Germany will now take effect after the foreign ministry abruptly dropped an appeal of the decision, German broadcaster ARD reported on Friday.
ARD said Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, a member of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), decided to drop an appeal filed just days ago, allow the ruling to take effect, following intense criticism by top SPD leaders.
The ruling was the first to deal with the right of under-age migrants to bring their families to Germany and could set a new precedent, ARD reported.
The foreign ministry had no immediate comment on the issue, but Gabriel told the broadcaster: “We know that it is bad, of course, when minors are here without their parents. It’s a good thing that we now have clarity.”
The ministry’s reversal on the issue comes as Gabriel’s party prepares to enter talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives about continuing the “grand coalition” that has ruled Germany for the past four years.
Migration - and the issue of allowing migrants to bring family members to Germany - could be a key topic in the coalition talks, which are due to begin on Jan. 7. Merkel had failed to reach agreement with two smaller parties.
The case in question centers on a Syrian youth who arrived in Germany in the summer of 2015 with an older cousin, and was granted only “subsidiary protection” rather than full asylum.
In 2016, the government had decided to suspend family re-unifications for two years for migrants with “subsidiary protection”, which is granted to people who are not considered as being persecuted individually but in whose home country there is war, torture or other inhumane treatment.
The court said that rejecting the family reunification in this case violated child welfare protections guaranteed under the European human rights convention and the U.N. Refugee Convention. | {
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CHENNAI, India, Aug. 26 (UPI) -- A sign posted at an Indian airport is making viral waves with its saucy-seeming English translation: "Eating carpet strictly prohibited."
The sign, which businessman Justin Ross Lee photographed at Chennai International Airport, was purportedly posted in a carpeted area by the Airports Authority of India and features Hindi text with the apparently poorly translated English text.
"What an outrage India. All I want to do is go down on your curry-stained airport carpet," Lee wrote on Facebook.
Facebook user Muzammil Azmi said in a comment on Lee's post that the Hindi text would more accurately be translated as, "Sitting and eating on the carpet is prohibited." | {
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CAMPANILE SERA
Scie chimiche su Grugliasco
Fake news, odio verso gli stranieri e il solito ambientalismo pieno di retorica. Nei post su facebook il "profilo" della candidata sindaca grillina nella Stalingrado dell'Ovest - TUTTO IL REPERTORIO NELLA GALLERY
Scie chimiche, frasi inneggianti allo sterminio dei rom, un occhiolino a CasaPound e a Salvini. Ma anche tante fake news “gentiste”, contro il Pd, contro i cinesi e gli stranieri in generale, a sostegno della famigerata cura “di Bella” e foto di gattini in quantità. È tutto sulla pagina facebook di Lella Bottazzi, la candidata sindaca del M5s a Grugliasco che la settimana scorsa ha ricevuto la visita del vicepresidente della Camera Luigi Di Maio. “Vogliamo migliorare le cose - ha detto -. Ho 56 anni, potevo starmene in un angolino, ma l’ho fatto perché ho un figlio di 28 anni, abita qui e avrà una famiglia qui, quindi voglio migliorare il luogo in cui viviamo”. Queste le sue poche semplici frasi pronunciate prima di lasciare spazio a Di Maio e al suo comizio.
Supportata dai consiglieri regionali Davide Bono e Francesca Frediani, ma anche dalla “padrona di casa”, la deputata Laura Castelli, la candidata di Grugliasco basa la sua campagna elettorale sulle più classiche delle lotte ambientaliste: stop alla cementificazione, più raccolta differenziata, migliori collegamenti pubblici con la città e stop all’inceneritore.
Tuttavia è su facebook che Bottazzi mostra il suo amore per gli animali, con decine e decine di post su gattini e cani randagi in cerca di cure. La candidata M5s è talmente legata agli animali da invocare lo sterminio dei rom dopo la devastazione del canile: “Casa pound vuole fare un'azione dimostrativa. Spero li massacrino”, scriveva il 21 maggio 2015 per poi aggiungere: “Questi bastardi devono andarsene con le buone o con le cattive. Un umano si difende un peloso no e questo mi fa andare in bestia”. E ancora: “E ditemi che dobbiamo sterminarli. Provate a dirmelo”.
Non sono gli unici post vagamente xenofobi. Il 31 maggio 2015 ne ha pubblicato uno rilanciando la classica bufala dei cinesi “immortali” e del riciclaggio dei documenti di quelli che muoiono senza lasciare tracce. Sempre ai cinesi e alla loro evasione fiscale dedica un’altra immagine in cui si invita Equitalia a controllare le loro attività lamentandosi del “razzismo anti italiano”. Il 1° giugno pubblica un’altra bufala, quella dei 40 euro al giorno “per tutta la vita” con la foto di sei africani di fronte a un albergo. Alcuni giorni dopo un’altra immagine con una scritta (un po’ sgrammaticata) contro “’sta commemorazione dei clandestini naufragati” per gli “italiani che lo Stato ha costretto a suicidarsi”.
E poi tante fake news, come quella dei timbri e delle schede elettorali trovate abbandonate sul ciglio di una strada o della polizia armata schierata dalla Francia alla frontiera per respingere tutti i clandestini.
Foto di apertura da L'Agenda News | {
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I saw this clip on Reddit of a guy approaching a whole swarm of bees attached to a tree. He slowly puts his hand through the mass of squirming insects and removes it a few seconds later, totally unharmed. The next time, he goes back in, he pulls off a huge of chunk of them, almost like the whole cluster was a liquid, like he was running his hands through a loosely cohesive whole.
Scrolling down through the comments, I hoped to find some sort of an explanation. And I found it. Someone wrote about how when you find bees attached to a tree or some other object, it means that they’re swarming, that they don’t have a queen to protect, and that they’re incredibly docile. It all made sense as far as I could tell, I mean, I’m no beekeeper, but this was proof, right?
So when my wife called me outside a few months later, she was screaming, “Rob! Come outside, come quick!” I went out back and she was standing twenty feet away from the garage. “Look Rob, there’s some sort of a beehive.” And it was just like I saw on the video, there were tons of them, all clustered in the top left corner.
I said to my wife, “You want to see something cool?” and I was just going do it, like I’d run my hands through and my wife would be all scared but after a while she’d see that I wasn’t being hurt. How would she react? She’d probably start asking a bunch of half-questions, like, “But … how? This … what?” and I’d just laugh, making up some nonsense answer like, “It’s all about confidence. These bees are more afraid of you than you are of them. You need to project strong vibes, and they’ll understand that. They don’t speak English, but body language a universal means of communication.”
So I calmly walked toward the hive. “Rob? What are you doing, Rob?” to which I replied, “Babe, I’ve got it. Don’t worry.” And that whole confidence, posture, body language thing, it totally worked on my wife. She saw me chill out, she started chilling out herself. “All right, just be careful. What are you going to do?”
“Watch,” and, you know, even though I was fairly certain that this was going to go just as it did on the Internet, there was still a palpable sense of fear. I mean, even if you’re positive that something doesn’t pose a real threat, a swarm of bees is still pretty scary. I’m not even used to dealing with like one bee, but this? This was hundreds of bees. I got close and the buzzing, which I could hear from back at the house, it grew louder, deafening, I could feel it like a cloud of vibration surrounding the periphery of my being.
I raised my hand toward the swarm and I realized that I was fighting my bodily instincts. It was same feeling I had when I went to this adventure park over the summer. One of the attractions was called the Mega Jump, basically, you climb up to a really high platform, they attach you to this rope and pulley thing, and you jump off, confident that whatever it is they’ve tied you to will slow your descent before you touch ground. Again, even though I knew it was this controlled thing, I still experienced a very physical reaction, a terror really, as soon as I stepped up to the edge.
But this was all in my head, I told myself, and I knew that I couldn’t stand there hesitating for too long. I’d psych myself out, or worse, my wife might get the impression that I didn’t know what I was doing, she might get hysterical again and I’d back out if only to keep her from freaking out. I swallowed the lump down my throat and I reached into the mass.
And the stinging was immediate. I recoiled my hand instantly, it was covered in bees, they were all stinging me. The outer layer of the swarm broke off and started circling my body, my face. I wanted to swat them away, I instinctively started flailing around, hitting myself in the head, which, with my one hand still covered in bees, it was just spreading them to my head, my scalp, the ones that had already stung me and died, it was like they were glued on, and I crushed some of them against my skull.
My wife came over with a bucket of water and doused me, but it did little good. In a brief lapse in between bouts of panic and terror, I regained control of my faculties and ran toward the hose, sprayed as many of them as I could away from my body, and followed my wife who had escaped inside the house.
There were like ten or twelve bees that had made it inside, and right outside, it was just this cloud, a whole nest of angry pissed off bees looking for some revenge. My hand was bleeding, everything was starting to swell, my wife was swatting at the few intruders were still circling our heads trying to exact revenge. I looked at my ballooning hand, she looked at me, she said, “What the fuck Rob? What the fuck?” | {
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A McKinney house has earned the nickname "The Trump House" because of its many signs and decorations supporting the Republican presidential candidate.
But not everyone agrees with its message. In fact, the homeowner, Kimberly Loyd, says her home and front yard have been vandalized at least six times since March.
The most recent report happened last week.
Now, police have made some arrests.
Two teenagers, ages 16 and 17, were charged Tuesday with criminal trespass after Loyd says the teens tore up campaign signs and broke a statue in her yard last week.
"Two down, four to go," she said.
During the past several months, Loyd says vandals have spray-painted derogatory terms and symbols on her home and signs. At least one vandalism incident was captured on surveillance video, she said.
Loyd also says windows on her home have also been shot out with BB guns.
"I only did this because they kept bullying me and pushing me and I'm not going to be pushed by anybody," she said.
Despite the vandalism, Loyd says she will not be taking down any signs until after the election, which is Nov. 8. | {
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新入社員である私の教育係が結婚に行き遅れた34歳のいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の女主任、いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は職場の女の子からBBAと陰口を叩かれているのですが、年下の私からすると人生の酸いも甘いも知り尽くしたいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は魅力的に映ります。いくら魅力的を感じていても他の社員の手前、部下の私からちょっかいを出すわけにはいかない、陰口を叩かれていることに気付いているいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任も部下に手を出すわけにはいかない、時間だけが過ぎキッカケがないかと思っている時に飲み会に誘われました。
先に酔いが回ったのは34歳のいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の女主任、他の社員はいつも厳しいいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の女主任が早く帰ってくれたほうが助かるため、新入社員の私が家まで送ることになりました。
いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任が住んでいるのは築年数が古いアパート、外階段を登るとキイキイきしむ、酔っているいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任に肩を貸してようやく部屋まで辿り着いたのですが、ベッドがあるだけで女らしさを感じるものは皆無。
会社では陰口を叩かれ住んでいるのはボロアパート、いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任のことが気の毒になり、せめて私だけでも女性として扱ってあげよう、ベッドに寝かせるために、いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任が着ていた上着を脱がすと、ブラウスのボタンがはちきれそうなくらいの豊満なオッパイ。
ベッドに寝かしたのですけどいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任が目を覚ますことはない、気になってミニスカートの中を覗くとストッキングは履いておらず、ブラジャーと同色のパンティはお尻に食い込んでいる。部屋に居るのは私といきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任の2人だけ、部下を部屋に入れて立場が悪くなるのはいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任、酔った勢いで行為に及んでしまうのはいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任にも責任がある、私はいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任のブラウスそしてブラジャーを脱がすと、ようやくいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は「ごめん、貴方が家まで送ってくれたの？」。
やましいことがなければ答えることが出来たのですが、いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任はブラジャーを脱がされオッパイは露わの状態、それに気付いたいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は慌てて手でオッパイを隠したのですが、仕事では冷静ないきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任が慌てると私は興奮、興奮を抑えられない私はいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任の股間に手を伸ばすと、「ちょっと何をするの？」。
画像をタップで今すぐ試し読み！
拒絶されるとますます興奮、拒絶しても酔っている女は非力、パンティまで手が届くと生暖かい、パンティの上からでもアソコが濡れているのは分かる、私が分かるくらいですからいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任自身もアソコが濡れていることに気付いている。
半ば強引にアソコに指を入れるといきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は断念、「分かったから、お願いシャワーを浴びさせて」、既にペニスが勃起していた私は我慢が出来ない、いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任が嫌がっても無理やりペニスをいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任にブチ込むと「痛い」。
久しくいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任はエッチをしていなかったようでアソコの締りは抜群、痛がられるとＳ気質の私は堪らない、「コンドームは付けて」とは言われたのですが、無理やりブチ込んでおいて今さらいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任の言うことを聞き入れるはずはありません。
ボロアパートだとアエギ声は室外に漏れるのですが、恥ずかしい思いをするのはいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任、私はお構いなしにエッチを続け、最後は顔射。
いつもは部下に厳しいいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の女主任が精液まみれになるのですから、ざまあみろと内心思っているのですが、久しぶりのエッチが気持ち良かったのか、いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は精液とマン汁が付いたペニスをお口でキレイにしてくれました。
男女の関係になってのいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の女主任は、私には優しくなり、残業で遅くなる時は会社のトイレ等でエッチ、もちろん、今もいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任とはコンドームは付けません。
その日は仕事の後会社の飲み会があり、部署のみんなと居酒屋で楽しく飲んでいました。私も結構飲みましたが、いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任も結構お酒を飲み、ついに寝てしまいました。
そこで誰が送るかという話になり、たまたま家の近い私が送ることになりました。最初は「しょうがないな」と嫌々送っていたのですが、送る途中肩をくんで歩いていると乳が私にあたり感触も柔らかく、とても気持ちよさそうでした。
そして家につくと酔った勢いなのか私を勢いよく押し倒してきました。ドキドキしていると、キスをしてきて股関に手を当ててまさぐってきました。いきなりの出来事に起ってしまった私にたいしていきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は「ベッド行こう」の一言。
画像をタップで今すぐ試し読み！
私は女性の家にあがるのも久しぶりでとても緊張していました。
ベッドに着くといきなり私のズボンをおろし、フ○ラをはじめました。それはとても気持ちがよくすぐにイッてしまいました。「早い～」と不満そうないきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任に会社同様、謝る私。
それに対して「謝らないで。それとこの事は内緒ね」と言ってきてそれにドキッとしてしまいました。
動けないでいると、いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任も服を脱いで「私も気持ち良くして」とねだってきました。
私が乳首を舐めると酔っているからか、あえぎ、「気持ちいい」と一言言われさらにドキッとしてしまいました。そうやってお互いのモノをいじくっていると、いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任の電話が鳴りました。話す口調を聞いていると、どうやら会社の社員の誰かみたいだった。
「ごめん。やることできちゃった。続きはまた今度ね。」と言われ、続きをやりたかった私は泣く泣く帰宅することに。ですが、また今度出来ると考えるだけで心がウキウキします。いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任への見方が変わりました。
画像をタップで今すぐ試し読み！
会社の行きおくれババアだなんて揶揄されてる先輩と新入社員である僕が営業先に周りに向かっていた日のことでした。
その日は近くで何かイベントがあったらしく電車の中は超満員で、僕といきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は必然的にかなり密着する形になってしまいました。ババアだなんて言われていてもだからこそと言うべきなのか、三十代半ばのいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任が普段から発している色気にいつもあらぬことを考えていた僕は思わずゴクリと喉を鳴らしました。
しかも乗ってから予想外にほかの乗客が乗り合わせてきたこともあり、まさかのいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任と僕は向かい合わせいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は電車のドアを背に、僕はそんないきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任を見下ろす形となっていました。
すみませんと謝る僕にいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は仕方ないわと笑っていました。
その笑顔にまた僕は思わず喉を鳴らしたのです。
電車が揺れた時です、大きく揺れた電車に体勢を崩したふりをした僕はいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任の胸に手を滑らせました。いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任が驚きに小さな声を上げました。
僕が慌てて謝るといきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任は困ったように笑いながらちょっと向き変えましょうかと自分の体を横向きに変えるように動きました。
それが僕の狙いでもありました。また乗客が乗ってきました。それに合わせて僕はいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任の胸に偶然手が当たっているふりをして、なんどかいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任の胸を刺激しました。
いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任が緊張から体を強ばらせたのがわかりました。
なんどか続けているうちにいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任が小さな声を上げました。顔が赤くなっているのもわかりました。
自分でも大胆なことをしたと思うのですが僕はもう我慢できずに、いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任の乳首に当たる部分に指を伸ばしました。
もちろん服の上からでしたが乳輪にあたる部分をそっとなでます。
いきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任が今度ははっきりと甘い声をあげました。
服と下着の感触が邪魔だったものの僕はいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任の乳首を摘むように触り続けました。
僕の股間はすっかり固くなっていて、押し付けるようにするとそこで信じられないことにいきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任がそっと僕の股間に手を伸ばしてきました。
欲求が爆発しそうになったところで残念なことに目的の駅に着いてしまいました。けれど赤い顔をして恥じらうように営業先へと並んで向かういきおくればばあ(行き遅れBBA)の主任もとても可愛らしかったのです。 | {
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When in doubt, promise a meaningless tax cut…
National’s tax plan to give the average worker an extra $430 a year
National leader Simon Bridges is pledging to move tax thresholds every three years in line with inflation, which would see someone on the average wage with an extra $430 a year in 2021.
…so what does that work out as weekly? $8.27 per week, that’s not even a Big Mac Combo each week!
But while that is a meaningless nothing to you and me, that represents millions in tax that doesn’t go into mental health, poverty reduction, education, health, housing and environmental protection.
This is a cheap stunt from an Opposition that gleefully underfunds public services with tax cut bribes that are as equally meaningless to the rest of us.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
You could have at least made it a whole Big Mac Combo Simon. | {
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Freeman's Mind is a machinima science fiction and comedy series by Ross Scott, created with Valve's Half-Life and parodying the inner thoughts of its silent protagonist, physicist Gordon Freeman.
Episode 1 [ edit ]
Freeman: [first lines] Aw, jeez, I'm running late...
Freeman: [seeing Barney Calhoun banging on a locked door] Ahh, I'm not the only one who's late! SUCKER! Ha ha! Train Intercom: The time is 8:47 AM. Freeman: Shit, I didn't know I was that late! Oh, man. 8:47. I am so dead.
Train Intercom: In the event of an emergency, passengers are to remain seated and await further instructions. Disabled personnel should be evacuated first. Please stay away from electrified rails, and proceed to an emergency station until assistance arrives. Freeman: Man, how dumb would you have to be? I mean, they're not going to say something like that unless somebody's already tried to do it, right? I guess if I was drunk enough I might climb out the window here and pull some hang-time on the electrified tram rail. That kind of reminds me of that squirrel that got caught between the power lines one day back at MIT. The thing caught on fire and got fused to the wires, which caused a transformer to blow up and knock out the power to all of campus. That squirrel must have cost the university at least ten thousand dollars. That was a good day.
Freeman: [seeing a radioactive spill] Hey, what's that green crap? What is this? Jesus Christ, look at this place! This is a disaster! That's gotta be toxic. God, the EPA is gonna tear us apart if they find out about that! Well, I'm not saying anything. I don't want to get called into court as a witness once the cat gets out of the bag.
Episode 2 [ edit ]
Freeman: [arriving late at work] Okay... keep against the wall and just walk straight past the front desk. Don't make eye contact, just walk... WALK! Guard: Hey, Mr. Freeman. Freeman: Dammit! Guard: I had a bunch of messages for you, but we had a system crash about twenty minutes ago, and I'm still trying to find my files. Just one of those days, I guess. Freeman: I was so close!
Freeman: In that case, let me show you what a genius I am and look at your computer. Scientist: Let me help you. Freeman: Shut up. Let's see... Wait a minute. This is a Windows blue screen. And you're typing on it like you know what you're doing. You're not doing anything. You're just looking busy. That's your whole job, isn't it? Just lookin' busy. Look, you have to re-boot it. Where's the reset button, is this it? [presses button, causing a siren to ring and lights to flash] Scientist: My God, what are you doing? Freeman: Well that's not it. Guard: C'mon, Gordon. You tryin' to get me into trouble? Freeman: OK, you can all go to hell if you're gonna act like that. See if I ever do anything nice for you again. Because I wont! Scientist: As I expected... Freeman: What was that? You tryin' to say something about me? [pause] Man, I'll kill you. Pricks.
Freeman: Wait a second. Did I just see what I think I saw? Yup, I sure did. Newton's formula for Gravitational Force. Having trouble remembering that guys?! What are we in high school now?! My department is working on Quantum Displacement! Just what the heck are you guys doin'? Jerkin' around in lab coats by the looks of things! I just can't believe it. Those monkeys in there are having trouble learning about gravity, whereas I can recite the Quantum Chromodynamic Gauge Invariant Lagrangian in my sleep! There is no justice.
Episode 3 [ edit ]
Freeman: [riding an elevator] I have to say, though, working in an underground laboratory is pretty cool. It kind of makes me feel like I'm an evil scientist. I always wanted to be an evil scientist. Muh-ha-ha-ha-ha. Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! AHH-HA-HA-HA-HA! [elevator stops] Okay, I better chill out. I don't want a repeat of Monday.
Freeman: Does my beard intimidate you? [on beeping eye scanners] Ahh, stop that noise! [enters test chamber] I hate that! It reminds me of that dream I have where I'm strapped to a gurney watching Fraggle Rock with flashing lights on either side of me, then I realize- I'm in hell! It's all crap, anyway. The only reason we have those scanners is because they caught me playing racquetball in here once. [prepares to spit in the anti-mass spectrometer] Eh, better not.
Freeman: It's times like this I remember why I became a physicist: To show antimatter particles who's boss!! YEAH!!
[as Freeman prepares to insert the sample] Scientist 1: [in observation booth] Wh-what is he doing in there?! Freeman: [stopping] Huh? Scientist 2: Nothing you need to worry about, Gordon, heh... That's it, go ahead. Freeman: Yeah. Wouldn't want to take the blinders off the horse, now would you? Whatever. [Green explosion as sample is inserted] Freeman: Oh, God! What'd I do? What- what did I do? Scientist 2: Gordon, get away from the beam! Scientist 3: Shutting down... Attempting shutdown... I- It's not- Its not shutting down- It's... [Explosions intensify] Freeman: No, no, no, this is not good! [runs to door] Let me out of here! Open the door! Scientist 3: AAAAAHHH!!! [beam kills scientists in the observation booth] Freeman: Open the door, you bastards! Aagh, I HATE YOU! This is a BAD EXPERIMENT! We are BAD PEOPLE! Why did we usher forth the GREEN APOCALYPSE?! [flash to black] What is this? What happened? Am I dead? I don't feel dead. If this is what it's like being dead then being dead sucks! [return to chamber] Oh, shit! That's the ceiling! WHERE IS MY HELMET?! [flash to Xen] What the fuck?! [flash to Vortigaunts] Who are you? No! I don't wanna be a schizophrenic! [fade to black] Oh my God, this is crazy in a box with a side order of fries!
Episode 4 [ edit ]
Freeman: [waking up from the Test Chamber explosion] No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no—huh? Ah! Ahaha! Ha! I'm not in Crazy Land anymore! Man, that was weirder than the time I was awake for four days straight and thought my house was being invaded by frog people. And the door's open now! Man, I'm on a roll! Murphy's Law can suck it! [spots a body on the floor.] Oh, hell. Is that guy dead? Damn it, I'm a doctor, not a...normal doctor! I wonder if he was trying to open the door for me. I'd feel like an asshole then. What am I saying? They're the ones who locked me into this tomb to begin with! If they're not dead already, they're on the list! [presses a button to open the next door, which just beeps at him] Huh. Yeah, very funny. Come on, door, open up. [tries it again, with the same result] Dammit, what a tease! I already made it past those thick-ass blast doors, which that guy died for, only to be stopped by this useless second door! This is bullshit! [presses the button once more] I am Captain Gordon Freeman of the Intergalactic House of Pancakes ordering you to open! [door opens] Yes! [door closes] No! [door opens and closes randomly] Shit! Uh...don't kill me! [runs through door]
Freeman: [Greeting two scientists after the disaster] Hey, hey! Boy, we really fucked up this time huh?
Freeman: [walking through the ruins of Black Mesa] Man, you can just smell the money burning in this place...
Freeman: I hate computers! Why do they always blow up when I use them?
Scientist: A failure of this magnitude is extremely improbable. Freeman: Well that's why we have insurance!
Freeman: Is that guy not even coming? What a hoser! When I'm in charge, I'll make sure he stays at the bottom of the corporate ladder.
Freeman: [after a headcrab materializes before him] Oh God, one of them's loose. Um, I can't turn back...okay, I can do this. [headcrab advances] I am a matador. I fearlessly— [headcrab attacks, Gordon runs away] Ah, Jesus! Shit! Fuck! Piss! Those things bite! Damn it! I'm starting to feel pretty naked here without a weapon. I've been meaning to take kung fu lessons for years now because I knew there'd be a day like today and I would be ready. But I kept putting it off, and here I am, totally unprepared and not knowing kung fu! Procrastination has failed me yet again.
Freeman: Hey is that a crowbar? Oh my God, this is friggin' perfect! [picks up crowbar] Now I can beat the snot out of people! Oh boy, I can't wait to get back to the lobby! They'll be like: 'Freeman! We thought you were dead!' And I'll be like: 'You thought WRONG!' POW!! Ok, time to bring on the pain!
Freeman: [reading] "Do not use elevators." [pushes button; elevator plunges by with two screaming scientists on board] Oh shit, they weren't kidding! [elevator crashes] Freeman: Oh, jeez, what do I do? The door won't open... [smashes glass door with crowbar] What should I do? I guess, uh...SORRY! DIDN'T MEAN TO KILL YOU! Oh, man...I hope at least they were jerks!
Episode 5 [ edit ]
Freeman: Oh, man, another body. You know, normally following a trail of dead bodies covered in blood is a sign that you're going the wrong way!
Freeman: [encountering a locked door] Oh, you've got to be kidding me. I'm gonna sue the hell out of Black Mesa when I get out of here! Locking your workers in? That's what the Triangle Shirtwaist factory did! Locked its workers in, then there was a fire, then everybody died! That's a formula for success. Damn it! We're making history right now - crap history! [smashes console with crowbar, door opens] What? Ha ha! I am incredible. Is there any end to the number of problems that I can solve just by beating the hell out of something? I'm not sure there is!
Freeman: Why does everyone have to keep dying on me? Is it really so hard to just not die? I mean, look at me! I was in the chamber in freaking ground zero and I'm still here! Yet you guys slip on a banana peel and that's it! Ugh. Darwin was right. I didn't realize I was working with a bunch of lemmings.
Episode 6 [ edit ]
[Houndeye teleports in front of Freeman] Freeman: No. [shoots it] Man, come on! That teleported out of freaking nowhere! Maybe I was hasty shooting it. It might have been an ambassador. Okay, if I see another one, I'll listen to what it has to say. [Second houndeye rounds a corner] Speak of the devil. [Houndeye unleashes sonic attack] Fuck! [shoots it] It's the same story every time - you give people the benefit of the doubt, and they try to kill you! That's what I get for being nice. [encounters group of houndeyes] Oh, here we go. [shoots] Suck on this, you jumping boogers!
[After teleporting in, something begins pounding its way through a metal door] Freeman: I'm guessing I'm not gonna like what's behind door number one, here. [Vortigaunt bashes its way through] Freeman: I was right! [Vortigaunt zaps Gordon before being shot] God damn, that hurts! Okay, that's it. It's official. All aliens are bastards! Especially you! And you! Hold still! [Shoots a headcrab.] Nice! That was a pretty good shot. Not so tough, now that I've got a gun, are ya?
Freeman: [On his inability to climb back out of a drainage pipe] Damn. White men in armored hazmat suits can't jump.
Freeman: [Starts a lift] Whoa, train's leaving the station, all aboard. [A pair of headcrabs jump on.] No, not you! You don't have a ticket!
Freeman: Whoa, what was that? [Headcrabs fall down beside him, and he readies the crowbar.] Batter up. Strike one! Strike two! Strike...ah, it's raining men! I mean aliens! Why is this taking so long? I could fall faster than this! [Starts smacking headcrabs.] NO! SHUT UP! NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR OPINION! YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS! YOU'RE ALL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS Now do what you're told and jump in this giant meat-grinder! NO! YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG! You're all incompetent!
Freeman: [After jumping off an elevator, a houndeye teleports in] Oh that's great! Teleport in more creeps. This place isn't crazy enough! [Walks onto catwalk. Bullsquid teleports in, falls on and breaks catwalk right in front of Freeman] WHAT THE FUCK!?
Episode 7 [ edit ]
[Gordon encounters a collapsed catwalk] Freeman: Hey, a rope! Now I can be Tarzan! [imitates Tarzan yell, sees the "rope" belongs to a barnacle] Freeman: Hey, wait, that's not a rope! These are, like, jellyfish or something. If I swung on that, it could come crashing down on me. These aliens are just good for nothing. [jumps off catwalk, lands on a crate] Freeman: These crates are good for something. That one just broke my fall. That means aliens are worth less than crates! Which is, what, a few bucks?
Freeman: Wow. I wasn't expecting this. This must be our box-smashing room. I mean, what? We have a bottomless pit, and the sides are all plate metal that looks strong enough to withstand a missile blast. This room must have cost a couple hundred thousand to build. Eat your heart out, taxpayers! This is where your money goes!
Freeman: Man, we picked the WRONG contractor to build these catwalks. "El Sleazo's Discount Construction: Bribing building inspectors for over 40 years."
Freeman: Good old New Mexico! We're really making a name for the state. First they invented the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, and now we've invented mean-ass aliens that teleport out of nowhere! I don't know which is worse!
Freeman: When they invented the atomic bomb they were afraid it was going to catch the atmosphere on fire and burn up the whole Earth, but they did it anyway. That took balls. Not us, though. The only people taking the risks were the ones who didn't understand them in the first place. We're not brave, we're just stupid.
Episode 8 [ edit ]
Freeman: Huh. We've got so many dead bodies now, we're hanging them from the ceiling. [Body pulled up out of sight] ...And the ceiling eats them. I guess that works...
Freeman: [spots sign] Ah! "Administrative..." Yeah, no exit! No one leaves here. What's that say? "Work harder, not smarter." Yeah, that's us, all right. We stay the course with stupid.
Freeman: [meandering] This "locked door" thing is getting REAL old.
[pinned down by an automated turret gun] Freeman: Hey, want to be my human shield? Scientist: Shut up! Freeman: Just an idea! [looks around corner] No, just a dead end... maybe I could force him out there if I waved my gun at him. Scientist: Nuhh... Freeman: Shit, did I say that out loud?
Episode 9 [ edit ]
[seeing two scientists enter an air vent] Freeman: Oh, you're doing the vent thing, too, huh? [something unseen pulls the screaming scientists in, body parts fly out] Freeman: Ugh! You dumbasses! You can't go through the fan blades! Some people just have to learn things the hard way. I mean, it only took me one time to learn not to stick your head in a fan.
Freeman: [shooting Headcrabs] How many of you fuckers are there? Do you want me to individually engrave your names on each of my bullets? Is my gun not personal enough for you? I'll kill every last one of you bastards. All I need are bullets. We have a lot of bullets here! EARTH IS A MINERAL-RICH PLANET! I bet yours sucks! It’s probably a swamp planet, with no metal! And if it’s not you belong in a swamp anyway! You should be out killing vacationing college students, not scientists trying to get work done!
Freeman: [after nearly being eaten by a barnacle in the presence of a scientist] What the fuck?! Now I'm covered in blood! My hair... this is gonna jam my gun! [to scientist] And what about you?! Enjoying the show?! Scientist: I just heard a secure-access transmission. Soldiers have arrived, and they're coming to rescue us. Of course, I have my doubts that we'll live long enough to greet them. Freeman: Yeah, thanks for the warning, asshole! I really appreciate how you stood there staring at me, not doing a goddamn thing! You're like a cat watching a mouse die!
Freeman: [approaching a door] Oh! An "Exit" sign! It's about bloody time.
[door is locked]
Freeman: Okay, remain calm...
[bashes door with crowbar, glass doesn't break]
Freeman: Jesus! Okay, we'll take this to the next level.
[gunshot]
Freeman: What the fuck? We installed bulletproof glass in our exit doors? That stuff's not cheap! How retarded are we!? I don't know anymore!
Freeman: Hey, I think that's an exit... [ceiling breaks] Huh? [a barrage of Headcrabs fall on him] Oh my God. THIS WAS NOT APPROVED BY THE COMMITTEE! I'M NOT TAKING ANY QUESTIONS! [swinging crowbar violently] NO COMMENT! NO COMMENT! NO COMMENT! [after killing all Headcrabs] Well, I can understand how some people can't get enough of me, but it's for their own good, really.
Episode 10 [ edit ]
Freeman: [after drinking coffee from previous episode] Brooahhh! Coffee coffee coffee. Coffee! It's not as strong as methamphetamine, but it lets you keep your teeth.
Freeman: [to running scientist] Hey, where's the party? [Headcrab leaps past him] Oh, God! Okay, lead the way. Where are we going? WHAT?! You're going to hide in the corner? Are you five years old? [shoots pursuing Bullsquid] Man, now I'm almost out of bullets. Are you happy? Because I'm not. You know what? You can stay in the corner. You've earned it. I'm gonna come back with a dunce cap for you, and you're gonna wear it.
Freeman: [after being attacked by a bullsquid] Yeah, that's right. Just puke on my suit. It doesn't matter anymore. It's already got blood all over it. Most of it's not even my blood - it's from the other alien that puked on me. I'm probably carrying a few blood-borne diseases on my suit. I'm a walking CDC nightmare. It makes me want to hug someone.
Freeman: OH GOD! Oh, man. I thought I almost fell for that turret gun again. Because this stairway looks exactly like that other one.
[having recently acquired a shotgun] Freeman: I need to find some more stuff to shoot. Shooting the dead bodies would look cool, but I don't want to get that stuff on me. Oh, what about that locked door? I'll make a new door with this baby. Call me Ali Baba. Open sesame! [shoots the door three times] Fine, then. Close sesame! Man, three rounds of buckshot point-blank. What the hell? It's like one of those doors from Looney Tunes where they blow up the whole building but the door is still standing. I bet it's locked on both sides and nobody has the key.
[preparing to jump over an elevator shaft to a ladder] Freeman: This, right here, is why you should eat Wheaties in the morning. I guess anything would be better than the two shots of vodka I had. All right, let's do this. [sprints] HOO-ga-sa-ka HOO-ga-sa-ka HOO! [leaps, falls] Oh, shit, oh shit, OH SHIT! [splat] [flatline] HEV: HEV activated. Automatic medical systems engaged. Major fracture detected. Internal bleeding detected. Emergency: user death imminent.
Episode 11 [ edit ]
[Gordon encounters an open elevator shaft, with the only ladder up on the opposite side] Freeman: So, my only way out of here is to take some flying leap of faith, like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, then claw like a mad cat, and hope like hell I get a grip and don't break my ribs! Once again, I need a grappling hook. I can't believe this. Why do you have a ladder in an elevator shaft? To fix the elevator! How do you get to the ladder? You take the elevator that doesn't work! Who thought this one up? Jesus Christ! I suppose I could do the math on whether this jump is feasible or not, but, y'know... I'll have plenty of time for that when I'm dead. [Gordon jumps to the ladder] Freeman: Oh my God! That was stupid! Why do I keep doing stupid things? Oh my Go—oh, I could have died! Scientist: [dangling from the bottom of a ladder further up the shaft] I-I can't hold on much longer! Freeman: Oh, cry me a river! I just jumped across an elevator shaft onto a ladder and I'm still here! Do I look like Spider-Man to you? No! If I was Spider-Man, I could do that web-flinging crap and be out of here hours ago! The point is, you can learn how to do a pull-up! Although, I'll admit, these ledges suck. [scientist loses his grip] Whoa! You might want to— [scientist falls to his death] Never mind.
Freeman: That shotgun's mine. [Gordon attempts to smash the glass with his crowbar, but finds it is bulletproof] Freeman: Oh, come on! There's extra ammo there and everything! Well, I guess out of the whole facility the security station is the one place that should have bulletproof glass. But still, I could argue I have more need for a shotgun now than any other time in my life... Though it wouldn't be the first time I've said that.
[Gordon finds a dead scientist] Freeman: Why is this guy dead? He wasn't dead a minute ago, he was screaming about silo doors like a possessed farmer.
[Gordon examines a dead soldier] Freeman: So what's the story on this guy? Yup, deader than a dead, dead guy... Is that an MP5? It is! [gasps] Now I can solve up to eight-hundred problems a minute! A submachine gun: it's not just for party tricks. [headcrabs start to teleport in] Freeman: Allow me to demonstrate! [Gordon shoots the headcrabs] Freeman: [cackles] That's right—short, controlled bursts. The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.
[Gordon encounters a cargo hook] Freeman: All right, is anyone looking? Here we go. [imitates Tarzan yell, swings on hook, headcrab teleports behind him] Oh, come on, why did you have to spoil the moment? You guys have no appreciation for art! [starts shooting] CRITIC!
Freeman: Whoa, this is slick. It's like there's oil mixed in or something? Whoa! Oh, oh, nice! Have another empty elevator shaft for me to slide my ass into after jumping over another trip wire. [jumps laser trip wire, sees more trip wires, turret guns, and two staring scientists] Oh, I see—that was just one stage of trying to kill me. Scientist 1: Hello, there. Freeman: Uh... hi. Little busy here. Don't try to help me, or anything. Nobody does that. Scientist 2: I'll stay here. Freeman: You do that! God, you two are creeping me out. "Come play with us, Gordon. Forever... and ever... and ever..." Scientist 1: Do you know who ate all the donuts? Freeman: The donu—? No! I've got more important things on my mind! [surrounded by a web of trip wires] Okay, this is weird. I'm gonna need a minute to think about this. Scientist 2: Fascinating... I never suspected such things could be. Freeman: Quit staring at me!
Episode 12 [ edit ]
Scientist: Rescued at last! Thank God you're here! Freeman: Ah, yeah, the rescue team! [HECU marine shoots scientist] Freeman: ...Or, um, what? Okay, I can understand shooting someone running at you screaming, but I don't know... this feels shady. Is there another way out of here? I think this guy's in a bad mood. Well... all right, fine, I'll try and go make friends, even though that always ends up the same way. [looks again] See, he's not even trying to plant a gun on him or hide the body. That's a bad sign, like this is just another day of work for him. I'll at least give him some warning, so I don't jump on him. Hey, killer, what's up? [Marine shoots at Gordon] Freeman: Ahh! Diplomacy sucks! [Marine pursues and shoots him] Ow! [Gordon shoots and kills marine] Hey, man, what's your problem?! Why are you shooting everyone? I'm taking this gun away from you, mister! You're obviously not mature enough to handle it! Now you sit there and think about what you've done!
Freeman: So, yeah, I'm killing people now! But that was not murder. It was totally self-defense. Just because I had a submachine gun doesn't change anything. It just lets me defend more efficiently. I haven't murdered anyone—well, not today anyway.
[Gordon encounters a squad of three HECU marines] Freeman: Oh, no. So, are we gonna play nice, or— HECU: Move in! [Gordon guns down the soldiers] Freeman: Nope. Well, looks like my armor is better than yours! And I'll just loot your bodies, 'cause that's how I roll... and that puts me at six or seven counts of self-defense.
Episode 13 [ edit ]
Freeman: [getting to the surface] I'm gonna get so drunk tonight, like, way more than usual. Yeah! It's the surface! PARTY! PAR— [seeing two HECU marines] Dammit! It's the fun police!
Freeman: [fighting HECU marines] I'm on your side, you fucking idiots! How many of you do I have to kill for you to understand that? God damn, you're stupid! You're like a bunch of lemmings with machine guns! Do I look like an alien?! Am I green?! Do I have tentacles coming out of me?! Give me this, and this! Hey, is that a chopper? HEY, HEY, HEY!! HELP!! HELP ME!! [an airstrike drives him indoors] What the fuck?! Why are we bombing?! There's nobody here! Why are the soldiers bombing each other? Is this real? I just wanna go home! Everyone is crazy except me! I don't understand, why is everyone trying to kill me? I'm awesome! Are you all jealous?! Shooting people isn't very nice! Give peace a chance! Or at least stand still!
Freeman: [after being driven back underground by HECU bombing] This must have been what H.G. Wells was talking about. Maybe half of humanity will go underground and start a new society, and enslave the surface-dwellers. That's my destiny. Yeah, I'm a first-generation Morlock. I don't think I'll start cannibalizing people right away, though. I'll at least wait until the vending machines run out.
HECU: I killed twelve dumbass scientists and not one of them fought back. This sucks! Freeman: Yeah, I guess that's what happens when you shoot everyone on a rescue operation. But not to worry; I'm a scientist, and I'm armed like a secessionist. Hey, that rhymes! [HECU open fire; Gordon shoots them] Freeman: Ah, okay! Fine! I should have known you guys aren't into poetry! I guess I can't completely blame you. That wasn't a perfect rhyme—the syllable count was off. So, what's that make? Twelve, fifteen counts of self-defense with an automatic weapon? I'm losing count and I don't think the cops are gonna buy that anymore.
Freeman: [comes to a dead end in a vent] Oh no. I give up. Guess I'll just die here...
Episode 14 [ edit ]
Scientist: Well, so much for the government. Freeman: Aah! How did you get in here? Scientist: It seems their idea of "containment" is to kill everyone associated with the project. Judging from your— Freeman: [door opens] Wha—? Scientist: —Hazard suit, I'd say you were part of what went wrong. Freeman: What the hell's that supposed to mean? Scientist: Look, if anyone can end this catastrophe, it's the science team in the Lambda complex at the opposite end of the base. With the transit system out, I couldn't tell you how to get there, but there's an old decommissioned rail system somewhere through here. Freeman: I don't care about any of this. Scientist: If you can make it through the rocket test labs, you might be able to worm your way through the old tunnels to track down whatever's left of the Lambda team. Freeman: Why? Scientist: You can trust them. You can trust all of us. Freeman: I don't trust you at all! Scientist: Good luck. Freeman: You appeared here like some magical genie out of a lamp! I don't understand why— Scientist: [whispering] I hear something. Freeman: What? Where? [goes out, looks around] There's nothing here. You're crazy! [returns] You're just like everyone else here! [looks in vent] And where did that security guard go? I didn't see him! He's off playing with that alien in this giant funhouse of a ventilation system! [grabs shotgun and ammo] At least this shotgun won't deceive me. It's filled with pellets, not lies! Scientist: Do you know who ate all the donuts? Freeman: No! Do you know if leptons are really compound particles? Friggin' donuts... [presses "Silo Door" button] Beep. Oh, this must be what that guy was screaming about. He would have wanted me to press that button. Hey, you're not really a genie, are you? You're not dressed like one. I ask because earlier I wished I had a shotgun, and now I have a shotgun, but if that was one of my three wishes, I don't want to wa— [accidentally fires shotgun, nearly hitting the scientist] God! Sorry, sorry! I-I'll just go, okay? I'm going...sorry...God...Well, I can forget about my other two wishes now! I'm never gonna own a water park...
Freeman: See, the quality of my life is going straight up now that I have a shotgun. I knew this would happen.
Freeman: Oh no, not down again. Well I like at least how the lights are red. It's letting me know ahead of time that I'm descending into Hell. This whole facility is designed to keep me down.
Freeman: I understand I have to fight for what's mine but why is it all the time!
Freeman: Ah, a radioactive spill! Part of me wants to believe we're not this criminally incompetent, but...I know better.
Episode 15 [ edit ]
Freeman: Unlike my colleagues, I have a tendency to stay alive. Since this morning, I've been bitten, shot, bombed, electrocuted, almost drowned, almost fallen to my death, and strangled. Rasputin wasn't so lucky! But, here I am, exposing myself to radiation. Why not? Let's add to the list: maybe I can get burned, stabbed, and poisoned before the day is done.
Freeman: That's how Spiderman got his powers. [gets on a elevator going up] That is such bullshit. For starters the odds of a random mutation being beneficial are astronomical. But even if you did get one, you would get radiation poisoning! Comic-book writers know as much about science as I know about [pauses and thinks] well, I'm a bad example since I know about almost everything, but the point is they can try harder!
[Freeman comes around a corner to find a bullsquid eating a corpse and ducks back into the corner] Freeman: I hate awkward pauses like this. [turns the corner and kills the bullsquid] But of course, I'm the one who has to break the ice.
Freeman: [after propelling a houndeye away with his shotgun] Ah ha ha ha! Today's lesson is on muzzle energy and momentum!
Freeman: [after accidentally blowing up a bridge with a houndeye on it] Whoa! Combo platter! [looks over the edge] Hope I don't need to go that way...
Freeman: [to scientist] Are you the one making all that noise? [the scientist screams as a giant tentacle breaks through the window and grabs him] Freeman: MONKEY ON A STICK! WE'RE GETTING FINGERED BY GODZILLA! Scientist: No! No! Get it off me! Freeman: [fires shotgun at the tentacle] FUCK! Scientist: Get it off! GET IT OFF! [tentacle pulls the scientist out the window] Freeman: Nnnnggh...okay, I was waiting for an opportunity to use this. [pulls out a grenade] And here it is! It's obvious—a handful of shrapnel makes the medicine go down! [throws the grenade]
Freeman: That's not a rope...you can't fool me. [shoots barnacle, body parts rain down] Ack! God! Jesus! It's all over me. That's right, the old layer was starting to dry. Better baste a new layer of blood on me. It's important I maintain a fresh layer of blood on me at all times. Helps my sheen.
Episode 16 [ edit ]
Freeman: Oh, safety bars. Knowing this place, that means somebody must have fallen in at one point. [Destroys bars with a single hit from the crowbar] And... we put up cardboard tubes wrapped in tin foil, apparently.
Freeman: [To tentacle monster, while smashing boxes] That's right. You bang, I bang, we all bang together.
Freeman: What was that Nietzsche said? "He who fights drummers should see to it that in the process he does not become a drummer"? Or was it monsters? I don't know. Same thing, really. [Smashes planks blocking a doorway] No, it had to be drummers. That's a monster and there's no way i'm going to end up looking like that thing. I wonder if Nietzsche was in a band. I bet he was. [Turns lever to cycle airlock] I should look him up when I get out of here. I bet the songs have pretty deep lyrics.
Freeman: Are you kidding me?! You can't open this from the inside and it automatically shuts? [sigh] I think there needs to be a sign on the outside that says "Please prop the door or else you'll die a slow death."
Episode 17 [ edit ]
Freeman: Hey, it's getting kind of drafty in here. I can barely hear myself think! [looks down at the giant fan] Oh, yeah. That's a breeze, all right. I wonder how far I could make my spit go if I was to hock a loogie into the— [looks again] No, better not. Too bad the bodies landed on the other side of the door. Then I could just throw them in and watch them explode! [hits the door with his crowbar] Come on, this is stupid! Huh, what about the keypad? [bashes the keypad; the door opens] Yeah! [suddenly gets blown into the air] WAAAAAAAA— [crashes into a set of planks under a vent] Unh!
Freeman: Stop persecuting me...all of you... [beats headcrab to death] Stop...stop...
Freeman: [on having been pinned to the ceiling by the fan] I'm not even wearing air-resistant clothing! I thought you had to be wearing MC Hammer pants and a poncho for that to work!
Freeman: You don't deal with this in theoretical physics, it's just numbers. But rocket scientists don't have that excuse. They have to test their rockets no matter how many people get killed, but I respect that!
Freeman: [to tentacle monster] Yeah, that's right. You show that metal floor who's boss! Don't take "no" for an answer!
Freeman: If I was on Mars, I wouldn't even have to think about this [wide] gap, but as it stands, I'm like a monkey trying to decide whether he can reach the next branch or not. It's a wonder we've even made it this far. We should've all fallen from trees and be extinct right now.
Episode 18 [ edit ]
Freeman: Ah, tick-tick-tock. Is that the sound of a Geiger counter or my lifespan counting down? It's both! That's right. Here at Black Mesa, when we talk about "half-life," we mean it in more ways than one. So make your peace, and come to Black Mesa. Here, you'll win a chance to fight freaks of nature, escape countless safety hazards, wander aimlessly for hours, and die scared, tired, and alone!
Freeman: Goddammit-Earth's-gravity-shouldn't-even-be-this-strong-for-a-planet-our-size. It's-only-this-way-because-there-are-so-many-metals-in-the-core-increasing-the-overall-density-and- oh fuck I'm gonna have to jump.
Scientist: Excellent! Someone has restored all power. We'll have the engine up again in no time. Freeman: Yeah, that room's dangerous, did you know that? It's a good thing I made it back okay. [stares at spinning dial] I was gonna... yeah, the... yes, master... no, stop! You can't kill me, so you're gonna try to control me, is that it? I'll never do your bidding! I have a doctor's degree!
Episode 19 [ edit ]
Freeman: While I'm a hundred percent in favor of having a tomb this size devoted to me, I shouldn't be put into it until after I'm dead. You don't bury the Pharaoh alive—that's what the help is for!
Freeman: You know, I don't remember getting horrible electrical shocks the last time I came through here... I do remember being in pain, though. I mean, it might not have been this exact same location, but that's been pretty consistent. In fact, if you were to sum up this whole day in just one word, it would be "pain"...or maybe "doom"... [hears tentacle monster again] or maybe just "bang." I guess that's your vote. [spots two corpses lying on the floor] I guess your votes are for dead, but I don't like dead.
Freeman: [after leaping across a wide chasm] Okay! I rock! Now stop making me prove it!
Freeman: [after firing the rocket engine to destroy the tentacle] Oh, yeah! That's it! If you can't take the heat, get out of the rocket propulsion test chamber! Ha ha ha! Burn! Burn! Burn! Physics rules!
Episode 20 [ edit ]
Freeman: Where is everybody? They're not up there. The guard's gone. I think I remember some explosives here. Now there's just scorch marks... bloodstain... and this is after firing that rocket...huh.
Freeman: Hey, that's a ladder! That means this is legit—this might go somewhere! I mean, it probably leads to a room filled with poison gas and a bunch of dead people that look just like me, but I don't know that, so there's room for hope, I guess.
Freeman: Oh! Oh, that's a drop. Wow, this is really making me put my money where my mouth is, because earlier I said I wanted to do a long-drop cannonball if there was water down there, and here it is. Ah...kind of stupid...but there's a light down there. This could be all right. Let's assess: cons, I might starve to death where no one can ever find me; pros, this could be fun as hell...I'm gonna do it. [jumps] YeeeeEEEEE! [hits the water] That was awesome!
[Gordon encounters an underground river of radioactive sludge] Freeman: Jesus Christ, look how much we're pumping out! This is bad! I thought the other spills were bad, but I also thought they were contained like we had some sort of plan if this happened, but this is a river! I'm not a bleeding-heart ecologist and I have more pressing things on my mind, but fuck me! If this gets into the ground water...well, that's it. We've already been playing crash-and-burn with this whole facility, but this is us pissing on the ashes as our final tribute to the whole community.
Episode 21 [ edit ]
Freeman: [sees a burning gas pipe] Wow, that looks hot. I want some marshmallows. [Vortigaunts teleport in] Freeman: [shooting the Vortigaunts] What the hell are you looking at? I don't have any marshmallows, and even if I did I wouldn't give any to you! They're mine! Everything's MINE! [Gordon takes a few steps forward, and the catwalk he's standing on collapses.] Freeman: Well, this facility's not mine. I thought I wanted it, but now I don't.
[Gordon enters the room] Freeman: Heeeeeere's JOHNNY!
Freeman: [gets shot at by by HECU soldier] What the fuck?! For the umpteenth time, I'm not an alien! [returns fire] Un-fucking-believable! And here I thought that they finally figured that out. That's what I get for giving people any credit! I saw them shooting the aliens and not me, for once, and I assumed that the military finally got it through their thick-ass skulls which targets they're supposed to shoot at! But no, no, no, no. [makes dumb-sounding voice] That's for smart people like me. [in normal voice] I know it's obvious I'm a genius, but is everyone else really this stupid? I don't know, but I do know how to prove who's more dead between us.
Freeman: I hate you all so much...
Episode 22 [ edit ]
Freeman: Look at this. I've never had any military training, so I don't know the correct procedure for these things, but if I saw my buddy run around a corner and get shot, then I saw my next buddy run around the same corner and get shot, I don't think I'd run around that same corner...but I use discretion. You're not allowed to have that in the military.
[after surviving a firefight with HECU marines] Freeman: Man, if I get indicted once I leave here, this is getting harder and harder to explain. I don't think anyone's gonna buy a few dozen counts of self-defense with a submachine gun. I think there's kind of an unspoken rule in our society that if this many people are trying to kill you, you're supposed to be dead. I need to talk to an attorney. Maybe there's some sort of Rambo clause. But wait, Rambo goes to prison after the first movie. Fuck!
Freeman: Lasers! Lasers! Nothing good ever happens with lasers around here. So I'm just gonna not deal with that. That's my favorite solution to any problem. It's like the classic debate about why measuring the position of an electron changes its momentum and vice versa. The only correct answer is to get drunk and set fire to things.
Freeman: This is ridiculous. The soldiers should be the ones fixing the generator, not me. I'm doing their job, again. First I'm killing everyone for them, now I'm playing engineer. [a Mawman surprises Gordon] Freeman: You don't even have a job! You're a vagrant!
[after turning on the generator] Freeman: Oh, my. That's bad. That must be a fuckton of voltage to jump like that. Maybe I can— [runs through the gap] Nyaaah! God...Yeah, I can't say wearing a suit covered in plate metal inspires confidence if that had hit me. I mean, Jesus. Most people hit by lightning survive, but that's because they're wearing rubber shoes and you can see where it exits. But if that hit me right now, the current would roll around in my body and exit through the top. My head would blow up like a baked potato wrapped in tinfoil. It would pop off like a Pez container. [looks around] I think I need to go the other way...Actually, if it wasn't me, it would be cool to watch if you got that on film. Your hair might catch on fire and it might look like that scene from Scanners, except this would be the real thing! Then you could sell it as a snuff film and make a bundle of money. I know buyers.
Freeman: I've brushed with Death so often, I should start giving him high-fives when I pass.
Episode 23 [ edit ]
Freeman: Who's punching in Morse code? I don't speak Morse code! [shoots radio] So stop that, it's rude! They're probably talking smack about me on the radio.
Freeman: [fighting HECU marines] Screw this, I'm just gonna wait for them to come around the corner again. [grenade lands in front of Gordon] Freeman: OH SHIT! [sprints away; grenade explodes] Okay! Natural selection! The dumb ones are all dead, so the survivors are a little bit smarter!
Freeman: Yeah, it's strange. I thought I might start feeling weird about killing all these people, but really I don't. I think it's because they're all pricks and deserve to die. I'll make a speech at their funerals if someone wants me to. I have no problem with going up to a grieving widow, and telling her I'm sorry for her loss, but her husband was a rat-fuck meathead who tried to kill me for no goddamn reason, because he was too stupid to learn what the word "civilian" means. If I hadn't put him down, he probably would have come home later and strangled you in your sleep. And not in the kinky way either...I know how you base wives are.
Episode 24 [ edit ]
Freeman: Okay, no power. Fine! The cavemen didn't have power, and they had to deal with soldiers with machine guns. And giant aliens with flamethrowers for hands. If they can do it, so can I. Yeah, whatever. But wait, why did I waste all this time doing— [sees the wounded guard] —YOU! You told me to go down there! That if I turned on the power, everything would be wonderful! You're a liar! I can see why somebody shot you! I'm taking your gun away from you. I can use it as a drop weapon if I accidentally shoot a civilian later.
Freeman: [After electrocuting a Gargantua] YES! I meant to do that! Woo-hoo! Big reptile-thing stomping around like they own the place. Well, that's how the dinosaurs went extinct: ME! The bigger they are, the cooler they are to kill.
Freeman: You know, I'm an expert on electricity—on the atomic level, anyway—and this, to me, looks like the power's on. A bit more dramatic than what I was expecting, but still, on. I'm going back up to that train room and finding out what the hell's going on here. That guard wasn't telling me the whole story. What he meant was "Hey, yeah! All you have to do is pump out all that bilge-water in the generator room, turn the power on to the generator, shoot everyone in sight, then come back around and turn on the DC generator, then go down to the storage room and roll a spool up here, then break out some pliers and electrical tape so you can lay down some HV cable, then just bust through a wall and wire up a new circuit, then do the same thing on the other end of the complex, and yeah, you'll have that train runnin' within the month!"
Of course, the real tragedy is that I didn't bring a camera. If I had been taking pictures, I'd be ready the next time I had to sit through some family members' slideshow. I could whip it out and be like "Fuck you, your pictures suck! Look at mine! There's me blowing up some bipedal alien the size of a dump truck. Here's me shooting some troops because I'm hardcore." [Looks at the wounded guard] Yeah, I think we're done here. You brought this on yourself.
Freeman: I'm gonna go out the window because there's no glass and no one can yell at me, that's one of the perks of killing everyone. Speaking of which, if this doesn't start I'm gonna take it out on that guard. [Tram starts] Ah ha ha! All aboard! Wait, wait... I did it wrong. That switch controls the track, not the power. Let me climb back. [Tries to climb through the window] Come on! Stupid sloped ledges. Fine, I'll walk! Ah screw it I'll run. The thing about running is that I'm not building up any muscle mass so it's not like AAAHHH! Okay, yeah. The benefits and drawbacks of running don't compare to tripping and doing a face plant on a white-hot burning gas pipe. That's just about the worst possible thing I could do, actually.
But yeah, I'm in awesome shape, and I've been running in circles today for miles already. There's just no point. I'm sure I worked off those Doritos hours ago. [Looks at the wounded guard] Hey you know what, I don't wanna hear it.
Episode 25 [ edit ]
Freeman: [finds large concrete blocks stacked in front of the tram line, reverses tram] This reminds me back in high school where we had a driver's-ed class and the gym teacher was asking us which was more dangerous: crashing a motorcycle at 60 miles per hour into a haystack or crashing a motorcycle at 60 miles per hour into a concrete divider. He got mad and started yelling at the class when no one answered. [stops, moves tram forward] Okay! Time to end my tram-operating career! [Jumps off tram as it moves to ram the blockade] If I was a conductor, this is how I'd want to retire: just jump off and let the train speed away with everyone on board.
Freeman: [hears strange, otherworldly screams, stops tram] Wha—? All right, I'm not an expert in the field, but that sounds to me like the cries of the damned. I'm not where I should be. [starts tram again] I'm going to come across a bunch of dudes in robes chanting, making some sort of sacrifice with daggers. Then I'm gonna have to fight their summoned demon or whatever. Hey! Maybe that's the— [static bolt appears, close to Freeman] Bwaargh! Maybe that's what I've been dealing with today. What I've been calling aliens, are really demons. Not that they can't be both, like how every square is a rectangle, but not vice-versa. Hey, are those boards blocking the track? [a set of buttress-like boards show up around the corner] Oh! That's a good sign! Is this thing gonna collapse when I move forward? Knowing our engineering, this may be made out of balsa wood.
Episode 26 [ edit ]
Freeman: You know, some people might argue I'm only focusing on the negative, but I think that's because I can't think of one thing today anyone else has done right. All anyone has been doing today has been breaking things, running around screaming, shooting the wrong people, or dying. I mean, what am I supposed to say to people? "Wow, you sure did a good job falling down that elevator shaft!" Or "Way to lock yourself inside the freezer! I'm so proud of you."
Freeman: I haven't checked this tunnel, and I'm still waiting for hidden treasure. We get funding for a lot of shady projects. Maybe there's some Nazi gold back here. Zeigen Sie mir das Geld! (Show me the money!) [checks the tunnel] Eh, there's nothing here. Just a dead end and some more boxes. Probably filled with network cards we can't use. BNC or something.
Freeman: Okay, I see an alien and a dead body. I can put one and one together. [shoots at the bullsquid] Actually, that's one and negative one. [shoots again, killing it] Now it's negative two, and me. But wait, wouldn't I be number one? I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. See, this is why you have to define your terms. If you don't, people die.
Episode 27 (April Fool's 2010) [ edit ]
Freeman: 'Tis true of the— [hears a noise from behind him] What be that noise? Arr, these caves be haunted, says I. But livin' and dead alike shall bow before the great Cap'n Freeman.
Freeman: [Shoots a marine with a shotgun] Arr, the bloodlettin' be flowin' over. I shows no quarter to lubbers such as thee. Ye calls yerselves marines but mariners I says yer not. I bet none of ye could rig a bunt-gasket 'round a mast and jigger if yer lives were hangin' in the balance!
Freeman: Now what'a we have here? An anti-scurvy machine. [headcrabs fall from the ceiling tiles] Shiver me timbers! [shoots them] By the powers! There be all manner o' queer beasties in this hold! I cares not for 'em.
Freeman: [speaking to a security guard] Ho thar, squire! What say ye to joinin' me crew? I gives ye my affidavi' I give ye yer cut of any loot we take. Guard: Okay, why not? Freeman: YA— [is interrupted by the guard] Guard: Didn't want to die alone anyway. Freeman: YARR! That be the spirit! Let us charge forth and paint the walls red with blood! Guard: I don't know if we should go any further, this doesn't look right. Freeman: Quakin' in yer booties now, are ye? You yellow-bellied sapsucker! Just follow me!
Episode 28 [ edit ]
Freeman: Arr, this scallywag be a right thorn in me side. Let it be known tha— [Begins coughing profusely] Eh, okay, that's enough of that. I've got another twenty years and a lot of whiskey-drinking before my voice sounds like that normally.
Freeman: [taking out a grenade when confronted with a soldier in a machine-gun nest] This sounds like a job for Ambassador Pineapple.
Freeman: So what's this...? [reads a message on the wall that says "SURRENDER FREEMEN"] Oh, shit. They know my name! Fuuuuuuuck! This changes everything. I can't just waltz out of here now, I'm wanted! Damn it, my beard betrayed me! They got an ID because I'm the only fucking scientist here with a beard! If I'd gone with that stupid Einstein hair, they wouldn't be able to pick me out from a line-up!
Freeman: [shooting aliens as they come out of the room when the door suddenly closes] What the hell, did it just close the door on me? But I'm a great salesman! [runs into the room and shoots the aliens] Hi, I'm selling these fine used bullets! Free samples! [notices some dead marines on the ground, with their ammunition lying next to them] Oh, looks like you already have some from the looks of things. But then why is there no—? [a headcrab jumps out of a corner and interrupts him] Ah, the missus of the house! Try some of our product! [shoots the headcrab]
Freeman: What's this? [reads a message on the wall that says "YORE DEAD FREEMAN"] "Yore dead". Wow. I can't even make fun of that.
Freeman: [pinned down behind a corner while a marine fires rockets at him] I don't like how liberal this guy is about firing rockets inside an underground tunnel. He's playing Chicken Little and doesn't even know it. [peeks around the corner and fires a few shots with his pistol, the marine fires back and he has to duck out of the way again] I don't think this guy has an architectural engineering, or even a geology degree, to accurately assess the load-bearing stress of rockets on this tunnel. [exchanges a few more shots with the marine, narrowly dodging another rocket] Rocky the Rocket Ranger... [they exchange shots again] God! See, I have to kill you before you kill yourself! And me!
Freeman: You know, everyone's always told me that I'm paranoid and I need to calm down, but guess what? I'm alive, and everyone who said that is dead. That's the ultimate proof that someone doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. "Follow my advice and you'll die just like me! Huh-heh!" I have the U.S. military spray-painting my name onto a wall, setting laser trip mines, and firing a fucking rocket launcher at me, and people have the gall to call me paranoid. Fuck them. Fuck everybody! Anyone who doesn't listen to me deserves the fate they get! I should kill everyone just on principle! [spots a vortigaunt and shoots at it] See, this is what I'm talking about! [kills the vortigaunt] "Aliens aren't invading, Freeman, you're just being paranoid." [kills another vortigaunt] "The mailman's not spying on you, Freeman, you're just being paranoid." [shoots a vortigaunt, and it runs off] What else... [the vortigaunt appears again and he shoots at it before it runs down another hallway] "There's no society of anthropomorphic frog people living in the sewer, Freeman, you're just being paranoid." [kills another vortigaunt] "Owls can't read your thoughts, Freeman, you're just being paranoid." [kills two more vortigaunts] Bet you wouldn't call me paranoid now if you were still alive. How about expecting five monsters to ambush me, is that paranoid?
Freeman: [when his tram automatically stops at a gate] I bet the controls are down that hallway, and there are a truckload of soldiers waiting to shoot me. I've done this dance before. They can keep the damn tram. I'm really not that attached to it. I'm not like those Jabba the Hutt bastards I see at Walmart scooting around in their motorized carts—I can walk!
Freeman:[walking down a tunnel] I am really bummed that they identified me though, that means I'm a fugitive now. So they've probably frozen my bank accounts. I need to get back to Massachusetts—I have about ten thousand dollars in gold buried in Harold Parker State Forest that I put there for exactly this kind of situation. Now, I didn't anticipate that I was going to get framed like this, I put it there that in case I got caught embezzling I would some sort of exit strategy, now granted, ten thousand will only get me so far here, but if I can get to India, I can live like a king with that kind of money, the American dollar goes a lot further there. [says, "I am your god. Kneel before me," in Hindi] I'm going to need a fake ID—I'll check in with Eddy once I get out of here. I think he will be able to hook something up with me. I'm going to need a car too, but that shouldn't be too difficult. I can just take some motorist hostage with my machine gun and drive to Massachusetts that way. Gonna be a long drive. [comes across and large room with sandbags and machine gun emplacements] I hear soldiers, I'm not stopping here, and look! There's another gate with no switch, so there was no point in taking the— [gunfire erupts from behind Gordon] Oh God!! [runs into the opposite tunnel] Good. Stay. That sounds like a heavier-caliber gun, and while I admit I am curious, I really don't feel up for another bullet-resistance test for this suit.
Freeman: A-ha! Elevator! Yes! [presses the button to activate the lift] Oh my God, it goes up and it doesn't even snap! This is amazing! [The elevator stops on the next floor, where several large crates of explosives have been stacked in front of the door way.] What...? Explosives...oh...I should think about this for a minute. [brief pause] You know, I'm really starting to think maybe this whole thing isn't a rescue operation.
Episode 29 [ edit ]
Freeman: [after failing to reach a ledge] See, if I had a grappling hook I could just go "whoosh" up there, then "whoosh" up there. Really, you don't need a physics degree to grasp the concept, but the fact that I have one is just insult to injury!
Freeman: [holding a grenade while on an elevator where a stack of explosives are blocking his path] Well, I take a chance. If I'm gonna level this place, I'm not gonna be half-assed about it. I'm gonna do it right. I HAVE TO BLOW EVERYTHING UP! IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO PROVE I'M NOT CRAZY! [throws grenade behind the crates, then quickly sends the elevator to the next floor down] Okay, down, down, down, down, down, down! [loud explosion] Oh...boy...I didn't think this through very well. I can't keep rationalizing away everything like this, or I'm gonna die! [sends the elevator back up] Trinitrotoluene doesn't care what mood you're in.
Freeman: [upon seeing electricity arching into a wall] Why is it arcing straight into concrete? So, is my education about electromagnetism wrong or is the world wrong?
Freeman: [after killing two soldiers who were hiding in a crate] What the fuck?! Did they just pop out of a box? Why were they in a box? That's Looney Tunes crap! Jesus! Well, they caught me off guard, I'll give 'em that. I wonder if that was their idea or if it came from up the chain of command. Yeah, I can envision some cigar-smoking general ordering this. [impersonating a stereotypical army general] "Yeah! Just put two soldiers in a box! When the enemy approaches they just jump out! It's brilliant!" [normal voice] I bet they're both named Jack, too.
Freeman: Maybe I should've taken the tram. I don't know. Then I could've just loaded it up with dead bodies and sent it forward. That would probably creep out everybody down the line. It would creep me out. If I was working in the lab and this cart of dead scientists just rolled in. It's a real conversation stopper. Yeah these goons write "YORE DEAD FREEMAN" on a wall and I send them a cart full of dead bodies. Who wins then? Psychological warfare worked for Vlad the Impaler. It can work for me too.
Freeman: Let's see what's over this way. [sees a long way full of lasers, electricity, and trip mines] Yeah, I'm not going this way.
Freeman: [after accidentally turning flashlight off and on] Stupid flashlight. Huh, I guess I'm pretty lucky the power's still working down here. Because if it went out and the flashlight stopped working, I guess I'd have to navigate my way by the light of my muzzle flashes, which would be less-than-ideal for a lot of reasons.
Freeman: So, I guess I'll have to check out the— [sees a hiding zombie's arm] Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho! What is that? Hell's coat rack! I don't think so! [kills zombie] Yeah! [is attacked by another zombie] AAH! DIE, DIE, DIE, DIE, DIE, DIE, DIE!! [shoots it multiple times even after it's dead] Okay...I think I got him. They flanked me. Which is why I know there's ONE UNDER HERE! [looking under the desk] Oh, guess not.
Freeman: [imitating a soldier] Well, here we are back in New Mexico on the laser corral roundin' up aliens so we can...Well, I don't know what we're gonna do with 'em. [looks at dead zombie] Space varmints!
Freeman:Okay, I'm going to pretend there's a world where not all glass is bulletproof. [smashes window with crowbar] Hey! Look at that. That's the power of imagination.
Freeman: Kind of sad though. Here, we have a giant underground complex with all these lasers, and instead of having a rave we're using them for evil.
Freeman: I'm going to kill all these people only to find out they were guarding some janitor's closet.
Soldier #1: So, who is this guy, Freeman? Freeman: [quietly, to himself] Hey, I'm outside! Soldier #2: They say he was at Ground Zero. Science team. You think he was responsible, sabotage, maybe? Freeman: No. Soldier #2: Maybe? Freeman: No! Soldier #1: All I know for sure is that he's been killin' my buddies. Freeman: Oh... Soldier #2: Oh yeah, he'll pay. He will definitely p— Freeman: [kills them both before the soldier can finish] There, that's for trying to guilt-trip me! Yeah, the big bad Freeman. Of course, you guys didn't start shit!
Freeman: That security guy said this track would take me to the surface. Okay, now what was the long way to the surface?
Episode 30 [ edit ]
Freeman: [after howling at the moon] Wait, what the hell am I doing? That's right, I was going to out of here; the Moon's a secondary objective.
Freeman: [approaching a blast door] Hey, a keypad! ...I don't know the code. I'll try some random numbers. [beeping] No? Okay, 1-3-3-7. [beeping] No... 1-2-3-4. [door opens] Ah-ha-ha! You know, as much as I'd like to claim this was the result of me being a genius, it's more that someone else was not.
Freeman: [passing through blast door] Knowing this code makes me a threat to national security now. [fired at by HECU marines] Speaking of threats! [grenade explodes] WHOA! He just... [shoots marine] Did I see that right? That guy in the beret just shot a grenade round at his buddies there! I don't think he was even aiming for me, I was just the excuse! I mean, what is this, The Three Stooges Join the Corps? There are three of them!
Freeman: I always expected this sort of thing to happen to the Stooges actually. That one day Mo would just fucking lose it and kill the other two Stooges for incompetence. Well, maybe not Larry, he could be brought back into the fold. But definitely Curly. Curly Joe was beyond redemption.
Freeman: [standing behind an unalerted HECU marine] These guys sound pretty chill considering there were gunshots and an explosion outside not two minutes earlier. I guess it doesn't occur to them to investigate that.
Freeman: Hey, what's this do? [pushes button, blast shields cover window, room shakes] Uh-oh. Uh... maybe I shouldn't be pushing every button I see. [looking through window] Jesus Christ, I launched a missile! I'm not helping anything! [blinded by thruster] Ahh, my eyes! Gaze upon the fiery doom of this earth! [room stops shaking] So... I guess I just started World War III. It's been a busy day.
Freeman: But in the end, there's only one thing that matters: I did not leave any fingerprints. I was wearing my suit. I'm getting out of here.
Freeman: [gazing out over the open desert after climbing a berm] Ah... that's right. I'm in New Mexico, aren't I? The middle of the desert. The middle... of the desert... Now that I think about it, the flight out here might have been longer than I remember. So, if I were to just pack it on foot, how far could I go? If I had food and water—which I don't—I could go twenty, maybe thirty miles in a day assuming the sun didn't beat me down - which it would. I really should have thought about this sooner.
Episode 31 [ edit ]
Freeman: If there's one thing I've learned today, it's that missile launches are not like the movies at all. I thought there were all these procedures, two different people with special keys, a small crew of people to monitor all the systems... but no. It's just a big, red button that says "Launch." [gets shot by a sniper] Gaaaah! Where the fuck did that come from!?! [Sniper fires again, Gordon runs for cover] Yee! I GOT IT THE FIRST TIME!!
Freeman: Hmm. I just thought of a paradox. Maybe the more people I kill, the less likely I am to be the fall guy. Because sure, they could say I killed five or ten people, but can they really pin dozens and dozens of armed military personnel on me?
Freeman: [Attacked by HECU marines after his tram derails] New Yorkers talk like they're all big and bad, I bet they don't deal with half of this shit in the subway! [gunshots] I think if I ever hear someone complain about their commute again, I'm just gonna punch them in the face. My drive home is worse than yours!
Freeman: Anyway, my background doesn't fit the profile. No military training, never fired a gun, acquitted for petty theft, not a member of any extremist organizations, has a PhD in theoretical physics. Yeah, that sounds like our man!
Freeman: Alvin York killed dozens of people. And he was a hero! He didn't even want to, he was like me... am I a hero? Eh, I don't know. I don't think it's heroic if the only person you're saving is yourself.
Freeman: [While looking up at a large broken metallic structure of some kind] What the hell is that? It looks like a prison guard tower. I don't get it. This place makes no sense. [submerges underneath the water, begins mumbling about something before coming back up to the surface] —It's unconstitutional— [submerges again, continues mumbling]
Episode 32 [ edit ]
Freeman: [surfaces for air in a flooded building after being underwater] Okay, don't panic, don't panic, don't panic...I'm sure there's... minutes... worth of air in this pocket. PANIC! [dives back into the water]
Freeman: Come to think of it, how much do I know about Black Mesa? We have toxic waste, loads of weapons, missiles, and now a shark tank. Am I working for a James Bond villain company?
Scientist: Did you see that? Freeman: [surprised] Jesus Christ, I would have shot you! Scientist: [regarding the icthyosaur] They said it was hauled from the Challenger Deep... but I'm positive that beast never swam in terrestrial waters until a week ago. Freeman: It's a shark. Scientist: There's a tranquilizer gun in the shark cage, but I'm not sure it would work on this species. You're welcome to try. Freeman: Thanks, but I have a real gun. Tranquilizer... look, I appreciate wanting to preserve the specimen in the name of science, but if that thing gets out of line, I'm blowing its freaking head off. Oh, and hey, if anybody else comes by here, I need you to be a character witness for me. Don't fuck me on this.
Freeman: [chased out of a pool by an icthyosaur] FUCK YOU, FISH! Oh, it is on. You want to eat me? I'll give you something to eat. You think I work at SeaWorld, giving you free food all day? You're gonna have to pay for this meal. Come on up... I won't hurt you... come on up... sucker. [kills icthyosaur with shotgun] Yeah! Call me Ishmael, bitch!
Episode 33 [ edit ]
Freeman: So, what are my options here? I could shoot every one of these tentacle things individually, but then they would puke up so much this ramp would turn into a Slip 'n' Slide of blood, and I just washed that off of me—again! What I want to do is lay that satchel charge in here and watch these things blow up, but...call me old-fashioned, but I'm still squeamish about setting off explosives underground! I'm sure the studies show— [sees shotgun ammo on a crate] Oh, look! Ammo! [jumps on the box, which collapses under his weight] Ow! Shit! [two Vortigaunts appear offscreen] Freeman: I'm boxed in! [Vortigaunt zaps him; he shoots it] Piss off! [gets zapped by and kills the second Vortigaunt] Yeah, that fish-in-a-barrel trick doesn't work so well when the fish has a shotgun, does it? Well, that was interesting! Looks like the aliens are taking a page from the military's book! [steps out of box] The military puts soldiers in a box to pop out of... [shoots a Barnacle] ...The aliens wait out of the box for me to go into—and it worked! Tactical combat is strange, man! No wonder people have to train so much for this stuff!
[Strange machinery starts to work] Freeman: What is this? Knowing us, I bet these machines serve no other purpose than to crack nuts. That button says "Generator" but, give me a break. Why would you have two sets of ENORMOUS pistons slamming into each other like that? It's obvious what's going on here. It's the same as the crate-smashing room. If we don't spend a billion dollars one year, then we don't get a billion dollars the next year. And if we don't get a billion dollars the next year, then we have to go and spend more money on lobbyists to get the laws changed so we get our billion dollars the year after that. And nobody wants that because then we might have to compete with other lobbyists. We could get into a bidding war. That's how democracy works. On the other hand, the nutcracker room here is a sure thing. I make fun of it, but in the long run, it's probably faster and cheaper just to build the giant nutcracker, write it off and be done with it.
[Gordon gets attacked from behind by a bullsquid] Freeman: Jesus Christ! [kills it] That was hella close to me! Another foot, that would've been inside me! [shudders] Maybe that's what the crushers are for—for when those things teleport inside your head and you become a walking xenomorph! It'd provide a nice, easy way for you to kill yourself, like The Fly! "Help meeeee..." [a Vortigaunt teleports around the corner] Freeman: No, not you, damn it! Your help isn't any help at all! You're just breaking things! [shoots Vortigaunt] I can do that! [kills headcrab] And I can do it better! [kills two more Vortigaunts, then accidentally shoots what appears to be a computer server] Oops. Uh, that was to prove a point. Guess nobody needs that computer now. I wonder if I just screwed somebody using our network. Network errors are lame. They're always [shoots headcrab] "404!" Or [shoots headcrab again] "503!" Why can't there be "Error 482? Somebody just shot the server with a 12-gauge. Please contact your administrator."
Episode 34 [ edit ]
Freeman: Oh my God, it's cold in here! [shivers] Is this ten fucking Kelvin?!
Freeman: Well, I was wrong about one thing. Those aliens are not from a swamp planet. Anything that could— [turns corner, sees a Vortigaunt in the distance and retreats] Oh my God. This whole neighborhood's going to hell, what with the gangs— [shoots Vortigaunt, then ducks back] Yep! [finishes it off] Can't even walk down the street of your own planet anymore! I remember the good old days when I didn't have to bring a gun to work, my coworkers weren't space bugs, I had a salary, I wasn't wanted by the government... [another Vortigaunt appears and he shoots it] Then you happened! [gets zapped from behind] Ow! Was I shot in the back of the—?! [kills a third Vortigaunt] No respect, man. No respect at all.
Freeman: [ while hunting a sniper that shot a guard ] Maybe the problem went away. Maybe I willed it out of existence. Maybe he was the magical sniper fairy that comes and gives silent hollow-point rounds to people who don't eat their vegetables. That was one of the Grimm's tales, right?
Freeman: [after surviving a firefight with Black Ops] Well, this settles it. Black Mesa is a James Bond villain company. We have missiles, robots, lasers, sharks, and ninjas.
Episode Zero [ edit ]
Freeman: [exits elevator and begins training] Looks like I'm the one stuck having to do training...ASS SLAPPAGE.
Freeman: [training in his HEV suit] The only reason I'm here is because everyone else on the team is too damned frail to do any physical activity whatsoever. So, because I can lift a box, I'm automatically the lab gofer.
Hologuide: Walk directly into the ladder, look up, and continue moving forward. If you want to come back down, just move backward. Freeman: "To wipe your ass, first orient your hand behind yourself, then move it forward...or backward." Honestly, who doesn't know how to use a ladder? I mean, it's a LADDER! Somehow, I don't think this program is designed for the gifted.
Hologuide: Please start the lift by moving up to the button, looking at it, and pressing the "use" key. Freeman: Sure. You want me to press a button, I'll press a button. I can press buttons all day! [elevator rises and stops in empty space] Hologuide: Now that you're up here, there's only one way down. Freeman: Where? Hologuide: Find the target on the floor below, and do your best to hit it. Freeman: What? Hologuide: If you take any damage from the fall, we will administer medical care at the next station. Freeman: Is this a joke? They want me to jump from this height onto flat concrete? There must be a typo with the instructions or something that no one corrected. I could climb down, but they want me to hit that target. I'm not doing that, that's retarded! So... I guess I failed the "lemming" portion of the test, but hopefully that's not required to pass the whole course. Well, training's over! I think I'll get out of here and go take my lunch break. I'll just tell everyone I passed training. Nobody's going to check this.
Episode 35 [ edit ]
Freeman: Okay, people, listen up. Today, we're talkin' about fermions. Fermions have a half-integer spin. Not a full-integer spin; those are bosons.
Freeman: This is not my finest hour, is it? Spending the night in a dumpster; getting dumped out of a sewer pipe face-first into a runoff puddle; waking up in the afternoon; I'm probably missing work; I'm lost in the desert; I have many unexplained bruises and facial lacerations. They say you know when you've hit rock bottom, but I can't say any of this is completely unfamiliar. Except for being in the desert, that's kinda new. The last time something like this happened was Austria. Actually, Austria was even worse, because I woke up naked. I had to wander around, lost in Innsbruck, until I could make some clothes out of old garbage bags. [Headcrab teleports in] Okay, well this part's different.
Episode 36 [ edit ]
Freeman: If the experiment was a success, I would've partied all night and got drunk off my ass, and probably woken up in a dumpster... but... I woke up sober, and that sucks. So that must mean the experiment was not a success. I probably got into some fights, then.
Freeman: I would also like to file a complaint about the number of locked doors here, and about the mutant animals that appear to be eating people. Trespasser or not, I have rights, and I'm entitled to a reasonable expectation of safety and comfort when I break into a place. This is America, after all.
Freeman: I'm probably the first person to ever set foot in this place. Therefore, as these are new territories as discovered by the nation of Freeman, any and all monuments shall henceforth be named after me. Me! The name of this monument will be, uh... Freeman Industrial Strength Mixer... With... Green Crap... Inside Of It...
Episode 37 [ edit ]
Freeman: I suppose this is good preparation for later in life if when I get Alzheimer's: I'll wake up not remembering everything, but still be able to escape the retirement home. Wait, what am I saying?! I'm not gonna get Alzheimer's. People who stay mentally active have resistance against that, and I mentally dominate everyone! When I get old, I'm gonna buy that walking cane I saw that secretly transforms into a sword, and scare the hell out of anyone who doesn't show me respect!
Freeman: [shooting aliens] THIS IS NOT A DEMOCRACY! I HAVE A GUN, SO I'M IN CHARGE! MANY GOVERNMENTS AROUND THE WORLD FUNCTION ON THIS PRINCIPLE, AND SOME OF THEM LAST FOR MONTHS!!!
Episode 38 [ edit ]
[on a conveyor belt] Freeman: Oh, wow. Seriously? We actually have crushers of death, too? What are we making in this factory? Something flat. Jesus Christ. [runs under the first crusher] Kyaahh! Oh, they have different stomping patterns! That's really necessary! [slips past the second] A-a-aah! Oh, this one's just full of tricks, tapping out Morse code with a fucking belt! Red lights, walking backwards—GIVE ME SOME MORE PRESSURE, I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH! [runs under the third crusher] YES! "BIOHAZARD!" PERFECT! THANK YOU! AAAHH!! FALLING TO MY DEATH! TANK OF ACID! SUPERB! Sidestepping... [drops onto another belt on the right]
Freeman: I feel like strangling something. It would be fun to be known as a strangler. I mean, it wouldn't be worth it to strangle people just to get the name, but if the police came up with a name for me like "The Sneaky Strangler" that would be cool. [looks up at a sign pointing towards a hallway to stairs] Ok, good. This sign points straight. Not left four times in a row, that would piss me off. Hey what am I talking about, I have a PhD! They'd call me "Dr. Strangle-love!" Actually that could be a porn name. But only for the edger stuff. [hears and sees a bullsquid coming to attack and pulls out his pistol] Aah! [Gun clicks empty and he turns around and begins to run back out of the hallway] OH GOD, I'M OUT OF AMMO!! WHOSE JOB WAS IT TO RELOAD?! THEY'RE FIRED!! WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE'S NO AMMO LEFT?! YOU'RE FIRED TOO!!
Freeman: Maybe I missed something. Because, y'know, exits are supposed to be difficult to locate. Because, God help you if somebody exited your building by accident. Then, they'd have to come back in.
Freeman: Oh... this is that door... So leaving here was never an option! Now, crawling in circles until you fucking die, THERE'S an option! I LIKE THAT OPTION!!! LET'S GO WITH THAT OPTION!!! RAAAAAAARRRGGGHH!!! ... Actually, I was just kidding. I don't like that option.
Episode 39 [ edit ]
[Gordon has just fallen off a conveyor belt into a pit and avoided landing inside a giant crusher and is on the sides of it] Freeman: Are you kidding, this is even worse than I expected! This is something out of a cartoon! [watches as the crusher kills a headcrab that has fallen from a different conveyor belt] Freeman: Oh my God, that just killed that space bug like an Earth bug! [a few more headcrabs try to jump towards Gordon who pulls out his crowbar and hits one while dodging the other] Freeman: Oh wow, my lucky day! This is a dream come true! When I was a kid and I went to see Santa Claus, I told him I wanted to be in a cage fight with these tiny fucking monsters jumping in my face! [hits another headcrab] And I wanted the floor to be made of a giant crusher that could kill me in one quick motion, AND THE SIDES TO BE SLANTED SO THAT IF I SLIPPED I'D IMMEDIATELY DIE! AND NOW I HAVE IT ALL! WHAT MORE COULD I POSSIBLY ASK FOR?!
Freeman: [While engaged in a gunfight with soldiers] Yoo-Hoo! Over here! You forgot your bullets! Take some of mine! [Shoots the last soldier] You're welcome!! Hmm... I'm gonna need some more ammo if I'm going to kill the whole world.
Episode 40 [ edit ]
Freeman: I don't know much Latin. "Language of science", my ass! It would be kind of cool if I wrote out "Latin is a dead language" in blood, and made it look like one of the soldiers did it as his dying action. People would say, "Wow, those were his last words, huh?!" Make them think.
Freeman: I mean, there is no actual right to privacy, but it's implied by the rest of the Constitution...and this gun.
Episode 41 [ edit ]
Freeman: Aw, no! Don't stop! Let's keep this laser party going! Get a disco ball and some music in here! Maybe clear out the bodies...hell, shoot the laser at the disco ball and set this whole room on fire!
Freeman: No matter how hard I try I can never ignore gravity. It's just always there. Talk about oppression! You never get a break. Unless you're completely underwater...but then you can't breathe, so what the hell?!
Freeman: OK, everybody shut up! I need time to think. OK, I won't be killing you because you told me exactly what I wanted to hear. [scientist mumbling] Hey, what did I just say? I could still change my mind! There's enough in this clip for every one of you! OK, let's do the "get outside" thing; you, come with me.
Scientist 1: With my brains and your brawn, we'll make an excellent team!
Freeman: Oh, so you think you're the brains of this operation, huh?
Scientist 1: I'll wait.
Freeman: Goddamn right you will.
Scientist 2: Fascinating... I never suspected such things could be.
Freeman: OK, dopey, you come with me.
Scientist 2: Alright.
Freeman: OK, now, this slicer is kinda dangerous. You oughta know; you designed it. But just take your time, it's only a concentric circle pattern. All you have to- [scientist is killed by spinning blades] What the fuck? Looks like I picked the wrong man for the job! Jesus Christ! This just looks bad for everyone involved. God... [turns back towards the door] Oh, yeah, better make sure the door opens. That would really cap things off if it doesn't. [door opens] Good. If this was locked, it would be a massacre trying to get this crew to climb up the pipes I came down on. OK people, time for plan B!
Scientist 3: Who is responsible for this mess?
Freeman: I don't like how you're lookin' at me, are we gonna have a problem here?
Scientist 3: Let's go.
Freeman: Good. [approaches Scientist 1] OK, I guess you too...
Scientist 1: I certainly hope you know what you're doing...
Freeman: That's it, I've had enough lip from you! You stay!
Scientist 1: Oh, slowing you down, am I?
Freeman: No, you're pissing me off is what you're doing! What I should do is turn that cheese slicer back on and let you form your own escape plan, brainiac! Like I need your help...
Scientist 3: I hope those people in the Lambda Lab can get this under control.
Freeman: Well if they're anything like poindexter back there, I think we're on our own.
Freeman: [has just walked outside of the building] OH MY GOD, I'M OUTSIDE AT LAST!...AGAIN! [Spots a soldier hiding to the side of the building] AH! [shoots the soldier before the soldier fires back] This endless desert isn't big enough for the both of us!
[being shot at by a rotating roof turret] Freeman: Not a weather vane! Not a weather vane! It looks like an anemometer, but it is not. Anemometers don't fire bullets, not even the expensive ones. Or I don't think they do... If they do then meteorologists are more hardcore than I thought.[shot at again by turret] Well, I don't know, maybe...they chase tornadoes and crap. Maybe this is what happens when they get better funding.[Shoots turret down which sets another off, Freeman dodges and takes cover] STOP BEEPING! [Shoots other turret down] No more measuring wind speed for you!
Freeman: I would feel bad about this, but morality is for people who don't have other people trying to kill them every five minutes. I mean, this isn't like a basketball game where I'm winning over and over. "C'mon, let us win just once." "C'mon, Gordon, let us kill you just once."
Episode 42 [ edit ]
Freeman: Boy, I feel like an idiot. I'm showing up with a gun to an artillery fight. That's like showing up with a rocket launcher to a tactical warhead fight. Of course, I didn't know this was going to be an artillery fight. [peeks around the corner; a helicopter fires missiles at him] Oh boy! I don't even wanna be here! They can blow up the damn dam for all I care! [looks again, takes fire from a rocket launcher, runs back] Damn it! I'm pretty sure this is unconstitutional. Even cops aren't allowed to mortar people. I mean, what happened? Was there an emergency session of Congress to vote on bombing me? Okay, think. I guess I'll just rush them. If I stagger my approach, they should miss. [runs across the dam, firing MP5] No! I changed my mind! [jumps over the side into the water] I don't wanna die!
Freeman: [shooting it out with the HECU Marines] I feel sufficiently motivated to leave this place! I don't need your encouragement! I said, I don't need your help! You have no faith in people! Aah! [HECU fire mortars at Gordon] Freeman: Bombs bad, bombs bad! Bad bombs bad! Okay, suppressive fire in, suppressive fire out, do the hokey-pokey and that's what it's all about! [kills a Marine] Stop shooting at me! I'm not the enemy! [fires at the helicopter] GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF THE CLOUDS!! [keeps shooting at the helicopter even as it explodes and crashes]
Episode 43 [ edit ]
Freeman: Another helicopter? I get the feeling something doesn't want me alive...besides the obvious. [turns, sees a few headcrabs] Yeah, okay, this is the wrong way. [turns around] I mean, sharks, mortar shells, attack helicopters, drowning...some force wants me dead. Maybe that's why all of this is happening. [climbs ladder] I was supposed to die yesterday in the test chamber, but I didn't because I'm hardcore, so now reality is slowly unraveling. That makes me the most important person in the universe. Still don't like getting shot at, though.
Freeman: So, if I die, will reality slowly correct itself, or will the world just end? It may as well be the end of the world if I'm dead. God, how many helicopters are there? Too damn many, that's how much. [sees helicopter fly over again] All right, yeah, more missiles. I never really had an opinion about it before, but after today, I think we definitely have too much military spending. It's, what, twenty percent? It needs to be, like, one percent. [watches the helicopter] Look at this guy. He's flying like he doesn't give a fuck how many missiles he uses. He's not paying for it. He'll probably use the extras to blow up cactuses. [the chopper launches a missile] Freeman: [sprints out of the way] Cacti! Yes, fire missiles at me! [returns fire] That's totally not overkill! [a houndeye attacks him and he kills it] No! Which way do I go? [the helicopter machine-guns Gordon] Oh my God! [runs into rock cluster] It's so hard to concentrate out here! Oh, nice. An arch. Yeah, let's see you shoot through solid rock there, tough guy.
Freeman: [soldiers start shooting at Freeman while he's shooting at a helicopter] Goddammit, you're not helping at all! Do I look like a helicopter? NO!! I do NOT look like a helicopter! If I did my life would be less complicated in some ways and more complicated in others.
Freeman: I like math. Math has zero bullshit tolerance.
Freeman:[still being chased by a helicopter] God damn it, that helicopter won't give up! I feel like all that propeller spinning should be affecting the axial procession of the Earth, even though I know it doesn't! The Coriolis effect is NOT working for me today!
Freeman: [is attacked by headcrabs] Gah! [starts shooting them with shotgun] Yaaa! Yaaa! Yaaa! Yaaa! Yaaah! [stops shooting] Huh. This is kinda how I claimed my lab space on my first day of work. Except I didn't have a shotgun for that, but I didn't need one.
Freeman: [walks up to a warning sign that reads "Mines"] MINE!
Freeman: [under fire from helicopter] I thought I hated mosquitoes and then I met you.
Episode 44 [ edit ]
Freeman: Sadly, I am noticing a pattern here. I seem to be going back and forth between wanting nothing more than to get above ground, then once I do, there's something so bad happening topside that it makes me wish I was never born, and I go back underground again. Man fuck Groundhog Day. It's getting worse, too. I'm reasonably certain there's going to be an active volcano outside if I do this enough times.
Marine: We'll kick your ass! Freeman: [taking cover] What did you say to me?! Actually, it doesn't matter. [fires a few shots, killing one Marine far off and takes cover again] I've got the best comeback of all, [pulls shotgun out] a SPAS-12. [shoots the closer, speaking Marine dead] What? What was that? Didn't catch that. Yeah, don't have anything to say now, do you? I actually don't hold a grudge against someone talking trash about me if they're shot afterwards. I try to rise above that and find my own peace.
Freeman: What the fuck is this? Is this seriously the bridge to the other side? I'd expect better than this from a Peruvian burro trail! Jesus Christ, why not just put up a sign that says "Die?" [looks at pair of pipes on the cliffside] What the fuck? These pipes look professionally built! How did that happen? Not like this! The wood's rotting, the stakes look rusted...I don't know how the soldiers got here, but it wasn't this way. Or maybe it was—that's why so many of the planks are missing. If I had a grappling hook, I could just tie off, rappel down and be done with it. Actually, maybe not. I'd have to be carrying a hell of a lot of rope. Uuuugh...well, they did use aircraft cable, I'll give them that. So there's more support if I walk on the sides since these boards look like they have the tensile strength of rice cakes. I'm probably overreacting. [steps onto the bridge, causing the first plank to fall off] OH NO, IT'S HAPPENING! [runs across the bridge, yelling, then pants and mutters on the other side] In retrospect, maybe I should have checked to see if the soldiers had any rope on them.
Freeman: [reverent monotone] Oh my God, it's a rocket launcher. The perfect gift for the man who has everything. Ohhh, you and I are gonna go places. My mind is spinning with new possibilities. You are the first good news I've had all day. [collects spare rockets] Yes, I'll bring your friends. [tries door, normal voice] Locked. [hears helicopter] Hark! Dost thou hear with thine ears what I hear with mine? Interloper! [returns to entrance] No quarter shall be shown hither, fiend! Anon! Show thyself, churl! [a helicopter flies over] Have at thee! [fires, retreats from return fire] Aagh! Curses! Fie upon thee! What-ho, the laser on mine rocket launcher be not a mere target, but a guidance system! Where art thou? Come hither, that I may smite thee! [shoots the chopper down] Thou shalt not be missed. That was liberating. Whoa, wait! What was that sound? Do you hear that? I think that's silence! That's the sound people make when everyone trying to kill me is dead! AND I HAVE A ROCKET LAUNCHER! I have a rocket launcher with a laser guidance system! And I'm walking on a really, really narrow cliff face…
Freeman: Besides seeming like a gift from the gods, this rocket launcher gives me some food for thought. I may have to revise my theory about the Universe wanting me dead. If that was true, the rocket launcher would never have happened. Only most of the Universe wants me dead. There's some larger game going on here. I'm more like Perseus or Odysseus, caught in the center of some cosmic politics. That's too bad. I was hoping the Universe would end with me. Maybe there's still a way to make that happen.
Freeman: Hmm, feel like I'm forgetting something important. [pauses and thinks] Mind reading! That was it. Okay, let's assume it exists, even though no transmissions show up on any known spectrum. [jumping up ledges] The tinfoil-hat people. What do they think? That it's electromagnetic radiation? What do they think the tin is going to do? [jumps onto the last bit of ledge and nearly slips and falls, screaming frantically, but eventually calms down] Th-that, that step was a little tricky. Oh God, oh God, o-ho-ho-ho-ho… [ascends ladder] So anyway, if it's electromagnetic, you’d need a Faraday cage for that, and a tinfoil hat doesn't act like one. It's not even grounded. In all likelihood, a chunk of metal on your head is going to conduct any signal you are worried about, not block it. You'd have a better chance with a lead helmet covered in rubber. Tinfoil-hat people are ignorant.
[Gordon comes across a drainage pipe, only to have a headcrab jump out at him] Freeman: Oh God! Jesus! [retreats from the pipe; the headcrab lunges again, he dodges it and it falls into the canyon below] Yeah! Toro, motherfucker! SPLAT! Forget the mind reading, I just want a helmet. Cranial protection from punctures and lacerations...and bullets.
Episode 45 [ edit ]
Freeman: Delivery for Mr. Abrams! [shoots a grenade round at a tank]
Freeman: [after singing Modern Major General] You know, this song is kinda dated. It's supposed to be MODERN major-general. I'm gonna add a new verse.
[singing to the tune of Modern Major General]
I can fire at a target and hit it at least half the time
or graph out an electron path while using only numbers prime
I calculate the fall rate of a bullet shot a thousand yards
I perforate the thick heads of a hundred military guards.
I can make a simulation of an atom bomb and build one too
Or flank a dozen men and ambush ten of them right out of the blue
From SMGs to RPGs, I carry quite an arsenal
And skip around a war zone like a subatomic particle.
Freeman: STILL NO CHORUS! OK, come on! Sing and I won't kill you! Those of you that are left, I mean...
Ah! (Tank fires at Gordon) OK. There we go. (clears throat)
Every soldier out here wants to kill me for my curiosity
I wage war on the whole damn world because of my tenacity
In matters combat tactical and physics theoretical
I am the very model of a modern Major-General!
Freeman: All right, no one else is even trying to sing along! I quit!
Episode 46 [ edit ]
Freeman: Yeah, that's kind of where my life is right now, where I know my best option isn't going to work
Freeman: Man, if it's worse than what I've seen, it must be... silverback gorillas with flamethrowers.
Freeman: There's people who give you the evil eye, and then there's snipers. Big difference.
Freeman:(Come across a dead security guard) Oh, another dead guy, that's nice..well, he didn't die from a mine, he still has all his body parts attached. Maybe...(A gunshot is heard, the bullet ricochets off Freeman's armor, he runs for cover screaming frantically, and almost running into a trip-mine, he peeks over his cover to see were the shot came from only for the sniper to shoot at him again nearly missing him a second time)Oh my GOD, that was close! Wait, is this that same sniper from last night? Is he following me!? I knew it! that guy is fucking evil! He shot at me and practically herded me into this trip-mine here. Vicious.
Episode 47 [ edit ]
Freeman: [talking to a hiding scientist] Okay, so you don't have ANYTHING, do you? No food, water, guns. I'll be blunt; you're not selling me on the "Wait Here" plan. I'd say that I'd think that this is going to get worse before it gets better, but really, I think this is just going to get worse forever. So, in other words, I think it's going to get worse before it gets worse. If you bet on that, I think it's pretty safe money.
Freeman: [navigating around a room full of explosive laser tripmines] This room confirms every single thing I've suspected about the soldiers. This is their grand strategy at work right here: just slap easily-triggered mines on everything in a room that could wipe out half the facility if there was a chain reaction. Oh, and leave some aliens hopping around in it higgledy-piggledy, too. Yeah, there are NO surprises here. Just blow up everything in sight. Don't worry about how we do missile research here
Freeman: See, this is why I don't have friends! All they ever do is run around screaming causing problems for everyone until someone tries to kill them. Friends are like weeds that scream.
Freeman: [regretting not learning how to hotwire a car] That crap is all on the internet now, there's no excuse.
Freeman: Now I know what time it is: it is clearly rocket launcher time. However...[takes a peek around the corner and quickly ducks back, narrowly avoiding a shot] Mr. Dead-To-Rights The Tank Operator doesn't seem to operate in my time zone. His clock says it's time to turn me into red paste
Freeman: [upon witnessing another friendly fire incident] That tank totally just shot and killed one his soldier buddies without hesitation. Almost killed the other one. Man, I'm NEVER joining the military!
Episode 48 [ edit ]
Freeman: I'm starting to regret accidentally shooting that guard. His tendency to run blindly in front of gunfire would be real helpful right now. I would have him run out there first, I'd run the other way, it'd be perfect. Teamwork: the ultimate sacrifice
Freeman: Why is this door not moving!? It's blown off the hinges! I can see inside for God's — it's not locked! This is cheating! Tell reality to stop cheating! Reality, how could you?
Freeman: Okay, this must be the sniper residence. I received a bullet delivery from you by mistake, so I'm returning it, plus a little something extra for your trouble. [throws grenade into sniper nest; three seconds later, the grenade explodes] Okay, I'll mark down that you received the shipment.
Freeman: Today's forecast is sunny mixed with raining bullets.
Episode 49 [ edit ]
Freeman: Okay, accident or not, I've killed so many people at this point that I have to be changing the course of history. I've mostly been killing soldiers though and they're not as likely to change the course of history unless it's a really decisive battle. Or maybe if they're smart and they go off and do important things later in life. No, there's no risk of THAT. I haven't killed any smart people.
Freeman: Earth bees are more hardcore than space bees. I guess the conventional wisdom is true.
Freeman: (Gets zapped by a few Vortigaunts) OK EVERYBODY SETTLE DOWN! (gets in M2 Browning machine gun and starts firing) DID YOU SAY SOMETHING?!? (Shoots more) YOU NEED TO SPEAK UP! (Shoots more) WHAT?!? (Shoots more) I CAN'T HEAR YOU! (Shoots more) YOU WANT ME TO SHOOT YOU? SURE I CAN DO THAT! (Shoots more) IS THAT ENOUGH? (Shoots more) OK I'LL KEEP IT COMING! (Shoots more) HOW 'BOUT NOW? IS THAT GOOD? HELLO?!? (Shoots more) Yeah I think that's good (dismounts from turret). He would let me know if there was a problem.
Freeman: [after experiencing the Xen trampoline for the first time] You're the reason we have napalm!
Freeman: It's kinda hard to think of excuses when people are shooting at you inside of a ventilation shaft. I had the same problem in high school.
Freeman: Ok, I have no idea where I'm going... umm, I guess I'll have to consort with the Dark Powers here because I'm out of ideas. [uses the Xen trampoline] WAA-WAA-AAA-AAUG-OOOF! [lands on a roof] Ok, thank you oh Dark Ones, I pay homage.
Episode 50 [ edit ]
Freeman: (Turns around corner and see's a security guard very quickly) BLAH! (Reacts very fast and accidentally shoots the wall next to the guard), So the ghosts aren't telling me to shoot you, so I guess you can be a part of the Freeman fan club! Guard: Sure. I didn't want to die alone anyways.
Freeman: (Walks through a tunnel, turns right, and sees a Gargantua shove a car into a soldier) OH BOY, THIS WAS THE WRONG WAY (Starts running but turns to see the security guard shooting the Gargantua) NOW'S YOUR CHANCE! SHOOT HIM! SHOOT ITS ASS GOOD! FUCKING DO IT! (Runs off)
Freeman: (Gargantua destroys gate) Oh shit that buckled fast! (Runs to airstrike control panel) YEAH! Let's do it again! (Hits button, an airstrike starts, the Gargantua shows no fear and keeps walking into the bombs) Yeah walk into it! YEAH GOOD GODZILLA! THAT'S A GOOD GODZILLA! (Gargantua gets blown up) YES THAT'S A GOOD JOB!
Freeman: (Studying the tactical airstrike map) I am again amazed that there is no authentication here. It's just two big joysticks and a red button. I guess the military understood the intelligence of the people they were working with.
Episode 51 [ edit ]
Freeman: See, chess doesn't prepare you for this. You can't say that a rook and three pawns flanked your knight but he laid down suppressing fire and punched through them anyway. You get disqualified if you try that. Maybe I've been disqualified from reality.
Episode 52 [ edit ]
Freeman: I guess that hole is sealed so water doesn't seep in when it rains and floods the underground man-made pond here with no source of water. And this all makes sense, because we're in the desert.
Freeman: I am glad this [automated turret] shot the aliens though, and that it's not programmed to only shoot me, because frankly that wouldn't surprise me at this point.
Episode 53 [ edit ]
Freeman: Uhh... why is this all green? [upon discovering the room spilled with radioactive] FUCK! THIS IS RADIOACTIVE! [rushes back in the elevator, with the elevator buttons not working] ABORT! ABORT!
Freeman: Do you know what the number one regret of dying people is? It's "I regret playing near all that radioactive waste because now I'm fucking dying!"
Freeman: Well, I'm satisfied. Through the power of hypnotic suggestions and a tank, I was able to convince all these people they were dead.
Freeman: [throws a grenade at an Alien Grunt] Follow the happy ball! What could it be? [the alien dodges the grenade] No! You didn't- [firefight ensues and ends with the alien dead] You were supposed to follow the happy ball and you didn't! Now no one's happy!
Freeman: [destroys an alien auto-cannon with a rocket launcher] See, this is why I'm such a good theoretical physicist. I solve problems that shouldn't even exist to begin with.
Freeman: How is this [.50 BMG] gun NOT shooting through a tool cabinet? Does Snap-On have a special tank-proof model or something?
Episode 54 [ edit ]
Freeman: Yeah... I'm about 90% sure that this scientist didn't kill himself to paint the floor with his blood as part of some performance art piece he was doing. Even engineering wouldn't do something like that.
Freeman: It's Occam's Shuriken: when the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas.
Freeman: Ninjas understand quantum mechanics a lot more than people realize. That was a controversial part of my dissertation.
Freeman: You can never prove the absence of ninjas, only their direct presence.
Freeman: [after firefight with Black Ops] But, really, in all likelihood, this is how I'm going to die. Not today, I'm strapped and wired as shit right now, but hey, maybe a year from now-- ten years-- it's almost a certainty ninjas are going to track me down and try and kill me. It's a matter of honor now. [quickly sneaks around wall] Ha! And, really, it's no surprise, given my lifestyle. I'd hardly be the first. Who's the Italian one? Ettore Majorana. Brilliant theoretical physicist, friends with Heisenberg, wasn't much older than me before he was killed by ninjas.
Episode 55 [ edit ]
Freeman: [discussing the Black Mesa incident again] There's probably gonna be a Congressional hearing about us later, asking "how did this happen?". And every single person is gonna say "Uhhhhh... uhhhhhh... uhhhh..."
Freeman: Whoever set up this intercom system | {
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3 Free Girly Branding Mockups and stationery items. In 3 angles, customizable and movable items. Front View Frontal view for your presentations, Top View Popular knolling. Interesting compositions with top view, Perspective Generate scenes in isometric. Use different angles to create awesome presentations. Easy- to-use Mockup Scene Generator allows to generate your own unique scenes by just dragging and dropping items in Photoshop.
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Author: Ruslan Latypov | {
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Australia has conceded in an official report that the Great Barrier Reef’s unique values as a world heritage site have been adversely affected by climate change.
In the report to Unesco’s world heritage committee, the Queensland and federal governments say the reef is “an icon under pressure with a deteriorating long-term outlook”.
The committee will review the status of the Great Barrier Reef at its June 2020 meeting in China, with the potential to place the reef on its “in danger” list.
As part of the process, the committee asked Australia to submit a comprehensive “state of conservation” report for the reef – the first since 2015.
The report says mass coral bleaching events of 2016 and 2017, together with six tropical cyclones, flood plumes and outbreaks of coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish “have impacted the [outstanding universal value] of the property since the last State Party Report in 2015”.
“The size of the property is becoming a less effective buffer to broadscale and cumulative threats, primarily due to climate change,” the report says.
The report outlines the four criteria used to list the reef as a natural world heritage site in 1981. Components that underpin all four criteria have deteriorated, the report says.
Under one criterion, covering how the ecosystem works, the report says: “Climate change is having a detrimental impact on some critical regulating processes such as sea temperature, reef building and recruitment (the addition of new young to the population) which means the ability of the system to ‘bounce back’ is weakening.”
Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C is “widely cited as a critical threshold for the Reef,” the report says.
Australia is taking “strong action” on climate change, the report maintains, saying a target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2030 was a “significant contribution to global climate action”.
The head of oceans at WWF-Australia, Richard Leck, said: “This report confirms those natural values have been significantly damaged, and the world heritage committee needs to decide if they have been damaged enough that the [reef] is placed on the ‘in danger’ list.
“It is welcome the Australian government is recognising that to protect the Great Barrier Reef, we need to limit global climate change to 1.5C. What’s problematic is that Australia is not on track to achieve that and, in fact, there’s a strong indication that if other countries did the same as Australia then we are more in line with a policy that would lead to a 3C or more rise in temperature.”
The director of strategy at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, Imogen Zethoven, said the report’s acceptance that the reef’s outstanding universal value had been impacted was “a critical statement for the World Heritage Committee to consider next year”.
She said the Australian government needed to play a leading role globally in encouraging leaders to act on climate change.
“The report states that 1.5C is widely cited as a critical threshold for the reef, but it doesn’t commit Australia to do our fair share of global emissions reduction to limit temperature rise to 1.5C.”
The environment minister, Sussan Ley, said in a statement that the Australian and Queensland governments had increased reef funding to “an unprecedented $2.7bn over the 10 years from 2014 to 2024”.
She said the government’s Reef 2050 plan “in conjunction with international emission reduction commitments under the Paris Agreement, are critical to the future of the Great Barrier Reef”.
Last month an international report said Australia’s policy response on climate change was among the worst of all G20 countries.
The Queensland Greens senator Larissa Waters said the report to Unesco was “an exercise in spin”.
“An honest reef report would read – ‘the reef is cooked unless we boldly and quickly ramp up rescue efforts’.” | {
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Flames shot into the sky and smoke filled the air as a house in downtown Edmonton caught fire early Monday morning.
Firefighters were called just after 4:30 a.m. to an abandoned house at the corner of 98 Avenue and 103 Street, just above Bellamy Hill.
READ MORE: Edmonton fire crews called to blaze in downtown home
Firefighters were called Monday morning to a fire inside an abandoned house at the corner of 98 Avenue and 103 Street near downtown Edmonton, April 22, 2019. Courtesy: Brent Leah Firefighters were called Monday morning to a fire inside an abandoned house at the corner of 98 Avenue and 103 Street near downtown Edmonton, April 22, 2019. Courtesy: Brent Leah Firefighters were called Monday morning to a fire inside an abandoned house at the corner of 98 Avenue and 103 Street near downtown Edmonton, April 22, 2019. Courtesy: Omar Shalaby Firefighters were called Monday morning to a fire inside an abandoned house at the corner of 98 Avenue and 103 Street near downtown Edmonton, April 22, 2019. Courtesy: Omar Shalaby Firefighters were called Monday morning to a fire inside an abandoned house at the corner of 98 Avenue and 103 Street near downtown Edmonton, April 22, 2019. Courtesy: Omar Shalaby
Crews arrived five minutes later to find a 1930s-era home on fire and began attacking the flames from the outside.
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No one was injured and no properties in the area had to be evacuated, Edmonton Fire Rescue Services said.
READ MORE: Cats trapped in Edmonton sinkhole prompts firefighter rescue
Six fire trucks responded to the fire. As of 6 a.m., crews were still determining if the house was safe to enter.
Firefighters were called Monday morning to a fire inside an abandoned house at the corner of 98 Avenue and 103 Street near downtown Edmonton, April 22, 2019. Dave Carels, Global News Firefighters were called Monday morning to a fire inside an abandoned house at the corner of 98 Avenue and 103 Street near downtown Edmonton, April 22, 2019. Dave Carels, Global News Firefighters were called Monday morning to a fire inside an abandoned house at the corner of 98 Avenue and 103 Street near downtown Edmonton, April 22, 2019. Dave Carels, Global News Firefighters were called Monday morning to a fire inside an abandoned house at the corner of 98 Avenue and 103 Street near downtown Edmonton, April 22, 2019. Dave Carels, Global News
No road closures were reported. The cause of the fire is not known.
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Grassroots campaign group Momentum has been fined £16,700 for "multiple breaches" of electoral law during the 2017 general election.
The fines handed down by the Electoral Commission include £12,150 - the largest fine levied on a non-party campaigner - for an inaccurate election spending return.
Momentum, which grew out of Jeremy Corbyn's successful Labour leadership campaign in 2015, has also been punished for failures to report donations.
Louise Edwards, the Electoral Commission's director of regulation, said it was "particularly disappointing" the group had broken the law, given "political campaigning is its full-time work".
She said: "Non-party campaigners are essential for a healthy democracy.
Image: Momentum grew from Jeremy Corbyn's successful Labour leadership campaign in 2015
"But just as crucial is that after a poll, voters can see complete and accurate spending data.
"The fines that we have levied reflect Momentum's repeated revisions to their spending return, poor record keeping and failure to follow advice given by the commission prior to the election."
Laura Parker, of Momentum, acknowledged that the commission did uncover "some mistakes in our reporting and some clerical errors", but added: "This isn't surprising for a new organisation which at the time was less than two years old and had 25,000 members and 150 local groups.
"The Conservatives likely employ more lawyers than Momentum have staff, and even getting close to fully complying with these complex regulations for a volunteer led, social movement organisation is a herculean task."
She said the fines levied were "disproportionate", adding: "The fines and associated staff time will cost Momentum more than our entire regulated campaign spend during the election.
"Not only did Momentum co-operate fully with the Electoral Commission, but these offences are incredibly minor when compared with other political organisations."
Ms Parker added the group had put in place "comprehensive systems" to ensure "we won't make these mistakes again". | {
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“If they’re planning on that, we’re right there with them,” Stevenson said. “Please do.”
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“It would have been unwise to jump to conclusions after the shutdown,” he said, “and I think it’s equally unwise to jump to conclusions about Obamacare.” | {
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Adding Bee to Metamask:
Login to Metamask
2. Select the “Tokens” and click “Add Token”
3. Add the Bee Token contract address(0x4D8fc1453a0F359e99c9675954e656D80d996FbF) to Metamask and view your tokens.
Adding BEE to My Ether Wallet:
Go to MyEtherWallet.com and click Send Ether & Tokens
2. Then choose your preferred method of accessing your Ethereum wallet.
3. Scroll down until you see Token Balances in the bottom right corner of your screen.
4. Click “Show All Tokens” and scroll down until you see BEE. Then select “Click to Load BEE”
Congratulations! You can now view your Bee Tokens!
_____
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https://facebook.com/thebeetoken
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https://t.me/beetoken
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instagram.com/thebeetoken
https://steemit.com/@thebeetoken
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Michael Pye | The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe | Pegasus Books | April 2015 | 31 minutes (8,498 words)
Below is a chapter excerpted from The Edge of the World, by Michael Pye, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.
* * *
There was nobody else alive, nobody who could read or preach or sing the service, except the abbot, Ceolfrith, and one bright boy: who was local, well-connected and about sixteen, and whose name was unusual. He was called Bede, and he wasn’t called ‘saint’ or ‘venerable’, not yet.
In 686, the sun went dark behind the moon. When the eclipse ended the plague came suddenly from the sea. It broke into the monasteries like this double house at Jarrow and Wearmouth in Northumbria and all the little ports along the coast. It killed quickly. The old abbot, Eosterwine, was sick and dying and he called all the monks to him. ‘With the compassion that was second nature to him, he gave them each the kiss of peace,’ Bede remembered. Nobody worried then about touching the sick; sickness was known to come in an impersonal miasma, a kind of mist; so the abbot’s kindness killed almost all of them.
The deaths left a quiet in the stone church that was as bad as the sight of walls stripped of pictures or a library without books: the house was reminded that it had lost its glory. Music was not yet written down; it lived only in men’s minds and could be learned only by ear; if it was not sung, it was lost. The monks had been taught ‘at first hand’ by the chief cantor of St Peter’s in Rome, and plainsong was one of great riches of the house; they were the first to sing Gregorian chant in Britain. But now the familiar antiphons, the sacred conversation of voices answering each other back and forth across the choir, were gone.
Ceolfrith was miserable, even tearful, and he stood the quiet for only a week. He needed to begin the familiar services again. He began by singing on his own, and then the boy Bede joined in: two voices instead of a dozen taking the parts. It was a thin sound in the small stone chancel, but they did what had to be done: they kept the music alive.
The plague went away almost as suddenly as it had come, and Bede lived to see the monastery thriving again. A whole new generation of novices arrived. There were new political crises, especially a tyrant king called Osred, which made the monasteries into a most welcome refuge. When Ceolfrith decided to go to Rome in 716 he left ‘behind him in his monasteries brethren to the number of around six hundred’.
And this was all the world that Bede ever knew. He’d been taken to the monastery at the age of seven, and dedicated to the Church by parents who may have been quite grand and certainly lived close by. He hardly ever left, except for study in another monastery; he never went on pilgrimage; he never travelled the fixed route from his home in the northeast of England to Ireland, which other men used in order to study or to escape the world or go out missioning. He could have gone overland from one church guest house to another, taking the usual three days and nights in each; he could have met up with the professional sailors who worked in the monastery on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland; he could have followed the tracks of his colleagues and predecessors to the Firth of Forth and then to the Firth of Clyde and then across to Derry. Those were regular routes even after the strong connection between the Christian communities at Lindisfarne and Iona was broken. Instead, Bede lived almost always inside his new, closed family. He shared all its high emotions.
Before Ceolfrith there had been two abbots for the two monasteries, one at Jarrow and one at Wearmouth: Benedict Biscop and Sigfrith. The two men were deathly sick at the same time and Bede remembered how Sigfrith had to be carried on a pallet to see his friend, and set down to lie side by side on the same pillow. Their two faces were close, but the men did not even have the strength to kiss; the monks had to reach down to turn their heads towards each other. Bede found it, he wrote, ‘a sight to move you to tears’. When Benedict decided that the two houses should be run by one man, and that man should be Ceolfrith, Bede tells how their virtues bound the two men together ‘more closely than any family relationship’. This Ceolfrith was central to Bede’s life, the father who never sent him away, and when Ceolfrith decided he would go again to Rome, this time to die, Bede had the one moment of crisis he acknowledges in all his life. In the preface to one of his biblical commentaries he writes of the consternation he felt, the ‘sudden anguish of mind’.
Being shut in by the monastery walls, the only way Bede could know the world outside was to read, study and ask; he had to build his whole world with books. The library Bede knew, some two hundred manuscripts, had been assembled by men who thought books for reading were just as important as pictures or relics or music. Benedict Biscop, the founder of the house, brought back ‘a large number of books on all branches of sacred knowledge’ from his third trip to Rome, ‘some bought at a favourable price, others the gifts of wellwishers’. The book trade was flourishing and it was complicated: Bede could read at Jarrow a codex of the Acts of the Apostles, Greek and Latin versions, which had been in Sardinia until the seventh century and ended up later in Germany. On Biscop’s next trip, he brought back ‘spiritual treasures of all kinds’ but ‘in the first place he returned with a great mass of books of every sort’. Everything else—relics of the saints, holy pictures, music in the Roman manner and even a promise of perpetual independence from any outside interference—comes further down the list in Bede’s account. His friend and mentor Ceolfrith, the third abbot, ‘doubled the number of books in the libraries of both monasteries’, he says, ‘with an ardour equal to that which Benedict had shown in founding them’.
These books were Bede’s work. From the time he became a priest at the age of thirty ‘until the age of 59’ he says he spent his time studying Scripture, collecting and annotating the works of the Church fathers and making extracts from them, adding his own explanations, even putting right one rotten translation from the Greek. He was under orders from his bishop to gather and make a digest of the books around him because they were so many and so long that only the very rich could own them and so deep that only the very learnèd could understand them. He was to take the riches of the Jarrow and Wearmouth library, manuscripts of all ages and origins, and publish them to all those houses which did not have a decent library at all. Books were not fine possessions to be stored away, precious but not for use; they were a practical way to distribute ideas and information, ship them out and share them.
* * *
Bede knew the whole process of making books from imagining and dictating the words to being the clerk who took them down, in the medieval version of the Roman shorthand called ‘Tironian notes’, a puzzle of dots, bows and teardrops, curved, wavy and straight lines all tilted five different ways and taking their meaning from where they were placed on the page. The code was an important part of literacy; it was schoolroom stuff. He also knew about being the scribe, the one who made fair or even lovely copies of the final result; he worked on one glorious coloured and decorated Bible, the Codex Amiatinus, which was given to the Pope.
So he worked in the scriptorium, the writing place, a narrow world inside the monastery. Everyone wrote exactly the same way: a neat, uniform and impersonal hand. In Jarrow, the writing was an uncial script, which is round like your first schooldays writing, but all in capital letters. Getting it right was very important because uncial script was Roman, and Jarrow was very much a monastery which looked to Rome. The Irish monks on Iona used an island script, and they had full heads of hair; at Jarrow the monks had the tonsure and they wrote in the Roman way because to do anything else would have bordered on heresy. Rome and the Celtic Church in the North were still arguing over issues such as how to date Easter, and writing was a way to choose sides. The scribes could sometimes play and make something personal in the decoration of the page, even glory in the beauty of what they could make, but it would be centuries before scribes could have reputations as artists. The act of writing was anonymous and a matter of monastic discipline.
They wrote with black ink made of oak galls and iron salts, using goose feather quills. They wrote on parchment: sheepskin or the hide of a calf, shaved, polished and cut until it had the texture of a kind of suede and a colour close to ivory, between white and yellow. When they wanted colours, gold was gold leaf, silver was silver leaf, fixed to the page. Black in the painted patterns and images was usually carbon, white was chalk or crushed shells; blue was woad before the much more costly lapis lazuli was easily available, purple came from lichen, yellow from a salt of arsenic, oranges and reds from toasted lead, and for green the scribes used verdigris, made by holding copper over vinegar for a while. A scribe making a book as lovely as the bible made at Jarrow for the Pope, or the Gospels made at Lindisfarne, was chemist and artist all at the same time, especially in the making of subtler colours like the surprising, polished pinks.
Writing hours were daylight hours because that was the best possible light, three hours at a time and usually two shifts in a day; ‘it is hard to bend the neck and furrow parchment for twice three hours,’ a scribe writes on one manuscript, and another, on an eighth-century manuscript, says, ‘He who does not know how to write thinks it is no labour. Yet although the scribe writes with three fingers, his whole body toils.’ Irish scribes had a way of gossiping and complaining in the margins: ‘I am very cold’ or ‘That’s a hard page and a weary work to read it’ or ‘Oh that a glass of good old wine were at my side.’ Their notes may have been for people working alongside them, because sometimes a team of four or more would work together on a single manuscript; but some were entirely personal, as when a scribe writes out the scene of Judas Iscariot betraying Christ with a kiss and adds in the margin: ‘Wretch!’
Then after the evening service of Compline there was time for cutting, polishing and ruling the skins for parchment. The ruling, done with the sharp point of a stylus or an awl, was vital if the text was to line up; pages were written separately and they had to face each other squarely in the finished book. There was also the business of discreetly correcting the pages already written. Correcting meant adjusting the letters and making sure they were the proper ones, but also putting in punctuation, which was often done after the words and letters had been written out. Punctuation was points, and the longer the pause the more there were and the higher they appeared above each line.
Everything about Bede’s life makes it seem that he was regulated and confined—everything except the books he wrote. His monastery was not strictly Benedictine but he closely obeyed the Benedictine rule of stability: to stay put. He chose never to be a pilgrim like the abbots of his house, even though he knew very well that the Irish thought you could hardly be Christian without travel to Rome, to shrines, to other places of learning. Most of his writing is careful, thoughtful accounts of the Bible, book by book, the kind of work that is best done in a closed, quiet room; and he was also, as he says, very familiar with the brisk, meticulous business of being in a scriptorium. So what liberated his mind to puzzle over where he was in time, and how the moon affected the sea and what might explain the plague even better than God’s anger?
For a start, monasteries were not at all cut off from the general world. Plague proved that. In the months after the sickness ‘of great villages and estates once crowded with inhabitants only a tiny scattered remnant remained, and sometimes not even that,’ Bede wrote. The monasteries shared their fate because they were often on the coast, which was where plague landed; plague travelled fastest by sea. They were also connected to all those great villages and estates, for monasteries were markets, hubs for trade in commodities like salt; people were always arriving and leaving. Villagers came in to worship, and monks went out to minister to the villages. Even on the more remote monastery island of Lindisfarne, sickness persisted for a year and almost every man died; even Lindisfarne was in the world.
The most surprising scraps of knowledge filtered into the scriptorium. In the bible that Jarrow made for the Pope there are curious marks on the golden halo round the head of Ezra the Scribe: they may just be tefillin, the tiny leather boxes holding fragments of the Torah that some Jews wear. Ezra also wears the headdress and breastplate of a proper Jewish high priest. It is true that Christians later had to be stopped from wearing St John’s Gospel as a cure for headache, which is a mutation of the same idea, but someone knew actual Jewish customs. The elegant designs on the page that look like the most subtle carpets owe much to Coptic art, and to the kind of prayer mats that were used in the Middle East and only later in Northumbria. When the monks came to bind up St Cuthbert’s own bible, buried with him as a kind of Book of Life, they sewed the binding in a distinctly Coptic style.
These elaborate decorations meant experiments with new techniques and new tools. Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, in the very early eighth century, started to use lead to draw out his designs on the back of the page; then he set the sketches on a frame of transparent horn or glass and put a strong light behind them so he could consult his design as he painted the page itself. He worked alone so his inventions went no further at the time, they were as hidden as he was, but they were remarkable: he made the first lightbox and the first lead pencil.
* * *
Bede did much more than make scrapbooks out of the texts he knew. He checked and changed, left things out and added to the old ideas; he thought again. He chose which old books to believe when he wrote history and he reshaped history by fitting the particular history of England into the grand and biblical story of the whole world. He was trying something extraordinary: to see where he stood in time.
He puzzled over things that others took for granted, like the plague and how it could be God’s will when these were the happiest times for the English and their Church, the age when they had Christian kings to rule them and priests to teach them and the whole of England was learning to sing holy songs. If disease was God’s judgement on sinners, ‘the avenger of evil deeds’ as it was supposed to be in pagan times, then why was He punishing His people now for doing the right thing?
When he came to write his schoolbook about nature, De rerum natura, Bede looked beyond the Bible and the usual written authorities; he used experience. He connected plague with the thunderstorms that break up summer and start the autumn, to the corruption of the air due to excessive dryness or heat or rain. He had no grand theory, but he looked and asked questions. He was right about the season for plague, although he never knew the reason. The sickness was spread by fleas that lived on the bodies of rats, which fed on the corn transported by ships, which sailed in the summer.
He saw the moon riding higher in the sky than the sun and asked how that was possible when everyone knew the moon was closer to the Earth. His explanation was an elegant experiment in thought: he asked his readers to imagine they were walking at night into an immense church, all brightly lit for some saint’s day and with two particularly brilliant lamps: one hanging high at the far end, one hanging lower but closer. As you walked into the church the lamp that’s closer would seem to be hanging higher than the lamp in the distance and as you walked forward it would seem to move higher and higher still until you were directly under it and the truth was obvious: it seemed higher precisely because it was closer.
He casually suggested that it would be easier to work out the age of the moon if you knew your fifty-nine-times table, which suggests that he did; he used mathematics even though it was hard to manage any complicated sum using the inflexible Roman numerals. His near contemporary Aldhelm used to complain that remembering the numbers to carry over when adding or dividing or multiplying or subtracting was so difficult that he could manage only when ‘sustained by heavenly grace’. Bede’s method was to do sums on his hands, not on paper, with a system of straight and bent fingers in different combinations that could reach 9,999; after that, he says without explaining, you need other parts of the body. The system had other attractions for a boy in the quiet monastery, a scribe in the silence of the scriptorium. Just agree a simple code, settle on a number for each of the twenty-three letters of the Roman alphabet, and the system allowed silent talk across a room.
Bede fixed the story of how the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain and how they brought true Christianity; he wrote commentaries on Scripture that were in demand across Europe; but more than those, he was the hero of computus. It may have been his most remarkable achievement at the time, but even the word is unfamiliar now, let alone the thinking: a blend of maths, astronomy and ideas about how the universe is shaped, all combined to establish a true and proper calendar. Anything to do with number had an element of holy mystery since as one Irish text has it ‘take number away and everything lapses into ruin’. The calendar also had everything to do with medicine, since diagnosis and treatment were linked to astronomical time, but computus had one main use: to calculate the date of Easter.
The whole Christian year was shaped by the date of Easter; but the Church’s own rules for fixing it meant Easter fell on a different Sunday each year, a floating feast. It was not just the most important festival, the day for remembering the event that gave Christianity meaning; it was also one of only two feast days on which anyone could be baptized into the Church, unless they were in imminent danger of dying unsaved. The other was Whitsun, and that always fell seven Sundays later. Without a settled date for Easter, nobody would know when to begin the long forty-day fast of Lent, which ends on Easter Day. So the date had to be set well in advance; it was not like the Islamic Ramadan which can be fixed by observation, watching for a full moon and the equinox. Fixing Easter required a kind of calculus.
It involved bringing two different calendars into line: the thirteen months of the Jewish calendar and the twelve months of the Roman calendar. The Gospels say Christ died during the Jewish feast of Passover, and Passover is fixed on the first full moon of ‘the first month’ in the Jewish lunar calendar. That would seem clear enough, except that the early Church fathers decided that it really meant the first full moon after the spring equinox, and that is where the trouble started. The date of the equinox was fixed according to the very different Roman calendar, which follows the sun. And since the solar year isn’t a round number of days, the actual equinox tends to come adrift from its official date, which complicates things even more.
This was a political issue. The Church was one Church, united, so it could not celebrate Easter on different days in different places. The Church was ruled from Rome, whatever the Irish Church thought, so the date had to be the one set in Rome. But the Irish insisted that news did not always travel reliably from Rome, so they devised their own way of fixing the date, and those ways did not agree with Roman ways. Bede was a true Roman, and he set out to find a universal answer to the problem.
He had to be radical. He was not being a historian now; he was looking to future dates and saying what would happen. He had to find names for years that were still in the future, something which neither Germans nor Romans did; they both named years after the king, emperor or consul in power at the time, so that Bede’s own monastery was begun in the twenty-ninth year of the reign of King Ecgfrith rather than what we know as 674 ce. He used thought and facts to solve an immediate problem, which was something the ancients hardly ever did in writing; their science was the recording of facts for their own sake. He needed a practical result from numbers, with (and despite) all their holy and mystical significance. He then had to deal with the Irish, and find a formula that Rome could happily endorse.
He showed how the moon years and sun years came together in cycles of nineteen Roman years. Writers before him had worked out the cycle, but he was the writer who gave them authority and spread the idea; he published it. For that, he had to understand the movements of sun and moon. He began with the written authorities in the library, who had ideas on how the moon works in the world: the bishops who said oysters grow fatter as the moon grows fuller, that wood cut after the full moon will never rot, that the more moonlight there is, the more dew. Then Bede observed for himself the phases of the moon and their real effect in the world.
He took what the Irish already understood, the connection between the stages of the moon and the force and height of the tides, and he brought that to everyone’s attention. He also refined it. He understood that the moon rising later each day was linked to the tide rising later each day, a pattern he could never have recognized without knowing that the Earth was round. From this he built a theory: the tides were not water gushing out of some northern abyss, nor water somehow created by the moon, but the moon tugging at the sea (‘as if the ocean were dragged forward against its will’). He measured the tides against the phases of the moon, and he measured them exactly, to the minute. For his history he had correspondents in many other monasteries along the coast from Iona in the west to the Isle of Wight in the south, and he may have asked the monks in each place to make observations for him, too. However he did it, he certainly knew that the time of the tides could be different in different places (‘we who live at various places along the coastline of the British Sea know that when the tide begins to run at one place, it will start to ebb at another’). He found that both moonrise and high tide were a little later each day, later by exactly 47½ minutes.
For centuries his work was mined for astronomical information. When it was finally printed and published eight centuries later – in Basle in 1529 and then in Cologne in 1537 – it was not out of antiquarian interest. It still had immediate, practical value, despite the need for notes to explain all the difficult bits. Indeed, his work has often survived better than his reasons for doing it. We still date events from the ‘year of Our Lord’, Annus Domini, the year of Christ’s birth; that was Bede’s invention – part of his solution to the problem of the calendar. Christianity was only just growing out of its eschatological phase, when the world was expected to end any day, and Bede wanted to rewrite world history and its ages to prove that the world still had a long time to live. He wanted to place himself in time, past and future, and in doing so he built the Western calendar as we know it.
He found himself arguing on occasions with the living and the dead, which could be dangerous in a Church that valued authority so much, and Bede had reason to know that. He once heard that he had been accused of heresy by someone who was having dinner with a bishop. He was aghast, he told his friend Plegwin, he went white. He said the talk was from ‘drunk peasants’, that it was ‘abusive talk of the foolish’; but it was disconcerting to be denounced, and denounced for a detail. His offence was that when calculating the seven ages of the world, he implied that each age need not be exactly one thousand years, which was the usual version; he wrote of ‘the unstable ages of this world’. He was arguing with everybody else’s assumptions, which would later seem his great and even heroic virtue.
Twenty years later, writing a new book, he was still furious.
* * *
Christians and missionaries bought books, shared books, copied books. Having their doctrine on the page gave it a particular authority; they were, after all, the People of the Book. Since all information had to be shipped about, on the page or in someone’s head, it can seem that they must have carried reading and writing itself into the North, that we owe them literacy and not just in Latin. But the story is more complicated than that. The habit of writing and reading had reached Ireland before St Patrick came over on his mission; and what brought it was the trade that went back and forth across the sea.
For Ireland wasn’t isolated before the missionaries arrived. Tacitus says the approaches to its ports were well known to traders in the first century ce. Words crossed from Latin into Irish even if Irish made them hard to pronounce; so the Latin purpura for fine cloth turned into corcur; the Irish long, a ship, is from the Latin for a longship, navis longa; and the Irish ingor comes from the Latin ancora, for an anchor. These are sea words, about sailing and about the goods that ships were carrying, and the words made the crossing before the fifth century. Military words also crossed, words the Christian missionaries did not need: words for a legion, a soldier, weapons and weekday names that are tributes to Roman gods such as Mercúir for Wednesday (and Mercury) and Saturn for Saturday.
The Irish were outside the empire, so they did not have to play by Roman rules. They did not need reading and writing in order to rise in the imperial bureaucracy. They settled questions about who owned which piece of land by hearing witnesses and swearing oaths and paying attention to the memory of a community. When they first carved words onto stone, using the Irish ogam script, they were making simple memorials to the names of the dead, markers that were solid enough to stand as boundary markers and more reliable than memory. But the Irish were also trading with the Romans, and that required either memory or records that the Romans would understand; in their voyages to Gaul or to Wales, the Irish quickly learned that the Romans’ language was different, and was written a different way. At the same time they were working out their own way of writing down their Irish language. The ogam alphabet grew out of the marks made on wooden tally sticks to count sheep and cattle, but its other purpose may have been to mystify the Roman functionaries and merchants, who knew only their own letters.
This meant that when Patrick arrived to convert Ireland in the fifth century, he had a head start. He was preaching the faith of the Book, carrying with him books of the law and the Gospels, and the Irish had their own habit of writing and reading already. They knew something about the technology. There are clues in the Irish law tracts written later, in the seventh century, which lay down that a contract can be proved by, among other things, ‘a godly old writing’, and witnesses can make a dead man’s agreement stand but only if they are not contradicted by relevant texts cut onto stones. Writing settles deep into Irish law. Much more remarkably, in his life of Patrick, the seventh-century monk Muirchú tells how the missionary found himself in a contest of magic with King Lóeguire’s druid. The king told the two to pitch their books into the water, and they’d see which god was worth adoring. The druid said he’d rather not because he knew about baptism and Patrick’s God was obviously a water god. It’s true that Muirchú was writing two hundred years later, and maybe he took for granted that the Irish had always had books because he had them himself, but the more likely story is literal: druids had some form of book, perhaps metal leaves, perhaps wood or stone, which could rival the Book. Patrick taught some men their alphabet to make them priests and bishops, but not all men needed the lessons.
This fact that the Irish wrote down Irish very early still matters very much: it made books useful.
Books could always be lovely things, used like jewels: sealed into shrines or put on an altar where nobody could possibly read them or sent to Rome as splendid presents for the Pope.
Boniface wrote to the Abbess Eadburga on his mission to convert Frisia, asking her for a truly showy book, ‘a copy written in gold’ of the Epistles of Peter so as ‘to impress honour and reverence for the Sacred Scriptures visibly upon the carnally minded to whom I preach’. His other need, with age, was for clarity. He asked the Bishop of Winchester for a particular copy of the Prophets that he knew was written out clearly, because ‘with my fading sight, I cannot read well writing which is small and filled with abbreviations’.
His books were written in an unbroken caterpillar of letters, nothing to separate the words, and they were meant to be read out loud, which required a reader who could make words and sense out of the string of letters on the page, and an audience used to hearing Latin. Many other peoples in Western Europe spoke a version of Latin, and they could understand the real old thing, but the Irish spoke a very different language; when a text was read out loud it was entirely different from daily talk and it gave them no clues to its meaning. They wanted words for the eye, not the ear. They wanted to see the form of the words clearly so they could translate their meaning, and therefore they began to put spaces between the words. Then they introduced their most brilliant invention: punctuation. Not only were the words distinct on the page: it was also clear where an idea stopped or paused or started.
Silent, individual reading now became much easier. It had always been a way to meditate on the meaning of a book, and understand it better, right back to the fourth-century St Ambrose, who was notorious for reading silently even when he had visitors. Now the habit could spread. New monastic rules punished anyone who read aloud, but just under their breath so as not to seem old-fashioned; they spoiled the quiet reading for everyone else.
Books for reading could be written out quickly and plainly: they were books for use. The Irish scribes trained Anglo-Saxon scribes. The first Christian missionaries to England had had to send for their books from Gaul or Rome, but in Bede’s time their libraries were being sent to Gaul to be copied. Bede, Boniface and the less famous Tatwine were all copied in northern France, in the monastery at Corbie. The most careful and solid text of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible was written out at Jarrow and Wearmouth and Lindisfarne, based on a manuscript from Naples; it rapidly became the standard version in all Northern Europe. By the seventh century there were already significant libraries in England. The Anglo-Saxons went out to found schools across the Germanic lands, and they became missionaries for words: the scholar Alcuin learned the new writing techniques in York and then took them over the sea to Charlemagne’s court in the 780s. He promoted a new idea: ‘the close study of letters’.
Anglo-Saxon scribes, too, were on the move, and not just with the various missions. They taught the court of Charlemagne the new idea of a library which should be well stocked with books and well organized for study. Charlemagne’s held historical books and ‘the doings of the ancients’, which were read aloud in the king’s presence, along with Charlemagne’s favourite, the works of St Augustine. When Alcuin was away from the court and wanted a copy of Pliny’s Historia naturalis, he asked to have it sent to him. On another occasion he wrote simply to ask someone to look something up in the bookchests of the court for him. This taste for books and the production of manuscripts caught on. Well into the ninth century, Anglo-Saxons were still crossing the sea to write in German monasteries, long after the first waves of missionary work. Some of the books they wrote were lovely and even spectacular, but most were portable information. With separate words and clear marks of where ideas began and ended, anyone could read in her own time for her own reasons.
People wanted to read Bede. Anglo-Saxons overseas wanted his account of Saxon triumphs. The growth of the English Church inspired a wide audience as English missionaries worked to convert the Frisians and the Germans. By the ninth century, the books reached St Gallen on what is now the Swiss border, where the monk Walahfrid Strabo put together a collection of key quotes for teaching and included Bede. They were in Reichenau, the island monastery in Lake Constance, and the cathedral library at Würzburg in Bavaria. They turn up in central France as deep as Tours. Bede from the edge of the world was being published over the sea to the known world.
* * *
It was a world of gifts, a routine of absolutely unavoidable exchanges: gifts up and down the social ladder, from kings to knights to keep them loyal, from knights to kings to keep them giving, from bishops to cardinals and from cardinals to priests; from Ireland to Northumbria to Frisia to Rome and beyond. Gifts bound people together in their proper ranks and obligations. Gifts were about power, and making it visible. When in Germany, the missionary Boniface sent silver to Rome and got back incense, and on one occasion a face towel and a bath towel; he sometimes sent unspectacular things like ‘four knives made by us in our fashion’ or ‘a bundle of reed pens’ because gifts were messages and statements much more than requests for something in return, and the act of giving was the whole point. At times his gifts were as diplomatic as state gifts to royalty today, but a bit more pointed. Boniface sent a hawk and two falcons to the King of Mercia to get him to listen to a message that he was not going to like at all, a dressing-down for his appalling sexual habits, especially in convents.
Of all the gifts that he received, Boniface tells the Abbess Eadburga, he most appreciated ‘the solace of books and the comfort of the garments’. Giving and sharing books became a system for putting ideas out into the world.
The glorious bible that Bede and others made at Jarrow was a gift for the Pope. Books were also buried with the saintly dead as gifts to keep them company. The book as gift, then, was sometimes quite different from the book to be read, a difference which later became almost ridiculous. One famous English calligrapher called Earnwine gave a fine book of psalms to King Canute and Queen Emma, who promptly sent it off to Cologne as a gift. When the Bishop of Worcester was in Cologne on the king’s business, he was naturally given a present, which happened to be Earnwine’s psalter. He brought it back to England, where it began. Nobody ever had to read a book like that.
Books were also sent about so they could be copied and copied again; the text itself was the gift. Boniface, like Bede, wanted that kind of book. He sometimes knew exactly which one he was after, and at other times he fished about for titles. He asked a former student for ‘whatever you may find in your church library which you think would be useful to me and which I may not be aware of or may not have in written form’. Just knowing which books existed and which you wanted was not at all easy; which is why Bede added a list of all his works at the end of the Historia ecclesiastica, including the biblical books he studied, the heroic verse he wrote, the terrible translation of a Greek text that he edited and corrected, his books on time and the nature of things, his hymns, his epigrams and his book on spelling. It reads a little like the back matter of a modern paperback. A librarian at Murbach in the ninth century was drawing up lists of books the monastery needed from the catalogues of other libraries and references in the manuscripts that he could examine; he was still using Bede’s list. He made notes alongside the names of some authors: ‘we are seeking his remaining books’ and ‘we want to find many others’.
This world of books was not a locked room full of chained volumes, the picture of later monastery libraries. Books moved. The territories that did not have Bede’s History directly from Jarrow sometimes took copies of a copy made from the copy in Charlemagne’s court library, and distributed by his orders. Boniface had to tell Abbess Bugga that he couldn’t send the writings she wanted ‘for I have been prevented by pressure of work and by my continual travels from completing the book you ask for. When I have finished it, I shall see that it is sent to you.’ The notion of a busy missionary archbishop copying whole books for someone else may be less surprising if copying was also a way of studying. A bishop tells an abbot
he’s not returning a book because ‘Bishop Gutbert has not yet returned it.’ Gutbert was Archbishop of Canterbury at the time. A young abbot can’t send back a book because, he says, the very important Abbot of Fulda wants time to make himself a copy.
The books that circulated this way were not just books about the Bible and the Church. Later, holy libraries consisted mostly of the Church fathers, the founders of the story of the Church, although even then one monk wanted Suetonius and those good dirty stories about the Caesars. But in Bede’s time, and for centuries afterwards, monasteries and cathedrals also cared for the pagan leftovers of Rome. Long before the official Renaissance brought back classical culture and Latin texts, which would not have been possible if nobody had bothered to preserve them in the first place, the Irish were fussing with Virgil; when a seventh-century schoolmaster says he’s just had some valuable copies from ‘the Romans’ he might just possibly mean the ones in Rome, but more likely he means the Irish scholars influenced by Rome. In the mid eighth century a nun called Burginda made a copy of a commentary on the Song of Songs and added a careful, wordy letter to the ‘distinguished young man’ who received it; her Latin misfires a bit, and she makes a mess of the subjunctive, but she knows how to quote Virgil so she must have found Virgil in her convent library alongside assorted holy works. Ecburg, Abbess of Gloucester, used Virgil too in a letter to explain in proper, flowery terms her pain at being separate from her sister: ‘everywhere cruel sorrow, everywhere fear and all the images of death’, almost a direct quotation.
And yet a pagan poet was a problem: essential, but dangerous. The scholar Alcuin read Virgil as a boy, imitated him in his own poems, but when he became an abbot he forbade his novices to read the man at all. In Carolingian schools Virgil might have been the very first heathen author the children read, mostly as an example of how to make verse scan, but he was firmly labelled heathen. Monasteries filed the heathen books among the schoolbooks and grammar because they were to be read in gobbets only, for their style and not their meaning, and under careful supervision. Nobody was supposed to pay attention to all the love, sensuality and battles.
If you had the right connections, you could borrow books from these holy libraries. One affluent noble, Eccard of Macon, had to write into his will instructions to send back the books he had from the monastery at Fleury, a chestful of them that he obviously had never meant to return in a hurry. The cathedral librarian at Cologne wrote loans down carefully at the end of his book list, but he had to leave whole pages blank in case Ermbaldus, a most enthusiastic borrower, decided to borrow yet more books ‘for the exercise of his ministry’.
To know laws and charters, to rule and know what you were ruling, it was very useful to read if not essential. Laymen owned books about law, about God, about farming and about war: the knowledge a noble needed. We know because they left them to their children in their wills, each title given to a particular child, so the books were something valued and considered. They often included history books, the history of the popes, the doings of the Franks. We can guess that the long poems in Latin and the historical stories at Charlemagne’s court were meant for a lay audience, and a rather grand lay audience at that. But the mighty were not exactly encouraged to take this literacy business too far. One eighth-century boy called Gerald was told to stop reading when he had worked through the Psalms and it was time for him to study more serious matters like archery, riding to hounds, and flying hawks and falcons. He did go back to books, but only because ‘For a long time he was so covered in small spots that it was thought he could not be cured. So his mother and father decided he should be put more closely to the study of letters.’ In Gerald’s case, remarkably, ‘even when he became strong, he continued to study’.
Books could be heirlooms, and they could also be assets. In Bede’s time Benedict Biscop bought a lovely book of cosmographies while he was in Rome, an account of the whole known world. Back in England the very literate, even bibliophile, King Aldfrith offered to give the monastery land in return for the book, enough riverside land to support eight families. The deal meant books were a very important part of a monastery’s useful wealth. When the Emperor Charlemagne died, he left his library to be sold ‘for an appropriate price’ and the money given to the poor. He knew there would be a market.
What’s more, books were stolen. The Baltic pirates who caught Anskar, ‘the Apostle of the North’, sailing to Sweden and made him walk the rest of the way were not at all averse to the forty books he was carrying with him. The Benedictine Loup de Ferrières in the ninth century worried about sending a work of Bede’s to an archbishop because the book was too big to hide on anyone’s person or even in a bag, and even if it could be hidden ‘one would have to fear an attack of robbers who would certainly be attracted by the beauty of the book’. More tellingly, a monastery in the Ardennes lost a psalter written in gold and decorated with pearls, which turned up intact and was bought in good faith by a pious woman; so it was the book that had value, not its incidental jewels.
Laymen could always hire a scribe out of the scriptorium to do their copying, although they need not expect any holy indifference to the price; as the scribe says in Ælfric Bata’s eleventh-century instructional text, ‘Nothing is more dear to me than that you give me cash, since whoever has cash can acquire anything he wants.’ Some laymen chose to write books out for themselves. Someone on a mission with the army, most likely a lay soldier, spent his time copying a collection of saints’ lives. Someone else, called Ragambertus, wrote out the letters of Seneca and put a note on the manuscript in ornate capital letters: ‘Ragambertus, just a no-account layman with a beard, wrote this text.’
Other people wrote books out of love, and terror. The noblewoman Dhuoda was apprehensive when her oldest son, William, went away to battle at the age of sixteen, and she wrote him a little book to take with him. ‘I want you,’ she wrote, ‘when you are weighed down by lots of worldly and temporal activity, to read this little book I have sent you.’ She wrote of the joy other women had in living with their children, and how anxious she was about being separated from William and how eager she was to be useful. She had read widely, even if what she read may mostly have been books of extracts from homilies and the lives of saints and the works of the Church fathers. She knew the Bible and she had read and thought about a poet like Ovid, and she culled what she thought would help her son while he was away. Her pain is vivid even now, a loving woman whose child was suddenly wrenched away into an adult and murderous world; she writes of her ‘heart burning within’. She wants her son to go on reading as a kind of moral shield against the life he was going to live at court and the wars he was going to fight; ‘I urge you, William, my handsome, lovable son, amid the worldly preoccupations of your life, not to be slow in acquiring many books.’
* * *
Books took effort, time, skill. Books required dead calves, polished skins, the making of ink and colours and pens, the ruling of guidelines. They had to be written out by hand, carefully, and corrected and punctuated and decorated; they had to be sewn together so they would stay in their proper order. They required craft. They also required words, either a book to copy or else someone to invent and dictate. They mattered for their content, of course: Bede helped change people’s minds about the proper date of Easter, the way to date our lives in the history of the world, what happened in Britain when it became both Christian and Anglo-Saxon. But books also began to matter for themselves, even when they were practical books for reading and not jewelled, painted lovelies.
Books were becoming independent of the way they were meant to be read. It came to this: books were worth burning.
Gottschalk found this out. He was a monk, a poet, a bit of a wanderer who never wanted to settle in one house, and he had unconventional ideas: he was, roughly, a Calvinist seven hundred years before Calvin. He had come to think that all men were predestined either to Hell or to Heaven; that was God’s will, and no amount of good deeds or even bad ones could undo it.
This was not the view of the Church, so he was ordered to appear, in 849, before the synod of the clergy in Quierzy, which is a town in Picardy, to answer for his opinions. He went along thinking he would be allowed to argue his case, so he carried with him the Bible texts he had used, and the writings of the Church fathers, the papers he needed to make his points: evidence, if you like. He expected discussion, but he was too optimistic. He found himself accused of heresy, flogged until he was on the point of death and told to keep silence for the rest of his life. Later, he’d be told he could be buried in holy ground only if he declared that he had changed his mind. He refused.
The priests insisted on something else: they burned his books.They took Bible passages and Church fathers, books available in many places and entirely proper, and burned them publicly as though they could purge and cauterize all of Gottschalk’s thoughts about them in one fire. They were determined that nobody should read those books as Gottschalk read them, that his view of them and his opinions should be silenced as his mouth was: they were killing the ideas. The ashes from the fire are brutal proof that they now knew reading could change the use and meaning of a book. Nothing about a book was safe any more.
* * *
From The Edge of the World, by Michael Pye, copyright © 2015. Published by Pegasus Books. Purchase the book. | {
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India's navy said all 18 sailors on board a submarine which exploded and sank on Wednesday are feared dead, after divers found no signs of life when they entered the stricken vessel.
Meanwhile, an inquiry has been ordered into what's thought to be India's worst naval disaster in more than 40 years in which the fully armed INS Sindhurakshak, which was recently refitted in Russia, caught on fire after an explosion and subsequently sank in a military shipyard.
Key points: All 18 sailors on board are feared dead
All 18 sailors on board are feared dead Navy divers found 'no signs of life' upon entering the vessel
Navy divers found 'no signs of life' upon entering the vessel The submarine sank following an explosion early Wednesday (local)
The submarine sank following an explosion early Wednesday (local) The fully armed INS Sindhurakshak was recently refitted in Russia
The fully armed INS Sindhurakshak was recently refitted in Russia Submarine lacked some modern safety equipment
As many as 18 soldiers were believed to have been onboard and defence minister AK Antony confirmed that some had died.
Chief of naval staff D.K. Joshi said no sign of life had been detected by divers who managed to enter the sub through the main hatch in a bid to refloat the vessel.
"While we hope for the best, we have to prepare for the worst," he told reporters in Mumbai, adding that there was a possibility some crew might have found air pockets but "the indicators are negative".
He also admitted that the incident had left a "dent" in the country's defences at a time when the world's biggest democracy has been expanding its armed forces rapidly to upgrade its mostly Soviet-era weaponry and respond to what is perceived as a growing threat from regional rival China.
The blast came days after New Delhi trumpeted the launch of its first domestically-produced aircraft carrier and the start of sea trials for its first Indian-made nuclear submarine.
Fire may have set off torpedos
It is not certain what caused the explosion, but reports suggest it may have occurred while maintenance was being carried out on the submarine's battery system.
The blast damaged other ships nearby at the naval base.
Rahul Bedi, a defence expert with IHS Jane's Defence Weekly, cited reports a saying the fire set off weapons on the submarine.
"Some agencies are reporting that the fire in fact set off two torpedos, one of which skimmed past a submarine that was berthed nearby and another sailed harmlessly into either the water or some other buildings," he said.
The NDTV channel showed grainy and shaky footage of the fierce explosion, which lit up the sky at the naval dockyard shortly after midnight.
"There were two to three explosions and the night sky lit up briefly," said eyewitness Dharmendra Jaiswal, who manages a public toilet near the dockyard and was sleeping there overnight.
"There was a lot of smoke and I thought it was some major repair work."
The Mumbai dockyard, which is a restricted area, was closed to media.
Smoke and flames rise from an explosion on a submarine at the naval dockyards in Mumbai, India. ( Twitter: Vikalp Shah )
Same submarine caught on fire in 2010, killing a sailor
In February 2010, the INS Sindhurakshak also suffered a fire while docked in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh state, killing a 24-year-old sailor and leaving two other crew members with burns.
There were fears that today's explosion might have damaged other navy vessels in the Mumbai dockyard, a colonial-era facility with civilian and military sections that employs more than 10,000 people.
Mr Bedi said the submarine was commissioned from Russia in 1997 and lacked some modern safety equipment common to newer vessels.
"They don't have escape routes in the event of accidents unlike some of the modern submarines," he said.
"The major concern is of India's submarine capability depreciating fast.
"I think out of 14 diesel-electric subs, 12 are operational.
"That's very inadequate and a big operational drawback for the Indian navy."
The Russian firm which refitted the submarine said the craft had been fully operational when returned to India in January.
A spokesman for the Russian Zvyozdochka ship repair company told RIA Novosti that "certain concerns" were raised when the Russian-made INS Sindhurakshak was inspected by experts at the Severonisk port on the Barents Sea.
But he said India raised no objections about the state of the diesel-powered vessel when receiving it from Russia.
INS Sindhurakshak is a kilo-class submarine which normally operates with a crew of 53 people and can sail on its own for 45 days, the Indian navy website says.
Russia is still the biggest military supplier to India, but relations have been strained recently by major delays and cost overruns with a refurbished aircraft carrier, the INS Vikramaditya.
ABC/wires | {
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“Traffic was not moving at all, so after a couple of minutes I’m like I have to do something so I turned around and went back to where I was,” Noush Habeeb Kutty said.
Habeeb Kutty is one of the many commuters who were stranded in Regina’s south-east quarter as they waited in traffic to get on a highway that they didn’t know was closed.
“It was quite difficult. It definitely cost me a solid twenty minutes of delay. I wish there had been some signage,” Habeeb Kutty said.
Horrible, horrible, horrible traffic congestion. Assiniboine Dr.East is closed at the ring road. #YQRTraffic Hundreds and hundreds of cars are trying to access and the congestion there. — KarenP-HD (@SunnySaskie) June 27, 2018
He wasn’t the only one with that complaint. The city received nearly 70 phone calls as well as complaints over social media thanks to the lack of signage.
“This morning was particularly difficult as the city failed to let residents know of changes to detours and did not have adequate signage up along the construction route for the work taking place on the Ring Road,” Norman Kyle, the city director of roadways and transportation admitted.
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“Typically we would have signage done in advance, but this was a changeover from the current restriction to the new one. Overnight we opened the Arcola ramps while closing the Assiniboine ones; it was a fair bit of work for the crews and we didn’t have all the signage we should’ve,” Kyle added.
The result was that commuters arrived at the Assiniboine Avenue on-ramp before realizing it was closed.
It caused a traffic jam that spanned hundreds of cars, and cost commuters valuable time.
“One guy I was supposed to meet, had a meeting, I think it was at 8:00 a.m., I think he was about 20-25 minutes late, so it affected quite a few people I think,” Gerard Rousseaux told Global News.
The affected area has become one of the busiest corridors of the city.
We apologize and understand the driver frustration and confusion around the work happening on the Southeast leg of the Ring Road.
We are committed to doing a better job with signage and informing residents on major projects as the work progresses. #yqrtraffic pic.twitter.com/osZeuMPHsf — City of Regina (@CityofRegina) June 27, 2018
“Just before Ring Road, Arcola Avenue has about 45,000 vehicles a day, so at peak hour that would be in the neighbourhood of 4,000-5,000 vehicles,” Kyle estimated.
The city has since set up signage to better direct the flow of traffic, and are working to ensure the situation doesn’t happen again.
“Mistakes happen, but we will be reviewing our processes to ensure that we don’t have misses like this. Especially with roads that have high traffic volumes,” Kyle said.
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The delays are something drivers won’t have to endure much longer. Paving on Ring Road is expected to be complete July 13.
READ MORE: 2018 Construction plan for Regina
“The work is actually going quite quickly we’ve actually accelerated it by having all three of our city pavers out there paving in echelon. It speeds up the project, not only that but it provides better quality of pavement,” Kyle noted.
The larger project involving work on the Victoria Avenue off-ramps won’t be complete until October.
The city has allotted roughly $35 million for construction this year, the Ring Road paving accounts for $1.5 million. | {
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C'est une très belle mythologie, au sens de Roland Barthes. Les vidéos de Bilal sont extrêmement frivoles. Mais il y a une beauté en lui, il réussit à projeter des signes mixtes. Il maîtrise parfaitement les codes de sa génération. Cette histoire est très significative de notre monde. (Eric Marty)
Le 26 janvier 2019, avec un total de 200 points dont 150 du public français, alors qu'il n'est classé que cinquième du vote du jury international avec 50 points, le jeune Français Bilal Hassani, né 19 ans plus tôt à Paris dans une famille d’origine marocaine se qualifie pour représenter la France au prochain concours de l’Eurovision avec sa chanson Roi. Hassani a posté sa première vidéo sur YouTube en novembre 2015. Trois ans plus tard, il a près d'un million d’abonnés. Le clip de Roi a dépassé les 7 millions de vues en trois semaines, c’est une star, mais une star d’aujourd’hui, c’est-à-dire une star inconnue.
Menaces de mort
Sa victoire lui donne une visibilité inédite. Dès le lendemain, le 27 janvier, les associations Urgence Homophobie et Stop homophobie font état de 1500 menaces de mort et insultes postées sur Twitter en l’espace de 24h à l’encontre de Hassani. La plupart sont agrémentées de réflexions racistes ou émanent de musulmans outrés par l’allure d’un jeune homme au nom arabe affublé d’une perruque blonde et affichant des poses ouvertement lascives sur certaines vidéos. On apprend alors que Bilal Hassani a annoncé publiquement son homosexualité dès 2017, qu’il se rend chaque année aux marches des fiertés, qu’il est aussi décrit comme queer, et qu’il est victime de cyber-harcèlement depuis le mois de décembre. Pour corser le tout, l’Eurovision doit avoir lieu en mai prochain à Tel-Aviv. En septembre, une trentaine d’artistes internationaux, parmi lesquels Ken Loach et Mike Leigh, ont publié dans le Guardian une pétition en soutien au BDS, le mouvement de boycott d’Israël, appelant au boycott du concours international. On dit qu’Israël pratique le pinkwashing, en d'autres termes qu'il utilise la culture gay pour mieux dissimuler l'oppression des Palestiniens.
Le 29 janvier dernier, Hassani porte plainte contre X pour injures, provocation à la haine et menaces homophobes. Trois jours plus tard, la chaîne israélienne francophone I24 révèle d'anciens tweets publiés par le chanteur en 2014, accusant Israël de crimes contre l'humanité et prenant la défense de Dieudonné. Quelques heures plus tard, Hassani déclare ne pas être l’auteur de ces tweets et ajoute qu'il n'avait que 14 ans à l’époque. Dans la foulée surgit une vidéo datant cette fois de 2018. Se voulant une parodie comique d’une autre vidéo, celle-ci montre Hassani et deux de ses amis sur un trottoir paraissant se moquer de la France post-attentats avec des gestes ultra féminins. Presque aussitôt, le sénateur des Alpes Maritimes, Henri Leroy, demande que Bilal Hassani soit « écarté d'urgence du concours ».
Disproportion
« Lâchez-moi, a répondu Hassani dans un communiqué officiel, laissez-moi tranquille, laissez-moi vivre s’il vous plaît. (...) Je suis un être humain comme un autre, et eux me prennent pour un objet, leur punching-ball».
On en est là. Et la première chose qui frappe est la disproportion. Autrefois, on parlait de culture, les œuvres provoquant le scandale s’appelaient Lolita ou Portnoy, Ulysses ou même Deep Throat et Emmanuelle. Aujourd’hui, la seule irruption d’un queer au nom arabe dans quelque chose d’aussi kitch et insignifiant que le concours de l’Eurovision suffit à irriter les nerfs d’une société à fleur de peau. Comment est-ce possible ?
Avant même sa victoire à l'Eurovision, j'ai été fasciné par Bilal, sa manière de construire sa propre vie, de se fabriquer... Bilal est au coeur de plusieurs haines. Il n'a que 19 ans. Il n'a pas conscience de tout ce qui se joue autour de lui. Il invente un espace précieux. Peut-être même que ça peut sauver des gens. Au Maroc ou ailleurs, des lois criminalisent les transgenres. Mais le désir de liberté est plus fort que tout. Des vidéos avec des stars transgenres sont visionnées par des millions de personne. Des stars renommées s'affichent avec ces stars transgenres. Tout ça cohabite en même temps: la répression du pouvoir et des nouveaux espaces de liberté. (Abdellah Taïa)
Programmation musicale
- Bilal Hassani : « Roi »
- Kateb Amazigh : « je voudrais être un fauteuil dans un salon de coiffure pour dame »
- Caetano Veloso : « Tonada de luna llena » | {
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Third North American Open Cup Starts at 18:00 PST tonight!
Two Cups for North America have been completed and while Team Zealot remains at the top after winning borth cups, there's still a chance for any team to usurp them before the Crucible in May.
Today at 18:00 PST the seven weeks of amateur North American competitive Heroes continues. The top four teams return, minus second place team Even in Death, along with Vox and the Busted Bullets, Miasma Esports, and many others hoping to find UT-A's weakness.
You can see a full list of todays participating teams here.
You can catch all the action today at 18:00 PST on twitch.tv/arcane8.
Can't play in this cup? Fear not! Registration for the fourth North American Open begins tonight as well at 18:00 PST.
Anticipating the next European Cup? You're in luck! Registration is still now open for the fourth European Open Cup commencing next week!
Follow us on Twitter @GosuGamersHotS for more Heroes of the Storm news and coverage from around the world. | {
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Bald or crazy-haired. Lairs above or below sea level. A wall of TV monitors in SD or HD - the Evil Genius gene does not discriminate.
But it does tend to create individuals prone to having doctorates and wearing bland one-piece outfits while they play God, or exercise their plots for world domination. These plots are usually executed from within the confines of some top-secret lair inside a volcano, with enough overhead to employ a small army of guards (read: human shields) and revisit said plans for pwning the world when the hero thwarts their first attempt. Thus is the stutter-step cycle of the Evil Genius, a tried-and-true movie villain profession.With Megamind 's titular character muscling his way into their ranks this weekend, IGN assembled our all-star team of individuals that can get you a space-based weapons platform by 3 o'clock.
Spent all that time creating a monster and didn't even have the decency to name it.So, the genius part is pretty clear on this one. He starts fooling around with chemicals and decaying bodies and makes his own creature. After creating it, though, he's so pissed that it's ugly that he doesn't even bother to name it – unless you consider "creature," "the demon," "wretch," "devil," "thing" and "ogre" terms of endearment (hey, whatever floats your boat). He even takes off and abandons it. Now that's just cruel. No wonder all the thing wants to do is run around and strangle everyone – his "dad" walked out on him because he was ugly.Turns out the doctor didn't have much in the common sense department, though. The creature decided to deal with its daddy issues by hunting him down and ends up killing his brother, bride and best friend. Moral of the story: Love your children, even if they're bolts-in-their-necks ugly, or else they'll kill everyone you love.
A computer program thing intent on hurting Neo's brain with "quid pro quo" this and this about the Matrix, and his cyclical role in it.Is he evil? Any computer construct that can be anything but chooses to dress as Col. Sanders has to be. Matrix Reloaded introduced us to The Architect, a key player in the Matrix, responsible for a lot of the things behind the bullet-time fun and spoon-bending Neo and friends deal with. We wish we could say more about the Matrix's talky, MENSA version of Yahoo! Answers, but we fell asleep during his "vis a vis" elliptical BS that made us wish we never wished for two Matrix sequels at all.Which is yet another reason for why this guy gets filed under "Evil."
Ernst Stavro Blofeld , SPECTRE's most infamous member, who would rather kill James Bond by building a launch pad inside a volcano, or ransom the world under the threat of nuclear war, than simply put a gun to 007's head.Blofeld first promised to kill Bond as a faceless cat enthusiast in From Russia With Love. But we didn't see his face until You Only Live Twice, where his most ridiculous plan to kill Bond and the world was apparently cause enough to finally reveal himself. If our brightest idea for world domination centered on sending a space capsule into orbit, to Pac-Man chomp American and Russian space craft for ransom, we'd do the exact opposite of showing our face in public. Especially if we're carrying around a white cat like it were our beast/hetero life partner.Eventually, Blofeld put on his Telly Savalas skin suit and got his closest to hurting Bond yet - by killing 007's new bride. As excessive and overproduced as Blofeld's plans were, the guy had ambition. And he never stopped trying... until Bond dropped his bald ass down a chimney from a helicopter in For Your Eyes Only.
To wipe out all humanity on Earth with killer plant spores, in order to recreate the Garden of Eden in space. AKA what we feel like doing every day when we're stuck in ungodly traffic on the 405.Honestly, you could include almost every James Bond Villain in this category. From bats!@# French millionaires loaded up on Nazi steroids with designs to murder Silicon Valley with earthquakes, to North Korean Colonels who undergo DNA replacement therapy to look like Patrick Bateman, 007 has faced them all. But there were two movies in a row, in particular, where Roger Moore's Bond took on wealthy industrialists who planned on killing everyone on the entire planet so that they can start humankind anew in some sort of dream utopia. Drax is one of them.Moonraker's fat, bearded Drax looked about as intimidating as a little serving jar of mango chutney, but he's the only villain that was able to take Bond up into space and evoke a full-on laser gun blast battle! The guy had big plans. Sure, most of it involved us all dying horrible deaths while he set-up a veritable non-stop sex colony in the cosmos, filled with the most beautiful people in the world, but you have to admire that kind of ambition.The second villain Moore's 007 faced was Karl Stromberg . The Spy Who Loved Me's baddie gets an honorable mention here, since he basically had the same plan as Drax, but it involved creating a new super-society *in Sebastian voice* "unda da sea." He was like the Bioshock Andrew Ryan of the Bond-o-verse.
A parody of Mr. Blofeld. Bumbling madman wants to hold the world ransom... for one million dollars!Take every stereotype about James Bond's villains, roll it up into one deranged Belgian tyrant, toss in a midget sidekick for good measure, and you have Dr. Evil. This evil genius has been the sworn nemesis of Austin Powers ever since their days at the British Intelligence Academy. Where Austin enjoyed the fame and women that came with being an International Man of Mystery, Dr. Evil had only his cockamamie plots to turn to.The duo have since come to learn they're actually long lost brothers. The former Dr. Evil has renounced villainy, but we doubt he'll be able to ignore his desires for frickin' sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their foreheads for long.
Jilted teen sidekick devotes adult life to terrorizing former mentor.Young Buddy Pine wanted nothing more than to be sidekick to the world famous Mr. Incredible. But when that didn't work out, Buddy devoted his life towards becoming Mr. Incredible's worst nightmare.He amassed a great fortune and designed powerful weapons based on zero-point energy. His elaborate plot nearly killed all five members of the Incredible family. But all the money, fancy robots and futuristic technology in the world are no match for proper teamwork. In the end, this mad genius forgot the oldest rule in the book – never wear a cape near an active jet engine.
The Brutus of Othello. Take his promotion, and he'll literally try to kill you.When you get passed up for a promotion at work, what do you do? Well, next time you decide to go for that pint of Chunky Monkey and a chick flick so you can cry about it in your room, take a few hints from this guy.Iago orchestrates the destruction of Othello (his superior), starting with his marriage, convincing him that the guy he promoted, Cassio, is banging his wife. Iago teams up with Roderigo, and then later kills him in a skeezy double-cross, all so he can convince Othello that his wife is having an affair. The plan is to force Othello to have Cassio killed and then Iago can take his place as lieutenant.Long Shakespearean story short, Othello ends up killing his wife, but Iago's plan ultimately fails when his own wife rats him out and he ends up getting arrested. Now that we think about it, maybe you should go for that ice cream...
A guy with Doogie Howser good looks who wants nothing more than to stand alongside Bad Horse in the Evil League of Evil......All he has to do is just defeat his nemesis, Captain Hammer, and tragically, accidentally, kill his lady love in the process. Damn, some job application processes are a bitch. Sure, all the sing-a-long blog fun aside, Dr. Horrible death rays himself from minor threat in a lab coat to major player in the business of plotting ends for the world the way soccer moms plan vacations.But Dr. Horrible earns his place in the EOE by getting rid of all that defined him - his nemesis and his girl. Next up for Horrible? Sing-a-long suicide hotline intervention. | {
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Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy has endorsed fellow Democrat Anna Eskamani in the Florida House District 47 race, Eskamani’s campaign announced Monday.
Eskamani, of Orlando, is the only Democrat in the race, facing two Republicans for the seat being vacated by Republican state Rep. Mike Miller, who is running against Murphy for Congress rather than seeking re-election. Still, it’s a so-far rare endorsement by the incumbent congresswoman whose Florida’s 7th Congressional District overlaps HD 47 in north central Orange County. And while Eskamani is running as an unabashed progressive, Murphy has been careful to navigate a more moderate path in Washington D.C.
“I am excited and proud to support Anna in her bid to serve the people of House District 47,” Murphy stated in a news release issued by Eskamani’s campaign. “I have seen Anna in action and she is a proven effective advocate. She is a strong and empathetic leader, who is fighting to ensure the safety and security of our community and to hold our state government accountable. This community deserves a State Representative who will always put people over politics, and that’s why I will do whatever it takes to make sure we elect Anna in 2018. I look forward to working alongside Anna when she becomes the next State House Representative for District 47.”
Eskamani, an executive with Planned Parenthood, faces Republicans Stockton Reeves, a Winter Park businessman, and Mikaela Nix, an Orlando lawyer, in the HD 47 contest.
“I am humbled to have the support of Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy. As a Member of Congress, Murphy understands what it takes to be an effective leader and policymaker,” Eskamani stated in the release. “She is ethics-driven and keeps a laser focus on the needs of Central Floridians, reaching across the aisle to work on issues like small business advancement and national security. I will do the same as your State House Representative, because Floridians deserve more than partisan gridlock and one political party in charge. Democracy is the competition of ideas, and we must work together if we hope to build a better state for all.” | {
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The Hilbert (axiomatic) method We place a locked cage onto a given point in the desert. After that we introduce the following logical system: Axiom 1: The set of lions in the Sahara is not empty.
Axiom 2: If there exists a lion in the Sahara, then there exists a lion in the cage.
Procedure: If P is a theorem, and if the following is holds: "P implies Q", then Q is a theorem.
Theorem 1: There exists a lion in the cage.
The geometrical inversion method We place a spherical cage in the desert, enter it and lock it from inside. We then performe an inversion with respect to the cage. Then the lion is inside the cage, and we are outside.
The projective geometry method Without loss of generality, we can view the desert as a plane surface. We project the surface onto a line and afterwards the line onto an interiour point of the cage. Thereby the lion is mapped onto that same point.
The Bolzano-Weierstraß method Divide the desert by a line running from north to south. The lion is then either in the eastern or in the western part. Let's assume it is in the eastern part. Divide this part by a line running from east to west. The lion is either in the northern or in the southern part. Let's assume it is in the northern part. We can continue this process arbitrarily and thereby constructing with each step an increasingly narrow fence around the selected area. The diameter of the chosen partitions converges to zero so that the lion is caged into a fence of arbitrarily small diameter.
The set theoretical method We observe that the desert is a separable space. It therefore contains an enumerable dense set of points which constitutes a sequence with the lion as its limit. We silently approach the lion in this sequence, carrying the proper equipment with us.
The Peano method In the usual way construct a curve containing every point in the desert. It has been proven [1] that such a curve can be traversed in arbitrarily short time. Now we traverse the curve, carrying a spear, in a time less than what it takes the lion to move a distance equal to its own length.
A topological method We observe that the lion possesses the topological gender of a torus. We embed the desert in a four dimensional space. Then it is possible to apply a deformation [2] of such a kind that the lion when returning to the three dimensional space is all tied up in itself. It is then completely helpless.
The Cauchy method We examine a lion-valued function f(z). Be \zeta the cage. Consider the integral
1 [ f(z) ------- | --------- dz 2 \pi i ] z - \zeta C where C represents the boundary of the desert. Its value is f(zeta), i.e. there is a lion in the cage [3]. | {
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The EU has announced the recipients of its coveted 2020 ERC Starting Grants, which included three up-and-coming young scientists from BGU. €677 million in grants were distributed, and the acceptance rate was 13%. | {
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As the Braves began their Spring Training slate this weekend, they did so with several new faces on the roster. This has been the case for the past two springs, but this year there is a sense that this team could surprise some people. John Coppolella has worked tirelessly to ensure a bright future for the Braves, and in do so has created a pattern of roster turnover that Braves fans are not accustomed to.
With all the trades that have taken place over the past two-plus years, the fan base has had to watch talented players depart. In many of these cases the returns justified the means, making it easier to understand the direction that the front office envisioned. Just this week, Baseball America released their organizational talent rankings, where the Braves came in at number one, thanks much in part to the tireless work of the men who orchestrated this rebuilding effort. However, as with any executive, Coppolella has made moves that left something to be desired. There are a couple that immediately come to mind, but I want to hear your opinions: which trade from Coppy’s tenure you would nix if given the opportunity?
In chronological order of questionable trades, we begin with the Evan Gattis trade. This deal hinges almost solely on the development of Mike Foltynewicz, given the seemingly limited ceiling of Rio Ruiz. Gattis was quite the sensation in Atlanta during his stint with the Major League club, but his inability to play even average defense at any spot (with the possible exception of first base, which is occupied) limited his value to the Braves. This deal is a tough one to judge at this point, but I could understand an argument here.
The next questionable deal that took place occurred on the eve of Opening Day in 2015, when the Braves sent Craig Kimbrel and Melvin Upton to San Diego for Matt Wisler, Jordan Paroubeck, Cameron Maybin, Carlos Quentin, and the 41st selection (which became Austin Riley) in the 2015 draft. This deal is complicated by the fact that the return was significantly altered by the Padres’ willingness to eat 3 years and $46.3 million worth of Melvin to make a deal for Kimbrel. The return in this case is one that also cannot be fully analyzed until a later date, but even at the time it seemed that the Braves left a lot on the table by having Upton included in the deal. His contract was a heavy burden on the payroll, and without it being included alongside Kimbrel, the Braves may have gotten a return similar or better than the one received by San Diego when Kimbrel was dealt to Boston (they netted Manuel Margot and Javier Guerra, plus two others).
The frustrating aspect of this deal is that the Braves dented Kimbrel’s value to create payroll flexibility and then never used the savings to field a competitive roster. That could change this season, but tainting the value of one of baseball’s most dominant pitchers to make only marginal additions seems a bit shortsighted when looking back. Wisler and Riley are the prizes of this deal, and each one has significant upside, but the possibilities that may have existed without Melvin make this a tough one to swallow. This deal would be my choice as the worst of the Coppy era, simply because of the value that was lost by trading Craig Kimbrel and the payroll void that was left unfilled as a result of Upton’s departure. I have high hopes for both Wisler and Riley, but Kimbrel was a tough loss.
The final questionable trade that I want to highlight is the Hector Olivera trade, which was criticized heavily at the time, and has become increasingly questionable in the aftermath. The Braves received Hector Olivera, Paco Rodriguez, Zach Bird, and the 40th pick in the 2016 draft (which became Joey Wentz) for Jose Peraza, Alex Wood, Jim Johnson, Bronson Arroyo, and Luis Avilan. This move was a little strange at the time, considering Olivera’s age and relative obscurity as it pertained to his abilities. Things only got worse with time, as Olivera looked somewhat overmatched during his stint with the big club, then was arrested for assault in Washington, D.C. His eventual trade to San Diego for Matt Kemp and his big contract is one that you can judge on your own, but suffice it to say that taking on Kemp’s deal would not have been the Braves’ first choice.
Wood and Peraza have had mixed results since the deal, with the latter being dealt to Cincinnati, where he is reportedly set to take over the second base job from the recently-traded Brandon Phillips. The value lost in this deal may not be crippling, but the circus that was Hector Olivera was not worth the time and trouble. This trade may actually come down to how well Matt Kemp performs as a Brave, but regardless of that the Olivera deal is certainly one that we can question.
Just as a disclaimer, the purpose of this is not to be critical of John Coppolella in any way, considering all the great work he has done since taking over. His ability and willingness to extract value from multiple avenues makes following the Braves as exciting as I can remember, and it should give hope to all those who are so anxious to see the Braves compete again. For all the great trades he has engineered (thanks again Dave Stewart), there are just a few minor blips on his radar that we can discuss. So again, if you could nix a deal from the Coppy era, which one would it be? | {
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Kelly Miller Arrest.jpg
Kelly Miller, 36, was arrested in Thailand this week after six years on the run to avoid prison in a 2004 fatal DUI crash.
(Hoover Police and Phuketwan.com)
An Alabama woman who fled the state five years ago to avoid going to prison for a DUI fatality has been captured in Thailand.
Kelly Lynn Miller, now 36, was taken into custody Tuesday by Phuket Tourist Police, who had been watching her for a month, according to Thailand publication Phuketwan.com. She had a two-month-old son with her at the time of her arrest.
The publication said Miller, of Bessemer, applied lipstick during a press conference announcing her time on the run. She was forced to sit in front of police during the presser.
She reportedly spent years island hopping to avoid detection, and gave birth to her son in a small clinic where the birth apparently went unregistered. The publication said Miller, and her infant, will be sent back to the U.S.
Miller, then 26, was charged with drunken driving in the death of a tractor-trailer driver on Interstate 459 in Hoover in 2004. Florida truck driver Donald Goodwin, 57, had parked his truck in the right emergency lane near Parkwood Road bridge and was checking his tires when he was struck and killed.
Hoover and Bessemer police responded to the scene, which happened about 12:15 a.m. that Tuesday. Police believe Miller sideswiped the truck with her car and then hit Goodwin. She paid a $1,000 bond and was released later that day.
A Jefferson County grand jury in 2006 indicted Miller on vehicular homicide, according to Alabama court records. She was arrested again, and then released on $10,000 bond. The case was set for a jury trial on Jan. 22, 2007 but Miller pleaded guilty.
She was sentenced to five years in prison. She fled the state before reporting to prison, and was officially declared a fugitive in 2010. | {
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Furniture can be manufactured by a different type of materials. For the different- different person, the requirement also changes according to budget, taste, and style.
For example, a glass made dining table can give a great look than a wooden dining table. If there is a small space. You can choose metallic furniture if you require a different look. Anybody can prefer plastic dining table if the cost is the main criteria. Leather furniture is available in so many colors and gives a great look to your interior. We can also provide fully hand made furniture on the demand of our customer. So, the material of the furniture is totally depended on customers choice, budget, aesthetic and use.
We provide a big range of furniture anywhere in Noida & Delhi NCR for interior as well as exteriors. We work on office furniture, bar furniture and houses furniture (Particularly living room, bedroom, dining room, etc.) we have also option in customized designer furniture on the demand of our clients. according to their specification.
Dshell design manufacture high-quality custom-made furniture for you only. We focus on long term result at which we and our experts work! With an endless strive for originality, for luxury, and above all for quality. | {
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More than 1,090 people across the country have been infected by the super contagious measles virus in ongoing outbreaks since January.
In New York, the virus has been spreading since September, mostly among Orthodox Jews, some of whom reject vaccines because of unfounded safety concerns. In Washington, mistrust of health officials and pharmaceutical companies drove parents in one county to opt out there — sparking another large outbreak. All together, measles clusters have sprung up in 28 states.
These outbreaks will cost states and the federal government millions of dollars to contain. They’ll distract from other important public health programs. Most importantly, they’ll put people who can’t be immunized — newborn babies, kids with vaccine allergies — at risk.
But here’s the most frustrating part: This is all entirely avoidable. By 2000, thanks to the measles vaccine, the virus was declared eliminated in the US. It’s absurd that outbreaks have reappeared, yet there’s one little discussed reason why: Too many states make it way too easy for parents to avoid vaccines on behalf of their kids. In other words, measles is making a comeback in part because of a policy failure.
Most of the people with measles right now weren’t immunized from the virus. Many live in places that permit a variety of nonmedical — religious or philosophical — exemptions from vaccines.
That’s now changing. Responding to these outbreaks, lawmakers in Washington, Maine and New York passed legislation in 2019 eliminating either personal or philosophical exemptions for vaccines — or both.
But other states, like Mississippi and West Virginia, closed their loopholes years ago; their vaccine coverage rates are higher and they haven’t had to deal with any outbreaks lately.
Researchers have repeatedly shown that when you make it easier for parents to avoid vaccines, they take advantage — and vaccine exemptions rise. The reverse is also true: making it harder to opt out can drive up vaccine rates, a new JAMA analysis of California’s recent move to outlaw all but medical exemptions shows.
So if we want to prevent dangerous, costly, and needless outbreaks — like the half-dozen going on now across the country — we need to make it harder for parents to opt out.
When measles vaccine coverage drops below 95 percent, “outbreaks are inevitable”
Before we get into the wonky details of state vaccine policies, let’s pause for a refresher on why measles immunization is so essential.
It’s not an overstatement to say that measles is one of the most infectious diseases known to man. When people aren’t immunized, it’s extremely easy to catch measles. In an unvaccinated population, one person with measles can infect 12 to 18 others. That’s way higher than other viruses like Ebola, HIV, or SARS. (With Ebola, one case usually leads to two others. With HIV and SARS, one case usually leads to another four.)
In the US, before a vaccine was introduced in 1963, there were 4 million measles cases, with 48,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths in the US every year. Measles was also a leading killer of children globally.
These days, with two doses, the measles vaccine is 97 percent effective in individuals. But for the vaccine to protect the population, including the small number of people who can’t be vaccinated, we need what’s known as herd immunity. Depending on the virus, a certain percentage of people needs to be immunized to keep a disease from spreading through populations (what’s called “herd immunity.”) Because measles spreads so easily, the percentage needed for herd immunity is really high.
“As soon as [measles] vaccination coverage drops below 95 percent,” Seth Berkley, the head of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, warned in a recent CNN article, “outbreaks are inevitable.” That means nearly everybody in a community who can get the vaccine needs to be accounted for to stop the virus from spreading.
The era of lax vaccine policies has to end
But state legislators have put policies in place that, in many cases, make it too easy for parents to opt out of vaccines.
It was actually measles outbreaks in the 1960s that inspired a push to have states require children get inoculated before starting kindergarten. By the 1980s, all states had mandatory immunization laws in place. The idea behind these laws was simple: Near-universal vaccinations sustain herd immunity.
Still, there’s a lot of variation across the country when it comes to immunization requirements. Even though all 50 states have legislation requiring vaccines for students entering school, 45 states allow exemptions for people with religious beliefs against immunizations, and 15 states currently grant philosophical exemptions for those opposed to vaccines because of personal or moral beliefs. (The exceptions are Mississippi, California, and West Virginia, and more recently, New York, and Maine which now have the strictest vaccine laws in the nation, allowing only medical exemptions.)
In these places, opting out can mean simply listening to a doctor or health official explain the benefits of vaccination or getting a signed statement about your religious beliefs notarized. It’s often harder for parents to sign their kids out of school for the day than to help them avoid vaccines.
In many states, even without an exemption, kids can be granted “conditional entrance” to school on the promise that they will be vaccinated, but schools don’t always bother to follow up.
We have plenty of evidence, spanning more than a decade, to show that when you make it easier for parents to opt out of their shots, the rates of vaccine exemptions tend to be higher. A 2018 analysis of US vaccine policies found that states allowing both religious and philosophical exemptions were associated with a 2.3 percent decrease in measles-mumps-rubella vaccine rates and a 1.5 percent increase in both total exemptions and nonmedical exemptions.
Every state also allows medical exemptions for people who might be harmed by a vaccine, such as those with weakened immune systems because of an illness or allergies to vaccine ingredients. And there appears to be no shortage of quack-ish health professionals who will sign off on questionable medical exemptions for people who don’t have legitimate health concerns.
What’s more, fewer than a dozen states require annual (or more frequent) recertification for medical exemptions. So for example, if a child in a K-12 school gets an exemption in kindergarten, it will follow them through to college. She’ll never be asked to renew that exemption.
So there are many ways for people to worm out of vaccines. “Putting some kind of administrative control on vaccine opt-outs is vitally important,” said Diane Peterson, the associate director for immunization projects at the Immunization Action Coalition. “It just shouldn’t be easier to get out of vaccination than it is to get vaccinated.”
California has made it tougher to opt out of vaccines — with mixed and instructive results
Some states — including New York, Maine, and Washington — have responded to the recent measles outbreaks by cracking down on vaccine avoiders.
Washington House Bill 1638 removed the personal belief exemption for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine only.
Maine House Bill 586 got rid of both its personal and religious belief exemptions for all vaccines required for school entry.
New York Senate Bill 2994 removed the religious exemption for public school vaccine requirements.
In 2015, another measles outbreak prompted California’s former governor, Jerry Brown, to sign a bill, SB277, that abolished all nonmedical exemptions. And the California experience is instructive for other states that might want to close some of their loopholes.
According to the state health department, the number of kindergarten students in the 2017-2018 school year with all their required vaccines was 95.1 percent — a 4.7 percentage point increase over 2014-2015 and the second-highest reported vaccine rate since health authorities started tracking. A new analysis, published in JAMA, put the opt-out rate at 4.8 percent by 2017.
But hidden within that increase is some conflicting data, said Emory vaccine researcher Saad Omer. Since the law was enacted, medical exemptions have also increased, suggesting there may be an unintended effect of the crackdown on nonmedical exemptions.
Something else was going on in California, and it offset that increase in medical exemptions. To explain: In parallel with abolishing nonmedical exemptions through SB277, California launched the “Conditional Entrant Intervention Project,” in 2015. The idea was that public health professionals would work with local health departments to identify schools granting high rates of conditional entrants, and work with them to bring them down.
Omer and his colleagues found a sharp 23 percent decline in the conditional admission rate between 2014 and 2015. So even with the rise in medical exemptions, the overall vaccine exemption rate still went down thanks to the decline in conditional vaccine entry to schools.
Omer told Vox, “I’m not discounting eliminating nonmedical exemptions. It’s a reasonable option. But it may not resolve all issues.” That’s why California — which has seen 55 measles cases so far this year — is now cracking down on bogus medical exemptions, too.
There is evidence from Mississippi and West Virginia that strict vaccine laws can work — but again, interpret it with caution.
Immunization rates in Mississippi and West Virginia — the only other two US states that don’t allow non-medical exemptions — are always among the best in the nation. In the 2014-’15 school year, more than 99 percent of kindergartners in Mississippi had their MMR and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis shots — the highest rate in the US. The rates for those vaccines were 98 percent for kindergartners in West Virginia. These figures are much higher than the national averages (85 percent for diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and 92 percent for measles-mumps-rubella).
But these two states also have demographics that probably help vaccine coverage. Researchers have repeatedly found that parents on the higher end of the socioeconomic spectrum, including those who send their kids to private and alternative schools, tend to be the ones who opt out of vaccine. Mississippi and West Virginia are among the poorest states in the nation.
Perhaps these demographic factors contribute to the high vaccine rates in the two states, the authors of a recent analysis in Health Affairs suggested:
Among US states, Mississippi and West Virginia rank fiftieth and forty-ninth, respectively, in median income, and forty-ninth and fiftieth, respectively, in the percentage of people ages twenty-five and older who have completed a bachelor’s degree. Thus, the states may have a smaller number of residents who are likely to hold anti-vaccination views and to have the political and social capital to undertake successful efforts to influence their legislators.
That suggests that simply outlawing nonmedical exemptions may not be a panacea in states that have a high percentage of parents using their social capital to spread anti-vaccine views. And as we saw in California, a ban on nonmedical exemptions could even backfire if other vaccine loopholes are left open.
So finding ways to make it more inconvenient to opt out — by cracking down on the conditional entry to school, introducing exemptions with regular renewals — should be what policymakers work toward.
And they should move fast. The percentage of people seeking nonmedical exemptions — while still small — has also been creeping upward, from 1.1 percent in 2009-2010 to 2.2 percent by 2017-2018. Outbreaks in recent years have also been getting larger, Omer said. “That’s the canary in the coal mine for me.” | {
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Saturday, Sept. 9 v. Orlando City SC | 7 PM
$25 Ticket & Scarf Package
Each ticket & scarf bundle is $20 plus a $5 donation to Team DC. Ticket fees apply. Subject to availability
Use promo code: PRIDE
Buy Now
Redemption Info
All tickets will be available at Will Call only on the day of the match.
Each ticket purchased will include a scarf voucher which MUST be redeemed inside the Field Level Fan Zone during the game on September 9.
during the game on September 9. Scarf must be picked up prior to the 75th minute of play.
The Fan Zone can be accessed from the concourse at Section 222.
Other Info
Gates open at 6:00 PM
The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC to sing the national anthem.
United Night Out, hosted by the Federal Triangles Soccer Club and presented by Team DC at RFK Stadium, occurs each MLS season as part of Team DC’s Night OUT series. | {
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(Newser) – A mother's honk at a car blocking the road turned tragic in Cleveland early Monday, when her 4-year-old son was shot in the head by the other driver in an apparent road rage incident. Police say the mother was driving her son as well as her 7-year-old daughter when she passed the other car after waiting five to eight minutes; that driver allegedly followed her onto the freeway and shot at her car around midnight, WKYC reports. The boy was conscious and breathing when he was taken to the hospital, and preliminary info indicates the bullet did not penetrate his brain, ABC News reports. The 7-year-old suffered minor scratches from shattered glass. Police are looking for two black men who were driving a 4-door white Pontiac with tinted windows. (Read more road rage stories.) | {
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Enough is enough with the Lady Gaga and Madonna comparisons.
In a recent interview with with Zane Lowe for Beats 1 Radio, the "Perfect Illusion" singer once again had to set the record straight on what seems to be a recurring interview theme.
"Madonna and I are very different," said Gaga. "I wouldn't make that comparison at all. I don't mean to disrespect Madonna...she's a nice lady, and she's had a fantastic, huge career. She's the biggest pop star of all time...But I play a lot of instruments. I write all my own music. I spend hours and hours a day in the studio. I'm a producer. I'm a writer. What I do is different." | {
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It happens every day. In fact, it is pretty hard to avoid it. There are some things that can only be understood with a slap on the forehead. Things so mind-boggling that one wonders how humans managed to evolve thumbs while being this mentally inept. Case in point:
Transgender Woman Can’t Be Diversity Officer Because She’s a White Man Now
I know what you are thinking. You think some woman had a sex change and now the liberals on campus have gone after the now him because of “the Patriarchy”. It is much worse.
Timothy Boatwright applied to an all-women’s school. While he checked the “female” box when he applied for the school, he identified as “masculine-of-center genderqueer” when he got there. Granted, that is rather nonsensical, but it is not the stupid part. This is:
And, by all accounts, Boatwright felt welcome on campus — until the day he announced that he wanted to run for the school’s office of multicultural affairs coordinator, whose job is to promote a “culture of diversity” on campus. But some students thought that allowing Boatwright to have the position would just perpetuate patriarchy. They were so opposed, in fact, that when the other three candidates (all women of color) dropped out, they started an anonymous Facebook campaign encouraging people not to vote at all to keep him from winning the position. “I thought he’d do a perfectly fine job, but it just felt inappropriate to have a white man there,” the student behind the so-called “Campaign to Abstain” said. “It’s not just about that position either,” the student added. “Having men in elected leadership positions undermines the idea of this being a place where women are the leaders.”
The New York Times ran an in-depth article giving further insight:
Last spring, as a sophomore, Timothy decided to run for a seat on the student-government cabinet, the highest position that an openly trans student had ever sought at Wellesley. The post he sought was multicultural affairs coordinator, or “MAC,” responsible for promoting “a culture of diversity” among students and staff and faculty members. Along with Timothy, three women of color indicated their intent to run for the seat. But when they dropped out for various unrelated reasons before the race really began, he was alone on the ballot. An anonymous lobbying effort began on Facebook, pushing students to vote “abstain.” Enough “abstains” would deny Timothy the minimum number of votes Wellesley required, forcing a new election for the seat and providing an opportunity for other candidates to come forward. The “Campaign to Abstain” argument was simple: Of all the people at a multiethnic women’s college who could hold the school’s “diversity” seat, the least fitting one was a white man.
To recap, Timothy signed up for school as a female so that his mother would not discover he is “transmasculine” (as he put it in the New York Times article). Once at Wellesley, he told his fellow students to call him Timothy and refer to him with male pronouns. They did this with apparently little problem. However, when Timothy attempted to become a multiculutral affairs coordinator, the students turned on him because he is white and considers himself male.
They think Timothy, a person who is female who identifies as male, ever a minority if there were one, is unqualified to be a diversity officer because Timothy is a white female who identifies as white male.
Keep in mind that Timothy has done nothing to alter his body. His body is still female. He simply identifies as male. Yet that simple identification is enough to make his fellow students hold his perceived maleness against him, despite the likelihood that he has never experienced any “male privilege” at all.
This politically correct fail is such a thing to behold. For example, there is this:
“Sisterhood is why I chose to go to Wellesley,” said a physics major who graduated recently and asked not to be identified for fear she’d be denounced for her opinion. “A women’s college is a place to celebrate being a woman, surrounded by women. I felt empowered by that every day. You come here thinking that every single leadership position will be held by a woman: every member of the student government, every newspaper editor, every head of the Economics Council, every head of the Society of Physics. That’s an incredible thing! This is what they advertise to students. But it’s no longer true. And if all that is no longer true, the intrinsic value of a women’s college no longer holds.”
That fear is genuine. A student named Laura Bruno was interviewed, and did not go well for her when stated that having men on campus diminished the importance of having a women’s college:
The interviewer asked Laura to describe her experience at an “all-female school” and to explain how that might be diminished “by having men there.” Laura answered, “We look around and we see only women, only people like us, leading every organization on campus, contributing to every class discussion.” Kaden, a manager of the campus student cafe who knew Laura casually, was upset by her words. He emailed Laura and said her response was “extremely disrespectful.” He continued: “I am not a woman. I am a trans man who is part of your graduating class, and you literally ignored my existence in your interview. . . . You had an opportunity to show people that Wellesley is a place that is complicating the meaning of being an ‘all women’s school,’ and you chose instead to displace a bunch of your current and past Wellesley siblings.” Laura apologized, saying she hadn’t meant to marginalize anyone and had actually vowed beforehand not to imply that all Wellesley students were women. But she said that under pressure, she found herself in a difficult spot: How could she maintain that women’s colleges would lose something precious by including men, but at the same time argue that women’s colleges should accommodate students who identify as men?
I feel sorry for students like Laura. They want to be inclusive, yet they want their “sisterhood”. The moment someone identifies as male enters the foray, that ruins the latter possibility. The simplest solution would be to require every student to at least identify as female. That would solve the immediate problem of having females transitioning to or identifying as males on campus. However, it would cause the new problem of asking the students who identify as male to leave.
Yet I also do not feel sorry for the students. This is precisely what happens when political correctness is left to its own devices. Accommodating transgender views about sex and gender render the very concept of sex and gender moot. If you think a person can change their gender or sex, then neither two concepts are concrete. They essentially do not exist. They are simply social constructs no different than race or nationality. And if that is true, then there is little point to having an all-women college. There is no such thing as a “woman” or “female”.
Obviously most people do not believe that. Most people think there are only two sexes, male and female, and that these are biologically determined, not social constructs. I suspect that most people at Wellesley do not actually think people like Timothy are male. They simply go along with it for the sake of appearances. However, people like Timothy do not know or suspect that, so when they attempt to engage in normal school activities, they end up with Timothy’s present situation.
Perhaps the most enlightening part of this is how much this mirrors the feminist attack on men and masculinity. That is essentially the argument at play, that men, maleness, and masculinity are unwanted and bad. Even transmen attending Wellesley share that view:
Others are wary of opening Wellesley’s doors too quickly — including one of Wellesley’s trans men, who asked not to be named because he knew how unpopular his stance would be. He said that Wellesley should accept only trans women who have begun sex-changing medical treatment or have legally changed their names or sex on their driver’s licenses or birth certificates. “I know that’s a lot to ask of an 18-year-old just applying to college,” he said, “but at the same time, Wellesley needs to maintain its integrity as a safe space for women. What if someone who is male-bodied comes here genuinely identified as female, and then decides after a year or two that they identify as male — and wants to stay at Wellesley? How’s that different from admitting a biological male who identifies as a man? Trans men are a different case; we were raised female, we know what it’s like to be treated as females and we have been discriminated against as females. We get what life has been like for women.”
It is bias all around, from the students who do not want transmen in their school to the transmen who do not want transwomen in the school to those oppose men in general. | {
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By Matt Spiegel–
CHICAGO (WSCR) I have said it all season, beginning with the free agent signings of last summer; the Miami Heat are the NBA’s Death Star. They are impressive, powerful, shiny and imposing. They demand attention, often providing awe-inspiring feats of power and strength. But, the Galactic NBA Empire will be defeated. They MUST be defeated, for the good of the entire Sports Universe.
The Celtics failed, the Lakers flat out quit, and who knows if anyone left in the West could accomplish it? It’s up to the Chicago Bulls to get it done.
• Derrick Rose, our young Jedi MVP will lead them. The Force is strong with him, and he will one day be the master of us all.
• John Paxson is Obi-Wan Kenobi. “Patience, young rim-rocker, patience.”
• Tom Thibodeau is Yoda, spending endless hours with the Jedi in a darkened film room (the planet Dagobah), mentoring him on the ways of The Force.
• Joakim Noah is the trusted wookie Chewbacca. That’s an easy one. Do the sounds amongst yourselves.
• Carlos Boozer is Han Solo. A wild card, a reckless mercenary. Frustratingly cavalier at times, but without him, the mission will not succeed. “GIMME DAT MILLENIUM FALCON, CHEWIE!” “REBEL ALLIANCE, COUNT IT!” Of course, before his breakout in game 6 of the Atlanta series, he could have put cinnamon rolls on his ears and been a pretty good Princess Leia, constantly needing to be saved.
• Kyle Korver is C3PO. Dashing good looks, troubling robotic defensive efforts.
• Keith Bogans is R2D2. Often annoying as compared to his peers, it can be difficult to discern his value. But he’s surprisingly resourceful and likable.
• Luol Deng presents casting options. I like him as Lando Calrissian: a gentleman, once mistrusted, who ends up being worth every penny; a valued accomplice. Others have suggested Luol is Wedge Antilles. He was part of the Rebellion before the young Jedi master arrived, and helped to bring down both the 1st and 2nd Death Star.
• Omer Asik looks horrifyingly like a Tauntaun, the omnivorous reptomammal indigenous to the icy planet of Hoth. Google it…it’s alarming.
And on the dark side…
• LeBron James is Darth Vader, the still brilliant Jedi who sadly fell to the wrong side of the Force. He is our chief antagonist.
• Dwyane Wade is Grand Moff Tarkin, the original commander of the Death Star, who enslaved others to work underneath him. He is destined to be destroyed by our young Jedi himself.
• Pat Riley is Emperor Palpatine, who ushered in this awful age. His secret identity is that of Darth Sidious, a dark lord of the Sith, using his powers to set these wheels in motion.
• Eric Spoelstra is Count Dooku, a Sith apprentice to the Emperor himself, entrusted with the Death Star undeservingly.
• Zydrunas Ilgauskas is Jabba the Hutt, the ageless, disgusting behemoth whose sheer grossness somehow makes him endearing. It’s awful to imagine him locking down Boozer in Princess Leia mode, in a steel bikini.
• Mike Miller is Boba Fett, with his endless tattoos standing in for body armor. And, as we grudgingly respected Boba Fett, you must grudgingly respect Mike Miller’s jumper.
• Juwan Howard is Admiral Piett, the rebel sympathizer who let Han Solo go in the 2nd film. He’s our own Chicagoan, and we all know deep down, he wants the Bulls to win.
But what about Chris Bosh? You know, the guy I like to call “the coat-tail rider,” that whiny, screaming, fake tough guy with no business being in this position. Well, there is one character, in the entire Star Wars realm, near-universally hated and derided. This character was essentially given third billing in movies with Ewan McGregor and Liam Neeson, for god’s sakes. And even though he was on the right side of the battle, he garnered a tremendous amount of attention in all the wrong ways. He became a laughingstock.
Chris Bosh is Jar Jar Binks.
And you have to admit, he’s a dead ringer.
Go Bulls.
Thanks are due to my friends on Twitter (@mattspiegel670), whose twitteraction furthered my nerdom, and to the Score’s Connor McKnight, who fortunately for me had no friends as a child. | {
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To play the role of captain, you need to have confidence, determination and a natural ability to lead. Liam Ridgewell has all three. He may have started his career back in England with Aston Villa, Birmingham and West Brom., but it’s in Portland, USA where he now leads by example. As captain of the Portland Timbers, Ridgewell has established himself as one of the most reliable defenders in the MLS and has fast become a vital cog in Portland’s machine, leading them to the MLS Cup. We caught up with him recently to find out how things are going in the Pacific North West, and how it all began.
BackOfTheNet: Liam, thank you for sitting down with us today.
BackOfTheNet: Not many people will know that you actually started your career at West Ham in their youth academy before leaving to join Aston Villa. As a Londoner, what was the reason behind that switch?
Liam Ridgewell: At the time their youth system was flooded with a lot of talent coming through already, e.g. Rio Ferdinand, Michael Carrick, Joe Cole. So, my path to the first team would’ve been very tough and felt I needed to change as I had been there since the age of 8. Being a London boy, it was a very tough decision to leave. That’s when I went up to Aston Villa at the age of 15.
BOTN: How would you sum up your time at Aston Villa?
LR: I couldn’t have asked for much more, coming through the ranks at Aston Villa. It’s a place that is obviously very special to me, giving me the chance to fulfil my dream and I’ll always be thankful. My time spent their playing, I loved every minute of it, but by the end of it, not playing regularly as I had been under previous managers, I couldn’t sit back and watch, so felt I needed the move to keep my football career progressing. That’s when my move to Birmingham materialized.
BOTN: How do you feel now when you read about the financial difficulties they are having?
LR: Tough to read about their financial difficulties, obviously the relegations have been a big hit on the club, something you never want to see, especially for a club that gave you your chance. I hope they can figure out a way to get themselves right and back in the big time where they deserve to be.
BOTN: You are one of a few players to have moved from Villa to Birmingham. Did you have any hesitation in joining them due to the rivalry?
LR: Yes, I did have hesitation due to the big rivalry and I had to think about it very strongly, more for family reasons. But in needing to carry on with my progression in my career, Steve Bruce was a tough manager to turn down, given how good of a player he was in his playing career, and to spend time with him and learn, it helped me a lot. Once I had made the decision I was fully committed and loved my time there. My decision was not based on the rivalry but based on the progression of my career and being able to play week in and week out. I feel that helped with the fans and the rivalry because I think they understood why I made the switch.
BOTN: You had an interesting time at Birmingham with various ups (League Cup win, being named captain) and some downs (leg break, relegation). What are your underlining memories of those years? How did you cope with the highs and lows?
LR: Some unbelievable career highs with Birmingham was none other than winning the league cup against Arsenal. It’s a memory that will always stay with me as it was such a big achievement for us as players and us as a club. Being named captain at the age of 22 was a hugely proud moment for me as I never expected it at such a young age as we had some great senior players there. Coping with the pressure of that is something that I loved and took in my stride, and that is just the type of person that I am. Being the captain of a club is a big honour and responsibility.
Relegation was the biggest low in my career as we were such a good team and building a brilliant squad. I know everybody says it, but we were too good to go down and to this day I still think what kind of team we may have been if we had stayed up and managed to keep all the boys there. Breaking my leg was very tough but sometimes that’s what football brings and you have to stay mentally strong to make sure you come back from it stronger and better.
BOTN: Portland made you an offer when you became a free agent in the summer of 2014, but I’ve read you had a couple of other options on the table. What made you move to the US?
LR: Yes, I had other options to stay in the UK but after my time at West Brom. I felt I needed a change to revive my love for the game and found it when I came to the Timbers.
BOTN: Are you disappointed that the MLS still has a somewhat negative, if naive, perception back home?
LR: I think a lot of people have not watched enough of the MLS to be able to give an opinion, so the more it’s televised the bigger it will become. There is definitely still a way to go for the MLS to capture some of the audience back home.
BOTN: I saw an interview you did recently where you talked about your life in Portland with the house on the lake, etc. Does Portland now feel like home, or do you still harbour desires to go back to England?
LR: Portland life is fantastic and I’ve really enjoyed living here. It’s made the move all the easier for me and my family, but I still have desires to come back home to play before I decide to hang up my boots.
BOTN: At several of the clubs you have played for, you have been named as captain. What qualities do you think you have that makes you a natural choice for leader? Do you think that a player’s position (i.e., centre half vs striker) should come into consideration when choosing a captain?
LR: No, if you have the qualities to be a captain it doesn’t matter where you play in the pitch. Personally, for me, a captain leads by example, helps people even if that person isn’t having a good game, and enjoys being the captain. And being heard 24/7 may have helped my case [laughing].
BOTN: Is centre half your most comfortable position? We have seen you play there, but also at left back, and as a holding midfielder throughout your career.
LR: Yes, that’s where I have played most throughout my career and feel comfortable, but my time spent at left back at the back end of my time at Birmingham and at West Brom. I really did enjoy as it allowed me to be more involved in the attacking side of the game, roaming forward from left back and getting myself a goal every now and again at the back stick.
BOTN: How important is it for a player to be adaptable?
LR: Adaptability is good, but for myself I prefer to be set at one position at a club as then I know my role and can perform to my best.
BOTN: Thinking back on your entire career, what do you think is your stand out moment – being capped for England at under 21 level? Winning the league cup for Birmingham? Or the MLS Cup as captain for Portland?
LR: My most stand out moment was being capped at under 21 level and captain for my country.
BOTN: Let’s talk swimwear and in particular your company Thomas Royall that you started with Sam Saunders and John Terry. How did that come about?
LR: Myself and Sam had been talking about ideas for after football to keep us busy and came up with many, but one day Sam came up with an idea, after visiting many pool parties one summer, of starting a swimwear range. I loved the idea and so we started brainstorming on looks and designs. We then brought in a team and with our head designer, Laura Moore, we haven’t looked back and formed what you now know as Thomas Royall. John became part of the Thomas Royall team after shopping for swim shorts online for his holiday and simply loving the brand and wanting to be a part of it. This year we released the new women’s and girl’s line and still have many more ideas pending for SS19.
BOTN: Finally, some quick-fire questions: Most complete player you played with?
LR: Gareth Barry, my time spent with him at Aston Villa.
BOTN: Hidden gem in the MLS?
LR: Darlington Nagbe who plays for Atlanta now.
BOTN: What will you do after retiring?
LR: After retiring I’m looking to go into management, but obviously with Thomas Royall going from strength to strength each year, that is something we set up for life after football.
Thanks again Liam! Good luck with the rest of the season and congratulations on the arrival of your baby girl!
For great swimwear options for this summer, check out Thomas Royall
Share your thoughts and follow us now on Facebook: BackOfTheNetBlog, on Twitter: @BOTN_soccer & Instagram: @backofthenet_soccer | {
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Main Street Republicans CEO Sarah Chamberlain says voters in congressional swing districts do not want the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency abolished, as Democrats have called for.
During an interview with Breitbart News Tonight on SirixusXM, Chamberlain told Breitbart Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour that Republican women in the key crucial congressional swing districts for the midterm elections believe the push to abolish ICE is “ridiculous.”
LISTEN:
“Nobody wants ICE going away. That’s ridiculous,” Chamberlain said. “That is our first line of security. So for the Democrats to be saying that … it’s not resonating back in our GOP districts.”
Chamberlain also said her polling in the swing districts revealed that voters — specifically female voters — are most concerned with immigration and border security, noting that voters want the Republican-controlled Congress to follow through on President Trump’s demand for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“So border security, they want the immigration system fixed,” Chamberlain said. “They want a wall … they want security for their children. I mean a lot of things that President Trump does talk about, that’s what they’re looking for. But the issue is, they really feel we need to fix our immigration system.”
As Breitbart News reported, abolishing ICE would have set free more than 1.4 million criminal illegal aliens over the last half decade who were in federal custody. A total of more than 1.6 million illegal aliens would have been released into American communities in the last five years had ICE been abolished.
Most recently, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said that the “first thing” Democrats should do if they take control back of the House and Senate is abolishing all immigration enforcement through disbanding ICE.
“We should … I think we should get rid of ICE,” Gillibrand said. “We should separate out the two missions. And do the anti-terrorism mission, the national security mission. And then on the other side, make sure you’re doing… looking at immigration as a humanitarian issue. These are civil issues, these are families.”
Breitbart News Tonight is broadcast live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6-9: 00 p.m. Pacific).
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | {
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Bob Seger’s “Greatest Hits” joins the rarefied group of Diamond-certified albums, marking sales of more than 10 million units in the U.S., the Recording Industry Associated of America announced along with Capitol Records and Universal Music Enterprises (UMe). Some 90 artists, including The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Prince, Led Zeppelin, and Adele have reached the milestone.
To celebrate the accomplishment, Capitol/UMe is reissuing vinyl versions of Greatest Hits, originally released in 1994, and Seger’s 1969 debut, “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” on June 2.
Both albums were remastered by Robert Vosgien at Capitol Studios Mastering and will be available in 150gram vinyl, in addition to other deluxe editions.
“Greatest Hits” features such classics as “Night Moves,” “Turn the Page,” “Hollywood Nights,” and “Old Time Rock And Roll.”
“Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” initially an independent release, became a regional hit and got the band — then known as the Bob Seger System — noticed by Capitol Records. Seger has since become Capitol’s longest-tenured solo artist. | {
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BURLINGTON (CBS) – Two people who were flying in a plane that crashed in Burlington on Wednesday appear to have escaped injury.
According to officials, the single engine Cirrus went down in an area off of Middlesex Turnpike around 1:30 p.m.
Both people on the plane were taken to the Lahey Clinic as a precaution.
The airplane was equipped with an emergency parachute, which the pilot was able to successfully deploy.
Bill King, Vice President of Cirrus Aircraft says they are the only company that makes a certified aircraft that has an air frame parachute system built into it. The emergency parachute is standard on all of their planes. According to their website, Cirrus claims the chutes have saved close to 100 lives.
King notes though that the parachute should only be used in a life or death emergency.
“There’s a certain amount of force to it. It’s certainly not a comfortable alternative landing device. This is designed to be a save your life, not save your aircraft,” King said.
WBZ NewsRadio 1030’s Ben Parker Talks With Bill King
| {
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As the main election promise for Lok Sabha elections, the Congress party has announced a minimum income guarantee scheme, the Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY). According to this scheme, 20% poorest people in the country of 5 crore families will be paid Rs 72,000 per year. This means an outgo of Rs 3,60,000 crore per year, but the party didn’t provide details of how they propose to fund this massive scheme. Now noted economist Abhijit Banerjee, who advised the Congress party on the formulation of the scheme, has made some startling revelations about the thinking behind the scheme.
In an interview with Times Now, Banerjee said that the NYAY will have to funded by new taxes. He said that at present India’s fiscal deficit is so large that the scheme is simply not sustainable without raising taxes.
When asked whether the NYAY will have to be funded by a tax or a series of taxes, Banerjee replied, “that is correct”. He also said that India will have to have new fiscal resources, saying that the country is at present “undertaxed”. He said that India needs to desperately raise taxes irrespective of the NYAY scheme. He also talked about expanding the tax base.
When asked whether the scheme will be viable without increasing taxes, Banerjee tried to avoid the question saying that the economy itself is not viable without increasing taxes. Nothing is viable without raising taxes, he emphasised, implying that the minimum income guarantee scheme is also not viable without increasing taxes.
We’re running a deficit which is so large that we have one of the world’s highest interest rates now. This is simply not sustainable. It’s not good for the economy. We need to do something about it: Abhijit Banerjee, Economist (Nyay Advisor) to @RShivshankar | #NyayKaSach pic.twitter.com/tHk9aU24b2 — TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) March 29, 2019
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Banerjee also said that India has been hurt by low inflation during the NDA government, and budgets of NDA government are not viable. He said that stopping the “inflation tax” by the NDA government has hurt the economy badly. He said that during UPA government, although the interests were high, due to the use of “inflation tax” by the government, the share of government debt in GDP was falling. According to Banerjee, now that the NDA government is not using the “inflation tax”, it has meant there are few sources of revenue for the government.
Abhijit Banerjee also said that the implementation of NYAY will mean that lots of current welfare programs will have to be scrapped. He said that many of the current schemes have no purpose, and nobody knows what their purposes are, and they will be replaced by NYAY. He said that subsidies provided for fertilizer, power, water etc are distortionary subsidies, and they need to go. Banerjee said that these subsidies are not good for the economy, they are not good for efficiency.
From the comments of economist Abhijeet Banerjee, it is clear that for the Congress scheme to be implemented, the government will have to increase taxes, raise inflation, and scrap existing welfare schemes, something which Congress party is not telling the people while talking about it. | {
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For all jewelry related inquiries, feel free to send me a note or e-mail me at: [email protected]
So I realized something the other day. I only had 1 other handcrafted piece of Sunset Shimmer Jewelry:
So it was obviously time to make another!
This pendant is hand fabricated out of nickel silver, copper and brass sheet. The human sunset silhouette is sawed out of nickel silver, and the pony Sunset is made from 4 copper and brass components. It measures approximately 2 1/4 inches in height, by 1 1/2 inches in width. It has a heavy sterling silver wire bail hidden on the backside. The edges of the pendant are beveled for a clean, finished look; and the entire piece was given a once over under a sand blaster, then put in a tumbler for a semi-polished 'moon-shine' glow. This finish also helps to hide fingerprints, smudges and minor scratches. After finishing, the front of this pendant has been sprayed with a hard lacquer to help prevent tarnishing.
You can also go with the option of sterling silver for the human Sunset silhouette. | {
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Please do not share your Transaction ID with anyone through Crowdin!
Proofreaders, please visit Slack frequently for latest updates.
Please visit our Minecraft Launcher project!If you encounter any technical issues or you would like to become or suggest a proofreader, please contact Mojang | {
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BRUSSELS (AP) — Belgian authorities questioned and released five people, including two brothers, who were detained after searches related to the Paris attacks, prosecutors said Monday.
Two people were taken in for questioning following a house search Monday in Brussels, the prosecutor’s office said. On Sunday evening, a building in central Brussels was searched on orders from an anti-terrorism judge. Two brothers and a friend were detained.
The prosecutor’s office, without giving details, said an analysis of phone records led to Sunday’s search. Authorities said they found no weapons or explosives at either residence, and didn’t identify those detained.
After a “thorough interrogation” by federal judicial police, the investigating judge ordered the release of all five, the prosecutor’s office said. Eight other people detained earlier in Belgium in connection with the Nov. 13 attacks in the French capital remain in preventive custody.
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“The investigation will continue unabated,” a statement from the prosecutor’s office said Monday.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, which left 130 people dead. A European Union summit last week resolved to continue the EU’s effort against violent extremism, and called for wide-ranging measures including systematic checks on people crossing Europe’s external frontiers.
In France, people traveling on high-speed trains from France to Belgium and the Netherlands now must pass through new metal detectors.
The open French-Belgian border has been under special scrutiny since the attacks by extremists with ties in both countries. In August, a Paris-bound Thalys was the scene of a thwarted attack when passengers subdued an Islamic extremist gunman who had boarded in Brussels.
There are already security checks on high-speed trains from France to Britain. There aren’t any metal detectors for slow trains between France and Belgium, or on routes from France to other neighboring countries.
___
Angela Charlton reported from Paris. | {
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BY MARKO VIDRIH: On May 7, the popular WeChat messenger in China updated its own payment transaction policies to include provisions that could limit the possibility of over-the-counter (OTC) trading in a country where the official circulation of cryptocurrencies was banned.
According to Primitive foundation partner Dowey Wan, account holders for trading activities are prohibited from conducting activity related to the release of tokens and raising funds with their help, as well as trading in cryptocurrencies. For violation of the existing rules, the owners of such accounts may face a blockage.
“Given most OTC transactions are happening in wechat, this may impact local liquidity to quite some extent,” wrote Wan on Twitter.
In particular, the accounts of well-known over-the-counter sites and users interacting with them are at risk. While the scale of the possible prosecution of participants in OTC trading is unknown, one of the methods of circumventing the restrictions is called registration of new accounts.
In August last year, cryptocurrency media accounts got blocked in WeChat because of their violation of the requirements for “public information distribution services in instant messaging tools”.
In September, the official sales channel miners Bitmain was locked, which was, according to the messenger, disseminated information, which required licensing.
Featured image via WeChat | {
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In their current form, decentralized applications (DApps) built on Ethereum are a bit difficult to access for the average app user, as there exists a real technical and informational barrier that ultimately limits wide-range adoption. Compounding these issues, very few DApps are available for mobile devices, the major platform for any application. Given that there were over 2.4 billion worldwide smartphone users in 2017, it’s clear that efforts are needed to make DApps mobile.
Status hopes to achieve this by developing a mobile operating system for Ethereum that includes an open source messaging platform and mobile browser, enabling users to interact with DApps that run on the Ethereum Network. Status combines a secure messenger, web 3.0 browser and an Ethereum token wallet that will be available for iOS and Android devices. Additionally, the Status team is building out a Hardwallet which allows users to facilitate cryptocurrency transactions using near-field communication (NFC). Together, Status intends to build the first real mobile gateway to the decentralized web.
Interested in Status? Here’s a quick rundown of the project:
Platform & Development
In short, Status is developing a mobile interface that functionally acts as an Ethereum operating system, as each mobile device becomes a light client node on the Ethereum network. Through this interface, users are able to leverage a secure messaging system that uses a peer-to-peer protocol which doesn’t rely on centralized servers, giving users total control over personal data. With this system, users are also able to send payments and smart contracts within chats. However, Status is creating far more than a communication platform, as it is also developing a DApp browser, a wallet for ETH and ERC20 tokens, and a social network with hashtags and messenger stickers.
The integral element of the Status platform is its DApp directory, which will function much like the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. This directory will provide a gateway for users to navigate DApps by category and rating. Status has already listed a number of DApps that are available through its platform, including Gnosis, Aragon and uPort.
In addition to DApps, Status has emphasized decentralized chatbots as an additional set of listings in its store. Much like the DApps, these chatbots will be community created and have a variety of use cases.
Status has issued its own ERC-20 token SNT, which has a number of utilities across its platform, including:
SNT is required by Stakeholders to select and receive push notifications.
SNT is required to register a username on the Status Network.
SNT is required to deploy a semi-public token-based group chat.
SNT is required to become a crypto seller. These sellers function in what is called the Status Teller Network, a DApp inside of Status, which provides borderless, peer-to-peer fiat-to-crypto.
In addition, SNT enables users to steer the direction of development and influence how the network evolves over time. There is an expanded number of use cases available to review through the Status whitepaper.
Status Hardwallet
To further bridge cryptocurrency with the real world, Status has created the Status Hardwallet, a physical wallet that is integrated with near-field communication (NFC), a technology used by products like the Square Chip Reader. This Hardwallet allows users to store, send and receive Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens while enabling point of sale purchases. Keeping with Status’ theme of open-source, the Hardwallet lets developers can easily see, use and edit the code to suit their requirements.
Status Open Bounty Platform
Status has developed a $1 million bounty fund for open source projects. Currently, the bounty platform has a number of open bounties available to developers, mainly from Status and Argon. Not only can developers choose to work on select bounties, they can also propose their own projects and request funding as anyone from anywhere can add money to a bounty purse. Additionally, Status is in beta for a system that enables external companies to leverage the Status network to securely hire top talent for short-term gigs.
The Status roadmap is condensed onto Github. However, it seems that only short-term milestones are listed.
Team
Status was founded by Jarrad Hope and Carl Bennetts, and there are nearly 80 team members involved with the project led by former Googler Nabil Naghdy. Status uses a very pragmatic approach to hiring, relying heavily on skilled-based assessment.
The project initially started with a DEVGrant from the Ethereum Foundation to port EthereumJ to Android. Status has since raised $100 million in its ICO.
Token Financials
Status (SNT) currently has a market cap of ~$475 million with a circulating supply of 3,470,483,788 SNT and a total supply of 6,804,870,174 SNT.
Final Take
Status is extremely well-funded, well-run and capable of building out its mobile platform. Given that they are still in the alpha phase of development, Status will likely continue to see significant value creation over 2018 and beyond. Ultimately, Status might be the key ingredient in bringing DApps to the masses.
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Disclaimer: The author(s) of this article may have a position in one or more of the cryptocurrencies mentioned above. This article is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. Always conduct your own due diligence before making investments. | {
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If you have been investing in cryptocurrency for a while, as an early adopter, you are in a big plus: the total market capitalization grew until the beginning of 2018. But the Wild West today has become civilized. And currently, in order to earn in the market of cryptocurrencies, it is necessary to look out for pearls on a cryptocurrency bottom before their hype.
Investing in cryptocurrency at the stage of hype is a risky decision, because today some digital currencies can be at their peak of popularity, while tomorrow lose half of their value. But what happens if you invest in a cryptocurrency that is very little known about but which has a great potential?
In this review we will look at such projects that are still in the sidelines, but can potentially multiply your capital in 2018 by several times.
IMMO: bet on a new world currency
At the moment, IMMO is the most mysterious project of all existing cryptocurrencies in the market. It is believed to have been developed by the Rothschilds, one of the most influential banking dynasties.
Since May, rumors of IMMO have not abated in the cryptocurrency media, which even Vitalik Buterin was worried about. Probably, having learned intentions of the giants of traditional finance from his trusted sources, he confirmed the veracity of these rumors.
On May 26 he asked his Twitter subscribers what they thought about the power of the Rothschilds: “Are “the Rothschilds” actually remotely as powerful and coordinated as the conspiracy theorists seem to believe, or are they just a group of old-money socialites and all that other stuff is overhyped?” In the discussion at Reddit he stated: “If old-money-type high society people want to make their own currencies, go ahead, more power to them; see you in the moderately-free market.”
Up to date very little information is available, and there are speculations regarding the IMMO. Opinions exist according to which that IMMO will be secured by the value of precious metals or associated with real estate. In case this is a private blockchain, it will probably help to keep records of the dynasty’s wealth.
In crypto community the bankers cryptocurrency is commonly known as Ripple. But what if Ripple is only a test case? The Rothschilds are believed to own the huge capital they have been accumulating for over two centuries.
The emergence of a new world currency is predicted by The Economist to take place by 2018. Turning to the statistics, we can find that the average life expectancy of a reserve currency is 94 years. The dollar has remained the world’s reserve currency for 93 years. It can be concluded from the facts that IMMO can likely to increase your investment by several times in 2018-2019.
Are “the Rothschilds” actually remotely as powerful and coordinated as the conspiracy theorists seem to believe, or are they just a group of old-money socialites and all that other stuff is overhyped? Help me learn and decide! https://t.co/rYcyEHhM6F
— Vitalik “Not giving away ETH” Buterin (@VitalikButerin) May 26, 2018
Eloncity: bet on the global electric grid
Eloncity is a decentralized energy infrastructure with a million self-sufficient energy micro-networks, which aims to make green energy available 24/7. This infrastructure will be developed without state and intermediaries. The price of energy will become transparent for everyone and strive to almost zero. Eloncity is going to create an automated high-speed trading network that will allow to exchange energy in the conditions of live supply and demand. At the same time, AI algorithm will determine the objective cost of electricity at the moment.
The project offers the solution of actual problems of centralization of power networks, among which the problem of environmental pollution, healthcare, security and reliability, possible networks failures, and high cost of electricity.
The Eloncity’s website was launched not so long ago, and the dates of ICO are yet to be posted. However, unlike IMMO, investors interested in Eloncity don’t have to deal with lack of information on the matter.
The team consists of specialists with many years of experience, developers and IT-architects. Among the partners of Eloncity are developers of energy systems. Certainly, the success of Eloncity directly depends on whether the team will be able to solve the performance targets. There are reasons to believe that Eloncity has a chance of success.
Selfkey: bet on identification system
SelfKey is one of the few projects that came out on ICO with a ready-made alpha version of the product. Selfkey is a decentralized identification system. It will make it easy for people to prove their identity in order to access various products and services, including passport and citizenship registration, company registration, financial services, bank account creation and others. Once downloaded by the user, the information can be reused for any product on the market. At the same time, the confidentiality of information is securely protected by the blockchain technology.
Selfkey is a front for KYC-Chain, which was founded in the year of 2016. KYC-Chain proved its capabilities by working with various companies such as Standard Chartered Bank, immigration agency NTL, cryptocurrency exchange Gatecoin, Lykke, Kyber, AirSwap, Polymath, ZILLA, Malabar.ai, TitanFx, DollarSmart and others.
At the Pre-ICO, they managed to attract more than $ 15 million, which indicates an increase on the investor’s interest. On June 27th Selfkey was listed on Binance and now 90% of trading volume occur in this exchange. The market capitalization today is $ 25 million, which is clearly not the ceiling of growth.
Selfkey solves the actual problem of personal data security, which opens up great prospects for the project. There are opinions that the launch of the finished product before 2019 carries some risks, but if you look at it, no other ICO’s enter the market with the finished and realized product. Selfkey is one of the few projects with a good background and experience in the industry, which is the reason to pay attention to this project.
Xinfin: bet on hybrid blockchain
Xinfin is the first and only hybrid blockchain offering advantages of both public and private blockchain. Based on the Ethereum and Quorum blockchain, which was developed by J. P. Morgan, the hybrid network runs on a DPOS consensus between trusted master nodes with both smart contracts and Internet of Things atop of the protocol.
Hybrid blockchain provides a turnkey solution that is much better suited for regulated businesses and governments. After all, large enterprises enjoy the benefits of blockchain without the risks associated with its use. This need led to the creation of several projects focused on private and public blockchain, such as: R3 consortium, IBM Hyperledger and Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
XinFin completed its ICO in March 2018 and launched TradeFinex, a global trading and financial platform that aims to minimize the inefficiency in the global trade and finance.
The Xinfin XDCE token is not yet traded on major cryptocurrency exchanges, and the total market capitalization today is only $ 15 million. Taking into account the technical component of this project, and the composition advisors in the face of Roger Ver, the Mate Tokay, Jason Butcher, a conclusion could be made that Xinfin has all the chances to grow several times over.
I’m now an advisor for @XinfinF, a fork of JPMorgan’s Quorum.
My first advice was to accept #BitcoinCash for their ICO.
Learn more at https://t.co/Lyv6AZ5x7c — Roger Ver (@rogerkver) March 6, 2018
No one knows whether the events of spring of 2017 will ever play out. In the recent 6 months only few cryptocurrency have shown slight positive dynamics. Yet, it is not a reason to give up on cryptocurrency market. Instead, adapting to new realities and finding new opportunities to make money may still be possible. If you can’t find those pearls, maybe it means you haven’t gone deep enough?
Author – John Peterson | {
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A familiar pattern plays out after every mass shooting in the US.
First, advocates of gun control point out, accurately, that taking guns off the streets and limiting who can buy them will save lives. Then opponents of gun control argue that there are no regulations that can stop a determined shooter and that what we really need is to address mental health.
“This is also a mental illness problem,” President Trump said, following the script, after shootings in Dayton and El Paso. “These are people that are very, very seriously mentally ill.” “Mental health is a large contributor to any type of violence or shooting violence,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott agreed.
Then liberal gun control advocates insist they too want better mental health care and that Republican gun control opponents are hypocrites because they oppose expanding access to health insurance that would help people get it.
But the convenient cries of “mental health” after mass shootings are worse than hypocritical. They’re factually wrong and stigmatizing to millions of completely nonviolent Americans living with severe mental illness.
Abbott is wrong: the share of America’s violence problem (excluding suicide) that is explainable by diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is tiny. If you were to suddenly cure schizophrenia, bipolar, and depression overnight, violent crime in the US would fall by only 4 percent, according to an estimate from Duke University professor Jeffrey Swanson, a sociologist and psychiatric epidemiologist who studies the relationship between violence and mental illness.
“People with mental illness are people, and the vast majority aren’t any more of a risk than anyone else,” Swanson says.
That doesn’t mean, he says, that we can’t do more to identify people at risk of committing gun violence and prevent them from getting guns — particularly if they are a danger to themselves or others. But portraying mass shootings as a mental health problem misrepresents the evidence.
Mental illness isn’t a major cause of gun murder or mass shootings
The data on mental illness and violence is somewhat tricky to wrap your head around at first. People with severe mental illnesses — particularly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — do have an increased risk of violence compared to the general population. But the absolute risk they pose is not high (being male or having a substance abuse issue are both bigger risk factors), and the vast majority of people with severe mental illness aren’t violent.
Mentally ill people are far, far likelier to be the victims of violence (including violence committed by police) than the perpetrators. And because a distinct minority of the population has schizophrenia or bipolar, mental illness doesn’t contribute much at all to the overall violent crime problem.
A study conducted from 1980 to 1985 illustrates these complicated dynamics well. The Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) study, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, conducted an ongoing survey of about 10,000 people in five different urban areas (Baltimore, St. Louis, Raleigh-Durham, New Haven, and Los Angeles), asking, among other things, diagnostic questions to see if respondents met criteria for mental illnesses, and if respondents had hit, punched, pushed, shoved, or otherwise violently attacked someone.
Before the ECA study, attempts to study mental health and violence typically started either in psychiatric hospitals or in the criminal justice system. Those methods have obvious problems: Scouring hospital wards only catches people who’ve been diagnosed and chosen or forced to get help, and scouring prisons doesn’t give you a representative sample of the mentally ill either. By using a general household survey, the ECA study avoided those biases.
The study did find that people meeting diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, major depression, and bipolar were more likely to report violent behavior. But, as Swanson found analyzing the study data, the attributable risk rate — that is, the share of overall violence explained by serious mental illness — was between 3 percent and 5.3 percent, for a midpoint estimate of about 4 percent. That’s where the idea that if you wiped out serious mental illness overnight, violence would fall 4 percent comes from.
The contribution isn’t just small, however; a large part of it is due to factors that often come with mental illness, rather than mental illness itself. A 2002 paper by Swanson and seven co-authors, looking at 802 people in treatment for severe mental illness (which, as discussed earlier, biases the sample a bit), examined how the relationship between mental health and violence varies by social factors like substance abuse, childhood maltreatment, and living in an adverse or violent social environment (like being homeless or living in a very high-crime area of an inner city).
What they found was that mentally ill people who didn’t have substance abuse issues, who weren’t maltreated as children, and who didn’t live in adverse environments have a lower risk of violence than the general population.
“If you add any one of those three, it doubles,” Swanson says. “If you add any two, it doubles again. If you have all three, your risk triples.” Subsequent research using Swedish data finds that while non-substance-abusing mentally ill people have only a slightly higher risk of violence, substance abuse hugely increases that.
Given that mentally ill people are substantially more likely to have substance use issues, to live in adverse environments like homelessness, and to have been maltreated as children, it stands to reason that their rates of violence should be higher. That exaggerates the effect that mental illness itself has on violence.
Nor does this picture change when you look at just mass shootings and mass murders, not all violence or all homicides. Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 article that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, were mentally ill. “The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder,” Stone concludes.
Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, a frequent writer on mass murder and mass shootings, and fellow researcher Emma Fridel analyzed a Stanford Geospatial Center database compiling shooters who killed four or more people since 1966. Of the 88 shooters who met that criteria, only 14.8 percent had been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. And even for them, it’s hard to say with any certainty that mental illness caused or contributed to their shooting.
The difference in the US is guns, not mental illness
Subsequent studies, both in the US and abroad, arrived at broadly similar conclusions to the 1980s ECA study that concluded only 4 percent of US violence is attributable to mental illness, even if the precise numbers were slightly different. “When we reviewed the literature, it varied between 3 and 10 percent in six studies,” Seena Fazel, a professor of forensic psychiatry at Oxford who has studied mental health and violent crime extensively, says, referring to a recent meta-analysis he and colleagues conducted. “But none of these was in the US.”
The US and other countries are more similar when it comes to violence than you might think. Most crimes, even most violent crimes, aren’t any more common here than in other countries. You see that in crime victim surveys (like the one highlighted in the above chart, which Swanson created) as well as in official government crime statistics. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's collated government data, the crime of assault was rarer in the US in 2014 than it was in Australia, France, Ireland, or the Netherlands. The assault rates in Belgium and England/Wales were more than double the US rate. Some of that is due to differing assault definitions, but scholars generally agree that for most offenses, US crime rates are pretty normal.
The one huge, glaring exception is homicide:
The difference isn’t that mental illness is more prevalent in the US than in other countries. It’s not even that the US has worse access to mental health care — that’s true, but it’s hard to see why it would lead to more homicide but not more of any other violent crime in the US.
Instead, a major factor is that the US has a lot more guns floating around. Swanson offers an example: “Imagine three immature, impulsive, intoxicated young men who come out of a pub in the UK in the middle of the night and get into an argument. There, somebody gets a black eye and a bloody nose. In one of our big cities, it’s statistically more likely someone has a firearm, so you’re likelier to get a dead body.”
Sure enough, international data shows that countries with higher gun ownership rates have more gun deaths:
And similarly, US states with higher gun ownership levels see more gun deaths, including gun homicides.
America has a critical mass of angry people with guns
Swanson, the Duke University researcher, is not a fan of broadly forbidding all mentally ill people from owning guns. But he still thinks there’s a high-risk segment of the population it would be useful to target.
In a 2015 paper, Swanson, Harvard's Ronald Kessler, and five co-authors sought to identify how many Americans show a pattern of impulsive angry behavior. So they looked at data from a survey that just asked people. Specifically, it asked if they agreed with one of three statements:
“I have tantrums or angry outbursts.”
“Sometimes I get so angry I break or smash things.”
“I lose my temper and get into physical fights.”
We don’t know with certainty that this group is likelier to impulsively use firearms. But it stands to reason they would be.
About 8.9 percent of Americans, the study found, report one of these behaviors and have a gun at home; that’s roughly 22 million adults. And 1.5 percent (3.6 million) report one of the behaviors and carry guns with them outside the house. “Fewer than 10 percent have ever been in a hospital for mental health or substance abuse,” Swanson says. Barring people with severe mental illness from getting guns isn’t going to reach this population.
What could, Swanson argues, are extreme risk protection order laws. Those laws, passed in Connecticut in 1999, Indiana in 2005, Washington and California in 2016, Oregon in 2017, and an astonishing 10 additional states in 2018 and 2019 alone, offer legal avenues for police to seize guns temporarily from people determined to be a danger to themselves or others.
The laws typically require a judge to approve the order on the basis of evidence offered by police or a concerned family member; it can last up to a year. That could, in theory, let concerned friends and family flag impulsive and angry people of the kind Swanson’s research identified and keep them away from guns. Unlike restrictions on gun sales, it would apply to people already in possession of guns.
And the people affected tend to have a lot of guns — seven each on average, according to a study by (yes) Swanson and nine co-authors focusing on Connecticut’s experience. The study found that the law was most often used to take guns away from people at risk of suicide, not homicide. Since most gun deaths are suicides, and guns are a much more lethal tool of suicide than just about anything else, that saved a significant number of lives. About 44 percent of people who had their guns taken away received psychiatric treatment they weren’t getting before.
The study estimates that the law prevented one suicide for every 10 to 20 removals carried out. Whether or not that’s a good deal depends, naturally, on how you weigh gun rights against the cost to human lives. But it’s indicative of effectiveness on suicides.
As for homicide or mass shootings, the law’s effect is less clear and evident. It didn’t, and likely couldn’t have, stopped Adam Lanza from killing 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut, because Lanza used his mother’s guns rather than ones he bought himself. And while it stands to reason that taking guns away from angry people would reduce homicides or mass shootings, we have little concrete evidence that the angry people Swanson’s research has identified are likelier to commit violent crimes or how much likelier if so. It’s an area begging for more research.
But Swanson thinks it’s a better place to be looking than the mentally ill as a whole. “What if the president had said, instead of, ‘This is a mental illness thing,’ that [the Texas church shooter] was a veteran, this is a veterans’ problem, ban guns for all the veterans”? he asks, referring to the Sutherland Springs, Texas, shooting from November 2017. “That would be outrageous. … We need to understand risk for what it is and not just assume punitively that this whole huge category of people is risky.”
Further reading: | {
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Another month, another Android security patch is here. Google just released the May 2019 Android security patch for Pixel devices, even though I/O is only a day away from starting. We already have both factory image and OTA files ready to be downloaded for those willing to do some manual labor, or as always, you can sit back and wait for the update to arrive over-the-air (OTA) to your device.
So far, we are seeing new 9.0.0 files for Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL(PQ3A.190505.002), Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL (PQ3A.190505.001), and Pixel and Pixel XL (PQ3A.190505.001). The Pixel C picked up a new 8.1.0 build as version OPM8.190505.001. All devices are getting the May 5 security patch level.
UPDATE : Google didn’t reveal any specific functional patches this month, only that the update “contains many functional updates and improvements to various parts of the Android platform and supported Pixel devices.”
You can grab each image or OTA file at the links below. For instructions on how to flash a factory image, here you go. For instructions on how to flash an OTA .zip file, here you go. To check for the update, head into Settings>System>Advanced>System update.
As more details arrive, we’ll update this post.
Links: | {
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La marque de nouilles Cup Noodles a dévoilé la publicité vidéo en anime Hungry Days: One Piece Marineford-hen !
Comme chaque année, Cup Noodle célèbre la Jeunesse à travers une vidéo en se référant à la culture manga.
Synopsis :
Et si on transposait les personnages de One Piece à notre époque en tant que lycéen ?
Après Zoro, Nami, et Vivi, c’est une référence à l’arc Marineford qui fait son arrivée ! Cette publicité nous rappelle que peu importe l’adversité qui se dresse en face de nous, il ne faut jamais abandonner.
Publicité Vidéo – One Piece Marineford :
Le groupe Bump of Chicken signe la musique de la publicité.
source : cupnoodle.jp
© 2019 EISAKU KUBONOUCHI / METEOR STREAMS
© 2019 NISSIN FOODS HOLDINGS CO.,LTD. | {
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Bid to save Scotland's ancient rainforest Published duration 20 May 2019
image copyright John Macpherson/WTML image caption Almost 75,000 acres of woodland is designated as Atlantic rainforest
Scotland's ancient rainforest is under threat, conservationists have warned.
Almost 75,000 acres (30,351ha) of woodland on the west coast is designated Atlantic rainforest because of the rare oceanic plant life.
But the forest is being lost to overgrazing by deer and livestock, invasive plant species and disease.
The dangers, and plans to regenerate the forest, have been set out in a new report by the Atlantic Woodland Alliance
image copyright John Macpherson/WTML image caption The woodland supports a rich range of oceanic plantlife, including rare mosses and lichen
The alliance of 16 charities and organisations has proposed eradicating exotic species of plants, such as Sitka spruce and Rhododendron ponticum, from thousands of acres of rainforest, and also neighbouring woodlands to prevent re-invasion.
Non-native plants diminish the quality of the rainforest, but can also smother native plantlife.
Threats to Scotland's rainforest
image copyright John Macpherson/WTML
Almost all of it is over-grazed to a degree that prevents trees and other plants from re-growing, says the alliance
Invasive rhododendron can be found in 40% of rainforest sites where it threatens to choke the woodlands
Ash dieback, which is caused by a fungus, threatens the future of our northern and western most ash woods
Climate change and air pollution risks the clean air needs for most of the forest's plants to survive
Planting more native trees, such as oak and birch, has also been suggested by the alliance.
Crinan Wood in Argyll, Ballachuan Hazelwood on Seil Island, Balmacara Estate in Kyle of Lochalsh and Lochaber's Allt Mhuic include areas of the ancient and bio-diverse woodland.
image copyright John Macpherson/WTML image caption Areas of the forest can be found in Argyll and the Highlands
Adam Harrison, of Woodland Trust Scotland, one of the members of the Atlantic Woodland Alliance, said: "Scotland's rainforest is just as lush and just as important as tropical rainforest, but is even rarer.
"It is found along the west coast and on the inner isles and is a unique habitat of ancient native oak, birch, ash, pine and hazel woodlands and includes open glades and river gorges.
"Our rainforest relies on mild, wet and clean air coming in off the Atlantic, and is garlanded with a spectacular array of lichens, fungi, mosses, liverworts and ferns.
"Many are nationally and globally rare and some are found nowhere else in the world."
image copyright John Macpherson/WTML image caption An alliance of organisations wants to boost the forest's coverage
Gordon Gray Stephens, of the Community Woodlands Association, said it was not too late to take action to save the rainforest.
He said: "Our vision for regenerating Scotland's rainforest is clear. We need to make it larger, in better condition, and with improved connections between people and woods.
"Coming together as an alliance can help to make this happen."
More members have been sought for the alliance, whose current members include Forestry and Land Scotland, Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority, National Trust for Scotland, Plantlife Scotland and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. | {
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Zip Codes by State
The table below allows users to find zip codes by state. Just select the appropriate state from the list to display all of the zip codes by state. It may take a few extra seconds to display the states that have a lot of zip codes. | {
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In the wake of the worst anti-Semitic massacre in U.S. history that claimed the lives of 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, five technology companies – PayPal, GoDaddy, Medium, Stripe, and Joyent – have taken action against the social network platform Gab.
The suspect, 46-year-old Robert Bowers, appears to have a history of posting anti-Semitic speech on Gab, an alternative to Twitter that bills itself as "defending liberty and free expression online," and has become a haven for far-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos – banned from Twitter for what the company called "inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others" – conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, white nationalist Richard Spencer, and the United Kingdom's far-right Britain First organization.
PayPal confirmed the ban in a statement to The Verge, saying: "The company is diligent in performing reviews and taking account actions. When a site is explicitly allowing the perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance, we take immediate and decisive action."
On Sunday evening, Gab's Twitter account sent a screenshot of a message from GoDaddy saying the web hosting and domain registry company was suspending Gab.com as of Monday at 9 p.m. ET due to "numerous instances of content on your site that both promotes and encourages violence against people." That content, GoDaddy said in the message, violates section 5 of its terms of service.
Later that evening, Gab claimed it was also kicked off of Medium. A Medium spokesperson told Fox News that the company does not comment on individual accounts that have been found in violation of its rules.
iPHONE TRICKS, HIDDEN MICROSOFT BROWSER AND MORE: TECH Q&A
Not long after the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue, Gab released a statement of its own on Medium saying that it immediately cooperated with law enforcement authorities and that it "unequivocally disavows and condemns all acts of terrorism and violence."
The platform, which claims 800,000 users in its community and 9 million visits per month, also posted a link to its user guidelines, which prohibit "calling for the acts of violence against others." The site also sent a tweet noting it was getting 1 million hits an hour all day, which prompted a backlash of its own.
Late Saturday, Gab posted a screenshot of a notice it received from Joyent, a cloud hosting company, which said the social network had violated its terms of service.
9 GREAT AMAZON PRIME PERKS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT UNTIL NOW
That same night, Gab also said that Stripe, a payment processing company, had suspended it pending an investigation. That investigation, according to Stripe, could take a week.
This is not the first time that Gab has been sanctioned by various technology firms. In August 2017, Google removed Gab from Google Play for violating its hate speech policy. Apple similarly prohibited Gab from the App Store for hate speech violations.
On its Twitter feed Sunday, Gab hit back at the sanctions, went on the attack against Facebook and Twitter, and called on President Trump to act on what it described as "direct collusion between big tech giants."
On Sunday, Gab's chief technology officer reportedly resigned. According to post shared on Twitter, he said: "The attacks from the American press have been relentless for two years now and have taken a toll on me personally."
The company denies any link between what users post on Gab and the real-world violence that unfolded in Pittsburgh.
As recently as Sunday, there was a post about "white genocide" with a comment saying "If Jews have their way, whites will be eliminated." The site also had users with anti-Semitic names, such as "JewsDid911" and "JewsRunTheWorld."
As of Monday morning, Gab was not available for users to log in and a message on the site said it was "under attack" but working to get back online and transition to a new hosting provider.
Fox News reached out to Joyent for comment and will update this story as needed. Stripe said it cannot comment on individual users due to privacy concerns and referred Fox News to its terms of service here. | {
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By Mason Mohon | @mohonofficial
Elon Musk is a brilliant man. His work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit, and idealism make him a major role model in my life. He looks at things differently than anyone else and builds things other people fear to even imagine building.
But maybe there is a reason other people fear to imagine the things he creates. And it may be because nobody actually wants them. Years ago, LA Times released the notorious breakdown of the governmental assistance Musk and his empire have been receiving. When totaled up, Elon is receiving a hefty sum of nearly $5 Billion (probably over that by now) from the government. Which in turn, means out of the pockets of the taxpayer.
I do not hear the end of remarks of Musk’s cronyism when I bring him up in Libertarian circles. People jump on the opportunity to belittle and deride him for his acceptance of the state’s money. But I don’t think this is the attitude that one should take about Elon. Instead of one of anger, it should be one of regret and pity, because Elon has found himself in a bad situation, and he may even know it.
Free market capitalism shines through the greatest whenever the brilliant ideas of an entrepreneur meet the demands of the consumers. It is how the market is hard-wired to work. An entrepreneur has an idea, and this idea will only be profitable if and only if it is designed to satisfy the needs or wants of consumers.
A business will go bankrupt if it does not sell things that consumers desire. That is the beauty of the market. Some call it forced altruism, some praise how it ties selfishness to helping others. All I care is that every single party is made better off by its workings.
There is, though, one exception to this matter. That exception is the state. When the state apparatus gets involved in the matters of a company by means of handing out money in one form or another, this distorts the entire system. If a company receives money from the government, their burden to serve consumers is lifted. This is because now the company only has to fulfill some arbitrary obligation to the state to now receive its paycheck.
The state has many more means of funding a business than the American consumer. The state has the option of inflating the currency, deficit spending, or just taxing citizens to garner funds for any project. What all three of these methods have in common, though, is harm to the consumers.
So when a business gets government funds, it flips the entire game on its head. Rather than helping consumers, they only begin to harm consumers. Jenny Beth Martin stated on the same subject:
Crony capitalism relies on government picking winners and losers. It depends on government choosing to move resources to a favored enterprise, even as it refuses to move resources to disfavored enterprises. By definition, that distorts the marketplace, and warps investment decisions better made by private stewards of finance unencumbered by political considerations, whose only fiduciary responsibility is to those whose funds they manage. By adding the political calculus to the decision-making matrix, it alters outcomes, and prevents the most economically efficient deployment of limited financial resources.
The problem is pretty clear.
One may object “but consumers do want electric cars, so it is all ok.” Maybe consumers do want electric cars. I would gladly take a Tesla. But the problem is that nobody wants an electric car at the price point that Musk is selling them at. Denmark removed subsidies from Tesla, and henceforth Tesla began to suffer in Denmark.
So why shouldn’t we hate Musk, and why should we pity him instead? Because the guy is one of a kind. Very few individuals have the drive and idealism that he has. There are geniuses, entrepreneurs, and intellectual superstars in the world, but very few compare to Elon Musk.
So he should have the play the same game as the rest of us. He has brilliant ideas, but they are being wasted away on things that consumers don’t exactly want. If the government subsidy safety net was pulled away from the Musk business empire, imagine the consumers that would be served and innovation that would occur. The man would be able to do unimaginable things for our society.
Maybe what he is doing right now could work for society. But the government gets in the way of that once again. The state really likes oil. It has since good ol’ Texas Oil Man Bush Senior took the White House, and then started to take the Middle East. The subsidies Musk receives are dwarfed by the subsidies that the oil and gas industries receive.
The answer is to put the electric car industry and the non-renewable resource based cars on equal footing. But that does not mean give them both billions of dollars; doing that would only distort the market more.
Rather, the total amount of money both industries should receive is a grand total of zero dollars.
To support 71 Republic, please donate to our Patreon, which you can find here. | {
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And so it passes, the greatest assault on the safety net from which Australian life is built. Scott Morrison’s tax cuts are through and the revenue base that provides for health and education and social welfare is shredded. The legacy of the 46th parliament is there in its very first week: the destruction of the social compact that made this country stable.
On analysis by the Grattan Institute, to pay for these cuts at least $40 billion a year will need to be trimmed from government spending by 2030. The Coalition argues it will not cut services. It says jobs growth will reduce spending on welfare. A surplus will mean less interest paid on debt.
The assumptions are heroic and unsustainable. They show an extraordinary indifference to reality. More than that, they are indifferent to need. People will be worse off under these cuts. They will face greater hardship, have less access to health and to quality education. The people worst affected did not vote for Scott Morrison. Half the country didn’t. The damage done is near irreversible. It is infinitely easier to cut taxes than to raise them. This is a triumph of greed and political cowardice. The Labor Party waved it through.
The principles of this policy were first written on a paper napkin in 1974, when the conservative economist Arthur Laffer sketched out his famous tax curve for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. That serviette is one of the most pernicious documents in modern politics. It made the case for what became trickle-down economics. It became the lie through which governments gave money to the rich and pretended they were helping the poor.
The year Scott Morrison became treasurer, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry brought Laffer to Australia for a speaking tour. He met with Josh Frydenberg. His doctrine has its most explicit contemporary expression in the cuts passed this week.
We know this doesn’t work. In 2012, the United States Congressional Research Service found no correlation between tax cuts for the rich and economic growth. It had 65 years of real data on which to draw. All but the most optimistic readers of the Laffer napkin agree on what is self-evident: giving money back to the rich serves only to increase inequality. It makes the rich richer.
In his first major speech as prime minister, Morrison said he didn’t believe people should be taxed more to improve the lives of others. He said people had to work for it: they had to have a go. “I think that’s what fairness means in this country,” he said. “It’s not about everybody getting the same thing. If you put in, you get to take out, and you get to keep more of what you earn.”
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of taxation. You don’t pay tax in exchange for services. You pay tax for a society. Under Morrison, you pay less tax and you have less society. The obliterating self-interest of this week will be felt for generations. Morrison’s victory is a huge, huge loss. | {
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