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Here are highlights from Judge Neil M. Gorsuch’s third day at his Senate confirmation hearings:
■ Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, asked Judge Gorsuch why, when he was a Bush administration Justice Department official in 2005, he had scribbled “yes” on a document beside a question about whether C.I.A. torture of terrorism suspects had yielded valuable intelligence. He said was merely acting as a lawyer.
■ Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Democrat, pushed Judge Gorsuch to say whether a president has constitutional powers to lawfully override torture and wiretap statutes. Judge Gorsuch said he would approach such a case using analysis set out when President Harry S. Truman tried to seize steel mills.
■ Mr. Leahy also pressed Judge Gorsuch to say whether he would recuse himself from Supreme Court cases involving the Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, who was a former client and helped get him appointed to the appeals court. Judge Gorsuch did not answer directly.
■ The nominee would not discuss whether President Trump’s business dealings with foreign governments might run afoul of the Emoluments Clause, an obscure constitutional provision that the judge said “has sat in a rather dusty corner” until recently. |
A few weeks ago, we reported about WhatsApp's plans to add a voicemail-like feature to its voice calls as well as an easy option to call back the person. At the time, all we had were translation strings, but now the feature is live on version 2.16.189 beta (which you can grab from APK Mirror here or by joining the Play Store beta). There are two other small features that were added a few beta versions ago that I'll cover in this post as well.
Voicemail and Call back
After you make a voice call on WhatsApp and your contact either declines the call or it goes unanswered, you will see a new "Call declined" screen with three new round buttons. One is to cancel and go back to the conversation, one is to place another call, and the last one is to record a voice message. The latter is similar to leaving a voicemail on regular phone calls.
None of these were impossible before. After a call was declined or unanswered, you used to be thrown back into the chat where you could easily call again or record a voice message to send to your contact. But the options are now integrated with the chat and just a tad bit easier and more intuitive to do.
FixedSys font
The other new feature available in WhatsApp is a new Fixedsys font, which you can use to differentiate a quote or a piece of code (we all talk to developers all the time on WhatsApp, don't we? Oh... it's just me) for example. To trigger it, you have to start and end your sentence(s) with ``` and no spaces between it and the first or last characters, like so: ```this is fantastic```.
Waiting for a message
There's one more "feature" that you might have started seeing on WhatsApp a few versions ago: a "waiting for this message" uhm... message when you're talking to someone. It only seems to show up when WhatsApp knows it should deliver a text message to you, but it hasn't grabbed all of it yet. But since WhatsApp's messages are just text and so light, then odds are they'll reach you before there's any reason to display that "waiting" bubble. I've only seen it once and even then, it was just there for less than a second.
These are all small changes to the app. We're still waiting for video calls, gif support, public group links with NFC and QR Code sharing, and more. In the meantime, you can grab the latest 2.16.189 beta to make the waiting a little more tolerable. |
Danish Design Kumfy Kradle Leopard Radiator Cat Bed (WIDE)
Your cat will be snug and warm on this radiator cat bed! They’ll look so cozy you’ll want to climb on yourself! It hooks over your radiator and has a removable, washable cover.
KKLW Size: Narrow Features: -Colour: Leopard.-With a striking leopard print cover.-Simply hook the bed over your radiator and this stunning faux fur radiator bed will put your cat in the lap of luxury.-Life Stage: Adult; Kitten.-Shape: Rectangle.-Product Type: Radiator Bed.-Collection: Kumfy Kradle.-Distressed: No.Dimensions: -Overall Height - Top to Bottom: 28.-Overall Width - Side to Side: 40.-Overall Depth - Front to Back: 50.
Stylish Leopard Print Design
Removable, Washable Cover
Create a Snug Warm Place For Your Cat To Nap
Suitable For Double Panel Radiators
Max. Load 12kg
This product is discontinued. See these similar products instead:
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Confit byaldi is a variation on the traditional French dish ratatouille by French chef Michel Guérard.
History [ edit ]
The name is a play on the Turkish dish "İmam bayıldı", which is a stuffed eggplant.[1][2]
The original ratatouille recipe had the vegetables fried before baking. Since at least 1976, some French chefs have prepared the ratatouille vegetables in thin slices instead of the traditional rough-cut. Michel Guérard, in his book founding cuisine minceur (1976),[3] recreated lighter versions of the traditional dishes of nouvelle cuisine.[4] His recipe, Confit bayaldi, differed from ratatouille by not frying the vegetables, removing peppers and adding mushrooms.
American celebrity chef Thomas Keller first wrote about a dish he called "byaldi" in his 1999 cookbook, The French Laundry Cookbook.[5] Keller's variation of Guérard's added two sauces, a tomato and peppers sauce at the bottom (pipérade), and a vinaigrette at the top.[6][7] He served as food consultant to the Pixar film Ratatouille, allowing its producer, Brad Lewis, to intern for two days in the kitchen of his restaurant, The French Laundry. Lewis asked Keller how he would cook ratatouille if the most famous food critic in the world were to visit his restaurant.[1] Keller decided he would make the ratatouille in confit byaldi form, and fan the vegetable rounds accordion-style with a palette knife.[8]
Preparation and serving [ edit ]
Vegetable rounds arranged on a baking tin
Per Thomas Keller's recipe, a pipérade is made of peeled, finely chopped, and reduced peppers, yellow onions, tomatoes, garlic, and herbs. The piperade is spread thinly in a baking tray or casserole dish, then layered on top with evenly sized, thinly sliced rounds of zucchini, yellow squash, Japanese eggplant, and roma tomatoes, covered in parchment paper, then baked slowly for several hours to steam the vegetables. The parchment is removed so that the vegetables may then roast, acquiring additional flavor through caramelization. To serve, the piperade is formed into a small mound, and the rounds arranged in a fanned-out pattern to cover the piperade base. A balsamic vinaigrette is drizzled on the plate, which may be garnished.[9][10]
Despite the delicate preparation and presentation, confit biyaldi, like most ratatouilles, improves with age overnight in the refrigerator.[5]
See also [ edit ] |
Round 5 has just finished and with a quick turnaround before Round 6 (Deadline Apr 13 8:30pm EDT), here are the FMLS takeaways from all the matches over the past weekend!
Philadelphia Union (2) – (1) Orlando City SC
MOTM – Kaka ($10.8) 7pts
Although it wasn’t a double digit haul, Kaka’s 7 points with out a goal/assist is the type of performance you want in your squad as the goals/etc will come.
WATCHLIST – CJ Sapong ($8.1) 7pts
Sapong once again looked dangerous throughout after putting a goal in the net early on. Thats his 3rd on the year will look to continue his scoring ways against the struggling Sounders.
Montreal Impact (2) – (0) Columbus Crew SC
MOTM – Ignacio Piatti ($10.5) 7pts
Although it wasn’t a double digit haul, Piatti’s 7 points with out a goal/assist is the type of performance you want in your squad as the goals/etc will come.
WATCHLIST – Victor Cabrera ($7.3) 11pts
4 defensive bonus on top of a clean sheet, and all for $1.5 cheaper than Ciman? Aaaand a favorable schedule leading up to their DGW in Round 8? Better bring him in before his price gets too high!
New England Revolution (1) – (1) Toronto FC
MOTM – Sebastian Giovinvo ($11.9) 8pts
The Atomic Ant was once again on the scoresheet and somewhat justified his price tag? With multiple DGW forwards doing just as good or better than Gio, his place in many squads is in jeopardy.
WATCHLIST – Jozy Altidore ($9.5) 4pts
Jozy’s first start on the year and he’s back to assisting Giovinco. However, I’m still leery of the lingering hamstring injury and the next three matches being away from home certainly don’t help his cause either.
D.C. United (4) – (0) Vancouver Whitecaps
MOTM – Espindola ($10.1) 14pts, Saborio ($7.7) 11pts, Acosta ($8.8) 9pts
Espindola was fit enough to start the match while the other two, Saborio and Acosta, were able to do their damage in substitute appearances. Should all three begin to get starts, take note.
WATCHLIST – Tim Parker ($6.5) 1pt
With Pedro Morales out injured, Vancouver looked lackluster offensively. After letting in 4 goals against DC, I look for them to shore up their defense in the upcoming rounds.
New York Red Bulls (0) – (2) – Sporting Kansas City
MOTM – Dom Dwyer ($10.2) 10pts
Dwyer notched his 3rd goal, his 2nd assist of the season, and looks primed to produce well in the upcoming DGW with Feilhaber pulling the strings in the midfield.
WATCHLIST – Ike Opara (7.0) 5pts
Opara has fully recovered from his injury and racked up 5 points in 50 mins after being substituted for the injured Kevin Ellis. With Bester’s status still unknown, Opara could be a 180min def for SKC’s DGW.
FC Dallas (2) – (2) San Jose Earthquakes
MOTM – Quincy Amarikwa ($7.6) 10pts
#Quincytime is once again in effect with his 2 assists. His price tag and expected output make for a perfect match to free up cash for the upcoming DGW.
WATCHLIST – Mauro Diaz ($10.6) and Clarence Goodson ($7.6)
Each player again missed out through injury and are unsure if they’ll be back for the upcoming DGW. Refer to MLSFB or R/FantasyMLS for future updates!
Real Salt Lake (1) – (0) Colorado Rapids
MOTM – Joao Plata ($9.5) 10pts
Plata has been involved in nearly every goal that RSL has scored (7 out of 9). If not for upcoming DGW’s, he should be in every team.
WATCHLIST – Axel Sjoberg (5.5) 4pts
A Starting CB with his price-tag and a DGW in Round 6 makes Axel a perfect way to free up cash for other DGWers if needed.
Houston Dynamo (1) – (1) Seattle Sounders
MOTM – Giles Barnes ($8.6) 8pts
Barnes returned from the injury suffered in Round 2 and was immediately back on the score sheet with his looping chip off an Anibaba throw in.
WATCHLIST – Cristian Maidana ($9.1) 5pts
Maidana is another returnee from injury and although he didn’t light up the score sheet, look for him to do so as the attack gels once again.
New York City FC (0) – (0) Chicago Fire
MOTM – Matt Lampson ($4.7) 9pts
Lampson continues to show the form that supplanted what many thought was Sean Johnson’s stronghold on the goalkeeper position. A 3rd clean sheet in a row should have managers (myself included) thinking about starting him instead of leaving all those points on the bench!
WATCHLIST – David Villa ($11.1) 4 pts
Again Villa “blanked” but was unlucky to not have a goal or two. He was also one away from 3 extra bonus. Look for him to break through next week against Columbus.
Los Angeles Galaxy (1) – (1) Portland Timbers
MOTM – Fanendo Adi ($10.0) 7pts
Adi once again found the back of the net but we weren’t lucky enough to see a penalty call so we can figure out if he will give way to the almighty Valeri! Both Adi and Valeri are near essential for their upcoming DGW in Round 6.
WATCHLIST – Sebastian Lletget ($8.0) 6pts
Lletget didn’t get on the score sheet but he certainly passed the eye test so look for the attacking returns to start climbing once the Galaxy get their mojo back.
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MORE INFO Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is out NOW! :D Mood: Lifetime Points: Last Activity: Dec 17, 2018 Joined: Sep 19, 2013 Friends: Profile Views: Location: Osaka Posts: Comments: Photos: Likes: About: Janet Hsu from Capcom Japan here. Twelfth year, and boy have I been privileged to work as the Localization Director and/or lead translator on some awesome text-heavy titles such as Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Monster Hunter Tri, Mega Man Legends 3, and of course, the Ace Attorney series. Loading... Forum Activity There has been no recent activity. Groups Ace Attorney Official Capcom Blog Ghost Trick Recent Favorites There has been no recent activity. Janet Hsu Profile
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Wall Ace Trivia: Smorgasbord of Justice
Well, here we are – less than one week away from the launch of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice on September 8th! I hope everyone’s been enjoying the Nintendo 3DS demo. If you haven’t tried it yet, *gasp* then what are you waiting for? A personal invitation? Well, luckily, I have one of the game designers, Mr. Daigo, here today to tell us about what in this demo makes it extra special. Plus, I have some extra designer and cultural notes about Rayfa and Nahyuta’s designs, and other random trivia floating about, so pull up a chair and enjoy this week’s dev and loc blog! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A Revolutionary Demo Hi, everyone. I’m game designer Yoriki Daigo. I’m here today to talk about my long history of fighting to the death with the director, Mr. Yamazaki. I mean, considering how we first met... What? I can’t talk about that? It’s not interesting, and too graphic... Plus, there’s a downloadable demo on the Nintendo 3DS eShop to talk about? But what about all those people who’ve already tried the demo at events like E3, Anime Expo, and San Diego Comic-Con this year? Well, actually...! The downloadable demo is even better than the version you tried! We’ve powered it up with the following four things: 1) A teaser trailer! 2) The Dance of Devotion! 3) Shah’do! 4) The main game’s opening sequence! Let’s take a closer look at each of these power ups. 1) A teaser trailer! Clear the demo to see an exclusive new trailer! 2) The Dance of Devotion! The downloadable demo features the sacred dance Rayfa performs at the beginning of each Divination Séance, which you can watch to your heart’s content. But for those of you who’d rather hurry and get to the Divination Séance itself, fear not! We have made this scene skippable just for you. 3) Shah’do! This lovable little doggie, Shah’do, makes an appearance in the downloadable demo. Just when he makes his appearance is something you’ll have to play to find out! 4) The main game’s opening sequence! We’ve added both the full game’s opening anime and Episode 1’s opening to the demo. (From the opening anime for Spirit of Justice) (From the Episode 1 opening in Spirit of Justice) Speaking of the Episode 1 opening, Mr. Yamazaki had a big smile on his face one day when he came up to me and said... Yamazaki: “So, I had this amazing thought...” Daigo: “And?” Yamazaki: “And I was thinking we could have a bunch of different images appear on the surface of the treasure box in the opening sequence.” Daigo: “Hey, that’s not a bad idea!” I gathered the art designers and programmers at once, and they told me that as long as it wasn’t in 3D, they could probably make some sort of movie of what he was envisioning. Daigo: “They said they’ll probably be able to pull it off, but it might be tough if it’s in 3D.” Yamazaki: “What? But the game’s on the Nintendo 3DS, so it should be in 3D.” Daigo & designers & programmers: “Gnarrrrgh!” There was blood pouring from the designers and programmers’ eyes. At this rate, I was afraid that the last thing I’d see in this world was going to be my fellow team members as they descended on me. However, everyone agreed that it would be better to have the opening be in 3D. And so, they went about trying to figure out how to do it. They figured that if they could get pictures to appear on a still box, then they could probably find a way to make it 3D. That’s when Mr. Yamazaki said... Yamazaki: “Um... Can we make this box rotate somehow?” Daigo & designers & programmers: “NoooooOOOOOOOOOO(screen flash) oooooOOOOooooooooooo!(*smack* *smack* *break*)” Everyone had a mini-breakdown all at once, but this talented team wasn’t about to be beaten. We all agreed it would be cool to have the treasure box spin, so, even though I have no idea how they did it, the art designers and programmers worked together and managed to make the box turn – and in 3D. I couldn’t believe it. I... I was saved! No one would need to divine what had happened to me through a Divination Séance! Or so I thought, because Mr. Yamazaki just couldn’t be stopped! Yamazaki: “Um... Actually... do you think you could... "...make the box look like it’s is coming out of the picture in this scroll?” Nngh... NNNNGGGGHHHOOOOOOOOOOHHH!!! It’s time for a revolution! And that’s how the evil Mr. Yamazaki was overthrown and how peace came to the Spirit of Justice team☆ ...Huh. Well, what do you know? My story somehow ended up being about how Mr. Yamazaki and I fought to the death anyway! In any case, I hope you’ll check out how the spinning box turned out for yourself in the opening of the downloadable demo for Nintendo 3DS. *This entry is a work of fiction. The characters of “the evil Mr. Yamazaki,” “the designers,” “the programmers,” and “Daigo” are in no way related to their real-life counterparts – in fact, we’re actually all very good friends. Furthermore, all of the ideas discussed above were given by the dev team as a whole. However... The fact that we kept refining features like this in order to make something even better IS NOT A WORK OF FICTION! Yamazaki: “...You know, I don’t mind that you made me out to be the bad guy in this, but... isn’t this entire entry structured almost exactly like the one you wrote for Dual Destinies? Plus, isn’t the whole "rebelling against some crazy impossible task" thing exactly the same as my entry? Hmph, not one for originality, are you? Heh heh heh. Daigo: “Aaaaaaaaaargh... You want me to revolutionize your face?!” Yamazaki: “Aaaaaaah! Wait, did you just steal tha...rgh...” And that is how I disposed of the evil Mr. Yamazaki. *laugh* --------------------------------------------------- Well, uh... thanks, Mr. Daigo... But I thought you guys were all “very good friends”? Still, that was quite the tale of technical woe, but the end result was definitely worth it. I remember being wowed by it the first time I saw it for myself. It also set the tone perfectly for the mysterious Kingdom of Khura’in. Speaking of Khura’in, I’d like to share some trivia about Rayfa and Nahyuta’s earlier and final designs that I dug out of Mr. Fuse (I actually just stopped him as he was on his way home today again... Sorry, Mr. Fuse! And thanks for being such a good sport!). Even in her earlier designs (right), you can see that Rayfa was meant to be a full-on priestess, but as the game’s story began to take shape, Rayfa also became the princess of Khura’in. Mr. Fuse added a few elements to denote this aspect of her character with her tiara and regal sleeves. In addition to wanting Rayfa to have a unique hairstyle, her hair was designed in a manner that is reminiscent of Queen Himiko, complete with large loops of hair. This sort of looped hairstyle is also meant to be a reflection of the halo of Khura’inism’s founder, the Holy Mother in the in-game world, as well as a link to the unique hair styles of Maya and Pearl Fey. Her pink dress also underwent some changes and the final outfit is designed after dancer’s clothes since performing the Dance of Devotion is a key part of her job as the royal priestess. Monk with khakkhara (left), miko priestesses with kagura suzu bells (right) The staff that Rayfa carries is another clue that she’s a religious figure, and is fashioned after khakkhara or “Buddhist monk staves”, but that’s not the only clue. The bells around Rayfa’s wrists are based on Japanese suzu bells, which are common at Shinto shrines and also in Shinto ceremonies. As with Buddhism, the jingling sound of a suzu bell is associated with spiritual power. Japanese miko (priestess) and their sacred kagura dances are also linked with the sound of bells. In fact, it’s almost impossible to say “miko” and not think of the sound of suzu bells. Lastly, besides being like the ribbons on the kagura suzu a miko carries, the long ribbon between Rayfa's arms is meant to make her look like a Khura’inese butterfly, and serves to reinforce her role within Khura’inism. A Khura’inese butterfly on a lotus flower. Note how the wing tips are attached at the bottom. When it comes to prosecutors, there is always a certain look that Mr. Fuse tries to achieve. As he talked about back when he was designing Simon Blackquill, an Ace Attorney prosecutor has to have a certain look, and it usually involves a suit or some other type of Western clothing. In this case, Nahyuta’s white jacket is based off of a traditional type of Indian clothing known as sherwani (especially fancy wedding ones) mixed with an English frock coat. We talk a lot about how Nahyuta is not just a prosecutor, but that he is also a devout monk of Khura’inism, but how is that reflected in his design? There are actually a few interesting design elements with meanings you may not be aware of. The first most obvious thing is his floating scarf. While it may seem like a silly piece of fabric, it’s actually another Japanese cultural shorthand that conveys Nahyuta’s holiness and suggests that he is like a god. These scarf-like things are called hagoromo (羽衣, lit: feather clothes) in Japanese, and are worn by Buddhist celestial beings known as tennin and deities such as Nio. Tennin (left), a Nio (right) Hagoromo are the celestial clothing that allows these deities to fly, so in a sense, a character wearing hagoromo is not unlike a character with a pair of angel wings in the West. Speaking of divinity, Nahyuta’s overall character design is very gender neutral, or as Mr. Fuse likes to say, Nahyuta has transcended gender. The team had originally meant for Nahyuta to be whatever gender the player wanted him to be. This aspect of his appearance is also rooted in Hinduism and Buddhism, where a number of deities and gods are either genderless or are portrayed as both genders at once or as alternating between male and female depending on the depiction. As you can see from one of the earlier versions of his design, he was more feminine at one point, so in order to bring him truly to the center of the spectrum, he was given slightly broader shoulders and a slightly more masculine face. Lastly, there is one more hint to his personality in his design: the prayer beads necklace he wears around his neck. Incidentally, it consists of 48 beads. And now, some bonus trivia! If you look really closely, the geometric design on Payne’s sash is actually the first character of his Japanese name, 亜内 (auchi). I guess his new clothes are just as tacky as the man wearing them.
Shah’do is said to be a red Tibetan mastiff. If you know anything about how big Tibetan mastiffs get, you know that Shah’do is still just a happy little puppy.
The little tuft of hair on the top of Ahlbi’s head is meant to resemble Maya’s top knot, and shows a point of intersection between the cultures of the Kingdom of Khura’in and Kurain Village. There are a number of these shared traits between the cultures of Khura’in and Kurain Village sprinkled throughout the game and in the designs of the characters, so keep your eyes peeled as you play and see how many you can find! Words like "Your Benevolence" and "Your Magistry" are titles we use to substitute for the fact that in English, you call people by titles to show rank and respect. The word “magistry” is not a real word, but a mashup we created of “majesty” and “magistrate” to give the judge an aura of authority in his courtroom.
We also use the word “accused” instead of “defendant” in the Khura’inese courtroom since it’s kinda hard to be a defendant if you’re guilty until proven innocent, and there are no lawyers around to, you know, defend you. There are other special names and titles like these that we’ve applied to the Khura’inese court system and culture that are mostly to help flesh out the world a little.
And finally, there seems to be some confusion as to where the Kingdom of Khura’in is, with some people thinking it’s in the Middle East! But while it seems like a paradox, this magic trick is quite easy to solve with the help of our friend Klavier Gavin. Athena: あ！牙琉のサインだ！ (A! Garyu no sain da!) “Oh, サイン (sain)!” you might say. That’s the English word “sign”! Well, let’s see what happens if you translate that sentence as “Ah! It’s a Klavier sign!” *Gavinners’ tour poster courtesy of 10 minutes and my mad 1999-era photoshopping skillz. Not exactly the result we were looking for, right? So what’s going on? This is an example of translating without cultural context. Without considering how a word is used within a specific culture, it’s easy to accidentally convey the entirely wrong idea to your target audience. (Heck, this even happens between British and American English with words like “lift” vs. “elevator” and “torch” vs. “flashlight.”) In this case, the sentence should’ve been translated as “Ah! It’s Klavier’s autograph!” Had Athena been talking about the actual sign, she would’ve said 看板 (kanban) instead since sain is only used to mean either an autograph or signature, a mathematical sine, or some sort of cue, like a sign or a signal a baseball catcher might give a pitcher. How does this relate to why アジアの西の果て (ajia no nishi no hate – lit: western edge of Asia) is officially translated in English as “the western edge of the Far East?” Because I wanted to more accurately convey where Khura’in is based on how the Japanese word ajia (アジア) is used. It’s understood among Japanese speakers that when ajia is used in daily life, and even on TV news broadcasts, they are only talking about the countries of East Asia – Japan, Korea, China, and Mongolia. As Wikipedia writers even pointed out: 日本では逆に、しばしば中近東ならびに中央アジアや南アジアを含めず、極端な場合には東南アジアも除いた東アジアのみをさすことがある。 “In contrast [to other cultures’ understandings], the general understanding in Japan is that ajia frequently does not include the Middle East, nor does it include areas like Central Asia or South Asia. In extreme cases, it doesn’t include Southeast Asia either, and only denotes the countries of East Asia.” So it turns out that the original intention of the Japanese description that was meant to be read and interpreted by a Japanese audience is only unambiguously accurate when translated as “the western edge of the Far East/East Asia,” and not “the western edge of Asia,” since even in English, the colloquial usage of “Asia” can vary from person to person and culture to culture to include (or not include) countries such as Turkey or regions such as Central Asia. But there’s actually another reason why a Japanese person would immediately think of the Himalayas and of India in conjunction with a religion like Khura’inism: the exoticism and mystery of India as the birthplace of one of the major religions of Japan – Buddhism – and the pervasiveness of stories like Journey to the West in the Japanese collective conscious. Much as how American Christians, Jews, and Muslims think of Jerusalem as the exotic and foreign birthplace of their religions, an element of mysticism has been infused with the Japanese people’s image of India through Japanese pop culture and immensely influential works like Journey to the West (西遊記, pinyin: Xī Yóu Jì) or “Saiyuki” as it’s transliterated in Japanese (no, not that “Saiyuki”...), which is the story of a monk and his supernatural companions who are on a journey to retrieve some sacred Buddhist scriptures from the Western Regions (or what one might say is “the western edge of the Far East”). India has pretty much always been considered “non-Asian” to the Japanese, since Japanese culture was historically influenced primarily by Chinese culture. So from the Japanese perspective, Indian culture is a familiar, yet utterly different and unique one compared to their own. As a comparison, think about how ancient Greek culture is one step removed from American culture, which is European influenced – it’s familiar because we know their gods and legends, like Hercules, but just far away enough through space and time for it to seem exotic. But ultimately, the reason why I know for sure that Khura’in is on the western edge of the Far East is because I spoke with Mr. Yamazaki and Mr. Fuse to confirm that that is actual region they meant to convey to their audience. ------------------------------------------------- Next Friday – well, you’ll probably be busy playing Spirit of Justice, but if you’re looking to take a break, I’ll be here to give you a look at how the game was put together – literally! It’s time to explore the programming and dramatic presentation scripting sides of Spirit of Justice, and just how we decided on the design of the game's logo. Until then! Catch up on previous blog entries here! 4.6 (4 Ratings) Report Tags: ace attorney dev blog khura'in localization phoenix wright spirit of justice |
大家好！ (Hi, everyone!) Welcome to the latest Mandarin Weekly, with yet more links and information for those of us learning Chinese.
Please tell your Chinese teachers, fellow students, and others about this free resource.
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New Year traditions
Chinese New Year is about to begin, and it’s thus time for us to learn (or re-learn) the words and phrases that have to do with that festival. In this post, we learn about popular traditions among people celebrating Chinese New Year:
http://speakupchinese.tumblr.com/post/138224129866/chinese-new-year-traditions
Twitter: @SpeakUpChinese
Chinese New Year vocabulary
Written Chinese also chimes in with a vocabulary list for the Chinese New Year:
https://www.writtenchinese.com/chinese-new-year-greetings-useful-cny-words/
Twitter: @WrittenChinese
Boom! Crash! Ouch!
How do you express certain real-world sounds in Chinese? This article introduces onomatopoeia, Chinese style, with many useful words and phrases:
http://www.fluentu.com/chinese/blog/2016/01/27/onomatopoeia-chinese/
Twitter: @FluentU
Two ways of saying “two”
Why does Chinese have two ways to say “two,” and when is each used?
http://mandarin.about.com/od/usingnumbers/fl/Two-ways-of-saying-two-in-Mandarin.htm
Useful grammar patterns
Certain grammar patterns repeat themselves all of the time in Chinese. In this posting, we learn about two of them, “VERB 一VERB” and VERB + 来／去:
http://www.duchinese.net/blog/15-would-you-like-some-goldfish-tea
Twitter: @DuChinese
Creative ways to express love
How can you say “I love you” in Chinese? This video provides us with 13 different ways to express your affection:
http://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/13-ways-to-say-i-love-you-in-chinese/
Twitter: @Fluent_Mandarin
Beginner Chinese videos
Just starting to learn Chinese? Here are some videos that you can use to get a jump-start on your learning of the language:
http://blogs.transparent.com/chinese/10-beginner-chinese-videos/
Twitter: @ChineseLanguage
Saying “yes” and “no”
LearnChineseNow answers one of the most common questions asked by newcomers to Chinese: How do you say “yes” and “no”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7kn4dB9MU0
Twitter: @LearnChineseNow
A Spanish couple
Learn about an elderly Spanish couple in this story, read aloud, with characters and Pinyin:
http://chinese-at-ease.com/learn-chinese-online-one-lifetime-one-couple/
Twitter: @ChineseAtEase
Chinese pronouns
How well do you know your pronouns in Chinese? This chart and introduction from Dig Mandarin should help you to get started and/or serve as a useful reminder:
http://www.digmandarin.com/pronouns-in-chinese-characters.html
Twitter: @DigMandarin
The “knife” radical
Another list of characters containing the “knife” radical:
http://allaboutchinese.tumblr.com/post/138325682029/allaboutchinese-all-about-chineses-%E9%83%A8%E9%A6%96%E7%B3%BB%E5%88%97
Top Chinese adjectives
YuTing from ChineseClass101 provides us with a video, demonstrating and pronouncing 25 common adjectives in Chinese:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZe4hH67UZw
Twitter: @chineseclass101
Where are you from?
What country are you from? That is a common question you’ll get when in China; with this list, you’ll (probably) be able to answer them:
http://blogs.transparent.com/chinese/countries-nationalities-and-languages-in-chinese/
Twitter: @ChineseLanguage
Long-distance relationships
Seeing someone special? But they live far away? In this video, ChinesePod offers us the chance to learn how to talk about such relationships in Chinese:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHHIkh6PRWM
Twitter: @ChinesePod
Tiger-related idioms
Chengyu, Chinese idoms, are an important part of learning to speak and understand Chinese. Many include tigers. In this posting, we learn about several of the more common tiger-related Chengyu:
http://www.digmandarin.com/tiger-stories-and-idioms-in-chinese.html
Twitter: @DigMandarin
Numbers, from 11 – 100
Want to count from 11 to 100 in Chinese? It’s surprisingly easy, as indicated in this video from ChineseClass101:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBZqbjlU6Q
Twitter: @chineseclass101
Translating nouns
Translating from Chinese to English isn’t always so straightforward; in this posting, we get some practice trying to perform such translations:
https://mandarinwithmanu.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/nouns-are-weird-translation-exercises/
Twitter: @MandarinWManu
Famous Chinese dishes
Traveling to China? Or just want to eat authentic Chinese food? This list of famous dishes, including their characters, will help to set you straight:
http://www.learnchinesechina.com/site-content/40-blog/1688-most-famous-dishes-in-china-a-z-part#.Vq8GyD82sVd
Did learning Chinese change your life?
A discussion among people who are relatively fluent in Chinese, who tell us how knowing the language has affected their lives and careers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/42h23m/those_whom_learnt_or_are_fluent_in_chinese_how/
Do Chinese children learn Pinyin?
Do Chinese children learn Pinyin, either before or while learning characters?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinese/comments/431h6n/is_pinyin_taught_in_chinese_schools/
Do native speakers know their tones?
If you ask a native speaker to identify the tones, can they do it? Does this matter for non-native speakers who are learning Chinese?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/42jgrt/do_you_think_that_most_people_who_learn_chinese/
How’s it going?
How can you ask someone how something is going? And when you do so, how which 的／得 is appropriate?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/43kilh/%E5%AD%A6%E7%9A%84%E5%BE%97%E6%80%8E%E4%B9%88%E6%A0%B7%E4%BA%86_what_does_this_exactly_mean/
Li Li Li
What is the difference between the characters 裡, 裏 and 里? All are pronounced lǐ, but are the meanings or uses different?
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17089/what-is-the-difference-between-%E8%A3%A1-%E8%A3%8F-and-%E9%87%8C
Your opinion, please
What is the difference between 看法 and 想法? Both seem to mean “opinion,” but are they used in different ways?
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17054/what-is-the-difference-between-%E7%9C%8B%E6%B3%95-and-%E6%83%B3%E6%B3%95
I thought so
What is the difference between 认为 (rèn wéi) and 以为 (yǐ wéi)? Both seem to mean “I thought so,” but they aren’t quite the same:
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17027/what-is-the-difference-between-%E8%AE%A4%E4%B8%BA-and-%E4%BB%A5%E4%B8%BA
Beautiful and ugly behavior?
You can use 美 and 丑 to indicate that something is beautiful or ugly. But does this work for behavior, or is it limited to appearances?
http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/50818-do-%E7%BE%8E-and-%E4%B8%91-often-refer-to-both-appearance-and-behavior/
Receiving
There are two ways to receive something in Chinese, and the distinction between 受 (shòu) and 收 (shōu) isn’t always obvious:
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17029/what-is-the-difference-between-%E5%8F%97-and-%E6%94%B6 |
AMD's Display Core difficulties
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Back in 2007, the announcement that AMD intended to reverse its longstanding position and create an upstream driver for its graphics processors was joyfully received by Linux users worldwide. As 2017 approaches, an attempt by AMD to merge a driver for an upcoming graphics chip has been rejected by the kernel's graphics subsystem maintainer — a decision that engendered rather less joy. A look at this discussion reveals a pattern seen many times before; the positions and decisions taken can seem arbitrary to the wider world but they are not without their reasons and will, hopefully, lead to a better kernel in the long run.
A quick timeline
Back in February, Harry Wentland posted a patch set adding the new "DAL display driver" to the AMD GPU subsystem; this driver, he said, would "allow us going forward to bring display features on the open amdgpu driver (mostly) on par with the Catalyst driver." It was not a small patch, adding 279 new source files containing nearly 94,000 lines of code. That code saw little public discussion and was never merged, though it has become clear that some private discussion took place.
In March, Alex Deucher proposed that DAL should be merged, saying that it was to be the core of the new display stack; his goal was to get it into the 4.7 release. Graphics maintainer Dave Airlie made it clear that this was not going to happen, saying that: "I think people are focusing on the minor comments and concerns and possibly deliberately ignoring the bigger concern that this code base is pretty much unmergeable as-is." His biggest complaint had to do with the overall design, which involved a lot of abstraction code that tried to hide the details of working with the kernel from the rest of the code. Others echoed his concerns and, indeed, the code was not merged for 4.7 or any other kernel released since then.
The current chapter began on December 7, when Wentland posted an RFC note saying that this code (now going by the name "display core") was needed to support the next generation GPU coming out of AMD. The company, he said, has based all of its efforts on the display core code, using it as the foundation for all of its quality-assurance work, its OEM preloads, and more. And, he noted: "DC behavior mirrors what we do for other OSes". That last point is important; the display core code helps the company maintain the driver across multiple operating systems by hiding a lot of system-specific interfaces.
This time, Daniel Vetter complained about the abstraction layers in the code and described why they were not acceptable in the mainline kernel. Airlie responded more strongly, saying that this code would not be merged in its current form:
Given the choice between maintaining Linus' trust that I won't merge 100,000 lines of abstracted HAL code and merging 100,000 lines of abstracted HAL code I'll give you one guess where my loyalties lie.
As one might expect, a certain amount of back-and-forth resulted; the AMD developers were not pleased by this response. It can only have felt like a slap to a group of developers who were trying to do the right thing by getting support for their hardware into the mainline kernel. Even so, they stayed with the discussion, which remained almost entirely civil, and which, in the end, seems to be leading to a viable path forward.
The trouble with midlayers
There are a number of complaints with the AMD driver code; it is not often that tens of thousands of lines of new code are free of problems. But the biggest issue has to do with the midlayer architecture. A midlayer, as its name suggests, sits between two other layers of code, typically with the purpose of hiding those outer layers from each other. In this case, for example, the display core code tries to hide the details of low-level hardware access, allowing the upper-layer driver to run on any operating system.
The kernel community has a long experience with midlayers, and that experience is generally seen as being bad. For an extensive discussion of the midlayer pattern in the kernel, this 2009 article from Neil Brown is recommended reading. A midlayer architecture can bring a whole raft of long-term maintainability issues in general; the graphics developers are also concerned about some more specific issues.
The idea behind AMD's midlayer is to abstract out the Linux-specific details in the driver. That may be desirable for somebody trying to maintain a cross-platform driver; it also helps the AMD developers get the Linux driver working before the hardware engineers move on to the next product and stop answering questions. But code structured in this way is painful for people trying to maintain the Linux kernel. Understanding higher-level code becomes harder when that code does not follow the normal patterns used by graphics drivers; that can be hard for maintenance in general, but it can become a severe impediment to any sort of refactoring work. As Airlie put it:
If I'd given in and merged every vendor coded driver as-is we'd never have progressed to having atomic modesetting, there would have been too many vendor HALs and abstractions that would have blocked forward progression. Merging one HAL or abstraction is going to cause pain, but setting a precedent to merge more would be just downright stupid maintainership.
A hardware abstraction layer must be maintained to meet the needs of code for other operating systems — code that the Linux kernel developers cannot see (and probably don't want to). In effect, that means that nobody outside of the originating company can touch the midlayer code, making community maintenance impossible. If members of the community do try to patch the midlayer — often to remove code that, from the kernel's perspective, is redundant — they will run afoul of the driver maintainers, who may well try to block the work. If they are successful in doing so, the result is code in the community kernel that is essentially off-limits for community developers.
Functionality placed in a midlayer, rather than in common code, has a high likelihood of developing its own behavioral quirks. As a result, drivers using the midlayer will behave differently from other drivers for similar hardware, often in subtle ways. That creates pain for application developers, who no longer have a single driver interface to work with.
A midlayer will also tend to isolate its developers from the common core code. The midlayer will be fixed and improved, often to work around shortcomings in the common layer, rather than improving the common layer itself. Kernel developers would rather see that effort going into the common code, where it benefits all users rather than one driver in particular. Developers who work on this support code have a say in the direction it takes, while developers who work on a midlayer generally do not. So things tend to diverge further over time, with the driver developers feeling that the core is not developed with their needs in mind.
Finally, midlayer-based code has a certain tendency to get stuck on older kernel versions; indeed, the current display core code is still based on 4.7. That makes it hard to maintain as the kernel goes forward. In this case, Vetter summarized this aspect of the problem by saying: "I think you don't just need to demidlayer DAL/DC, you also need to demidlayer your development process." Code intended for the mainline needs to be developed and tested against the current mainline, or it will inevitably fall behind.
The way forward
Regardless of how one views the odds of seeing the Year of the Linux Desktop in the near future, it seems certain that those odds can only be worse in the lack of AMD GPU drivers. The blocking of such a driver — otherwise on track to be in mainline before the hardware ships — thus looks like a step backward for a subsystem that has already struggled to gain support for current hardware.
Chances are, though, that this standoff will be resolved more quickly than people might expect. The AMD developers were not unaware of the problems and, it seems, not unwilling to fix them. Deucher said:
What I really wanted to say was that this was an RFC, basically saying this is how far we've come, this is what we still need to do, and here's what we'd like to do. This was not a request to merge now or an ultimatum.
Some work has indeed been done since the early posting of this patch set; and, it is said, about one-third of the midlayer code is gone. Vetter made it clear that this work had been seen and appreciated:
I guess things went a bit sideways by me and Dave only talking about the midlayer, so let me first state that the DC stuff has massively improved through replacing all the backend services that reimplemented Linux helper libraries with their native equivalent. That's some serious work, and it shows that AMD is committed to doing the right thing.
The code that had been removed so far is, naturally enough, the easiest third to take care of; getting rid of the rest of the midlayer will require some significant refactoring of the code. Vetter provided a roadmap for how that work could be done; Wentland and AMD developer Tony Cheng agreed that the path seemed workable. Wentland acknowledged that things could have been done better at AMD, saying: "We really should've started DC development in public and probably would do that if we had to start anew." Actually getting all that work done may take a while; it must compete with other small tasks like making the driver actually work for existing and upcoming hardware.
One might conclude that what we are really seeing here is a negotiation over just how much of this work must be done before the code is deemed good enough that the rest of the fixes can be done in the mainline. Maintainers tend to worry about giving way in such situations because, once they have merged the code, they have given up their strongest leverage and can find that the developers become surprisingly unmotivated to finish the job. Arguably, that is a relatively unlikely outcome here; AMD has been trying to improve its upstream development for nearly a decade and its developers know what the rules are.
The most likely outcome, thus, is that this driver is delayed for perhaps a few more development cycles while the worst problems are taken care of and some sort of convincing story exists for the rest. Then it will be welcomed into the kernel as a welcome addition to mainline support for current hardware, and users worldwide will have something to celebrate. The Year of the Linux Desktop, unfortunately, may be a little slower in coming. |
A whole bunch of years ago, we posted on this idea here on CSS-Tricks. We figured it was about time to update that and do the subject justice.
Imagine a scenario where you need to split a layout in half. Content on the left and content on the right. Basically two equal height columns are needed inside of a container. Each side takes up exactly half of the container, creating a distinct break between one. Like many things in CSS, there are a number of ways to go about this and we're going to go over many of them right now!
Using Background Gradient
One simple way we can create the appearance of a changing background is to use gradients. Half of the background is set to one color and the other half another color. Rather than fade from one color to another, a zero-space color stop is set in the middle.
.container { background: linear-gradient( to right, #ff9e2c 0%, #ff9e2c 50%, #b6701e 50%, #b6701e 100% ); }
This works with a single container element. However, that also means that it will take working with floats or possibly some other layout method if content needs to fill both sides of the container.
See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Background Gradient by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen.
Using Absolute Positioning
Another route might be to set up two containers inside of a parent container, position them absolutely, split them up in halves using percentages, then apply the backgrounds. The benefit here is that now we have two separate containers that can hold their own content.
See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Absolute Positioning by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen.
Absolute positioning is sometimes a perfect solution, and sometimes untenable. The parent container here will need to have a set height, and setting heights is often bad news for content (content changes!). Not to mention absolute positioned elements are out of the document flow. So it would be hard to get this to work while, say, pushing down other content below it.
Using (fake) Tables
Yeah, yeah, tables are so old school (not to mention fraught with accessibility issues and layout inflexibility). Well, using the display: table-cell; property can actually be a handy way to create this layout without writing table markup in HTML. In short, we turn our semantic parent container into a table, then the child containers into cells inside the table — all in CSS!
See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Display Table by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen.
You could even change the display properties at breakpoints pretty easily here, making the sides stack on smaller screens. display: table; (and friends) is supported as far back as IE 8 and even old Android, so it's pretty safe!
Using Floats
We can use our good friend the float to arrange the containers beside each other. The benefit here is that it avoids absolute positioning (which as we noted, can be messy).
See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Floats by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen.
In this example, we're explicitly setting heights to get them to be even. But you don't really get that ability with floats by default. You could use the background gradient trick we already covered so they just look even. Or look at fancy negative margin tricks and the like.
Also remember you may need to clear the floats on the parent element to keep the document flow happy.
Using Inline-Block
If clearing elements after floats seems like a burden, then using display: inline-block is another option. The trick here is to make sure that the elements for the individual sides have no breaks or whitespace in between them in the HTML. Otherwise, that space will be rendered as a literal space and the second half will break and fall down.
See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Inline-Block by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen.
Again there is nothing about inline-block that helps us equalize the heights of the sides, so you'll have to be explicit about that.
There are also other potential ways to deal with that spacing problem described above.
Using Flexbox
Flexbox is a pretty fantastic way to do this, just note that it's limited to IE 10 and up and you may need to get fancy with the prefixes and values to get the best support.
Using this method, we turn our parent container into a flexible box with the child containers taking up an equal share of the space. No need to set widths or heights! Flexbox just knows what to do, because the defaults are set up perfectly for this. For instance, flex-direction: row; and align-items: stretch; is what we're after, but those are the defaults so we don't have to set them. To make sure they are even though, setting flex: 1; on the sides is a good plan. That forces them to take up equal shares of the space.
See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Flexbox by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen.
In this demo we're making the side flex containers as well, just for fun, to handle the vertical and horizontal centering.
Using Grid Layout
For those living on the bleeding edge, the CSS Grid Layout technique is like the Flexbox and Table methods merged into one. In other words, a container is defined, then split into columns and cells which can be filled flexibly with child elements.
If the cells in the demo below are stacked, then your browser doesn't support CSS Grid. At the time of this writing, support is limited to Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera (except Opera Mini).
See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Grid Layout by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen.
Isn't it cool how many ways there are to do things in CSS? |
Wikimedia Commons Detroit was once the symbol of American wealth and industrial capacity. It is now everybody's emblem of decline.
The data about Detroit grow more depressing by the month. This report may be the most depressing thing you'll read all year.
In a nutshell, it says that roughly half of all the people who live in Detroit are illiterate. They can't read the back of a cereal box. They can't read a weather report. They can't read at all.
As Andrew Coulson notes in his blog at Cato: "Virtually the entire illiterate population has completed elementary school, the level at which reading is theoretically taught. That's seven years of schooling (k-6), at a cost of roughly $100,000, for… nothing."
By way of epitaph, last month every teacher in the Detroit public school system was laid off. |
On January 26, 1950, when General Curtis E. LeMay, commander of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, attended yet another conference to discuss the next U.S. long-range heavy bomber, his mind was likely already made up. The Convair B-36 was soon to be obsolete, and a variety of successors had been proposed. But Boeing bombers had served the U.S. military well during World War II, and if LeMay got his way—and he usually did—the next big bomber would be another Boeing product: the B-52 Stratofortress.
The potential contract was huge, and U.S. aircraft manufacturers brought ambitious proposals to the table. One of the designs—the Model 1211-J—came from the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, California. Never had a bomber looked so capable—on paper.
Powered by four turboprop engines, the Model 1211-J was a colossus—160 feet long with a wingspan of 227 feet, about the size of the Convair behemoth it was to replace. It was designed around a new 43,000-pound conventional bomb but could carry nuclear weapons as well. It could also carry its own fighter escorts, as parasites under its immense wings. A variety of fighter types were suggested, including Douglas' new ogival-wing jet, the F4D Skyray. The fighters' jet engines were to be powered up to assist the carrier bomber during takeoff; refueling of the fighters was to take place while they were stowed on the mothership's underwing pylons.
Though the concept of parasite aircraft had an appealing ingenuity, flying them was fraught with difficulty. Flight testing had revealed that turbulent airflow would form under the carrier aircraft, causing severe problems as the fighter attempted to reattach itself to the host aircraft.
Would the Model 1211-J have succeeded as a parasite platform? "The combination of the totally new bomber and the totally new fighter, attaching itself in the direct path of the turboprop propeller wash, is frightening to contemplate," says Walt Boyne, a retired B-52 pilot and former director of the National Air and Space Museum. "The inclusion almost smacks of either desperation or a sense of humor on the designers' part." (A few years later, the parasite concept was rendered obsolete by the use of inflight refueling.)
In place of the parasite fighters, large underwing drop tanks and special-purpose pods could be substituted to provide, according to the Douglas proposal, "extreme versatility in operations." Douglas engineers imagined pods—"droppable or not as desired," the proposal states—that could carry reconnaissance or radar equipment, countermeasures, even personnel to supplement the bomber's nine-man crew. One drawing shows the pods in a photo-reconnaissance configuration, complete with cameras and even a small film-processing lab.
Without the parasites, the Douglas bomber could defend itself with a choice of radar-controlled 20-mm cannon or Hughes MX-904 self-guided missiles, stored in an internal rotary launcher like an oversized Colt six-shooter.
The Douglas team had also proposed droppable takeoff gear positioned under the outer section of the 1211-J's enormous wings. "Using droppable gear is always a last resort," says Boyne. "The B-52 had retractable tip gear, which was a heavier but more sensible solution."
By including so many options, the Model 1211-J's designers tried to make the bomber a paragon of multi-tasking self-sufficiency. They had hoped to sell the Air Force not just a single bomber but a family of aircraft, with a variety of airframes to choose from, including custom options and mission-specific add-ons. But would asking so much of the 1211-J compromise its ability to do its main job: put bombs on target? "I've always been a minimalist in aircraft design," says aerospace historian and author Dick Hallion. "When you take a look at this Douglas design, there's a lot of frou-frou. There are a lot of things here that wouldn't work out well operationally. There are a lot of issues that make turboprops unreliable: gearbox issues, shafting issues, the propellers themselves. These are all complex problems that need to be worked out." And even if Douglas engineers could have solved the 1211-J's problems, the bomber's fussy design would have made it a maintenance nightmare.
The Douglas designers of course hoped to dazzle the Air Force with possibility, but no matter how much versatility they put into the 1211-J, it wasn't enough to interest LeMay, who kept pushing for the more practical, turbojet-powered B-52. In the spring of 1951, Air Force chief of staff General Hoyt Vandenberg approved the Boeing proposal. Given the stupendous—and ongoing—career of the B-52, this was certainly a wise decision. |
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digiKam bills itself as a digital photo management application. Suffice it to say that digiKam is a humble application, because "digital photo management" barely touches on the feature set.
digiKam basics
If you don't have digiKam installed, you can either grab it for Linux, Windows, or, with a little bit of work, on OS X from the digiKam download page or, on Linux, from your distribution's software repository. Your distribution may or may not have the latest version, but don't get overly concerned about that; digiKam is in the enviable position of having been essentially a complete and stable application for years now, so unless you're looking for a specific feature that only exists in the latest version, it's going to be a good experience, at least just getting started.
Upon first launch, you must step through a brief setup wizard. Some choices affect performance and file size, so read the screen carefully to decide what you really want, but all of the decisions can be changed later, so accepting the defaults is safe if you're not sure.
Decisions, decisions.
The initial launch will be slower than usual because digiKam must analyse the photographs in your collection and record information about each one. Depending on how many photos you have and how large they are, you might want to let it run over night.
Interface
The layout of digiKam is fairly intuitive, especially if you're a KDE user. The basics are pretty simple: On the left are panels that control how you view photos, in the middle are the photos themselves, and on the left are effects and filters.
The initial default view is a filesytem view, starting from whatever directory you defined as your image folder during digiKam setup. DigiKam refers to whatever directories it finds within your image directory as an Album, and it parses each image file, along with its native metadata plus metadata digiKam allows you to add, into a thumbnail view.
When you select a directory (or an album, if you prefer), the photos within are displayed as an array in the right panel. There are lots of other ways to view your photos, though, and they're all accessible as verticle tabs (a time-honored KDE interface tradition) along the left edge of the main window. In addition to the Album view, there are:
Tags filters the photos in your collection by arbitrary metadata tags. There probably won't be tags at first (unless you've created or imported some), but you can create tags in the Tag Manager interface and assign them to pictures. Clicking on any tag (or control-clicking on several tags) in the Tag panel filters the thumbnail view to show photos with that tag assigned.
The tag manager.
Labels filters your photos according to how many stars you've assigned to a photograph. There are other forms of labels, such as color labels and flags, all user-assignable from the thumbnail view.
filters your photos according to how many stars you've assigned to a photograph. There are other forms of labels, such as color labels and flags, all user-assignable from the thumbnail view. Dates , Timeline , and Map let you view photos by relevant data contained in the photo's EXIF information.
, , and let you view photos by relevant data contained in the photo's EXIF information. People scans your photo collection for faces. DigiKam recognises faces as faces, and can even take guesses as to their identities (an "experimental" feature). Scanning your entire collection from the start can take a while, but once the initial scan is done, digiKam only scans photos upon import, so be patient on the first use and you won't even notice it happening from then on.
There are other filtration options, including fuzzy searches to find images similar to one another, a sketch search to try to match a photo with a rough drawing of what you're looking for, and more.
Thumbnail view
The thumbnail view is the central panel of digiKam, but its right-click menu provides a host of important features, such as switching to fullscreen mode, assigning tags, and assiging labels, but also file-management functions and access to digiKam's digital darkroom.
Aside from organizing your photos, the first thing you're likely to do once you have imported an SD card full of pictures is to figure out which of the group are the really good ones, and especially choose between several similar shots of the same subject. The method digiKam provides for this is its light table view, a separate window that helps you focus on just two or three photographs at a larger size than a little thumbnail.
Comparing photos on the light table.
To add a photo to your light table, either right-click on it and select Add to Light Table, or select a photo and press Ctrl-L. Because it's often used for comparing photos, you can add several photos to the light table at once; to add more photos, either right-click and select Add to Light Table again, or press Ctrl-Shift-L.
The light table interface also has facial recognition overrides. If you've got a photo that digiKam hasn't identified faces in, or has mis-identified faces, then load it into the light table and right-click on the image. Select Add a Face Tag for the face tag editor. Draw a box around the face that you want to identify, and type the person's name into the text field.
Photo by Michael Kordahi; CC BY-SA 2.0
The thumbnail view also can help manage your photos. Right-clicking enables common file management tasks, such as renaming photos, adding a photo to a specific album, or moving irreparable ones to the trash, and so on.
To see information about a photo, use the vertical tabs on the right edge of the digiKam window. These show metadata, color data, versioning data, and more. Also from the thumbnail view, you can edit photos using digiKam's robust effect plugins.
Editing and effects
DigiKam has an built-in editor for most common photo effects and touch-ups. To get there, select a photo and click the Image Editor button along the top toolbar. This opens a new window for dedicated editing.
The image editor interface has two entry points for nearly every function; you can select effects from the window menu or from the Select Tool button in the top toolbar.
All the usual effects are present: color balance, saturation, levels, red-eye removal, and so on. Special effects are included, too, such as textures, oil paint filters, borders, film grains, film emulation (profiled by popular film stocks), and much, much more. Feel free to try them all because none of them alter your original photo until you save the changes.
Filters and effects can be un-done from the Edit menu, but only in the order they were applied. The filters are linear (unlike in Darktable, where filters are truly filters that can be slotted in at different points in the filter stack), so if you apply a Color Balance filter and then a Vivid effect, if you undo the Color Balance then you also implicitly undo the Vivid effect that followed it.
Make pictures better. Edit them.
To see the effects applied to a photograph, click the Versioning tab along the right side of the Image Editor window and select the Used Filters tab.
When you're finished, save your changes directly to your original photo, or save the changes as a new version. If you save a photo as a new version, then you'll see your new version in your thumbnail view, but you'll always have the option to view previous versions.
Exporting
Getting images out of digiKam, strictly speaking, is automatic, because photos are never "in" digiKam. DigiKam reads images straight from your file system, so to get an image from digiKam, all you have to do is look in the place you last left it. It'll still be there.
In fact, not just the photo will be there; saved versions of the photo will also be there, named as you'd expect (the first new version of "IMG_050.jpg" becomes "IMG_050_v1.jpg", and so on).
DigiKam also has convenient export options, though, depending on how you installed it. (Certain export options require additional libraries that you may or may not ever need.) Export targets include Piwigo, email, Flickr, Google Photos, Google Drive, Facebook, Debian Screenshots, MediaWiki, SmugMug, raw HTML, any remote computer you have an account on, and, believe it or not, many more.
But wait, there's more!
DigiKam is an easy but powerful photo management and re-touching application. It's got lots of great features, and this article has only touched on the basics. There's so much more to explore in digiKam, including features—such as the easiest Batch Queue processing system I've ever seen in a GUI photo application—that still elude other editors. DigiKam isn't just efficient, it's fun to use, brings your photos to life, makes rummaging through directories and directories of pictures to find the really good ones fun, and gives you the freedom and courage to make them better.
If you're not using digiKam, and you also find yourself ignoring your photos, you owe it to yourself to give digiKam a go. If you're looking for a good photo manager with facial recognition, photo effects, and all the export options you could ever want, then get digiKam. In short, if you take photographs, you should treat yourself to digiKam. |
In addition to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal government announced it was also sending agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help clear protesters from a camp near Lake Oahe in Cannon Ball.
Protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline camp near Lake Oahe in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, were given evacuation orders by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who cited public health and safety concerns, according to a statement released Friday.
The Corps said that it would close the Oceti Sakowin Camp — located at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers — on Feb. 22 because of a "high potential for flooding" in the low-lying area, especially due to a record snowfall in the winter season. They also said that the "unauthorized placement of structures, vehicles, personal property, and fires" contributes to soil erosion and pollution which can result in contaminated waste seeping into both rivers.
"As stewards of the public lands and natural resources, we have a responsibility to the public to prevent injuries and loss of life…we must also ensure our precious water resources are free from pollution due to human activities and respect for all who rely on this water for their livelihoods," U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Omaha District Commander Col. John Henderson said, according to NBC.
Along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal government also announced Friday that it was sending officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help clear protesters from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.
“North Dakota Governor [Doug] Burgum, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe leadership, local law enforcement, and local landowners have all warned the public and those still camped of the dangerous spring flooding expected due to the heavy amount of snowfall the state received this winter…the closing of the camps is a matter of public health and safety, and working together at this time will allow for the safe removal of waste and debris that will impact the local environment and protection of those camped,” Michael S. Black, Acting assistant secretary of Indian affairs, said according to Washington Post.
According to the Post, nearly 700 people have been arrested in southern North Dakota since the protests began in August over fears that the local water supply could be contaminated and sacred sites destroyed if the construction of the pipeline is allowed to continue.
Although protesters won a major victory in December when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied the builder of the $3.8 billion project — Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners — a permit to complete the final leg of the pipeline, President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week to expedite the construction.
Responding to the president’s executive order, the acting secretary of the Army, Robert Speer, ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to grant an easement to Energy Transfer Partners to finish the pipeline, which was later confirmed Tuesday by North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, who said so to NBC.
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Praise be to Allaah.
Many people overstep the mark in speaking to others, and they do not observe any good manners or modesty. The reason for that is ignorance and a lack of interest in developing a good attitude or good manners. That includes what many people do of interfering in that which does not concern them and asking about people’s private affairs.
It was narrated from Abu Hurayrah (may Allaah be pleased with him) that the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said:
“Part of a person’s being a good Muslim is leaving alone that which does not concern him.” Narrated by al-Tirmidhi (2318); classed as saheeh by al-Albaani.
Ibn Rajab said in Jaami’ al-‘Uloom wa’l-Hikam (1/114-116):
This hadeeth represents an important principle of etiquette. Imam Abu ‘Amr ibn al-Salaah narrated that Abu Muhammad ibn Abi Zayd, the imam of the Maalikis of his time, said: All good manners and etiquette are based on four ahaadeeth:
The words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “Whoever believes in Allaah and the Last Day, let him speak good or else keep silent.”
And the words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “Part of a person’s being a good Muslim is leaving alone that which does not concern him.”
And the words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “Do not get angry.”
And the words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “The believer loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”
The meaning of this hadeeth is that part of his being a good Muslim is that he refrains from doing and saying that which does not concern him, and he does and says only that which does concern him, i.e., he has something to do with it. Mostly what is meant by refraining from that which does not concern him is guarding his tongue against idle talk.
In al-Musnad (1/201) it is narrated from al-Hasan that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Part of a person’s being a good Muslim is talking little about that which does not concern him.” [al-Arna’oot said: It is hasan because of corroborating evidence].
‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azeez (may Allaah have mercy on him) said: The one who regards his words as being among his deeds speaks little except about that which concerns him. And it is as he said. Many people do not regard their words as being among their deeds, so they are careless and do not watch what they say. But Allaah has stated that there is nothing good in much of what people talk about amongst themselves. He says (interpretation of the meaning):
“There is no good in most of their secret talks save (in) him who orders Sadaqah (charity in Allaah’s Cause), or Ma‘roof (Islamic Monotheism and all the good and righteous deeds which Allaah has ordained), or conciliation between mankind”
[al-Nisa’ 4:114]
al-Tirmidhi and Ibn Maajah narrated from Umm Habeebah that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said:
“Everything that the son of Adam says is counted against him and not for him, except enjoining what is good and forbidding what is evil, and remembering Allaah, may He be glorified and exalted.
[It was classed as da’eef by al-Albaani in Da’eef al-Tirmidhi].
Some people stated in the presence of Sufyaan al-Thawri that they found this hadeeth strange, and Sufyaan said: Why do you find this strange? Allaah says (interpretation of the meaning): “There is no good in most of their secret talks save (in) him who orders Sadaqah (charity in Allaah’s Cause), or Ma‘roof (Islamic Monotheism and all the good and righteous deeds which Allaah has ordained), or conciliation between mankind” [al-Nisa’ 4:114].
Al-Tirmidhi narrated that Anas (may Allaah be pleased with him) said:
One of the companions of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) died, and a man said: Glad tidings to him of Paradise. The Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said “You don’t know; perhaps he spoke of that which did not concern him, or he was miserly with something that he could do without.” Classed as saheeh by al-Albaani in al-Silsilah al-Saheehah (3103).
Reports with similar meanings were narrated via numerous isnaads from the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and in some of them it says that the man was killed as a martyr. End quote.
Al-Munaawi said in Fayd al-Qadeer (7/3):
It is possible that what is meant is asking a man too many questions about his situation, which includes asking about that which does not concern one. That also may lead to embarrassment for the one who is being asked, because he may prefer not to tell him about his situation, and if he tells him he may feel upset about that, but if he lies to him or tries to give indirect answers he may still feel upset, and if he ignores his question that will be bad manners. End quote.
There are reports from some of the salaf which point to this matter of etiquette:
‘Amr ibn Qays al-Malaa’i said:
A man passed by Luqmaan and there were people with him. He said to him: Aren’t you the slave of such and such a tribe? He said: Yes. He said: Didn’t you used to farm by Mount So and so? He said: Yes. He said: Then how have you ended up as I see you? He said: Speaking the truth and keeping silent for a long time about that which does not concern me.
Muwarriq al-‘Ijli said:
It is something that I have been seeking for so many years, but I was not able to do it, but I will never stop looking for it. They said: What is it? I said: Refraining from that which does not concern me.
Both reports were narrated from Ibn Abi’l-Dunya.
Abu ‘Ubaydah narrated that al-Hasan al-Basri said: One of the signs of Allaah’s turning away from a man is that he becomes involved in that which does not concern him, as a sign that Allaah, may He be glorified and exalted, has left him to his own devices.
The above shows people how to adopt this important attitude and etiquette, and how to interact with one another in accordance with the guidance of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and the righteous.
For more information on this sublime etiquette that is lacking among many people, see the commentary on hadeeth no. 12 in Jaami’ al-‘Uloom by Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali (may Allaah have mercy on him), where there is a useful discussion under the heading: Mu’allim fi tarbiyat al-nafs min husni islaam al-mar’i tarkuhu ma la ya’neehi, written by ‘Abd al-Lateef ibn Muhammad al-Hasan, in the al-Bayaan book series published by al-Muntada al-Islami in London.
And Allaah knows best. |
Construction has hardly begun at the first of Vancouver’s temporary modular housing projects and already pushback is mounting against the city’s latest strategy to house its homeless.
Vancouver was granted an injunction earlier this week from the Supreme Court of British Columbia to dislodge protesters who were preventing work crews from accessing a construction site in the tony neighbourhood of Marpole.
Some residents feel blindsided by the move and are critical of a decision they feel puts children in danger. Three schools are close to the project, including an elementary school located directly across the street.
The Marpole site will host two buildings with a total of 78 units, each of which would measure about 23 square metres and contain a kitchen and washroom. The project is part of a $66-million investment from the provincial government to build 600 units across Vancouver. Another 2,000 modular living quarters are planned across B.C. over the next two years.
Derek Palaschuk, a spokesman for the Caring Citizens of Vancouver Society, said the community fully supports the construction of modular housing and solving homelessness in Vancouver.
“It’s the right idea but wrong location,” he said on Thursday.
“You should not put our children at risk by having this modular housing … 25 steps from an elementary school.”
Palaschuk cited city documents that reserve at least 20 per cent of the units for tenants who may have an extensive criminal past and a high risk to reoffend, a history of property damage, aggressive and intimidating behaviour, and poor housekeeping and hygiene.
Ethel Whitty, Vancouver’s director of homelessness services, said it is typical for residents to protest this kind of project before embracing it, which has been the experience with the 13 permanent supportive housing initiatives located across the city.
“People forget they’re even there,” Whitty said. “That’s the thing. In some cases there will be resistance right in the very beginning. The community advisory committees will be set up and people will come once a month and then quarterly and then interest kind of drops off because, in fact, the housing just becomes integrated into the community.”Other groups have expressed support for the project, including an organization made up mostly of students from Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School, a block from the Marpole project.
Holly Morrison, 17, a spokeswoman for Marpole Students For Modular Housing, said the idea for the group came after she and other students saw adults calling themselves Marpole Students Against Modular Housing protesting outside the school.
“We kind of felt like we had maybe our voices stolen from us,” Morrison said. Homelessness is not the fault of the individual but of society as a whole, she added.
“These aren’t inherently bad people. These are people who have just been dealt a bad hand of cards.”
The group plans to push for better transit and a cheaper grocery store in the neighbourhood, Morrison said.
Several other sites around the city have been earmarked for modular units, though another proposed site in the centre of the city’s Downtown Eastside that would replace a tent city has prompted a backlash. Residents issued a statement saying the B.C. government of shirking on the need for more permanent social housing.
Geordon Omand, The Canadian Press
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Perhaps the biggest announcement the week of the 183rd annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came late on Easter Sunday. The LDS Church announced plans to purchase Utah State University, renaming the 125 year old school BYU-Logan.
The Church cites increasing tension between Aggie fans and Cougar fans as the reason for the purchase.
“We hope this move will defuse any tension between Aggie fans and Cougar fans. Now fans from both schools can cheer for BYU, regardless if they’re from Logan or Provo”, said a church spokesperson.
Utah State University officials point to a dramatic drop in school enrollment, in large part due to the Church’s announcement last fall that young men are now eligible to serve LDS missions at 18 years of age.
“They joke around and call us their little brother. Now they can call us their twin brother,” said a school spokesperson.
Of course, Monday is April 1st and we hope Aggie fans can appreciate a good April Fool’s joke when they read one! |
Two Statements by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce
(1877 and 1879)
The lands of the Nez Perce stretched from Oregon to Idaho, but after the Gold Rush, in the 1860s, the federal government seized millions of acres of their lands, crowding them into a small part of their former lands. Chief Joseph led the resistance to the ongoing encroachment of Nez Perce lands in the 1870s, but his people came under fierce attack in 1877. Chief Joseph was forced to lead a retreat toward the Canadian border. He and his followers were defeated, some forty miles from the border, in Montana, on October 5, 1877. He was sent to the Indian Territories in Oklahoma, where he continued to speak out against the crimes of the U.S. government, as he did in a visit to Washington in 1879. From Voices of A People's History, edited by Zinn and Arnove
CHIEF JOSEPH'S SURRENDER (OCTOBER 5, 1877)1
Tell General [Oliver Otis] Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Ta-hool-hool-shute is dead. Looking-Glass is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say "Yes" or "No." He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.
CHIEF JOSEPH RECOUNTS HIS TRIP TO WASHINGTON, D.C. (1879)2
At last I was granted permission to come to Washington and bring my friend Yellow Bull and our interpreter with me. I am glad I came. I have shaken hands with a good many friends, but there are some things I want to know which no one seems able to explain. I cannot understand how the Government sends a man out to fight us, as it did General [Nelson] Miles, and then breaks his word. Such a government has something wrong about it. I cannot understand why so many chiefs are allowed to talk so many different ways, and promise so many different things. I have seen the Great Father Chief (President [Rutherford B.] Hayes); the Next Great Chief (Secretary of the Interior [Carl Schurz]); the Commissioner Chief; the Law Chief; and many other law chiefs (Congressmen) and they all say they are my friends, and that I shall have justice, but while all their mouths talk right I do not understand why nothing is done for my people. I have heard talk and talk but nothing is done. Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country now overrun by white men. They do not protect my father's grave. They do not pay for my horses and cattle. Good words do not give me back my children. Good words will not make good the promise of your war chief, General Miles. Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not give my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk. Too many misinterpretations have been made; too many misunderstandings have come up between the white men and the Indians. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian be can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented nor will he grow and prosper. I have asked some of the Great White Chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me.
I only ask of the Government to be treated as all other men are treated. If I cannot go to my own home, let me have a home in a country where my people will not die so fast. I would like to go to Bitter Root Valley. There my people would be happy; where they are now they are dying. Three have died since I left my camp to come to Washington.
When I think of our condition, my heart is heavy. I see men of my own race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals.
I know that my race must change. We cannot hold our own with the white men as we are. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. If an Indian breaks the law, punish him by the law. If a white man breaks the law, punish him also.
Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself—and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.
Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other then we shall have no more wars. We shall be all alike—brothers of one father and mother, with one sky above us and one country around us and one government for all. Then the Great Spirit Chief who rules above will smile upon this land and send rain to wash out the bloody spots made by brothers' hands upon the face of the earth. For this time the Indian race is waiting and praying. I hope no more groans of wounded men and women will ever go to the ear of the Great Spirit Chief above, and that all people may be one people.
Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht has spoken for his people.
Footnotes
2 Chief Joseph Recounts His Trip to Washington, D.C. (1879). Quoted in Chester Anders Fee, Chief Joseph: The Biography of a Great Indian (New York Wilson-Erickson, Inc., 1936), pp. 281-83. |
God made man and woman: separate, opposite and at least, in some ways, some of the time, equal. That is often thought of as the Christian view. But, despite much opposition, trans people are increasingly being welcomed within our churches. And not just welcomed, but asked to take a lead; that is accepted and authorized as ministers, pastors, priests -- as those entrusted to teach and lead and guide and care.
I recently undertook a mapping exercise of Christian churches across the US and Europe to support a project considering the legal rights of transgender and transsexual persons in a global context. And, speaking as a sociologist (activists, very naturally, would take a different view), there has been a surprising amount of change over the last decade. An increasing number of the larger mainstream Protestant denominations now accept and welcome transgender Christians in their congregations and in roles of leadership, and conduct marriages involving transgender people.
The first transgender minister in the USA, Sky Anderson, was ordained back in 1979 with the pioneering, one might say prophetic, Metropolitan Community Church. Now that change is coming into the mainstream of American (Protestant) Christianity, with transgender Christians accepted as ministers in the United Church of Christ in 2003, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America in 2009, The Presbyterian Church (USA) in 2010 and The Episcopal Church in 2012.
Back across the pond, the Lutheran churches, especially in Scandinavia have led the way with the Church of Sweden permitting the ordination of transgender (and LGB) clergy in 2006. Now many European churches have transgender clergy and marriage. In some cases the impetus for change has been Equality legislation, but change in practice has also been prompted by individual cases. The Church of England, for example, has not formally discussed the issues affecting transgender Christians in its synod, but the first priest to transition, the Revd. Carol Stone (who very sadly died last year) did so back in 2001 with the strong backing of her bishop, Barry Rogerson.
Of course not everyone is in agreement: denominations who count their membership in the millions, and especially those tied to the state of national identity will inevitably have people with very different opinion, as on every other issue. The fact that change is happening at the rate it is within Churches, which as community associations must tend to the needs of all their members, is what makes the speed of these recent developments surprising.
Strong opposition and open hostility also remain common. Indeed the overwhelming majority of the 2.1 billion Christians in the world belong to churches, which are officially unsympathetic to the claims of transgender people. Such churches are driven to interpret and condemn transgenderism as a psychic or moral disorder because of the way in which they understand (or many would argue misunderstand) the significance of gender difference. They include denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention, which in 2014 provided a clear statement of their opposition to transgender identity. It also includes Pope Francis, radical in so many ways, yet on matters of gender very firmly anchored to the worldview of his predecessors. But of course 'on the ground,' as with so many other issues, lay Catholics have different and often dissenting views. And despite his views on gender, the Pope is clearly someone who values the voice of the people; who is prepared to listen. |
Every intern, cameraman and anchor at Fox News knows one thing is true: no one ever went broke mongering white fear. Selling the idea that brown people are coming to get your stuff—whether it's your presidency, your kid’s rightful college slot, your medical insurance or the true racial identity of Santa Claus—has always been Fox's calling card. Over the years, that has proven to be a remarkably successful marketing strategy. But never has it been so winningly packaged as in the brand called Megyn Kelly.
Since its debut in October at the 9pm slot, "The Kelly Files" has killed in the ratings, raking in an average of 430,000 viewers in the 25-to-54 demographic advertisers crave most. Her 2.5 million viewers are more than the combined averages of CNN, MSNBC and HLN in the same time slot. She’s been pulverizing Piers Morgan and Rachel Maddow. Variety last month observed that Kelly is “doing something extraordinary.”
Until last week’s no-black-Santa (and no-black-Jesus) remark, Kelly seemed to be crafting a career trajectory zooming her beyond the Foxbot brand and into mainstream television. Before she signed her last contract, Roger Ailes was quoted worrying that other networks would snag the 43-year-old lawyer-journalist.
There was talk of a possible future at GMA and "The Today Show."
“We’d love her to stay here and be even a bigger star,” Ailes said at the time. “I’d be stunned if she wanted to go to any other cable channel. That’s a real dive off a high cliff. If somebody wanted her to host The Today Show or something, she’d have to look at that, I suppose.” According to Brian Stelter, Kelly spoke with CNN, “which was very interested in hiring her,” and her reps sought a meeting at ABC.
The question that now must be on her agent’s mind is whether the no-black-Santa comment torpedoes that potentially rewarding mainstream career path. It all depends on whether Kelly’s viewers recognize the comment for what it was: the live-television version of a smiling horror movie pod-person cracking open to reveal the lizard within. And then, of course, it depends on whether those same fans secretly like the lizard.
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Blonde, sleek and sassy, with publicity shots of herself supine in black silk, Kelly is visually a typical Foxbot. When she won the primetime slot, Stephen Colbert made a joke of switching the faces of Kelly, Greta van Susteren and Gretchen Carlson from under one blonde helmet to the next. “Fox is bringing in some fresh blood and not just for Rupert Murdoch’s wine cellar!” Colbert joked.
But Kelly brought elements to her career that elevated her above her peers. Like van Susteren, she’s a lawyer by training. Early on, she put those skills to to use as an “investigative” journalist, famously “revealing” that Obama’s Justice Department was soft on black radicals. Like Ann Coulter she knows how to harness the power of a sassy quip delivered from inside a black halter top. And, she’s managed to brand herself as a Palin woman, rejecting “interest group” feminism, proudly flaunting three on-air pregnancies while snappily shooting down neanderthals like Lou Dobbs and right-wing blogger Erick Erickson on women’s proper roles in society. She’s useful in branding Fox for women. As Alyssa Rosenberg noted on ThinkProgress after Kelly excoriated Erickson about women being genetically made for housework:
“The Republican Party as a whole may draw accusations that it’s fighting a war on women, an impression aided by a lot of male politicians who show a decided implication to chow down on their own shoe leather. But Fox News can use Kelly’s defense of working mothers, and of maternity leave, as proof that it isn’t utterly beholden to the least competent elements of the party with which it often finds itself identified.”
For a tough-talking professional woman to survive and thrive on the right, she must be careful always to give lip service to the joys of motherhood even if single, and if a mom, exude satisfaction with domesticity. Kelly’s Twitter profile reads: “Happily married to Doug, crazy in love with my children Yates, Yardley and Thatcher and anchor of the Kelly Files.”
Her half-a-million-plus Twitter followers can have no idea how truly happy or unhappy that home life is, with husband Doug, a former IT security company executive now bricked up in the mansion as a stay-at-home dad and novelist. His first novel sank like a rock, and Kelly rather scandalously interviewed him about it herself.
If Kelly plays fast and loose with the rules, she can do so because she knows their limits. Born and raised in upstate New York, with a law degree from Albany, she put in 10 years at the mega-law firm Jones Day, representing credit agency Experian, that faceless wall of bureaucracy and trove of personal data collection. She’s connected and knows how to use her connections. When she married Doug, the New York Times covered the wedding but mysteriously omitted all mention of her first marriage, which ended in divorce. Asked about the omission—since the paper never covers marriages without mentioning prior nuptials—the paper said it was just an oversight.
Kelly combines a little actual news sense—disagreeing with Karl Rove on his bad Ohio call in the 2012 election; being the first broadcaster to call Virginia for Terry McAuliffe last month—with the Fox standard, sowing fear and suspicion with a smile and Chiclet teeth. She purveys a slightly more presentable version of the urban legends that frightened white people email to each other, about brown people who place baby carseats on the side of the road and lie in wait in the woods for well-meaning travelers who stop to investigate, or bad guys lurking in suburban mall parking lots waiting to jump into your car.
Her chief claim to fame in the investigative department was tracking the “New Black Panthers” and endlessly recycling a spurious claim that this shadowy if not mythical outfit was planning to violently suppress white voters. According to Media Matters, she devoted 45 segments—three and a half hours of air time—to the New Black Panthers over two weeks, churning the story which then was picked up and amplified by the radio frothers.
She found a disgruntled ex-DOJ Republican to claim Obama's DOJ gave a pass to Black Panther depredations against whites. At the time, she had an afternoon slot called "The Kelly Factor," primetime for priming the fear pump on stay-at-home mothers. In Kelly's interview ex-DOJ employee and GOP activist J. Christian Adams alleged the Department of Justice wouldn’t prosecute black people for voting crimes. “Do you believe that the DOJ has a policy now of not pursuing cases if the defendant is black and the victim is white?” Kelly asked. Adams replied: “There’s no doubt about it.”
Even her fellow Foxbot Kirsten Powers called her out on that story, accusing Kelly of "doing the scary black man thing."
She’s also reliably anti-immigrant. In 2010, she went to town on a story about how immigration groups were trying to get reporters to exchange the terms "illegal aliens" and "illegal immigrants" in favor of "undocumented immigrant." Kelly compared that request to criminal defense lawyers asking reporters to rebrand rapists as "non-consensual sex partners."
"You could say that a burglar is an unauthorized visitor. You know, you could say that a rapist is a non-consensual sex partner which, obviously, would be considered offensive to the victims of those crimes," Kelly said. "So how far could you take this?"
Last week’s comment about black Santa and black Jesus was only the clarified essence of the Kelly “brown people are coming to get you” brand. “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white,” Kelly said at the time. “But this person is just arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa. But Santa is what he is.”
She continued: “Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change, you know? I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure, that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa—I just want the kids watching to know that.”
Two days later she offered not an apology but an explanation: She was making a joke and the humorless, possibly envious left didn't get it.
“I offered a tongue-in-cheek message for any kids watching,” she explained. “Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this show, but sometimes that is lost on the humorless. Many questioning whether I understand that Santa is a mythical figure, others suggesting that I am a racist who is outraged at the idea of a black Santa. Well, this would be funny if it were not so telling about our society, in particular the kneejerk instinct by so many to race-bait and to assume the worst in people. Especially people employed by the very powerful Fox News channel.”
The pretty deliverer of ugly messages is nothing new in the television age. In Videocracy, documentary filmmaker Eric Gandini made a study of the use of pretty woman by the Berlusconi media empire during the last several decades. “In Italy you get the feeling that this cultural banality has been a tool to destroy democracy,” he told me in an interview. “It's not a question of ideology, it's a question of lack of values, lack of morality. Italy has become a country where words don't work anymore. 'Videocracy' means the power of the image. … Impressions are much more valuable than truth.”
In America, that now-salty dog in a black cocktail dress, Anne Coulter, long ago proved the bankability of the lithe, red-meat-tossing, right-wing blonde. A sharp, pretty woman willing to provoke and arouse for ratings will always attract the attention of the networks, eventually. But black Santa will be the test of whether the Megyn Kelly brand of racial provocation makes it across the shrinking divide between Fox and the mainstream. Does she go Hasselbeck or Coulter? Coulter’s more fun, Hasselbeck’s more money. The decision may not be hers to make now. |
A Tibetan monk set himself on fire in protest at China's rule over the Himalayan region, overseas media and rights groups said on Friday, adding it was unclear whether he survived.
Images of a man in monk's robes lying on the pavement as flames almost one meter (three feet) high engulfed him were posted on the website of Radio Free Asia (RFA), which is backed by the US government.
Thursday's fiery protest in Yushu, in the north-western province of Qinghai, was carried out by 26-year-old Sonam Topgyal, said the British-based campaign group Free Tibet.
"Information about whether he survived is not yet available," it said. Phone and internet communications were shut down immediately after the self-immolation attempt, and local people's movements restricted, Free Tibet said.
RFA said the burning was the sixth this year, and the 142nd such act in Tibet and elsewhere since 2009, most of them fatal. Many Tibetans accuse the central government of religious repression and eroding their culture, as China's ethnic majority Han increasingly move into historically Tibetan areas.
Beijing condemns the self-immolation protests and also says it has brought development to Tibet. Yushu is a rugged, remote corner of the Tibetan plateau, where a devastating earthquake struck in 2010, killing nearly 2,700 people.
First Published: Jul 10, 2015 18:30 IST |
by Ann Garrison
KPFA Weekend News broadcast Sept. 3, 2016
Transcript
KPFA Weekend News Anchor Lola Acanmu: On Tuesday, Sept. 6, Bay Area Green Parties will protest the Commission on Presidential Debates’ youth engagement function at Dominican University in San Rafael. KPFA’s Ann Garrison reports.
KPFA/Ann Garrison: By calling itself the “Commission on Presidential Debates,” the private corporation that controls presidential debates masquerades as a government entity. It is in fact a private, corporate-funded corporation controlled by the Republican and Democratic National Committees.
A federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush recently tossed out a lawsuit brought against the so-called commission for excluding Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. The judge ruled that the commission is a private entity and that only government institutions have First Amendment obligations.
Nevertheless, Dominican University is partnering with the private entity to produce College Debate 16, an event they say will encourage student involvement in the upcoming debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. A promotional YouTube video describes the event:
Promotional video narrator: This spring, students from partner colleges and universities from across the country will be chosen to represent their schools and states. These student delegates will convene at Dominican University of California, a voter education partner of the Commission on Presidential Debates, to organize, collaborate and plan outreach at their schools and virtually to peers near and far. Using social media, the delegates will connect and rally students nationwide to expand the conversation about what matters most.
After engaging their peers, the delegates will return to Dominican University of California in September for the 2016 college convention. The main event, a town hall, will be streamed live to partner colleges and universities across the nation. At the town hall, the delegates will identify the top issues they want the presidential candidates to address at the debates.
This newly formed national network of college students will inform the presidential debate moderators about the top issues that influence how students vote. Through the power of peer engagement and social media, young voters will hold the candidates accountable to addressing what matters most to this valuable youth constituency.
Student in video: Never before has access to information and engagement in civic life been so accessible. We can’t sit on the sidelines. We have to stand up, speak out and vote!
Students: Together we make a difference. Our vote counts.
KPFA: In its emphasis on social media, College Debate 16 resembles campus promotions of humanitarian militarism, including campaigns for intervention in Darfur, South Sudan, Syria and Uganda.
Student in promotional video: College Debate 16 is a social media initiative where we partnered with the Commission on Presidential Debates to create this social media initiative to get college students across the entire country involved in the presidential debates by keeping the conversation going through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Another student: Young people are the future. We don’t read the news but we’ll read a Twitter feed. We’re going to know what’s going on through our social media and so using Instagram, Twitter, can bring up terms like “foreign policy.”
KPFA: Students in the promotional videos identified the cost of education as a key concern, but Dr. Jill Stein, who advocates the abolition of student debt, will be excluded from the presidential debates. Stein says that 43 million college students and graduates are trapped in predatory student debt and that their votes are enough to swing the election.
Bay Area Greens say that they have been stopped from passing out campaign literature at Dominican University and that they will be at Dominican on Tuesday to protest that and Dr. Jill Stein’s exclusion from the presidential debates. In 2010, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Laura Wells was arrested while protesting her own exclusion from a debate at Dominican.
In Berkeley, for Pacifica, KPFA Radio, I’m Ann Garrison.
Greens will protest at Dominican University, 550 Acacia, San Rafael, CA during the college convention from 12:30 pm to 3:00 pm on Tuesday, September 6. The Facebook page for the protest is https://www.facebook.com/events/514387055428976/.
Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Counterpunch and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at [email protected]. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting. |
by Gloria Lee, Jessica Li and Joey Kwan
Lam Siu Mui (not her real name), a 40-year-old who has worked as a cleaner for more than 20 years, sits with a union organiser and prepares to tell her story. In December, 2014, she started working for a contractor providing outsourced cleaning services for a public housing estate.
But she quit last July when she discovered the company had been cheating on her salary and holidays. “I have never experienced such deception in the 20 years I’ve been working,” says Lam. “I had trusted the company, but I have been hopelessly depressed after this.”
Lam is her family’s sole breadwinner. “I have to feed my parents in the Mainland and my 15-year-old son who lives with me,” she says, “I work two jobs a day.”
Lam trusted her team leader at work so whenever the team leader handed her documents to sign, she would do so without hesitation, even though she could not understand the contents.
“I’m illiterate, I was thankful to have a job,” she explains.
In July, 2015, Lam told her team leader she needed a few days of leave to look after a sick relative in the Mainland. She was shocked when the team leader told Lam she had already used up all her annual leave for 2015. Lam says she had not taken a single day of annual leave that year.
When she announced she was quitting, the team leader changed tack because she wanted to keep Lam on. “She [the team leader] said she could compensate me for all the annual leave days owed to me if I chose to stay” Lam recalls.
Later, she quit anyway and decided to take legal action against the company with the help a trade union. That was when she says she realised she had been misled to sign documents such as rosters and applications for annual leave. These showed Lam had taken all her annual leave days and had taken regular days off.
In fact, she says, the company had sometimes asked her to work on her days off. “When they told me to work on days off, they didn’t give any reason except to say the company needs me.”
John Leung Yip-hon from the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions has been helping Lam for more than a year. Leung says he handled more than 60 similar cases in 2015. Leung thinks Lam has little chance of winning in court because the company has all the supporting documents but Lam has only her word.
Leung says it is common practice for contractors to cheat on outsourced workers’ holidays and salary and the government’s policy of outsourcing has led to labour abuses and hurt workers’ rights and livelihood.
He explains that a contractor may only make a profit of around HK$30,000 a month for providing cleaning services on an estate; that is if they do not cheat.
“If a worker normally works eight hours a day at the minimum wage level of HK$32, that’s HK$256 a day,” Leung calculates. “If there are 70 cleaners in the housing estate, the contractor can make an extra profit of HK$17,920 by cheating one day of holiday from each cleaner.”
The government has been outsourcing public services and reducing the number of public servants in order to lower costs and promote efficiency within departments since the 1990s. Currently, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, Government Property Agency, Housing Services Department and Leisure and Cultural Services Department are the major departments which employ outsourced services. Together, they account for nearly 90 per cent of all government outsourced workers. Most of these workers are on low wages and lack sufficient protection.
Kwok Lai-shan works as a cleaner, for another private contractor, which she does not want to name. She has been on the job for six years and at 71 finds it is physically arduous. What is more, Kwok says she is required to work on statutory holidays, and when the black rainstorm signal or the number eight gale or storm signal are up. Despite this, she and many others are paid the minimum wage.
Kwok recalls that a few years back, she and six co-workers went to the boss to ask for a raise.
“We did reflect our opinions, but the company told us if we don’t want to work, then we should sign the resignation letter,” Kwok says. “But you know, not everyone can afford to lose the job, and with it the few thousand dollars [a month].”
Law Pui-shan, the Policy Research Officer of the Hong Kong Catholic Commission for Labour Affairs, says workers have minimal bargaining power. Many outsourced workers are not well educated, some are elderly and are afraid of losing their jobs because it would be hard to find another one.
“Contractors don’t need to use guns or knives to intimidate the workers,” Law says, “but they tell the workers that they may lose their job if they disobey.”
Law points out the current situation is abnormal because there is a greater demand for workers than there is a supply.
“If the contractor lacks workers, it should be the employer who doesn’t want you to leave, and should offer better working conditions. But the workers are so scared of the employers.”
Law says this is because there is little protection for outsourced workers. The government will only investigate if there is a complaint. However, workers are afraid to complain because they are afraid of losing their job. The only legal safeguards of workers’ welfare are the Employment Ordinance and the Standard Employment Contract.
But Law says the guidelines in the Standard Employment Contract are very vague, especially those on work safety. It simply states contractors need to follow the Employment Ordinance and to protect the work safety and health of workers. “That is it,” Law says. “But how do you protect? How do you implement? Are there any specific policies?”
Under the existing outsourced services tendering system, private contractors are regulated through a demerit point system. Those contractors who have had a certain number of points deducted will be barred from submitting tenders for contracts. But critics say the system is ineffective. Law Pui-shan says the “buying out” of holidays, problems with work safety, the lack of severance payment and forced resignations have not been included in the demerit points system.
“The demerit points system can no longer successfully monitor private contractors, and protect the rights of workers.” Law says.
According to Law, the government outsourced the responsibility to protect working conditions when it outsourced services. The plight of workers is exacerbated, she says by the “alliances” formed by private contractors.
“It is like contractors allying with each other, one takes the tender for the first three years while the other one succeeds for another three years.” says Law. “The government does not want to offend the private contractors, because it is hard to get contractors now, the government is worried that no contractors will tender and no one will do the cleaning.”
Law estimates there are fewer than 20 contractors bidding for cleaning contracts and suspects this may be why the government is unwilling to improve the monitoring of private contractors. She says the government should encourage new contractors to compete.
Other than that, she thinks the government should strengthen regulations and improve the demerit system, clearly list work safety regulations and step up inspections. Most importantly, Law says there should be more communication among government departments, especially with the Labour Department, to form a strong network to monitor private contractors.
However, Legislative Councillor Leung Yiu-chung who is also from the pro-labour Neighbourhood and Worker’s Service Centre says the government outsourcing policy was an attempt to introduce market forces and reduce costs in the provision of public services. He says that under the “big market, small government” principle, the government would not set up concrete guidelines.
“Flexibility for contractors is essential in outsourcing. Who would still tender when there are so many guidelines restricting flexibility?”
Accordingly, Leung does not think the government will do much to protect the welfare of outsourced workers.
“The contract does not protect the workers. The government simply looks to see if it fits within the law. In outsourcing [services], the government doesn’t care about workers’ welfare.”
Most government departments adopt the lowest bid wins system while selecting private contractors. According to a report conducted by the government’s Efficiency Unit, over 80 per cent of government departments awarded tenders to companies offering the lowest price. In order to offer the lowest price for the bid, contractors tend to offer workers wages no higher than the statutory minimum wage rate.
An attempt has been made to change the situation. Starting from July, a revised outsourcing guideline states government departments have to take into account the wages contractors offer their workers in awarding contracts. However, according to a written reply from the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD), “up to now, the FEHD does not see significant change in the contractors’ committed wage offers since the revision of the relevant guideline in late June this year”.
The Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau said in its reply that it was not possible to assess the impact of the revised guidelines on workers’ wages as departments are allowed to determine the weightings of the assessment criteria when outsourcing, depending on the operational needs.
Paul Yip Siu-fai, professor at Hong Kong University’s Department of Social Work and Social Administration, says it would be best if the government abolished the whole outsourcing system, but he acknowledges this is unlikely.
Yip says the root problem of outsourcing is that neither the government nor society place much value on workers. He adds that in countries such as Britain and Australia, there are much heavier punishments for industrial accidents and deprivation of workers’ rights.
“The deterrent effect of our laws and punishments is weak,” says Yip. “We haven’t made good use of the laws we have in Hong Kong.” This is particularly true in the case of outsourced workers. |
Story highlights Chuck and Elicia James lost their dog during Superstorm Sandy a year and a half ago
While looking to adopt a new dog, Reckless was the very first dog introduced to them
"He jumped 3 feet in the air," owner tells CNN
"We love happy endings," animal shelter CEO says
When Chuck and Elicia James ventured to their local animal shelter to adopt a dog, they expected to meet a new member of their family. Instead they found themselves reunited with their long lost canine.
The James' had not seen Reckless, a brown and white terrier-pitbull mix, since he went missing over a year and a half ago during Superstorm Sandy. They had lost their beloved pup after the fence in their Keansburg, New Jersey, home was mangled during the storm, Chuck James told CNN on Friday.
While the family never stopped looking for Reckless, for their 10-year-old daughter's birthday they decided it was time to move on and adopt a new dog at the Monmouth County SPCA
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To their surprise, the first dog they were introduced to was one named Lucas, who had a striking resemblance to their former pup.
"He jumped 3 feet in the air," James said. "He immediately recognized us. And then the tears came -- there wasn't a dry eye in the place."
The James' confirmed it was their dog based on an uncanny scar on the top of his head.
"After Sandy, we had so many animals being turned in," said Jerry Rosenthal, president and CEO of the animal shelter. Rosenthal told CNN that 3-year-old Reckless ended up at the shelter last November after an employee found him on the streets.
Rosenthal believes Reckless was taken in by another family for a period of time before he once again got loose.
Rosenthal said the James' story really emphasizes the importance of getting your pet microchipped. Microchipping is a process in which an animal is implanted with a rice-sized chip that is used to identify him or her.
"If Reckless had been microchipped, we could have reunited him with his family much sooner," he said.
"We love happy endings. I always tell people our goal is to prevent animals from coming into the shelter except when we can get them back to their original owners," Rosenthal said.
The James family is still displaced from their home after it was destroyed by Sandy. They are currently residing at a local hotel with Reckless after the hotel happily allowed him to stay.
The James' 10-year-old daughter was absolutely ecstatic with Reckless' return and the two have been inseparable since, Chuck James told CNN while on a family weekend camping trip.
"The only thing I can say now is I am finally on a vacation with all the members of our family again," said James. |
Anyone who mentions the name of the French president around members of Germany's governing coalition at the moment can expect to see plenty of irritated faces. Dubbed the "French general," Nicolas Sarkozy has already annoyed members of Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats and their coalition partner, the business-friendly Free Democrats, by not consulting anyone when he sent his fighter jets to patrol the skies over Libya. Didn't the French president once allow "Brother Colonel" Moammar Gadhafi to pitch his Bedouin tent in Paris, they ask? Perhaps, they add, Monsieur Sarkozy wants that little snippet of information to be quickly forgotten -- along with his cosy relationships with other North African despots. Oh, and he is facing elections next year, as well: A determined military operation to defend human rights might do no harm in that respect.
There are not many people in Berlin who have good things to say about the country's western neighbor at the moment, despite the high value that is normally attached to good Franco-German relations. The military operation against the Libyan dictator has put a spanner in those particular works.
The German government considers the military action a mistake, hastily launched without a proper plan. The lack of preparation is, however, compensated for with plenty of rhetoric. France is determined to assume its "role in the face of history," Sarkozy declared. And he went further, cleverly portraying Germany as occupying an outsider role alongside China and Russia. And now Paris also wants to downgrade NATO to the role of a helper rather than giving it command of the operation.
The Paris leadership is getting on the nerves of many in Berlin. The feeling is so strong that FPD floor leader Birgit Homburger made her anger clear on Wednesday: "I cannot see how we can be criticized by those who go it alone themselves."
'Our Relationship Is Markedly Colder'
But the animosity is currently mutual. The French are disappointed with the German abstention on the Libya resolution in the UN Security Council. The Le Monde newspaper said the German government was "lacking solidarity or any maturity." Germany was giving the impression of being a freeloader who wanted to "harvest the fruits of the determination shown by the French, British and American allies without getting their hands dirty."
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe was more cautious with his words. "We would have wished that Germany would join us," he said. Other, anonymous sources, however, were far more explicit. "Angela Merkel will have to pay for this for a very long time," a French diplomat was quoted as saying by the newspaper Le Parisien. "Even if they receive the support of their own public, their international image will suffer, and our relationship is getting markedly colder." Le Figaro also quoted a disgruntled high-ranking French diplomat, who described Berlin's stance as "a big mistake which will cost Germany dearly in political terms." The newspaper spoke of a "severe blow to the Franco-German friendship."
Officially, of course, there is no mention of such problems. Following the adoption of the UN resolution, Chancellor Angela Merkel rushed to the Libya summit meeting because she wanted to avoid the impression she was politically isolated. President Sarkozy did not say anything and welcomed Merkel as warmly as ever. The chancellor hastily insisted that the resolution was now "also our resolution" -- abstention or not. Germany naturally stood by its allies, she said. Nonetheless, it was noticeable that, out of the European leaders present, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was the only other head of government who had not offered any military assistance.
Germany on the Sidelines
France will not go out of its way to make sure that Germany is involved in future planning of the operation in Libya. Sarkozy's diplomats are currently working hard in Brussels to prevent leadership of the military operation being transferred to NATO, something the Germans would welcome. Instead, Paris has organized its own political steering committee, which would include representation from all the parties involved in the operation, as well as the African Union and the Arab League. The first meeting will be held in London next Tuesday. The Germans will be on the sidelines.
The French government has tried to downplay the disharmony. Foreign Minister Juppe said it was not the first time Germany and France had been at odds: "That has never put our fundamental solidarity in doubt." Europe Minister Laurent Wauquiez talked of the two countries having different views of the Libya issue. "Does this mean the end of Franco-German relations?" he asked. "Of course not!"
He is obviously right, but the relationship between the two countries is hardly going to improve any time soon. Perhaps Sarkozy and Merkel can start the process of making up on Thursday, when they will meet in Brussels for the EU summit. Libya will take a back seat, with the final scope of the euro-zone rescue fund set to be top of the agenda. That, at least, is an area where Germany and France usually take a joint leading role.
There will, however, be another issue up for discussion which could cause further division between the two countries: the consequences of the nuclear emergency in Japan. The chancellor has announced a joint Franco-German initiative on nuclear power plant security. Sarkozy made clear, however, that he does not agree with Merkel's sudden shutdowns of nuclear plants in Germany. "Phasing out nuclear power is not an option," he said. |
Mark Sanchez has been spending a lot of time honing his quarterback game on the football field this offseason. And it appears that the Jets stud signal caller has also spent much of his spare time working on his dating game.
After numerous connections to big time celebrities and supermodels, such as Kate Upton, over the past year, Sanchez is now rumored to be dating model and actress Eva Longoria, according to In Touch Magazine.
Longoria and Sanchez were recently spotted shopping together at a Kings Super Market in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Sanchez owns a home. The couple could also be seen eating dinner and sipping some drinks at New York's Hotel Griffou a few nights later, although Longoria apparently tried to hide her identity by wearing a blonde wig to the restaurant.
Longoria has been linked to other athletes in the past, after being married to Spurs guard Tony Parker for more than four years and reportedly dating Lakers guard Matt Barnes in the past few months as well.
Sanchez' relationship with Upton was never confirmed, but the 25-year-old quarterback was spotted spending some late nights at the supermodel's apartment on occasion at the end of the 2011 NFL season.
Click here to see some photos of Mark Sanchez's former fling, Kate Upton >>
Photo via Facebook/Eva Longoria |
Strong support for the theory of kin selection can come from predicting outcomes under circumstances of within-family conflict. Genes inherited from mothers (matrigenes) and fathers (patrigenes) usually work harmoniously in the offspring. However, kin selection theory predicts these genes may be in conflict over interactions among relatives in which they are unequally represented (half-siblings). In honey bees, patrigenes are predicted to favor daughters that lay eggs themselves rather than remaining sterile and rearing their half-sisters' offspring. We tested this prediction, using crosses of distinct genetic stocks. Workers displayed the reproductive characteristics of their paternal genomes, patrigene expression was higher in reproductive tissues, and this patrigene bias increased in reproductive workers. These results provide strong empirical support for kin selection theory.
Abstract
Sexual reproduction brings genes from two parents (matrigenes and patrigenes) together into one individual. These genes, despite being unrelated, should show nearly perfect cooperation because each gains equally through the production of offspring. However, an individual’s matrigenes and patrigenes can have different probabilities of being present in other relatives, so kin selection could act on them differently. Such intragenomic conflict could be implemented by partial or complete silencing (imprinting) of an allele by one of the parents. Evidence supporting this theory is seen in offspring–mother interactions, with patrigenes favoring acquisition of more of the mother's resources if some of the costs fall on half-siblings who do not share the patrigene. The kinship theory of intragenomic conflict is little tested in other contexts, but it predicts that matrigene–patrigene conflict may be rife in social insects. We tested the hypothesis that honey bee worker reproduction is promoted more by patrigenes than matrigenes by comparing across nine reciprocal crosses of two distinct genetic stocks. As predicted, hybrid workers show reproductive trait characteristics of their paternal stock, (indicating enhanced activity of the patrigenes on these traits), greater patrigenic than matrigenic expression, and significantly increased patrigenic-biased expression in reproductive workers. These results support both the general prediction that matrigene–patrigene conflict occurs in social insects and the specific prediction that honey bee worker reproduction is driven more by patrigenes. The success of these predictions suggests that intragenomic conflict may occur in many contexts where matrigenes and patrigenes have different relatednesses to affected kin. |
In the third post of this blog series on the problems associated within the activated sludge process and how to control them Oliver Grievson is going to look at the Return Activated Sludge system.
So what problems are seen and how can they be fixed? A particular one that I have seen and this especially on smaller activated sludge plants where there is little or no control there has been an issue with settlement. Now you can query the fact that what on earth has the amount that you re-circulate solids around the system got to do with the way in which the sludge settles and the answer is of course the floc loading within the start of the process especially in plants that do not tend to have an anoxic zone (particular the case with oxidation ditches). It is the variation from very high floc loading to very low floc loading that causes problems in sludge settlement
The civil engineering solution would be too install an anoxic zone or in an oxidation ditch control aeration to create anoxic zones within the ditch (again an alternative method of control). The way of controlling this with instrumentation and control is to install a method of RAS pumping control. The second “problem” is that of energy consumption, not really a problem but after aeration pumping is the next highest energy consumer on activated sludge plant.
The problems that I have seen regard on treatment works is on small treatment works where the rate of return is controlled by the level that a bellmouth is manually set at so as flow into the works varies so does the return rate. The tendency being to set the RAS too high (the bellmouth at a lower setting) as the settlement is poor (due to the lack of RAS control) and if flow rates increase (due to inclement weather) then solids will be lost to the environment. The other problem that I have seen is fixed speed return pumping, something that can be managed if the rate of flow to the pumping station managed but causes a problem if it isn’t This is particular the case on larger treatment works that have Archimedes screw pumps.
Fortunately control systems can resolve both of these problems depending upon on what RAS system is in place on the treatment works and whether sludge is removed from the final tanks by pump or by bellmouth and how the sludge is returned to the treatment works but the general principle is the same. To define the problem and solve the first problem, that of inconsistent RAS causing settlement problems is relatively simple. In the UK at least if a treatment works has a permit to discharge to the environment it must have a flow meter measuring the flow, for control purposes of the treatment works the best position of this meter is measuring the treatment flow to the works (for a single secondary process works serial secondary process works). For the sake of this blog I am going to assume that the incoming flow is that received by the Activated Sludge Process. If not then the flow measured into the process needs to be measured. The flow measured by the flow meter can be used to ensure that the rate of return to the RAS return point or points (if the Eckenfelder floc loading is being used) is proportional to the incoming flow into the process. This gives the ability to stabilize the floc loading into the process and thus stabilize the process as a whole. In order to do this all that is needed is the incoming flow rate that should be there anyway and the measurement of the RAS flow. If these flow rates are stabilized so that they follow each other then the first problem can be resolved. This is not say that the flow rates have to equal each other, just be proportional to each. This is where the second problem, that of energy consumption, can be addressed but this also increases the amount of risk to the wastewater operator.
If you have a system in place as described above so that the incoming flow and RAS flow are both measured then the simple way to control the process is to divide the RAS flow by the incoming flow and calculate the RAS ratio. As the ratio decreases the amount of RAS that is returned is lower and power savings are made. However as the RAS ratio decreases sludge blankets get thicker and deeper and as such it is advisable to measure the RAS solids and the sludge blanket level to mitigate the operational risk. These two instruments can also be used in other control systems, RAS solids in sludge wastage control (part I of this blog) and sludge blanket level in protecting the permit (part IV of this blog, next week). As the solids get thicker then there is also a risk that bellmouths will block so an alert limit on the thickness of the RAS.
So what are the benefits, using the two examples I used earlier. The smaller treatment works which was an oxidation ditch the benefit of installing a control system was more for compliance purposes only. The treatment works had SSVI 3.5 concentrations of 220mL/g upon installation of the control system and stabilizing the floc loading the SSVI 3.5 concentrations dropped to 80mL/g and an extreme case and an extreme decrease but shows the benefits of installing a control system. The second case is a much larger treatment works where three screw pumps were returning the RAS to the activated sludge process. Examination of the flows and loads showed that only 1 of the screw pumps needed to be running for 16 hours of the day with the second pump running for the remaining 8 hours. The third screw pump was only needed as a standby pump. Considering that these pumps were rated at 80kW each the overall saving on a monthly basis for this particular case was about 440MW per month, a significant operational saving.
In the next in the blog series I will examine what can be done on activated sludge plants to resolve some of the compliance issues that activated sludge plants cause and I will also attempt to sum up this series of blogs.
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1. Introduction
For my first NLHE article for Donkr, I have chosen a topic that I know many new players find difficult, namely correct strategies for 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet preflop wars in NLHE 6-max.
1.1 Presenting the problem
Against weak low limit opposition, we can get away with playing an almost completely value-based game. We 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet mainly for value, and it's not a big mistake to assume our opponents are doing the same. If we reraise as a bluff, we usually limit ourselves to the occasional 3-bet bluff. A value-based style with little bluffing works well at small stakes because our opponents use more or less the same strategy, and many of them execute it poorly. Of course, every now and then we run into aggressive players who are capable of reraising as a bluff, but there are plenty of fish that will pay off our straightforward game, even if we bluff much less than is game theoretically optimal.
But let's say our Hero has built a bankroll by patiently grinding the low limits, and now he wants to take a stab at $200NL. He will now experience a lot more 3-betting, especially if he's out of position.
For example:
Example 1.1.1: We get 3-bet out of position
$200NL
6-handed
Hero ($200) raises to $7 with
Straightforward, and although Hero expects to get bluffed some of the time, he really doesn't have any choice but to fold. It's correct that his hand can no longer be played for value, but as we shall see later, it's possible to turn it into a 4-bet bluff.
At any rate, Hero plays on. The players behind him keep 3-betting him frequently when he is out of position, and Hero keeps folding weak hands to 3-bets. After a while, this hand occurs:
Example 1.1.2: We get 3-bet out of position (again)
$200NL
6-handed
Hero ($200) raises to $7 with
This is getting frustrating. Hero has a decent hand, but it's not strong enough to defend against a 3-bet from out of position, so Hero folds. But he is starting to feel exploited. If only he could get dealt a good hand and punish these bastards!
What an inexperienced player now might do (as his frustration builds up more and more), is to make up his mind to fight back against the loose 3-bettors. But he doesn't quite know what to do, and therefore he will often use poor strategies, and the wrong types of hands!.
Let's look at two common (and sub-optimal) ways to defend against 3-betting, out of position with 100 BB stacks:
Example 1.1.3: We get 3-bet out of position (again) and we call
$200NL
6-handed
Hero ($200) raises til $7 with
Flop:
Hero ($176) checks, button ($176) bets $30, Hero folds.
Hero is frustrated, but he doesn't see what else he could have done out of position with a hand of this type. Too strong to fold (at least in Hero's mind) against a loose 3-bettor, but not strong enough to 4-bet. Or? Hmmmmm .... Hero contemplates his next move, and soon another 3-bet pot occurs:
Example 1.1.4: We get 3-bet out of position (again) and we 4-bet for value (or at least that's what we think we are doing)
$200NL
6-handed
Hero ($200) raises to $7 with
Flop: Q T
Turn: Q T 7
River: Q T 7 Q
Hero tears his clothing and sprinkles ashes over his head. Damn!!
What happened throughout this sequence of hands?
OK, I made up this story, but it illustrates several of the problems an ABC low limit player faces when he moves up to tougher games. He will get 3-bet left and right, so he will have to fold a lot out of position (which is correct). He realizes he has to fight back to avoid getting run over (also correct), but he's not quite sure how to do it. So his attempts to counter the aggression are often poorly executed, frustrating and tilt-inducing.
For example, Hero might start calling 3-bets out of position with hands he feels are too good to fold, but not strong enough to 4-bet for value. This leads to many miserable experiences like Example 1.3. Or he might start 4-betting medium/weak hands without a clear understanding of whether he is doing it for value (planning to call a 5-bet), or if he is bluffing (planning to fold to a 5-bet).
What our inexperienced Hero might not realize, is that his opponents' loose 3-betting doesn't necessarily mean they are willing to splash around with lots of weak hands in 4-bet and 5-bet pots. When two good and aggressive NLHE-players engage in 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet warfare preflop, this is what usually happens:
Both players operate with wide ranges, and all ranges have a significant percentage of bluffs in them, especially at the early stage (raising and 3-betting)
Both players are willing to fold most of their bluffs (but not all of them), when their opponent reraises them back
This results in ranges that start loose, but get more and more (but never completely) weighted towards value. And it's usually plain wrong to assume you can 4-bet a medium hand like AJs for value against a loose 3-bettor, and expect to be a favorite when he 5-bets all-in. Yes, AJs is a decent hand against the range that 3-bet you, but it's crushed by the range that 5-bets you, and it's your opponent who decides when the 5th bet goes in (and that rarely happens unless he has the goods).
Therefore, if you decide on a frustrated whim to "take a stand" against an aggressive and competent 3-bettor with a hand like AJs, you will discover that in some mysterious way he almost always manages to come up with a better hand when you get all-in preflop.
This has lead many an inexperienced NLHE player to lose his stack, since these players:
Don't understand the roles different types of hands have in different types of ranges. First and foremost: Do I have a value hand that wants to get all-in, or do I have a bluff hand that I will fold to further aggression?
Aren't willing to fold hands that are strong at the early stages, but turn into weak hands when Villain keeps reraising
Let's look at Example 1.4 again. Hero open-raised AJs (correctly), and he got 3-bet. He then decided that his AJs was a good hand against Villain's 3-bet range (debatable, but not a big mistake), so he 4-bet for value (wrong!), planning to call a 5-bet all-in. Playing AJs for value after a 3-bet and going all-in with it was a big mistake. The 4-bet in itself was not a big mistake, since Villain has a lot of bluffs in his 3-betting range, and he will fold most of them to a 4-bet. So it's not a problem to 4-bet AJs as a bluff against a range full of 3-bet bluffs. But when Villain comes over the top with an all-in 5-bet, our AJs crumbles to dust (if Villain knows what he is doing).
But our inexperienced Hero did not realize what had just happened when he got 5-bet, and he stuck with his plan of playing AJs for value against what he perceived to be a wide and weak range. The problem is that the range he faces after a 5-bet from a competent player isn't wide and weak, it's very narrow and very strong.
Note what the real mistake was in this hand. 4-betting AJs against a wide range was not a big mistake in isolation, and neither was calling a 5-bet getting 2: 1. But the combination of 4-betting AJs + planning to always call a 5-bet, now that was a big mistake against a competent opponent. It caused Hero to invest his remaining 96.5bb stack as a huge underdog. The problem was, as mentioned previously, that his opponent controlled when the 5th bet went in, and Villain made sure he had a hand.
Our goal for this article is to give Hero a set of tools he can use to comfortably counter preflop aggression when he is sitting as the raiser out of position. We'll base our work on Hero's opening ranges, and based on these, we can deduce defensive strategies against positional 3-bets. And we will use game theory to design these strategies in such a way that the 3-bettor can not exploit Hero in these scenarios. Our work on Hero's game theory optimal defensive strategies also gives us a set of optimal 3-betting strategies for his opponent, so we kill two birds with one stone.
We have here talked mostly about the ills of getting 3-bet when sitting out of position, and this is what I feel inexperienced players find hardest to deal with. But the mirror image of this scenario, with us being the 3-bettor in position, is also worth discussing. These are easier scenarios to play, but we will benefit a lot from understanding optimal 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet dynamics also from this perspective. We'll learn how to construct optimal 3-betting ranges, based on the raiser's opening range, and we'll learn how to play against a 4-bet.
Regardless of whether we're the raiser or the 3-bettor, we want to understand which hands we can (re)raise for value, and which hands we (re)raise as bluffs. And above all else, we want it to be 100% clear which of these two things we are doing before we engage in a 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet war preflop.
1.2 Our model and overall philosophy
In this article we'll design so-called optimal strategy pairs for the raiser and the 3-bettor in the following scenario:
- The raiser opens some range
- A player behind him 3-bets
- The raiser 4-bets or folds
- The 3-bettor 5-bets, or folds to a 4-bet
Note that the raiser is always out of position (e.g. UTG, MP, or CO), and that no other players interfere.
We'll define a model for this scenario with 100bb stacks and standard bet sizing. Then we'll analyze our model, using mathematics and principles from game theory (but we'll keep it as simple as possible). We then construct game theory optimal(ish) strategy pairs for the raiser and the 3-bettor (one strategy for the raiser, and one matching strategy for the 3-bettor) that they can employ in their 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet wars.
Both players are trying to play perfectly against the other, and both are assuming their opponent is trying to play perfectly as well. The two players now both zoom in on a perfect strategy, designed not to lose against their opponent's perfect strategy. And the result is a pair of strategies that are perfect against each other, and we have our optimal strategy pair.
When we have learned these strategies, we have defensive (e.g. unexploitable) strategies we can use both as the raiser out of position, and as the 3-bettor in position. Using these optimal strategies guarantees that better players can't exploit us. They will also win against players who play poorly, although they will not win the maximum (if we want to exploit opponent leaks maximally, we have to deviate from optimal play ourselves, and use strategies that target specific leaks in our opponent's non-optimal strategies).
Knowing optimal strategies also makes it easier to spot our opponents' mistakes (where we can define "mistake" as a deviation from optimal play). If we know what an opponent should have done if he had played optimally, we can conclude that he has a weakness in his game if he chooses to do something different. And we might be able to exploit these weaknesses and turn them into leaks for him.
1.3 Background material for the article
Before we get started, I want to give credit to Cardrunners instructor Matthew Janda. During the spring of 2010 he published a 3-part video series Optimal Preflop Play I-III at Stoxpoker, which contains most of the theory we use in this article. This video series was inspiring and eye-opening, but sadly it became unavailable after Stoxpoker shut down in May 2010.
Matt Janda is now a Cardrunners instructor, and he continues to produce game theory related videos. His old videos from Stoxpoker might get moved over to Cardrunners, and if that happens, I recommend you check them out.
Without further ado, let's get started:
2. The mathematics behind optimal 3-/4-/5-betting with the raiser out of position
I have chosen an approach where we first go through the necessary math and theory quickly, and then we apply it by constructing optimal strategy pairs for two scenarios:
- The raiser in early position (UTG or MP) with a 15% opening range
- The raiser in CO with a 25% opening range
Lumping UTG and MP together under the label "EP" makes sense, since most players use very similar ranges for these two positions. The percentages we have chosen for EP and CO are typical TAG ranges that can be used under all game conditions.
The exact ranges we use to illustrate the procedures aren't important. Our goal is that you learn to construct optimal strategy pair (one strategy for the raiser and one for the 3-bettor) based on your own opening ranges. And you will of course also be able to design optimal strategy pairs to use against specific opponents (not on the fly, but by doing a bit of analysis work between sessions).
2.1 Our model
We use the following scenario:
Alice is sitting with a 100bb stack in EP or CO, and she raises pot to 3.5bb with some opening range
Bob is sitting in a position behind Alice with 100bb, and it's folded to him. Bob 3-bets pot to 12bb
Alice either 4-bets to 27bb (a bit less than pot), or she folds
Bob's response to Alice's 4-bets is to 5-bet all-in or fold
Alice's response to Bob's all-in 5-bets is to call or fold
Note that Alice doesn't defend against 3-bets by calling out of position. We could conceivably design a defense strategy where we fold weak hands, 4-bet strong hands, and call with medium hands, but this is not a good strategy out of position with 100bb stacks.
You have poor implied odds (due to low stack/pot ratio and being out of position) when you call for postflop value with implied odds hands. And it's difficult to steal and outplay Villain when you are out of position. And what you absolutely cannot do, is to call and then play fit-or-fold postflop. It will be much more fold than fit, and you are simply burning money by letting Villain c-bet his way to riches and early retirement on your expense.
With regard to Alice's choice of 4-bet size, it's standard to use 25-30bb (where full pot would be 37.5bb) with 100bb stacks. The logic behind this is that with 100bb stacks, we are putting Villain in a shove-or-fold scenario, also when we 4-bet a bit less than pot. His 3-bet bluffs will still fold, and his strong hands will still shove. So we win the same when he folds, but lose less on our bluffs when he doesn't fold. In other words: We risk less for the same reward when we're bluffing, and we don't lose anything when we're 4-betting for value. We simply choose 27bb as a representative value for a less-than-pot 4-bet, and the math won't change much if you use any number between 25bb and 30b instead.
Here are a few assumptions/statements we will use:
Bob knows Alice's opening range. Not necessarily all the hands in the range, but he knows the percentage of hands Alice opens
Both Alice and Bob are trying to play perfectly, under the assumption that their opponent is also trying to play perfectly
The worst hands in a bluffing range or calling range should be break even
The last statement needs an explanation: When we're 3-betting/4-betting/5-betting as a bluff, we should not lose money on our bluffing hands, and the worst of them should be no worse than break even. The same goes for when we're calling for pot odds. This makes sense if you think about it. When we're making a play that loses money, we should stop doing it to increase our EV.
Note that we're not concerned about the effects of deception when we work with game theory. We're only concerned with immediate EV. Also, if we're making money on all our bluffs or our calls, we can make even more money by bluffing more and calling more. So we keep adding bluffs and calling hands until our weakest hands are at the break even point, and then we stop. Conversely, if we're losing money on some of our bluffing or calling hands, we remove them from our ranges. Again, this results in our weakest bluffing/calling hands being no worse than break even.
Under these assumptions, we'll find an optimal strategy pair with a raising strategy (including defense against a 3-bet and against a 5-bet) for Alice, and a 3-betting strategy (including defense against a 4-bet) for Bob. We'll find a unique strategy pair for each of Alice's positions (e.g. for each of her opening ranges). We'll soon see how these strategy pairs follow from Alice's opening range, but first, let's talk a bit about optimal strategy pairs:
What is an optimal strategy pair?
When our two players Alice and Bob are playing optimally against each other, Alice's strategy and Bob's strategy make up an optimal strategy pair. When both are playing optimally, neither of them can gain from changing to a different strategy. If one of them can gain from switching to another strategy, then the original strategy wasn't optimal.
It's important to realize that a game theory optimal strategy doesn't try to maximize +EV against a random opponent. It's trying to maximize EV against an opponent who is also playing perfectly. Sometimes, this means the best result for both players is to break even. A game theory optimal strategy is first and foremost a defensive strategy, designed not to lose. However, an optimal strategy will win against players who are using non-optimal strategies. But If we see an opponent making big mistakes, we will win more by switching to an exploitative strategy, designed to exploit this opponent's specific leaks maximally.
But by changing our strategy from optimal to exploitative, we are moving away from optimal play. By doing so, we are creating weaknesses in our strategy, and other players might be able to exploit those weaknesses (although they might not see them). But if the weak player we are trying to exploit has big leaks, this trade off will usually be worth it. The art of playing against fish and regs at the same time is to exploit the fish, while we're defending ourselves against the regs. Against very poor opponents, we use very exploitative strategies. Against players who are as good as us, or better, we can fall back on optimal strategies so that they can't exploit us.
To balance these two goals well, we need to have an understanding of what optimal play is. Playing optimally (or, more likely, close to optimally) defends us against the good players, and understanding optimal play also makes it easier to spot mistakes in weak players (where "mistake" can be defined as deviating from optimal play).
With these concepts at the back of our mind, we move on to the mathematics behind optimal strategies for raising, 3-betting, 4-betting, and 5-betting with 100bb stacks:
2.2 How opening ranges, 3-betting ranges, 4-betting ranges, and 5-betting ranges are connected mathematically
We work our way through the raise/3-bet/4-bet/5-bet war, one step at a time, and construct all the mathematical tools we need. We jump back and forth between Alice and Bob, and we'll see how they influence each others' strategies when they both are trying to play perfectly against each other, assuming the other player is also trying to play perfectly.
What is Alice's optimal 4-bet%
The process starts with Alice raising some opening range known both to her and to Bob. When Bob 3-bets, Alice's most pressing concern is the following:
Alice can't fold so much that she gives Bob an opportunity to make a profit by 3-bet bluffing any two cards
So how often does Alice have to 4-bet? This follows from the pot odds Bob is getting on his 3-bet bluffs. There's 1.5 + 3.5 =5bb in the pot from the blinds and Alice's raise, and Bob 3-bets to 12bb to win this. Bob is then risking 12bb to win 5bb, and he's getting effective pot odds 5 : 12 on a 3-bet bluff.
He then needs to win more than 12/(5 + 12) =70% to have a profitable bluff. So if Alice folds more than 70%, Bob will have an automatic profit by 3-bet bluffing any two. Alice needs to prevent this, so she has to 4-bet enough to make Bob's bluffs break even.
Alice's optimal 4-betting strategy is therefore to 4-bet 30% of her opening range, and she will 4-bet a mix of value hands (planning to call a 5-bet) and bluffs (planing to fold to a 5-bet). We'll compute Alice's optimal value/bluff ratio in a moment, but first we have to find Bob's optimal ranges for 3-betting and 5-betting. These ranges follow from Alice's opening range:
What is Bob's optimal value/bluff ratio in his 3-bet range?
When Alice 4-bets to 27bb, she is risking 23.5bb (27bb minus he 3.5bb raise) more to win a 17bb pot (1.5bb from the blinds + Alice's 3.5bb raise + Bob's 12bb 3-bet). The effective pot odds for Alice's 4-bet bluffs are 17 : 23.5, and she can make a profit by 4-bet bluffing any two (of the hands she open-raised) if Bob folds his 3-betting hands more than 23.5/(23.5 + 17) =58%.
Bob can't allow Alice to 4-bet bluff any two cards profitably, so he defends optimally by folding exactly 58% of the time, and 5-betting all-in (including some 5-bet bluffs as we shall soon see) 42% of the time. Therefore, 42% of Bob's 3-bets need to be value hands that he plans to 5-bet all-in (including some 5-bet bluffs). We now define a 3-bet for value as a 3-bet where we plan to 5-bet all-in after a 4-bet. If this is not our plan, we are making a 3-bet bluff that we will fold to a 4-bet.
To make these percentages easy to remember, we round Bob's optimal 3-bet value/bluff ratio to 40/60. So now we know that 60% of Bob's 3-bets should be bluffs, and 40% should be for value (including some 5-bet bluffs). But we still don't know how many hands Bob should 3-bet overall. To find this number, we first have to find which hands Bob can 5-bet for value.
What should Bob's 5-betting range look like?
Bob first chooses the type of hands to 5-bet bluff with. He wants hands that have decent equity when called, and we can use Axs hands A5s-A2s for this purpose. Axs hands work as blockers against Alice's AA/AK (an ace in Bob's hand makes it less likely Alice has AA/AK), and they always have at least an overcard when Alice has another high pair. They also have straight and flush potential.
Axs has minimum ~30% equity when we 5-bet and get called, even against a strong range, as shown below:
So Bob will 5-bet a mix of true value hands and some Axs bluff hands, and he expects to have about 30% equity when his bluffs get called. So when he 5-bet bluffs and gets called, he will have ~30% equity in a 201.5bb pot where he invested 88bb with the 5-bet. Bob first 3-bet to 12, so the 5-bet is 88bb more. On average, Bob gets 0.30 x 201.5 =60bb back from the pot, so his net loss after 5-betting and getting called is 88 - 60 =28bb.
The pot size before Bob's 5-bet is 40.5bb (1.5 from the blinds, + 27 from Alice's 4-bet + 12 from Bob's 3-bet). So Bob is effectively risking 28bb to win 40.5bb when he is 5-bet bluffing. The effective pot odds are 40.5 : 28, and Bob needs to win at least 28/(28 + 40.5) =40% to profit from 5-bet bluffing any two (or more precisely, any Axs hand, since we base our calculations on having ~30% equity when called).
For Alice, this means she has to call a 5-bet 60% of the time to prevent Bob from making a profit by 5-betting any two. So Alice's 4-betting range has to contain 60% value hands and 40% bluff hands. Now we know everything we need to know about Alice's 4-betting range. She 4-bets 30% of her opening range, and she uses a 60/40 value/bluff ratio. We'll summarize Alice's total optimal strategy below, but first we'll find out how often Bob should 3-bet.
We know which type of hands Bob should 5-bet bluff (Axs), and we know he should use a 40/60 value/bluff ratio (which, coincidentally is the opposite of the ratio for Alice's 4-bet range). The last piece of information we need is Bob's total 3-bet percentage in an optimal 3-betting strategy. We find the answer by observing that Bob should 5-bet bluff enough to make Alice's weakest value hands break even. He he bluffs more, Alice can gain by calling with more hands, and then Bob's strategy can't be optimal. And if he bluffs less, Alice can gain by folding more hands, and Bob's strategy can't be optimal in this case either.
How many Axs hands we need to make Alice's weakest 5-bet calling hands break even varies with Alice's value range (60% of 30% of her opening range), which follows from her opening range. So we have to compute this result on a per-case basis, for every one of Alice's opening ranges. We'll give a quick example in the summary below, and the procedure will be thoroughly discussed later in the article.
2.3 Summary of Alice's optimal raising strategy
We summarize everything we have learned about Alice's optimal strategy for raising, 4-betting and calling 5-bets:
- She needs to 4-bet 30% of her opening range
- Her 4-betting range should have a 60/40 value/bluff ratio
So Alice's optimal strategy is:
Alice open-raises some opening range
When she gets 3-bet, she 4-bets 30% of her opening range with a 60/40 ratio between value 4-bets and bluff 4-bets
Alice therefore 4-bets 0.60 x 30 =18% of her opening range for value and 0.40 x 30 =12% of her opening range as a bluff
If Bob 5-bets all-in, Alice calls with all her value hands, and folds all her 4-bet bluffs
So Alice's value hands are the top 18% of her opening range. For example, if she opens 15% from UTG, this corresponds to a value range of 0.18 x 0.15 =2.7% of all hands. This makes up 0.027 x 1326 =36 combos, e.g approximately the range {QQ+, AK} =34 combos. We'll use this value range example when we summarize Bob's optimal strategy below. And then we'll illustrate each strategy step thoroughly when we apply the theory to Alice's EP and CO openraises.
2.4 Summary of Bob's optimal 3-betting strategy
We summarize everything we have learned about Bob's optimal strategy for 3-betting and 5-betting:
Bob starts by finding which hands he can 3-bet for value, planning to 5-bet all-in against Alice's 4-bet value range. For this purpose, he needs hands that have at least 50% equity against Alice's value range
Bob then adds enough Axs hands as 5-bet bluffs to make Alice's weakest value hands break even when calling Bob's total 5-bet range
Bob's value hands and 5-bet bluffs are joined to a total value range (where value range =the range he 3-bets and 5-bets all-in)
Finally, Bob chooses a 3-bet bluff range so that the ratio of his value hands (including 5-bet bluffs) to his bluff hands is 40/60
When Alice raises, Bob 3-bets his value range and his bluff range
If Alice 4-bets, Bob 5-bets his value range all-in and folds his bluff range
For example, if Alice raises 15% from the UTG, her optimal value range is {QQ+, AK} as shown previously. Bob chooses value hands that are at least 50% against this range, and his pure value range becomes {KK+}. Then he adds Axs hands as 5-bet bluffs until Alice's weakest value hands (QQ and AK) are break even against his total 5-bet range.
Alice then calls her remaining 73 BB to win a 189.5 bb pot (1.5 from the blinds, 100 from Bob, 27 from Alice's 4-bet), so her pot odds are 128.5 : 73. She needs minimum 73(/128.5 + 73) =36% equity to profit from calling, so Bob makes sure her weakest value hands have against his 5-bet-range. Later in the article we'll show that Bob ends up with a total 5-bet range of {KK+, A5s, A4s} when Alice's value range is {QQ+, AK}
This gives Bob {KK+, A5s, A4s} =20 value combos that he 3-bets, planning to 5-bet all-in. Then he picks hands to 3-bet bluff until he has a 40/60 ratio between value combos and bluff combos. Bob needs 60/40 =1.5 bluff combos for every value combo, so he will choose 1.5 x 20 =30 bluff combos against Alice's {QQ+, AK} value range.
You should memorize both Alice's strategy and Bob's strategy until you know them cold. It's not really complicated at all. Just remember that Bob uses a 40/60 value/bluff ratio for his 3-bets, and Alice uses a 60/40 ratio for her 4-bets, and then you know the most of it. Value hands are per definition hands we plan to raise and reraise until we are all-in. Bluff hands are hands we plan to fold if our opponent reraises us back.
We now begin the job of constructing optimal strategy pairs for Alice and Bob. First when Alice raises a 15% range from EP, and then when she raises a 25% range from CO. We'll do this thoroughly and methodically, so that you can learn the procedures inside out. I hope you'll see that these strategies aren't really complicated to construct and then apply at the table.
3. Optimal strategy pairs for raiser/3-bettor with an EP raiser out of position
We'll now find the optimal strategy pair for Alice and Bob when Alice open-raises from early position (EP =UTG or MP), and it's folded to Bob in position.
It's of course possible to vary EP opening ranges a lot, according to opponent tendencies and general game conditions. But the core strategy for a typical TAG is to open somewhere around 15% of his hands (plus/minus a couple of percentage points in both directions) from both EP positions, and slightly tighter from UTG than from MP.
We'll construct all strategies/ranges with great detail for this scenario, so that there won't be any doubt about how to apply the theory. Then we'll move on to the scenario with Alice in CO, and do this quickly, with brief comments along the way.
3.1 Alice's optimal raising strategy in EP (UTG and MP)
We assume Alice is opening with a ~15% EP range. Note that any 15'ish% EP-range will do, since our work is based on the numbers of hands in the range, and not the specific hands it contains. Obvious value hands like high pairs and AK have to be included, since these hands have a job to do in the ranges for 4-betting and calling 5-bets. But the exact mixture of medium and weak hands in Alice's range is irrelevant.
We give Alice the following range:
Alice's EP range
22+
ATs+ AJo+
KTs+ KQo
QTs+
J9s+
T9s
98s
87s
76s
186 combos
14%
We now place Bob somewhere with position on Alice. Alice open-raises and it's folded to Bob, who 3-bets. Both players want to play perfectly against the other, and both assume the other is also trying to play perfectly.
Alice starts by defining her value range. This is per definition the hands she plans to 4-bet for value and then call a 5-bet with. She counts the total number of combos in her opening range (186), and she knows that she on average has to defend 30% of her total range against a 3-bet. She also knows that the optimal value/bluff ratio of her 4-betting range is 60/40. So she 4-bets 0.60 x 0.30 =18% of her opening range for value, and 0.40 x 0.30 =12% as a bluff.
Alice then 4-bets 18% of the 186 combos for value, e.g. 0.18 x 186 =33 value combos. This corresponds almost exactly to the value range {QQ+, AK} =34 combos (a couple of combos too many or too few doesn't matter much). This is a standard value range from EP, also for players who haven't studied optimal raise/3-bet/4-bet/5-bet strategies.
Now the 4-bet bluff range. These are the hands Alice 4-bets and then folds to a 5-bet. There are two ways to define the bluff 4-bet range: We can choose some specific bluff combos and always 4-bet them, or we can 4-bet all the non-value hands a certain % of the time.
Let's illustrate both methods:
Defining a 4-bet bluff range using the combo method
If we choose specific bluff combos, we need 12% of 186 combos, e.g. 0.12 x 186 =22 bluff combos. For example, we might choose AQ (16) + JJ (6) which gives us exactly 22 combos. Or we can choose something different, since it doesn't matter what we use for bluffs when Bob either folds or 5-bets all-in. When Bob doesn't fold to our bluffs, he 5-bets, and we have to fold, so our 4-bet bluff hands never get to see a flop. And when they never get to see a flop, their postflop value is irrelevant.
But note that a hand like AQ works as a blocker against Bob's premium hands (AA, AK, QQ). So when Alice uses AQ as a bluff, it will be less likely that Bob has a hand he can 5-bet for value. Keep this in mind if you are choosing specific hands to always use for 4-bet bluffing.
Defining a 4-bet bluff range using the percentage method
My preferred method, and also the easiest method to remember. We only need to remember one number, namely the static percentage Alice 4-bet bluffs her non-value hands. Let's find this percentage once and for all:
Alice 4-bets 18% of her opening range for value, and she's left with 82% non-value hands she can use for 4-bet bluffing. We now choose to use all these hands a fixed percentage of the time, so that the effective total value/bluff ration is 60/40. We now want:
value/bluff =60/40
18/82x =60/40
18/82x =1.5
18/82 =1.5x
0.22 =1.5x
x =0.22/1.5 =0.15 =15%
So we 4-bet bluff all non-value hands 15% of the time and fold them the remaining 85% of the time. Note that this percentage is universal for Alice. No matter what her opening range is, she can always use this percentage to obtain a 60/40 value bluff ratio for her 4-bets.
Let's double-check to see that this works the way it should:
When Alice has raised some opening range and gotten 3-bet, we have deduced that her optimal value 4-bet range is 18% of her total range. If she 4-bets the remaining 82% of her range as a bluff 15% of the time, her overall bluff percentage will be 0.15 x 0.82 =0.12 =12%. So her total 4-bet range is he optimal 18 + 12 =30%, with a 18/12 =60/40 value/bluff ration. So the percentages add up perfectly.
Alice's optimal raise/4-bet/call 5-bet strategy in EP
We now have everything we need to specify Alice's total strategy after a 15% open-raise. We can write Alice's total EP range as a sum of value hands (raise, 4-bet for value, call a 5-bet) and bluff hands (raise, 4-bet bluff, fold to a 5-bet):
{Alice's total EP range}
={22+,ATs+,KTs+,QTs+,J9s+,T9s,98s,87s,76s,AJo+,KQo}
={value hands} + {4-bet bluff hands}
={QQ+, AK}
+ (15% 4-bet and 85% fold) x {the rest of the range}
Alice raises {22+, ATs+, KTs+, QTs+, J9s+, T9s, 98s, 87s, 76s, AJo+, KQo} =186 combos from EP. If she gets 3-bet, she 4-bets {QQ+, AK} for value and calls a 5-bet with them. Those times she doesn't have a value hand, (e.g. she has JJ, AJo, 76s, etc.), she 4-bets 15% of the time as a bluff, and otherwise she folds.
The percentage of value hands is then 34/186 =18%, while the effective percentage of bluff hands is 0.15 x (186 - 34)/186 =12%. The value/bluff ratio for her 4-bet range is 18/12 =60/40, which is optimal.
To randomize her 4-bet bluffs and get the correct 15% 4-bet frequency for her non-value hands, Alice uses a random number generator from
Let's illustrate randomized 4-bet bluffing in practice with an example:
Example 3.1.1: Randomized 4-bet bluffing in EP
$100NL
6-handed
Alice ($100) raises pot to $3.50 with
Alice does not have one of her value hands {QQ+, AK}, so she knows that this is a 4-bet-bluff-or-fold scenario. She also knows how often she should 4-bet bluff with these hands (15%). Alice clicks the random number generator, planning to 4-bet to 27bb ($27) if it returns a number between 0 and 15, and otherwise she folds.:
The randomize returns 39, so Alice folds this time.
We have now specified Alice's optimal EP strategy for for raising/4-betting/calling a 5-bet when she gets 3-bet by a player in position. Our next step is to turn to Bob. What is Bob's optimal strategy for 3-betting/5-betting in position after a ~15% EP raise from Alice?
3.2 Bob's optimal 3-bet-strategy versus Alice's optimal raising strategy in EP
We're assuming Bob knows Alice's opening range (he only needs to know the % of hands, not the specific hands), either from observation, or by using a HUD. Alice's raise percentage dictates her value 4-bet range, which dictates Bob's strategies for 3-betting and 5-betting.
Bob starts by finding the hands that he 3-bets and 5-bets all-in, purely for value. His value range also includes some 5-bet bluffs, and the next step is to find these. Then we pick a range of 3-bet bluffs that Bob plans to fold to a 4-bet. We'll also talk about Bob's flatting range. These are medium strong hands that are playable, but they are not strong enough to 4-bet for value,and they are too strong to use as bluffs, so Bob flat-calls with them.
Bob's flatting range can be viewed as a completely separate part of Bob's overall strategy, and we don't have to be concerned with it when constructing optimal ranges for 3-betting/4-betting/5-betting. But we will discuss the flatting range briefly, since it helps us understand the big picture. When Alice has raised, Bob can respond in 3-ways: He can 3-bet (for value or as a bluff), he can flat, or he can fold. Different hands have different jobs to do within these ranges. And depending on Alice's opening range, hands can move between Bob's 3-betting/flatting/folding ranges.
For example, we'll see that AK isn't strong enough to be a value hand for Bob against Alice's EP range, so AK goes into the flatting range in this scenario. But when Alice opens a much wider ~25% range in CO, AK is promoted to a value hand that is 3-bet and 5-bet for value. More about that later in the article.
So let's begin defining Bob's optimal 3-bet/5-bet strategy in position against Alice's optimal raise/4-bet/call 5-bet strategy with a ~15% EP range:
Bob's pure value range
Bob knows that Alice EP range is ~15% (14% to be exact), and therefore he can draw the same conclusion Alice just did, namely that her optimal value 4-betting range is {QQ+, AK}. To profitably 3-bet and 5-bet all-in for value against this range, Bob needs a hand with at least 50% equity.
AA is obviously such a hand, and we can easily compute some equities to see that KK is the only other possible hand. So Bob ends up with the super tight pure value range {KK+}.
So Bob will 3-bet {KK+} and 5-bet them all-in if Alice 4-bets. He will also 3-bet/5-bet some 5-bet bluff hands (type Axs), and he will have a wide range of 3-bet bluffs that he folds to a 4-bet. We'll now find Bob's 5-bet bluffing hands, then his 3-bet bluffing range, and then we are done.
But first, let's talk about something that I know you're thinking about right now:
Wait a minute, are you saying that we shouldn't 3-bet the mighty strong QQ and AK for value against an EP open-raise?
Correct. Against Alice's tight and optimally played ~15% EP opening range, QQ and AK aren't strong enough to use as value hands, even if they have strong equity against Alice's total opening range. The reason is that they can not profitably get the whole stack in Against the range Alice is willing to get all-in with, namely {QQ+, AK}. Therefore we don't want to 3-bet them for value. Keep in mind that the process of getting all-in starts with a 3-bet, and we know the moment Alice open-raises with a ~15% EP range that her all-in range is a favorite over our QQ and AK hands.
Therefore, since we know this before we have put our first chip into the pot, we don't want to choose a path with QQ/AK that is the first step towards getting all-in with them preflop. This is also true for other hands that are good enough to play for value, but not strong enough to get all-in preflop against Alice's value range {QQ+, AK}. Examples of such hands are QQ-22, AK-AJ, KQ, QJs-T9s, etc. (and you can probably list some more if you think about it).
So should we 3-bet these medium strong hands as bluffs then?. No, because they are too strong to turn into bluffs and waste their postflop value. The alternative, which is a good one, is to flat-call with them and play a raised pot with position against a range we have god equity against (namely Alice's total opening range). Of course, we could always pretend they are trash and use them as 3-bet bluffs, but why should we do that when it's profitable to flat and play for postflop value? It's true that we want to 3-bet bluff a lot, but we have plenty of bad hands to choose from for that purpose, and we don't want to waste the postflop value we gain from flatting with our medium strong hands.
Here is a soccer analogy in these World Cup times:
Moving QQ/AK from the flatting range up to the value range against a ~15% opening range is a bit like moving a defender forward and using him as a striker. Sure, he might score a goal or two, but he isn't quite good enough for the job. But he is too good to sit on the bench, so he should play. Therefore, since there is another job for which he is well qualified (defending), we let him play there. The right man for the right job.
Bob will therefore flat QQ, AK and various other medium strong hands/implied odds hands after a ~15% open-raise from Alice. The optimal flatting range depends on how Bob thinks Alice plays postflop, what he thinks the players in the blinds will do, how they play postflop, their stack sizes, etc. So we leave the construction of an optimal flatting range to Bob.
Note that 3-betting QQ and AK for value against a ~15% EP raiser is equivalent to assuming the raiser isn't playing optimally. If you feel these two hands can always be 3-bet and 5-bet all-in for value against this EP range, you can assume it's because the players you meet don't defend well against 3-bets out of position.
Thinking about these things is useful, because when we know what's game theoretically correct, we know that we can exploit someone if it seems correct to do something else. So feel free to deviate from optimal play in Bob's place, if you have position on a weak player. For example, you might be up against a player who 4-bet bluffs spazzy and way too much, or he raises a lot and calls 3-bets out of position with medium strong hands, and then he plays fit-or-fold on the flop. Against such players, QQ and AK might be used as value 3-bet/5-bet hands, since our opponents play far from optimally against our 3-bets.
But don't 3-bet QQ/AK for value against a ~15% opening range in the hands of a player like Alice. She plays optimally against our 3-bets, so 3-betting QQ/AK won't do anything for us. Against Alice we use QQ/AK as flatting hands, thus setting ourselves up for playing a raised pot in position against a range we have good equity against (Alice's total opening range, and not just her value hands). This will give Alice (and the blinds, should they get involved) opportunities to make postflop mistakes that we can exploit.
But later in the article we'll let Alice open with a ~25% range from CO, and we'll see that QQ/AK now moves up to Bob's value range. Alice's value range is wider and weaker with a 25% opening range, and Bob's optimal 3-bet strategy changes accordingly.
OK, enough about flatting. Let's move on and find Bob's 5-bet bluffs, and then his 3-bet bluffing range:
We include 5-bet bluffs in Bob's value range
Remember the definition of "value range" as the hands we 3-bet, planning to 5-bet all-in after a 4-bet. Some of these hands will be 5-bet bluffs, but for simplicity we'll refer to all the 5-betting hands as Bob's value range.
From the previous theory section, we remember that Bob wants to have enough Axs 5-bet bluffs in his value range to make Alice's weakest value hands break even. This accomplishes two things for Bob:
He forces Alice to fold more of her 4-bet bluffs
He makes it impossible for Alice to "cheat" by not paying off Bob's value 5-bets with {KK+}. If she tries to be "smart" and fold QQ/AK, Bob will just collect his profit with his 5-bet bluffs instead.
So Bob's 5-bet bluffs with some Axs hands attack Alice's 4-bet bluffs, and they also make it impossible for her to profitably tighten up her value range, even if she knows Bob's value range is the squeaky tight {KK+}. Keep in mind that Alice knows Bob's strategy, since this follows from her own strategy, which follows from her opening range, which both players know.
So she knows Bob only 3-bets/5-bets {KK+} for pure value, and if Bob's doesn't 5-bet bluff a bit, Alice can improve her 5-bet-calling strategy by folding the big underdog's QQ/AK from her value range {QQ+, AK}. And when one of the players can improve his/her EV by a strategy change, the original strategy pair can't be optimal (per definition). So Bob has to 5-bet bluff.
The next step for Bob is to add enough Axs to make Alice's weakest value hands break even when they call a 5-bet. Alice then calls off her last 73bb to win the blinds + Alice's 4-bet + Bob's stack =1.5 + 27 + 100 =128.5 bb. The pot odds are 128.5 : 73 =1.76 : 1, so Alice needs minimum 1/(1 + 1.76) =36% equity against Bob's 5-betting range to call profitably.
We add A5s to Bob's value range, and check Alice's equity with QQ/AK:
AK is above the threshold, but QQ is way below 36%. We add A4s and try again:
QQ is now slightly better than break even, and Bob can use A5s/A4s as his optimal 5-bet bluffing hands. However, if we want Alice's equity to be exactly break even, we have to remove a 5-bet bluff or two. Let's remove
Bingo, and Bob's optimal 5-bet bluffing hands are {A5s, 4 , A 4 , A
People generally don't 4-bet bluff enough, and they are also reluctant to tighten up their 4-bet value ranges when they get exploited by very tight 5-betting (e.g. 5-bets that are 100% for value). For example. a typical low limit TAG with a ~15% EP range might have decided to never 4-bet bluff, and always 4-bet QQ and AK for value and call a 5-bet with them. And he is unlikely to change that plan, even if Bob's exploitative response is to drop all 5-bet bluffs from his value range, and only 5-bet-shove {KK+}, purely for value.
These things happen because a) people are blinded by seemingly strong hands, even after they get trapped in situations where their hands suddenly aren't strong anymore, and b) because people are reluctant to change their initial plan, even after if becomes clear it's a bad plan.
Against an opponent who makes the dual mistake of not 4-betting bluffing enough, and also paying off our value 5-bets too much, Bob can gain a lot from not having to think about 5-bet bluffing. Bob simply 3-bets {KK+} for value, plus a wide range of 3-bet bluffs, and after a 4-bet he 5-bets {KK+} for value and folds everything else.
This way Bob exploits Villains lack of 4-bet bluffing, since his 3-bet bluffs forces Villain to fold most of his non-value hands (since Villain is unwilling to 4-bet bluff with these hands). And Bob also doesn't need to attack Villain's 4-bet bluffs with 5-bet bluffs of his own, since Villain isn't 4-bet bluffing. Finally, Bob exploits Villain's static 5-bet-calling range by only 5-betting for value (and getting called as a big favorite), and not having to include 5-bet bluffs for deception. Easy game.
At any rate, Bob's final value 3-bet range (including his 5-bet bluffs) against Alice's optimally played ~15% EP range is {KK+, A5s, A4s}. Bob's last job is to construct the 3-bet bluff range. These are the hands we 3-bet, and always fold to a 4-bet.
Bob's 3-bet bluff range
We remember the strength principle for poker hands:
- Bet/raise your strongest hands for value
- Check/call with your medium hands
- Fold/bluff with your weakest hands
We have already defined Bob's value range (including 5-bet bluffs) as {KK+, A5s, A4s}, and we have mentioned that he also flats some range of good-but-not-great medium strong hands. Against Alice's ~15% EP range this means flatting with hands like QQ, JJ, TT, AK, AQ, AJ, KQ, etc.
So when we pick hands for Bob's 3-bluffing range, we drop down to the "cellar" and pick hands that aren't god enough to 3-bet for value preflop, and not good enough to flat for postflop value. Against Alice, who either 4-bets or folds, it doesn't matter which hands we choose to 3-bet bluff with, since these hands will never see a flop. Alice either 4-bets or folds, and when she 4-bets, we 5-bet our value range all-in, and fold our 3-bet bluff range.
But in practice the choice of 3-bet bluff range matters a bit, since the raiser will sometimes call our 3-bet with his medium strong hands out of position and force us to play postflop. Therefore, since we can choose freely from our worst hands, we might as well choose the best of our worst hands.
In other words, we'd rather 3-bet a hand like K8s as a bluff than a hand like 72o. K8s has some postflop value those times the raiser calls and forces us to see a flop, while 72o doesn't. So 3-bet bluffing with hands like K8s dominates (e.g. is sometimes better than, and never worse than) 3-bet bluffing with hands like 72o.
So let's list some 3-bet bluff candidates à la K8s that are too weak to flat, but have some postflop value when we get called. We make a list of ace high, king high and queen high candidate hands:
Candidate list for 3-bet bluffing:
- Ace high: A9s-A6s ATo-A8o (52 combos)
- King high: K9s-K6s, KJo-K9o (52 combos)
- Queen high: Q9s-Q6s, QJo-Q9o (52 combos)
If you don't approve of this list, feel free to make your own. The specific hands are irrelevant, what matters is that we use hands with the right properties, namely hands that aren't quite strong enough to flat. NB! A5s-A2s are reserved for 5-bet bluffing, so we can't include them in this list.
This gives us a list of 156 "pretty" combos for 3-bet bluffing, and the next question is which hands to choose and when. We remember that the optimal value/bluff ratio for Bob's 3-betting range is 40/60, so he can use 60/40 =1.5 bluff combos for each of the combos in his value range (including his 5-bet bluffs). His total value range is {KK+, A5s, A4s} =20 combos, so Bob can pick 1.5 x 20 =30 3-bet bluff combos.
As mentioned previously, there are two techniques Bob can use:
- Pick 30 specific combos and always 3-bet them
- 3-bet all hands from the candidate list a certain percentage of the time
I prefer the percentage method. To use it, we only need to memorize the candidate range once and for all, plus one number (the % we 3-bet bluff the candidate hands). Let's compute the number to use against Alice's EP range:
To effectively have 30 bluff combos from the candidate list in our 3-betting range, we need to use each of them 30/152 =20% of the time. Note that this percentage isn't universal, like Alice's fixed 4-bet bluff percentage (15%) is for all her opening ranges. To see this, note that Bob's value range varies with Alice's opening range, but the candidate list of 3-bet bluff hands is static (we have simply chosen some hands to use).
So Bob will have to calculate a new bluff% to use for his candidate list against each of Alice's opening ranges. However, this isn't a big job, we simply do the math once and for all against each of Alice's ranges and memorize the numbers we need (and we'll look at Alice's CO range in a minute).
So, finally:
Bob's optimal 3-bet strategy against Alice's optimal raising strategy in EP
{Bob's total 3-bet range}
={value hands and 5-bet-bluff hands} + {3-bet bluff hands}
={KK+, A5s, A4s}
+ 20% x {A9s-A6s,ATo-A8o,K9s-K6s,KJo-K9o,Q9s-Q6s,QJo-Q9o}
Bob always 3-bets {KK+, A5s, A4s} and 5-bets all-in after a 4-bet. If he has one of the 152 combos from his candidate list for 3-bet bluffing, he uses a randomizer and 3-bet bluffs 20% of the time, and he folds to a 4-bet. We had to do a bit of work to construct all these ranges, but it was worth it, and we have learned a lot in the process.
Let's see what Bob's optimal total 3-bet% is in this case:
- Value part: 20 combos (1.5% of all hands)
- Bluff part: Effectively 20% of 152 =30 combos (2.3% of all hands)
This results in a total 3-bet% of 1.5 + 2.3 =3.8% against Alice's ~15% EP raises. His value/bluff ratio is the desired optimal 20/30 =40/60. Later, when we construct an optimal strategy against Alice's 25% CO range, we'll see that Bob's 3-bet% skyrockets as a consequence of Alice raising a much wider opening range.
Note that the combination of a candidate list of 3-bet bluff hands and a fixed (but adjustable) bluff% to use with these hands, gives us a lot of flexibility to adjust our 3-bet bluffing as we please. Against an unknown opponent, we can start with the optimal 20% frequency, and 3-bet {KK+, A5s, A4s} always, and the candidate list 20% of the time. But if we note that the raiser doesn't defend optimally, we might want to adjust this bluff percentage.
For example, of the raiser never 4-bet bluffs and only 4-bets a tight value range like {QQ+, AK}, we can go bananas with our 3-bet bluffs. We might decide to double the bluff frequency from 20% to 40% for our list of 152 bluff candidate combos. Now we have 20 value combos, and effectively 0.40 x 152 =61 bluff combos. This means 20/(20 + 61) =25% of our 3-bets are for value, and 75% are bluffs. Our first adjustment to exploit this particular opponent is therefore to lower the optimal value/bluff ratio from the optimal 40/ to the more exploitative 25/75.
Then we can also drop 5-bet-bluffing against this tight player, as discussed previously. The simplest adjustment is to keep 3-betting our 5-bet bluffing hands A5s/A4s, but we move them from the value range down to the 3-bet bluff range, and fold them to a 4-bet. The only hands we 5-bet against this player and his {QQ+, AK} 4-bet range is {KK+}, purely for value.
Here is an example of randomized 3-bet-bluffing, using the randomizer from
Example 3.2.1: Randomized 3-bet bluffing against a ~15% EP raise
$100NL
6-handed
Alice ($100) raises to $3.5 from UTG, and it's folded to Bob ($100) who has
The randomizer returns 18, so Bob 3-bets to $12. Alice quickly 4-bets to $27, and Bob folds.
Everything according to plan, and with total control, so there is no reason to feel frustrated after this clash. Our
Remember that we know Alice's strategy just as well as she knows our strategy, and we know that she will 3-bet us 30% of the time and fold 70%. When the 4-bet comes, we quietly fold our 3-bet bluffs and 5-bet-shove our value/5-bet bluff range of {KK+, A5s, A4s}. And we do these things calmly, without emotion.
4. Optimal strategy pairs for raiser/3-bettor with a CO raiser out of position
After the thorough work with Alice raising ~15% in EP, we can now reap the rewards and quickly run through the same procedure with Alice raising a ~25% range in CO. She now opens a wider range, as a consequence, all other ranges get wider as well.
4.1 Alice's optimal raising strategy for CO
Raising from CO is a bit more situational than raising from EP. It's now easier to isolate the blinds, and with a tight player on the button, it might be correct to play very loosely to get heads-up with position on the blinds. Still, everybody has a core range of hands that they always play, regardless of whether they have written this range down or not.
We'll assume Alice is using a TAG core range of ~25% in CO. More specifically, this range:
Alice's CO range
22+
A2s+ A9o+
K9s+ KTo+
Q9s+ QTo+
J8s+ JTo
T8s+
97s+
87s
76s
65s
326 combos
25%
Alice's value range
Alice defends against 3-bets 30% of the time, and she does it by 4-betting 18% of her opening range for value and 12% as a bluff. So she needs 0.18 x 326 =59 value combos that she can 4-bet and call a 5-bet with. In EP she used [QQ+, AK} =34 combos, and in CO we simply add the next tier of hands and use {JJ+, AQ+} =56 combos (precise enough).
Then she needs 0.12 x 326 =39 bluff combos. She can pick ~39 specific combos and always 4-bet them (e.g. AJ, AT, TT =38 combos), or she can 4-bet all her non-value hands 15% of the time, as explained previously. We choose the latter approach, and write Alice's complete raise strategy for CO as:
Alice's optimal raise/4-bet/call 5-bet-strategy in CO:
{Alice's total CO range}
={22+,A2s+,K9s+,Q9s+,J8s+,T8s+,97s+,87s,76s,65s,
A9o+,KTo+,QTo+,JTo}
={value hands} + {4-bet bluff hands}
={JJ+, AQ+}
+ (15% 4-bet and 85% fold) x {the rest of the range}
Alice raises {22+,A2s+,K9s+,Q9s+,J8s+,T8s+,97s+,87s,76s,65s,
A9o+,KTo+,QTo+,JTo} =326 combos from CO. If she gets 3-bet, she 4-bets {JJ+, AQ+} for value, planning to call a 5-bet. Those times she doesn't have a value hand (e.g. 88, A9o, T9s, etc.), she 4-bets 15% of the time, and the rest of the time she folds. Using a random number generator from
That's it for Alice's CO strategy. Over to Bob:
4.2 Bob's optimal 3-bet-strategy against Alice's optimal raising strategy in CO
Bob needs a value range, including an optimal number of 5-bet bluffs, and he needs a range of hands to 3-bet bluff.
Bob's pure value range
Bob knows that Alice now uses {JJ+, AQ+} as her value range, so he builds a range of pure value hands that have at least 50% equity against {JJ+, AQ+}. AA and KK obviously belong in this range. To see what else is included, we run equity calculations for the next tier of hands (QQ and AK):
QQ and AK are barely above the threshold, while all weaker hands will be big underdogs. Thus, Bob's pure value range is {QQ+, AK}, and he happily 3-bets these hands, and then 5-bets them all-in, purely for value.
We add 5-bet bluffs to Bob's value range
We now want to add enough Axs hands so that Alice weakest value hands (JJ and AQ) are break even when they call our 5-bet range (and the threshold is 36% equity, as shown previously). We start with A5s/A4s and see what we get:
Alice's weakest value hand is AQ, and it's a small loser with 34% equity against Bob's total value range {QQ+, AK, A5s, A4s}. Close enough for us, so the 5-bet bluffs in this case are the same as we used against Alice's EP range. However, if we want it to be exact, we need to add a couple more bluffs (for example,
Bob's 3-bet bluffing
Bob's value range, including 5-bet bluffs, is {QQ+, AK, A5s, A4s} =42 combos. He wants an optimal 40/60 value/bluff-ratio, so he needs 60/40 =1.5 times as many bluff combos. This amounts to 1.5 x 42 =63 bluff combos.
We use the previously defined candidate list for 3-bet bluff hands:
Candidate list for 3-bet bluffing:
- Ace high: A9s-A6s ATo-A8o (52 combos)
- King high: K9s-K6s, KJo-K9o (52 combos)
- Queen high: Q9s-Q6s, QJo-Q9o (52 combos)
We bluff these hands some fixed percentage x, and for this to effectively correspond to 63 bluff combos, we need x =63/152 =41%. We can round this to x =40% to make it easy to remember.
We remember that we used a 20% bluff candidate frequency against Alice's ~15% EP range. So when Alice moves from a ~15% EP range to a ~25% CO range, our 3-bet bluff candidate frequency doubles. We only need to memorize the candidate list, and these two numbers (20% vs EP and 40% vs CO), and then we know all we need to know about 3-bet bluffing optimally against Alice's EP/CO ranges.
At any rate, against Alice's optimal CO raising strategy, Bob gets:
Bob's optimal 3-bet strategy against Alice's optimal raising strategy in CO
{Bob's total 3-bet range}
={value hands and 5-bet bluff hands} + {3-bet bluff hands}
={QQ+, AK, A5s, A4s}
+ 40% x {A9s-A6s,ATo-A8o,K9s-K6s,KJo-K9o,Q9s-Q6s,QJo-Q9o}
Using a randomizer from
Bob's total 3-bet% for this scenario is:
- Value part: 42 combos (3.2% of all hands)
- Bluff part: Effectively 40% of 152 =61 combos (4.6% of all hands)
This results in a total 3-bet range of 3.2 + 4.6 =7.8% against Alice's ~25% CO range. The value/bluff ratio, using our numerical rounding, is 42/61, which is very close to the optimal 40/60.
When Alice moves from EP to CO and her opening range changes from ~15% to ~25%, Bob responds by loosening up his 3-betting range dramatically. This is an interesting observation. Those of you who use a more or less static 3-betting range (for example, the generic {JJ+, AQ} without any 3-bet bluffing that is recommended on many low limit forums) now have game theoretical "proof" that we can get away with a lot of 3-bet bluffing on the button against a CO raiser.
Even against a TAG CO raiser with a solid ~25% opening range, you can 3-bet almost 8% on the button and there isn't anything he can do to exploit your loose 3-bets. And if he defends poorly, for example by not 4-bet-bluffing enough, or not being willing to use JJ/AQ as value hands, you can deviate from optimal play and attack him even harder. The first adjustment against a weak/passive CO raiser who folds a lot to 3-bets is to increase your fixed 3-bet bluff percentage for the candidate list. You might increase the bluff candidate 3-betting frequency from 40% to 60%. If Villain (and the blinds) doesn't adjust to your exploitative, loose 3-betting, you'll be printing money.
5. Summary
We have gone through the theory for game theory optimal(ish) raising/3-betting/4-betting/5-betting with the raiser out of position, and then we demonstrated how the theory can be implemented and used at the table.
We constructed optimal strategy pairs (one strategy for the raiser, and one for the 3-bettor) for two scenarios. First with the raiser in EP (UTG or MP) with a ~15% range, and then with the raiser in CO with a ~25% range. In both scenarios we gave the raiser a standard TAG opening range. We then deduced optimal strategies for both players as a function of the raisers opening range. We observed that the strategies for the CO scenario involved considerably looser ranges than the strategies for the EP scenario.
Our optimal strategy pairs confirmed that it's correct to 3-bet a wide range on the button against a CO raiser, even if he starts with a solid opening range, and defends optimally against a 3-bet. And if he doesn't defend optimally, we can loosen up even more. When you see a good and aggressive NL player dominate the table by 3-betting loosely in position, this is what happens. Loose, positional 3-betting is game theoretically correct, even against strong players. And against weak players, it's even more correct.
As a result of our work, we ended up with specific and concrete implementations of the theory, both as the raiser and as the 3-bettor. You can implement these strategies immediately in your own game by following the procedures outlined in this article. The strategy pairs depend on the raiser's opening range, but the ~15% and ~25% EP and CO ranges are relatively standard, and you will meet many opponents who play close to these ranges. If you need to apply the theory to other ranges, just plug them into the method, and construct the strategy pairs yourself.
We didn't look at small blind vs big blind in this article, even if it falls under the same category with the raiser out of position. I elected to leave this situation out, since blind vs blind dynamics is very dependent on the players involved, and the history between them. So it's difficult (and probably not very useful) to try and generalize and assign SB a standard opening range. But if you want to do this, you can use the method and construct the optimal strategy pair yourself.
Those of you who enjoy experimenting with ranges and numbers can now start to apply the optimal strategies in your own game, using your own ranges. Plug your own opening ranges for EP and CO into the theoretical "machinery" outlined in this article, and produce optimal strategy pairs, based on the ranges you use at the table. Remember that everything follows from the opening ranges, and remember that you will get both an optimal strategy for the raiser (you), and the positional 3-bettors optimal strategy against you.
Learn both parts of every optimal strategy pair. When you are the raiser OOP against an unknown 3-bettor, you can simply play optimally and assume that he is playing optimally too. You now have 100% knowledge about the raiser's range (since this is your range), and you know the optimal strategy pair for this situation exactly. Since the 3-bettor doesn't know these things precisely, he will make mistakes, and you won't.
When you have position on the raiser, things are slightly less straightforward, since he is the one who chooses the opening range. But against an unknown raiser, you can start by assuming he uses opening ranges that are close to your default ranges. Then you simply respond with the corresponding optimal 3-betting strategy. If he uses ranges that are only slightly different from yours, the optimal strategy pairs will be similar.
And if you should need optimal strategy pairs for opening ranges that are very different from your own (for example, if you meet a CO raiser who opens 45% of his hands), you can quickly construct the corresponding optimal strategy pair for him and yourself. Remember that you don't need to know his opening range in detail, you only need to know the number of hands that he opens. This number is relatively easy to estimate from a HUD, even if the sample isn't big.
To be prepared for any opening range you might encounter as a 3-bettor, you can sit down and do the work for 10%, 35% and 45% opening ranges on your own. Then you'll have have a set of optimal strategy pairs that cover almost all cases of EP and CO open-raising you are likely to encounter in practice.
Again, when you are the raiser, everything follows from your ranges, and you can do this work once and for all (assuming you have a well-defined set of default core opening ranges) and memorize it. Then you can play optimally from out of position, and sniff around for opponent leaks. If you don't find any, keep playing optimally. If you find some exploitable leaks, think about how you can adjust to increase your EV. But you don't have to adjust until you are sure. Remember, if you are playing optimally and your opponent isn't, you gain from his mistakes (although you might gain more by switching to an exploitative strategy).
A classic opponent mistake at the low limits is not 3-bet bluffing enough (or at all) in position. Love these guys, because it's easy to exploit them. For starters, they are "exploiting themselves" by allowing you to run over them by not 3-betting you nearly as often as they should. And when they do 3-bet, you know that they are strong. So you simply drop all your 4-bet bluffs from your range and continue with a 4-betting range of only value hands, planning to call a 5-bet. Easy decisions and easy game.
When someone has raised in front of you, you ideally want to use an optimal strategy for each opponent, and for each of his positions (since optimal 3-bet strategy is a function of the raiser's range). This might sound like a lot of work, but in practice it all follows from estimates about the ranges you meet. And small deviations don't change things dramatically. For example, when you know the strategy pair corresponding to a 15% opening range, you can apply the same strategies against a 12% raiser and an 18% raiser without losing much accuracy. You won't play optimally in these cases, but near-optimally is close enough. Besides, pin-pointing opponent opening ranges to within +/-1% or less is difficult, so using near-optimal strategies is the best we can hope for in practice.
The nest step of the process is the most interesting one. When you have trained optimal play, you will discover that it's now much easier to spot opponent mistakes. For example, when you come across an opponent who doesn't 4-bet bluff (and these are common at the low limits), you immediately know that this is a leak, and you know how to exploit it. Tight and straightforward players who refuse to 4-bet bluff can be exploited by 3-betting a lot, and not 5-bet bluffing at all. You can 3-bet a metric fuckton of bluff hands, and when they finally pick up a hand good enough to 4-bet, you fold all your bluffs and ship a tight value range (sometimes as tight as {KK+}). Just keep an eye on the other players to see if they are trying to exploit your loose 3-betting (tighten up a bit if they do), and you'll do very well in this spot.
Another leak you'll see is spazzy 4-betting from players with insufficient understanding of the theory behind optimal 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet wars. This might happen when you have driven someone crazy with your loose 3-betting, and he starts to tilt. Or when someone tries to fight back in a controlled manner, but he doesn't quite know how to do it (so he starts 4-bet bluffing way too much).
The first thing you have to realize when you are playing optimally, and then spotting a leak, is this: It's not necessary to deviate from optimal play to benefit from his mistakes. If you keep playing optimally, and your opponent doesn't, you will win from him in the long run, period. The question is now whether you should deviate from optimal play yourself, in order to win more. If you have a clear idea about how to exploit your opponent maximally, by all means go ahead and make the adjustment.
But be cautious when you adjust to spazzy and unpredictable opponents. Remember that your optimal 3bet/4-bet/5-bet strategies are designed to protect you, and there is nothing a maniac can do to exploit you in these scenarios, even if he raises and reraises at every opportunity. If you see concrete adjustments you can make to win more, go for it, but be careful if you tilt easily (preflop raising wars have a tendency to trigger tilt). Then you might be better off sticking to optimal play against hyper-aggressive opponents, let the ranges do the work for you. You can use your focus to terrorize the passive and easily exploitable players instead.
Finally, if you meet tough regs who don't give up preflop edge in these scenarios (at least any edge you can see), these optimal strategies will protect you from getting exploited. They can't take advantage of you in preflop 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet wars, so don't worry about it if they try. Follow the optimal strategies, and the mathematics of the situation will protect you. But don't forget to sniff for leaks against regs. Everybody has leaks, and your knowledge about optimal 3-/4-/5-betting will make it easier for you to find them. And pay close attention if you see a reg starting to tilt! Now he might blow up completely in preflop raising wars, and you can adjust accordingly.
I hope this article will be useful for those of you who find it difficult to play well in preflop 3-/4-/5-bet wars, and that you have learned to implement the optimal strategies in your own game. And for those who already knew these things, I hope that this systematic discussion of the topic has given you things to think about.
I chose to name this article "Optimal 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet strategies in NLHE 6-max - Part 1", even if a Part 2 hasn't been planned yet. But I do have some more ideas about the topic, and I might write more. For example, we could do one article about optimal strategy pairs with the raiser in position (e.g. after a 3-bet from the blinds). Then we could dedicate one article to discussion about optimal versus exploitative play, and talk about how to apply one or the other against different opponent types.
Good luck!
Bugs For my first NLHE article for Donkr, I have chosen a topic that I know many new players find difficult, namely correct strategies for 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet preflop wars in NLHE 6-max.Against weak low limit opposition, we can get away with playing an almost completely value-based game. We 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet mainly for value, and it's not a big mistake to assume our opponents are doing the same. If we reraise as a bluff, we usually limit ourselves to the occasional 3-bet bluff. A value-based style with little bluffing works well at small stakes because our opponents use more or less the same strategy, and many of them execute it poorly. Of course, every now and then we run into aggressive players who are capable of reraising as a bluff, but there are plenty of fish that will pay off our straightforward game, even if we bluff much less than is game theoretically optimal.But let's say our Hero has built a bankroll by patiently grinding the low limits, and now he wants to take a stab at $200NL. He will now experience a lot more 3-betting, especially if he's out of position.For example:$200NL6-handedHero ($200) raises to $7 with J T from UTG, it's folded to the button ($200) who 3-bets to $24, the blinds fold, and Hero folds.Straightforward, and although Hero expects to get bluffed some of the time, he really doesn't have any choice but to fold. It's correct that his hand can no longer be played for value, but as we shall see later, it's possible to turn it into a 4-bet bluff.At any rate, Hero plays on. The players behind him keep 3-betting him frequently when he is out of position, and Hero keeps folding weak hands to 3-bets. After a while, this hand occurs:$200NL6-handedHero ($200) raises to $7 with A J in MP, it's folded to button ($200) who 3-bets to $24, the blinds fold, and Hero folds.This is getting frustrating. Hero has a decent hand, but it's not strong enough to defend against a 3-bet from out of position, so Hero folds. But he is starting to feel exploited. If only he could get dealt a good hand and punish these bastards!What an inexperienced player now might do (as his frustration builds up more and more), is to make up his mind to fight back against the loose 3-bettors. But he doesn't quite know what to do,Let's look at two common (and sub-optimal) ways to defend against 3-betting, out of position with 100 BB stacks:$200NL6-handedHero ($200) raises til $7 with K Q in MP, button ($200) 3-bets to $24. Hero thinks for a bit, decides that this hand is too good to fold, but too weak to 4-bet, so he calls. 4 4 9 ($51)Hero ($176) checks, button ($176) bets $30, Hero folds.Hero is frustrated, but he doesn't see what else he could have done out of position with a hand of this type. Too strong to fold (at least in Hero's mind) against a loose 3-bettor, but not strong enough to 4-bet. Or? Hmmmmm .... Hero contemplates his next move, and soon another 3-bet pot occurs:$200NL6-handedHero ($200) raises to $7 with A J from UTG, MP ($200) 3-bets to $24. Hero decides to fight fire with fire, and he 4-bets pot to $75. Button 5-bets all-in, Hero calls. MP has K K . Hero screams in agony. 7 ($403) Q ($403) 4 ($403)Hero tears his clothing and sprinkles ashes over his head. Damn!!OK, I made up this story, but it illustrates several of the problems an ABC low limit player faces when he moves up to tougher games. He will get 3-bet left and right, so he will have to fold a lot out of position (which is correct). He realizes he has to fight back to avoid getting run over (also correct), but he's not quite sure how to do it. So his attempts to counter the aggression are often poorly executed, frustrating and tilt-inducing.For example, Hero might start calling 3-bets out of position with hands he feels are too good to fold, but not strong enough to 4-bet for value. This leads to many miserable experiences like Example 1.3. Or he might start 4-betting medium/weak hands without a clear understanding of whether he is doing it for value (planning to call a 5-bet), or if he is bluffing (planning to fold to a 5-bet).What our inexperienced Hero might not realize, is that his opponents' loose 3-betting doesn't necessarily mean they are willing to splash around with lots of weak hands in 4-bet and 5-bet pots. When two good and aggressive NLHE-players engage in 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet warfare preflop, this is what usually happens:This results in ranges that start loose, but get more and more (but never completely) weighted towards value. And it's usually plain wrong to assume you can 4-bet a medium hand like AJs for value against a loose 3-bettor, and expect to be a favorite when he 5-bets all-in. Yes, AJs is a decent hand against the range that 3-bet you, but it's crushed by the range that 5-bets you, and it's your opponent who decides when the 5th bet goes in (and that rarely happens unless he has the goods).Therefore, if you decide on a frustrated whim to "take a stand" against an aggressive and competent 3-bettor with a hand like AJs, you will discover that in some mysterious way he almost always manages to come up with a better hand when you get all-in preflop.This has lead many an inexperienced NLHE player to lose his stack, since these players:Let's look at Example 1.4 again. Hero open-raised AJs (correctly), and he got 3-bet. He then decided that his AJs was a good hand against Villain's 3-bet range (debatable, but not a big mistake), so he 4-bet for value (wrong!), planning to call a 5-bet all-in. Playing AJs for value after a 3-bet and going all-in with it was a big mistake. The 4-bet in itself was not a big mistake, since Villain has a lot of bluffs in his 3-betting range, and he will fold most of them to a 4-bet. So it's not a problem to 4-bet AJs as a bluff against a range full of 3-bet bluffs. But when Villain comes over the top with an all-in 5-bet, our AJs crumbles to dust (if Villain knows what he is doing).But our inexperienced Hero did not realize what had just happened when he got 5-bet, and he stuck with his plan of playing AJs for value against what he perceived to be a wide and weak range. The problem is that the range he facesisn't wide and weak, it's very narrow and very strong.Note what the real mistake was in this hand. 4-betting AJs against a wide range was not a big mistake in isolation, and neither was calling a 5-bet getting 2: 1. But the combination of 4-betting AJs +, now that was a big mistake against a competent opponent. It caused Hero to invest his remaining 96.5bb stack as a huge underdog. The problem was, as mentioned previously, that his opponent controlled when the 5th bet went in, and Villain made sure he had a hand.Our goal for this article is to give Hero a set of tools he can use to comfortably counter preflop aggression when he is sitting as the raiser out of position. We'll base our work on Hero's opening ranges, and based on these, we can deduce defensive strategies against positional 3-bets. And we will use game theory to design these strategies in such a way thatin these scenarios. Our work on Hero's game theory optimal defensive strategies also gives us a set of optimal 3-betting strategies for his opponent, so we kill two birds with one stone.We have here talked mostly about the ills of getting 3-bet when sitting out of position, and this is what I feel inexperienced players find hardest to deal with. But the mirror image of this scenario, with us being the 3-bettor in position, is also worth discussing. These are easier scenarios to play, but we will benefit a lot from understanding optimal 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet dynamics also from this perspective. We'll learn how to construct optimal 3-betting ranges, based on the raiser's opening range, and we'll learn how to play against a 4-bet.Regardless of whether we're the raiser or the 3-bettor, we want to understand which hands we can (re)raise for value, and which hands we (re)raise as bluffs. And above all else, we want it to be 100% clear which of these two things we are doingIn this article we'll design so-calledfor the raiser and the 3-bettor in the following scenario:- The raiser opens some range- A player behind him 3-bets- The raiser 4-bets or folds- The 3-bettor 5-bets, or folds to a 4-betNote that the raiser is always out of position (e.g. UTG, MP, or CO), and that no other players interfere.We'll define afor this scenario with 100bb stacks and standard bet sizing. Then we'll analyze our model, using mathematics and principles from game theory (but we'll keep it as simple as possible). We then construct game theory optimal(ish) strategy pairs for the raiser and the 3-bettor (one strategy for the raiser, and one matching strategy for the 3-bettor) that they can employ in their 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet wars.Both players are trying to play perfectly against the other, and both are assuming their opponent is trying to play perfectly as well. The two players now both zoom in on a perfect strategy, designed not to lose against their opponent's perfect strategy. And the result is a pair of strategies that are perfect against each other, and we have our optimal strategy pair.When we have learned these strategies, we have defensive (e.g. unexploitable) strategies we can use both as the raiser out of position, and as the 3-bettor in position. Using these optimal strategies guarantees that better players can't exploit us. They will also win against players who play poorly, although they will not win the maximum (if we want to exploit opponent leaks maximally, we have to deviate from optimal play ourselves, and use strategies that target specific leaks in our opponent's non-optimal strategies).Knowing optimal strategies also makes it easier to spot our opponents' mistakes (where we can define "mistake" as a deviation from optimal play). If we know what an opponentif he had played optimally, we can conclude that he has a weakness in his game if he chooses to do something different. And we might be able to exploit these weaknesses and turn them into leaks for him.Before we get started, I want to give credit to Cardrunners instructor Matthew Janda. During the spring of 2010 he published a 3-part video seriesat Stoxpoker, which contains most of the theory we use in this article. This video series was inspiring and eye-opening, but sadly it became unavailable after Stoxpoker shut down in May 2010.Matt Janda is now a Cardrunners instructor, and he continues to produce game theory related videos. His old videos from Stoxpoker might get moved over to Cardrunners, and if that happens, I recommend you check them out.Without further ado, let's get started:I have chosen an approach where we first go through the necessary math and theory quickly, and then we apply it by constructing optimal strategy pairs for two scenarios:- The raiser in early position (UTG or MP) with a 15% opening range- The raiser in CO with a 25% opening rangeLumping UTG and MP together under the label "EP" makes sense, since most players use very similar ranges for these two positions. The percentages we have chosen for EP and CO are typical TAG ranges that can be used under all game conditions.The exact ranges we use to illustrate the procedures aren't important. Our goal is that you learn to construct optimal strategy pair (one strategy for the raiser and one for the 3-bettor) based onopening ranges. And you will of course also be able to design optimal strategy pairs to use against specific opponents (not on the fly, but by doing a bit of analysis work between sessions).We use the following scenario:Note that Alice doesn't defend against 3-bets by calling out of position. Weconceivably design a defense strategy where we fold weak hands, 4-bet strong hands, and call with medium hands, but this is not a good strategy out of position with 100bb stacks.You have poor implied odds (due to low stack/pot ratio and being out of position) when you call for postflop value with implied odds hands. And it's difficult to steal and outplay Villain when you are out of position. And what you absolutely cannot do, is to call and then play fit-or-fold postflop. It will be much more fold than fit, and you are simply burning money by letting Villain c-bet his way to riches and early retirement on your expense.With regard to Alice's choice of 4-bet size, it's standard to use 25-30bb (where full pot would be 37.5bb) with 100bb stacks. The logic behind this is that with 100bb stacks, we are putting Villain in a shove-or-fold scenario, also when we 4-bet a bit less than pot. His 3-bet bluffs will still fold, and his strong hands will still shove. So we win the same when he folds, but lose less on our bluffs when he doesn't fold. In other words: We risk less for the same reward when we're bluffing, and we don't lose anything when we're 4-betting for value. We simply choose 27bb as a representative value for a less-than-pot 4-bet, and the math won't change much if you use any number between 25bb and 30b instead.Here are a few assumptions/statements we will use:The last statement needs an explanation: When we're 3-betting/4-betting/5-betting as a bluff, we should not lose money on our bluffing hands, and the worst of them should be no worse than break even. The same goes for when we're calling for pot odds. This makes sense if you think about it. When we're making a play that loses money, we should stop doing it to increase our EV.Note that we're not concerned about the effects of deception when we work with game theory. We're only concerned with immediate EV. Also, if we're making money on all our bluffs or our calls, we can make even more money by bluffing more and calling more. So we keep adding bluffs and calling hands until our weakest hands are at the break even point, and then we stop. Conversely, if we're losing money on some of our bluffing or calling hands, we remove them from our ranges. Again, this results in our weakest bluffing/calling hands being no worse than break even.Under these assumptions, we'll find anwith a raising strategy (including defense against a 3-bet and against a 5-bet) for Alice, and a 3-betting strategy (including defense against a 4-bet) for Bob. We'll find a unique strategy pair for each of Alice's positions (e.g. for each of her opening ranges). We'll soon see how these strategy pairs follow from Alice's opening range, but first, let's talk a bit about optimal strategy pairs:When our two players Alice and Bob are playing optimally against each other, Alice's strategy and Bob's strategy make up an optimal strategy pair. When both are playing optimally, neither of them can gain from changing to a different strategy. If one of them can gain from switching to another strategy, then the original strategy wasn't optimal.It's important to realize that a game theory optimal strategy doesn't try to maximize +EV against a random opponent. It's trying to maximize EV against an opponent who is also. Sometimes, this means the best result for both players is to break even. A game theory optimal strategy is first and foremost a, designed not to lose. However, an optimal strategy will win against players who are using non-optimal strategies. But If we see an opponent making big mistakes, we will winby switching to an, designed to exploit this opponent's specific leaks maximally.But by changing our strategy from optimal to exploitative, we are moving away from optimal play. By doing so, we are creating weaknesses in our strategy, and other players might be able to exploit those weaknesses (although they might not see them). But if the weak player we are trying to exploit has big leaks, this trade off will usually be worth it. The art of playing against fish and regs at the same time is to exploit the fish, while we're defending ourselves against the regs. Against very poor opponents, we use very exploitative strategies. Against players who are as good as us, or better, we can fall back on optimal strategies so that they can't exploit us.To balance these two goals well, we need to have an understanding of what optimal play is. Playing optimally (or, more likely, close to optimally) defends us against the good players, and understanding optimal play also makes it easier to spot mistakes in weak players (where "mistake" can be defined as deviating from optimal play).With these concepts at the back of our mind, we move on to the mathematics behind optimal strategies for raising, 3-betting, 4-betting, and 5-betting with 100bb stacks:We work our way through the raise/3-bet/4-bet/5-bet war, one step at a time, and construct all the mathematical tools we need. We jump back and forth between Alice and Bob, and we'll see how they influence each others' strategies when they both are trying to play perfectly against each other, assuming the other player is also trying to play perfectly.The process starts with Alice raising some opening range known both to her and to Bob. When Bob 3-bets, Alice's most pressing concern is the following:So how often does Alice have to 4-bet? This follows from the pot odds Bob is getting on his 3-bet bluffs. There's 1.5 + 3.5 =5bb in the pot from the blinds and Alice's raise, and Bob 3-bets to 12bb to win this. Bob is then risking 12bb to win 5bb, and he's getting effective pot odds 5 : 12 on a 3-bet bluff.He then needs to win more than 12/(5 + 12) =70% to have a profitable bluff. So if Alice folds more than 70%, Bob will have an automatic profit by 3-bet bluffing any two. Alice needs to prevent this, so she has to 4-bet enough to make Bob's bluffs break even.Alice's optimal 4-betting strategy is therefore to 4-bet 30% of her opening range, and she will 4-bet a mix of value hands (planning to call a 5-bet) and bluffs (planing to fold to a 5-bet). We'll compute Alice's optimal value/bluff ratio in a moment, but first we have to find Bob's optimal ranges for 3-betting and 5-betting. These ranges follow from Alice's opening range:When Alice 4-bets to 27bb, she is risking 23.5bb (27bb minus he 3.5bb raise) more to win a 17bb pot (1.5bb from the blinds + Alice's 3.5bb raise + Bob's 12bb 3-bet). The effective pot odds for Alice's 4-bet bluffs are 17 : 23.5, and she can make a profit by 4-bet bluffing any two (of the hands she open-raised) if Bob folds his 3-betting hands more than 23.5/(23.5 + 17) =58%.Bob can't allow Alice to 4-bet bluff any two cards profitably, so he defends optimally by folding exactly 58% of the time, and 5-betting all-in (including some 5-bet bluffs as we shall soon see) 42% of the time. Therefore, 42% of Bob's 3-bets need to be value hands that he plans to 5-bet all-in (including some 5-bet bluffs). We now define aas a 3-bet where we plan to 5-bet all-in after a 4-bet. If this is not our plan, we are making athat we will fold to a 4-bet.To make these percentages easy to remember, we round Bob's optimal 3-bet value/bluff ratio to 40/60. So now we know that 60% of Bob's 3-bets should be bluffs, and 40% should be for value (including some 5-bet bluffs). But we still don't know how many hands Bob should 3-bet overall. To find this number, we first have to find which hands Bob can 5-bet for value.Bob first chooses the type of hands to 5-bet bluff with. He wants hands that have decent equity when called, and we can use Axs hands A5s-A2s for this purpose. Axs hands work as blockers against Alice's AA/AK (an ace in Bob's hand makes it less likely Alice has AA/AK), and they always have at least an overcard when Alice has another high pair. They also have straight and flush potential.Axs has minimum ~30% equity when we 5-bet and get called, even against a strong range, as shown below:So Bob will 5-bet a mix of true value hands and some Axs bluff hands, and he expects to have about 30% equity when his bluffs get called. So when he 5-bet bluffs and gets called, he will have ~30% equity in a 201.5bb pot where he invested 88bb with the 5-bet. Bob first 3-bet to 12, so the 5-bet is 88bb more. On average, Bob gets 0.30 x 201.5 =60bb back from the pot, so his net loss after 5-betting and getting called is 88 - 60 =28bb.The pot size before Bob's 5-bet is 40.5bb (1.5 from the blinds, + 27 from Alice's 4-bet + 12 from Bob's 3-bet). So Bob is effectively risking 28bb to win 40.5bb when he is 5-bet bluffing. The effective pot odds are 40.5 : 28, and Bob needs to win at least 28/(28 + 40.5) =40% to profit from 5-bet bluffing any two (or more precisely, any Axs hand, since we base our calculations on having ~30% equity when called).For Alice, this means she has to call a 5-bet 60% of the time to prevent Bob from making a profit by 5-betting any two. So Alice's 4-betting range has to contain 60% value hands and 40% bluff hands. Now we know everything we need to know about Alice's 4-betting range. She 4-bets 30% of her opening range, and she uses a 60/40 value/bluff ratio. We'll summarize Alice's total optimal strategy below, but first we'll find out how often Bob should 3-bet.We know which type of hands Bob should 5-bet bluff (Axs), and we know he should use a 40/60 value/bluff ratio (which, coincidentally is the opposite of the ratio for Alice's 4-bet range). The last piece of information we need is Bob's3-bet percentage in an optimal 3-betting strategy. We find the answer by observing that Bob should 5-bet bluff enough to make Alice's weakest value hands break even. He he bluffs more, Alice can gain by calling with more hands, and then Bob's strategy can't be optimal. And if he bluffs less, Alice can gain by folding more hands, and Bob's strategy can't be optimal in this case either.How many Axs hands we need to make Alice's weakest 5-bet calling hands break even varies with Alice's value range (60% of 30% of her opening range), which follows from her opening range. So we have to compute this result on a per-case basis, for every one of Alice's opening ranges. We'll give a quick example in the summary below, and the procedure will be thoroughly discussed later in the article.We summarize everything we have learned about Alice's optimal strategy for raising, 4-betting and calling 5-bets:- She needs to 4-bet 30% of her opening range- Her 4-betting range should have a 60/40 value/bluff ratioSo Alice's optimal strategy is:So Alice's value hands are the top 18% of her opening range. For example, if she opens 15% from UTG, this corresponds to a value range of 0.18 x 0.15 =2.7% of all hands. This makes up 0.027 x 1326 =36 combos, e.g approximately the range {QQ+, AK} =34 combos. We'll use this value range example when we summarize Bob's optimal strategy below. And then we'll illustrate each strategy step thoroughly when we apply the theory to Alice's EP and CO openraises.We summarize everything we have learned about Bob's optimal strategy for 3-betting and 5-betting:For example, if Alice raises 15% from the UTG, her optimal value range is {QQ+, AK} as shown previously. Bob chooses value hands that are at least 50% against this range, and his pure value range becomes {KK+}. Then he adds Axs hands as 5-bet bluffs until Alice's weakest value hands (QQ and AK) are break even against his total 5-bet range.Alice then calls her remaining 73 BB to win a 189.5 bb pot (1.5 from the blinds, 100 from Bob, 27 from Alice's 4-bet), so her pot odds are 128.5 : 73. She needs minimum 73(/128.5 + 73) =36% equity to profit from calling, so Bob makes sure her weakest value hands have against his 5-bet-range. Later in the article we'll show that Bob ends up with a total 5-bet range of {KK+, A5s, A4s} when Alice's value range is {QQ+, AK}This gives Bob {KK+, A5s, A4s} =20 value combos that he 3-bets, planning to 5-bet all-in. Then he picks hands to 3-bet bluff until he has a 40/60 ratio between value combos and bluff combos. Bob needs 60/40 =1.5 bluff combos for every value combo, so he will choose 1.5 x 20 =30 bluff combos against Alice's {QQ+, AK} value range.You should memorize both Alice's strategy and Bob's strategy until you know them cold. It's not really complicated at all. Just remember that Bob uses a 40/60 value/bluff ratio for his 3-bets, and Alice uses a 60/40 ratio for her 4-bets, and then you know the most of it. Value hands are per definition hands we plan to raise and reraise until we are all-in. Bluff hands are hands we plan to fold if our opponent reraises us back.We now begin the job of constructing optimal strategy pairs for Alice and Bob. First when Alice raises a 15% range from EP, and then when she raises a 25% range from CO. We'll do this thoroughly and methodically, so that you can learn the procedures inside out. I hope you'll see that these strategies aren't really complicated to construct and then apply at the table.We'll now find the optimal strategy pair for Alice and Bob when Alice open-raises from early position (EP =UTG or MP), and it's folded to Bob in position.It's of course possible to vary EP opening ranges a lot, according to opponent tendencies and general game conditions. But the core strategy for a typical TAG is to open somewhere around 15% of his hands (plus/minus a couple of percentage points in both directions) from both EP positions, and slightly tighter from UTG than from MP.We'll construct all strategies/ranges with great detail for this scenario, so that there won't be any doubt about how to apply the theory. Then we'll move on to the scenario with Alice in CO, and do this quickly, with brief comments along the way.We assume Alice is opening with a ~15% EP range. Note that any 15'ish% EP-range will do, since our work is based on the numbers of hands in the range, and not the specific hands it contains. Obvious value hands like high pairs and AK have to be included, since these hands have a job to do in the ranges for 4-betting and calling 5-bets. But the exact mixture of medium and weak hands in Alice's range is irrelevant.We give Alice the following range:22+ATs+ AJo+KTs+ KQoQTs+J9s+T9s98s87s76s186 combos14%We now place Bob somewhere with position on Alice. Alice open-raises and it's folded to Bob, who 3-bets. Both players want to play perfectly against the other, and both assume the other is also trying to play perfectly.Alice starts by defining her value range. This is per definition the hands she plans to 4-bet for value and then call a 5-bet with. She counts the total number of combos in her opening range (186), and she knows that she on average has to defend 30% of her total range against a 3-bet. She also knows that the optimal value/bluff ratio of her 4-betting range is 60/40. So she 4-bets 0.60 x 0.30 =18% of her opening range for value, and 0.40 x 0.30 =12% as a bluff.Alice then 4-bets 18% of the 186 combos for value, e.g. 0.18 x 186 =33 value combos. This corresponds almost exactly to the value range {QQ+, AK} =34 combos (a couple of combos too many or too few doesn't matter much). This is a standard value range from EP, also for players who haven't studied optimal raise/3-bet/4-bet/5-bet strategies.Now the 4-bet bluff range. These are the hands Alice 4-bets and then folds to a 5-bet. There are two ways to define the bluff 4-bet range: We can choose some specific bluff combos and always 4-bet them, or we can 4-bet all the non-value hands a certain % of the time.Let's illustrate both methods:If we choose specific bluff combos, we need 12% of 186 combos, e.g. 0.12 x 186 =22 bluff combos. For example, we might choose AQ (16) + JJ (6) which gives us exactly 22 combos. Or we can choose something different, since it doesn't matter what we use for bluffs when Bob either folds or 5-bets all-in. When Bob doesn't fold to our bluffs, he 5-bets, and we have to fold, so our 4-bet bluff hands never get to see a flop. And when they never get to see a flop, their postflop value is irrelevant.But note that a hand like AQ works as a blocker against Bob's premium hands (AA, AK, QQ). So when Alice uses AQ as a bluff, it will be less likely that Bob has a hand he can 5-bet for value. Keep this in mind if you are choosing specific hands to always use for 4-bet bluffing.My preferred method, and also the easiest method to remember. We only need to remember one number, namely the static percentage Alice 4-bet bluffs her non-value hands. Let's find this percentage once and for all:Alice 4-bets 18% of her opening range for value, and she's left with 82% non-value hands she can use for 4-bet bluffing. We now choose to use all these hands a fixed percentage of the time, so that the effective total value/bluff ration is 60/40. We now want:So we 4-bet bluff all non-value hands 15% of the time and fold them the remaining 85% of the time. Note that this percentage is universal for Alice. No matter what her opening range is, she can always use this percentage to obtain a 60/40 value bluff ratio for her 4-bets.Let's double-check to see that this works the way it should:When Alice has raised some opening range and gotten 3-bet, we have deduced that her optimal value 4-bet range is 18% of her total range. If she 4-bets the remaining 82% of her range as a bluff 15% of the time, her overall bluff percentage will be 0.15 x 0.82 =0.12 =12%. So her to |
Illustrating the intellectual dangers of a Christian education, a brainwashed young woman delivers a shrill and historically inaccurate vision of America, claiming the U.S. was ”founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
In a vulgar and demoralizing display of naive Christian imperialism, young Karis Peters delivered a spoken word poem at the 2015 ACE International Convention in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Peters, hailed by some Christian extremists as a “21st Century Esther” recited a revised version of Carman’s “We Need God In America Again.”
Declaring “The only hope for America is Jesus,” Peters delivered a shrill rant full of historical inaccuracies and Christian hubris. For example:
Our country was founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We eliminated God from the equation of American life. Thus, eliminating the reason this nation first began. From beyond the grave, I hear the voices of our founding fathers plead: ‘You need God in America again.’
and:
If you want to see kids live right, stop handing out evolution and start handing out the word of God.
and:
The only hope for America is Jesus.
To be clear: Peters is a victim – a victim of parents and adults blinded by religious superstition and ignorance, a victim of parents and adults willing to use children as canon fodder in their holy war, their jihad for Jesus.
To be clear: The blame rests with the parents and other adults involved in the so-called education of this young woman.
One can only be sad and depressed after witnessing this obviously bright and talented young woman recite such foolish nonsense. We can only hope she manages to escape her bondage to ignorance in the service of extreme Christian dogma, and develops the critical thinking tools denied to her by her extreme Christian education.
Ultimately, when all is said and done, one is left with the following question: When does religious indoctrination become child abuse?
(H/T Christian Nightmares, Friendly Atheist) |
The pastor of a black church interrupted Donald Trump’s remarks in Flint, Michigan, on Wednesday as the Republican presidential nominee began to attack his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“Mr. Trump, I invited you here to thank us for what we’ve done in Flint, not to give a political speech,” the Rev. Faith Green Timmons told Trump as she approached the businessman.
Trump turned to the pastor and immediately changed course. “Oh, oh, oh, OK, that’s good. Then I’m going to back on Flint. OK,” he said, before addressing the community once more.
Trump spoke in front of about 50 Flint residents at Bethel United Methodist Church, which has distributed aid and water to the community during the lead crisis that started in 2014. The GOP nominee praised residents for their response to the crisis, before launching into an attack against Clinton and her support for trade agreements such as NAFTA. Earlier in the day, he toured the city’s water treatment plant.
IRS regulations bar tax-exempt churches like the one Trump spoke at from participating in electioneering. Timmons released a statement prior to Trump’s visit, clarifying that his presence at the church “in no way represents an endorsement of his candidacy.”
“What we pray is that it conveys a final example of a faithful, intelligent, historically African-American congregation at work, serving and volunteering among the people of Flint as we work through this crisis of national impact. We cannot let this story drift from national attention for any reason,” she added.
Watch the video above. |
When Sen. Bernie Sanders regales his campaign crowds with a portrait of The Way Things Are Going to Be, his “Medicare for All” program takes center stage. In a Sanders administration, the candidate promises, every man, woman, and child in America will share in a government-run, government-funded health-care system.
But the single-payer system that Sanders is evangelizing isn’t just a figment of progressive utopian fantasies. Single-payer health care has already been tried—and failed—in Sanders’s home state of Vermont, where the proposal collapsed under its own weight last year before it was ever implemented.
Deciding why it failed in Vermont is key to whether you buy into the candidate’s promise to extend the program nationwide.
According to critics, from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman to USA Today’s editorial board, Sanders’s single-payer plan is something between a well-intentioned fool’s errand and a political pipe dream, an unrealistic idea that has been proven not to work in the senator’s own backyard.
But closer to home, activists say Vermont’s failure even to implement its plan for universal health care was a failing of political will, not the policy itself. In better hands, they say, the policy can still work. To know the difference, it’s important to understand how Vermont got so close to single-payer in the first place.
In 2011, the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature approved a government-run, government-financed health-care system for all Vermonters. The state’s new Democratic governor, Peter Shumlin, signed the bill into law after campaigning on a pledge to enact single-payer himself. A cost estimate of the program, known as Green Mountain Care, was ordered, but long delayed.
Elections came and went, including Shumlin’s own 2014 reelection, which was so close Vermont law required the final decision to go to the legislature after Shumlin failed to win a majority of the vote in November. As the state waited for the legislature to take up the election results, Shumlin announced that he would not pursue single payer after all when the long-awaited financial projections showed “the promise and the peril” of a single-payer system. The promise, of course, was a chance to give nearly every Vermonter reliable access to quality health care.
But the very real peril came in the cost for the program, an estimated $4.3 billion a year, almost the size of the state’s entire $4.9 billion budget. To make up for the $2 billion shortfall, taxes would have to go up, a lot. Businesses would see an 11.5 percent payroll tax increase, on top of whatever they chose to provide for employee health care, while individual income taxes could jump by up to 9 percent. The report recommended against moving forward “due to the economic shock and transition issues,” and Shumlin agreed.
“I wanted to fix this at the state level. And I thought we could,” Shumlin said in a statement issued with the financial report. But he called implementing single-payer health care in 2015 “unwise and untenable.”
Despite the ominous budget projections at the time, single-payer advocates now say they believe Shumlin’s decision was purely political.
“Right up to the last gubernatorial election, Gov. Shumlin was saying he was going to do everything he could to make single-payer health care a reality in the state. That was quite frankly why we didn’t run a candidate against him,” said Kelly Mangan, the executive director of the Vermont Progressive Party. “Almost immediately, he turned around and said, ‘Oh, yeah, we can’t afford single-payer health care. It’s not going to happen.”
Mangan described single-payer advocates today as “fatigued and very disheartened.” As Vermont’s state budget continues to be squeezed by Medicaid costs, she said the possibility of returning to the issue any time soon seems unlikely. She also worries that Vermont’s example will damage future prospects nationally. “I think it will have a ripple effect. People will use it as an excuse to do nothing by saying, ‘If they couldn’t do it there, then it can’t be done,’” she said.
Dr. Gerald Friedman, an economics professor at UMass-Amherst and a part-time Vermonter, has worked with Sanders to develop and calculate the cost of his plan and says the budget wasn’t the problem for the Vermont proposal. The governor was the problem.
“On the economics, it would have been cheaper, but the governor just lost the political will,” Friedman said.
But the professor acknowledged that any national health care proposal from Sanders would face the same political headwinds that Shumlin ran into. “It’s going to be a tough road, and Vermont is a lesson,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that it happened the way it did.”
Even with the Vermont debacle in the rearview mirror and Friedman’s own projections that Sanders’s “Medicare for All” would cost north of $14 trillion over 10 years, the politics of single-payer are still working for Sanders. The latest Kaiser poll showed 81 percent of Democrats favor a “Medicare for All” proposal, while 60 percent of independents favor it, too.
Clinton has dismissed Sanders’s proposal as unrealistic and a danger to the reforms that have already been enacted through the Affordable Care Act. That argument seems to be falling flat in New Hampshire, where the latest WMUR poll showed Sanders trouncing Clinton by nearly 30 points. But at least Clinton can count on some support when the campaign gets to Vermont. Gov. Shumlin, who will not run for reelection, has announced he’s with her. |
Piltdown Man is one of the most famous scientific hoaxes in history. A new paper in Royal Society Open Science provides compelling evidence that there was just one forger, rather than many. Also, the bones used to create the fakes came from a single orang-utan specimen and at least two human skulls.
“The people at the Natural History Museum [in London] have never stopped looking at Piltdown Man,” lead author Isabel de Groote, a paleoanthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.S., told Gizmodo. As new technologies become available, the specimens are re-examined, in hopes of shedding light on the remaining mysteries. This time around, the analyses included CT scanning, ancient DNA analysis, spectroscopy, and radiocarbon dating.
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When paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward and lawyer and amateur antiquarian Charles Dawson announced their discovery of unusual fossils in a gravel pit near the town of Piltdown in December 1912, it caused an immediate sensation. The two men claimed to have excavated human skull fragments and a distinctly ape-like jawbone with two worn molar teeth, along with some stone tools and the fossilized remains of animals.
Since the bones were found next to each other in the pit, surely, the men argued, they all came from a single creature—technically called Eoanthopus dawsoni, but soon nicknamed Piltdown Man. Many hailed the find as the long-sought missing link proving that man and apes were evolutionarily linked.
Woodward and Dawson presented a reconstruction of what such a skull might have looked like to the Geological Society of London that same month, speculating that the individual to whom it belonged must have lived 500,000 ago. More such fossils were excavated at the original Piltdown site over the next few years, including a canine tooth and an oddly curved slab of bone resembling a cricket bat.
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Dawson died in 1916, but the year before, he wrote to Woodward claiming he had found three more fossil fragments (including a molar) from another skull at a second site just a couple of miles from the first one. The Piltdown 2 site was never found, and Woodward didn’t present the new fragments to the society until several months after Dawson’s death.
There were certainly skeptics within the scientific community when the discovery was announced, but eventually Piltdown Man was accepted as the real deal. It took 40 years before a team of researchers at the British Museum uncovered the fakes in 1953, using the then-new technique of fluorine dating. They found that the bones were not all the same age. The upper skull was 50,000 years old, and the ape-like jawbone just a few decades old, most likely taken from a modern orang-utan. There was also evidence that the jawbone had been stained with potassium dichromate to give it an older, reddish-brown appearance.
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So it was clearly a hoax. But was Dawson the sole perpetrator, or did he have help from a fellow forger? Or was it someone else entirely? Woodward, at least, seems to have a been a true believer, continuing the search for more such fossils until his death in the 1940s.
One suspect was Martin Hinton, a British Museum staffer who didn’t like Dawson and may have nursed a grudge. Some surmised he may have planted additional fossils after the first “discovery,” as a way to discredit his adversary—or at least let Dawson know he was onto him. Still others have argued that a young French priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was present when the canine tooth was found, may have planted that particular artifact. Even Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made the list of suspects, since he lived near Piltdown, was a paleontology buff, and was rather hostile to the theory of evolution.
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This latest analysis exonerates the usual suspects and pins the blame on Dawson alone, since the forger’s modus operandi was so consistent among all the fakes, and a limited number of specimens were used to create all the fake fossils. He brought the first fossils to Woodward, and nobody ever uncovered a new specimen when he wasn’t present at the site. No more Piltdown fossils were found after Dawson’s death in 1916. He had the necessary access and connections, and he knew that the British scientists would expect to see “a large brain, ape-like face and jaws, and heavily fossilized materials that indicated great antiquity” in any missing link, the authors write.
And Dawson turned out to be a prolific forger—at least 38 fake finds, according to de Groote, including a stone axe, a fraudulent flint mine at the Lavant Caves, and what he claimed was one of the first bronze statuettes linked to Roman times. “He clearly had been doing this for a very long time,” she said.
Not coincidentally, the paper’s been published on the 100th anniversary of Dawson’s death (August 10, 1916).
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The CT scans and DNA sequencing analysis show quite clearly that the teeth and jawbone came from a single orang-utan, most likely a relative of the apes found in Borneo. Two or three human skulls were also used in the forgery, likely dating to the medieval period.
There was gravel from Piltown in the bones and teeth, and also a kind of putty—what a dentist would have used at the time to make a white filling. The putty had been used to fill holes and repair broken bones, and there was evidence that the molars had been removed and then re-set in the jaw. This clearly links the fossils found at the Piltdown 1 and Piltdown 2 sites.
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So is the case now closed? Not quite. At least one paleoanthropologist isn’t ready to exclude the possibility that Dawson had an accomplice—namely, the French priest, Teilhard de Chardin, who had a reputation as being a prankster, according to Francis Thackery to the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. “My view is that Teilhard was an advisor to Dawson and that the motive behind the forgery was that it was initially a joke against [Smith] Woodward,” he told Science magazine.
There is also still the question of why the canine is a darker reddish-brown than the other bones. And where did Dawson get his putty? Plus, the ancient DNA analysis of the human bones came up empty, as did the radiocarbon dating, although they may be as much as 1000 years old. De Groote said they opted not to go deeper into the bone to remove more sample material for a re-test. “We decided, let’s leave them and maybe several years from now, other new technologies will come around,” she said. “Although fake, the fossils do have cultural value. They’re almost antiques and we don’t want to destroy them.”
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The paper is surprisingly readable, due in large part to de Groote’s desire to “write the story rather than a [typical] science paper,” thereby providing a unifying framework for the different analyses. Because let’s face it: it’s one hell of a story. And in this case, that story enhances, rather than detracts from, the scientific content.
There’s even a section speculating about Dawson’s possible motivations, based on historians’ analysis of the many letters and papers Dawson left behind. “That’s the hardest thing for me as a scientist, to do,” de Groote admitted. “I look at numbers and images, I say this is right or wrong.” The question of why is much more difficult to answer, but Dawson certainly had high ambitions for his scientific career, complaining in a 1909 letter that he was still waiting for that one “big ‘find’” that would cement his reputation and earn him a fellowship with the Royal Society.
Dawson died before any such election could take place, but he fooled a great many smart people for several decades. The authors write that this should serve as a warning to not let our preconceived notions cloud our view of the evidence. “It was a lesson we had to learn the hard way,” said de Groote. “I just hope it doesn’t happen again.”
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[Royal Society Open Science] |
MARTIN COUNTY, Fla. -- Sheriff's deputies were called to Kokomo Lane in Martin County, Florida, on Monday evening because a neighbor told 911 he'd been stabbed trying to break up a fight.
CBS Tampa affiliate WPEC reports that when the first deputy arrived, the sheriff said she had found a man on top of another one in a driveway, biting his face.
The sheriff said the suspect was removing the victim's flesh with his teeth. Eventually, multiple deputies and a K-9 pounced, trying to remove the suspect from the prone man on the ground. They used a stun gun, but only after use of great force from every law enforcement officer available could they remove him.
The victim was pronounced dead at the scene. His wife was found dead as well inside the garage of their home.
The age and identity of the victims and suspect has not been provided. The sheriff would only say the suspect and the deceased couple knew each other.
The Good Samaritan who called 911 and tried to rescue his neighbor suffered substantial injuries, WPEC reports. He was airlifted to St. Mary's Hospital where he underwent emergency surgery. His condition is not known at this time.
The suspect was also taken to St. Mary's, where he is undergoing treatment. His motive is not known at this time.
"When we see a case like this, when someone is biting off pieces of somebody's face, could it be flakka, the answer is it absolutely could be flakka case, we don't know," Martin County Sheriff William Snyder said, according to CBS Miami.
Flakka is a designer drug that can be snorted, smoked, injected or swallowed, and has been seen in a large number of cases of bizarre and uncontrollable behavior in Florida in the past year.
Flakka is most typically made from the chemical alpha-PVP, which is a synthetic version of the amphetamine-like stimulant cathinone. Cathinones are chemicals derived from the khat plant grown in the Middle East and Somalia, where the leaves are frequently chewed for a euphoric buzz.
It's the same class of chemical that's used to make so-called bath salts, a drug that was found to be behind a number of alarming incidents, including the case of a man in Miami who allegedly chewed another man's face while high on bath salts in 2012.
The immediate and long-term effects of cathinones can rival some of the strongest crystal meth and cocaine.
Sheriff Snyder said of the Martin County case: "It will be some time before we get any kind of toxicology report, but I would not be surprised, though, if we end up finding out that is the case." |
Real Ghostbusters star Slimer passed away peacefully at his home in Beverly Hills at the weekend, his agent has confirmed. He was a ghost, and therefore of indeterminate age.
Slimer rose to fame in the animated adaption of the movie Ghostbusters, a hit with audiences worldwide for seven seasons in the 80’s.
Speaking about the role in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2001, he said “As an actor it was a dream come true for me. When I saw the movie I just thought ‘That’s me, that’s my life up there’. When I heard they were putting together a TV series I got on to my agent straight away. ‘Get me an audition, whatever it takes!’ I shouted, but he couldn’t really make me out over the phone. I’ve got a ridiculous voice and the handset gets all clogged up with goo.”
Slimer was subsequently cast as the iconic lime-green spook, going on to appear in 147 episodes. He brought his own twist to the role.
“I said right from the get-go I wanted his character to be sympathetic. I thought there was a naive vulnerability there that hadn’t been fully explored in the movie. He just basically shoveled sausages into his mouth and attacked Bill Murray. I felt there was more driving this guy than that.”
Slimer was rewritten as a friendly pet of the Ghostbusters, who paid their own personal tributes yesterday.
The cartoon version of Peter Venkman released a statement that read: “As the guy who did my voice died in 2001 I am unable to say anything at this sad time. To put on the page my feelings about that little fella is just too painful. So I’ll simply say this. He was a friend.”
The Cartoon version of Egon Spengler said: “I spent a lot of time pouring my heart out to Slimer. He was a great listener. More than that, he was a disgusting individual.”
In later years the series was re-branded as Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters, but by this stage many thought the show to be past its best.
“I disappeared up my own butthole” the star told Time Magazine in 2005. My behavior became unacceptable. I would spray whipped cream into my mouth, wash it down with a gallon of cream soda and a carton of fried chicken, then burp and smear myself all over the rest of the cast in a kind of frenzy. I recognize now I must have been difficult to work with.”
After the show’s cancellation in 1991 Slimer concentrated on low-key hauntings of derelict buildings, a passion he had enjoyed before taking up acting.
Dan Aykroyd said last night: “How can a ghost die? That doesn’t make any sense”, but Dan Aykroyd says a lot of things.
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Yuuta Banda poses for a photo with OriHime, his robot avatar. Image: OryLab
When Yuuta Banda was just four years old, he suffered a car accident that left him paralyzed, connected to a respiratory machine, and confined to bed for life. But almost two decades later, he's been able to experience different places, and even find a job thanks to OriHime, his robot avatar.
"At first I couldn't understand what was so great about OriHime, but I gradually learned through using it that [the robot] afforded people with a sense of presence," Banda told me in an email. "I felt a greater sense of satisfaction as I spoke with people in different places to me through the robot."
OriHime, created by Japanese startup OryLab, is a portable robot about the same height as a laptop screen that acts as an avatar for a human operator. When I first saw it in OryLab's Tokyo office, it looked like a cross between a power ranger and a sea creature. Its creators argue that screen-on-wheels type telepresence devices like the one that projected US whistleblower Edward Snowden's face during a 2014 TED Talk can sometimes make it seem like you're talking with someone far away through a window. Their robot, they say, makes it feel like the person you're speaking to remotely is actually by your side—embodied through the robot.
OriHime looks at the author reflected in the smartphone that is controlled by Akirahime. Image: Emiko Jozuka
The startup, which has been supported by angel investors since its founding in 2012, is in the midst of securing its first round of venture capital for its product, which it wants to be used in everything from social settings like parties to serious business meetings.
OryLab CEO Kentaro Yoshifuji initially dreamt up the robot when he was unable to attend school for three years owing to an illness. Years later, he met Yuki Akirahime, OryLab CFO, who shared a similar experience when she was confined to a hospital bed for six months as a high school student. The experience led her to miss out on giving a presentation in the US when she won a prize at the Japan Science and Engineering Challenge (JSEC) in 2006.
"Yoshifuji and I both had a period where it was hard for us to go outside due to both our physical and psychological states," explained Akirahime. "If I had had an alter ego, then it could have gone to the US on my behalf, and I could've just given the presentation from the hospital in Japan."
OriHime the robot demoes one of its ten poses. Image: Emiko Jozuka
Banda, who connected with OryLab CEO Kentaro Yoshifuji via Facebook, has been using the robot for almost two years. He currently performs secretarial duties full-time for OryLab from his home in northern Japan. To control his robot counterpart in the Tokyo office, Banda either speaks directly into a microphone or selects commands by moving a pen connected to a mousepad with his chin.
I'd really like this robot to be used by people [who can't move] owing to incurable diseases, and for it to provide these people with a sense of purpose within society"
The Wi-Fi-connected, battery-powered, and app-controlled robot has an onboard camera that acts as the eyes for its human operator, flippers that move to reflect its user's moods, and a microphone that projects the user's voice. OriHime—whose name comes from a fairytale about a goddess who can only see her beloved, Hikoboshi, once a year—currently has ten moves that range from a nod to show agreement, a side-to-side head movement that means no, and a flipper tap denoting a special phrase (nandeyanen) unique to the Kansai region in the south of Honshu, Japan's main island, to indicate affectionate disagreement when someone says something a bit dumb.
"I'd really like this robot to be used by people [who can't move] owing to incurable diseases, and for it to provide these people with a sense of purpose within society," said Banda, who mentioned how people in similar situations to him could also find a way to enter the labor force through the robot.
The idea of telepresence robots has always been big in Japan, with veteran researcher Susumu Tachi spending over 30 years perfecting his concept, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro giving lectures via a lifelike doppelganger android, and entrepreneur Tatsuki Adiyana creating a VR headset that lets people see the world through the eyes of an avatar teddy bear. Yet these ideas have yet to make it commercially—one thing OryLab is trying to change with OriHime.
So far OryLab—which has nine employees—has made close to 100 OriHime robots. Fifty have been rented out; some for free and others at a charge of 300,000 YEN ($277) per month. The rest are undergoing testing. The company is aiming to have made at least 300 robots by the end of this year, and want to produce close to 1,000 in 2017. It also wants to bring the robot's rental fee down to 10,000 YEN ($92) per month. Akirahime explained that the startup prefered renting out its robots as opposed to selling them as the software is constantly being improved based on user feedback.
OryLab co-founder and CFO Akirahime with OriHime in Tokyo. Image: Emiko Jozuka
For Banda, who initially worked his way from an internship to a full-time position at OryLab, OriHime has levelled his experience of the workplace, making it a more democratic space where all can participate.
"Even now, I'm having my presence felt in OryLab's office in Tokyo through OriHime. I take part in meetings, attend lectures with the team," said Banda. "I'm really just in the middle of making up for 20 years worth of hospitalization and experiencing the world."
Cool Japan is a column about the quirky and serious happenings in the Japanese scientific, technological and cultural realms. It covers the unknown, the mainstream, and the otherwise interesting developments in Japan. |
It might have been the sight of a London taxi mooching through the wilds of Kazakhstan, or maybe it was the curious image of a Lamborghini Huracán pinned down a ski slope at crazy speed - with a bloke who used to be called Joey behind the wheel. But wobbling a clapped-out Maserati 222 into Havana’s Revolution Square beat them both as a personal reminder of the sheer scope of films we’ve made for this new series of Top Gear.
That’s what I love about working for TG - the stupefying variety of locations and vehicles, places and people. From simple(ish) power tests at our Dunsfold test track to scrabbling up rock faces in the California desert, every day is an adventure, and at the centre of each insane idea there is at least one motor car we want to understand and, most of the time, celebrate. I still can’t quite believe the line-up of metal you’ll get to see over the seven weeks - it’s remarkable.
I hope you have as much fun watching the show as we did making it. |
The 1970 Cincinnati Bengals have been widely credited with bringing the West Coast offense to the N.F.L. The team’s coach, Paul Brown, and offensive coordinator (and future San Francisco 49ers coach), Bill Walsh, were faced with a challenge, as quarterback Virgil Carter was a smart player with a weak arm. Under Walsh’s tutelage, the Bengals operated a short-passing game that was effective in those run-heavy days. A year later, Carter led the N.F.L. in completion percentage.
But that 1970 Cincinnati team is famous for another reason: Of the 158 teams from 1970 to 2014 that started an N.F.L. season with a 1-5 record, it is the only one to make the playoffs. It actually began the season 1-6, before winning its final seven games to finish 8-6.
Now, 35 years later, the Kansas City Chiefs (at 5-5) are poised to join the Bengals. Fittingly enough, it’s a team with Walsh ties; Kansas City Coach Andy Reid worked for years in Green Bay under Mike Holmgren, who was Walsh’s quarterbacks coach for three seasons in San Francisco. The Chiefs also have a quarterback with a similar playing style.
Like Carter, Alex Smith is one of the game’s brightest quarterbacks, and is able to make plays with his legs. Their passing styles are similar, too. Entering Week 11, Alex Smith’s average pass had traveled just 6.08 yards from the line of scrimmage, by far the fewest in the league. But Smith’s conservative approach has its benefits: He has not thrown an interception since Week 3, and he has thrown a franchise-record 253 consecutive passes without an interception. |
Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
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A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.
Russia’s effort was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, involved the country’s military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S. intelligence officials. They reportedly briefed Trump last week on the possibility that Russian operatives might have compromising information on the president-elect. And at a Senate hearing last week on the hacking, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said “I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case.”
There’s little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the country — not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia — would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country’s election. And President Petro Poroshenko’s administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race.
Yet Politico’s investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections.
Russia’s meddling has sparked outrage from the American body politic. The U.S. intelligence community undertook the rare move of publicizing its findings on the matter, and President Barack Obama took several steps to officially retaliate, while members of Congress continue pushing for more investigations into the hacking and a harder line against Russia, which was already viewed in Washington as America’s leading foreign adversary.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S. administrations. Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about Poroshenko’s regime, while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin’s regime.
Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month contract with a well-connected GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings with U.S. government officials “to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations.”
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort (pictured) and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. | Getty
Revelations about Ukraine’s anti-Trump efforts could further set back those efforts.
“Things seem to be going from bad to worse for Ukraine,” said David A. Merkel, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who helped oversee U.S. relations with Russia and Ukraine while working in George W. Bush’s State Department and National Security Council.
Merkel, who has served as an election observer in Ukrainian presidential elections dating back to 1993, noted there’s some irony in Ukraine and Russia taking opposite sides in the 2016 presidential race, given that past Ukrainian elections were widely viewed in Washington’s foreign policy community as proxy wars between the U.S. and Russia.
“Now, it seems that a U.S. election may have been seen as a surrogate battle by those in Kiev and Moscow,” Merkel said.
•••
The Ukrainian antipathy for Trump’s team — and alignment with Clinton’s — can be traced back to late 2013. That’s when the country’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort had been advising, abruptly backed out of a European Union pact linked to anti-corruption reforms. Instead, Yanukovych entered into a multibillion-dollar bailout agreement with Russia, sparking protests across Ukraine and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country to Russia under Putin’s protection.
In the ensuing crisis, Russian troops moved into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and Manafort dropped off the radar.
Manafort’s work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC’s arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.
A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort’s role in Yanukovych’s rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych’s political party.
In an interview this month, Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities — including Ukrainian-Americans — she said that, when Trump’s unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump’s ties to Russia, as well.
She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said. In January 2016 — months before Manafort had taken any role in Trump’s campaign — Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump’s campaign, “I felt there was a Russia connection,” Chalupa recalled. “And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved in this election,” said Chalupa, who at the time also was warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was “Putin’s political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections.”
She said she shared her concern with Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy. According to someone briefed on the meeting, Chaly said that Manafort was very much on his radar, but that he wasn’t particularly concerned about the operative’s ties to Trump since he didn’t believe Trump stood much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination, let alone the presidency.
That was not an uncommon view at the time, and, perhaps as a result, Trump’s ties to Russia — let alone Manafort’s — were not the subject of much attention.
That all started to change just four days after Chalupa’s meeting at the embassy, when it was reported that Trump had in fact hired Manafort, suggesting that Chalupa may have been on to something. She quickly found herself in high demand. The day after Manafort’s hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC’s communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation.
A former DNC staffer described the exchange as an “informal conversation,” saying “‘briefing’ makes it sound way too formal,” and adding, “We were not directing or driving her work on this.” Yet, the former DNC staffer and the operative familiar with the situation agreed that with the DNC’s encouragement, Chalupa asked embassy staff to try to arrange an interview in which Poroshenko might discuss Manafort’s ties to Yanukovych.
While the embassy declined that request, officials there became “helpful” in Chalupa’s efforts, she said, explaining that she traded information and leads with them. “If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to follow up with.” But she stressed, “There were no documents given, nothing like that.”
Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia to point them in the right directions. She added, though, “they were being very protective and not speaking to the press as much as they should have. I think they were being careful because their situation was that they had to be very, very careful because they could not pick sides. It’s a political issue, and they didn’t want to get involved politically because they couldn’t.”
Shulyar vehemently denied working with reporters or with Chalupa on anything related to Trump or Manafort, explaining “we were stormed by many reporters to comment on this subject, but our clear and adamant position was not to give any comment [and] not to interfere into the campaign affairs.”
Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 race was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin (pictured), and involved the country’s military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S. intelligence officials. | Getty
Both Shulyar and Chalupa said the purpose of their initial meeting was to organize a June reception at the embassy to promote Ukraine. According to the embassy’s website, the event highlighted female Ukrainian leaders, featuring speeches by Ukrainian parliamentarian Hanna Hopko, who discussed “Ukraine’s fight against the Russian aggression in Donbas,” and longtime Hillary Clinton confidante Melanne Verveer, who worked for Clinton in the State Department and was a vocal surrogate during the presidential campaign.
Shulyar said her work with Chalupa “didn’t involve the campaign,” and she specifically stressed that “We have never worked to research and disseminate damaging information about Donald Trump and Paul Manafort.”
But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia. “Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should contact Chalupa,” recalled Telizhenko, who is now a political consultant in Kiev. “They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa,” he said, adding “Oksana was keeping it all quiet,” but “the embassy worked very closely with” Chalupa.
In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet’s ongoing investigation into Manafort.
Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, “If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.”
Chalupa confirmed that, a week after Manafort’s hiring was announced, she discussed the possibility of a congressional investigation with a foreign policy legislative assistant in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who co-chairs the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus. But, Chalupa said, “It didn’t go anywhere.”
Asked about the effort, the Kaptur legislative assistant called it a “touchy subject” in an internal email to colleagues that was accidentally forwarded to Politico.
Kaptur’s office later emailed an official statement explaining that the lawmaker is backing a bill to create an independent commission to investigate “possible outside interference in our elections.” The office added “at this time, the evidence related to this matter points to Russia, but Congresswoman Kaptur is concerned with any evidence of foreign entities interfering in our elections.”
•••
Almost as quickly as Chalupa’s efforts attracted the attention of the Ukrainian Embassy and Democrats, she also found herself the subject of some unwanted attention from overseas.
Within a few weeks of her initial meeting at the embassy with Shulyar and Chaly, Chalupa on April 20 received the first of what became a series of messages from the administrators of her private Yahoo email account, warning her that “state-sponsored actors” were trying to hack into her emails.
She kept up her crusade, appearing on a panel a week after the initial hacking message to discuss her research on Manafort with a group of Ukrainian investigative journalists gathered at the Library of Congress for a program sponsored by a U.S. congressional agency called the Open World Leadership Center.
Center spokeswoman Maura Shelden stressed that her group is nonpartisan and ensures “that our delegations hear from both sides of the aisle, receiving bipartisan information.” She said the Ukrainian journalists in subsequent days met with Republican officials in North Carolina and elsewhere. And she said that, before the Library of Congress event, “Open World’s program manager for Ukraine did contact Chalupa to advise her that Open World is a nonpartisan agency of the Congress.”
Chalupa, though, indicated in an email that was later hacked and released by WikiLeaks that the Open World Leadership Center “put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.”
In the email, which was sent in early May to then-DNC communications director Luis Miranda, Chalupa noted that she had extended an invitation to the Library of Congress forum to veteran Washington investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. Two days before the event, he had published a story for Yahoo News revealing the unraveling of a $26 million deal between Manafort and a Russian oligarch related to a telecommunications venture in Ukraine. And Chalupa wrote in the email she’d been “working with for the past few weeks” with Isikoff “and connected him to the Ukrainians” at the event.
Isikoff, who accompanied Chalupa to a reception at the Ukrainian Embassy immediately after the Library of Congress event, declined to comment.
Chalupa further indicated in her hacked May email to the DNC that she had additional sensitive information about Manafort that she intended to share “offline” with Miranda and DNC research director Lauren Dillon, including “a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I’m working on you should be aware of.” Explaining that she didn’t feel comfortable sharing the intel over email, Chalupa attached a screenshot of a warning from Yahoo administrators about “state-sponsored” hacking on her account, explaining, “Since I started digging into Manafort these messages have been a daily occurrence on my yahoo account despite changing my password often.”
Dillon and Miranda declined to comment.
A DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party’s political department, not a researcher. She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its dossiers on the subjects, the official said, stressing that the DNC had been building robust research books on Trump and his ties to Russia long before Chalupa began sounding alarms.
Nonetheless, Chalupa’s hacked email reportedly escalated concerns among top party officials, hardening their conclusion that Russia likely was behind the cyber intrusions with which the party was only then beginning to grapple.
Chalupa left the DNC after the Democratic convention in late July to focus fulltime on her research into Manafort, Trump and Russia. She said she provided off-the-record information and guidance to “a lot of journalists” working on stories related to Manafort and Trump’s Russia connections, despite what she described as escalating harassment.
About a month-and-a-half after Chalupa first started receiving hacking alerts, someone broke into her car outside the Northwest Washington home where she lives with her husband and three young daughters, she said. They “rampaged it, basically, but didn’t take anything valuable — left money, sunglasses, $1,200 worth of golf clubs,” she said, explaining she didn’t file a police report after that incident because she didn’t connect it to her research and the hacking.
But by the time a similar vehicle break-in occurred involving two family cars, she was convinced that it was a Russia-linked intimidation campaign. The police report on the latter break-in noted that “both vehicles were unlocked by an unknown person and the interior was ransacked, with papers and the garage openers scattered throughout the cars. Nothing was taken from the vehicles.”
Then, early in the morning on another day, a woman “wearing white flowers in her hair” tried to break into her family’s home at 1:30 a.m., Chalupa said. Shulyar told Chalupa that the mysterious incident bore some of the hallmarks of intimidation campaigns used against foreigners in Russia, according to Chalupa.
“This is something that they do to U.S. diplomats, they do it to Ukrainians. Like, this is how they operate. They break into people’s homes. They harass people. They’re theatrical about it,” Chalupa said. “They must have seen when I was writing to the DNC staff, outlining who Manafort was, pulling articles, saying why it was significant, and painting the bigger picture.”
In a Yahoo News story naming Chalupa as one of 16 “ordinary people” who “shaped the 2016 election,” Isikoff wrote that after Chalupa left the DNC, FBI agents investigating the hacking questioned her and examined her laptop and smartphone.
Chalupa this month told Politico that, as her research and role in the election started becoming more public, she began receiving death threats, along with continued alerts of state-sponsored hacking. But she said, “None of this has scared me off.”
•••
While it’s not uncommon for outside operatives to serve as intermediaries between governments and reporters, one of the more damaging Russia-related stories for the Trump campaign — and certainly for Manafort — can be traced more directly to the Ukrainian government.
Documents released by an independent Ukrainian government agency — and publicized by a parliamentarian — appeared to show $12.7 million in cash payments that were earmarked for Manafort by the Russia-aligned party of the deposed former president, Yanukovych.
The New York Times, in the August story revealing the ledgers’ existence, reported that the payments earmarked for Manafort were “a focus” of an investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption officials, while CNN reported days later that the FBI was pursuing an overlapping inquiry.
One of the most damaging Russia-related stories during Donald Trump's campaign can be traced to the Ukrainian government. | AP Photo
Clinton’s campaign seized on the story to advance Democrats’ argument that Trump’s campaign was closely linked to Russia. The ledger represented “more troubling connections between Donald Trump’s team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine,” Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, said in a statement. He demanded that Trump “disclose campaign chair Paul Manafort’s and all other campaign employees’ and advisers’ ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities, including whether any of Trump’s employees or advisers are currently representing and or being paid by them.”
A former Ukrainian investigative journalist and current parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, who was elected in 2014 as part of Poroshenko’s party, held a news conference to highlight the ledgers, and to urge Ukrainian and American law enforcement to aggressively investigate Manafort.
“I believe and understand the basis of these payments are totally against the law — we have the proof from these books,” Leshchenko said during the news conference, which attracted international media coverage. “If Mr. Manafort denies any allegations, I think he has to be interrogated into this case and prove his position that he was not involved in any misconduct on the territory of Ukraine,” Leshchenko added.
Manafort denied receiving any off-books cash from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, and said that he had never been contacted about the ledger by Ukrainian or American investigators, later telling POLITICO “I was just caught in the crossfire.”
According to a series of memos reportedly compiled for Trump’s opponents by a former British intelligence agent, Yanukovych, in a secret meeting with Putin on the day after the Times published its report, admitted that he had authorized “substantial kickback payments to Manafort.” But according to the report, which was published Tuesday by BuzzFeed but remains unverified. Yanukovych assured Putin “that there was no documentary trail left behind which could provide clear evidence of this” — an alleged statement that seemed to implicitly question the authenticity of the ledger.
The scrutiny around the ledgers — combined with that from other stories about his Ukraine work — proved too much, and he stepped down from the Trump campaign less than a week after the Times story.
But the scrutiny around the ledgers — combined with that from other stories about his Ukraine work — proved too much, and he stepped down from the Trump campaign less than a week after the Times story.
At the time, Leshchenko suggested that his motivation was partly to undermine Trump. “For me, it was important to show not only the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world,” Leshchenko told the Financial Times about two weeks after his news conference. The newspaper noted that Trump’s candidacy had spurred “Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election,” and the story quoted Leshchenko asserting that the majority of Ukraine’s politicians are “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”
But by this month, Leshchenko was seeking to recast his motivation, telling Politico, “I didn’t care who won the U.S. elections. This was a decision for the American voters to decide.” His goal in highlighting the ledgers, he said was “to raise these issues on a political level and emphasize the importance of the investigation.”
In a series of answers provided to Politico, a spokesman for Poroshenko distanced his administration from both Leshchenko’s efforts and those of the agency that reLeshchenko Leshchenko leased the ledgers, The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. It was created in 2014 as a condition for Ukraine to receive aid from the U.S. and the European Union, and it signed an evidence-sharing agreement with the FBI in late June — less than a month and a half before it released the ledgers.
The bureau is “fully independent,” the Poroshenko spokesman said, adding that when it came to the presidential administration there was “no targeted action against Manafort.” He added “as to Serhiy Leshchenko, he positions himself as a representative of internal opposition in the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko’s faction, despite [the fact that] he belongs to the faction,” the spokesman said, adding, “it was about him personally who pushed [the anti-corruption bureau] to proceed with investigation on Manafort.”
But an operative who has worked extensively in Ukraine, including as an adviser to Poroshenko, said it was highly unlikely that either Leshchenko or the anti-corruption bureau would have pushed the issue without at least tacit approval from Poroshenko or his closest allies.
“It was something that Poroshenko was probably aware of and could have stopped if he wanted to,” said the operative.
And, almost immediately after Trump’s stunning victory over Clinton, questions began mounting about the investigations into the ledgers — and the ledgers themselves.
An official with the anti-corruption bureau told a Ukrainian newspaper, “Mr. Manafort does not have a role in this case.”
Ukrainian member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko has sought to recast his investigation after the election. | Getty
And, while the anti-corruption bureau told Politico late last month that a “general investigation [is] still ongoing” of the ledger, it said Manafort is not a target of the investigation. “As he is not the Ukrainian citizen, [the anti-corruption bureau] by the law couldn’t investigate him personally,” the bureau said in a statement.
Some Poroshenko critics have gone further, suggesting that the bureau is backing away from investigating because the ledgers might have been doctored or even forged.
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a Ukrainian former diplomat who served as the country’s head of security under Poroshenko but is now affiliated with a leading opponent of Poroshenko, said it was fishy that “only one part of the black ledger appeared.” He asked, “Where is the handwriting analysis?” and said it was “crazy” to announce an investigation based on the ledgers. He met last month in Washington with Trump allies, and said, “of course they all recognize that our [anti-corruption bureau] intervened in the presidential campaign.”
And in an interview this week, Manafort, who re-emerged as an informal advisor to Trump after Election Day, suggested that the ledgers were inauthentic and called their publication “a politically motivated false attack on me. My role as a paid consultant was public. There was nothing off the books, but the way that this was presented tried to make it look shady.”
He added that he felt particularly wronged by efforts to cast his work in Ukraine as pro-Russian, arguing “all my efforts were focused on helping Ukraine move into Europe and the West.” He specifically cited his work on denuclearizing the country and on the European Union trade and political pact that Yanukovych spurned before fleeing to Russia. “In no case was I ever involved in anything that would be contrary to U.S. interests,” Manafort said.
Yet Russia seemed to come to the defense of Manafort and Trump last month, when a spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry charged that the Ukrainian government used the ledgers as a political weapon.
“Ukraine seriously complicated the work of Trump’s election campaign headquarters by planting information according to which Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, allegedly accepted money from Ukrainian oligarchs,” Maria Zakharova said at a news briefing, according to a transcript of her remarks posted on the Foreign Ministry’s website. “All of you have heard this remarkable story,” she told assembled reporters.
•••
Beyond any efforts to sabotage Trump, Ukrainian officials didn’t exactly extend a hand of friendship to the GOP nominee during the campaign.
The ambassador, Chaly, penned an op-ed for The Hill, in which he chastised Trump for a confusing series of statements in which the GOP candidate at one point expressed a willingness to consider recognizing Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea as legitimate. The op-ed made some in the embassy uneasy, sources said.
“That was like too close for comfort, even for them,” said Chalupa. “That was something that was as risky as they were going to be.”
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk warned on Facebook that Trump had “challenged the very values of the free world.”
Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov, piled on, trashing Trump on Twitter in July as a “clown” and asserting that Trump is “an even bigger danger to the US than terrorism.”
Avakov, in a Facebook post, lashed out at Trump for his confusing Crimea comments, calling the assessment the “diagnosis of a dangerous misfit,” according to a translated screenshot featured in one media report, though he later deleted the post. He called Trump “dangerous for Ukraine and the US” and noted that Manafort worked with Yanukovych when the former Ukrainian leader “fled to Russia through Crimea. Where would Manafort lead Trump?”
The Trump-Ukraine relationship grew even more fraught in September with reports that the GOP nominee had snubbed Poroshenko on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the Ukrainian president tried to meet both major party candidates, but scored only a meeting with Clinton.
Telizhenko, the former embassy staffer, said that, during the primaries, Chaly, the country’s ambassador in Washington, had actually instructed the embassy not to reach out to Trump’s campaign, even as it was engaging with those of Clinton and Trump’s leading GOP rival, Ted Cruz.
“We had an order not to talk to the Trump team, because he was critical of Ukraine and the government and his critical position on Crimea and the conflict,” said Telizhenko. “I was yelled at when I proposed to talk to Trump,” he said, adding, “The ambassador said not to get involved — Hillary is going to win.”
This account was confirmed by Nalyvaichenko, the former diplomat and security chief now affiliated with a Poroshenko opponent, who said, “The Ukrainian authorities closed all doors and windows — this is from the Ukrainian side.” He called the strategy “bad and short-sighted.”
Andriy Artemenko, a Ukrainian parliamentarian associated with a conservative opposition party, did meet with Trump’s team during the campaign and said he personally offered to set up similar meetings for Chaly but was rebuffed.
“It was clear that they were supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy,” Artemenko said. “They did everything from organizing meetings with the Clinton team, to publicly supporting her, to criticizing Trump. … I think that they simply didn’t meet because they thought that Hillary would win.”
Shulyar rejected the characterizations that the embassy had a ban on interacting with Trump, instead explaining that it “had different diplomats assigned for dealing with different teams tailoring the content and messaging. So it was not an instruction to abstain from the engagement but rather an internal discipline for diplomats not to get involved into a field she or he was not assigned to, but where another colleague was involved.”
And she pointed out that Chaly traveled to the GOP convention in Cleveland in late July and met with members of Trump’s foreign policy team “to highlight the importance of Ukraine and the support of it by the U.S.”
Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S. Valeriy Chaly publically critcized Donald Trump during the 2016 elections. | Getty
Despite the outreach, Trump’s campaign in Cleveland gutted a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that called for the U.S. to provide “lethal defensive weapons” for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian incursion, backers of the measure charged.
The outreach ramped up after Trump’s victory. Shulyar pointed out that Poroshenko was among the first foreign leaders to call to congratulate Trump. And she said that, since Election Day, Chaly has met with close Trump allies, including Sens. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, and Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, while the ambassador accompanied Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Ukraine’s vice prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, to a round of Washington meetings with Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), an early Trump backer, and Jim DeMint, president of The Heritage Foundation, which played a prominent role in Trump’s transition.
•••
Many Ukrainian officials and operatives and their American allies see Trump’s inauguration this month as an existential threat to the country, made worse, they admit, by the dissemination of the secret ledger, the antagonistic social media posts and the perception that the embassy meddled against — or at least shut out — Trump.
“It’s really bad. The [Poroshenko] administration right now is trying to re-coordinate communications,” said Telizhenko, adding, “The Trump organization doesn’t want to talk to our administration at all.”
During Nalyvaichenko’s trip to Washington last month, he detected lingering ill will toward Ukraine from some, and lack of interest from others, he recalled. “Ukraine is not on the top of the list, not even the middle,” he said.
Poroshenko’s allies are scrambling to figure out how to build a relationship with Trump, who is known for harboring and prosecuting grudges for years.
A delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians allied with Poroshenko last month traveled to Washington partly to try to make inroads with the Trump transition team, but they were unable to secure a meeting, according to a Washington foreign policy operative familiar with the trip. And operatives in Washington and Kiev say that after the election, Poroshenko met in Kiev with top executives from the Washington lobbying firm BGR — including Ed Rogers and Lester Munson — about how to navigate the Trump regime.
Weeks later, BGR reported to the Department of Justice that the government of Ukraine would pay the firm $50,000 a month to “provide strategic public relations and government affairs counsel,” including “outreach to U.S. government officials, non-government organizations, members of the media and other individuals.”
Firm spokesman Jeffrey Birnbaum suggested that “pro-Putin oligarchs” were already trying to sow doubts about BGR’s work with Poroshenko. While the firm maintains close relationships with GOP congressional leaders, several of its principals were dismissive or sharply critical of Trump during the GOP primary, which could limit their effectiveness lobbying the new administration.
The Poroshenko regime’s standing with Trump is considered so dire that the president’s allies after the election actually reached out to make amends with — and even seek assistance from — Manafort, according to two operatives familiar with Ukraine’s efforts to make inroads with Trump.
Meanwhile, Poroshenko’s rivals are seeking to capitalize on his dicey relationship with Trump’s team. Some are pressuring him to replace Chaly, a close ally of Poroshenko’s who is being blamed by critics in Kiev and Washington for implementing — if not engineering — the country’s anti-Trump efforts, according to Ukrainian and U.S. politicians and operatives interviewed for this story. They say that several potential Poroshenko opponents have been through Washington since the election seeking audiences of their own with Trump allies, though most have failed to do do so.
“None of the Ukrainians have any access to Trump — they are all desperate to get it, and are willing to pay big for it,” said one American consultant whose company recently met in Washington with Yuriy Boyko, a former vice prime minister under Yanukovych. Boyko, who like Yanukovych has a pro-Russian worldview, is considering a presidential campaign of his own, and his representatives offered “to pay a shit-ton of money” to get access to Trump and his inaugural events, according to the consultant.
The consultant turned down the work, explaining, “It sounded shady, and we don’t want to get in the middle of that kind of stuff.” |
Questions on 'the legality of the conduct of News Corporation,' was raised, Lautenberg wrote. | REUTERS 9/11 families call for U.S. probe of Murdoch
Angry family members of victims of the 9/11 attacks and a growing number of lawmakers on Wednesday called for a U.S. investigation into allegations that journalists at the British News of the World tabloid sought to hack the phones of their lost love ones.
“Someone should look into it to see if their rights were violated – the family members I’ve talked to are appalled, they’re disgruntled, they have to relive the pain all over again,” Jim Riches, a former deputy chief in the New York Fire Department whose 29-year-old fireman son was killed in the attacks, told POLITICO.
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“I think they crossed the line. They’re trying to get messages from loved ones in the last moments of their lives. It’s horrible, and they should be held accountable. It’s despicable and unethical,” Riches added.
Sally Regenhard, vice chairwoman of 9/11 Parents and Families of Firefighters & World Trade Center Victims, said that she also supports an American probe and added that the latest allegations come at a particularly hard time for victims’ families..
“It’s hard enough for people to deal with the 10th anniversary and now this – it just adds more salt to the wounds,” said Regenhard, who lost her 28-year-old firefighter son, on Sept. 11.
“If it’s true, then it’s an egregious violation of decency and respect. Whether it’s 9/11 victims or the British victim – the child who was kidnapped – I think we really need to look at national and international standards for security for privacy for this type of thing,” Regenhard added. “We need to put a hold on this no matter who it is.”
Meanwhile, an increasing number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill are now pushing for an investigation.
With many of the 9/11 victims having been New Jersey residents, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) called on the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to look into the conduct of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
“The limited information already reported in this case raises serious questions about the legality of the conduct of News Corporation and its subsidiaries under the [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act],” Lautenberg wrote. “Further investigation may reveal that current reports only scratch the surface of the problem at News Corporation.”
Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) sent a letter Wednesday to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro urging their respective agencies to probe whether employees of News Corp. subsidiaries attempted to bribe British police and whether Americans’ phones may have been hacked.
“The reported allegations against News Corporation are very serious, indicate a pattern of illegal activity, and involve thousands of potential victims. It is important to ensure that no United States laws were broken and no United States citizens were victimized,” the senators wrote in the letter.
In a separate letter, Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) also called for a DOJ investigation.
Laura Sweeney, a DOJ spokesperson, said that the department would review the letters but declined further comment.
The 9/11 hacking allegations first surfaced in a report in the British newspaper, the Daily Mirror. The paper said journalists at the News of the World approached a New York private investigator and tried to buy phone records of victims from him. The investigator, who had been a cop, allegedly declined to provide the records. |
In the latest teaser for the HTC 10, HTC, the VR-focused electronics company who now makes phones on the side, is bragging up their next phone’s performance. Not only that, but they have confirmed the Samsung-esque button setup on the phone’s chin, although it is at least in the correct arrangement.
The teaser says that we should expect the “fastest and smoothest Android” yet, which is actually something we love to hear as Android elitists. Android “jank” has almost always been a problem on phones not made by Google, so hopefully HTC can prove to the world that all Android skins really aren’t “created equal.” I would imagine that the next version of Sense that will be coupled with the HTC 10 will be leaner than ever, helping it with performance.
As for the button setup, well, you can see it there. We are looking at a centered home button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor, with back and app switcher flanking it. It’s not a setup I would typically prefer, but as I mentioned above, at least they put the buttons in the correct spots with back on the left and app switcher on the right. Even Samsung can’t seem to get that right.
Part of me is still holding out hope that we’ll be able to turn off the capacitive buttons and go with an on-screen setup, like we saw on the OnePlus 2. Will HTC? We haven’t seen any indication of that happening. A boy can dream.
After seeing this new teaser, specs from GFXbench, and all of those leaked pictures from yesterday, your interest has to be growing some? Come on, you have to be at least a bit curious, right? |
The BJP's Andhra Pradesh unit has decided to cash in on Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi's popularity, literally.
In a first, the party's state unit is collecting a registration fee of Rs 5 per person to attend a public meeting to be addressed by its election campaign committee chief here on August 11.
"Other parties ferry people for their public meetings... The idea of collecting the nominal amount is to encourage seriousness and commitment. We will contribute the collected amount towards Uttarakhand relief,” state BJP spokesman N Ramachandra Rao said.
And, keeping in mind Modi's following in the virtual world, the registration can be done online. The registration process began recently and will continue till August 10.
The Lal Bahadur Stadium in central Hyderabad is the venue for the meeting and the target is to mobilise one lakh people in the age group of 18-40 years, Rao said.
The BJP aims to reach out to the large crowd of IT professionals and college students in the tech-savvy Andhra Pradesh capital, he said.
About 40,000 people have already registered and the party hopes that it will go up to at least 70,000, Rao said.
Modi's rally was originally scheduled for July 27 but was postponed to August 11 in view of the Gram Panchayat elections.
The BJP poster boy's rally here would be the first for him in south India after being made the chief of the party's election campaign committee.
The BJP, which has four members in the legislative assembly, is making a determined effort to increase its strength in the state in the 2014 general and assembly elections. The party is focusing on Telangana region and has aggressively taken up the cause of separate statehood. |
This year’s strong spring flows through the Columbia River come amid a high-stakes conflict over how much water should be used to help salmon migrate over the dams rather than run through hydroelectric turbines.
CASCADE LOCKS, Oregon — In this year of epic snow and rain, the Columbia River is a formidable sight, thundering over spillways at Bonneville Dam to form a turbulent stretch of white water that courses toward the sea.
The spring flows through the region’s mightiest waterway are a dramatic turnaround from the drought that gripped the region two years ago. They have been some of the strongest in decades, with a March 25 peak at Bonneville that was the highest for that month since at least 1960, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.
These high flows come amid an intensifying clash over how to manage the federal network of Columbia Basin hydroelectric dams that offer the region abundant low-cost renewable power but also are a major obstacle to the recovery of 13 runs of wild salmon and steelhead.
In a court victory this spring, salmon advocates persuaded U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon to ordermore water spilled over the dams to aid young salmon. That’s easy to do in high-water years such as this spring. But the injunction, which already has stirred a backlash from some in Congress, will require higher levels in leaner water years, and that could mean, at times, running significantly less water through the hydroelectric dams.
In his ruling, Simon cited a “growing scientific body of evidence and growing consensus” to support the higher levels of spills.
This water helps to guide young salmon over the dams, steering them away from a more treacherous trip downstream through the powerhouses that can prove fatal. It also creates a current that can help propel these juvenile fish toward their ocean feeding grounds, where they mature before returning to freshwater to spawn.
“Spill helps this dammed-up river act a little more like an actual river,” said Joseph Bogaard, executive director of the Seattle-based Save Our Wild Salmon coalition, which had members among the lawsuit plaintiffs. “It delivers juvenile salmon to the ocean more quickly and safely.”
Federal biologists at NOAA Fisheries largely acknowledge the benefits.
But they question the need to ramp up the spill to significantly higher levels. They argue that in some circumstances more spill may not offer more help to the fish, and in their court filings they allege that the National Wildlife Federation and other plaintiffs “attempt to oversimplify a complex and dynamic system.”
In another court filing, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the federal agency that markets the hydroelectric power to regional public utilities, estimated the cost of added spill as an estimated $80 million of lost power generation over a two-year period.
The judge largely rejected the federal agencies’ arguments. In his March 27 ruling, he gave federal agencies a year to come up with spill plans for each federal dam in the Columbia River Basin.
Federal agencies, in recent decades, have spent billions of dollars to help revive the 13 runs listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act. But this was the latest in a string of rulings that over the years have faulted the federal agencies for failing to push forward aggressively enough to save these runs.
Opportunity to learn
For young salmon, downstream passage is a critical phase, and salmon advocates say this spring offers an excellent opportunity to learn more about the impacts of increased spill to aid these fish.
Unlike many years, plenty of water is available both to run the turbines at the highest levels that can be handled by the regional power grid and to push over the spillways at the levels outlined in the court order.
And this year’s high water volume is expected to continue deep into the spring as warmer temperatures begin to melt a high-elevation snowpack that remains largely intact.
“The thing that is on my radar is the amount of snow still above 6,000 feet,” said Steven Barton, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chief of water management for the Columbia Basin. “We are going to continue to have flows at levels higher than people have seen in a long time.”
Bonneville, unlike some upstream dams, has no storage reservoir behind it. So all the river water must pass as it arrives. And, through the course of the day, Army Corps officials decide how to allocate the flow between powerhouse turbines and spill as they consult with the BPA, federal fishery biologists and other stakeholders.
Sometimes, these decisions get complicated by maintenance, such as with an erosion-repair project that this year put Bonneville workers below the spillway.
“They would go work for eight or 10 hours, and then we shoo them out and go spill for eight or 10 hours,’’ said Ray Guajardo, hydroelectric power operations manager at Bonneville. “Everything is coordinated. Everything.”
As the water is spilled, it increases the dissolved gases. Those gas levels are carefully monitored because — if they go too high — both sides in the legal battle agree they can injure or kill young salmon.
That’s why Washington and Oregon have set total dissolved-gas limits. They are not supposed to exceed 120 percent in the water that reaches an area below the dam.
In recent weeks, due to the unavoidable need to pass so much water over the dams, the dissolved gas levels at Bonneville and other sites have often averaged above the states’ limits. They often have measured in the 121 to 125 percent range, according to monitoring reported by the federally funded Fish Passage Center in Portland.
Michele DeHart, the center’s director, said that danger zone starts somewhere above 125 percent. Sampling of this year’s young salmon — known as smolts — has not detected significant health problems from the higher levels.
“We’ve been monitoring gas-bubble trauma under all conditions every single year — for about 20 years, and what we are seeing is consistent with all the historical data,” said DeHart.
‘Unintended consequences’
DeHart said years of research — under all different kinds of river conditions — indicate the increased flows should boost the numbers of smolt that make it to the ocean. That, in turn, should bump up the percentage of fish that return as adults to spawn in the Columbia Basin.
But some politicians are not happy with what’s been happening on the Columbia this spring.
In a May 2 letter to the administrator of the BPA, four Northwest members of Congress — Washington Republican Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Dan Newhouse, and Oregon Democratic Reps. Kurt Schrader and Peter DeFazio — expressed “deep concern” with the management of the Columbia Basin dams in the aftermath of the federal judge’s order.
Their letter appears to question the science behind the judge’s order and the economic impact that could arise in future lean-water years as more power production is sacrificed to fish passage.
“As you know, Judge Simon is ordering a significant increase in mandatory spill in the spring of 2018,” they wrote. “ … there will likely be unintended consequences that will hurt fish recovery while greatly increasing power costs … Our constituents deserve to understand the proposed measures, as well as the expected impacts they will have on the region.”
In their letter, they ask for the BPA to answer a series of questions about the dams, fish and costs to the region’s ratepayers in carrying out the judge’s order.
Bogaard, of Save our Wild Salmon, views the letter as “an excellent example of how politics continually intervenes to distort policy for salmon and communities in the Columbia Basin.”
Bogaard wants salmon restoration based on the best science. Otherwise, he cautions, those efforts risk failing, and wasting taxpayer dollars. |
Davis, who wanted to play and did appear at first base in the 11th, was initially listed in his usual fifth spot in the lineup. But after manager Buck Showalter spoke to the first baseman and conferred with the team's training staff, the O's decided to give Davis a day off.
NEW YORK -- Chris Davis was scratched from the starting lineup for Sunday's 11-inning, 7-4 Orioles win in New York after being hit by a pitch in the left elbow in Friday's series opener.
NEW YORK -- Chris Davis was scratched from the starting lineup for Sunday's 11-inning, 7-4 Orioles win in New York after being hit by a pitch in the left elbow in Friday's series opener.
Davis, who wanted to play and did appear at first base in the 11th, was initially listed in his usual fifth spot in the lineup. But after manager Buck Showalter spoke to the first baseman and conferred with the team's training staff, the O's decided to give Davis a day off.
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Davis, who went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts on Saturday, was replaced by rookie Trey Mancini, who hit sixth, with catcher Welington Castillo batting fifth. |
“In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. . . . Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building. . . . For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes.”
— George Orwell, “1984”
Documents inconvenient to the regime went into the Ministry of Truth’s slits and down to “enormous furnaces.” Modern tyrannies depend on state control of national memories — retroactive truths established by government fiat. Which is why Russia’s Supreme Court recently upheld the conviction of a blogger for violating Article 354.1 of Russia’s criminal code.
This May 2014 provision criminalizes the “rehabilitation of Nazism.” The blogger’s crime was to post: “The communists and Germany jointly invaded Poland, sparking off the Second World War.” The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact have gone down one of Vladimir Putin’s memory holes.
The pact was signed Aug. 23, 1939. On Sept. 1, Germany invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Poland was carved up in accordance with the secret protocols, and less than a year later Soviet occupiers were conducting the Katyn Forest Massacre of 25,700 Polish military officers, officials, priests and intellectuals.
Although in 2009 Putin denounced the pact as “collusion to solve one’s problems at others’ expense,” last year he defended it as Stalin’s means of buying time to prepare for the Nazi onslaught. This fable is refuted by, among other facts, this: Stalin did not prepare. When Germany’s ambassador in Moscow informed Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov that their nations were now at war, a stunned Molotov asked, “What have we done to deserve this?”
The Russian Supreme Court’s Orwellian ruling was that the blogger denied facts established by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. The tribunal convicted leading Nazis of waging aggressive war against, among others, Poland, but, in an act of victor’s justice, made no judgment against the Soviet regime, representatives of which sat on the tribunal. This accommodation to postwar political reality was necessary to enable the tribunal to function, which was necessary for civilizing vengeance. The tribunal ignored, but did not deny, the patent fact of Soviet aggression.
The Russian court’s ruling is a window into the sinister continuity of Putin’s Russia and the Soviet system that incubated him. So, if the former secretary of state who aspires to the American presidency has time to read a book before Jan. 20, she should make it “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin” by Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times. It is a study of the volatile nostalgia of a man seething with resentments acquired as a KGB operative — a “devoted officer of a dying empire” — during the Soviet Union’s final years. It is a pointillist portrait painted with telling details that should cause sobriety to supplant dreams of happy policy “resets” with Russia.
As a senior security official in post-Soviet Russia, Putin kept on his desk a bronze statue of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police and terror apparatus. At Putin’s May 7, 2000, presidential inauguration, a choir sang a composition “written in 1836 to celebrate a soldier’s death in the war against Poland and rewritten in Soviet times . . . to remove the homage to the tsar. For Putin, the choir sang the Soviet verses.” There was the 2006 assassination in Moscow, on Putin’s 54th birthday, of the troublesome journalist Anna Politkovskaya. (Asked about the frequent deaths of anti-Putin journalists, Donald Trump breezily said, “I think that our country does plenty of killing.”) And the 2006 poisoning in London of Putin’s antagonist, Alexander Litvinenko, using radioactive polonium 210.
Domestically, Putin’s “managed democracy” is Stalinism leavened by kleptomania, as in the looting of the energy giant Yukos. In foreign policy, Putin’s Russia is unambiguously and unapologetically revanchist. The Soviet Union was likened to a burglar creeping down a hotel corridor until he finds an unlocked door. Putin, who found Crimea unlocked (when he honeymooned there in 1983, it seemed “a magical, sacred place to him,” writes Myers), is pushing on the door of what remains of Ukraine.
The Democratic presidential nominee fundamentally misread Putin’s thugocracy, and her opponent admires the thug because “at least he’s a leader.” As the Russian blogger’s fate demonstrates, Putin practices what Orwell wrote: “ ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ ”
In early 2015, the Pew Research Center conducted a poll that looked at American views of the conflict in Ukraine. Respondents were asked whether they had favorable or unfavorable views of Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Adam Taylor,Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
Back in the day, some analysts prophesied a “convergence” between the Soviet Union and the United States, two industrial societies becoming more alike. In our day, there is indeed a growing similarity: In both places, post-factual politics are normal.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook. |
Israel on Tuesday appointed the first-ever female judge to serve in the country’s sharia court system.
The unanimous appointment of Hana Khatib, hailed by some Arab lawmakers as “historic,” was carried out by the Committee to Elect sharia judges, known as qadis, which is headed by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked.
Khatib is from the town of Tamra, located in the lower Galilee region. She practices family and sharia law, according to an online advertisement for her firm.
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Sharia courts in Israel deal with personal status issues for the Muslim community, such as marriage, divorce, conversion, inheritance and prevention of domestic violence.
They have existed in what is now Israel since early Ottoman times and through the British Mandate, and were recognized by the State of Israel upon its founding in 1948.
Shaked, a member of the right-wing Jewish Home party, said the appointment of a female Muslim religious judge “should have happened a long time ago.”
“This is great news for Arab women and the Arab society,” she said in a statement. “I’m excited over the choice, and hope this is the bellwether for further appointments of women.”
Arab-Israeli lawmakers hailed the appointment as an achievement for Arab-Israeli women in the Jewish state.
MK Aida Touma-Suleiman (Joint List), who is the chairperson of the Knesset’s Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, called the appointment “a historic step in the Arab feminist movement in Israel, a step that benefits not only Arab-Muslim women, but the entire Arab population in Israel.”
She said that in 2000 she filed a petition on the subject to the Supreme Court, and at the start of her tenure as a lawmaker in 2015, she, along with MK Issawi Farij (Meretz), followed up the petition with a Knesset bill.
MK Osama Saadi (Joint List), a member of the Committee to Appoint Judges, said Khatib’s appointment was “a very important step in the right direction for a proper and worthy Arab representation in the judiciary.”
The Abraham Fund, an Israeli nonprofit working on Arab-Jewish coexistence issues, said in a statement: “The appointment of a Muslim woman to the important role is a historic step that signals Arab women to aspire to leadership positions.”
Khatib will be sworn in by President Reuven Rivlin in a few weeks.
There are not many female qadis around the world. Two women serve as sharia judges in the neighboring Palestinian Authority.
There are nine regional sharia courts in Israel as well as an appeal courts, with Tuesday’s appointments bringing the number of qadis in the Muslim system to 18.
AFP contributed to this report. |
Valencia's defender Jose Gaya (left) celebrates a goal.
Valencia are neither surprised nor alarmed at reports linking Real Madrid with a summer bid for Jose Gaya.
The 19-year-old left-back, whose contract at the Mestalla runs until June 2018, is one of the brightest young talents in La Liga and has had an impressive season.
Spanish sports newspaper Marca reports on Wednesday that Real are looking to make a move at the end of the season for the Spain Under-21 international.
"We don't have to send out messages to anyone," Valencia's director of football Francisco Rufete told Valencia TV on Wednesday.
"We are in talks since a few weeks ago with Gaya, wiith his family and with his agent to extend his contract.
"We are confident he will remain at Valencia for many years."
According to the local media, Valencia want to tie Gaya to the club for a further six years and significantly increase his buy-out clause, which is currently set at £13.4m.
Gaya, a product of Valencia's youth academy, has been a regular in Nuno's side since the Che club sold Spanish left-back Juan Bernat to Bayern Munich last summer.
The promising youngster has started in 17 league games, scoring one goal and setting up three more to help Valencia remain in contention for Champions League qualification next season.
Valencia striker Paco Alcacer, who on Tuesday extended his contract with the club until June 2020, is not surprised that Gaya is attracting interest from top clubs.
When asked about Real's reported interest in Gaya, he told Valencia TV: "It's normal that they are enquiring and that they want him.
"I see him very happy and well adapted to the team." |
Deutsche Telekom’s (DT) CEO said the operator is “not in the mood” to sell T-Mobile US, although he didn’t dismiss the possibility completely, especially in the case of changes in the US regulatory environment following the election of a new president, Reuters reported.
DT has a 65 per cent stake in T-Mobile US and has tried twice in the past five years to sell it, coming up against regulatory objections both times.
However, since then, the US operator has been on a strong upward trajectory: in Q3 2016 revenue surged 17 per cent to €8.28 billion with almost 2 million new customers. Some analysts believe T-Mobile US is DT’s “only opportunity to grow”, the Reuters report said.
According to CEO Tim Hoettges, speaking at a Morgan Stanley event: “We are not in the mood of selling the business. We are not in the mood of: ‘Oh where is the partner we need?'”.
“We are now open to how we could create something beyond our execution, which is creating value,” he said.
However, he also said that “with Trump, the regulatory environment might change. Everybody is expecting this. At least the chance is bigger than it was under the Democrats”.
“I am not afraid about whether a (pure) mobile player can survive in this environment. If there are any options, we are going to consider,” he added.
It should be noted that T-Mobile US’ total revenue is significantly higher than its parent’s domestic business. The German unit’s revenue (fixed as well as mobile) in Q3 was €5.6 billion, a decline of 0.8 per cent. |
Antihydrogen is rare in our part of the Universe. Indeed, it was only last year that scientists at CERN’s Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) managed to trap a significant amount of the stuff for the first time, albeit only 38 antiatoms for just 172 milliseconds.
Today, they announce a significant improvement. These guys now say they’ve trapped 309 antihydrogen atoms for up to 1000 seconds. That’s an increase in trapping time of four orders of magnitude, comparable to what’s possible with good old ordinary matter.
The news is significant because it makes possible a new set of experiments that should answer some important questions.
Most important of these is whether ordinary gravity attracts or repels antimatter. In other words, does antihydrogen fall up or down?
Although there have been many attempts to do this experiment, all have been inconclusive because nobody has been able to trap a good lump of antimatter for long enough to try.
All that should soon change. The ALPHA team now plans to cool a small lump of antihydrogen and then watch it as it falls (or rises). Which means physicists should have their answer within months.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1104.4982: Confinement Of Antihydrogen For 1000 Seconds
You can now follow the Physics arXiv Blog on Twitter |
Bernie Sanders Knows His Medicare-For-All Bill Won't Pass. That's Not The Point
Enlarge this image toggle caption Drew Angerer/Getty Images Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will introduce a bill next month to create a government-run, single-payer health care system. And he knows it's going to fail.
"Look, I have no illusions that under a Republican Senate and a very right-wing House and an extremely right-wing president of the United States, that suddenly we're going to see a Medicare-for-all, single-payer passed," he said recently, sitting in his Senate office. "You're not going to see it. That's obvious."
The point of the bill, Sanders says, is to force a conversation: "Excuse me: why is the United States the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all people? Why are we spending far, far more per capita on health care than any other nation? Why do we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs?"
Single-payer was a major policy plank of Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, and he has been ready all year to put it into legislation. He was just waiting for Republicans to wrap up their effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
That means Sanders has been waiting for a while.
Despite President Trump's continued calls for Congress to repeal Obamacare, House and Senate Republicans appear to have moved on to other priorities. That means when Congress returns to Washington, D.C., next month, Sanders will roll out his bill.
The measure is the latest example of how Sanders is trying to push the Democratic Party — a party he is not formally a member of as an independent — to the left.
Sanders and his staff are confident a substantial number of Democratic senators will co-sponsor the measure. But many Democratic Party leaders continue to hold the idea of single-payer at arm's-length. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez regularly pivots to a broader answer about health care policy when he is asked whether he backs a single-payer plan.
"We believe that health care is a right for all, and not a privilege for a few," Perez recently told NPR. "And right now, in Washington, D.C., in the political climate in which we live, preserving the Affordable Care Act is a major victory."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was more direct earlier this year when she was asked whether Democrats should run on a single-payer platform in 2018.
"No," Pelosi said. "I say to people, 'You want to do that, do it in your states.' "
"The comfort level with a broader base of the American people is not there yet. Doesn't mean it couldn't be. States are a good place to start," she added.
Democrats in Pelosi's home state of California tried to pass a single-payer bill this year. The measure passed the state Senate but stalled in the Assembly, despite complete Democratic control in Sacramento, the capital.
The resistance from Pelosi and other Democratic leaders is tactical, not ideological. It took decades to pass something like Obamacare, and their concern is that, despite what polls might suggest, something as aggressive as single-payer just isn't politically feasible right now.
In fact, the congressional leaders you hear talking about single-payer are often Republicans, not Democrats. House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans regularly float it as a worst-case Democratic alternative.
"Ultimately it's very clear that they're more interested in a single-payer system, which means government-run health care," Ryan said during the Senate push to repeal Obamacare. "Government-run health care is not in our nation's interest."
Senate Republicans even forced a vote on a single-payer option on the Senate floor last month, hoping to get Democrats on the record supporting the idea.
Most Democratic senators voted "present." No one voted "yes."
"I urged my colleagues to vote 'present' because we are not going to dance to the tune of right-wing Republicans, who of course were not prepared to support a single-payer," Sanders said. "For them, it was just a political moment that they thought would be advantageous for them."
Polls show single-payer is gaining support. A recent Pew Research survey showed the number of respondents favoring government-run health care has gone up percentage points this year alone and is 12 points higher than it was in 2014.
In a more important metric, more than half of House Democrats signed on to co-sponsor a single-payer bill earlier this year.
Jeff Weaver, a longtime adviser to Sanders, argues Democrats should be more aggressive on health care after a stretch during which broad swaths of voters organized against the GOP's Obamacare repeal effort. "This is a very powerful issue, in that people are prepared to be mobilized in support of their health care," Weaver said.
Like Sanders readily admits, this bill isn't going anywhere any time soon.
The whole thing is more about political framing — getting Democrats to the point where this would be a top priority whenever the party is back in power.
That is how progressive activists like Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, are viewing Sanders' impending bill rollout.
"If we left this debate with 20 senators on the record supporting single-payer, and the entire Senate Democratic caucus uniting around giving every American the option of buying into Medicare if they want to, that would be a wonderful place to land," Green said. |
During the CES trek I take every year the Modders-Inc team in 2014 landed at the Zotac Booth. While at the booth we got the normal tour of all the items they had and are coming out with. During this we came across a computer that was shaped like an orb called the Zotac ZBOX Sphere OI520. My first thought was “Wow this would be a cool case to mod into the Death Star from Star Wars”. So during the conversation I brought up the idea and we all had a good laugh about and went on talking about others things. Well a month later I got contacted by Zotac about bringing the Death Star Case Mod to life and of course my reactions was “Yes, lets do it”. And so the journey began…
I would like to say thanks to Zotac for the product to mod.
Straight from Zotac was a delivery of the OI520 in a plain box with plenty of protection. I am guessing that I got the case that was on display at CES 2014 or another demo model, but either way I got it and it is time to go to work.
You might think that the computer is large, but it is not. At only 6 inches across I knew it would be a challenge to work with and get the detail I wanted.
The rear of the OI520 has all the connections that a typical PC would have.
One thing that really helped the idea of the Death Star was that Zotac put a lighted ring around it, just where the trench would be. This also created one issue for me and that was do I put the planet destroying laser? |
Ryan Kalish’s major league career still hasn’t taken off.
Kalish, once a highly touted prospect in the Boston Red Sox organization, was designated for assignment by the Chicago Cubs on Friday. The move made room on the Cubs’ roster for pitcher Jacob Turner, who was acquired from the Miami Marlins.
Kalish turned heads after being drafted by the Red Sox in the ninth round in 2006. The outfielder was considered one of Major League Baseball’s top 100 prospects before the 2008 season by both Baseball America (No. 96) and Baseball Prospectus (No. 60). He ultimately broke into the majors with Boston in 2010, hitting .252 with four homers, 24 RBIs and 10 stolen bases in 53 games that season.
A rise to stardom seemed inevitable, but neck and shoulder injuries have stalled Kalish’s career. He never appeared in the majors in 2011 and then missed all of 2013. The Red Sox chose not to tender him a contract following the 2013 season.
Theo Esptein and the Cubs took a chance on Kalish. The 26-year-old made the club’s Opening Day roster this season, but he has hit just .242 (22-for-91) with four RBIs and three stolen bases in 39 games at the major league level in 2014.
Kalish, known for his gritty style, is young enough that better days could lie ahead. Things haven’t come together to this point, but he at least is healthy, which hasn’t always been the case. |
In 1999 cryptographer Ron Rivest published an encrypted text that was designed to take 35 years to break. 18 years later it is still unbroken.
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The unsolved encrypted message I am writing about today depends on a simple equation. Here it is:
All you need to do is calculate the value of w. This value can then be used to decrypt a ciphertext. The values of t and n are the following:
t = 79685186856218
n = 631446608307288889379935712613129233236329881833084137558899
077270195712892488554730844605575320651361834662884894808866
350036848039658817136198766052189726781016228055747539383830
826175971321892666861177695452639157012069093997368008972127
446466642331918780683055206795125307008202024124623398241073
775370512734449416950118097524189066796385875485631980550727
370990439711973361466670154390536015254337398252457931357531
765364633198906465140213398526580034199190398219284471021246
488745938885358207031808428902320971090703239693491996277899
532332018406452247646396635593736700936921275809208629319872
7008292431243681
The LTC35 challenge
The cryptogram described above was developed by Ron Rivest, known as the “R” of RSA. I took the following picture of him at last year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco:
Ron Rivest published this challenge on the occasion of the 35th birthday of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) in 1998. This puzzle is designed to take approximately 35 years to solve. It is therefore referred to as “LCS35 challenge” or “LCS35 cryptogram”. I wrote my first blog article about it in 2014 (in German).
The LCS35 challenge uses ideas described in the paper Time-lock puzzles and timed-release Crypto by Rivest, Adi Shamir (the “S” in RSA), and David Wagner. To the extent known, the value of w can only be calculated sequentially, which means that it is not possible to parallelize this process. The puzzle can be solved by performing t successive squarings modulo n. There is no known way to perform this computation more quickly, unless one knows the factorization of n, which is the product of two large prime numbers.
Rivest chose the value of t taking into consideration the growth in computational power due to Moore’s Law. He estimated that the puzzle would require 35 years of continuous computation to solve, with the computer used being replaced every year by the fastest model available.
The ciphertext
Once one has found out the value of w, one has to exclusive-or it with the following ciphertext:
427338526681239414707099486152541907807623930474842759553127
699575212802021361367225451651600353733949495680760238284875
258690199022379638588291839885522498545851997481849074579523
880422628363751913235562086585480775061024927773968205036369
669785002263076319003533000450157772067087172252728016627835
400463807389033342175518988780339070669313124967596962087173
533318107116757443584187074039849389081123568362582652760250
029401090870231288509578454981440888629750522601069337564316
940360631375375394366442662022050529545706707758321979377282
989361374561414204719371297211725179287931039547753581030226
7611143659071382
The result is the cleartext, which provides information about the factorisation of n. This allows the solution to be easily verified.
There’s one important problem Rivest mentions in his LCS35 description: If there’s an error in the computation, all the following work will be useless.
Crypto experts will note that there is a relationship between the LCS35 challenge and the RSA algorithm (co-invented by Rivest, Shamir and Leonard Adleman). Both can be broken by factorizing a large prime number product. In this case this product has 2048 bits. The longest prime number product ever publicly factorized is 768 bits long. It is therefore as good as impossible to attack a 2048 prime number product, which means that the RSA algorithm with a 2048 public key is secure and that the LCS35 challenge can only be solved via the squaring method described above.
I am not aware of anyone, who is currently working on the LCS35 challenge. According to Rivest’s LCS35 description, the solution will be publicly announced in 2033. My expectation is that nobody will come up with the solution before.
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So you're sitting in the pub and your nice-but-naive friend says: "Hey, I heard the most amazing story the other day. There were these twins, right, a boy and a girl, who were separated at birth and adopted by different families. And, like, years later, by an amazing coincidence, they meet. And fall madly in love, and get married. Straight up! Then, obviously, they find out they're actually brother and sister. And it all has to be annulled, and they're just devastated. It's the ultimate nightmare. Can you imagine?"
Assuming your brain is still functioning like the well-oiled piece of precision engineering it is, your response would, I trust, be: "That's a wind-up if ever I heard one. Think about it for a minute - you mean these two meet by accident, discover not only that they were both adopted but were born on exactly the same day in exactly the same town, and still never pause to wonder whether they might be related? Pull the other one. What did it say on their birth certificates?"
Last week it was reported that this unlikely scenario had actually taken place - and news outlets the world over went bananas. Biologists and psychotherapists came forward to confirm the "genetic inevitability" of the pair's attraction and lamented the "cruelty of fate" and "trauma of forced separation".
The tabloids screamed: "Are YOU one of the twins - or do you know them? Get in touch NOW on 020 ..."
Here's the thing: it all came from a single remark more than a month ago by the vehemently anti-abortion Roman Catholic peer and father of four, Lord Alton, in favour of all children having the right to know the identity of their biological parents.
He had heard about this particular case, he said, from the judge who handled the annulment. Or perhaps (he later admitted) a judge who was "familiar with the case". Britain's top family judge, Sir Mark Potter, has never heard of the story. And, as the excellent Heresy Corner blog notes, the whole thing is statistically improbable, procedurally implausible (for 40 years, adoption practice has been to keep twins together) and based on the equivalent of a friend in the pub saying, "Hey, I heard the most amazing story the other day."
Still, stranger things have happened. |
FAYETTEVILLE -- The Arkansas Razorbacks changed up their play distribution between second-string quarterbacks Tuesday, giving redshirt sophomore Ty Storey all the work in team drills. Redshirt freshman Cole Kelley will get the extended work today with the second unit behind starter Austin Allen.
Coach Bret Bielema brought Kelley and Storey into his office Tuesday morning to explain the practice plan.
"It felt good," Storey said. "We started kind of slow as a unit, but we picked it up towards the end and in the red zone we lit the fire, it felt like, so it was a good day."
Said Kelley: "Ty did really well today. I think he got in a pretty good rhythm. We started kind of rough coming out, but he didn't. He did well."
Storey said the increased reps were helpful.
"When you have to go in for two plays and come out, you don't really get that rhythm with the guys," he said. "But when you're out there all day, especially in move-the-ball situations, it feels really good.
"Being in the huddle every single rep and looking the guys in the eyes and letting them know you're the guy today is pretty cool."
Kelley is eager for his workload today.
"Going in four reps then sitting out 16 and then going four, it's kind of hard," Kelley said. "Today Ty got all the two reps and tomorrow I will, and we'll see how it goes."
Nance x 2
Jonathan Nance scored a couple of times in Tuesday's practice.
"Jonathan took the top off a couple of times," receiver Jordan Jones said.
"J-Nance had a big day," quarterback Ty Storey said. "I know he caught one, I think it was in a team blitz pickup [period]. He caught a big touchdown there. Then he caught a fade ball in the back of the end zone, so it was a good day for J-Nance."
He's in
Freshman running back Chase Hayden said the film review of his long run against the starters in Saturday's scrimmage showed he stayed in bounds after a push from Henre Toliver inside the 10-yard line on the left sideline. Hayden was deemed to have stepped out by the side judge for a 65-yard gain to the 9. A touchdown would have given him a 74-yard gain to the end zone.
12 percent rule
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville offensive players said Tuesday that offensive coordinator Dan Enos has presented the team with a 12 percent rule. According to Enos, the Razorbacks have a good winning percentage when less than 12 percent of their offensive snaps include mistakes such as penalties, dropped passes, quarterback hits and turnovers.
"We have this system set up that involves sacks and drops and QB hits and missed assignments called the 12 percent rule," tackle Colton Jackson said. "We've just got to stick to being under 12 percent on those mental errors."
Said receiver Jordan Jones: "When we were under 12 percent, most of the time we won the game. So he's stressing that a lot. When the ball hits the ground or somebody holds or is offside, the 12 percent rule is going to apply."
Jackson 3
Koilan Jackson is the third son of Little Rock's Keith Jackson to play major college football, following Keith Jr. at Arkansas and Kenyon at Illinois. Keith Jackson Sr. was an All-American at Oklahoma and a six-time Pro Bowler in the NFL who is in the College Football Hall of Fame.
Koilan Jackson was asked whether there is pressure to play immediately because all of his family members did.
"Not just didn't redshirt, but they all started their freshman year," he said. "In the Jackson family, it's an expectation. I'm just going to take it step by step and see what comes of it."
Smack-what?
Receiver Jordan Jones, a product of Smackover High School in southern Arkansas, said he gets some weird looks when he tells people the name of his hometown.
"A small town that nobody knows where it's at," Jones said of the Union County town with a population of 1,763 in the 2016 census. "I say I'm from Smackover and everybody looks at me like I'm crazy.
"But it's been fun. My hometown gives me a lot of credit when I go back home."
Run balance
Offensive tackle Colton Jackson said the line has focused on run blocking in practice after grading out well in pass protection in Saturday's scrimmage.
"Since the scrimmage, we've mainly worked on running the ball more," Jackson said. "We've been very focused on pass pro and stuff since last year, so we can't get away from what we do here at Arkansas, which is run the ball. We're working on being a balance of both."
Punt pitch
Sophomore punter Blake Johnson made his first media appearance since winning the starting job in the spring and gave his work in camp a thumbs up.
"I've been working really hard and doing a really good job honestly, hitting really consistent balls that are going pretty far and doing what I'm supposed to," Johnson said.
Johnson said his average in camp is more than 40 yards per punt, and his hang time has been more than 4.0 seconds.
"I definitely did great in the spring and have had a great camp so far," said Johnson, who has credited much of his improvement to Toby Baker, the Hogs starting punter the past two years.
Frog scout
TCU Coach Gary Patterson, whose Horned Frogs will serve as the opponent in Arkansas' on-campus opener Sept. 9, is happy with the offensive staff he's assembled.
Patterson hired former Louisiana Tech and Cal coach Sonny Dykes as his offensive analyst to help co-coordinators Sonny Cumbie, who coaches quarterbacks, and Curtis Luper, who handles running backs. The other offensive staff members are inside receivers coach Jarrett Anderson, outside receivers coach Rusty Burns and offensive line coach Chris Thomsen.
"I've never had as much experience in my offensive room anywhere in my 35 years," Patterson said. "Everybody in the room is a coordinator on offense. Everyone has been a coordinator or a head coach."
A defensive specialist, Patterson said the offensive staff has a framework in which to operate, and he doesn't micro-manage.
"They don't need my help in there," he said. "I've given them some guidelines. I don't care what it looks like as long as it scores points, moves the ball and doesn't turn the ball over. I'm pretty simple when it comes to that."
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Property website Zoopla says sharpest falls are in south-west as housing market and mortgage data point to a slowdown
The average home in Britain has lost around £1,000 in value since the start of the year, according to property website Zoopla.
The company said its data showed prices were down 0.4% between the start of January and the end of March, the equivalent to a fall of £11.15 a day for the average property.
But it noted varying patterns in different parts of the country, with prices falling most sharply in south-west England, by 0.6%, but bucking the trend in Wales by rising 0.4%.
Compared with a year earlier, average British house prices were up 1.4%, Zoopla said. It did not provide figures on annual growth in previous months. The housing market is typically quiet around the turn of the year but usually picks up in the spring, meaning the price falls since the start of 2017 could be reversed.
Other housing market indicators have pointed to a slowdown in recent months. UK house prices fell for the first time in almost two years in March, according to Nationwide, with the average price dropping to £207,308 following a 0.6% rise in February. Bank of England figures showed mortgage approvals fell for the first time in six months in February.
“The softening in values and continued low mortgage rates are positive news for first-time buyers trying to get on to the property ladder,” said Zoopla’s Lawrence Hall.
“These prospective homeowners will be pleased to see a decrease in overall property values as seemingly unstoppable growth has pushed many areas out of reach in the past year.
“It’s also encouraging to see the resilience of the Welsh property market which in the past has often lagged behind England and Scotland.”
Zoopla’s analysis of its property values data showed prices in England dropped 0.4% over the first quarter of the year but were little changed in Scotland, dipping by less than 0.1%. Year-on-year comparisons showed house prices were up 2.1% in Wales, 0.9% in Scotland and 1.5% in England.
Looking at property values by town, it found Tredegar in Wales had the largest increase between January and March, with a 1.8% rise. Leominster in Herefordshire saw the biggest rise among English towns, with prices up 1.7%. In Scotland, the biggest increase was in Livingston, West Lothian, with average prices up by 0.7%. |
With the jaw-dropping stairwell brawl in "Atomic Blonde" fresh on our minds, we ask critics to name the best fight scenes ever shot.
Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)
This week’s question: In honor of the bone-crunching “Atomic Blonde,” what is the greatest movie fight scene?
Erin Oliver Whitney (@cinemabite), ScreenCrush
I’ve got a soft spot for wuxia so the “best fight scene” immediately evokes Zhang Yimou in my mind. I could list every fight in “Hero,” sequences so spellbindingly beautiful and graceful you forget you’re watching violence. The bamboo forest battle from “House of Flying Daggers” is another all-timer, a mesmerizing fight that almost entirely takes place in the air. And the bone-crunching, table-smashing Vernita Green duel in “Kill Bill Vol.” I never gets old. But if I had to choose just one scene to crown as the GOAT, it’s gotta be the “Oldboy” fight. Like the “Atomic Blonde” stairwell fight, you feel the sheer exhaustion and pain amounting during a nearly-3 minute single-take. Plus, how do you top a fight where one guy takes on 25 with nothing but a hammer and a knife in his back?
Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevasse), Freelance for The Guardian, Nylon, Vulture
I am firm in my conviction that more professional basketball players should be learning kung fu. During the ’70s, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar trained under Bruce Lee and developed a close personal friendship with the virtuoso ass-kicker, allegedly going so far as to fly himself to Hong Kong during the NBA’s on-season just to shoot his role in Lee’s directorial effort “Game of Death.” He plays what essentially amounts to the final boss on Lee’s vaguely defined quest upwards through the level of a pagoda, the photosensitive Mantis Guardian of the 5th Floor. The real Abdul-Jabbar was no match for Lee, and the scene has to work around that imbalance, but what the man lacked in technical skills he more than made up for in being freakishly tall. The matchup of the already-slight Lee with his stilt of an opponent is bizarre and engrossing, with every shot resembling an optical illusion. Better still, K.A.J.’s emulation of Lee’s self-originated Jeet Kune Do style pairs the two of them in a fluid interplay that should feel awkward, but somehow plays like a brutal waltz. Someone get Kyrie Irving in one-on-one sessions with Tony Jaa. [closes tab containing google search for ‘name of any basketball player’]
Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow), The New Yorker
The long answer is the impetuous, Homeric ten-minute brawl between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen to top off John Ford’s “The Quiet Man,” which also has built into it the audience for fight scenes and their authentic yet dubious pleasures. The short answer is the shockingly fast (single-take, if memory serves) climactic shootout near the end of Fritz Lang’s “Moonfleet.”
Jordan Hoffman (@JHoffman), Freelance for The Guardian, Vanity Fair
John Goodman vs Nicolas Cage in “Raising Arizona.” The camerawork is clean and smooth and velvety, but the fighting itself is a mess. Cage winding up for a thunderous punch only to scratch his knuckles on the ceiling is the type of thing that would happen to me.
Christian Blauvelt (@Ctblauvelt), BBC Culture
I feel like I should go with something really cool and obscure like the “house of mirrors” shoot-out in Tonino Valerii’s undersung Spaghetti Western masterpiece “My Name Is Nobody.” But I’m going with my heart. And my heart tells me that the sustained, snowballing opening of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” is the greatest bit of action ever put on screen.
It begins, of course, with a musical number – Steven Spielberg directing his future bride Kate Capshaw in a lavish Shanghai floorshow production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes that opens with the striking of a massive gong (a hat-tip to Rank Films’ famous logo). Then it becomes a tense showdown over a lazy susan as Indy, wearing a white tux and in full Bond mode, negotiates for a diamond from gangster Lao Che in exchange for the ashes of the first Manchu dynasty emperor Nurhaci. Then Indy gets poisoned, balloons drop, and the diamond gets lost in a spilled bucket of ice and it’s a total free-for-all that results in a high-speed chase down the streets of Shanghai and onto an airplane – an airplane that is piloted by a Lao Che goon and drops Indy and company over the Himalayas, leaving them to slide down the side of a mountain and off a cliff on an inflatable raft. You barely get a chance to catch your breath.
“Temple of Doom” is basically Spielberg’s version of a Tarantino film – a film stuffed with references to the movies that inspired him. And the range of movies quoted in “Temple of Doom” is wildly diverse: from “Broadway Melody of 1940” for that starry bit of Norman Taurog-esque staging of the chorus girls during “Anything Goes,” to Capra’s “Lost Horizon” for the action aboard the plane and the mysterious Himalayas landing, to Disney’s “In Search of the Castaways” for the journey in the raft down the mountain.
Spielberg and Lucas embraced pulp with “Temple of Doom” with an intensity they never quite did with the more respectable “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Last Crusade” (as great as those movies are in their own right). The mix of action, comedy, and utter horror on display throughout is truly breathtaking and I love the elegance of the sight gags: when, later in the film, Indy burns his shoes using his feet as brakes to stop the cart at the end of extraordinary mine chase (the meta idea of an action scene literally becoming a roller-coaster ride) he dances around and shouts “Water! Water!” His feet are on fire! Except then he sees that Mola Ram’s henchmen have opened a dam and a river’s worth of water is rushing toward them at lethal speed, at which he point he shouts again “Water! Water” not as a plea but as a warning. A brilliant comedic reframing based on context and intonation, and indicative of how tightly crafted this whole movie is.
I’m putting it out there: “Temple of Doom” is the best Indy movie. It’s the purest execution ever of how to make a bit of Old Hollywood pulp new again.
Jude Dry (@judedry), IndieWire
Flying slightly under the radar when it came out in 2007, Michael Davis’ woefully underrated action parody “Shoot ‘Em Up” is the kind of movie you either love or hate, depending on how serious you think Davis takes himself. Though it seems pretty clear from the outset that Davis is having fun; anyone who opens his movie with the protagonist (a stone-faced Clive Owen) delivering a baby in the middle of a shoot-out and severing the umbilical chord with a bullet clearly has a sense of humor. The ridiculous action sequences stand out even more in opposition to the seriousness of the characters, namely Owen as a drifter caught up in an outlandish baby-farming ring who goes by the name Smith, Paul Giamatti as a criminal overlord for the ages, and Monica Bellucci as a drippingly sensuous femme fatale.
The best fight sequence in the movie is as inventive and naughty as any more artfully done, when Smith and Bellucci’s character are besieged mid-shag by a comically endless string of gun-toting assassins. Without missing a beat, Smith takes down each and every one with a series of moves that get both jobs done at the same time. Bellucci really helps sell it, registering each flying bullet and inadvertent stroke with alternating shock and pleasure. It’s completely ridiculous, and oh so much fun.
Davis drives home the movie’s pulp parody showing Smith biting a carrot, and actually uttering the words, “What’s up, Doc?” to Giamatti’s equally outlandish and oily villain. All in good, fun, “Shoot ‘Em Up” infuses its satisfying action sequences with humor at every turn, providing layers beneath the fun for those who choose to see it. Thankfully, Davis doesn’t bang you over the head with his satire, which is probably why it was lost on so many — an unfortunate side effect of not taking yourself too seriously.
Christopher Campbell (@thefilmcynic), Nonfics and Film School Rejects
This week’s question is close to a stumper for my attempt to always answer with documentaries, but I’m not giving in. If anything, I could just say the fight scene from “They Live” as featured in “The Pevert’s Guide to Ideology,” but that’s sort of cheating. Would the confrontation in “Harlan County USA” count? Probably not. I guess I have to go with something very recent: the cat fight scene in “Kedi.” Actually, that’s not too much of a settle, since it’s a pretty crazy fight scene.
Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@chrisreedfilm), Hammer to Nail
So, although I did not love the extreme violence of “Atomic Blonde” nor its clunky plot set-up and reveal, I loved the panache of its design and wild choreography of its fight scenes. That’s always what gets me: pure choreography, like a brutal ballet, motivated by the narrative. Which should make me a fan of Asian martial-arts films, but I confess I have a gaping hole in my film knowledge there, though I adore what Jackie Chan films I have seen (that man is a genius). One of my favorite moments in the very silly “Rumble in the Bronx” is when Chan does battle from within an abandoned refrigerator. That was cleverer to me than anything I saw in the much more renowned “Drunken Master” films (which, granted, are better actual movies). And Chan would be nowhere without Bruce Lee (and Buster Keaton). Lee’s “Enter the Dragon” is a delight, for sure. I am not such a fan of “wire fu,” however: those films where the characters can fly. It takes the fun out of it, for me.
Other movies where the fight scenes have stood out are as follows: the bald Nazi fight in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”; most bits of the first three Bourne films; the train fight between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw in “From Russia with Love”; Jason Statham kicking ass while greased to the gills in the otherwise very dumb “The Transporter”; Sigourney Weaver squaring off against the mother alien in “Aliens”; and Sandra Oh and Anne Heche doing serious damage to each other in Onur Tukel’s “Catfight.” But my two absolute favorites, as I write this, are the vicious naked-in-the-sauna fight scene in David Cronenberg’s 2007 “Eastern Promises” and the tragicomic pas-de-deux-in-the-boxing-ring of Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 “City Lights.” The former is a masterful bit of non-gratuitous savagery that is entirely justified by the story and where the stakes are genuinely – and viscerally – high. The latter is a wonder of comic timing made more resonant by its sad conclusion, with similarly weighty stakes. Boxing films aren’t usually my thing, but I can watch this moment in “City Lights” over and over again and it never gets old.
David Ehrlich (@davidehrlich), IndieWire
My immediate response to this question — my immediate response to most questions really — was to think of the scene in “The Legend of Drunken Master” where Jackie Chan fights a guy in the cramped space beneath a train. There are too many incredible Chan fights to name, but the grace, confidence, and comedy of this exquisitely violent ballet is what first made me recognize that his talent is on par with that of Charlie Chaplin.
Mike Ryan (@MikeRyan), Uproxx
The underwater fight in “Top Secret!.”
What is the best movie currently playing in theaters?
Most Popular Answers: “Dunkirk” & “Landline” (Tie)
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As expected, Microsoft today announced that OneDrive now supports files up to 10GB in size, a significant jump from the previous 2GB cap. Support for larger files is included on the Web and in the Windows, Mac and mobile apps.
Business users can also look forward to the increased limit, though Microsoft didn’t specify a launch date.
OneDrive also increased the number of files that can be downloaded or uploaded simultaneous on PCs and Macs, so syncing to the service should be faster.
Windows 7 and 8 users can now grab links for sharing OneDrive files straight from Windows Explorer instead of having to sign onto the website. The feature is gradually rolling out over the next few weeks.
Microsoft has also added drag-and-drop folder uploading to OneDrive for Chrome.
➤ OneDrive now supports 10 GB files [OneDrive blog]
Read next: Kevin Rose’s North mobile design studio is building an app for sharing tiny disappearing photos |
Toddlers sure love surprises. And I bet the parents of this little girl were also pleasantly surprised by the string of swear words that emanated from her adorable lips when they poured a pot of water on her. From whence only babble came before, now came an unholy cursing of epic proportions.
The best thing about this video (delivered via Uproxx) is how unexpected the expletives are. First there's an adorable child sitting in a chair muttering to herself in some strange, as yet uninterpretable language that shares many similarities to how I imagine Troll dolls talk. Then there's a pot of (what is probably lukewarm) water lovingly and gently poured over her head. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, this sweatpanted munchkin in gorgeous pigtails rears back and screams "fuck your mouth!" with all of her might. It's cathartic, it's terrifying and, most of all, it's the most hilarious thing I've seen all day. Fuck you in the mouth, parents. What else did you expect?
UPDATE: I've watched the video again and concede that the child could be saying "fucking hell" because she is that one sassy maid on Downton Abbey. I still think she is saying "Fuck your mouth." |
In a perfect follow-up to both President Obama's earlier comments and the news that a hearing is to be held ion May 17th, Rick Santelli has a few things to say. Clearly irritated at the incredible reality of big brother and government intervention, Santelli pushes his blood pressure to 11 on the dial as he comes to grip with the repercussions of the IRS actions. "Truth is power," he exclaims, "you can't assume someone is fair and honest," just because a politician says so. His bigger fears lie in the IRS administration of Obamacare where he is concerned that "No stent for you," will be heard when the powers that be know what groups you support, what thoughts you have, and what area you live in. Think he is exaggerating? Did you really believe the tin-foil hat wearers conspiracies that the IRS was doing this before it became mainstream news? |
HOUSTON, TX - DECEMBER 01: Case Keenum #7 of Houston Texans looks to pass during the game against the New England Patriots at Reliant Stadium on December 1, 2013 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Scott Halleran/Getty Images)
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Case Keenum was the winning quarterback for the first time in his professional football career. He wasn’t speechless, but talking about it wasn’t easy.
“I can’t put words on it,” Keenum said about the win. “It’s very special.”
It wasn’t the most successful statistical performance of Keenum’s career by any means. He managed just 185 yards while throwing no touchdowns and one interception. He completed 20 of his 42 pass attempts finishing with a quarterback rating just over 50.
The stats weren’t as important as getting the win. Chris Myers knew Keenum was a key to the victory.
“Huge,” Myers said about Keenum’s performance. “We definitely missed him. To see him – what he went through up in St. Louis and coming here in a week, less than that, and be able to put the performance he did today speaks a lot about his character and his dedication.”
Myers said Keenum spent a lot of hours catching up on the offense this week.
“First one up here, last one to leave, the entire week,” said running back Arian Foster. He said most people don’t understand how difficult it is for a player to go from one offense to another in such a short amount of time. He said Keenum “studied his ass off” to get ready for this game.
According to Keenum the system started to come back to him as he immersed himself in it this past week. He praised the offensive line for their protection and the offensive game plan leading to his success.
“Every play we ran, I felt good about what was called,” Keenum said.
DeAndre Hopkins wasn’t surprised by the showing today from his quarterback.
“The guy’s going to give you all he has once he get out there on the field,” Hopkins said. “He’s not going to leave anything out there. It was no question about him going out and being to perform the task today.”
Owner Bob McNair called Keenum’s performance “fantastic” after the game.
Keenum is the epitome of the next man up attitude this team preaches said Kareem Jackson.
“Case stepped in and did a great job for us today,” said Jackson who had two interceptions. “He did everything that the coaches asked of him. He led us today.”
Now it will be up to Keenum to lead the Texans next week against the Jaguars, a must-win game for the Texans if they have designs on playing more than 16 games.
Follow Stoots on Twitter – @Cody_Stoots |
The South Bend police chief says there was no wrongdoing in the August arrest of Notre Dame cornerback Devin Butler. On Friday, chief Scott Ruszkowski said via statement he will not refer the case to the Board of Public Safety but that an internal investigation had been opened because of the large public interest in the case of the Fighting Irish senior.
"As with proceedings for citizens accused of wrongdoing, serious officer discipline cases are handled according to due process," Ruszkowski said, according to the report. "These discipline cases, presented in public to the Board of Public Safety and decided based on evidence, are not reopened once a decision is made and a case is closed.
"I have stressed honesty, integrity and accountability each and every day since becoming chief last year. Under my watch, SBPD examines every use-of-force case regardless of whether or not a complaint is made. For every case of alleged misconduct that comes before our department, we base decisions and recommendations on a full review of evidence. Cases for major discipline, from written reprimand to termination, are referred to the Board of Public Safety upon completion of an internal affairs investigation and my recommendation on appropriate discipline.
"In the Butler case, the evidence does not support a claim of wrongdoing on the part of any officer involved, which is why I am not referring the case to the Board of Public Safety. It is also important to note that no formal citizen complaint was filed by Mr. Butler or others. Due to the considerable public interest in this case and accusations made in public, we decided to open an internal investigation anyway. We have refrained from releasing additional information about this case out of respect for Mr. Butler's right to due process. We will release further information as soon as circumstances allow."
Butler, who was suspended from the Irish indefinitely following his arrest, faces felony counts of resisting law enforcement and battery against a public safety official. A not-guilty plea was entered on his behalf Aug. 24.
Butler's girlfriend, Haleigh Bailey, had previously disputed the police account of Butler's arrest, telling the South Bend Tribune in August that Butler was "abused and wrongly arrested."
The officer who had arrested Butler, Aaron Knepper, had been named as a co-defendant in three separate lawsuits since 2012 that accused him of using excessive force and violating civil rights, according to reports.
A Washington D.C. native, Butler had been expected to miss the first month of this season with a broken left foot that had been re-injured this past summer. The 6-foot-1, 195-pound Butler appeared in 37 games and started three for the Irish, with 39 tackles, six pass breakups, one forced fumble, one fumble recovery and one interception. |
Thunder and lightning rolled through the metro area Sunday, causing some property damage and even killing some goats in one neighborhood.
The two goats were struck and killed by lightning at about 7 a.m. in Kelso, Wash. A witness said the animals had been standing next to a tree when lightning hit the tree.
Elsewhere, Sunday afternoon, a tree hit by lightning fell and damaged two homes in the 18700 block of Southwest Hennig Court in Aloha. No one was hurt.
"There was just this horrible big boom and at first, I thought it was thunder,"said Karen Lund. "And then I thought 'that's pretty strong thunder.' I went to the kitchen and saw the branches that had gone over the house and into the back yard. Then, when I turned around, I could see the branches that came through the roof and into the den."
Throughout the rest of the afternoon, forecasters predicted a chance of showers and wind gusts up to 18 mph, according to the National Weather Service.
It looks like the wet, cooler weather is sticking around. Showers and temperatures barely cracking 70 degrees are on tap for Monday and Tuesday, KATU Meteorologist Mary Loos predicts. |
There is no place in the latest Cameroon squad for West Ham's Alex Song, despite the fact he has completed a three-match ban.
The Indomitable Lions are set to play Sierra Leone on 10 and 15 October in Group D of 2015 Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers.
Song was given the suspension after being sent off during Cameroon's second match at the World Cup.
He was dismissed for elbowing Croatia's Mario Mandzukic in the 4-0 loss.
Cameroon's 2015 Africa Cup of Nations qualifying so far Won 2-0 against DR Congo - goals from N'Jie and AboubakarWon 4-1 against Ivory Coast - 2 goals each from N'jie and Aboubakar
The 28-year-old missed the final Group A match in Brazil, a 4-1 loss to the hosts, and then Cameroon's opening two Nations Cup qualifiers.
Following the World Cup, he joined English Premier League side West Ham on a season-long loan from Spanish giants Barcelona.
There is a recall for the Lyon defender Henri Bedimo, who missed the qualifying wins against DR Congo and Ivory Coast through injury.
Cameroon are set to host both qualifiers against Sierra Leone in Yaounde as the Leone Stars are unable to play at home due to the ongoing outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the country.
The Indomitable Lions are top of Group D after the first two matches with the top two sides in each group guaranteed to qualify for January's finals in Morocco.
Cameroon squad:
Goalkeepers: Pierre Sylvain Abogo (Tonnerre Yaounde), Guy Roland Ndy Assembe (Nancy, France), Joseph Ondoua (Barcelona, Spain)
Defenders: Frank Bagnack (Barcelona, Spain), Henri Bedimo (Lyon, France), Cedric Djeugoue (Coton Sport), Jerome Guihoata (Valenciennes, France), Bana Moussa (Coton Sport), Nicolas Nkoulou, Brice Nlate (both Marseille), Ambroise Oyongo (New York Red Bulls, USA)
Midfielders: Enoh Eyong (Standard Liege, Belgium), Marc Kibong Mbamba (Konyaspor, Turkey), Raoul Cedric Loe (Osasuna, Spain), Georges Mandjeck (Kayseri Erciyesspor, Turkey), Stephane Mbia (Sevilla, Spain), Benjamin Moukandjo (Stade Reims, France), Edgar Salli (Monaco, France), Guy Christian Zock (Cosmos Bafia)
Forwards: Vincent Aboubakar (Porto, Portugal), Eric-Maxim Choupo Moting (Schalke 04, Germany), Jean Marie Dongou (Barcelona, Spain), Frank Etoundi (FC Zurich, Switzerland), Leonard Kwueke (Caykur Rizespor, Turkey), Clinton N'Jie(Lyon) |
How the Media Support Hamas' Efforts to Delegitimize Israel
The Palestinians long ago realized that they cannot defeat Israel militarily and opted instead to delegitimize and diplomatically isolate Israel. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has approached this goal by pushing for unilateral diplomatic recognition, a strategy facilitated by its claim to represent a peaceful approach to the conflict with Israel. That claim became far less credible once the PA (1) accepted Hamas, which the U.S. State Department has designated as a terrorist group, into a unity government, and (2) more recently embraced Hamas' violent attacks.
Like the PA, Hamas also seeks to delegitimize and diplomatically isolate Israel, and uses its civilians and the mainstream media to that end. By posing a direct threat to Israeli civilians, Hamas compels Israel into a war that Hamas is bound to lose militarily but win on the PR front. Hamas knows that the international media will rarely provide the context, balance, history, and technical details for Israel to be judged fairly. So to achieve its goal of delegitimization, Hamas just has to start a war with Israel. Then, a cooperative media will dutifully reinforce a simple and oft repeated narrative: the militarily superior IDF brutally and disproportionately harms innocent and defenseless Palestinians. That narrative defames Israel, with potentially serious political and economic consequences. In the current conflict in Gaza, the mainstream media has been abundantly helpful to Hamas. There are countless examples, but here are some highlights that demonstrate just how much the press helps Hamas (out of anti-Israel animus, journalistic sloppiness, and/or naivete). The media clearly favor Hamas by: Focusing so much more on Palestinian suffering than anyone else's. Nigerians must die in far greater numbers before the mainstream media take notice (those hundreds of abducted Nigerian schoolgirls left the front pages long ago).
Minimizing its coverage, if any, of the Hamas attacks that led up to Israel's military response and generally providing so little context that outsiders think that Israelis kill Palestinians just for fun. The French media are particularly guilty of this, and their distortions of the conflict are so one-sided that they incite Muslims across France to attack Jews and synagogues (which attacks unwittingly remind everyone why the Jews need a state).
Emphasizing the Gazan civilian death toll without explaining that (1) Hamas casualty reports are hasty and inflated, and (2) Hamas maximizes that total by using Palestinians to shield its weapons and by urging them to stay in the very areas that the IDF -- in its effort to minimize our civilian deaths -- warns Gazans to evacuate.
Never mentioning the fact that if Hamas could kill millions of Israelis, they would (after all, their charter calls for Israel's destruction and their anti-Semitism is amply on record). Just as the 9/11 hijackers made the most of what they had but would have liked to kill far more Americans (for example, with the help of WMD), Hamas too would love to kill far more Israelis. Indeed, they have purposely targeted Israel's nuclear reactor on several occasions, with that very goal in mind. Of course, the media rarely highlight the genocidal intent behind such attacks when mentioning Israel's "disproportionate" response.
Never calling Hamas "jihadists" even though they persecute Christians (the same as the ISIS, which just compelled Mosul's Christians to convert to Islam). The forced conversion, expulsion, or murder of Christians and other religious minorities by Islamists has been happening for millennia, as assiduously documented in Raymond Ibrahim's Crucified Again , but such historical context is absent from most reporting on Hamas' conflict with Israel.
Downplaying how bad Hamas is for Gazans by not reporting on, for example, their attack on the very Israeli power station that provides electricity to 70,000 Gazans. The media also ignored how the Israelis -- in their remarkable display of goodwill -- exposed their workers to the perils of our rockets so that they could restore power to Gaza.
Minimally reporting on Hamas' corruption, unfair wealth, or vast expenditures on tunnels to attack Israel while ordinary Palestinians grew poorer.
Overlooking how -- to maximize Palestinian deaths -- Hamas stored its missiles in an UNWRA-run school and how, when UNWRA found out, they just handed the missiles back to Hamas.
Disregarding Arabs who have the courage to critique Hamas -- like Dr. Tawfik Hamid, an Islamist-turned-reformer who blames Palestinian suffering entirely on Hamas.
Ignoring Israeli humanitarianism in providing medical aid to the very terrorists trying to kill them.
Failing to acknowledge Israel's immense restraint. Had Hamas been fighting Syria's Assad regime, by now Gaza would have been flattened -- devastated by barrel bombs, poison gas, and other attacks that are far more indiscriminate than Israel's intelligence-directed strikes. And of course, if Syria were killing Palestinians, the media would hardly care. But luckily for Hamas, they're fighting Israel -- that country that everyone loves to hate -- so Hamas can count on favorable coverage.
Omitting how Israel chose to sacrifice dozens of IDF soldiers when destroying Hamas tunnels and weapons in densely populated areas like Shejaiya because doing so with air strikes (which risks no soldiers) would have killed many thousands of Palestinians. The media's omission of such crucial moral facts repeats how the press covered Jenin in 2002, when (again) -- rather than praise Israel's humane but costly decision to use ground troops rather than air strikes -- the media falsely accused Israel of a massacre during another IDF operation to stop Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.
Not sharing with English readers what Hamas openly says in Arabic: that they view any truce as just an opportunity to rearm for their next war against Israel (as Hamas spokesman, Musheer Al Masri, recently declared on TV).
Not underscoring that Israel can do nothing to make peace with Hamas (after all, Israelis ended their occupation of Gaza in 2005 and they've been rocketing Israel ever since). Hamas absurdly insists that the next cease-fire deal remove Israel's blockade so that they can more easily replenish their weapons and restore their tunnels for their next attack. Anyone who -- like Qatar -- sides with Hamas' terms for a truce plainly wants to subject Israel to ceaseless, bloody attacks.
Not reminding readers, when mentioning potential truce arrangements, that world powers are no more capable of ensuring a demilitarized Gaza than they were capable of disarming Hizb’allah in south Lebanon. As if all of the above weren't bad enough, the mainstream media's skewed reporting encourages countless pro-Hamas protesters to organize often violent demonstrations that embolden the terrorist group while giving it a veneer of political legitimacy. Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East. |
(CNN) Every other week 50,000 fans of an English Premier League team flock to the city's soccer cathedral to cheer on a club that hasn't won a trophy for over half a century.
But it's not Newcastle United's inability to end an exhaustive wait for silverware that is troubling a sizeable chunk of its supporters.
Its billionaire British owner has seemingly perfected a method for squeezing every last cent out of a club that made a $28 million profit for 2013/14, while appearing content to let it tread water in sporting terms.
The English Premier League team is deep in a trough of form, defeat at Liverpool on Monday its fifth in a row, and could yet be sucked into another bitter battle to avoid relegation.
But an under performing team is only part of the problem.
Many supporters feel betrayed by a perceived poverty of ambition from Mike Ashley, who they accuse of allying the club to "tacky" brands and prioritising profit over performance since his takeover in 2007.
"A zombie club," is how one Newcastle fanzine describes United's current state. "An empty shell," cries another.
Newcastle is renowned in soccer circles for the passion of its fans.
The joke goes the club could schedule a friendly for two days' time in Timbuktu and a clutch of hardy souls would still make the trip.
But patience is running thin. The four-time English champions' last domestic trophy was secured 60 years ago and it hasn't won anything of note since 1969.
Sad to see what a mess #nufc are in. No discipline, no direction, no leadership. Need a new manager allowed by Ashley to rebuild properly. — Henry Winter (@henrywinter) April 13, 2015
Ashley stands accused of not investing enough in the squad, selling the club's best players and being content merely to survive in order to milk the huge riches on offer from multi-billion dollar television deals.
Yet despite the discontent, 50,000 disciples ritually flock up Gallowgate Hill on a match day to pack the Premier League's third biggest stadium for every home game.
There might be a few less sporting the famous black and white stripes on Sunday though, as disillusioned fans call for a boycott of the clash with Spurs in protest at the club's apparent stagnation.
"When Ashley rolled into town you thought 'We've got this mega-rich, English businessman in the sports industry, what could possibly go wrong?'" Mark Jensen, editor of The Mag fanzine, told CNN.
"Our place in his business empire appears to underpin the rest of it. The eternal optimists keep thinking he's going to reach a point where he says 'I'm going to invest in players, and we're going to plan to be successful.'
"He's been in charge nearly eight years now and any sane person can tell that's not going to happen.
"The club have said that cup competitions aren't a priority and they mean it. To remain in the Premier League is the overall aim. But survival -- what does that offer fans?"
Ashley is a fabulously wealthy man, and a controversial one.
He has grown his Sports Direct empire significantly since acquiring Newcastle, piggybacking on the Premier League's profound global reach to spread its name far and wide.
From a turnover of $1.8 billion in 2006, it recently announced a "record" 15% rise in annual pre-tax profits to $359.8m and a turnover of $4.05bn. There are stores in 19 European countries and an expansion into Australia and New Zealand is planned.
But the company, whose logo is plastered all over Newcastle's St James' Park stadium, has been criticised for employing an estimated 75% of its staff on zero-hour contracts — that guarantee no set hours each week.
The retailer's chairman, Keith Hellawell, told a British parliamentary committee that 15,000 of its 19,000 staff were on such terms, arguing it offered flexibility for what is, predominantly, a young workforce.
The club argues it is unable to compete with the untold riches at the disposal of fellow top flight clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City, and Ashley has tried desperately to drive up revenue.
NUFC don't just require a new manager and new players. The club needs fumigating. — George Caulkin (@CaulkinTheTimes) April 13, 2015
The 123-year-old St James' was temporarily renamed The Sports Direct Arena in 2011 to try and attract a naming sponsor. It was a move that infuriated fans.
And the decision to sign a shirt sponsorship deal with payday loans company Wonga is one that stoked anger in what is, traditionally, one of the most economically deprived regions of the country.
"Like a lot of fans, I think (the association) is cheap and tacky and undermines the values of what the club stands for," the leader of Newcastle City Council, Nick Forbes, told CNN.
"As leader of the council it really concerns me we've got a toxic brand like Sports Direct, with the zero hours culture it promotes, and Wonga and the payday loans it promotes. To have both of those concepts sponsoring our football club is deeply unfortunate.
"As a council we are having increasingly to pick up the pieces of people whose lives have been shattered both by zero hours contracts and by loan sharks.
"Newcastle United has such brand recognition it penetrates into some of our poorer communities in a way that others can't and I find it absolutely appalling that's the message they get.
"It doesn't feel that there's any social responsibility.
"Because there's only one Newcastle United I think there's a reliance on fans as cash cows to keep supporting the club come what may.
"I think there's been a calculated business decision to keep milking that cash cow without generating the football returns that people expect."
Sports Direct declined to respond when contacted by CNN and questions to both Wonga and Newcastle United were unanswered.
While Ashley's appetite to grow his retail business appears limitless, he has insisted on a far more frugal modus operandi at Newcastle.
The club seeks to unearth bargains in foreign markets then sell them on for huge profits when they reach peak value.
United's stated aim is a 10th place finish or higher in the Premier League while the two domestic cup competitions are "not a priority."
But Newcastle are on an unquestionably sound financial footing.
Ashley has turned a traditionally debt-laden outfit into one that turned an $28.05 million profit in the 2013/14 season, recent accounts showing it had a $51m surplus in its bank accounts.
The club's managing director Lee Charnley trumpeted the figures as a "reflection of the prudent and measured manner in which we operate."
But fans are at a loss to explain why a man whose fortune amounts to $4.5 billion, according to Forbes, seems so reluctant to chase success for a club that is the 19th wealthiest in Europe.
"People are miserable, fed up," Forbes added. "Newcastle's current performance is like a permanent cloud over the city.
"The club feels soulless — an island. In the same way the senior management doesn't have any engagement with fans, they don't have any engagement with the city either.
"People have worked out the current owner has a business model, which is participating in the Premier League but not winning it.
"What people see is a disinterested owner, interested only in the cash the business generates, not the trophies it could produce."
Just like last year, Newcastle are stumbling towards the end-of-season finishing line.
In January 2014 it sold its star player Yohan Cabaye to Paris-Saint Germain for $28.5m, making a cool $22.5m profit in the process.
No replacement was hired, the money was banked and its season quickly nosedived. A year on, history is repeating itself.
Manager Alan Pardew left for Crystal Palace — a much smaller English top flight club — and was replaced by his assistant, John Carver and Newcastle signed no new players.
They have won two out of 14 games since and its threadbare squad contains only two fit defenders. They are leaking goals, losing games and haemorrhaging confidence.
Fans, having suffered one relegation under Ashley's ownership in 2009, are fearful of another. Protests have been audible at matches, now the Toon Army are planning to vote with their feet.
"There has been a numbness and with Ashley twice failing to sell Newcastle, there has also been a powerlessness," George Caulkin, north east correspondent for The Times newspaper, told CNN.
"A huge part of the North East tradition is simply turning up at the football — turning up no matter how bad it gets, turning up and bearing witness, turning up and singing, turning up, regardless.
"It is like being locked in a loveless marriage. The fact some people are now considering not turning up at all shows how much alienation is around."
Mark Douglas, who covers United for two local papers The Chronicle and The Journal, says fans find it hard to believe the club when it says it will invest healthily in the summer.
"Most Newcastle fans say they've heard all that before," Douglas explained. "It's the second season that it has drifted after Christmas and it's created this toxic atmosphere.
"They have lost all the faith and belief of the supporters who don't believe in what Ashley is trying to do any more. The identity of the club has been lost in the last seven or eight years.
"It has culminated in a feeling that this club is happy just to exist. They're not interested in glory or in winning things any more. You can see it in the way the players are the results have gone.
"It's a slow evaporation of what NUFC is all about."
In the early 90s, Newcastle were dubbed 'The Entertainers' for a swashbuckling style under manager Kevin Keegan, and came close to winning the Premier League in 1995/96.
After losing successive finals of the FA Cup — England's premier cup competition — in 1998 and 99, the late Sir Bobby Robson led Newcastle to a third placed finish in the Premier League in 2001/02 and into the European Champions League.
Keegan returned at the start of the Ashley's reign but later resigned in protest at how the club operated. Fans demonstrated and Ashley vowed to sell, but he could not find a buyer.
Keegan was subsequently awarded $3m by an independent arbitration panel, that rejected some of the club's evidence as "profoundly unsatisfactory."
Newcastle finished fifth in 2012, narrowly missing out on a return to Europe's top club competition, as a slew of signings gelled together. Finishes in the Premier League of 16th and 10th have followed.
But while those flirtations with glory under Keegan and Robson have shown fans could be possible, Douglas says the ambitions of supporters are much more grounded these days.
"Newcastle's fans are often painted as delusional, believing that they should be regularly in with a shout of winning the league," Douglas explained. "Having lived and worked here for eight years that idea is complete rubbish.
"What Newcastle fans want to see is a club that, even if it fails, it is at least trying to be the best it can be. That means attempting to win things, taking a few risks.
"It could be a northern powerhouse. At the moment, it's almost a shell of a club, it exists just to exist and that's not what fans want from a club that is supposed to represent the city much better."
There have been protests before but Ashley has ridden the storm.
Whether a groundswell of support for the boycott on social media translates into an embarrassing number of empty seats in what is a televised match on Sunday, remains to be seen.
But even if it does, fans are unlikely to hear what their publicity-shy owner thinks about it.
"Does Ashley care? As it is impossible to get close to him, so it is impossible to answer," Caulkin explained.
"The evidence of recent years will probably make him feel he can just about get away with anything and people will still troop through the turnstiles. Is that different now?
"In the final analysis, he'll only go when someone meets his asking price, but there can be a value in protest for protest's sake, in saying that this is not good enough, that more should be expected, that a club is not just about profit margins but a collection of human beings brought together for a common cause.
"Sometimes a howl of anguish is all that there is left." |
Colin Fraser has cleared waivers, per Lisa Dillman of the LA Times:
Pausing in a break between slopestyle and moguls, we have bit of Kings news. Told by them that Colin Fraser cleared waivers. — lisa dillman (@reallisa) February 9, 2014
Placing Fraser on waivers allows the Kings additional flexibility in advance of the lifting of the NHL’s trading freeze at 8:59 p.m. PT on Sunday, February 23. More about this flexibility can be found on yesterday’s posts about the subject here and here. This move does not necessarily mean that Fraser will join the Manchester Monarchs, though he could technically be assigned to Manchester in a “paper” transaction without reporting, as the added salary cap flexibility was the key consideration of yesterday’s transaction.
I’m hoping to hear more about what this means for Fraser and how he fits within the Kings’ plans, but keep in mind a much firmer sense will be had after the lifting of the trade freeze and with any hypothetical trades.
UPDATE, 12:25 PM PT: After speaking with the Kings, the plan is for Fraser to report to Manchester “later next week.” |
It was excruciatingly hot for most of the day, until the last 15k when we were treated to a wonderful shower of rain… and hail. We sought shelter underneath a hanging rock and enjoyed the relief from the heat. We finally arrived, soaked and covered in dirt, at the refuge at La Cathédrale. The owner asked us where we had come from. “Anergui”, I told him. “Anergui?” he exclaimed, “But there are no tracks there anymore.” The confused owner was right, there’s no road anymore, not even for 4 x 4’s, but on a mountain bike it’s possible to ride there – but it’s not easy. Especially not after the ride we had the day before.
We were on a 550km bike-packing adventure through the High Atlas. We started in Tinerhir, and went through the Gorge du Todra, over 8 days. We crossed the High Atlas from east to west, then went back to the south over the M’goun mountains to Boulmalne de Dadès, our finish.
The views in Morocco are fantastic. Everything seems so desolate, no houses or other buildings. Occasionally we’d see a shepherd surrounded by sheep and donkeys. Around the villages, kids would chase us on foot, their main interest not in us but for cigarettes.
On the third day, we were up early and left the small village of Bou-Zemou and began the very long, but gentle climb into the mountains. We could see remote houses in the distance – these people probably didn’t see tourists that often, let alone bikers.
A narrow cut track (piste coupée) was the only thing that was separating us from our pass and the valley far below. The route down is a 5k track losing 1200m in altitude. The track starts with a steep downhill path. It seemed to have been used before, so we figured we were on the right track. Soon, however, it became impossible to cycle. Plants, branches and large jutting rocks littering the tracked resulted in us changing the plan and continuing on foot. In the extraordinary heat of the day, we quickly tired and our water rations were depleting rapidly.
Despite knowing our destination for the night was not too far off, we were in trouble…
Getting off the mountain was draining us mentally and physically. The descent took a huge a toll on my shoulder and arm, which is held together with titanium nuts and bolts after a riding accident in Belgium earlier in the year, so I took a break, and sat there enjoying the view, and considering my options.
I could seriously use some help, but my three friends were having their own problems so I was pretty stuck. |
The proposal to include async function in ECMAScript has reached stage four; that means it’s on track to be in the 2017 release of the standard. But what does that mean for JavaScript developers?
There’s a lot of interest in async, the capabilities JavaScript will need to easily execute multiple functions in parallel.
“Because JavaScript is single-threaded, that means if you have any long-running work it has to happen asynchronously for your app to remain responsive or it would just block and your browser would freeze,” said Anders Hejlsberg, the lead architect of C# and now also a core developer for Microsoft’s TypeScript transpiler for JavaScript. So the JavaScript runtime libraries and all the frameworks are designed such that they only have asynchronous ways of doing things. If you want to do an expensive operation like an XML HTTP request, you don’t get to block and await for the result; you get to supply a callback that calls you back later with the result.”
“There’s a huge amount of excitement out there; people are looking forward to when they can use async functions without transpilation,” said Brian Terlson, from Microsoft’s Edge team, who is the editor of the ECMAScript standard as well as “champion” for the async proposal on the TC39 committee that standardizes ECMAScript. When he tweeted that the async proposal had reached stage four, it got more retweets than anything else he’s tweeted.
Async functions are now stage 4 and will be included in ES2017! — Brian Terlson (@bterlson) July 29, 2016
“Async programming models allow developers to ask all their questions at once. Developers then react to the answers as those answers are provided. The application is constantly adjusting to the information as it comes in. The user experiences a dynamic application that updates itself instead of being forced to wait an unbounded time for a perfect completed view,” said Naveed Ihsanullah of Mozilla’s platform engineering team, and partly because it’s going to make code more understandable.
“Asynchronous programming is very important for developing the best user experiences. Information is in many places and modern applications seek to seamlessly integrate all those disparate sources into one cohesive view. The instantly loaded and completed web page is all illusion, however. Behind the scenes, numerous requests for information are made on the user’s behalf. Some of these are answered quickly and some may take longer. Some may go unanswered altogether,” he said.
The whole web platform is moving in this direction, pointed out Terlson. Async going into ECMAScript 2017 is “a reflection of the fact that more and more things in the platform are asynchronous, so your code ends up having to deal with more asynchrony. Talking to a web worker is an asynchronous kind of thing, as is any kind of networking. Storage APIs are asynchronous. Service workers are doing a bunch of network stuff, so they’re asynchronous. The new Streams API has a lot of asynchronous pieces in it. As new APIs are added, we’re just discovering more and more sources of asynchrony as the platform grows in capability, so it permeates your code.”
The growth of APIs that add asynchrony means JavaScript needs better ways of handling that in code than callbacks. “If you have just one source of asynchrony a callback is OK but if you’re got a lot of them it sucks, and it’s also painful for performance reason with lots of functions created and thrown away.” Essentially, notes Terlson, reiterating over the HTML Document Object Model (DOM), again and again, isn’t efficient.
Making Async Bearable
He views async as a ‘vast improvement’ over callbacks because “there’s no pyramid-of-doom nesting callbacks” and Ihsanullah agreed.
“While async programming has many benefits, writing applications in this style is often complex and tedious. The JavaScript language has had low-level async facilities, such as XMLHttpRequest, for years. These lower level callback-based constructs were very difficult to work with, difficult to maintain and difficult to debug. They could degenerate the source code to Callback Hell as multiple nested requests were made. Asynct has the potential for greatly decreasing the barrier to writing high quality maintainable asynchronous code. These developer benefits translate directly to more responsive applications for users as more async is used.”
In many ways, this is JavaScript catching up with other languages, like C# which pioneered asynchronous programming, and the way asynchrony will work in JavaScript is very similar to how it’s handled in C#, Hejlsberg said. That makes code easier to read and to think about.
“JavaScript is a single-threaded execution environment. If you want anything to happen as a result of asynchrony, you’ve got to do through callbacks or someone has to call you, because only there’s one thread of execution. If someone else has it, they’ve got to give it up and let you run. So from day one, JavaScript always had callbacks like setTimeout or like DOM events; all that happens by someone calling you back.
The problem is how complex the code structure becomes with a lot of callbacks, and how hard that makes it to work with, Hejlsberg said. “The logic often becomes more complex; what if you have to have conditional branching or you have to have the equivalent of a for loop but with async calls in middle of the loop? You can try to do that mapping yourself, where you have to lift your state into shared object or shared variables and maintain that, but you basically have to write a state machine yourself. State machines are something computers are very good at reasoning about and humans are horrible at reasoning about!”
Async takes care of that, he explained. “It turns out that you can mechanically transform code that’s written in the regular sequential style into asynchronous code using CPS, Continuation Processing Style code rewrites. You can rewrite any program that uses synchronous function calls with returns and turn them into functions that take callbacks — and that’s what powers async. You get to write your code as if it is synchronous and then the compiler rewrites it into asynchronous callback-based code for you and turns your code into a state machine.”
That’s the best way to think about the new async/await feature, he suggests. “The places where you use the await operator to await an asynchronous piece of work, the compiler automatically makes a callback out of the rest of your code.”
“The big benefit is you get to write your code the way you always have. If you need an if statement, you write an if statement, if you need a for loop you write a for loop, and inside those you can say await and then have control return and then come back whenever the async work completes. People are very excited about that, because it makes your code look a lot cleaner and it’s a lot it’s easier to reason about your code.”
As Terlson notes, “For the most part you don’t have to worry about the fact that you’re calling an asynchronous API; you just await it and go about your day. If the promise is rejected you get an exception thrown by async, so you can write asynchronous code that looks like synchronous code and handle errors with normal synchronous imperative code.”
You still have refactoring to do. “When you make a function an async function, code that calls it gets a promise instead of a value, so you do need to change the calling code to async as well, and await the result.” But that’s far easier to do with async because the code itself is less complex. “You can even await non-promises. There are some APIs that return promises but sometimes if they know a value synchronously they just return it, so if you await the API result the right thing will happen.”
Being able to write code using these familiar, synchronous patterns while getting all the benefits of asynchrony “greatly simplifies writing code for dynamic and responsive web applications” said Ihsanullah. He suggests thinking of it as a “syntactic wrapper over JavaScript promises and generators” and points out that “understanding these features will greatly facilitate a developer’s understanding of async” and “experience with promises is probably mandatory.”
Understanding that async and its related function await is based on generators and promises will help you deal with more complex asynchronous code, he said. “Await currently only allows waiting on one thing a time. A developer recognizing that these async functions are promises, however, could then use await Promise.all(…) to wait on several actions.”
Browsers Getting Ready for Async
At one point, async seemed a slightly controversial proposal. “There was some concern around whether blessing promises as the async pattern is the right choice or something more like tasks that could swap out other things under the covers,” Terlson explained. But at that stage there hadn’t been many implementations beyond Microsoft’s Edge browser (starting as an experimental feature in Edge 13.10547 back in September 2015 and moving to an unprefixed version in the Windows Insider preview build 14986).
“Then Google V8 started implementing it and as we got more implementation experience, and people were convinced there were not problems for performance and so on, that helped.”
Plus, explained Ihsanullah, JavaScript needed those building blocks of async: promises and generators. “While promises, by virtue of being implementable in JavaScript, have been usable in browsers for a few years, generators are a more recent addition to the language.” And getting the syntax to reflect the way developers use functions is important. “It started with arrows. Then generators. And now async functions. To the standards committee and to the community, ergonomics of the language matters.”
Now async functions are enabled by default in Chrome, since Chrome 55 (Google’s Jake Archibald called them “quite frankly marvelous”) and they’ve been in the Firefox nightly releases since November 2016 (the plan is to support them in Firefox 52). Opera 42 and later support async, and it’s under development in Safari.
Transpilers
And with transpilers like Babel and TypeScript, you can even write async code and have it run in older browsers, as well as being confident it will work in the latest browsers as they add support.
It’s a lot more work to support async without generators, which is why it used to only be possible to transpile async code to ECMAScript 2015 in TypeScript, and Babel has different techniques depending on which version of ECMAScript you want to target. But now TypeScript 2.1 lets you go all the way back to ECMAScript 3, said Hejlsberg.
“Once you rewrite your code into a state machine, if you have generators then the transformation is relatively simple — rewriting an async function with awaits in it into a generator is almost trivial. But if you don’t have generators it is much more complex — because now you have to wrap a state machine around your code and effectively every place you see await, the function has to return and then when control comes back it has to jump back there and continue executing. And since there are no gotos in JavaScript, that’s complicated. So you have to write a while loop with a switch statement with a bunch of machine-invented states that you then maintain. The rewrite that happens to your code is complex and getting that rewrite correct is not simple.
“With TypeScript 2.1 we switched to a new emitter; this is the backend of the compiler. It’s a tree writer that rewrites your syntax trees to make these new state machines and the other fancy stuff you have to make, so we now natively support rewriting async await to ECMAScript 3. And it’s not just doing the simple cases where you can only use await at the top level not in the middle of an initialise or for a property of an object literal — no, it’s an operator like any other, so just like you can say plus, you can say wait.”
Browsers and transpilers aren’t the only place async needs to be supported for it to become mainstream of course; frameworks and libraries also need to support it. “If you want to write async style code but you have a bunch of frameworks that weren’t written in that style, those frameworks are still going to do callbacks,” he points out. “Async works fantastically if you have a promise based library that you’re coding against. Often, though, libraries are not promise-based and then you have to promisify them or find a promisified version of that same functionality. That will be the challenge, because that’s the glue that connects you from the callback to the async world.”
Expect that to take time to happen. “As with anything, it’s not happening overnight but there’s going to be an increasingly gradual shift and modern frameworks getting written now will use promises for all their async — and that means it will be a lot easier to consume them with async code. It’s going to be this wave that slowly washes over as opposed to something that happens overnight.”
Announcing that async will be in ECMAScript 2017 will help with this. “Library authors will have to transpile async for some time,” Terlson predicts, “but they can now be confident it’s a future direction for JavaScript so they can use it and not be concerned it’s going to be broken by future language changes.”
And of course, writing asynchronous JavaScript will be new to many developers. “If you’re not using a transpiler today, you haven’t used async functions,” Terlson points out. Anyone already using async is an early adopter, but as ECMAScript 2017 moves towards ratification, now is the time to start looking at how it can improve your code.
Feature image via Pixabay. |
IN a bid to woo Muslims, Mulayam Singh Yadav Sunday said if voted to power, his party would ensure amendments are made in the Constitution for their reservation and said only the SP could prevent Narendra Modi from becoming the Prime Minister.
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“Muslamano ne desh ko banaya hai aur musalamano ke liye sanvidhan mein sanshodhan karke arakshan diya jayega (Muslims have made this country, and for Muslims, amendments would be made in the Constitution for their reservation),” the SP supremo said at Government Inter-College Grounds in Etah.
While addressing another election rally backing Akshay Yadav, son of SP national general secretary Ram Gopal Yadav, he said, “Only the SP could prevent Modi from becoming the PM.”
Mulayam said Modi claims that the SP was “spying on BJP people but in reality BJP people were themselves informing him about everything”. He also hit out at Modi saying his development claims in Gujarat are all lies.
Claiming that there was internal split in the BJP, Mulayam said the BJP would never be able to touch the figure of 272 seats in the Lok Sabha elections. He exuded confidence that the third front would form the next government at the centre and the SP would get the highest number seats in LS.
Attacking the Congress, he said its leaders speak in English, but seek vote in Hindi during poll campaigns.
The SP chief also took a dig at Union minister and Congress leader P Chidambaram, saying he was afraid of contesting polls.
Addressing an election rally in Hathras, Mulayam said it would be decided after the elections as to who would be the Prime Minister in the third front government.
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The former defence minister accused the UPA government of failing to provide adequate facilities to soldiers on the border. With parties in UP trying to woo Muslim voters, he claimed the SP enjoyed the support of 80 per cent members of the community in the state. |
Lorenzo stated earlier in the season that he’ll help Dovizioso if and when the time comes, a situation that’s edging closer to becoming a reality as the Italian sits just 11 points behind Honda star Marc Marquez with three rounds to go.
Speaking at an event for sponsor Tissot in Melbourne today, Lorenzo said he still considers it too early to be potentially giving up a win just to help his teammate.
According to the Spaniard, he might be willing to forego a victory at the final round in Valencia – but the top step of the podium is still fair game for both factory Ducati riders in Australia and Malaysia.
“Probably not for the next two races,” he told Motorsport.com when asked if he’d sacrifice a win to help his teammate.
“It would be different in Valencia for the last race, but for now, if I have the chance to win… normally [a position change] shouldn’t happen.
“If it was fighting for another position maybe, but for the win, maybe it’s still too soon.”
Lorenzo also reiterated his frustration at not having already broken his duck on the Ducati, singling out the Misano and Motegi races as genuine missed opportunities.
“We’ve missed some great opportunities,” he added.
“For example at Misano. I had a real chance to win, I was leading by five seconds. But the conditions were very delicate, and I made a small mistake and crashed.
“Also in Motegi, I believe I had a good chance to win. But then came the heavy rain, and I didn’t have the same feeling as in the normal wet conditions. I struggled more than I expected.
“For me, Motegi was the greatest chance to win.
“Maybe here at Phillip Island we have a small possibility, and in Malaysia even more. But I’m disappointed about the race in Motegi, to be honest.
“But, you know, you need to look forward, forget the past and concentrate on what you can do now.” |
More rumors are cropping up about the 64-bit Exynos processor that Samsung is expected to debut with the Galaxy S5. According to a new report by the Korean media, the 64-bit processor, the first of Samsung’s Exynos 6 series of chipsets, will be accompanied by 4GB of RAM, making use of one of the biggest advantages of 64-bit processing support.
Samsung has already beaten other manufacturers by being the first to use 3GB of RAM (on the Galaxy Note 3), and 4GB of RAM would be the next logical step. Personally, I hope that the Galaxy S5 does have 4GB of RAM, as 3GB of RAM hasn’t exactly provided the boost in multitasking I thought it would on the Note 3, all thanks to all the unnecessary stuff TouchWiz and Samsung’s add-on features keep running in the background, so another gig of RAM would go a long way towards actually showing some advantages of having more memory than normal.
Source |
Virtual Reality is BACK! Amusing, fantastic, entertaining, informational, unbelievable, fascinating, impressive, exciting, captivating…these are some of the adjectives that come from those who experience VR today.
Virtual Reality was first introduced two decades ago but failed to engage consumers due to the lack of technologies, expensive hardware and limited software, making its application costly, its scope small and its implementation highly inefficient and unfeasible. Fast forward to the present: updated emerging technologies, innovative software and design developments, global infrastructure… In conjunction with a globally competitive market and innumerable talented app developers, virtual reality is finally making a strong comeback.
Don’t be mislead, virtual reality is not only for gaming; VR applications can also be used in various sectors and fields - business, sports, media, education, healthcare, architecture design, film, among others. It is an experience that enables one to experience a different reality – hence, “virtual reality” – that otherwise one will not be able to experience due to limitations, say experiencing a flight simulation in high altitude as a test pilot, or to be in an entirely new world under the immense pressure of ocean depths as an underwater explorer.
With ultra high-speed smartphone processing capability today and 1.75 Billion smartphone users worldwide, experiencing virtual reality is easier than ever.
What is XG VR?
XG VR is a head-mounted device that uses your very own smartphone to let you immerse into the virtual world. Our premise is simple: Virtual reality is fun, and we believe that everyone should be able to experience it. You CAN be that test pilot without undergoing the years of training to actually experience being one. You CAN be that underwater explorer. You CAN be anything, anyone, anywhere. Gone are the days when you needed a bulky, expensive PC to run an application, right now it can be found at the palm of your hand – the indispensable smartphone. With its high resolution and processing power, it is now possible to experience a virtual reality immersion with the gadget you already have. All you need is a virtual reality viewer; hence, we came up with the XG VR for you. Where you can be virtually anyone, anywhere, anything you want to be.
Who is I AM Cardboard?
We’re tech geeks, engineers, designers, dreamers… and as it turns out, our adventure with VR all started after seeing the Google I/O presentation online. We love new technology, ideas and gadgets, and we wanted to have our very own Google cardboard virtual reality kit. Like most people, we printed out the templates, on a piece of ordinary A4 paper, to make our own. But we quickly found out making one with scrap cardboard boxes, cutters, and excited resolve didn't really cut it - it wasn't as easy as it looked.
We didn't want to settle for any flimsy looking structure or a second rate lens... after all, we were going to be the ones using it. Yes, we went a little overboard making our own I AM CARDBOARD design, with the original intention of being used by a handful of tech-geeks' personal use only... but in the end, we thought, why stop there, and instead share the ease and convenience with the community instead?
With the strong network of quality suppliers and logistic partners, we were able to deliver. We specialize in end-to-end supply chain management, ensuring that products and services promised and agreed will be fulfilled to our clients and customers globally.
What has been done?
After the success of our virtual reality cardboard kit, we wanted to push the envelope even further. Reading countless feedbacks and suggestions from the community has resulted in the next, most logical step in VR progression and development: the creation of the XG VR.
Durability, compatibility, affordability - all of which was taken into account into our initial design considerations. From there onwards, We have gone through several sketches and concepts, all undergoing several prototyping phases - updating the design, reducing the weight, reusability, ease of use - to come out with our launched version. A sturdier, more comfortable VR headset that is future proof - compatible with multiple phone sizes - so even if you upgrade your phone, chances are, you can still use the XG VR.
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But things do not stop there: Further improvement and upgrades will still continue. Any time during the kickstarter campaign, we will continue to hear your opinions, and integrate them into future design considerations which may help for the improvements to the final product.
What are the features?
How do you attach your phone?
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The Turnbull government’s decision to put the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in charge of a voluntary postal plebiscite on same-sex marriage has left many scratching their heads. It was expected the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) would run the vote, not the body responsible for the five-yearly census.
By giving the job to the ABS, the government has sidestepped questions about its constitutional authority to pay for an AEC-run plebiscite. But it has opened up new avenues of legal challenge and established a process that lacks legitimacy.
Further reading: Explainer: with no free vote for now, where next for marriage equality?
Legal questions
On Wednesday, Treasurer Scott Morrison directed the Australian Statistician to ask the ABS to collect statistical information about the proportion of electors who are for or against the law being changed to allow same-sex couples to marry. This information is to be requested on a voluntary basis.
The same day, independent MP Andrew Wilkie and two others announced they would launch a High Court challenge against the ABS poll. It is likely that at least two grounds of challenge will be put.
The first concerns the power of the ABS to run the plebiscite. Under the Census and Statistics Act, the Australian Statistician can, if directed by the minister, collect “statistical information” on a range of prescribed matters, including “births, deaths, marriages and divorces”, “law”, and “population and the social, economic and demographic characteristics of the population”.
Separately, the Australian Bureau of Statistics Act provides that one of the functions of the ABS is “to collect, compile, analyse and disseminate statistics and related information”.
The key question is whether information about Australians’ opinions on same-sex marriage is “statistical information”.
Surveying people on their views about marriage is very different from collecting factual data about, say, the numbers of marriages taking place in Australia.
And given the postal ballot will be voluntary, the views of some social groups (like those more likely to use postal services) will feature more heavily than others. Arguably, such an “unweighted” data set falls short of the rigorous standards of “statistical information”.
More broadly, if opinions about marriage law are considered “statistical information”, it is hard to think of what sorts of information do not fall into that category. Is it the case that any collection of data is a statistical exercise? If so, the ABS’s powers are very broad.
The second legal question concerns the government’s authority to spend money on an ABS-run postal vote. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann acted quickly to source the A$122 million required from a little-used “advance” appropriated by parliament in this year’s budget.
However, the minister’s advance fund is reserved for “urgent” and “unforeseen” expenditure. It is doubtful that spending on a postal plebiscite falls into either of these categories.
By way of comparison, in 2016 the government gave the AEC $101 million in “advance” funds to help it implement major changes to Senate voting in time for the July federal election.
There is no similar urgency in a vote on same-sex marriage. And, if anything, the need to spend money on same-sex marriage poll was entirely predictable. The government’s budget papers anticipated spending $170 million for this purpose.
The ABS is poorly equipped
Legal questions aside, the ABS is poorly equipped to run a plebiscite on same-sex marriage.
It has significant expertise in collecting factual information on the economy, housing, crime and many other matters that is of immense value to governments and researchers. But it has never run a poll of this kind.
The closest precedent occurred more than 40 years ago. In 1974, the ABS conducted a telephone survey of 60,000 Australians, asking for their preferences on the national anthem. But that is altogether different from the massive logistical exercise of administering a postal ballot for 15 million voters on a contentious social issue.
The stakes are higher and the risk of mistakes is greater. And there will be little tolerance for error.
For the ABS, even the basic task of sending out ballot papers will not be straightforward. Unlike the AEC, it does not have direct access to the electoral roll.
The Commonwealth Electoral Act sets down rules about who can access the electoral roll and for what purpose. Under regulations, the AEC “may” provide the ABS with information on the roll for the purpose of “collecting, compiling, analysing and disseminating statistics and related information”. It would therefore be open to the AEC to refuse the ABS access to the roll, including on the basis that a poll on marriage is not about “collecting statistics”.
Assuming that the ABS gains access to the roll, it is unclear whether it will be able to send ballot papers to all registered voters. The position of silent electors is particularly uncertain.
The addresses of silent electors are not displayed on the roll: to do so would put their safety, or the safety of their family, at risk. Also, the AEC is not permitted to provide information about silent electors to agencies such as the ABS. As a result, silent electors may wonder if they will be able to participate in the poll.
The addresses of eligible overseas voters also do not appear on the roll. However, Cormann has said they will receive ballot papers provided they have “registered as an overseas voter and provided their overseas address”.
More generally, the ABS lacks the AEC’s institutional capacity when it comes to conducting nationwide votes. These are highly complex exercises, which involve distributing, collecting and transporting ballot papers, and then counting them quickly and securely.
Cormann has said AEC officers will be seconded to the ABS to “assist” the process.
Other problems
ABS involvement in the plebiscite raises particular problems, but the shortcomings of a voluntary postal vote go well beyond who is administering it.
Even if turnout is high, we cannot be confident that the result is representative of community opinion. For example:
Young people move address more frequently than the rest of the population and are less likely to receive the ballot papers.
Homeless electors and grey nomads may also find it hard to participate.
Communities with limited access to reliable postal services (including Indigenous people living in more remote parts of Australia) may be disadvantaged.
Also worrying is that the postal vote will take place without the usual protections of election law. Campaigners will be able to circulate unauthorised material – including posters and pamphlets with harmful messages about same-sex couples and their families – without fear of legal consequences.
And, if the result is close, there will be no clear process for resolving claims about the formality of votes and other contentious administration issues.
It should be abandoned
The voluntary postal vote on same-sex marriage should be abandoned. Not only does it rest on shaky legal foundations, it risks damaging the standing of two of our most trusted national institutions.
The absence of standard legal protections is worrying, and the polling method is so flawed that neither side can have confidence in the outcome.
And, at the end of it all, the result is non-binding. The federal parliament is the only institution that can resolve the issue of same-sex marriage definitively. It should do so now, without resorting to such a flawed and expensive venture. |
Cambridge academics are being discouraged from using terms such as genius, brilliant or flair in feedback for fear of alienating female students.
It is one of a series of moves lecturers say will help women – including changing exams and even removing portraits of men from the library.
Dr Lucy Delap, lecturer in modern British history, said ‘vague talk of genius, brilliance [and] flair carries assumptions of gender inequality’. She said some women ‘don’t find it very easy to project themselves into those categories’.
Lecturers say the move will help women feel more at home in academic environments
Some female students suffered ‘imposter syndrome’ – where they feel they don’t belong – in a ‘male-dominated’ environment, said the academic. Dr Delap revealed exams were being overhauled in a bid to tackle a ‘gender differential’ which sees women outshone.
This could mean more coursework, take-home exams, group work or a portfolio of essays.
It follows Oxford University’s decision to allow students to take a history exam home in the next academic year, in order to help more women get top results.
Reading lists are being reassessed to include more female historians, and there are plans to replace some portraits of men with women in the library.
Discussing the ‘male-dominated environment’ at Oxbridge, Dr Delap, deputy director of history and policy at Cambridge University, told Radio Four’s Today programme: ‘If you look at just something as simple as the art on the walls of a college, they’re often by men and they depict men and often they’re white men as well.’
Portraits of men are being replaced with some portraits of women in the library
The academic said they also tried to avoid words such as ‘flair’ in feedback as ‘students don’t understand what flair means’.
But Professor Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University, said: ‘It seems to me wrong to look at this from the point of gender – imagine the outrage if we were adjusting things for the sake of men.
‘It’s patronising and wrong to think they have difficulty with terms such as genius.’
In 2015-16, 31 per cent of women gained firsts in history at Cambridge compared with 39 per cent of men. A university spokesman said it was reviewing subjects to see how it could address ‘variations’ between different groups.
In Oxford academics yesterday lost a fresh attempt to challenge rules forcing them to retire at the age of 67. Staff voted down a call to axe the ‘employer-justified retirement age’. Campaigners are now expected go to one of the university’s regulatory committees to argue their case. |
RAS LAFFAN, Qatar — The temperature hovered around 100 degrees on the jetty here, where a set of pipes were connected to a giant red-hulled ship. But the moisture in the air froze on the pipes and flaked off, creating snowlike flurries on the early summer evening.
The incongruous sight is common on the Qatari ship, the Al Rekayyat, which carries a frigid fuel known as liquefied natural gas.
Natural gas, when chilled to minus 260 degrees, turns into a liquid with a fraction of its former volume. The process has reshaped the natural gas business, allowing the fuel to be pumped onto ships and dispatched around the world.
After investing tens of billions of dollars, Qatar is at the forefront. Part of the emirate’s fleet, the Al Rekayyat, run by Royal Dutch Shell, goes to Fujian in China and Yokkaichi in Japan, as well as Dubai and Milford Haven in Wales. |
Foster Farms Bowl: Indiana Hoosiers vs. Utah Utes
Date: Dec. 28, 8:30 p.m. ET on Fox
Location: Levi's Stadium | Santa Clara, California
Junior running back Devine Redding was a workhorse for Indiana with 236 carries for 1,050 yards in the 2016 regular season. Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire
Indiana
Best moment: Running back Devine Redding powered Indiana into the end zone and into its second consecutive bowl game with a fourth-quarter score against rival Purdue. Beating the Boilermakers for the fourth straight year capped a six-win season and also marked only the fifth time in program history that the team won both its Big Ten rivalry games against Purdue and Michigan State.
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Lowest moment: Five interceptions against Wake Forest in late September led to the Hoosiers’ first loss of the season and some serious doubt about those bowl chances. With a loss in the nonconference schedule, the Hoosiers didn’t have a ton of room for error during the Big Ten season. From there, transfer quarterback Richard Lagow managed to take better care of the ball (to be fair, he did throw for nearly 500 yards in the loss) and Indiana eventually got the wins it needed.
Key player: Mitchell Paige may not be the home run threat that some of Indiana’s other wide receivers present, but he’s the player that opponents would be wise to keep on their radar. He leads the team in receptions and has used his slippery running style effectively whether he’s catching passes, running sweeps or returning punts.
Motivation level: High, but with coach Kevin Wilson suddenly out of the picture, it’s a wild card for the Hoosiers. Indiana has not won a bowl game since 1991, which means there’s a good chance there is no one on the Hoosiers’ roster who has been alive for a postseason victory in Bloomington. That should be enough to get the troops excited about a late December trip. -- Dan Murphy
Joe Williams returned in October from a month-long "retirement" to lead the Utes' rushing attack. Russ Isabella/USA TODAY Sports
Utah
Best moment: The Utes trailed USC by two scores late but came storming back to grab a dramatic win. Troy Williams led a 93-yard drive to give Utah a 31-27 victory, hitting Tim Patrick for a touchdown with 16 seconds left. That September win is even more impressive in retrospect: That was the last time USC lost.
Lowest moment: Oregon’s Justin Herbert threw a touchdown pass to Darren Carrington to beat Utah, 30-28, with two seconds left. That loss knocked the Utes out of the Pac-12 title race. Utah managed only 51 combined points in losses to the Ducks and California, the Pac-12’s two worst defenses -- both giving up over 40 points per game.
Key player: Running back Joe Williams returned from a four-game in-season retirement to scorch box scores from mid-October until the end of the season. He racked up 1,110 yards over five games -- 222 yards per game -- in a tear that shocked many and included a 332-yard effort at UCLA.
Motivation level: Questionable. The Utes were in serious Pac-12 title contention until very recently, before they suffered deflating season-ending losses to Oregon and Colorado. That made the 8-4 finish to the regular season disappointing. If Kyle Whittingham doesn’t effectively rally the troops, there’s a real chance of a bowl hangover here. -- David Lombardi |
Bill Gates has been almost prophetic in his past predictions: his 1999 list was hauntingly accurate, foreseeing the advent of price comparison websites, smartphones, social media, and bots. Over the last few years, in interviews and annual letters, he has continued predicting: here are a selection of seven of his insights. 1. In the next 15 years, 33 million people could be wiped out in less than a year by a pathogen. At the Munich Security conference, Gates warned that “epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year.” This could be due to mutation, accident, or terrorist intent. While this may seem outlandish, similar events have occurred before: the most obvious example is the Black Death, which killed almost a third of Europe, but more recently, in 1918, the Spanish Flu wiped out between 50 and 100 million people. 2. Africa will become entirely self-sufficient in terms of food production. He believes Africa will achieve the goal due to a number of structural changes: First, better fertilizers and crops being developed will cause an upward spiral of greater nutrition leading to greater productivity.
Second, developments in infrastructure that are already taking place, such as Ghana increasing the width of highways connecting production zones to distribution zones and Senegal removing checkpoints that cause delays. Third, as phones become more widespread, this will allow the communication of information such as weather reports and market prices. 3. The lives of the poor will be transformed by mobile banking. Electronic banking systems will allow the poor to store and protect money digitally: he said in his 2015 annual letter that “by 2030, 2 billion people who don’t have a bank account today will be storing money and making payment with their phones.”
4. In the year 2035, poor countries will no longer exist. Gates cites how much the world has changed during his own lifetime — moving from a world segmented into the Soviet Union, the Western Allies, and “everyone else” to the world we see today — as a precedent for how much it has the potential to change. He wrote in his 2014 letter that “aid is a fantastic investment, and we should be doing more. It saves and improves lives very effectively, laying the groundwork for […] long-term economic progress.” 5. By 2030 there will be a clean energy breakthrough that will revolutionize our world. In a slightly more recent prediction, made in 2016, Gates does not name any existing method of renewable energy as the panacea, but he thinks the key is investment in young people. He has already invested $2 billion in alternative technologies. 6. Countless jobs will be lost to automation. In an interview with Quartz, Bill Gates envisages, as many industry leaders do, a world in which humans are put out of work by robots. Gates, though, has provided a possible plan of action: to tax robots in order to fund more jobs that can only be performed by humans, like taking care of the elderly or working with children. 7. Polio could be eliminated worldwide by 2019. In his 2013 Annual Letter, Gates revealed statistics showing that the prevalence of polio has been reduced from impacting millions of people in hundreds of countries to now being active in only three countries worldwide. The key, he states, is measurement: “You have to measure accurately, as well as create an environment where problems can be discussed openly so you can effectively evaluate what’s working and what’s not.” |
Licensed medical marijuana producers say federal advertising rules pertaining to the drug are impeding their ability to adequately inform doctors and patients of treatment options.
In November, Health Canada issued warning letters to 20 licensed producers about their advertising practices, telling them they had until Jan 12, 2015, to come into compliance with prohibitions against the advertising of cannabis laid out in the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations, the Food and Drugs Act and the Narcotic Control Regulations.
This means that, generally, producers' websites can only list brand names, strain names, price, cannabinoid content and contact information. They can't tout each strain's reported benefits or post photos of the drugs. All companies came into compliance by Monday, the deadline day.
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Brent Zettl, the CEO of Prairie Plant Systems Inc., the parent company of CanniMed Ltd. – both of which were on the list – said his company scrubbed a number of prohibited items from the two websites. They include passages containing anecdotal evidence, a reference to "reliability" and some photos of the products, Mr. Zettl said. What remains on the clinical-looking CanniMed site is a generic, textbook description of the company's cannabis products and photos of doctors in white lab coats and product packaging – not the product itself.
Mr. Zettl called the restrictions "frustrating beyond words," particularly because Prairie Plant Systems Inc. had operated with Health Canada under contract, serving as the federal department's sole supplier of medical marijuana for 13 years, up until regulations changed last March. During that time, the company had government approval to show a number of images, including those of marijuana and marijuana growth chambers, he said.
"All of a sudden, they've changed their minds; marijuana plants are now not to be shown, because they might encourage somebody to use medical marijuana," he said. "My question is: What the hell are we selling? We're not selling alfalfa. Come on."
Mr. Zettl said the restrictions prevent staff from fully educating doctors and prospective patients about the drug at a time when more education is needed for the market to transition to legal from illicit.
Zack Hutson, a spokesman for the large-scale, Nanaimo-based medical marijuana producer Tilray, said the stringent regulations ensure the medicine for patients is "safe, pure and predictable." However, while they protect patients from false or unsubstantiated claims, "they also limit the amount of information that can be shared with physicians and patients about the differences between strains, which can help inform treatment decisions."
Companies can directly provide more detailed information about a product to an individual as long as it is not disseminated to the general public. But as Mr. Zettl counters: "Who wants to become a registered patient before they can get information?"
Health Canada declined to make a spokesperson available for an interview despite several requests. An e-mail from the department stated that in determining whether a message constitutes an advertisement, one must consider the context, the intended audience and who is delivering the message.
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"If the message is written by the drug manufacturer, it is more likely to be advertising," the statement said. |
What makes a great lager? I wish I knew for sure.
It’s a bit tricky. Lagers are renowned worldwide for their drinkability, their simplicity and — perhaps unfairly — their mediocrity.
They are the beers your sports-loving uncle drinks. They’re the cheap pints, and the cans that scream ICE COLD, and the tallboys you shot-gunned in university. But where do they fit in the craft beer sphere?
People who drink lager rarely want to think about what they’re drinking with any sort of depth. It’s generally a means to an end, the end most often being refreshing relaxation.
Thus, it would seem a great lager would be a drink that most effectively accomplishes this, without too many frills distracting the drinker.
With that in mind, craft beer brewers and drinkers alike tend to enjoy a beer which pushes the envelope a bit, maybe adding a new dimension to a well-trodden style.
Is a great lager one that sticks to the formula closely, and pulls it off well? Or is it a beer that seeks to transcend its rather narrow niche and break new ground?
I put two Ontario lagers that I’m quite fond of – Amsterdam Brewery’s 3 Speed and Cameron’s Brewing Captain’s Log – head-to-head to see what makes them great.
They couldn’t be more different as lagers. 3 Speed is a light American-style, Captain’s Log a more hoppy European style. But they’re both good – and here’s why.
Amsterdam Brewery’s 3 Speed Does “Traditional” Terrifically
A light American-style lager – the description doesn’t exactly send shivers of excitement down my spine.
But that’s not what it’s supposed to do. 3 Speed is a workhorse beer, one that can be consumed in larger quantities with less consideration than even their highly sessionable Cruiser.
Everything that your Uncle loves about his evening “cold one” can be found in 3 Speed. A pleasant sweetness, vibrant carbonation, crisp finish, and only the lightest touch of bitterness to remind you it’s beer you’re drinking.
But 3 Speed pulls it off a little better than most macro domestics. It doesn’t have that corn-syrupy sweetness of Molson, and it has a bit more character and flavor than other light beers like Bud Light.
In other words, Amsterdam has deftly made a light American lager that doesn’t need to sacrifice taste entirely for drinkability. It goes down as easy as any, but there’s just a bit more substance for those that care for such things.
Cameron’s Brewing Captain’s Log Skillfully Shakes Things Up
If you’re as sick of crappy Euro-lagers like Stella as much as I am, you might be a little jaded.
Cameron’s breathes some life into the style with their Captain’s Log lager, a wonderfully aromatic, richly-flavoured lager that breaks the mold a bit, while sticking true to its roots.
Far more aromatic than the 3 Speed, Captain’s Log will turn away hard-core Bud drinkers way faster than 3 Speed would. But it balances its floral notes with a nice malt backbone, and a finish that doesn’t stray into bitter territory.
Captain’s Log has the potential to convert lager-only drinkers into a broader array of styles, but it might alienate some who would appreciate the improvement of 3 Speed, but would be put off by something too different.
All-in-all, I thoroughly enjoyed Captain’s Log, and it was a refreshing change from the general lineup of golden lagers I’m exposed to.
***
It is possible to make a great lager, but the style is certainly harder to quantify than other types of beer.
It comes down to a choice – do simple, traditional, and formulaic well with extreme consistency, or bend the rules a bit and bring something a little different than what you’d expect.
No matter what you prefer, I can definitely recommend Amsterdam’s 3 Speed or Cameron’s Captain’s Log. Both are lagers I definitely think are worth sipping slow. |
WASHINGTON — The commander of US air forces in the Pacific is reporting a significant increase in activities by Russian planes and ships in the region.
Gen. Herbert Carlisle linked that to the situation in the Ukraine. He said Russia was demonstrating its capabilities and gathering intelligence on US military exercises.
Carlisle said there had been long-range Russian air patrols to the coast of California and a circumnavigation of the US Pacific territory of Guam. He said a US F-15 fighter jet intercepted a Russian strategic bomber that had flown to Guam.
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He also reported a sharp increase in Russian air patrols around Japanese islands and Korea.
Carlisle said there was a lot more Russian ship activity too.
He was speaking Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. |
I.O.I‘s Somi confessed that she was recently in a relationship but dumped by her boyfriend after only one week of dating.
The confession came on a variety program when cast members asked Somi about her dating life and whether or not she was in a relationship.
“Yes, I’ve dated in the past. He broke up with me after 1 week of dating because I couldn’t meet his expectations.” — Jeon Somi
The other cast members and audience were shocked when they heard her reason, as Somi is one of the most popular K-Pop idols currently promoting in the industry. She’s proven herself to be incredibly intelligent, have a fantastic personality and her beauty doesn’t even need describing.
While Somi didn’t mention that the boyfriend was recent on the show, in April 2016 she announced that she had never dated before and she wanted a boyfriend. It appears that since then, she’s experienced having a boyfriend but also heartbreak as well. |
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s Sony Corp, Toshiba Corp and Hitachi Ltd will merge their liquid-crystal display operations using $2.6 billion of government-backed funds to fend off growing competition from rivals in South Korea and Taiwan.
Sony Corp Executive Deputy President Hiroshi Yoshioka (R), Hitachi Ltd. President Hiroaki Nakanishi (2nd R), Toshiba Corp. President and CEO Norio Sasaki (3rd R) and Innovation Network Corporation of Japan President and CEO Kimikazu Noumi pose for a photograph at their joint news conference in Tokyo August 31, 2011. REUTERS/Issei Kato
The merged entity will be the world’s largest maker of small panels used in smartphones and tablet PCs, leapfrogging leaders Sharp Corp of Japan and Samsung Electronics of South Korea and keeping at bay the likes of Taiwan’s AU Optronics.
Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi were all making losses on small panels until last year so the merger will allow them to focus on their main operations.
However, the 90-percent government-owned fund, set up in 2009 to promote innovation in Japanese industry, could come under fire for using public money to prop up a volatile business in its biggest investment to date.
The Innovation Network Corp of Japan (INCJ) will invest about 200 billion yen ($2.6 billion) in the merged unit, taking a 70 percent stake. The three firms said on Wednesday that they will each take a 10 percent stake.
They aim to complete the merger by the spring of 2012 and list the merged entity, to be called Japan Display, by the financial year ending March 2016. By then, they intend to have boosted annual revenues to 750 billion yen from 570 billion yen expected in the year to March 2012.
A shakeup has been long expected because harsh competition and advances in technology require producers to make regular large-scale investment.
The three firms together controlled 21.5 percent of the market for small and medium-sized displays last year, larger than Sharp with 14.8 percent or Samsung Mobile with 11.9 percent, research firm DisplaySearch estimates.
While all three had been loss making in small panels until last year, they were expected to pull into the black in the current financial year.
They had hesitated about investing in a new line to compete against Sharp, which is due to receive a $1 billion investment from Apple Inc, or South Korean rivals LG Display and Samsung Mobile Display, which have supply agreements with key clients.
Sony has been weighed down by chronic losses in its TVs, Toshiba is speeding up plans to shrink its chip business, while Hitachi has been looking to distance itself from the volatile panel business to focus on infrastructure operations.
“Sharp is especially aggressive, and those who don’t have a strong customer base may struggle, given that only a handful of smartphone and tablet makers are doing well,” said Nam Dae-jong, an analyst at HI Investment & Securities.
Increasing demand from smartphone and tablet PC makers has prompted panel makers to shift their focus to smaller screens.
DisplaySearch says weighted average prices for mobile phone panels were 30 percent higher in the first quarter of 2011 compared with a year earlier.
However, analysts predicted the shift means the industry will be oversupplied next year.
“It’s not a business that will likely provide stable profits in the mid- to long term,” said Shigeo Sugawara, a senior investment manager at Sompo Japan NipponKoa Asset Management.
RESTRUCTURING
The INCJ is supervised by Japan’s trade ministry, which had been criticized for not supporting Japan’s chip and display industries in the early 1990s, a failure critics say allowed U.S. and South Korean firms to take the lead.
“The decision reflects a growing sense of crisis in Japan in light of its falling market share in the global chip and display markets,” said a South Korean government official, who declined to be named.
The INCJ will lead the recruitment of new executives to run the company, while external directors will be drawn from Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi and INCJ.
How the three firms, which use two different types of display technology, will merge operations is unclear. The announcement did not include details of how they intended to deal with business overlaps either.
“The parent companies have found a most convenient buyer for their factories and staff,” said Yoshihisa Toyosaki, head of Japanese research firm and consultancy Architect Grand Design.
“The assets of the merged entity will be huge. Without restructuring, there is no way that this company will win against Sharp, or rivals from South Korea, Taiwan, and eventually China.”
Past investments by the INCJ, which can invest up to 900 billion yen with mostly government-guaranteed funds, include a 40 percent stake in Swiss meter maker Landis+Gyr to support Toshiba’s $2.3 billion acquisition.
The new display company will focus on developing next-generation displays, including thinner organic light-emitting diode displays with higher resolution, the three firms said.
Hitachi has been in separate talks with Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn Electronics Inc, about a joint venture in LCD panels, sources have said.
The new Sony Tablet S2 is displayed with the Tablet S1 (rear) by company representatives during a press availability in New York in this July 13, 2011 file photo. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Talks with the parent of Chimei Innolux Corp broke down when Hitachi failed to grab a key contract with Apple, an industry source said.
Ahead of the announcement, well-flagged by media, shares in Sony closed down 1.8 percent, Toshiba fell 2.4 percent and Hitachi rose 0.5 percent. The market benchmark Nikkei average ended flat.
($1 = 76.735 Japanese Yen) |
A Russian billionaire, whose jet-setting travel intersected with Donald Trump’s stops at the Charlotte and Las Vegas airports during the presidential campaign, says their intersecting paths were “pure coincidence” and nothing more.
“A number of theories have been circulating about the supposed relationship between Dmitry Rybolovlev and President Donald Trump,” Sergey Chemitsyn, an adviser to the Russian billionaire, said in a statement to McClatchy. “None of these theories has any foundation in fact.”
Rybolovlev’s travels prompted speculation that he was somehow shadowing Trump in yet another tie between the new president and Russia.
“Mr. Rybolovlev has never met Mr. Trump personally and has no connection whatsoever to Mr. Trump or his team of advisers,” Chemitsyn said.
Trump, a billionaire through real estate dealings, has also denied ever meeting the Russian, who built his fortune in the fertilizer business.
Rybolovlev had previously given only a terse explanation for the coinciding flights before McClatchy published a story this week describing how their aircraft pulled into gates at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport less than an hour apart on Nov. 3, 2016. Rybolovlev’s jet landed shortly before Trump appeared at a rally in nearby Concord. Rybolovlev’s plane had first flown to the airport in Concord, N.C., and then took a 24-minute flight to Charlotte, where Rybolovlev spent the night.
Chemitsyn said Rybolovlev “was in North Carolina for a business meeting, and we can state categorically that he did not have any contact with Mr. Trump or any of his advisers at the time he was there.”
Rybolovlev’s aide did not disclose the nature of Rybolovlev’s business activity, but the Russian billionaire’s plane also was in Charlotte last April 21 at 1:20 p.m., according to a Charlotte man who didn’t want to be identified. He told McClatchy that he noticed the jet at the Charlotte airport and took a photo because he wanted to show his granddaughter, named Mary Kate, that her name was on a jet. The jet’s identifying registration is MKATE, which are the letters on its tail.
Last Oct. 30, four days before his second Charlotte visit and on the same day that Trump was in Las Vegas, Rybolovlev’s plane landed at Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport early in the afternoon and taxied to the private hangar of casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, flight records obtained by McClatchy show. Rybolovlev’s plane was only on the ground for about an hour and 20 minutes, even less than the two hours reported earlier.
Adelson, a major campaign benefactor for Trump, hosted a rally for the Republican presidential nominee that morning at his Venetian Resort Hotel Casino.
Neither spokespeople for the Sands nor Rybolovlev would comment about why he visited Adelson’s hangar, which does not service most general aviation aircraft.
Rumors about Rybolovlev’s direct or indirect relationship with Trump have swirled in part because Rybolovlev’s family trust paid $95 million in 2008 to buy a Palm Beach mansion from Trump as the global financial crisis took hold. Trump, who had purchased the property out of foreclosure for $41 million, is believed to have reaped a significant profit at a time when the global financial meltdown was hurting all real estate values and loans were tough to obtain.
Chemitsyn said Rybolovlev purchased the oceanfront mansion as an investment for a cost “below the asking price and following a process of negotiation.”
Trump’s initial asking price for the mansion was $125 million.
Rybolovlev no sooner closed on the purchase than his marriage went sour, and his wife, Elena, filed legal papers to prevent him from selling the property. He said that he never set foot inside.
Their legal spat initially yielded the largest divorce award in modern U.S. history, $4.5 billion, but that 2014 verdict was eventually reduced in an out-of-court agreement.
The mansion has since been razed and the prime 6.3-acre estate divided into three parcels. One has already been sold drawing $34.34 million for 2.35 acres.
Chemitsyn said “there is every prospect that (Rybolovlev’s) investment will turn out to be profitable.”
Rybolovlev sold off his industrial assets a few years ago, making it difficult to gauge what assets he owns beyond his high-profile stake in the storied AS Monaco soccer club.
David Newman, the attorney who represented Elena Rybolovleva in the divorce litigation, said he found tracing Rybolovlev’s assets a tough task. Newman said those assets included luxury homes and works of art that were all hidden behind layers of shell companies and trusts “so that the true identity of ownership is not obvious or clear or easy to discern — even through investigation.”
“Whether it is an ex-spouse or ex-business partners, a government or creditors, people of high net worth have a lot of exposure, and it’s not unusual that they will use a lot of schemes or mechanisms to protect those assets,” said Newman, now an attorney with Sills Cummis & Gross, a large New York-area law firm. |
OTTAWA—The Harper government will not mount another campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council after Canada’s historic defeat last year, says Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. “It’s not something I envisage,” Baird told The Canadian Press, when asked whether he planned another bid for a two-year, temporary term on the powerful council in the coming years.
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird says the Conservative government will not mount another campaign for a seat on the United Nations Security Council after Canada's historic defeat last year, says Baird. ( Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
The often-combative rookie foreign minister was defiant and cutting in his reasoning for the decision. “Listen, I mean, we don’t go along to get along. That’s just not a phrase,” said Baird, using the oft-repeated mantra that has morphed into the mantra for his first six months as Canada’s top diplomat. Canada was trounced by Portugal last year for the second of two temporary two-year, non-veto-wielding seats on the United Nations’ top body. It was the first time in the six-decade history of the UN that Canada failed to win a seat for which it made a bid.
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The loss sparked criticism in many quarters about whether Canada’s foreign policy under the Conservative government — perceived tilts in policy toward Israel and away from Africa and an unpopular policy on climate change, among them — may have cost the country support among a majority of the UN’s 190-plus member countries. Baird shot back at critics on all fronts in an interview shortly before Christmas. “Maybe if we had shut up, and not talked about gay rights in Africa; maybe if we had shut up and been more quiet about our concerns about Sri Lanka; maybe if we hadn’t been so vocal against the deplorable human rights record in Iran, maybe Iran might have voted for us,” Baird said. “But we didn’t and I don’t think we regret anything. Iran probably voted against us; North Korea probably voted against us; Gadhafi probably voted against us. I think those are all badges of honour.” Baird said he is especially proud of his stand against Sri Lanka’s government for not adequately investigating alleged atrocities by its military forces when they defeated the Tamil Tigers in May 2009.
Critics say Baird and the Tories are playing what has been called “diaspora politics” by taking positions that may win them support in large blocs of newly arrived Canadians. Tamils, for example, number in the hundreds of thousands in key Toronto-area ridings, the population’s largest concentration outside Sri Lanka. Baird rebutted the criticism, saying: “We didn’t do it before election day.”
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On Israel, the Conservatives have incurred the ire of Muslim and Arab-Canadian groups with what is seen as their unqualified support of Israel. Baird dismissed that as unfounded, suggesting it was a creation of the media. “It’s a principled position. If you look at our position on Israel — in my riding we have 2,800 Jews and 11,500 Muslims and Arabs. We don’t do it for political gain; we do it because we think it’s right and we believe in it.” Baird said he plans to go to Israel and the Palestinian territories in early January. He heaped praise on Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, after meeting him earlier this year. “He is probably the world’s quietest success story. The security situation in the West Bank has improved immeasurably under his leadership,” said Baird. “We’ve been working very closely with him on that with a lot of Canadian support. On the security side, their transparency and getting rid of corruption is a gigantic accomplishment for him and the Palestinian people. The economic growth rate has improved considerably, so it’s been good news.” As for Canada being a laggard on climate change, a topic Baird raised without being asked, he said: “Travelling almost twice around the world, I’ve only had two foreign ministers raise climate change with me.” Baird added: “It’s a big issue for some; it certainly hasn’t been one that I’ve heard a lot about.” Baird said Canada remains committed to helping the Arab Spring countries — Libya and Egypt in particular — to build democratic societies that respect the rule of law. But the minister could offer few specific examples of programs. Baird reiterated the rights of Arab and Muslim women should not be trounced in the months ahead. “It’s funny because I’m not a natural champion of feminism but the role of women in North Africa, and the Middle East and the Arab Spring is tremendously important because I think it leads to not just equality, which is a Canadian value, but I think it leads to a more civil society,” he said.
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Story highlights Boats adrift off the coast of Japan or wrecked on its coast have revealed a gruesome cargo
Japan's coast guard is trying to unravel the mystery of where the boats came from
(CNN) An unsettling mystery has washed up on Japan's shores.
Over the past two months, at least 12 wooden boats have been found adrift or on the coast, carrying chilling cargo -- the decaying bodies of 22 people, police and Japan's coast guard said.
All the bodies were "partially skeletonized" -- two were found without heads -- and one boat contained six skulls, the coast guard said. The first boat was found in October, then a series of boats were found in November.
A ship found in mid-November off Noto Peninsula that was towed to the shore.
Coast guard officials are trying to unravel the riddle of where these ghostly boats came from and what happened to those on board.
Their best guess so far is that the ships are from North Korea.
Read More |
Scavenger hunt in the CERN Computing Centre
Hidden among the racks of servers and disks in the CERN Computing Centre, you’ll find Hawaiian dancers, space aliens, gorillas… all LEGO® figurines! These characters were placed about the Centre for the arrival of Google’s Street View team for the world to discover.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE COMPETITION IS OVER.
ONLY FOR REFERENCE, HERE IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE.
We’re pleased to announce our first global scavenger hunt! Spot three LEGO® figurines using Google’s Street View and you’ll be entered to win a gift of your choice from our CERN Gift Guide.
A LEGO® figurine in the CERN Computing Centre, as seen on Google Street View.
Here are the details:
Find at least three LEGO ® figurines hidden around the CERN Computing Centre using Google Street View.
hidden around the CERN Computing Centre using Google Street View. Take screencaps of the figurines and e-mail the pictures to [email protected]. This email is no longer active.
There will be TWO winners: one from CERN and one from the general public. If you are from CERN, make sure to send your pictures from your CERN e-mail account.
If you are from CERN, make sure to send your pictures from your CERN e-mail account. The competition is open until 31 January.
The winners will be contacted by e-mail and will be announced in the Bulletin.
Helpful hints:
Try looking on top of racks and servers; these figurines won’t be hanging from the air!
There are over 20 LEGO ® figurines spread across both floors of the Computing Centre. If you think you’ve looked everywhere, try the next floor.
figurines spread across both floors of the Computing Centre. If you think you’ve looked everywhere, try the next floor. We’ve included a map of the Computer Centre and an example of a figurine (above) to help you get started.
Wherever you are this holiday season, you’ll be able to participate in the competition.
by CERN Bulletin |
Tom Sangster reveals the players to pick and who to avoid in SuperCoach 2016.
KEEP up to date with the weekend’s SuperCoach action in our weekend rolling coverage.
Highlights, lowlights, injuries, judiciary dramas and talking points — it’s all here.
Bookmark this page and keep coming back throughout the weekend so you never miss a big SuperCoach moment.
STORM V WARRIORS
Injuries/reports:
Winger Marika Koroibete looked to have suffered a painful knee injury, only to remarkably shake-it off and play on.
Young Tonumaipea suffered a knee injury.
Simon Mannering could be in for a stint on the sideline after he suffered a serious cut in his mouth.
Roger Tuivasa-Shecks’s replacement at fullback Tuimoala Lolohea left the field in the first half have with a knee injury and didn’t return.
Talking points:
In bad news for Simon Mannering owners, the reliable forward suffered a serious cut to his mouth. Before the injury he spent 44 minutes on the field where he made 28 tackles and one line break to score 34 points.
Tohu Harris again proved his value from the backrow by backing up his strong performance from last week with a 90 point showing which included a try.
Highlights:
Prop Jesse Bromwich was influential yet again. The big man finished the game with 98 points, thanks to an unlikely try assist, a linebreak, a linebreak assist and 23 tackles.
Storm skipper Cameron Smith (123 points) was at his very best from dummy half and steered the ship in attack which earned him three try assists and two forced drop outs.
Lowlights:
Supercoaches who were keeping an eye out for Tuimoala Lolohea would have been bitterly disappointed, after the versatile back left the field injured and only managed 3 points before doing so.
Star halfback Shaun Johnson (40 points) was able to spark his side. He made 20 tackles and had two line break assists.
Final teams:
Storm: 1. Cameron Munster, 2. Young Tonumaipea 3. Richie Kennar 18. Suliasi Vunivalu 5. Marika Koroibete 6. Blake Green 7. Cooper Cronk 8. Jesse Bromwich 9. Cameron Smith 15. Tim Glasby 11. Kevin Proctor 12. Tohu Harris 13. Dale Finucane Interchange: 4. Ben Hampton 10. Jordan McLean 14. Kenny Bromwich 17. Nelson Asofa-Solomona
Warriors: 1. Tuimoala Lolohea 2. David Fusitua 3, Blake Ayshford 4. Solomone Kata 5. Manu Vtauvei 6. Thomas Leuluai 7. Shaun Johnson 8. Sam Lisone 9. Isaac Luke 10. Ben Matulino 11. Bodene Thompson 12. Ryan Hoffman 13. Simon Mannering Interchange: 14. Jonathan Wright 15. Jacob Lillyman 16. Charlie Gubb 17. Ligi Sao
ROOSTERS V DRAGONS
Injuries/reports:
*Sam Moa was put on report early for a late shot on Josh McCrone.
*Aidan Guerra left the field for a concussion test but returned.
*Mitchell Frei was put on report for a high tackle on Gareth Widdop.
*Mitchell Aubusson went off for a concussion test but returned.
*Jackson Hastings was put on report for a high tackle.
*Mitch Rein (shoulder) went off midway through the second half and did not return.
*Dylan Napa was controversially put on report for his tackle on Taane Milne inside the final few minutes.
Talking points:
*Jackson Hastings kept raking in those dollars with a strong 51 but it could have been even more had he not ignored a four on one overlap to go himself late in the match.
*After a rough start to the season Gareth Widdop dotted down for the second week in a row for a very respectable 62.
Highlights:
*Aidan Guerra had another strong performance after his return to form last week and churned out 70 despite going off for a concussion test.
*Jack de Belin was solid as a rock once again with an all-base 54.
Lowlights:
*Latrell Mitchell is the most selected player in SuperCoach but he had a day to forget, making a series of handling errors and poor passes. He scored a try in the second half to stem the damage but still scored just 32.
Final team:
Roosters: 1. Latrell Mitchell 21. Joe Burgess 4. Blake Ferguson 5. Shaun Kenny-Dowall 3. Brendan Elliot 19. Ryan Matterson 7. Jackson Hastings 8. Sam Moa 9. Jake Friend 10. Dylan Napa 11. Mitchell Aubusson 13. Boyd Cordner 12. Aidan Guerra. Interchange: 14. Kane Evans 15. Mitchell Frei 16. Eloni Vunakece 17. Connor Watson
Young gun Jayden Nikorima is out of the Roosters side after being named in the under-20s team to play earlier on Monday afternoon. He’s been replaced at five-eighth by debutant Ryan Matterson. Daniel Tupou has been dropped for Joe Burgess and Boyd Cordner returns from injury at the expense of Isaac Liu.
Dragons: 1. Josh Dugan 2, Kalifa Faifai Loa 15. Will Matthews 4. Tim Lafai 5. Jason Nightingale 6. Gareth Widdop 7. Josh McCrone 8. Leeson Ah Mau 9. Mitch Rein 10. Mike Cooper 11. Tyson Frizell 12. Joel Thompson 13. Jack de Belin Interchange: 14. Russell Packer 15. Dunamis Lui 17. Siliva Havili 19. Taane Milne
Euan Aitken has failed to overcome a hamstring strain with Will Matthews to deputise in the centres early on. Rookie centre Taane Milne will make his NRL debut from the bench.
KNIGHTS V SEA EAGLES
Injuries/reports:
* Peter Mata’utia (knee) — his return to Newcastle ended midway through the first half
* Brett Stewart (hamstring) — came off early in the second half.
* Jarrod Mullen (hamstring) — went down with a hamstring problem after making a break in the second half.
* Tom Trbojevic (knee) — went off inside the final 10 minutes.
Talking points:
* Popular cheapie Brenton Lawrence saluted for his owners with a powerful stint from the bench that included a try late in the first half. He finished with a robust 70 points.
* The Saifiti brothers continued their indifferent form with Daniel scoring just 27 and Jacob not faring much better with 33.
Highlights:
* Jake Trbojevic top scored with 96 as a typical workman like performance was capped off by a late try.
* His younger brother Tom managed to cross the stripe as well and put up a nice 77. Trbojevic the younger would have come into consideration following the injury to Brett Stewart but a possible move to fullback is now off the cards after he suffered a knee injury late in the match.
Lowlights:
* Peter Mata’utia made his return to the Hunter after a few years with the Dragons and replaced his brother Pat at left centre. The match went poorly for the eldest of the Mata’utia clan and he scored just 16 before leaving the field.
* He’s been a SuperCoach stay away for a couple of years now, but Stewart managed a mighty 3 points before he left the field early in the second half.
Final teams:
Knights: 1. Dane Gagai, 2. Nathan Ross, 3. Sione Mata’utia, 20. Peter Mata’utia, 5. Akuila Uate, 6. Jarrod Mullen, 7. Trent Hodkinson, 8. Sam Mataora, 9. Danny Levi, 17. David Bhana, 11. Tariq Sims, 12. Korbin Sims, 13. Jeremy Smith. Interchange: 14. Tyler Randell, 15. Josh King, 16. Jacob Saifiti, 10. Daniel Saifiti.
Mid-week recruit Peter Mata’utia replaces brother Pat Mata’utia in the centres. David Bhana has been promoted to starting prop, replacing Daniel Saifiti who joins brother Jacob Saifiti on the bench.
Sea Eagles: 1 Brett Stewart, 2 Brayden Wiliame, 3 Jamie Lyon, 4 Steve Matai, 5 Tom Trbojevic, 6 Dylan Walker, 19 Daly Cherry-Evans, 8 Darcy Lussick, 7 Apisai Koroisau, 10 Nate Myles, 11 Tom Symonds, 12 Martin Taupau, 13 Jake Trbojevic. Interchange: 14 Lewis Brown, 15 Addin Fonua-Blake 16 Brenton Lawrence, 17 Siosia Vave
Star halfback Daly Cherry-Evans returns from a knee injury. His inclusion sees Apisai Koroisau shift to hooker and Matt Parcell drops out after failing to recover from a hamstring injury.
SHARKS V PANTHERS
Injuries/reports:
* Waqa Blake (hip pointer) — copped a knock and didn’t return
* Te Marie Martin (fractured shoulder) — didn’t return
* Jayson Bukuya (concussion, round nine) — didn’t return
Talking points:
* Young gun Te Marie Martin (18) fractured his shoulder and is now a sell after making $130,000 for owners.
* The very promising James Fisher-Harris (93) has been a slow burner this year, but produced the best performance of his young career in scoring two tries.
Highlights:
* Isaah Yeo (84) spent plenty of time in the centres due to injury and his attacking stats benefited. He notched a try and try assist.
* The score of Andrew Fifita (68) should surge above 70 when effective offloads are added in the stats recall.
* Paul Gallen (81) has averaged 82 in his last four games, showing why he is the best player in SuperCoach history.
Lowlights:
* Ben Barba (31) looked sharp but couldn’t quite notch the big attacking stats and may have peaked in price for now.
* The base stats of the usually reliable Josh Mansour (35) have fallen off the face of the earth. He produced his third straight score in the 30s and will see a huge price drop given his break even of 113.
Final teams:
Sharks: 1 Ben Barba 2 Sosaia Feki 3 Jack Bird 4 Ricky Leutele 5 Valentine Holmes 6 James Maloney 7 Chad Townsend 8 Andrew Fifita 9 Michael Ennis 16 Matt Prior 11 Jayson Bukuya 12 Wade Graham 13 Paul Gallen. Interchange: 10 Sam Tagataese 14 Gerard Beale 15 Chris Heighington 17 Luke Lewis
Just the usual change for the Sharks, with Sam Tagataese dropping to the bench and Matt Prior to start.
Panthers: 1 Matt Moylan (c) 2 Josh Mansour 3 Waqa Blake 4 Peta Hiku 5 Dallin Watene-Zelezniak 6 Te Maire Martin 7 Jamie Soward 8 Leilani Latu 9 Peter Wallace 10 Reagan Campbell-Gillard 11 Bryce Cartwright 12 Isaah Yeo 13 Trent Merrin. Interchange: 14 Tyrone Peachey 16 Suaia Matagi 17 James Fisher-Harris 21 Jeremey Latimore
Jeremy Latimore replaces Sam McKendry (suspension) on the bench in the only change.
COWBOYS V EELS
Injuries/reports:
* Johnathan Thurston copped a hit to the knee in the last moments of the match but recovered quickly to kick for the final conversion — although he did miss it.
Talking points:
* Eels five-eighth Corey Norman spent 10 minutes in the sin bin for a professional foul on Michael Morgan over the Cowboys tryline, which stopped the Eels in their tracks.
* The Cowboys were challenged but found plenty against a determined Eels outfit in Townsville. Although captain Johnathan Thurston (79) didn’t have his best night he again showed why he is such a good NRL and SuperCoach player, stepping up when it mattered in the second half to guide the Cowboys and his coaches home.
Highlights:
* Semi Radrada (68) followed up his 81-point match last week with a two-try effort just in time to start looking very handy for the bye period.
* Gavin Cooper (84) has flown under the SuperCoach radar this season but continues to provide his 8% of owners with consistent output. His try against the Eels added to his 35 tackles against the Eels, he will now have a three-round average of about 80 points.
* The Michael Morgan (98) rollercoaster continued, hitting a high point against the Eels. Morgan backed up his 93 points from last week with two tries and one try-assist for his 6000 owners.
* Eels forward Manu Ma’u (57) continues to shape as a potential bye period goldmine with another solid performance.
Lowlights:
* Corey Norman (40, including a try assist) was on target for a good score before being hit with the sin bin penalty and the enforced time on the sideline.
* Coaches will be getting nervous about using Eels hooker Nathan Peats (39) as bye coverage after another below-par performance. And Cowboys hooker Jake Granville (22) had his worst score for the year for his 8.5% of SuperCoaches.
Final teams:
Cowboys: 1. Lachlan Coote 2. Kyle Feldt 3. Justin O’Neill 4. Kane Linnett 5. Antonio Winterstein 6. Michael Morgan 7. Johnathan Thurston 8. Matthew Scott 9. Jake Granville 10. James Tamou 11. Gavin Cooper 12. Ethan Lowe 13. Jason Taumalolo Interchange: 14. Rory Kostjasyn 15. Patrick Kaufusi 16. Scott Bolton 17. Ben Hannant
Unchanged.
Eels: 1. Michael Gordon 2. Semi Radradra 3. Michael Jennings 4. Brad Takairangi 5. Clinton Gutherson 6. Corey Norman 7. Kieran Foran 8. Junior Paulo 9. Nathan Peats 10. Daniel Alvaro 11. Manu Ma’u 12. Beau Scott 13. Tepai Moeroa. Interchange: 14. Isaac De Gois 15. Peni Terepo 16. Danny Wicks 17. Ken Edwards
Unchanged.
RAIDERS V TITANS
Reports/injuries:
* Tigers lock Dene Halatau injured his hand in the first couple of minutes and didn’t return to the field.
* Raider Joseph Tapine injured his ankle in the first half and didn’t return.
* Kevin Naiqama was hit hard trying to make a tackle and left the field for a concussion test late in the match and didn’t return.
Talking points:
* After a tough month the Green Machine hit back with a dominate performance. Four Canberra players cracked the SuperCoach ton, including Jordan Rapana, whose 162 points (before recounts) was one of the top-five all time SuperCoach scores.
* Popular captain option and one of the competition top points scorers James Tedesco (28) was held to his lowest score of the season.
Highlights:
* A quartet of tries and a try assist propelled Canberra winger Jordan Rapana (162) into the SuperCoach scoring hall of fame.
* Dally M leader and Raiders English hooker Josh Hodgson (106) was superb. He was in everything, particularly in the first half, and his haul included a staggering 48 points from try assists.
* Hard-running Canberra centre Joseph Leilua (124) continues to be a surprise POD heading into the bye period. Before this match he had a five-round average of over 50 without great attacking stats. The floodgates opened against the Tigers. His haul included two tries, a try assist, offloads, line breaks and line-break assists.
* Chris Lawrence (75) was one of the few shining lights for the Tigers on a dark, dark night.
Lowlights:
* Besides the low score from Teddy, popular Tigers centre Jordan Rankin could only manage 11, only just beating his break-even of 6.
Final teams:
Raiders: 1. Jack Wighton 2. Edrick Lee 3. Jarrod Croker 4. Joseph Leilua 5. Jordan Rapana 6. Sam Williams 7. Aidan Sezer 8. Shannon Boyd 9. Josh Hodgson 16. Paul Vaughan 11. Josh Papalii 12. Elliot Whitehead 13. Shaun Fensom. Interchange: 14. Kurt Baptiste 15. Luke Bateman 17. Joseph Tapine 18. Clay Priest.
Frank-Paul Nuuausala has been left out of the team, with Paul Vaughan taking his spot at starting prop. As a result Clay Priest has been named on the Riaders bench to make his NRL debut.
Tigers: 1. James Tedesco 19. David Nofoaluma 3. Nathan Milone 4. Kevin Naiqama 5. Jordan Rankin 6. Mitchell Moses 7. Luke Brooks 8. Ava Seumanufagai 9. Robbie Farah 10. Tim Grant 11. Curtis Sironen 12. Chris Lawrence 15. Dene Halatau. Interchange: 14. Josh Aloiai 13. Sauaso Sue 16. Kyle Lovett 17. JJ Felise
Winger David Nofoaluma returns, with potential cash cow Josh Addo-Carr dropping out of the side. Sauaso Sue returns but will start off the bench with Dene Halatau to start at lock.
BULLDOGS V TITANS
Injuries/reports:
* Titans lock Greg Bird left the field for a concussion test but returned soon after to help launch the Titans’ late surge.
* Bulldogs winger Sam Perrett was injured in a tackle but played on.
Talking points:
* Popular SuperCoach cash cow Ashley Taylor was ruled out the day before the match after spending time in hospital with stomach cramps. He was replaced at five-eighth by fellow rookie Cameron Cullen, who made a creditable 48 points, including a try assist, in his second game of NRL. With Taylor expected back next week and Tyrone Roberts fit, it’s unlikely Cullen has much to offer SuperCoaches, although his price will jump significantly the next time he pulls on the Titans strip.
* Bulldogs centre Kerrod Holland again proved himself one of the best buys of the SuperCoach season so far. While he didn’t reach the two-try heights of last week he was a solid contributor with 56 points, including 22 tackles and 20 points from line breaks. It could have been even better had he not missed two conversions.
Highlights:
* Bulldogs forward Josh Jackson (94) gave SuperCoaches some food for thought ahead of the bye rounds. Jackson had plenty of admirers last year on the back of his strong attacking play. Up until Round 6 this year Jackson’s attacking stats had been almost non-existent but he has upped the ante in the last couple of weeks, including a try, 10 points from line breaks and eight from line break assists to go with his 41 tackles against the Titans. The Bulldogs will play in the two tough bye rounds of 12 and 18. Jackson is currently in 4% of teams.
* Returning after missing last week through suspension, Greg Bird (88) added stability to the Titans forward pack and a smile to the faces of 5% of SuperCoaches. Historically Bird has scored well against the Bulldogs and he didn’t disappoint, notching a try assist, 28 tackles and 38 points from hit-ups. If you’ve got him, you’d be happy with those points but with Origin just around the corner, he won’t be finding his way into many more teams.
* Moses Mbye rewarded coaches who stuck by him despite some lean weeks with an improved 57 points. The exciting 22-year-old looked dangerous with the ball, including a great run and dummy to gift a try to Will Hopoate.
* Will Hopoate scored a try-inflated 66 for his 8% of owners, ruing the fact he’ll be missing from Sunday games, while Bulldogs captain James Graham (63) was at his at his usual consistent best.
Lowlights:
* Although most coaches ditched Craig Garvey (12) with the return of Bulldogs hooker Michael Lichaa, those who still have him on the bench would have been disappointed with his 5 minutes of play on his return.
Final teams:
Bulldogs: 1. William Hopoate 2. Curtis Rona 3. Josh Morris 4. Kerrod Holland 5. Sam Perrett 6. Josh Reynolds 7. Moses Mbye 8. Aiden Tolman 9. Michael Lichaa 10. James Graham 11. Josh Jackson 12. Tony Williams 13. Greg Eastwood. Interchange: 14. Sam Kasiano 15. Tim Browne 16. David Klemmer 21. Craig Garvey
Hooker Craig Garvey has been named on the bench, with Lloyd Perrett and Adam Elliot dropping out of the squad.
Titans: 1. William Zillman 2. Anthony Don 3. Josh Hoffman 4. Nene Macdonald 5. David Mead 6. Tyrone Roberts 19. Cameron Cullen 8. David Shillington 9. Nathan Friend 10. Ryan James 11. Zeb Taia 12. Chris McQueen 13. Greg Bird Interchange: 14. Luke Douglas 15. Leivaha Pulu 16. Agnatius Paasi 17. Kierran Moseley.
As expected, Cameron Cullen replaces fellow rookie Ashley Taylor at five-eighth, while Eddy Pettybourne misses out.
BRONCOS V RABBITOHS
Injuries/reports:
Rabbitohs —
Hymel Hunt’s night ended early after he suffered what looked like a serious pec injury.
Halfback Adam Reynolds left the field clutching his jaw at the 55th minute. Remarkably he demanded to return in the second half despite nursing a suspected fracture. Reynolds will undergo scans and know by Monday whether he has suffered a jaw fracture for the second time this season.
Paul Carter suffered a head knock but passed a concussion test and returned.
Broncos —
Andrew McCullough injured his left knee and didn’t return. Wayne Bennett said his rake had suffered a calf complaint with scans set to determine how long he would be sidelined. “There are is no medial or cruciate (knee) damage,” he said
Joe Ofahengaue and Adam Blair were placed on report.
Talking points:
Potential cheapie Herman Ese’ese scored 14 points and as expected he only saw limited game time playing off the bench.
Hulking winger Corey Oates dived over in the corner in one of the best put downs of the season. He also had another try disallowed in the first half. His 46 point display also included two tackle busts and a linebreak.
Anthony Milford wasn’t able to reach the dizzying heights that he did against the Knights (153 points) but he finished with a respectable 65 points — his kicking game a highlight, he forced three dropouts. The five-eighth also had a try assist.
Highlights:
SuperCoach ‘God’ Corey Parker bagged himself a try in the latter part of the second half, taking his score to 81 points. He also kicked four goals and made four tackle busts.
Ben Hunt was on fire again and in an impressive performance notched up 85 points. The halfback took control of Brisbane’s attack making two linebreaks, five tackle busts, a try assist and he even crossed for a try of his own.
Greg Inglis finally found some form after a below par start to the season for the superstar fullback. He finished the game with 63 points thanks to a try, six tackle busts and a linebreak.
Lowlights:
Andrew McCullough finished with only 11 points to his name thanks to his injury.
In a huge blow to Hymel Hunt (6 points) owners, the centre left the field after only six minutes. He looked to have suffered a serious pec injury which is likely to result in a lengthy spell on the sideline.
Final Teams:
Broncos: 1 Darius Boyd 2 Corey Oates 3 Jack Reed 4 James Roberts 5 Jordan Kahu 6 Anthony Milford 7 Ben Hunt 8 Josh McGuire 9 Andrew McCullough 10 Adam Blair 15 Sam Thaiday 12 Matt Gillett 13 Corey Parker (c). Interchange: 14 Jarrod Wallace 16 Joe Ofahengaue 17 Kodi Nikorima 18 Herman Ese’ese
Alex Glenn is out with a hip injury with Sam Thaiday coming into the starting side. Herman Ese’ese earns a call-up onto the bench to make his debut.
Rabbitohs: 1 Greg Inglis (c) 2 Bryson Goodwin 19 Dane Nielsen 4 Hymel Hunt 5 Aaron Gray 6 Luke Keary 7 Adam Reynolds 8 Thomas Burgess 18 Damien Cook 10 David Tyrrell 11 Chris Grevsmuhl 14 Paul Carter 13 Sam Burgess. Interchange: 3 Kirisome Auva’a 9 Cameron McInnes 15 Jason Clark 16 Nathan Brown
Forward George Burgess has been dropped. Damien Cook has been promoted into the starting side at hooker with Cameron McInnes dropping to the bench. Kirisome Auva’a also drops to the bench with Dane Nielsen to make his Rabbitohs debut at centre. Backrower Paul Carter starts with Kyle Turner omitted. |
When I first heard about unit testing using a framework like JUnit, I thought it was such a simple and powerful concept. Instead of ad hoc testing, you save your tests, and they can be run as often as you like. In my mind, the concept didn’t leave much room for misunderstanding. However, over the years I have seen several ways of using unit tests that I think are more or less wrong. Here are 5, in order of importance:
1. Testing algorithms together with coordinators. Algorithmic logic is easiest to test if it is separated from coordination code (see Selective Unit Testing – Costs and Benefits). Otherwise you end up with tests where you for example first have to submit a job through a job queue before the logic is tested. The job queue part only complicates things. Unless you are testing the job queue itself, break out the logic that would be executed when calling the run method, and test that logic separately. Both the code and the tests become much easier to write and manage that way.
2. Mocking too much. Perhaps the greatest benefit of unit tests is that they force you to write code that can be tested in isolation. In other words, your code becomes modular. When you mock the whole world around your objects, there is nothing that forces you to separate the parts. You end up with code where you can’t create anything in isolation – it is all tangled together. From a recent tweet by Bill Wake: “It’s ironic – the more powerful the mocking framework, the less pressure you feel to improve your design.”
3. Not using asserts. Sometimes I see tests where an object is created, some methods are called, and that’s it. Maybe it is done in a loop, with some variation in creation or calling. However, nothing is ever checked using asserts. That misses the whole point – checking that the code behaves as expected. Sure, the code is run, but that’s it. If an exception is thrown, we would notice, but nothing else is verified.
4. Leaving print statements in the tests. I see this as a remnant from manual testing – you look at the values and decide if they are correct or not. But all checking should be done using asserts. If an assert fails, you will see it, because the test fails. When the test passes, nothing should be printed. Sometimes when developing the tests, it can be useful with print statements. But in that case add a flag, and turn printing off when checking in the tests.
5. Checking the log statements, not the result. Thankfully not common, but I have seen an otherwise very competent developer do this. Since it is the result of the method that matters, not what is printed in log, there can be errors in the code, and the tests still pass. Enough said.
The last 3 problems are all easy to avoid. The first 2 require more effort, but will result in code that is nicely separated. Happy unit testing! |
33 minutes of music approximately. The sound is very good-clean and with some of the warmth associated with the original vinyl pressing (which I still own). The disc is snapped inside a tri-fold cardboard holder, which contains a short but informative essay on the group and the album by Dominic Priore. The original b&w back cover is also here inside the tri-fold holder. This album is actually somewhere between 3-3 1/2 or 4 "stars", depending on your nostalgia level and how highly you rate the music.
Well, a small wrong has been finally righted. Instead of the previous releases which were a collection of tracks from various albums, we have the original album with all the tracks in straight order. Never a first run band, THE STRAWBERRY ALARM CLOCK were (and continue to be) known primarily for the one track (a number 1 hit in 1967) we all know-"Incense and Peppermints"-a song that comes to mind when you think of the late 60's and the "Summer of Love", Hippies, tie-dye shirts, love beads, and all the rest.
One look at the wonderfully evocative, period cover photo will tell you a lot about the music and the era. The music was a mix of fuzz-toned guitars, cheesy organ, vibraphone, flute, and some close harmony singing-all wrapped up in the pop/psychedelic sound of the era . That and the fact that their one hit record was sung by a non-band member (Chris Mumford from SHAPES OF SOUND), who was hanging around the studio that day. But all that adds up to some fun, cool music-even if it was a bit lightweight. But if you listen to "Unwind With The Clock", a jazzy instrumental/vocal (a track that is always left off compilations), or "The World's On Fire", you hear another side to this band-they had more chops than many thought.
For a short time THE STRAWBERRY ALARM CLOCK were one of the main attractions in the L.A./Sunset Blvd area. A number of people started digging their music, hoping the psychedelic vibrations would continue a while longer. But it wasn't to be. The whole Sunset Blvd. club thing was outlawed, and everybody scattered to new places for their musical fix and everything else. But, finally, we have one of the original artifacts from that wonderful, exciting, weird era. Listening to this does bring back some good memories of growing up during that period when everything was seemingly new and vital. And that makes this release of the original album all the more important. Admittedly if you weren't there you'll hear it with slightly different ears, but this band/music/ Single was a part of the times.
As I said-a small wrong has been made right-it's good to know that I now own one of the small but important musical artifacts of that time, when it seemed there was something new to hear every week. A small but important piece of the puzzle is now in place. Enjoy! |
The Department for Health is failing to target suicide prevention work at men say experts, according to a report on male suicide BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.
Jane Powell of the male suicide prevention charity CALM said:
“It’s cultural as much as anything else. We don’t really see men as needing help in anyway or as being vulnerable unless they’ve got some additional asset or qualification which means we should look at them as needing any further assistance.
“And that runs through our entire society which says that failure and being weak is something that women’s do and being strong is what men do. And so when we look at the suicide prevention strategy where it says and mentions that men are at higher risk than women, it then goes on to look at what other factors like ethnicity, sexuality or anything else that bring that kind of added qualification as for why we should look at a particular group as needing anything.
“We equate manhood as being invulnerable so we can’t allocate resources in that area because they’re men. A man who is depressed is more likely to behave aggressively, to self medicate, to have anger problems and to end up in prison than end up getting any kind of mental health help.”
The Psychologist Martin Seager, who was also interviewed on the programme said that we have to “remove the blind eye we’re turning to it because in 104 out of 105 countries that we have statistics for the male suicide rate is much higher so it isn’t purely a cultural thing it seems to be an embedded evolutionary mind and body issue for men.
Male suicide is one of the key topics covered at the third national conference for men and boys. To buy your tickets today click here now
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Bottas: We are missing race pace and quite a big amount
Before the first race of the 2015 season many expected Williams to take the fight to Mercedes, but that has not transpired and the former world champions have even taken a step back in the current Formula 1 pecking order, with Valtteri Bottas lamenting the lack of race pace in the FW37.
After missing the season opener in Melbourne due to a back injury, Bottas was back in action at Sepang and reflected after his fifth place finish, “We maximised the result but we are missing race pace – and quite a big amount.”
“With the ideal race, starting at the front, the gap wouldn’t be that big but it is too big, much bigger than we expected. It shows we have a lot of work to do.”
“There is a lot more potential, we just need to get more performance because it is possible others made huge steps,” said the highly rated Finn referring no doubt to the leap made by Ferrari.
Bottas explained, “In traffic, we seem to struggle with traction a bit in slow-speed corners compared to Toro Rosso and Red Bull. Toro Rosso seem to be much stronger where we are weak, which is slow-speed, mid to exit.
“We have some updates coming and all we can do now is learn from anything we can,” concluded Bottas.
Last year Williams became a Mercedes F1 engine customer and, after a number of years in the doldrums, became front runners, eventually finishing the season third in the constructor’s standings.
In testing earlier this year they appeared to have retained the momentum, but in Australia they already appeared to have slipped a notch and in the heat of Malaysia Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel powered to victory and gave everyone ‘a wake up call.’ |
Mike: I think you can keep going in that direction to from your talking about LSD in you come back from a DMT trip when you’re not so sure you’re not living in a really convincing hologram.
Euvie: Simulation.
Duncan: The same thing that they say in Buddhism and Hinduism, Maya illusion. You guys know that term, Maya?
Mike: Yep.
Duncan: Personified illusion, not only is it a lie but it’s a living lie. Like it’s a lie that its nature trying to deceive you is that I love virtual reality because when you pull your virtual reality goggles off and go from the VR universe to the real universe. You’re like holy s**t man my senses really can be completely tricked. There is a kind of spiritual corollary to that experience which is that you can remove the whatever the cognitive filters are that you wear what makes sense. I’ve heard from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that any organism would only process the data necessary to survive there all the spectrum of the different types of light we can see the sounds we can’t hear, the feelings that we can’t feel even though they are buffeted by all of these phenomena that are sensory apparatus that allows the process. The reason that this is because it has nothing to do with our basic survival needs and to suddenly become aware of it is to reduce your chance of survival. You know, when I take mushrooms or any psychedelic in since I was a kid I will always see some version of elves I’ll see some kind of elf, not like Christmas elves or whatever but for example lsd, if I’m looking concrete, not a small dose like a 100µg, 200µg dose of lsd. I will see weird runic writing everywhere, And then also what appears to be some kind of health way arcade drawings of elves and it’s like they’re basing those drawings on whatever this is and they seem to be alive but they seem to be existing on a different layer of the Universe and they seem to be aware of us to some degree but somewhat unconcerned or annoyed sometimes or ignoring or they seem like nature too. They seem wild, they don’t they seem feral, right. Not in a crazy way like a dog, a mad dog. But innocent of like an indigenous and tribal. Those things are probably there you know, that the astral plane that you’re seeing. But here’s the thing maybe for whatever reason we haven’t seen those things is because it doesn’t help us survive. It just complicates the situation. Like dealing with getting up in the morning and going to use the bathroom and need some food around or whatever order you do that in. It’s only complicated if on the way to the bathroom you’re seeing tribes of ancient hyper dimensional beings watching you from the walls.
Mike: Yeah, I love the idea of simulation theory that we’re all living inside a big virtual reality game because it makes everything more interesting like you said concrete or when I take mushrooms the carpet and I think that is the base level of reality is that the deeper you look into things maybe the the algorithm creates more complex solutions to your questions.
Duncan: What do you think the algorithm is?
Mike: You know that game, No Man’s Sky? They did a procedural generation world where you can explore 18 quintillion planets. You can go as deep as you want into it. I think that’s all the algorythm was meant to do is to be very convincing and to expand as our curiosity expands.
Duncan: But the question is who made the algorithm?
Mike: That’s a question I love too because it implies there’s meaning in the the events of your life and that maybe you can uncover meaning. I sometimes walk around and pretend like there is meaning in everything. Someone trips on the street and I go OK what was the meaning of that person tripping in front of me to my life. It’s just a game I play but sometimes you can actually find little patterns in that and pull wisdom out of that. Euvie and I were at a coffee shop a few weeks ago with someone fell down the stairs few minutes later someone dropped a coffee mug somewhere and then a few minutes after that someone dropped another thing I was like Ok, Euvie pull your computer in, just like protect your computer and within minutes after that someone spillt a full grande sized cup of coffee on Euvie’s keyboard.
Duncan: Woah.
Mike: I was like ok, maybe that’s a sign.
Duncan: So look what you did, not only did you like recognise a pattern but you were able to prognosticate it something else is going to happen and it happened so
Mike: Yes.
Duncan: Your hypothesis was right it just wasn’t good enough to know she should move the keyboard. You knew there was going to be some action because you were seeing a pattern that other people weren’t seeing
Mike: Yeah. So after the guy spills the coffee over the laptop he offers to take us to an Apple repair store where we can get the computer looked at. So we travel there and we were a bit nervous and so is he because he’s he’s afraid he might have to pay all this money to repair the laptop. So we get to the apple repair store and it on trying to ease the tension as the computer is being taken apart and looked at so I asked him what do you do, what are you up to in Istanbul and it turns out he’s this robotics engineering student And he’s in Istanbul at the moment to attend this Google conference for robotics and that’s this big competition that they have like battle robots going against each other so it seem like a really interesting thing. So he actually invited us to the event and I was thinking about we’re in Istanbul for a couple of weeks just you know waiting for my visa and it would be nice to have some friends and meet some people involved in tech, maybe meet some investors and since starting this incubator in Plovdiv it would be a cool thing to meet people involved in robotics, AI or whatever. This impulse to ask him about his life for what he’s up to in Istanbul and the whole coffee spilling incident brought us unto this next step to meet someone involved in the robotics and tech scene. So it’s pretty cool. Turned out the laptop was totally cool, no problems whatsoever. Euvie’s just got a little bit of a sticky keyboard but you know it didn’t have any problems.
Duncan: I’ve read about this there is actually a form of you know like a bibliomancy you are you open the Bible or any other work with the dictionary whatever you have a question open the Bible open a dictionary whatever. You point to you that’s the message that you’re supposed to get to know. I cant remember which book this was where I read this but you formulate a question, put yourself in a magical state which is what you’re talking about seeing the patterns is like bringing yourself into a magical state and then go to a cafe is actually what I read. Go to a place with the question in mind and sit in a listen to the people or watch the people not as though they were individuals but they were so they were one organism.
Mike: Aha, have you read synchronicity by Kirby Surprise?
Duncan: No I have not.
Mike: I think they’ve got a story from that you you might really like that but actually but that he says the same thing. Go to a market.
Duncan: Maybe that was it, maybe that’s where I got it from because it was like an essay somebody emailed me so I could have easily been added it could have been out of there for sure.
Mike: The book is so cool. I like playing around with it and people get so sceptical and like turned off by this but I think the more willing you are they just play with the idea you have to detach yourself to an actually believe that any of it but if you just open to the idea of everything having meaning every single event every colour, everything you look at smell, taste, touch, hear. There meaning in it. Then you can pull information from that and you can you can almost decide the meaning but much of that information can start to become useful and I’ve been playing with this concept for a couple of years now and it’s like it’s getting stronger or that coffee shop incident is like a normal occurrence now. That’s weird man.
Duncan: Have you read Robert Anton Wilson?
Euvie: Not yet no but it’s been recommended to us.
Duncan: So there’s this idea of this thing called the chapel perilous, you guys heard of this?
Mike: No.
Duncan: So, in magical practices when you begin to get into it you know someone you should definitely have on your podcast is
Mike: -Jason Louv.
Duncan: Yeah! Exactly. He really understands it. When I talk about it It’s like a murky memory but I can vaguely understand what they’re talking about this in my own dabbling in magic. And so the chapel perilous is basically what happens is when you begin to realise exactly what you’re talking about and there so many different ways to put it. We’re living in the mind of God or something or everything’s information and information can be not only apprehended in ways that most people are apprehending it but can also be manipulated in ways the most people are manipulating it.
Mike: Yeah.
Duncan: You can begin to see new fields of data and then transform those fields of data using techniques that most people think are absolute b******* . But you will begin to witness actual profound changes in your own subjective universe from these techniques and then you, your life starts jumping timelines because whatever the timeline you were on prior to recognising this data fields and manipulating them and that’s gone, you basically kill yourself because now you’ve jumped in a completely new version of reality where suddenly you’re with a person that you would never been with had you not shifted you’re thinking and this will bring you into the presence of either really good people are very dangerous people. Depending on what kind of magic you’re practicing, you know. Because some people are really into power. I was at this round as a treat talking to someone who met Carlos Castinada. You guys know Carlos Castinada? The sorcerer?
Euvie: No.
Duncan: So it’s a great book. He studied under a, god I can’t remember the name of the religion where they take peyote but he studied under a sorcerer and he learned a lot of different, a lot of magic real magic. Just like Crawley and some of the rituals are really awful like sewing lizard eyes shut.
Euvie: Jesus.
Duncan: Yeah, lots of…you know I was talking to my friend like this. I never liked those. Once i got to those parts in the books i just stopped reading because I cannot respect anyone It would do something like that that’s so f***** at meanwhile I’m super hipocrite because I eat meat. Different podcast. But the point is this guy and my friend I said to me know what that’s so f***** up like that what it where is compassion there and my friend said he’s not in the compassion, sorcerers are in it for the power. They actually see compassion as a kind of low-level form of power but it’s not the power it’s not that it’s not it’s it’s kind of like a grade school stuff. Compassion sure yeah ok f****** cultivate your compassion, whatever. You go ahead and do that I’m travelling into the astral realm. I’m making people do things and they don’t realise it I’m making s*** tons of money for myself and for my friends using magic and I don’t care about your compassion. Should I get you a blanket and maybe we got it in the end you find a nice the hill the sit down with your blanket Gandhi really that’s what you want compassion. So you run into those people and they’re real and then you can get into chapel perilous where suddenly you get sucked deeper and deeper into ever increasing realizations of the complexity of the astral realm. You can get lost in the astral realm. You can basically go nuts which is why you hear this again and again when it comes to magic. Be very careful, be careful. When you reading his books you know from the greatest magicians, all of them have like some pretty intense warnings in there is it how to protect yourself, how to purify yourself. In my younger days my reaction was like whatever, thats just a movie bulls***. I could sit In my room and do a ritual where I tried to make some connection with some Anokian entities and I don’t really need to go through the several days of preparation that they recommend. I don’t really need to wear the clothes they recommend or do the particular drawings the right way that you put on your wall or burn the right kind of incense. I don’t really need to do that because this is actually a bunch of b******* it can’t really be real. Then you sit down and start doing it in the next thing you know you open yourself up to something that you’ve had no idea what it was like ordering plutonium through the mail
[laughter]
Duncan: And throwing away the manual. It’s like hey, when you’re handling this plutonium you should definitely be wearing some kind of, you should be behind several shields of led. You know but never got some b******* scientists nonsense you know. So that’s the chapel perilous you can get pulled into a thing that is really fun at first but can become a little it’s like how much do you want the university wink at you, how much do you want in adversity to say hello. I’m not going to keep going on with this rant but I had a friend recently who had a rather profound psychedelic experience that was not pleasant at all. And he was running through the experience with me and in the beginning he said you know I ate the mushrooms and then I invited the universe to come and tell me what the universe needed to tell me and then he went to like a bar or something and I’m like wait, you invited the universe to come and talk to you at a bar? Like really? You invoked the universe you’re only saying the universe, eating this is psilocybin, you had an intention of connecting to the intelligence of the univers to tell you something and then you go to a bar. I didn’t say it like that, the message I was trying to put through but I’ve been doing the same thing. Guess what, sometimes the universe answers your invitation and when the universe comes to you, look at the universal Farm Chapter 7 of The Bhagavad Gita I think it’s Chapter 7 where Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna and Arjuna is describing Krishna. The saints throughout the universe are bowing down to you like praying, an infinite number of arms and eyes and mouths and we know, the light emanating from you is brighter than a billion Suns and I see all humans being devoured in your mouth and this is the Oppenheimer quote but „Hello, I have become death, destroyer of worlds“ at the very end of that chapter Arjuna says to Krishna ( I’m definitely going to like abbreviate what he says but the essence of it is) could you please go back to normal form Krishna, please.
[laughter]
Euvie: Normal form Krishna haha.
Mike: It’s like he’s staring at the The spinach and his teeth but it’s all the bodies of all the people that have ever lived.
Duncan: Exactly. So, So I can read that in The Bhagavad Gita and it’s cool like how he understands the vastness of the cosmology in what we call Hinduism. But in real life are you ready for that, are you ready to see that and to really see it? Not just to think man, can I really manipulate reality using my mind or is it possible that we exist in multiple timelines. Is it possible that we are existing in a multiverse and I can jump in the different multiverses just through intention moving closer and closer and closer to my divine self. Is it possible that my divine super evolved actualized self existing at some point in some future and some multiverse can send signals back to me that I can follow in the direction of that thing. Is it possible that at some point in some future in some multiverse there is some awakened version of me that is the awakening version of all people that is calling out through all multiverses to bring those who can hear closer to it and we call that thing Gad when actually the closer you get to the thing the more you turn into it. Because it’s that powerful and if that is possible are you ready for that? Your ego will be like f*** yeah I’m ready, that sounds awesome
[laughter]
Euvie: Or it will be horrified.
Duncan: Or horrified. And the horrified is better because the versus the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. I think you’re sending me set for that or if you want to put it in a sweet away if you read The Chronicles of Narnia, did you ever read those?
Mike: Yeah.
Duncan: Ok. Well, C.S. Lewis made this Jesus metaphor, Jesus analogy for a lion. This lion Aslan is this wonderful being There is kind of like the Avatar that comes to balance things out of the peers and ontologies with one of the characters in the book when referring to Aslan this Christ symbol says he is not a tamed Lion. And in the same way this thing that we’re contacting in different ways thtough psychedelics or prayer, meditation, spiritual practice. It’s not tamed. it’s not safe in the way that we think things are safe. It kills every second it, devours itself and it does it with zero problem. Wiping out your identity in this particular incarnation. It doesn’t care, it doesn’t care if you walk off a cliff, it doesn’t save. It’s like oh yeah do that experiment, let’s try that again walking off the cliff up didn’t work.
Euvie: Try again, new body, pop there you go.
[laughter]
Duncan: Yeah. So that’s the chapel perilous. This is why I I love the teachings that were [inaudible] because it’s rather than being the complicated rituals of Aleister Crowley the lesser keys of Solomon in all the grimmoires and all the different magical systems that are so beautiful. But I’m just not wise enough for that, I’m not smart enough for that and not disciplined enough for that. No f****** way I can do that and if I do it I’d inevitably f*** myself up which is why I really love this concept of love everyone and tell the truth. Come in the present moment and just be here with the intention of loving or work on yourself so you can help the people around you. That’s where I’m at right now. By the way old man warning secretly the guys Iike “Don’t do magic, it’s bad”. I didn’t mean it like that, it’s so fun, I’m just not good at it.
[laughter]
Duncan: So fun. It’s such a weird thing this again yeah that’s great as long as you’re getting pulled into the Right Group you know just not getting white drawn in by people who have gotten really good at drawing and energy some people really good at drawing innogy whether it’s like the locker money success or other people and I don’t even know why they’re doing it I haven’t established their intention with themselves to their attention is subconscious down on the Furious they doing it you know out of a kind of accidentally, they haven’t identified this like why do I do this? Why am I having this experience? Or who am I serving? If you can identify who you’re serving, what you’re serving the algorithm if you want to call it that whatever it may be and you and you and you can begin to connect with that and allow that to be the center of your intentions then everything will be great because then you just become a vehicle of the thing or an appendage of the thing.
Euvie: The concept of karma in this case is really useful for me because you can think about what kind of karma are you accumulating by doing this or that. I mean how much suffering are you going to cause yourself in the future if you do these things because you know in this life you might cause yourself a little bit of suffering but you know over time you’re going to cause your future self a lot more suffering.
Duncan: Yeah. That’s right. This is from a podcast of Ron Doss and he was sitting with, I can’t remember these names are so difficult, policing when it is teacher is telling the story of getting really angry and the teacher said don’t worry Ron Doss, that’s just your karma running off like we get angry, when you start freaking out that’s old karma reaching some, you know that karma might be 10 seconds old, it might be 2 years old or a lifetime, whatever it is. Another way I’ve heard it described It is a lot easier for me to understand is that it’s like a fish swimming in circles in a fishbowl running into its own poop
[laughter]
Duncan: That’s what karma is. Now i get to be around this shitty thing that I Created some time ago, like oh, you grew up fast, wow you’re just a tiny little bit of bad luck. Now you’re a big big big boy, you grew fast. Well, instead of letting you trigger my procedure of habituation that is defined my entire life about another’s point maybe this time I won’t react in the way I did before and then you can start cleaning it up a little bit for sure. But yeah I’m thinking about the karmic implications of your actions there is definitely a great thing to do especially when it comes to magic because it’s all, you know, imagine you did discover that as we’ve talked about earlier that the universe is actively attempting to keep people asleep for whatever reason. Not even like some cabal of bankers but some fundamental aspect of the universes hypnotic in attempts to keep people in a state of never ending obituations that they never really wake up to their true identities. Well if that’s the case then you certainly do have a lot of power over people if you’re even slightly awake. I mean just literally waking up in a room full of sleeping people. The kind of power you have over them is so extreme.
Euvie: All the d**** you can draw on their faces.
Duncan: Yeah, exactly or even worse. God forbid Bill Cosby should wake up in a room full of sleeping people.
[laughter]
Duncan: A dream for him, a true dream. But God forbid that should happen. So, in a same way If you begin the wake up to some of these things and you’re weak and you don’t have great intentions you just want to be surrounded by, and you see this all the time like anytime you see someone who’s got an entourage. You’re witnessing a magician. They might not know but that’s what they are and you’re witnessing a magician that surrounds themselves with human energy and it’s kind of like vortex floating around them in the form of all their weird sycophantic friends. So it’s like when you ever you want to know if a person’s got a swarm of people around them, that’s a magician in the magician is used that magicians power to enslave or to magnetize certain people around them. Which is why when you run into celebrity, big celebrities inevitably have entourages, any entourage. It’s so funny because the members of the entourage have personality characteristics identical to the sorcerer that they’ve been enslaved by because the sorcerers power is so intense that it actually is causing the identity of the people they brought into their gravity to transform into their own identity. It’s so cool to see Nosferatu. This is a really obscure, obscure thing. Not a Nosferatu, a Renfield. Renfield the Vampire Slave. I can remember being in a comedy store. There’s comedy club and there is comedian who’s kind of obscure but kind of famous in the world, he worked for Richard Briers. His name’s Paul Mooney and he is really funny but kind of one of these terrifying human who have no filter. So getting around a person like that if you’re leaking some b******* he’ll just tell you. Maybe something you’ve been trying to deny and he’ll just say it and it to your face forcing you to deal with it ultimately good, but in the moment painful. So there is a guy who is like basically is servant of the family that runs the comedy store, you know any powerful family what are people who are awake by holding them who were kind of draining their power, maybe getting some bad energy back but this famous f****** guy is famous for his role with this like kind of comedy dynasty that was in the parking lot. Paul Mooney just looked over and look at you, you’re a Renfield. You know that don’t you, you’re a vampire slave? Haha it was wild. He looks at the guys face like Oh no because it was true. That happens so waking up is a lot of responsibility goes into that because if you’re going to wake up and in use that get a bunch of sleepwalking people to start following you around then you’re f***** up. The people surrounding you should all be a SATs on the people who are trying to wake themselves up in each other. It shouldn’t be you and then a bunch of zombies that you’ve tricked into thinking you’re famous or whatever which is the arbitrary, absolutely ridiculous concept. Be careful. Be careful, if you’re going to f*****g do it so that we can all wake up and we can begin the ripples that are going to hopefully create a global civilization.
Euvie: Yeah we were just talking about this. We were making a mind map of kind of our goals and then breaking it down into kind of human level goals and things in our lives that we should be doing. Not not to get into too much detail because I don’t think we should reveal those kinds of private goals, but one of the things that we wanted to help people wake up. Going back to the beginning of this conversation and there’s just you know the information is out there people just aren’t looking at it so even on that basic human level just getting people to be more aware and look at reality without this kind of blurry filter that they normally have.
Duncan: Yes, and to show them the highest technology because the highest technologies is not computers, the highest technology is love. That is the highest tech that is always cutting edge it will never stop being cutting edge it is the most cutting edge technology on planet Earth and to cultivate that and to get around people and love them. Not try to change them but to love them were they’re at good luck. But if you could do that, there’s people who have done that with me. There’s people who have cultivated that energy That’s where the transformation happens, that’s where the waking up happens. Does the waking up happen by showing people a look at this f****** Isis video. No that’s not going to wake people up to make people want to go back to sleep if they were awake. It made me like f*** this man, I’m just dont want to look at anything again that has something to do with the news. But if you come to someone that you don’t know and you’ve cultivated your ability or abilities. So Nim Crawley Baba, Ron Doss’s guru is telepathic. There is countless stories of him reading people’s minds. It’s called seeing into what they are and telling them things that they’ve never told anyone. So, he had cultivated over the many years prior to him becoming this awaken being. He was a sadhu a wandering aesthetic, but he also had a family. Very few people know who he was. His name, Nim Crawley Baba. Nim Crawley was a train station.They used to call him the train baba because he was on a train, I get these stories, I blur them up but he was like sitting on a train and he didn’t have a ticket. And they made him get off the train. He got off the train and the train wouldn’t go. And then they invited him back on the train and it went. So, no one really knows his story necessarily but you can be certain, and this is what’s really interesting about him and all the other you know „teachers“ is they are in Crawley and Lebur four talks about this an introduction definitely get me before you guys have a copy of Lebur four?
Mike: No.
Duncan: Ok. Get a copy of that. L-I-B-E-R four(4). In the introduction of that Crawley talks about the the way that did people disappear for awhile. Muhammad goes into the cave. Jesus I do not know the first 30 years is life. Buddha goes into the forest. All the stories share that same component of going somewhere kind of vanishing from the world for a little while so you can speculate on what they were doing during that time period. Probably they were doing what you guys are doing right now, they were begining to expand their consciousness, Any beginning to you figure out had a like do some of the tricks that we have heard great sources are capable doing. So Nim Crawley Baba definitely achieved some state of being able to look into a person fully and see all the stuff in there. The next thing he did, now if you could just do that and there’s many people who can do that if you could just do that you would be a great salesperson you would be able to sell a lot of f****** mattresses, cars nuclear weapons, you will be able to really make a lot of money in the world by reading people completely seeing them see what they are you could really f*** with people if that was the only thing that you could do but what he added to it and what the awakened beings seem to do along with this ability is they look into that part of the person that the person doesn’t want to show anyone and they love it they don’t love it ambigously, they love it completely, they love it with everything inside of them personally. Not like i just love everything but like I see into you, I see that thing that you did that hurt that person so much and you know you hurt them and you feel so horrible about that but I love you still. I love the person you were when you did that. I were the person you were before you did that and I love you now completely and it’s not phoney, it’s real. If you could do those two things if you could master those two powers that every single human that you got around will at least temporarily wake up, they would wake up and they would feel what is real. The only thing that’s real which is love. Those are the two if I could choose he magical powers does will be there to that I would want to be able that and the third would be invisibility.
[laughter]
Euvie: The thing about love that you’re talking about that, that is the method of enlightenment through the Indian tradition the guru loves the student completely with all of their flaws and all they’re horrible thoughts and things that they’ve done and through that loves the student is able to awaken. That is exactly the technology.
Duncan: That’s it.
Euvie: Yeah.
Mike: You know when you walk down the street you just think straight s*** about people like oh look that guy looks stupid or whatever.
Duncan: Oh my god, I’m so bad about that s*** . Do you guys play World of Warcraft?
Mike: No, I played Minecraft.
Duncan: Ok, well that’s cool. But World of Warcraft is a pretty awesome game and there is like online role playing game and people are divided up between the Alliance and the Horde. It’s ridiculous but I met someone who is like an alliance player and this is how bad it is for me. I heard that and I’m like in the back of my head for a second – what a d**k. Why would you do that, why would you play like that?
[laughter]
Duncan: This is terrible. This is the uncultivated – this is what happens if you let your mind run around without teaching or training it all you will definitely thinks things like that. You’ll walk down the street in the mind of judgement will do that but then the other thing they say is well yeah that reason your other reason you’re doing that is you don’t love yourself, really. First you start with yourself, right. Turn the view upon yourself. See if you can love yourself. See if you can love yourself not like that way of like you read an inspirational literature or whatever. Sit in front of the mirror and say I love you, you’re wonderful you’re worthy, you deserve love, you deserve peace. No, really love yourself. Can you do it? Why not? Once you start trying to love yourself and you realise you can’t do it then that creates a series of inquiries. The first thing being why can’t I love myself? Then whatever the answer to that question is, that will lead you into the direction where you need to go. Then Theoretically after you achieved some state of really loving yourself through the practice. All theory from me friends. Theoretically you would kind of instinctually do that around people who you ran into on the street. I guess I will not say it’s theoretical only because I’ve been around. I’ve interviewed some people who have had a lifetime practice and that’s what they do. I’ve seen it first hand, I just can’t do it.
Euvie: Yeah. I think you have to accept yourself first before you can love yourself and that requires looking into your deepest darkest s*** in your mind and digging it up and looking it square in the face and accepting it. That yes, this is part of the human experience. This are the things that i’ve thought and these are the things that I’ve done and I accept them. I haven’t done that many horrible things to have to face that kind of stuff but In the last month I’ve discovered just all the stuff that was stuck in my unconscious that I wasn’t dealing with end until I was able to look at it in deal with it I wasn’t able to love myself.
Duncan: It’s crazy right? That stuff that you just forget about. I was floating in a, I had a float tank in my house once and I would go into it all the time. I was floating in it and all of a sudden I would start having these vivid memories of things I completely forgot and I can remember like feeling that you’re being shown it’s not like you’re like summoning it is showing you this . When I was like 11, 13 -young kid I had this vivid recollection of me being a bully to someone. Completely forgot about it, but there it was like it never went anywhere, like it happened yesterday. God isn’t that scary. Every moment of bluntness, every moment of mild rudeness, this is is actually something someone told me who works at a hospice who has died. Had the experience of going someplace were being told no you’re not going to die yet, go back and work, you’re not off work yet. That’s the funny thing about death experiences when people talk about it a lot of them like I don’t want to come back, they make you come back here. Like in a way when you were a kind and you didn’t get a hall pass to go and use the bathroom. No, no, no, no, no. You go back into the classroom. You didn’t learn yet. So, in that same what he said that with the experience of dying when I talk about the life of you is not that you see it like you’re watching a movie but you view you experienced it again with the addition of that you feel what you made all the people around you feel.
Euvie: Yes.
Duncan: God that sucks man. I’ve been doing comedy for like seventeen years Indefinitely the first 10 years had a sack so I’m going to go through like at least 10 years of like feeling like a poor dog.
[laughter]
Mike: The more people you get in front of don’t become a celebrity early, you’re f****d. [laughter]
Duncan: But you know what? Maybe at the time of death of achieve this thing that you’re talking about self acceptance and some subsequent self love then when I love that runs through you you can love it just like you were loving yourself when you were in the human incarnation. That’s maybe why the practice is so important so that when that life review comes, did you know what, maybe the person who does the life review, the judger. You know there’s talk about them at the gates of Heaven, the entity that determines where you go maybe that’s the crazy thing is that it’s just yourself who decides by gazing upon what you did, you know what you didn’t pass. You’re the professor and the student. You didn’t pass the class this time. Let’s do it again, let’s keep doing it till we pass but keep doing. I don’t know. Let’s hope that it is and not some oblivion even though oblivion can be be cool too. S**t guys I’ve got to move. It’s eleven thirty, i’ve got to get back to work. I’ve got so much to do today.
Mike: No worries man that was a lot of fun.
Duncan: You guys are awesome, it was so fun talking to you. I don’t want it to end.
Euvie: Well let’s do it again!
Duncan: Let’s do it again. For sure let’s do it again you guys are awesome.
[laughter]
Euvie: So much fun. Ok bye!
Mike: Bye! |
Farmers load tomatoes onto a truck during harvest at the Grzegorz Tokarski farm in Gorne, eastern Poland, in 2014. A new report says North Korean women are being used as forced labor in Polish tomato fields. File Photo by Wojciech Pacewicz/European Pressphoto Agency
SEOUL, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- North Korean women workers are being deployed as forced laborers at a tomato farm in Poland, according to a South Korean television network.
The workers reportedly work 70 hours a week but are only allowed to take home $75 in monthly pay, KBS reported Tuesday.
The women were being held in confinement at a farm in Sarnow, about 170 miles southwest of Warsaw, the Polish capital.
A KBS reporter who investigated the site attempted to gain access to the farm surrounded by high fences but was turned away by a Polish guard.
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The guard told the reporter that he is "just an employee" and that he "knows nothing" about North Korean workers.
"I cannot answer your question," the guard says in the KBS video footage.
But in the evening the reporter returned to the site, where a Ukrainian worker said more than 100 North Korean women are working on the farm.
The worker said there are separate dormitory facilities for the women.
The women also were found shopping for groceries at a local supermarket the next day.
The North Koreans KBS interviewed at the market appeared to be in their early 20s, and avoided answering questions from the South Korean journalist.
The women are allowed to leave their compound for two hours a week to buy necessities, according to the report.
One woman denied they were forced laborers and said she and the others are allowed to work as much as they want to, "sometimes 8 hours, other times 5 hours" a day.
"We are here because we want to earn money," the woman said.
In June, Poland stated North Korean workers were no longer being permitted to enter the country.
North Korea's deployment of forced laborers, about 50,000 in total, according to one South Korean estimate, earns the Kim Jong Un regime up to $300 million a year. |
The House Republican leadership has billed American taxpayers $3 million to defend the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, but GOP leaders did a deep dive on Wednesday as the high court heard the legal challenge to DOMA.
The growing approval of same-sex marriage, and declining popularity of anti-gay laws, seems to have gotten under House Speaker John Boehner’s orange skin.
Boehner was tweeting Wednesday on familiar topics — “Time to Build the Keystone Pipeline,” “Bad News for Obamacare” — but said not a tweet about a federal law that discriminates against same-sex couples and denies them federal benefits.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was carrying on about an Indiana Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for school vouchers.
By contrast, freshman Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., whose district includes conservative rural areas, was trumpeting the fact that she was one of 200 Democratic House and Senate members who signed legal briefs advocating that DOMA be overturned.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who voted for DOMA in 1996, tweeted that she hopes the Supreme Court will overturn the law. She is a cosponsor of legislation that would throw out the anti-gay law.
With public opinion rapidly changing, House Republicans have tried to disguise the big legal bill, used to hire ex-Solicitor General Paul Clement. The House leadership assumed defense of DOMA when the Obama administration decided the law was no longer defensible.
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., scoured House rules in January, seeking to find the legal bill for DOMA’s defense. He finally discovered it on page 17, disguised as a $3 million spending authorization for something called the “Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group.”
Nina Totenberg, the veteran court correspondent for National Public Radio, reported on Wednesday morning: “Those defending DOMA have been strangely unwilling to make their arguments outside of the court. House Speaker John Boehner declined to be interviewed for the article, as did Clement and leading House members who voted for the law.” |
SPRINGFIELD — The Springfield Business Improvement District (BID) and the Springfield Central Cultural District are set to unveil the first annual Downtown Springfield Holiday Market. On Wednesday, Dec. 2 from 5 to 8 p.m., they will hold an official ribbon-cutting event with the Springfield Regional Chamber at the Springfield Gift Store, located at 1341 Main St. Refreshments will be served.
The retail sector employs more than 550,000 individuals in Massachusetts alone. With a succesful holiday market in the heart of downtown, the BID hopes to not only contribute to the revitalization efforts of downtown Springfield, but also encourage economic growth within the region by establishing downtown as a holiday shopping destination.
The month-long shopping event includes dozens of local retailers selling a wide variety of gifts, including a Springfield Gift Store selling items like downtown Springfield restaurant gift certificates, Springfield Falcons merchandise, toys from Springfield Museums, CityStage and Symphony Hall tickets, and much more. In addition, an Artisan’s Gallery offers dozens of handmade gifts, while full-time retailers such as Forget Me Not Florist, Simply Grace, Lux Boutique, Dilaura Naturals, and Walking in a Winter Wonderland are participating as well.
Santa Claus will visit the Springfield Gift Store every Saturday from 1 to 3 p.m. Visit the Springfield BID’s website, springfielddowntown.com, for other events happening in the Holiday Market. |
High-powered entertainment attorney Steve Warren demanded that Justice Clarence Thomas and the rest of the Supreme Court justices act against the Defense of Marriage Act and Prop. 8 during a stirring speech at the GLAAD Media Awards in San Francisco last night.
“Our basic civil rights are currently being experimented with in 50 different state laboratories,” said Warren, a board member of the watchdog org and recent recipient of its Stephen F. Kolzak Award. “Many of which have little or no hope of ridding themselves of the prejudice and hate that still exists in so much of our country. It pains me to think of what could have been for our relationships, including my own of 26 years, if our nation had embraced all of us, and given us the love, respect and support given to heterosexual couples, of all races. We need, we deserve and we are rightfully entitled as American citizens to be included under the shield of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.”
Warren took specific aim at Justice Thomas, drawing a parallel between his interracial marriage and the struggle for the same recognition for same-sex couples.
“Because the Clarence and Virginia Thomas’s of the world are accorded the protections of the U.S. Constitution and we are not,” Warren stated. “Our basic civil rights are currently being experimented with in 50 different state laboratories. Many of which have little or no hope of ridding themselves of the prejudice and hate that still exists in so much of our country. It pains me to think of what could have been for our relationships, including my own of 26 years, if our nation had embraced all of us, and given us the love, respect and support given to heterosexual couples, of all races. We need, we deserve, and we are rightfully entitled as American citizens to be included under the shield of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.” |
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The outlook for the Australian economy remains gloomy, the RBA says in its quarterly update, and a further cut in interest rates is still on the table
The Reserve Bank of Australia has refused to rule out further interest rate cuts amid concerns about slowing Chinese growth and weak business investment in Australia.
In its quarterly statement on monetary policy released on Friday, the RBA left the door open to another rate cut after slashing the cash rate to a fresh low of 2% on Tuesday.
“The board will continue to assess the outlook and adjust policy as needed to foster sustainable growth in demand and inflation outcomes consistent with the inflation target over time,” the RBA said.
The RBA also revealed a gloomier economic outlook than was forecast in its last statement on monetary policy in February, revealing particular concerns about Chinese growth and local business investment.
The central bank said economic growth was expected to be in the range of 2.5-3.5% in the year to June 2016, which was a quarter of a percentage point weaker than previously predicted.
“GDP growth is forecast to remain below trend for a bit longer than had been anticipated in the February statement,” the RBA said.
It said Australia’s major trading partners, especially China, were growing slower than predicted in February.
“In China, economic growth in 2015 is projected to be a little weaker than previously forecast, reflecting slower-than-expected growth across a rage of activity indicators in the March quarter,” the RBA said.
Domestically, the central bank said business investment and public spending remained sluggish, and that mining investment would “continue subtracting substantially from growth over the next couple of years”.
This was in line with what governor Glenn Stevens said in his statement accompanying Tuesday’s rate decision in which he referred to weakness in business investment, and said public sector spending was “scheduled to be subdued”.
He also pointed to the strong Australian dollar, saying further depreciation was “both likely and necessary”, particularly given declines in key commodity prices.
Most analysts believe another interest rate cut is unlikely in the months ahead because of signs of recovery in the economy, and the risk of overheating the property market in Sydney.
On the plus side, Friday’s RBA statement said the outlook for Australian dwelling investment was up, driven by lower interest rates and strong population growth.
It also said the jobs market looked stronger than previously forecast.
“The latest data from the labour force survey suggest that recent trends in the labour market have been a bit better than earlier indicated,” the RBA said.
It said underlying inflation was predicted to remain “well contained” over coming months. |
For all the talk we make about wanting Google to open the floodgates on Glass, lowering the price and making it widely available to users interested in embracing this brave new world of wearable technology, it’s easy to forget that Glass still isn’t a finished product. Last fall, for example, we learned of some minor changes Google was making to Glass’s hardware, tweaking how Glass would work with prescription lenses and other small adjustments. Today, on the eve of Google I/O 2014, Google’s got another Glass refresh to announce, with some improved hardware specs.
So far, the Glass Explorer Edition has shipped with 1GB of RAM: a seemingly sufficient amount, especially considering the low-res display and the sort of applications Glass runs. But Google is interested in boosting performance and doing a little future-proofing, so it’s giving Glass a solid 2GB of RAM from here on out. Glass is also shipping with a larger battery, but that change is already in effect, and orders placed in the past couple months should already have the larger cell.
In addition to that hardware change, there’s also some new Glass software Google’s in the process of deploying, adding features like a voice-activated viewfinder to assist with framing pics, and new Google Now cards – including one that reminds you where you parked your car, just like we saw Android phones get earlier this year. Battery life is also a focus of these software tweaks, with this updated code helping to extend Glass battery life by up to 15% – though savings that high will also require the latest hardware with that bigger battery.
The only bad news is for you early adopters: there’s not going to be any free upgrade to this new hardware.
Source: Google, The Verge |
During the month of July, the Last Word On Sports NFL department will determine which three players deserve to be considered the faces of each franchise. For this series, we will only consider active players. In this edition, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the focus.
Faces of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Gerald McCoy
Head coach Lovie Smith said Gerald McCoy is “the best at his position” and “the best player on our team.” Since being drafted as the third overall pick in 2010, McCoy has established himself as arguably the best defensive tackle in the NFL. After accumulating 154 tackles, 27 sacks, 13 passes defended, four forced fumbles and three Pro Bowls in five seasons, he has proven to be one of the most productive defenders in football. His attributes such as his speed, explosiveness, and burst at the snap have caused difficulties for offensive linemen attempting to contain him. With his teammates raving about his skillset, McCoy continues to impress both the Buccaneers organization and the entire league.
Along with improving his game everyday, McCoy is striving to be the leader of this team. Earlier last season, he said that he appreciated the praises of his teammates, but he doesn’t plan to slow down with his production. Considering he plays for a franchise loaded with all-time great defensive linemen such as Simeon Rice and Hall of Famers Lee Roy Selmon and Warren Sapp, McCoy wants to continue to set the standard at his position.
Lavonte David
Another stalwart on the Buccaneer defense is weakside linebacker Lavonte David. At age 25, David already has 430 tackles, 19 passes defensed, 10 sacks, six interceptions and six forced fumbles in three NFL seasons. Voted an All-Pro in 2013, he is gradually becoming one of the premier defenders in the game. Although he hasn’t received the level of recognition as Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly–who plays in the same division–coaches and peers have recognized his superb play. As David’s teammate in 2013, All-Pro cornerback Darrelle Revis said that “if David was not a Pro Bowler, then something is wrong. The voting must be rigged.” Head coach Love Smith even compared David to Hall of Fame linebacker Derrick Brooks, another Tampa Bay legend. If both Lavonte David and Gerald McCoy can continue to dominate and lead their teammates, the league may see a new form of the 2002 Super Bowl Bucs defense.
Jameis Winston
Although he’s only a rookie, Jameis Winston may be the main driving force for Tampa’s success this season. Concluding a brief, yet illustrious career at Florida State University that featured a Heisman Trophy honor and a national championship, Winston will now be asked to lead an offense that has struggled mightily in the past two seasons after breaking franchise marks in 2012. Losing only one game as a collegiate starter in two years, Winston has proved he can make plays and lead his team on the field; his off-the-field antics, however, have caused analysts to question his character. Persuading the football world that he’s a changed man earlier this year, Winston will get his opportunity to display his abilities once September rolls around.
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