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HYPERINFLATION requires a good head for figures and a sturdy wallet to hold wads of low-value paper money. Goverments have attempted to keep pace with hyperinflation by issuing ever-higher denomination banknotes to replace worthless notes that might as well serve as wallpaper. Last week Zimbabwe's central bank unveiled a 100 billion dollar banknote to cope with inflation running at 2.2m%. On Sunday July 27th the bank changed tack and announced it would be lopping off a string of zeroes on replacement notes, in what passes for economic reform in stricken Zimbabwe. But Robert Mugabe has some way to go before he can claim for his country the accolade of printing the highest-denomination banknote. A note issued in post-war Hungary came with a mind-boggling 19 digits.
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Julius Robert Mayer (November 25, 1814 – March 20, 1878) was a German physician, chemist and physicist and one of the founders of thermodynamics. He is best known for enunciating in 1841 one of the original statements of the conservation of energy or what is now known as one of the first versions of the first law of thermodynamics, namely that "energy can be neither created nor destroyed".[1][2] In 1842, Mayer described the vital chemical process now referred to as oxidation as the primary source of energy for any living creature. His achievements were overlooked and priority for the discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat was attributed to James Joule in the following year. He also proposed that plants convert light into chemical energy.
Early life [ edit ]
Von Mayer was born on November 25, 1814 in Heilbronn, Württemberg (Baden-Württemberg, modern day Germany), the son of a pharmacist. He grew up in Heilbronn. After completing his Abitur, he studied medicine at the University of Tübingen, where he was a member of the Corps Guestphalia, a German Student Corps. During 1838 he attained his doctorate as well as passing the Staatsexamen. After a stay in Paris (1839/40) he left as a ship's physician on a Dutch three-mast sailing ship for a journey to Jakarta.
Although he had hardly been interested before this journey in physical phenomena, his observation that storm-whipped waves are warmer than the calm sea started him thinking about the physical laws, in particular about the physical phenomenon of warmth and the question whether the directly developed heat alone (the heat of burning), or the sum of the quantities of heat developed in direct and indirect ways are to be accounted for in the burning process. After his return in February 1841 Mayer dedicated his efforts to solve this problem.
In 1841 he settled in Heilbronn and married.
Development of ideas [ edit ]
Even as a young child, Mayer showed an intense interest with various mechanical mechanisms. He was a young man who performed various experiments of the physical and chemical variety. In fact, one of his favorite hobbies was creating various types of electrical devices and air pumps. It was obvious that he was intelligent. Hence, Mayer attended Eberhard-Karls University in May 1832. He studied medicine during his time there.
In 1837, he and some of his friends were arrested for wearing the couleurs of a forbidden organization. The consequences for this arrest included a one year expulsion from the college and a brief period of incarceration. This diversion sent Mayer traveling to Switzerland, France, and the Dutch East Indies. Mayer drew some additional interest in mathematics and engineering from his friend Carl Baur through private tutoring. In 1841, Mayer returned to Heilbronn to practice medicine, but physics became his new passion.
In June 1841, he completed his first scientific paper entitled "On the Quantitative and Qualitative Determination of Forces". It was largely ignored by other professionals in the area. Then, Mayer became interested in the area of heat and its motion. He presented a value in numerical terms for the mechanical equivalent of heat. He also was the first person to describe the vital chemical process now referred to as oxidation as the primary source of energy for any living creature.
In 1848 he calculated that in the absence of a source of energy the Sun would cool down in only 5000 years, and he suggested that the impact of meteorites kept it hot.[3]
Since he was not taken seriously at the time, his achievements were overlooked and credit was given to James Joule. Mayer almost committed suicide after he discovered this fact. He spent some time in mental institutions to recover from this and the loss of some of his children. Several of his papers were published due to the advanced nature of the physics and chemistry. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1859 by the philosophical faculty at the University of Tübingen. His overlooked work was revived in 1862 by fellow physicist John Tyndall in a lecture at the London Royal Institution. In July 1867, Mayer published "Die Mechanik der Wärme." This publication dealt with the mechanics of heat and its motion. On November 5, 1867, Mayer was awarded personal nobility by the Kingdom of Württemberg (von Mayer) which is the German equivalent of a British knighthood. Julius Robert von Mayer died from tuberculosis on March 20, 1878 in Germany.
Mayer's place in the history of physics [ edit ]
After Sadi Carnot stating it for caloric, Mayer was the first person to state the law of the conservation of energy, one of the most fundamental tenets of modern day physics. The law of the conservation of energy states that the total mechanical energy of a system remains constant in any isolated system of objects that interact with each other only by way of forces that are conservative.
Mayer's first attempt at stating the conservation of energy was a paper he sent to Johann Christian Poggendorff's Annalen der Physik, in which he postulated a conservation of force (Erhaltungssatz der Kraft). However, owing to Mayer's lack of advanced training in physics, it contained some fundamental mistakes and was not published. Mayer continued to pursue the idea steadfastly and argued with the Tübingen physics professor Johann Gottlieb Nörremberg, who rejected his hypothesis. Nörremberg did, however, give Mayer a number of valuable suggestions on how the idea could be examined experimentally; for example, if kinetic energy transforms into heat energy, water should be warmed by vibration.
Mayer not only performed this demonstration, but determined also the quantitative factor of the transformation, calculating the mechanical equivalent of heat. The result of his investigations was published 1842 in the May edition of Justus von Liebig's Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie.[4][5] It was translated as Remarks on the Forces of Inorganic Nature[6] In his booklet Die organische Bewegung im Zusammenhang mit dem Stoffwechsel (The Organic Movement in Connection with the Metabolism, 1845) he specified the numerical value of the mechanical equivalent of heat: at first as 365 kgf·m/kcal,[7] later as 425 kgf·m/kcal; the modern values are 4.184 kJ/kcal (426.6 kgf·m/kcal) for the thermochemical calorie and 4.1868 kJ/kcal (426.9 kgf·m/kcal) for the international steam table calorie.
This relation implies that, although work and heat are different forms of energy, they can be transformed into one another. This law is called the first law of the caloric theory and led to the formulation of the general principle of conservation of energy, definitively stated by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1847.
Mayer's relation [ edit ]
Mayer derived a relation between specific heat at constant pressure and the specific heat at constant volume for an ideal gas. The relation is:
C P , m − C V , m = R {\displaystyle C_{P,m}-C_{V,m}=R} ,
where C P,m is the specific heat at constant pressure, C V,m is the specific heat at constant volume and R is the gas constant.
For more general homogeneous substances, not just ideal gases, the difference takes the form,
C P − C V = V T α 2 β T {\displaystyle C_{P}-C_{V}=VT{\frac {\alpha ^{2}}{\beta _{T}}}\,}
(see relations between heat capacities), where C P {\displaystyle C_{P}} is the heat capacity of a body at constant pressure, C V {\displaystyle C_{V}} is the heat capacity at constant volume, V {\displaystyle V} is the volume, T {\displaystyle T} is the temperature, α T {\displaystyle \alpha _{T}} is the thermal expansion coefficient and β {\displaystyle \beta } is the isothermal compressibility.
From this relation, several inferences can be made:[8]
Since isothermal compressibility β T {\displaystyle \beta _{T}} α {\displaystyle {\alpha }}
C P , m {\displaystyle C_{P,m}} C V , m {\displaystyle C_{V,m}}
As the absolute temperature of the system approaches zero, the difference between C P,m and C V,m also approaches zero.
and C also approaches zero. For incompressible substances, C P,m and C V,m are identical. Also for substances that are nearly incompressible, such as solids and liquids, the difference between the two specific heats is negligible.
Later life [ edit ]
For dispute over priority with Joule, see main article Mechanical equivalent of heat: Priority
Mayer was aware of the importance of his discovery, but his inability to express himself scientifically led to degrading[clarification needed] speculation and resistance from the scientific establishment. Contemporary physicists rejected his principle of conservation of energy, and even acclaimed physicists Hermann von Helmholtz and James Prescott Joule viewed his ideas with hostility. The former doubted Mayer's qualifications in physical questions, and a bitter dispute over priority developed with the latter.
In 1848 two of his children died rapidly in succession, and Mayer's mental health deteriorated. He attempted suicide on May 18, 1850 and was committed to a mental institution.[citation needed] After he was released, he was a broken man and only timidly re-entered public life in 1860. However, in the meantime, his scientific fame had grown and he received a late appreciation of his achievement, although perhaps at a stage where he was no longer able to enjoy it.
He continued to work vigorously as a physician until his death.
Honors [ edit ]
1840 Julius von Mayer received the Knight Cross of the Order of the Crown (Württemberg).
1869 Mayer received the prix Poncelet . [9]
. The Robert-Mayer-Gymnasium and the Robert-Mayer-Volks- und Schulsternwarte in Heilbronn bear his name.
In Chemistry, he invented the Mayer's reagent which is used in detecting alkaloids.
Works [ edit ]
Ueber das Santonin : eine Inaugural-Dissertation, welche zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde in der Medicin & Chirurgie unter dem Praesidium von Wilhelm Rapp im July 1838 der öffentlichen Prüfung vorlegt Julius Robert Mayer . M. Müller, Heilbronn 1838 Digital edition by the University and State Library Düsseldorf
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ] |
Cincinnati Reds outfielder Jay Bruce had knee surgery Monday to repair a partially torn meniscus in his left knee and could miss a month, the team announced.
It was announced before Sunday's game that Bruce was scratched from the original starting lineup with left knee soreness and would be replaced by Chris Heisey in right field and the cleanup spot in the order. Cincinnati went on to a 4-3 victory over Milwaukee at Great American Ball Park.
Bruce is hitting .218 with three home runs and 14 RBIs in 29 games this season.
Bruce missed only one of Cincinnati's first 31 games this season, sitting out against Pittsburgh lefty Francisco Liriano in the Reds' 4-0 win over the Pirates on April 16.
He came off the bench in the seventh inning Sunday and struck out on three pitches in a pinch-hit appearance against Milwaukee.
The loss of Bruce is a blow to a Cincinnati offense that's tied for 10th in the National League with 116 runs scored.
He is one of only three current players (Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers and the Texas Rangers' Adrian Beltre) with at least 30 home runs in each of the last three seasons. Bruce, a two-time All-Star, averaged 32 homers and 101 RBIs per season from 2011-2013. |
We’ll admit we’re surprised that a publication like the New York Times bothered at all with a (non-fatal) mass shooting at a concert venue in Little Rock, Ark. As tragic as it was, it’s just not going to resonate with the “common sense gun control” crowd composing the paper’s readership.
We’re glad the Times tuned in, though, because it gave us the gift of this incredible tweet about gun violence in “downtown Arkansas.” (Editor’s note: The tweet was deleted, so here’s a screen shot.)
Dozens of people were wounded by gunfire at a nightclub early Saturday morning in downtown Arkansas https://t.co/XK4uwVzwwn — The New York Times (@nytimes) July 1, 2017
“Pardon me … how to I get to downtown Arkansas?”
If @nytimes had copy editors, they would know that Arkansas is a state, not a city. #flyoverCountry https://t.co/VvQmZQQtbF — Stephen Fleming (@StephenFleming) July 1, 2017
Hmmm, just where exactly is downtown Arkansas? — Chris Rush (@cbobrush) July 1, 2017
Word is Vox is hard at work on a map.
Where exactly is "downtown Arkansas"? Where are your copy editors? Oh, wait… — Lenny-T (@vtlen) July 1, 2017
Yeah, they all walked out the other day.
"Downtown Arkansas"? Perhaps you should rethink the plan to eliminate copy editors? — Ellen Goldlust (@EllenGoldlust) July 1, 2017
Downtown Arkansas? Come on @nytimes — Linda S Ⓥ (@maisondechienvt) July 1, 2017
#PrayFor
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Related: |
Bodies found believed to be missing Joshua Tree hikers KDFX 10PM
JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - The discovery of two embracing bodies in Joshua Tree National Park on Sunday may finally give some answers to the families of a pair hikers who have been missing for nearly three months.
Bodies found in Joshua Tree National Park may be missing hikers
A source close to the investigation first confirmed the news to I-Team Investigator Karen Devine. The National Park Service has since confirmed "hikers discovered two bodies in a remote region of Joshua Tree National Park" in a release.
Rachel Nguyen and Joseph Orbeso went missing in July of 2017. Much of the search for the pair has been focused in and around Joshua Tree National Park.
Rachel Nguyen and Joseph Orbeso went missing in July of 2017. Much of the search for the pair has been focused in and around Joshua Tree National Park.
21-year-old Joseph Orbeso and 20-year-old Rachel Nguyen were last heard from on July 27. Their car was found in the park near the Maze Loop trailhead. Their last known contact was a cell phone ping in the area; their belongings were still at the rented home they never checked out of.
The remains were found today on the north side of the Maze Loop trail. Joseph Orbeso's father Gilbert was with members of Joshua Tree Search and Rescue when the bodies were found.
"I would tell Joseph that I love him very much and I hope they can rest in peace now," Orbeso said Sunday evening.
In a Facebook post Sunday morning, Gilbert wrote "Searching for Joseph and Rachel. God protect and give us strength." Hours later, Gilbert and JOSAR searchers discovered the two bodies. Searchers say the bodies were embracing each other.
"I believed that I was going to find them. I didn't know when, but I had my answer today," Gilbert said.
The searchers said they were covering new grounds and were scaling 30 foot cliffs and boulders. They were just 2 miles from Maze Loop when they came across water bottles, clothing, and food wrappers that lead them to the bodies.
A coroner's helicopter overhead picked up the remains, which will be sent to the San Bernardino coroners office to confirm the identities.
"A sense of reliefe that we have found them after going a long time on these hikes. I feel like we have closure. We know we found them. That was our main goal, to find them. And I'm glad we did that with these great people here with me and the rest of everyone," Gilbert said.
A vehicle connected to two missing hikers was found near the Maze Loop Trail in Joshua Tree National Park.
A vehicle connected to two missing hikers was found near the Maze Loop Trail in Joshua Tree National Park.
I-Team investigator Karen Devine has been following the case closely, even joining Gilbert Orbeso and the JOSAR search team on one of their weekly hikes to look for any clues.
I-Team investigator Karen Devine talks with Gilbert Orbeso, the father of missing man Joseph Orbeso, during one of the weekly hikes to search for clues in the expansive terrain of Joshua Tree National Park.
I-Team investigator Karen Devine talks with Gilbert Orbeso, the father of missing man Joseph Orbeso, during one of the weekly hikes to search for clues in the expansive terrain of Joshua Tree National Park.
WATCH: Missing hiker's father continues search for son
The lead detective on the case from the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office is now on the way to the scene. Official identification of the bodies has not yet been made, sources say.
In the days following the pair's disappearance, rescue teams brought dogs to search the area to try and pick up a scent from the missing hikers. Because of this, park rangers blocked off the area where the search was being conducted so the dogs won't get confused by the scent of other people.
The intense heat and rugged terrain proved challenging for searchers, but was also considered as something that could help them find clues.
Hikers return from search efforts after finding bodies in Joshua Tree National Park on Sunday, October 15.
“There were some footprints and we found them in sporadic places, through intermittent areas through the park," George Land, public information officer for the Park said in late July. "One thing that will happen when people are in heavy heat stress is that they’ll start taking off pieces of clothing. We haven’t found any of that so far.”
The days stretched into weeks. Then months. Some tips did continue to come in. In September, sunglasses found in the park caught attention of searchers. A witness claimed to have seen the pair outside of the park even after they were reported missing. U.S Marshals were reportedly set to join the search in September. But it wasn't until today that it was confirmed the pair were most likely in the park.
This is a story the I-Team has been on top of for months and continues to track. Stay with KESQ News Channel 3 and CBS Local 2 for continuing coverage of this breaking news. Copyright 2017 Gulf California Broadcasting. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Video: Family continue search for missing hikers in Joshua Tree
Do you have a tip you want the I-Team to investigate?
Call 760-773-3333 or email [email protected] |
“Fiat” is money with no intrinsic value beyond whatever an issuing government is able to enforce. When it enjoys a monopoly as currency, fiat inevitably turns the free market functions of money inside out. Instead of being a store of value, the currency becomes a point of plunder through monetary policies such as quantitative easing. Instead of greasing society as a medium of exchange, the currency acts as a powerful tool of social control. The second harm is far less frequently discussed than inflation, but it is devastating. The personal freedoms that we know as “civil liberties” rest upon sound money.
In his classic book The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises argues, “It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically, it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights.”
Yet the best solution to the harms caused by fiat is often dismissed even by staunch free market advocates; namely, allow the private issuance of money that freely competes with fiat as currency. This would involve removing all prohibitions, other than fraud, abandoning monetary controls such as legal tender laws and all reporting requirements. In turn, this might well eliminate the Federal Reserve, although people would be free to accept whatever money they wished.
In his invaluable book What Has Government Done to Our Money? the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard addresses the strange reluctance to consider private currencies, “Many people, many economists, usually devoted to the free market, stop short at money. Money, they insist, is different; it must be supplied by government and regulated by government.” (Note: Technically, the currency is generated through a banking cartel with government support.)
History frowns upon that theory. Before the United States Mint issued its first coin in 1793, the 13 colonies were awash with an assortment of currencies that included both private and government-issued ones. Current fiscal reality also frowns on this. Privatizing zealot Martin Durkin calls the idea of government guaranteeing the quality of money “the sickest joke in economic history. Governments have always robbed their subjects by debasing the currency, but this abuse, in recent years, has burst all bounds of decency and sanity.”
But focusing upon economics and efficiency can miss the reality of how a currency monopoly is intimately connected with the violation of traditional civil liberties.
A key reason Mises viewed sound money as a necessary protection of civil liberties is that it reins in the growth of government. When a government prints money without the restraint of competing currencies — even if the restraining “competition” is a gold standard — runaway bureaucracy results. Wars are financed; indeed, it is difficult to imagine the extended horrors of World War II without governments’ monopoly on currency. A white-hot printing press can finance the soaring numbers of prisons and law enforcement officers required to impose a police state.
Floods of currency can prop up unpopular policies like Obamacare or the War on Drugs. That is why government holds onto its monopoly with a death grip. In The Theory of Money and Credit, Mises observes, “The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.”
(Note: Mises addresses “sound money,” which is distinct from private money, but both forms of currency would serve the function of putting a severe brake on a government’s ability to swell.)
Another way a currency monopoly threatens civil liberties is by permitting government to monitor virtually all transactions through the financial institutions with whom it maintains an intimate partnership. Total surveillance is a prerequisite to total control, which is what the government wants to establish as quickly as possible. For example, prior to establishing the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) in 1996 — a form that financial institutions submit to the U.S. Treasury — banks were required to automatically report any transaction over $10,000. Now any activity deemed “suspicious” is vulnerable.
The monopoly facilitates a vicious attack on privacy and has become a main building block of the American surveillance state. As libertarian Mark Hubbard stated, “Civilization is a movement toward privacy, a police state the opposite, and tax legislation has become the legislation of our new Big Brother states.”
Much of the tracking is a pure money grab, but it is also an attempt to ferret out and punish “unacceptable” behavior, like dealing in drugs or politically dissenting. Indeed, it is criminally naive to believe the government will not use these massive and valuable data to target its critics. Thus, people can be discouraged from speaking out. Controlling the information, however, means controlling the currency. Otherwise, anyone could mint gold coins in the middle of the night and release them covertly into the wild.
Equally, a currency monopoly allows the government to impose social policies that punish and control categories of people. For example, as long as banks function as an arm of the government, they will refuse to open accounts for people without state-issued identification and Social Security numbers. Thus, the “undocumented” are effectively barred from the monetary transactions that are part of everyday life. By contrast, counterculture financial institutions often require little more than a username and a password to deposit funds. No wonder some politicians are pushing agencies like Bitcoin to open up their data to close government scrutiny.
The currency monopoly is vital to both the rise of a police state and the targeting of individual civil liberties. In arguing for a free market in currencies, it is important to claim the moral high ground by stating and restating what should be obvious: Civil liberties require sound money. And nothing ensures the quality of a commodity as surely as competition.
Regards,
Wendy McElroy |
The Israeli military shelled a United Nations Relief Works and Agency (UNRWA) school today, killing and injuring some of the Palestinians who had gathered there after fleeing their homes following Israeli messages to do so. CNN‘s Ben Wedeman, who is reporting from Gaza, said that medical sources told him 30 people were killed. Other reports put the death toll lower; the Associated Press reports that at least seven were killed, while Agence France Press reports nine dead.
UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness has confirmed that there are “multiple dead and injured at designated UNRWA shelter in Beit Hanoun.” He said on Twitter that the Israeli military had been given “precise co-ordinates of the UNRWA shelter in Beit Hanoun.”
The first reports came in on Twitter from Palestinians in Gaza, and were then confirmed by CNN’s Ben Wedeman, who is reporting from the coastal strip.
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As Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified last week, they dropped leaflets in Palestinian neighborhoods urging them to flee ahead of heavy bombardment. Tens of thousands of people heeded the call, with UNRWA sheltering 140,000 people in 83 different schools.
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UNRWA has been pulled into the conflict by both sides. On Tuesday, the agency for Palestinian refugees announced that they “discovered rockets hidden in a vacant school in the Gaza Strip” for the second time. The agency condemned “the group or groups responsible for this flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law.” Israel has also hit other UNRWA schools multiple times. The agency’s spokesman, Chris Gunness, reported that “UNRWA’s had 3 direct hits from Israeli fire on 2 schools in 3 days,” injuring five Palestinians in one of the incidents.
During Israel’s 2008-09 assault on Gaza, the military bombed UNRWA facilities multiple times, a war crime under international law.
Editor's note: Since this article was published, the death toll has written to at least 15. |
Time magazine and The Associated Press refused to attend a press "gaggle" with White House press secretary Sean Spicer Sean Michael SpicerFive political moments to watch for at the Oscars Sean Spicer joins 'Extra' as 'special DC correspondent' White House spokeswoman leaving to join PR firm MORE on Friday, which several news outlets were blocked from attending.
Spicer held a smaller question-and-answer session in his office in lieu of a traditional press briefing on Friday, because President Trump spoke earlier in the day at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
But several high-profile news outlets were excluded from attending the gaggle, including The New York Times, The Hill and Politico, among others. The AP and Time were both permitted to attend but refused to do so.
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While many mainstream news organizations were blocked from the Q-and-A session, some conservative outlets were allowed in, including Breitbart and the Washington Times.
Several major news organizations were let in to cover the gaggle, including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Reuters, Bloomberg and McClatchy.
The White House Correspondents’ Association criticized the White House's handling of the gaggle Friday.
“The WHCA board is protesting strongly against how today's gaggle is being handled by the White House,” Jeff Mason, the association’s president, said in a statement.
“We encourage the organizations that were allowed in to share the material with others in the press corps who were not,” he added. “The board will be discussing this further with White House staff.”
Jordan Fabian contributed |
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Save this picture! Courtesy of Cox Rayner Architects
Text description provided by the architects. This narrow private house demonstrates what can be achieved on the myriad of ‘left-over’ spaces in inner cities, such as disused easements or parking lots. In this case, a 3 metre wide tiny caretaker’s cottage, adjoining a Heritage Hall has been recycled and linearly extended into a family house for parents and two children. Although challenged by its site, they set about grafting old with new elements that belie its constraints and pursuing their philosophy of making everything count.
In the three metre wide frontage to the old cottage is a new study designed through its portals and window boxes to engage the street. Where the site slightly opens up behind the cottage to an open, roofed and screened staircase atrium forms the primary social space. A small bridge is a library connecting it to kitchen and living room, and beyond to stacked bedrooms and a stair to a roof deck.
Privacy from close placed neighbours is gained by a series of iron screens whose perforations for light are the patterns of peeling paint of weatherboards on one of the neighbouring cottages. The screens slide or swing out to engage the neighbours when desired and to mediate different solar positions. They are one of an array of details rethinking the typology of the private house, no matter how small, as both sanctuary and communal participant.
The project recycles an existing small cottage as a piece of the house to which extensions in front and back are grafted in 3 metre and 5 metre wide portions respectively. The forward portion is a single level study room for architectural practice, or if later to be used by a new owner, a potential small office. The former cottage is opened up to form a conduit to the rear portion, it also comprising the dining space. As the site falls steeply to the rear, two levels of bedrooms are attached to the old cottage piece, with a staircase atrium running longitudinally beside a library which also bridges the front and rear parts of the house.
The atrium belies the narrowness of the site, the stairs being seating treads, and scale generated by volume. This space manages the climate of the subtropics with layers of perforated iron screens which alternatively project and open up to the external conditions. The mobile screens are intrinsic to an approach to private house design that facilitates sanctuary and engagement of the community as desired. A series of inserted window boxes, a side door to an easement and sliding downstairs doors each play a role in participation in or closure off from other spaces or to neighbours and passers-by. |
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Lousiville, KY – A Councilman in Louisville is now calling for a third party to investigate rape allegations against one of Louisville’s finest after four women have come forward alleging he raped them.
The man in question is Louisville Metro Police Officer Pablo Cano. The first complaint was made public 12 days ago when it was revealed that a woman filed a report in June claiming she had been raped by Cano twice.
The woman claimed she first met Cano at a city park, and then he showed up at her house weeks later and raped her. After the rape, he came back the next day and did it again. He was allegedly in uniform the first time, and then in plain clothes the next day when he came to rape her again, but had a gun at the time of the crime.
She filed a lawsuit against Cano and the Police Department. Her lawyer, Shannon Fauver, also represents a second woman, who came forward eight days ago accusing the highly decorated officer of raping and sexually molesting her in December 2016. The LMPD responded by placing Cano on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.
A third woman came forward four days ago and said she, too, was raped by Cano. She is not being represented by Fauver, who said she’s not at all surprised, and suggested Cano is a serial rapist. “I will say that I’m not surprised. When someone is a rapist, there will be more victims,” Fauver said.
Then two days ago, a fourth woman came forward. Louisville Councilman David James said he was shocked by the scandal. “I was actually in shock,” James admitted. “It’s another black eye for the police officers.”
As a retired police officer, Councilman James said he believes cases like Cano’s should not be handled internally. As The Free Thought Project has reported on numerous occasions, there is a conflict of interest when police departments investigate one of their own who has been accused of a crime.
While this is an opportunity for the department to stand up for justice and against criminal activity and arrest one of their own, there is also a chance that the department will quietly make the charges go away. Often times, officers are charged with lesser crimes, allowing for a jury to find them not guilty. They then resume their careers as abusive law enforcement officers and are ultimately not held accountable for their actions.
“With the sexual offenses it might be a good idea to have either the attorney general’s office or the Kentucky State Police handle those investigations,” James said. Only then, presumably, will justice have a chance to take place for the now four women accused of being raped.
“Who do you call when a police officer assaults you? Do you trust another officer to take care of it?” Fauver questioned. She said she is also concerned there are more victims out there who have yet to come forward. “If someone has raped someone…they’re going to have done it again,” she said.
While newspapers stop short of calling for victims to come forward, we at TFTP will not. If you or someone you know has been raped by Pablo Cano, call the Public Integrity Office of the Louisville Metro Police Department. Then call the Kentucky State Police. It is time for people to become vigilant in order to rid society of rapists—especially those wearing badges. |
Image copyright NASA Image caption Titan, seen here with Tethys in the background, is shrouded in an orange haze of organic chemicals
Scientists believe they have detected the first liquid waves on the surface of another world.
The signature of isolated ripples was observed in a sea called Punga Mare on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan.
However, these seas are filled not with water, but with hydrocarbons like methane and ethane.
These exist in their liquid state on Titan, where the surface temperature averages about -180C.
Planetary scientist Jason Barnes discussed details of his findings at the 45th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas this week.
We think we've found the first waves outside the Earth Dr Jason Barnes, University of Idaho
Titan is a strange, looking-glass version of Earth with a substantial atmosphere and a seasonal cycle. Wind and rain shape the surface to form river channels, seas, dunes and shorelines.
But much of what's familiar is also turned sideways: the moon's mountains and dune fields are made of ice, rather than rock or sand, and liquid hydrocarbons take up many of the roles played by water on Earth.
The vast majority of Titan's lakes and seas are concentrated around the north polar region. Just one of these bodies of liquid - Ligeia Mare - is estimated to contain about 9,000 cubic km of mostly liquid methane, equating to about 40 times the proven reserves of oil and gas on Earth.
An image of Titan's north pole taken by the Cassini probe during a flyby in July 2012 shows sunlight being reflected from surface liquid in much the same way as a mirror re-directs light. This phenomenon is known as a specular reflection.
Titan - 'Looking glass Earth' Image copyright ESA Titan is Saturn's largest moon and the second biggest in the Solar System
It is the only moon in the Solar System with clouds and a substantial atmosphere
Wind and rain create similar features to those found on Earth, such as dunes, lakes and rivers
But on Titan it rains liquid methane, filling the rivers, lakes and seas with hydrocarbons
Dr Barnes, from the University of Idaho in Moscow, US, used a mathematical model to investigate whether the features in the image were compatible with waves.
"We think we've found the first waves outside the Earth," he told the meeting.
"What we're seeing seems to be consistent with waves at just a few locations in Punga Mare [with a slope] of six degrees."
He said other possibilities, such as a wet mudflat, could not be ruled out.
But assuming these were indeed waves, Dr Barnes calculates that a wind speed of around 0.75 m/s is required to produce ripples with the requisite slope of six degrees.
That points to the waves being just 2cm high. "Don't make your surfing vacation reservations for Titan just yet," Dr Barnes quipped.
However, Titan appears to be on the brink of major seasonal changes, which present important opportunities for scientists to gain a better understanding of this complex and endlessly surprising world.
"The expectation is that any day now, the winds will start getting strong enough as we move into northern summer, and the waves will start picking up," Ralph Lorenz, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) in Maryland, told BBC News.
"You can also get a phenomenon known as wind set-up, where wind over a body of water will cause the liquid to pile up, potentially causing a storm surge."
He added: "A metre of storm surge, a metre of tides, is certainly within the realms of possibility for Titan. Whether we can see that [with Cassini] is another matter."
Dr Lorenz said he was hopeful that sea level rise of a metre in height could cause shorelines to migrate and that this could be picked up from orbit.
Titan operates on a 30-year seasonal cycle, with the northern region currently approaching summer solstice, which it will mark in 2017.
Image copyright NASA Image caption Titan's lakes and seas are concentrated at the saturnian moon's north pole
Computer models of Titan's weather suggest that the northern summer is approaching the rainy season, in which liquid hydrocarbons are "pumped" from the south pole to the north by the climate cycle.
Sometime soon, scientists expect, clouds will start to gather at the north pole and it should start to rain.
"We have a long-term picture of liquid levels rising in the north and declining in the south. But that's against the backdrop of seeing what we think are evaporite deposits around the northern seas and lakes," Dr Lorenz explained.
These evaporite regions are Titan's equivalent to salt flats on Earth where bodies of water evaporate, leaving behind minerals that had previously been dissolved in the water.
"That suggests that while the sea level is rising in the current epoch, at some time in the past, the liquid level was much higher than it is today. We've now mapped most of the surface and there aren't large areas where you could hide another sea," he explained.
The amount of moisture in the climate system might fluctuate because methane is continuously destroyed in the atmosphere by sunlight. But scientists think it could also be re-supplied via volcanic belches from beneath the moon's surface.
'Tidal roar'
In his own presentation at the LPSC, Dr Lorenz focused on a narrow "throat" feature that separates the two main basins of Titan's largest sea, Kraken Mare.
Dubbing it the "Throat of Kraken", he said it was similar in size to the Straits of Gibraltar and might generate fast-moving tidal currents through the narrow channel.
Dr Lorenz pointed out that on Earth, such circumstances can produce whirlpools, and in the case of the Corryvreckan off the coast of Scotland, a tidal maelstrom generates a roar that can be heard 16km away. Whether such phenomena existed at this location on Titan was pure speculation, he said.
Dr Lorenz explained: "It's really getting quite exciting, because we're starting to get a literal big picture, in the sense that the radar coverage [of Titan's surface] is close to complete. But because we're moving into northern summer, there's better lighting, which means the camera and the near-infrared spectrometer on Cassini are also able to map the northern seas."
"Everything is really starting to come together, and the seas and lakes are very much becoming the central topic in Titan science."
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ASUS, the Taiwanese components maker, has released its much-criticised video card drivers that allow online game players to cheat.
The drivers, which allow players to see through walls, were first announced in July last year and were immediately condemned by players and gaming organisations.
At the time, ASUS boasted: "There are three special weapons for ASUS VGA cards' users -- Transparent View, Wireframe View, and Extra Light. If you do not have an ASUS VGA card -- be careful! Never compete in the 3D games with anyone who has an ASUS VGA card. Because the only result is to loose (sic)."
In an open letter of complaint, the Online Gamers Association said that releasing the drivers "would ruin the spirit of good sportsmanship in online and competitive gaming [and] would be disastrous for the online gaming community, and for the growing sport of professional gaming."
A poll of OGA members showed that 90 per cent of those who voted felt ASUS should not release the drivers, "as it would encourage cheating in online games".
It was thought that ASUS had backed down in the face of overwhelming opposition, but this week it came to light that the drivers have in fact been released. Not surprisingly, online gamers and industry professionals are again up in arms.
Epic Games programmer Tim Sweeney, who created the Unreal and Unreal Tournament engines and is now working on development for Microsoft's Xbox console, was quick to condemn ASUS:
"What a bunch of lamers. Any hardware maker who releases drivers that encourage cheating in multiplayer games is out of touch with the spirit of gaming."
Tony Ray, programmer of the anti-cheating software PunkBuster, expressed similar feelings:
"We tried to get Asus to respond by helping us stop the use of the cheat drivers months ago and never received a response from them. They seem bent on harming the honest gamers in the online communities with no thought about anything except their own sales figures. They are playing on the worst human
emotions to try to sell more product."
It is possible to prevent most cheating in online games, either by implementing security checks or fixing exploitable bugs, but there is little that can be done to prevent the use of driver-level cheats.
PunkBuster can detect the ASUS drivers and ban players who are using them, but currently the software only works with one game, Half-Life, and its various add-ons such as Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. Players must install a small monitoring program and connect to a PunkBuster-enabled server, but the system is entirely voluntary so until it becomes standard, cheating players can simply connect to a normal server.
So is an engine-level solution the way to go? Tim Sweeney answers: "That's difficult, because Microsoft (rightly) goes to great lengths to abstract Windows away from particular pieces of hardware. Especially with a situation like this, where the cheating is a particular driver version from a particular manufacturer using an NVIDIA chipset -- it would be hard to ban just the cheaters without impacting innocent players who happen to have the same or similar hardware."
Instead, Sweeney suggests, the solution should come in the traditional form of complaints and protests from disgruntled players.
"Probably the best way to deal with this is to ask gamers all over the world to email Asus explaining why their cheat-drivers ruin everyone's online gaming experience, write negative articles about how Asus is anti-gaming, and criticise whatever idiotic marketing guy at Asus though this was a good idea."
Hype and hysteria
Although the ASUS cheat drivers do give reason for concern, their potential impact has been exaggerated by some members of the gaming community. In reality, it is not technically possible to achieve the "see through walls" cheat, at least not to the extent that some people believe.
One common optimisation in online games is that players and items which are hidden behind scenery are ignored, so there is less for the player's computer to draw and less data for the server to send, improving both frame-rates and network efficiency.
Quite accidentally, this optimisation also prevents the ASUS cheat from working as well as it otherwise might have. For example, Sweeney explains how the cheat would impact Unreal games:
"The effect will be somewhat limited because Unreal only sends coordinates of other players that are either visible, almost visible, or were visible sometime in the past several seconds. So it won't give cheaters a godlike ability to track other players, but will definitely create an unfair advantage, because you'll be able to see players who've just ducked behind walls or are running away and hiding."
But even if the ASUS drivers don't provide the miracle cure that cheaters are looking for, they are certainly a warning sign. It just remains to be seen what new ways ASUS or another 3D card manufacturer may devise to give their under-skilled customers a helping hand up the gaming league tables.
Cheater's paradise?
Cheating in online games, especially first-person shooters, is more common than you may imagine, and the tricks that cheaters use range from the devilishly simple to the technically impressive.
With games such as Quake giving players the ability to customise graphics, it wasn't long before someone came up with the idea of editing the 'skins' of opponents so they would appear as solid white figures, making it impossible for them to hide in shadows.
This tactic was soon taken a step further, and cheaters began to edit their own in-game characters so they would look like common items such as a health packs or ammo boxes, making it easy to hide and sneak up on opponents. Some cheaters even morphed themselves into tiny, one-pixel blocks, making them almost invisible.
Nowadays, cheats are much more advanced. Hacked versions of the OpenGL graphics system allow cheaters the same options as the controversial ASUS drivers, making walls transparent and even removing shadows, which gives a cheating player a tactical advantage.
And so-called "aim bots" exist which intercept messages sent from the game server and analyse where opponents are on screen, allowing them to be automatically targeted with no effort from the cheating player.
Last year, there was outrage after the programmer of an aim bot for Quake III Arena admitted how he had created the cheat in the hope of ruining the game for its mainstream audience. He preferred Quake II and hoped that by allowing people to cheat in Arena, genuine players would go back to the earlier game. |
The first National Football League (NFL) was the first attempt at forming a national professional American football league in 1902. This league has no ties with the modern National Football League. In fact the league was only composed of teams from Pennsylvania, which meant it was actually regional, despite having locations in the two largest cities in Pennsylvania. Two of the teams were based in Philadelphia, while the third was based in Pittsburgh. This NFL was a curious mixture of football players and baseball players who adapted to playing football. Future Baseball Hall of Famer Rube Waddell was with the Philadelphia Athletics, and pitcher Christy Mathewson a fullback for Pittsburgh. Two of the three teams were owned by the Philadelphia Phillies and Philadelphia Athletics, with the third team suspected of being owned by the Pittsburgh Pirates. The league folded after the 1902 season.[1]
History [ edit ]
Founding [ edit ]
League President, David J. Berry, who also managed the Pittsburgh Stars
Ironically the roots of the league lie with baseball, not football. It began as a part of the baseball wars between the National League and the new American League that began in 1901. In Philadelphia the AL's Athletics lured several of the NL's Phillies from their contracts, only to lose them through court action. When Phillies owner John Rogers decided to start a football team, the Athletics followed suit. A's owner Ben Shibe fielded a team made-up of several baseball players as well as some local football talent. He appointed his baseball manager Connie Mack as the team's general manager and named former University of Pennsylvania football player Charles "Blondy" Wallace as the team's coach. Each Philadelphia team was named after their respective baseball clubs and became the Athletics and Philadelphia Phillies.
However, both Rogers and Shibe knew that to lay claim (to what they hoped would be) the "World Championship"; they had to play a team from Pittsburgh, which was the focal point of football at the time. They called on pro football promoter Dave Berry, and a Pittsburgh team was soon formed around a championship team from Homestead.[2] This team was named the Stars, after the number of football players on the team who were considered football stars during the era. The team was owned and operated by Berry, the former manager of the Latrobe Athletic Association. However many historians believe that due to Berry's limited wealth and the amount of talent on team, that Pittsburgh Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss and/or Pirates president William Chase Temple (who briefly owned other pro football teams in Pittsburgh only to see them fail in short fashion) may have secretly owned the team, a statement both vehemently denied. The first league had no bylaws, no offices and no schedule-making powers. Having three of the top professional football teams in country helped make up for those shortfalls.[4]
These three teams are all that made up the 1902 NFL. Due to the animosity that existed between Philadelphia's Shibe and Rogers, Dave Berry was picked to the league's president. Attempts were initially made to expand the league outside of Pennsylvania into other major cities like Chicago and New York City. Investors in neither city were interested in joining the league at the time.
1902 season [ edit ]
With all the baseball involvement, training did not get underway for the football teams until September 29, 1902, with the season was scheduled to open a week later on October 4. However, most of the players were already in shape. Besides the baseball players, many of the others had jobs that kept them in good condition. For example, Pittsburgh halfback, Artie Miller, came in after a summer's lumberjacking in the Wisconsin woods. To make the preseason even less stressful, the average football team in 1902 only used about a half-dozen plays and they were all standard.
The Philadelphia Athletics of the 1902 National Football League
The league played all of its games on Saturdays, since there were no Sunday sports events according to Pennsylvania blue laws in 1902. The Pittsburgh team played all of its home games at the North Shore Coliseum, while the two Philadelphia teams used their own respective baseball stadiums, Columbia Park and the Baker Bowl, for home games. Each team played two games against each of other two teams. When they were not playing each other, the teams played various teams from colleges and athletic clubs from Pennsylvania and southern New York state.
On Thanksgiving Day 1902, Berry billed a game between the Stars and the Athletics as being for the championship of the National Football League. The Athletics had split on the season with the Phillies, as had Pittsburgh. Although a Philadelphia victory on Thanksgiving would give the A's the championship hands down, a win by the Stars could tie the league race tighter. Mack readied his A's for the big game by playing an exhibition tour through northern Pennsylvania and southern New York. In Elmira, New York the Athletics joined in the first night game in pro football history.[1] Lights were set up along the sidelines and giant searchlights glared from behind the goal posts. The A's won the game 39–0 over the Kanaweola Athletic Club.
1902 championship first attempt [ edit ]
When Mack agreed to Berry's championship game, he was promised $2,000 for his team's participation. However, when he arrived in Pittsburgh, he saw that the stands were pretty much empty and since his $2,000 came from the ticket sales at the gate, it looked as if he wouldn't be getting his $2,000 and his team would be stranded, with no money, in Pittsburgh. Therefore, seeing no reason to take the field, Mack refused to play until his team was paid their promised share of the gate, $2,000. It looked as if the game would not be played. However Mack received a check for $2,000 from William Corey, the head of Carnegie Steel, who impatiently wanted to see the game, and the game soon began. Corey got his money's worth, if he liked evenly matched games. Both teams played at their best to a scoreless tie. It was a fair verdict, but Berry's "championship game" hadn't decided anything.
1902 championship [ edit ]
Another championship game was soon planned between Berry and Mack. Because of a lack of funds Berry almost ended up cancelling the game. However, he later promised to his players they would all share equally in Saturday's game, which was sure to be a sell-out. After some complaints were addressed, everything was set. The crowd was a little better on Saturday, but not much. About 2,000 fans showed up, and the players knew before the game began that they were going to come up short at pay time. The game looked like it might once again end in a tie. However a late touchdown by Ellis and another by Artie Miller led Pittsburgh to an 11–0 win over the Athletics.
Afterwards [ edit ]
Not many fans noticed the championship win. The Pittsburgh players were too busy suing Temple for their Thanksgiving Day money to do much gloating over their victory, and the story disappeared from the newspapers before the suit was settled. Most of the players tried it again with Franklin or Canton or Massillon in the next few years. The Philadelphia Athletics went home and beat the Phillies to wrap up second place. It was a nice win and gave them the city championship, but that was all that it was; the season was won by Pittsburgh the week before.
Meanwhile, several members of the Athletics and the Phillies went on to play in the first World Series of Pro football on a team erroneously named "New York" at Madison Square Garden (the "error" was deliberate as the tournament's founder felt that the combined team was the best in the event, and bestowed upon them home field advantage for the tournament). New York and Syracuse AC played in the first indoor football game in front of 3,000 spectators, on December 28, 1902. Syracuse, with Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner at offensive guard, won the game 6–0 and went on to win the tournament.[1]
The league quietly folded, and the war between the baseball leagues was resolved the next spring. While the NFL thrived in Philadelphia, it never took hold in Pittsburgh, where professional football had already had its moment in the spotlight come and go over the previous decade. Public relations errors by Berry resulted in a lukewarm reaction to the franchise. Many Pittsburghers followed their local athletic clubs and colleges more than the Stars. In fact the Washington and Jefferson Presidents football team had a much greater following than the Stars. Professional ice hockey would become the sport of the moment in the early to mid-1900s (decade) as the Western Pennsylvania Hockey League began hiring professional players.
The league had been slightly ahead of its time; it would not be until 1920 that the idea for a true "National Football League" would come to be accepted.
Controversy [ edit ]
With the win, A's players decided to call the Stars game an exhibition, and declared themselves the champs. However, the team had agreed to that season-ending championship game against Pittsburgh the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and they had lost it. This was recognized by all parties at the time as the championship game. Each team carried a record of 2–2 for league play. Pittsburgh had by far the better point ratio, scoring 39 points to their opponents' 22. Both the Athletics and the Phillies gave up more points than they scored in their league games. Finally Dave Berry used his power as league president and named his Stars the 1902 champions.
Final standings [ edit ]
Team Games Wins Losses Ties Pts For Pts Against % Pittsburgh Stars 6 3 2 1 39 22 .600 Philadelphia Athletics 6 3 2 1 34 44 .600 Philadelphia Phillies 6 3 3 0 41 34 .500
1917 restart attempt [ edit ]
In 1917, an unnamed representative from a professional football club in Detroit attempted to start a professional football league, based on the model of the 1902 NFL. The plan called for the league to be backed by Major League Baseball, with the teams to be based in Chicago, New York City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. Several of these metropolitan areas and cities had existing professional clubs in the Ohio League and various other "major regional" leagues of the era, such as the Detroit Heralds, Columbus Panhandles, and the McKeesport Olympics (in the Pittsburgh metro area). Cleveland, though it did not have an Ohio League team at the time, was not very far away from the Northeast Ohio trifecta of dominant pro football teams: the Canton Bulldogs, Akron Pros and Massillon Tigers. Philadelphia also had a strong semi-pro football circuit, which included (among other teams) the Union Club of Phoenixville, 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia.
Under the proposal, teams would then begin play immediately after baseball season concluded and continue as long "as the weather is favorable." To build name recognition, it was determined that those baseball players with sufficient football skill would be featured on league rosters with the remaining slots filled by ex-college football players. The games would be played in the baseball parks such as Forbes Field, Comiskey Park, the Polo Grounds and Navin Field.
The unnamed agent pitched the idea to Frank Navin, the owner of Detroit Tigers, and Charles Comiskey, the owner of the Chicago White Sox. Comiskey told reporters, "If pro football can be made to pay it will be an answer to a problem that has confronted baseball owners since the game started. For years we have been going along using our ballparks three months in a year, only to see the property lie idle the other nine months." He then stated that he would take the upcoming week to think over the proposal.
The story was only closely examined by only two national newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times. On January 4, 1917, an editorial in the Inquirer declared the idea "no good in Philadelphia" and supported their conclusion by citing a similar idea of fifteen years earlier, which was "long remembered as a failure". The commentary ended with a statement that college football was too big and would always draw a bigger crowd than the pro game. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times featured two articles on the pros and cons of a professional football league. Times columnist Harry A. Williams supported the idea of a league. However, he felt that the league would have a better chance by teaming up with teams associated with the Pacific Coast League instead of major league baseball, due to the warmer weather. The opposing opinion was given by Warren Bovard, the manager of the University of Southern California football team, who stated that football was tailored for colleges and not professional play. He then stated that pro football would have to rely on all-star games, which draw well at first, but fail to hold any long-term interest.
However, after Bovard's article, all mention of the new league disappeared from the papers. Comiskey's decision to take part in organizing a new professional football league based on the 1902 NFL was never made public. All interest in the story died by April 1917, when the country entered into World War I. At war's end, a flu pandemic swept the world, and virtually all of the professional football teams in the country shut down or drastically scaled back operations.[6] The modern National Football League, formed as a confederation of the existing professional football clubs and with no baseball backing, was established three years later in 1920.
Notes [ edit ] |
About
Introduction
1000 Bees is an App that showcases and celebrates the diversity of bees across the globe.
1000 beautiful, high-resolution images of individual bees have been taken from some of the most acclaimed museum and research collections in the world, including the Natural History Museum, London, the Hope Entomological Collection at Oxford University, and the Linnean Society of London.
We are also drawing data about the species from Discoverlife.org and additional images from USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab.
Although often used by scientists, many of these specimens have rarely been seen by the general public. 1000 Bees takes these specimens out of their cabinets and puts them on display, making them available for anyone to discover, view and explore on an iOS device.
A beautiful collection of bees, on your phone or tablet
1000 Bees will be freely available to download as an app for anyone with an iPad or iPhone.
The app has a very special interface and a number of nifty features that we're excited to announce:
View the entire collection in two unique ways
You can view the collection either one bee at a time, or as a succession of images that transform the collection into an animated film! Drawing inspiration from experimental film techniques, Callum will create a ‘director’s cut’ of the collection that animates these 1000 species and brings these bees to 'life'.
Create your own film to view and enjoy.
1000 Bees lets you generate your own film by applying a range of filters to the collection. You can sort and sequence the collection by scientific name, size, colour, nesting behaviours, geographic distribution, level of ecological threat and more to generate a film that you can view and enjoy. Can you see any patterns?
Explore every bee, up close.
Every single bee featured in this app has been photographed under a microscope using a special technique called 'photo montaging'. This technique allows a scientist to stitch together several images of the same bee- allowing for an up-close, macro photograph that retains all the detail of the bee.
1000 Bees will present each specimen beautifully: every bee will be shown in high resolution with exploration as simple as a pinch zoom.
Discover the stories behind individual bee species.
You'll be able to access information on every single bee species featured in the app, including its scientific name, classification and geographic distribution. In addition, our Science Consultant and Writer, Chris O'Toole will writing about 50 of the most fascinating and important bee species, sharing the stories behind some of these most intriguing bees with us.
About the team
About us: Ana Tiquia and Callum Cooper
Watch a short film on why we feel this project is so important.
We're a producer and artist/ director team. We have been working on 1000 Bees for the past two years; a project that was born out of the desire to create an interactive project that looked at bees and biodiversity.
Ana is a creative producer and has a wealth of experience producing digital projects: from large scale interactive exhibitions to award-winning apps.
Callum is an experienced moving image artist and film director, his projects have screened at film festivals such as Sundance and his work has been exhibited at institutions such as MOMA, NYC.
Meet Sennep, our Developers
Meet Chris O'Toole, our Science Consultant & Writer
Visit the collection at the Natural History Museum, London
We need your help!
With your help, we can develop this project and make it freely available for anyone to download around the world.
We've been granted access to some of the largest and most acclaimed collections of bees in the world and we've completed an initial design for the project.
All we need now is to raise funds so that we can develop the project for iOS devices, and to bring our developers, designers and science consultant on board to work with us.
Funding is needed for the following costs:
Rewards
For a pledge of £2, you'll receive first notice of when 1000 Bees launches on the App Store so you can download it immediately.
For £10 we have a range of exclusive, bee-inspired original artworks from a range of artists, available as digital wallpapers for your iPad, iPhone or computer desktop... as well as be notification to download the moment the app launches on the App store.
Pledge £15 and receive a bundle of all our artist digital wallpapers! as well as well as notification to download.
Artworks have been contributed by: Jean Jullien, Mikey Please, Jonny Wan, Harriet Russell, Sophie Illustrates, Éric Tourneret, Marc Martin
Illustration by Marc Martin inspired by Thyreus lugubris, our 'Domino Cloak & Dagger Bee'
Illustration from Sophie Illustrates, inspired by Melissodes (Heliomelissodes) desponsa, who specialize on the pollen of thistle flowers.
Photos by Éric Tourneret. Laptop shows a Himalayan honey hunter in Nepal, harvesting honey from the giant honeycombs of the Himalayan Honeybee. iPad shows the Sacred Mayan Honeybee, Melipona beecheii
For a pledge of £25 you receive your name in the credits of the app! As well as all the artist wallpapers and first notification to download.
For £50 or more you can sponsor one of the bees featured in the app, and have your name credited as a sponsor alongside it, with up to 4 others.
PLUS you'll receive one of our fantastic Interactive Postcards!
For £100 or more you will become the sole sponsor of one of the bees in the app, and receive a credit alongside it.
PLUS you'll receive a beautiful, A2 full colour poster!
Below is one we framed, the images in this poster are courtesy of our partners at USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab they have used military camera technology to present some of the most compelling bee images.
A2 Poster with images courtesy of the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab
We are making 36 individual, specially chosen bee species available for single backers of the project. We have four, tiered patronage packages available for sponsoring some of the rarest and most interesting individual bee species in 1000 Bees.
For £250 or more you receive our Amber Sponsorship Package. This includes every other reward available to smaller backers of the project PLUS: sole sponsorship of one of 18 of our ‘top 36 bees’ and a credit alongside this species in the app.
1. The Desert Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
From the deserts of Sudan comes Megachile albescens, a solitary leafcutter bee. Like many bees from extreme desert habitats, it is covered in dense, pale hairs.
2. The Eastern Honeybee
Meet one of Asia's honeybee- indigenous to Southern and South-East Asia, and found in China, Pakistan, India, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands!
3. The North African Longhorn bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Found in North Africa, Eucera cintella are solitary mining bees, notable for the males’ long antennae. These bees are called long-horned bees due to their elongate antennae - females have antennae of a normal length. Much less is known about the antennae of bees other than honeybees, however length of antennae is almost certainly related to mate seeking
4. The First Bee of Spring
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Andrena nigroaena is the early bird...(well, bee) of the bee family. One of the first bees to appear in Spring, Andrena nigroaenea females get in there first, gathering pollen from a wide range of spring and early summer flowers.
5. The Eeyore Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Like A.A. Milne’s character Eeyore, this bee is a lover of thistles. Melissodes (Heliomelissodes) desponsa are solitary mining bees, found throughout North America. The females specialise on the pollen of thistle species in the genus Cirsium.
6. Long-horned Indian Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
This bee with exceptionally long antennae is the Tetralonia punjabensis, a solitary mining bee found only in India.
7. The Perfumed Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Solitary mining bee, Centris (Hemisella) nitida can be found across central and South America, and has recently been naturalised in Florida. Females collect oils from the flowers of 8 different species of the tropical Malpighiaceae flower.
8. The Mysterious Sub-Saharan Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Coelioxys torrida is a striking, mysterious cuckoo bee that can be found in Sub-Saharan Africa. Very little is know about this species or its host. The majority of of Coelioxys spp. are cuckoos in the nests of leafcutter bees, Megachile, with some parasitizing the nests of other bees in the Megachilidae and a few whose hosts are in the Apidae or the orchid bee genus Euglossa.
9. A Dwalf Indian Carpenter Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
This dwarf carpenter bee, Ceratina demotica is found in India. Carpenter bees excavate their nests in plant structures; this little bee likes to nest in the dead, pithy stems of plants. Most species live in the tropics or warm temperate regions, and some species of Ceratina are sub-social, where the female remains within the nest and guards her developing offspring from parasites and predators such as spiders or earwigs.
10. The South American Giant
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
This South American giant is one of the 29 species of bee from the subgenus Schonnherria, some of the largest of all bees in the world. Xylocopa simillima is found in Peru, Boliva, Brazil and Argentina. A large carpenter bee, it excavates its nest in solid wood.
11. Giant Malay Carpenter Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
This impressive specimen was collected by Alfred Russel Wallace on the island of Timor. The Xylocopa perforator belongs to the Mesotrichia- a subgenus of very large bee species found in Asia. The male of this species, pictured, has very large eyes, which nearly meet on the top of the head. This feature is often associated with males that are aggressively territorial as part of their mate seeking behavior.
12. The 212 Year-Old Leafcutter Bee!
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
One of the oldest bee specimens to be featured in 1000 Bees, this female Megachile willughbiella bee was collected at least 212 years ago!
Megachile willughbiella is a solitary leafcutter bee- it nests in pre-existing cavities such as beetle borings in dead wood or hollow plant stems, sealing its nest with cut pieces of leaf. This species is widespread and common in much of Europe, including the UK. It is also found in Canada and northern USA.
13. The Mysterious Cuckoo Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
This mysterious bee is a cuckoo in the nests of oil-collecting solitary mining bees from the same genus as our 'Brazil Nut Bee', Epicharis conica (see below). Little is known about this exact species however, and the host species of Rathymus quadriplagiata remains unknown.
14. A Brazil Nut Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Females of this solitary mining bee collect oils from a range of plants which offer this reward to pollinators. Species of Epicharis and the related oil-collecting genus, Centris are, together with the orchid bees (See Euglossa and Eulaema) key components of the guild of pollinators which help maintain the tropical forests of Central and South America. Females of Epicharis conica also pollinate the economically important Brazil Nut, Bertholettia excelsa.
15. The Kickstarter Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
We've nicknamed this bee the 'Kickstarter Bee' as Halictus farinosus are social mining bees that work together to get the job done, in an organised but non-hierarchal way!
Scientists describe these bees as being 'primitively eusocial', meaning that there is at least some overlap of generations sharing a nest, with some females behaving as egg-laying queens, others forming a worker caste, which is responsible for pollen and nectar-gathering and excavating brood cells. However, unlike highly eusocial species such as the honeybees, Apis spp., there are hardly any major differences in structure between queens and workers.
16. Daisy Dukes
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
The females of daisy-loving species Andrena simplex specialize in collecting the pollen of members of the daisy family (Asteraceae). Particular favourites include species of Aster and Solidago (Goldenrods). Andrena simplex can be found in the Eastern areas of the USA.
17. The Fast-Flyer
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
From Malawi comes this solitary mining bee. Found in Central and Southern Africa, Amegilla grandiceps is has a rapid rapid, darting flight, like all species of Amegilla. The species belongs to a group in which the adults are active from August through to May.
18. The V.I.Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Females of this little bee demand exclusive access to its favourite flowers and always wants to be first in, best served! Lasioglossum zephyrum have been observed forcing open unbloomed flowers of the endangered Tennessee yellow-eyed grass, Xyris tennesseensis to extract the pollen, to ensure first and exclusive access.
Be listed as one of the project patrons on the main page of the app! Mockup showing the title page for 1000 Bees
For £500 or more you receive our Silver Patron package. This includes every other reward available to smaller backers of the project PLUS: sponsorship of one of 10 of our ‘top 36 bees’, a special patron credit on the title screen of the app, and a limited edition poster.
19. Himalayan Cliff Hanger Bees
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
The Giant Himalayan Honeybee Apis labriosa is the largest honeybee in the world. Found in the high mountains of Nepal, Bhutan, India and China, Apis labriosa are greatly valued by the Gurung tribespeople of Nepal for their honey. Apis labriosa nest on steep, south-west facing cliffs, which makes harvesting of honey a difficult and often treacherous task.
20. South American Tunnelling Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Like the sponsor of this species, the stunning Oxaea festiva digs deep!
A solitary mining bee, females of the eight species of Oxaea nest in flat ground, and, according to species, excavate a deep vertical tunnel between 30-245cm deep. Horizontal tunnels radiate out from the end of the main shaft, each ending in a vertical cell lined with a waxy film.
21. The Domino Cloak and Dagger bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
This striking, domino patterned bee is a cuckoo bee which preys on the nests of Amegilla bombiformis, the Teddy Bear Bee. Like other cuckoo bees, Thyreus lugubris employs stealthy measures to raise its young. Females of this species lay their eggs in the nests of other bees. Typically, a female finds a host nest, waits until a Amegilla bombiformis female leaves, then lays an egg in the open cell.
The cuckoo larva eats the host’s egg and then feeds on the stored pollen-honey mixture. Because female cuckoo bees do not have to collect pollen, they have lost pollen transporting structures – pollen brush (scopa) or pollen basket (corbiculum).
22. Europe’s pickiest eater
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Female Melitta tricincta bees specialise on the pollen of the Red Bartsia, a common plant throughout Europe. This solitary mining bee can be found as far east as Russia, however it is a rare bee, considered endangered in much of Europe. Melitta tricincta bees are picky eaters- the females collect pollen only from the Red Bartsia flower and both males and females visit the plant for nectar.
23. One of Our Oldest Bees: Gooden’s Nomad Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
This specimen of Gooden’s Nomad Bee was described by early entomologist William Kirby in 1802. At least 212 years old, this is one of the oldest specimens featured in 1000 Bees. Reverend William Kirby (1759-1850) was an English country parson and naturalist and is considered the ‘British founder of entomology’.
24. A Saudi Arabian Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
A new addition, Colletes guichardi is a very recently described species. Like all mining or digger bees, Colletes guichardi females excavate their nests in the ground. This bee is currently known only from Saudi Arabia.
25. The Big Emerald Australian Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Australia has lots of big things: the Big Mango, the Big Prawn, the Big Merino Sheep amongst others. Add this to its collection: the big, emerald bee: Ctenocolletes smaragdinus, found across Central and South-Western Australia. What a beauty!
26. The Japanese Apple Orchard Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Meet Osmia taurus, an important managed pollinator in Japanese apple orchards. Found throughout China and Japan, Osmia taurus are mason bees that use mud to construct the walls of their nests. This species has recently been introduced into North-Eastern US to be used as an orchard pollinator.
27. The Giant Madagascan Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
One of the largest solitary mining bees in the world, Pachymelas (Pachymelas) micrelephas can only be found on the island of Madagascar. Females of this species have unusually long mandibles, the function of which still remains unknown to scientists.
28. The Lowrider
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
A nocturnal bee, Xylocopa lanata is found in the desert areas of the Middle East and Central Asian steppe-deserts. The pale-faced males, such as this one, cruise low over the nest sites at nighttime in search of females. This carpenter bee is an anomaly; unlike most carpenter bees who nest in solid wood, Xylocopa lanata prefers to nest in the ground.
For £1000 or more you receive our Gold Patron package. This includes every other reward available to smaller backers of the project PLUS: sole sponsorship of one of 5 of our ‘top 36 bees’, a special patron credit on the title screen of the app, a limited edition poster AND you can Beta test the app!
29. The Sacred Mayan Honeybee
Image courtesy of DiscoverLife/RicardoAyala
Worshipped and highly valued in Mayan culture, the stingless Mayan honeybee Melipona beecheii is now considered endangered. Found in Mexico and Central America, the Mayan honeybee also played another important role in American history: Melipona beecheii were the source of the honey given to Columbus by Native Americans when he landed in Hispaniola. Today Mayan honeybees are still kept in traditional log hives and used as a source of honey.
30. To Bee or Not to Queen Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
This beautiful metallic sweat bee can be found from Tropical Mexico to Brazil and nests in rotting wood or pithy stems. Megalopta genalis bees are considered a ‘faculatively communal’ species. Female bees can either live as solitary, independent queens who go out to forage for their own food, or they can be social queens- “stay at home mums” whose daughters go out to forage for them, so that they rarely have to leave the nest.
31. The Leggiest Bee in the World
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Females of the leggy Rediviva emdeorum species have the longest forelegs of any known bee species. Females of Rediviva emdeorum collect oil from the twin tubular spurs of flowers of Diascia tanyceras, using their elongated legs to probe the spurs of the plant’s flowers. Found across the winter rainfall areas of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, Rediviva emdeorum and its habitat are both highly threatened by climate change.
32. The Optical Illusion Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
This splendid, metallic, solitary mining bee can be found across Canada, USA and Northern Mexico. Some species in almost all bee families have metallic colouration. The metallic colours – blue, green, red, or gold, or combinations of these - are not the result of pigments in the cuticle. Instead, they are structural colours, caused by ultra-microscopic structuring in the cuticle. This scatters or refracts different wavelengths of light so that metallic colours of particular wavelengths are reflected.
33. The Teddy Bear Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
This cuddly looking bee is commonly found in gardens in Australia. Amegilla bombiformis or Teddy Bear Bee, has been described as looking like “a furry golden ball hanging in the air” when in flight. A solitary mining bee, the species name bombiformis refers to its similarity in appearance to bumblebees (Bombus spp.), which are not native to Australia.
Receive one of three signed copies of Chris O'Toole's book when you become a major patron of 1000 Bees
For £3000 or more you receive our Platinum Patron package. This includes every other reward available to smaller backers of the project PLUS: sole sponsorship of one of 3 of our ‘top 36’ species, a major patron credit on the title screen of the app, limited edition poster, Beta testing of the app, a Skype call with the creators of the project, and a special signed copy of Chris O’Toole’s Book, Bees: A Natural History.
The Largest and Most Mysterious Bee
Image courtesy of the Hope Entomological Collections, Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Found in 1868 on the Indonesian island of Bachan by the great 19th Century naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, the gigantic Megachile (Chalicodoma) pluto is one of the largest known species of bee in the world. With a wingspan of 2.5 inches, a length of 1.53 inches and huge mandibles used to tap resin from trees, this is a truly formidable bee!
This is a truly unique specimen- This is the unique specimen that Frederick Smith used for his original description of the species published in 1869. Little was known about Wallace’s Giant Mason Bee until the 1980’s when American entomologist Adam Messer discovered a population on this and another Indonesian island, Halmahera.
2. Linnaeus’ Honeybee
Image courtesy of the Linnean Society of London
The Western Honeybee is our most iconic bee; the species most of us think of when we think of bees. As well as producing delicious honey, the Western Honeybee is used as a managed pollinator for many of Europe and North America’s agricultural crops.
This particular specimen is extremely special- it was collected by Carl Linneaus in 1758. Linneus was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, physicist and one of the most influential scientists in history. He is often referred to as the ‘father of taxonomy’.
3. The Orchid & Brazil Nut Bee
Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London
Meet Euglossa ignita, a very special species of bee. It’s described as an orchid bee as males of this species (as pictured above) collect perfumed oil from orchids, which they store in spongy tissue inside their highly modified hind legs. Females of some species of Euglossa, together with other large bees are pollinators of Brazil Nuts |
The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment right of individuals to own firearms, should finally lay to rest the widespread myth that the defining difference between liberal and conservative justices is that the former support “individual rights” and “civil liberties,” while the latter routinely defer to government assertions of authority. The Heller dissent presents the remarkable spectacle of four liberal Supreme Court justices tying themselves into an intellectual knot to narrow the protections the Bill of Rights provides.
Or perhaps it’s not as remarkable as we’ve been led to think. Consider the Court’s First Amendment decisions. Contrary to popular belief, conservative justices are about as likely to vote in favor of individuals bringing First Amendment challenges to government regulations as are the liberals. Indeed, the justice most likely to vote to uphold a First Amendment claim is the “conservative” Justice Anthony Kennedy. The least likely is the “liberal” Justice Stephen Breyer. Consistent with general conservative/liberal patterns in commercial speech cases, Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have voted to invalidate restrictions on advertising more than 75 percent of the time. Justices Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, meanwhile, have voted to uphold such restrictions in most cases.
Conservative justices also typically vote to limit the government’s ability to regulate election-related speech, while liberal justices are willing to uphold virtually any regulation in the name of “campaign finance reform.” In Davis v. Federal Election Commission, decided the same day as Heller, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Court’s conservatives, reaffirmed the “fundamental nature of the right to spend personal funds for campaign speech.” The dissenters argued that “in the context of elections … limiting the quantity of speech” is perfectly acceptable.
Liberals have also been more willing than conservatives to limit the First Amendment’s protection of “expressive association.” The Court’s conservatives held that forcing the Boy Scouts of America to employ a gay scoutmaster violated the Scouts’ right to promote its belief in traditional sexual morality. The liberal dissenters thought the government should be allowed to force the Scouts to present a message inconsistent with the Scouts’ values.
The Fifth Amendment’s protection of property rights presents, if anything, an even starker example of greater commitment to individual rights by the conservative majority. In the infamous Kelo v. New London, the Court’s liberal justices, joined by Justice Kennedy, held that the government may take an individual’s property and turn it over to a private party for commercial use. The four conservative dissenters argued that such actions violate the Fifth Amendment’s requirement that government takings be for “public use.”
A few years earlier, the Court’s conservative majority held that a government regulation that deprives a land owner of any use of his property amounts to a “taking” that requires compensation. The liberal dissenters would have permitted the government to totally wipe out an individual’s investment without any redress.
And consider the issue of government use of racial classifications. Liberal justices have been willing to uphold virtually any use of race by the government—including quotas in higher education, set-asides for government contracts, and raced-based assignments of students to public schools—so long as the government claims benign motives. The conservatives, by contrast, argue that the government must treat people as individuals, not as members of a racial caste.
Other examples could be raised. The conservatives, for example, have been more sympathetic to free exercise of religion claims than the liberals, and more inclined to forbid government regulation of “hate speech.”
The point should be clear. There are many ideological differences between the conservative and liberal justices on the Supreme Court. But a consistent, stronger liberal devotion to supporting individual rights and civil liberties against assertions of government power isn’t one of them. |
The 1931 United Kingdom general election was held on Tuesday 27 October 1931 and saw a landslide election victory for the National Government which had been formed two months previously after the collapse of the second Labour government . Collectively, the parties forming the National Government won 67% of the votes and 554 seats out of 615. The bulk of the National Government's support came from the Conservative Party, and the Conservatives won 470 seats. The Labour Party suffered its greatest defeat, losing four out of five seats compared with the previous election. The Liberal Party, split into three factions, continued to shrink and the Liberal National faction never reunited. Ivor Bulmer-Thomas said the results "were the most astonishing in the history of the British party system". [1] It was the last election where one party (the Conservatives) received an absolute majority of the votes cast and the last UK general election not to take place on a Thursday , and would be the last election until 1997 in which a party won over 400 seats in the House of Commons.
After battling with the Great Depression for two years, Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government had been faced with a sudden budget crisis in August 1931. The cabinet deadlocked over its response, with several influential members such as Arthur Henderson unwilling to support the budget cuts (in particular a cut in the rate of unemployment benefit) which were pressed by the civil service and opposition parties. Then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, refused to consider deficit spending or tariffs as alternative solutions.
When the government resigned, MacDonald was encouraged by King George V to form an all-party National Government to deal with the immediate crisis.
The initial hope that the government would hold office for a few weeks, and then dissolve to return to ordinary party politics, were frustrated when the government was forced to remove the pound sterling from the gold standard; meanwhile the Labour Party expelled all those who were supporting the government.
The Conservatives began pressing for the National Government to fight an election as a combined unit, and MacDonald's supporters from the Labour Party formed a National Labour Organisation to support him; MacDonald came to endorse an early election to take advantage of Labour's unpopularity. However the Liberals were sceptical about an election and had to be persuaded. Former Liberal leader David Lloyd George firmly opposed the decision to call an election and urged his colleagues to withdraw from the National Government.
A main issue was the Conservatives' wish to introduce protectionist trade policies. This issue not only divided the government from the opposition but also divided the parties in the National Government: the majority of Liberals, led by Sir Herbert Samuel, were opposed and supported free trade, but on the eve of the election a faction known as Liberal Nationals under the leadership of Sir John Simon was formed who were willing to support protectionist trade policies.
In order to preserve the Liberals within the National Government, the government itself did not endorse a policy but appealed for a "Doctor's Mandate" to do whatever was necessary to rescue the economy. Individual Conservative candidates supported protective tariffs.
Labour campaigned on opposition to public spending cuts, but found it difficult to defend the record of the party's former government and the fact that most of the cuts had been agreed before it fell.
Historian Andrew Thorpe argues that Labour lost credibility by 1931 as unemployment soared, especially in coal, textiles, shipbuilding and steel. The working class increasingly lost confidence in the ability of Labour to solve the most pressing problem.[2]
The 2.5 million Irish Catholics in England and Scotland were a major factor in the Labour base in many industrial areas. The Catholic Church had previously tolerated the Labour Party, and denied that it represented true socialism. However, the bishops by 1930 had grown increasingly alarmed at Labour's policies towards Communist Russia, towards birth control and especially towards funding Catholic schools. They warned its members. The Catholic shift against Labour and in favour of the National Government played a major role in Labour's losses.[3]
In the event, the Labour vote fell sharply, and the National Government won a landslide majority.
Although the overwhelming majority of the Government MPs were Conservatives under the leadership of Stanley Baldwin, MacDonald remained Prime Minister in the new National Government.
The Liberals lacked the funds to contest the full range of seats, but still won almost as many constituencies as the Labour Party.
There were more MPs (72) who were elected under a Liberal ticket of some description then there were the combined number of Labour and National Labour MPs (65), but the three-way split in the party meant that the main Labour group still ended up as the second-largest in Parliament. |
A DANGEROUS killer was still on the run last night after escaping from the custody of prison officers.
A DANGEROUS killer was still on the run last night after escaping from the custody of prison officers.
Manhunt under way for dangerous killer on the run
Gardai issued a nationwide alert after Christopher Doyle (39) disappeared during a visit to his seriously ill father in St James's Hospital in Dublin last Wednesday.
Doyle has a number of convictions for violent attacks on elderly people, including beating a Co Meath farmer to death in 2000.
He is serving prison sentences for dangerous driving causing bodily harm and a number of robberies.
Doyle, who is described as being extremely dangerous, gave prison warders the slip when he went to the toilet during the hospital visit and escaped through a window.
It was still unclear last night if he had planned the escape and whether he had an accomplice. Gardai have been talking to Doyle's family and friends in a bid to track him down.
Officers have also been studying CCTV to trace his movements when he left the hospital grounds.
It is understood that he had been granted compassionate temporary release to visit his father in the company of at least one prison officer.
Apart from the garda investigation, the Prison Service has also launched an internal inquiry to ascertain how Doyle made his escape. They will try to establish why he was not handcuffed at the time.
The violent thug, who has a reputation for attacking and robbing elderly people in their homes, was jailed in 2002 along with his brother for the manslaughter of pensioner Paddy Logan.
Christopher and John Doyle demanded money and beat Mr Logan and his brother Peter, when they broke into the home of the two elderly bachelor farmers in June 2000.
Paddy Logan died as a result of his injuries and Peter was also badly injured. The Doyles made off with just €50 and their brutal attack shocked the nation. Christopher got 12 years and his brother 15 years.
Locals in Castlejordan, Co Meath, where the brothers lived at the time of the attack, said that the house was sold shortly afterwards.
Irish Independent |
Pebble shipped its new all-metal "Steel" smartwatch earlier this week, and now reveals that app store updates for its iOS companion software will roll out on Monday (the Android version is about to launch in beta and will follow soon after). Until now, wearers have had to hunt through a myriad of app developers and third-party sites to download new watchfaces or apps. Once the apps (and older Pebble devices) get updated and paired wirelessly over Bluetooth, you'll only need a Pebble account and two clicks to load new software from a phone or tablet. Since the watch itself can only have up to eight apps loaded at any given time, easily managing the thousands of choices available is an important new feature. We took a long look at the store and its apps (including software from ESPN, GoPro and Foursquare) in our review of the Pebble Steel, owners should keep an eye on their mobile devices Monday for access. |
On the heels of the passage of mandatory genetically engineered (GE) food labeling bills in Connecticut and Maine, and the narrow defeat of the labeling bill in Washington State, the big food and chemical companies are going on offense. As Center for Food Safety reported last week [1], according to a draft bill outline leaked by Politico, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) is shopping a Federal voluntary labeling bill in Congress that would block states from passing meaningful mandatory labeling bills, redefine GE food as “safe” and even allow GE foods to be labeled as “natural.” [2]
Without mandatory labeling of GE foods, consumers are being left in the dark about the foods we are purchasing and feeding our families. There is overwhelming public demand—consistently near 95%—for the labeling of GE foods. Yet the U.S. is one of the only developed countries in the world that doesn’t require labeling; sixty-four countries have mandatory labeling policies for GE foods including South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Brazil, China, South Africa, Australia, the entire European Union, among others. In 2013, over 50 GE labeling bills were introduced in 26 states, including Hawaii, Washington, Indiana, Missouri, and Vermont, with many more expected.
Action has already been taken at the federal level this legislative session: Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) have introduced legislation that would require nationwide, mandatory labeling of GE products.
So why would anyone introduce another GE food labeling bill? Because industry will do whatever it takes to make sure you don’t have the right to know whether the food you’re buying is genetically engineered. Voluntary labeling of GE foods has been allowed by FDA for more than a decade and not a single company has “volunteered” to label its products as containing GE food. There is no reason to think they will do so now, when there is more support for mandatory labeling of GE food than there ever has been.
The introduction of this bill would only serve to undermine state and federal legislation meant to grant consumers the right to know and avoid GE foods. Attacking state labeling laws does nothing to address the increasing call from consumers for transparent GE food labeling. Instead, it gives the biotech and food industries yet another free pass and keeps consumers in the dark.
Tell Congress to oppose the GMA bill that would block state GE food labeling, and instead to support the Boxer-DeFazio bill to label GE food.
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More information:
1. CFS Press Release: Leaked Document Reveals Big Food Lobby's Plans to Preempt State GMO Labeling (January 7, 2014).
2. Draft GMA bill outline leaked by Politico (January 7, 2014). |
WASHINGTON - NASA announced Tuesday a Grand Challenge focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do about them.
The challenge, which was announced at an asteroid initiative industry and partner day at NASA Headquarters in Washington, is a large-scale effort that will use multi-disciplinary collaborations and a variety of partnerships with other government agencies, international partners, industry, academia, and citizen scientists. It complements NASA's recently announced mission to redirect an asteroid and send humans to study it.
"NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth," said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver. "This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem."
Grand Challenges are ambitious goals on a national or global scale that capture the imagination and demand advances in innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology. They are an important element of President Obama's Strategy for American Innovation.
"I applaud NASA for issuing this Grand Challenge because finding asteroid threats, and having a plan for dealing with them, needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort," said Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "The efforts of private-sector partners and our citizen scientists will augment the work NASA already is doing to improve near-Earth object detection capabilities."
NASA also released a request for information (RFI) that invites industry and potential partners to offer ideas on accomplishing NASA's goal to locate, redirect, and explore an asteroid, as well as find and plan for asteroid threats. The RFI is open for 30 days, and responses will be used to help develop public engagement opportunities and a September industry workshop.
To watch the archived video of Tuesday's asteroid initiative industry and partner day, visit:
http://youtube.com/nasatelevision
For more information about NASA's asteroid initiative, including presentations from Tuesday's event and a link to the new RFI, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidinitiative
- end - |
Tolkien fans rejoice! The Lord of the Rings author's estate will soon release a 100-year-old manuscript that was never before released to the public. Titled The Story of Kullervo, the work is one of Tolkien's earliest efforts, and helped lay the foundation for the stories he'd tell about Middle-earth throughout his career.
Tolkien started Kullervo in 1914, during his college days at Oxford University. The tale, which follows the tragic story of an orphan cursed with supernatural powers, is based on the Finnish epic poem The Kalevala, and though he never finished it in his lifetime, he used this work as a basis for his own stories and languages:
"The germ of my attempt to write legends of my own to fit my private languages was the tragic tale of the hapless Kullervo in the Finnish Kalevala. It remains a major matter in the legends of the First Age (which I hope to publish as The Silmarillion)"
Though this is the first time Kullervo is being made available for public consumption, the manuscript was originally published in 2010 by author and Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger in Tolkien Studies: Volume 7. The Story of Kullervo, complete with notes and supplementary essays,will hit bookstores in the UK on August 27th. It'll be available in America on October 27th. |
Some people simply don’t understand the phrase, “No, you can’t do that.” Alex Zanardi, Alessandro Nannini and Robert Kubica are just some of those people. All three suffered potentially career-ending injuries, yet successfully climbed back into competition. All three had different injuries to overcome, but they did.
By Andy Hallbery
Zanardi’s situation is well documented, especially here on Motorsport Retro , returning to racing – and winning – after the sickening Indycar accident that cost him both legs, and oh-so-nearly his life.
Kubica’s accident came in a rally, the metal barrier shearing his car, and but for a sinew or two, his arm with it. At the time, the Pole, with one Grand Prix win to his name, was on the verge of the big time. He too desires a return to F1, and a test in a DTM car proved that the speed is still there, but not – yet – in the confines of a single-seater. “If all the races were at places like Barcelona, yes,” he says of his recuperation. “But Monaco? No way, not yet.”
An accident in 1990 severed Nannini’s right arm completely just below the elbow when he was thrown from his helicopter as he crashed while landing at his home in Siena. Like, Zanardi, we thought his racing career was well and truly over.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Groundbreaking microsurgery allowed doctors to sew Nannini’s right arm back on, the nerves were reattached, and all this happened to Sandro without barely the blink of an eye or a second thought.
There were doubters who at the time thought the then-ground-breaking surgery would not work, among them his former Benetton teammate and very good friend Nelson Piquet. The Brazilian was one of the first to visit Sandro in hospital, and advised that his arm would be better gone. “Yes, that’s true,” admits Nannini. “Nelson had a friend who had lost a limb, a leg I think, and had it sewn back on. Since, he regretted doing that, feeling that he would be better with a prosthetic limb. I wouldn’t even let myself think about what Nelson was saying. The doctors had rescued my arm, I was going to race Formula 1 again, and that was that. I didn’t want anybody to fill me with the slightest doubt.”
Nannini’s will saw him not only in the cockpit of a Formula 1 car just over a year later, it was his beloved Ferrari, the team he was – as the story goes – already signed to for 1991 when his accident happened. In the adapted #27, the helicopter crash was a memory.
Just two years after his accident the happy Italian was back at Monza, and this time he was racing. It wasn’t a single-seater like the Grand Prix winner had been used to, but that didn’t matter. Sandro was back doing what he loved, and the car was red. He was racing in Italian Touring Cars in an Alfa 155 GTA – and winning!
Many years later we are sitting talking in one of his Nannini cafés and with the espressos, the ever-present smile and cigarette. This is trademark Nannini, the driver the fans loved.
The only give away was his right hand which was now naturally curled up in a ball that he constantly tried to straighten, and that he now smoked using his left hand instead of is right one. A short puff and he is smiling his way down memory lane.
“You can’t imagine what kind of emotion coming back was for me,” he laughs. “I remember before the start my heart was pumping like crazy. I felt like I was a kid in my first Fiat Abarth races. But all those feelings vanished when the race started. By the time we hit the brakes for the first corner, I was grinding my teeth and slamming on the door of those trying to overtake…
“It was like waking up from a dream, “ he continues, “and I restarted acting like a racing driver, as if I’d never been away.”
To those outside too, including family, Sandro was the old Sandro, save for his new technique of holding his cigarette with his curled up hand. The muscles had withered, and it was a deal smaller than it had been, but first and foremost, he was a racing driver. At races, he kept the glove on, one less thing to worry about. There was however, a slightly new mindset.
“Nobody really thought I could come back from the accident,” he recalls. And without saying it, his demeanour suggests that he felt very much alone during his recovery. “Nobody really thought I could do it,” he smiled. “Neither the doctors nor my family. When I talked about my plans, they just listened to me almost condescendingly, just to keep me ‘up’, and thinking positively. But I didn’t want to give up, because I knew I could do it.”
And he did, that season led to an offer from Alfa for a works car in the DTM and subsequently the ITC. His teammates included Nicola Larini, Michele Alboreto, Christian Danner, Giancarlo Fisichella, Gabriele Tarquini and others.
His rivals included Keke Rosberg, Klaus Ludwig, Bernd Schneider, Dario Franchitti, Alex Wurz, Yannick Dalmas and others. These were no second-rate championships, far from it. It was the cream of touring car and F1 drivers. Nannini’s 13 wins showed that his spirit and speed were undiminished, the talent of the Grand Prix winner still there. And the smoking humour came at his expense, courtesy of German TV, Vox.
Another coffee arrived as we began our photo shoot in his café. While not quite ‘embarrassed’ about his hand, it was rarely on display, usually in his pocket or behind his back. The smile though is constant, even when talking about the difficulties. “There was a moment in those years where things weren’t going so well for me and I thought ‘what am I doing here if I’m not able to compete to win? Wouldn’t it be better to leave?’
“Once you are used to fighting for victory, when you don’t obtain it you feel like you are missing something,” he says, “and even behind this so-called smiling face’ I suffer if I am only second. However I can’t say I’m unsatisfied because it’s almost a miracle that even now I am still racing, although not at that level. It’s still normal to aspire to the maximum.”
Photo: Charles Best/motorsportretro.com
Handicap or not, both Zanardi and Nannini beat world class racers on their returns, and Kubica is still aiming at the very top.
Does this sound familiar? “Frankly I cannot imagine that I won’t return to F1,” Kubica told my colleagues at Autosport. “Quite the contrary. I am convinced I will go onto the startline again.” Kubica is working hard on his strength, and his speed is not in any question. “If it was just about power, I could fix it in the gym. But it is more than that, nerves and muscles, which are much more complicated.”
He knows that while not in the near future that return is still in his sights (“unless they make F1 cockpits 20cms wider tomrrow!”), but that goal is tempered with realism. “Last year after the accident, I said that I was happy I survived,” he adds. “Then when you go to the hospital and see people who have no chance at all, you start to take life differently.
“Very often we do not appreciate what we have. When all is well and everything is in order with us, we find the opportunity to complain about the bad weather. But when you are attached to a hospital bed and you can’t even get up, you don’t care if it’s raining outside or not. In those moments you start to appreciate what you have, even if it’s not what you dream of.”
Photos: Bernard Cahier, Cahier Archive, http://www.f1-photo.com/
Charles Best. http://www.charlesbest.co.uk/tearsheets/23.html
Follow @MotorsportRetro and @Hallbean on Twitter and join in the Motorsport Retro discussion on the site’s page on Facebook |
Maine's Republican Gov. Paul LePage is known for his tough life story and his willingness to say whatever is on his mind. Click above to see him blame Maine's problems with heroin and prescription-drug abuse on "guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty" who drive up to Vacationland from New York and Connecticut, sell their drugs, hook up with Maine girls, and then "go back home."
Full statement:
“The traffickers, these aren’t people who take drugs. These are guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty,” LePage, a Republican, said during a discussion of the state’s heroin epidemic at a town hall event. “These type of guys that come from Connecticut and New York. They come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home.” “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave,” he added. “Which is the real sad thing, because then we have another issue that we have to deal with down the road.”
Hat Tip: Buzzfeed.
LePage doesn't mention the race of heroin dealers but does invoke stereotypically ghetto names, thus continuing one of the most despicable aspects of the drug war in America: Its racism.
In the early 20th century, for instance, "cocaine negroes"—black men who ingested huge amounts of the stuff and thus become superpowered predators and/or enticed white women with same drug into sexual frenzies—were a thing, with The New York Times and other respectable authorities of the day freaking out over a terrifying combination of race-mixing, sex, and narcotics. Opium was associated with Chinese living in America and marijuana with Mexicans in a blend of racial anxiety and fear of intoxication that terrified lawmakers and voter alike.
LePage's comments, which link the drug trade not just with blacks but hypersexualized blacks, show that even as the country is growing up in terms of treating pot more like beer, wine, and alcohol, we haven't really gotten that far.
Many accounts of a spike in heroin use (or any other "new drug of choice") are sensationalized and begging for hard evidence.
According to the Maine government's statistics, between 2010 and 2014 (the latest year for which data is readily available online), the state has seen a sharp increase in the "number of treatment admissions where heroin or morphine" was the primary substance involved. In 2010, that number was 955 and in 2014 it had risen to 2,538. Yet over the same time frame, overdose EMS responses for heroin and related drugs have declined from a peak in 2012. While the number of deaths attributed to heroin/morphine has increased dramatically over the same period, the absolute number remains in the mid-double digits, at 57.
To the extent that heroin is a growing problem in Maine, it's not fully clear what LePage hopes to achieve by laying the blame for that on the D-Moneys and Smoothies of the world. According to the director of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, fully 83 percent of drug traffickers arrested by his agents are Maine residents.
But perhaps only charity, not responsibility, begins at home. |
With today's announcement of the PlayStation Vita TV (for the Japanese market, at least), Sony becomes the latest in a long line of companies trying to exploit the low costs and surprisingly decent capabilities of mobile gaming technology to upend the traditional idea of a game console. Why pay hundreds for top-of-the-line technology, the argument goes, when you can remove the screen from a cheap smartphone (often the most expensive bit), insert an HDMI output, and have a perfectly capable low-end alternative to the living room set-top box?
The Vita TV has a leg up on a lot of the mostly Android-based competition in this space, thanks in no small part to its established library of top-shelf games. Still, I feel like all of these microconsoles are pretty much destined to be niche players that don't really satisfy a wide market need.
The idea of playing portable games on the TV is nothing new. Nintendo started the trend with the Super Game Boy back in 1994. They continued it later with the Game Boy Player, which let Game Boy Advance games be played on the TV through a Gamecube. The PlayStation Portable also featured components cables that allowed for direct HDTV output, a feature that was pointedly removed from the Vita.
These portable-to-TV solutions differ from today's slate of microconsoles in a few ways. For one, their asking price was even lower than the $100 price point that seems to be the sweet spot for today's efforts, even accounting for inflation. For another, they were generally positioned as niche novelties—ways to get some additional use out of your existing portable library—rather than full-fledged competition for the actual console hardware.
And make no mistake, the Vita TV and its Android-based microconsole cousins are competing more or less directly with their full-fledged console counterparts. You can argue that their extremely low cost and/or their more open development environments put them in a class by themselves. All of these systems fit generally into the category of "boxes that play games on my TV" though, and most consumers that aren't die-hard gaming aficionados aren't looking to buy more than one for their living room (one important exception: parents looking for a low-cost system for the kids to have in their room).
That means that you have to compare the Vita TV directly to competing products like Sony's own PlayStation 4. Vita TV starts off well with a price point that's about $300 cheaper, but the low cost doesn't look quite so low when you add in the cost of a controller and the proprietary memory card (which is practically a necessity on top of the tiny 1GB of internal storage). The price comparison looks even worse if you compare the Vita TV with the current generation of consoles. A brand new PlayStation 3 with 12GB of storage now costs $200. The PS3 also has a much wider lineup of games that were actually designed for a TV (more on that later), and it comes with its own controller to boot.
More importantly, it's not at all clear how much price sensitivity truly matters in the market for game consoles that are going to be attached to your TV for many years. Yes, the Wii rode its low cost-to-hardware sales dominance in the console generation that's currently wrapping up, but that was largely attributable to a unique and gimmicky control scheme and a must-have system seller in Wii Sports. Without those, the low price point alone likely wouldn't have mattered. Low prices surely didn't help the bargain-priced Nintendo GameCube and Sega Dreamcast when they went up against the much stronger PlayStation 2. Even the PlayStation 3, which was significantly more expensive than both of its competitors for years, was able to scrape into rough international sales parity with the Xbox 360, thanks in large part to some high-profile exclusive games that showed off the system's hardware power.
Splitting the market
Vita TV is not going to have many of those exclusives. On the contrary, Sony has made a big deal about how its highest-profile Vita games are "cross-buy" titles that already come packaged with a largely identical PS3 download (this also applies to the downloadable PSOne classics that make up a large chunk of the Vita TV's advertised 1,300 game library). And the games that are exclusively available on the Vita have been designed for a very different use case than that of a home console. You can go on and on about how the differences between consoles and portables are dwindling and how portable games are more like their console brethren than ever, but there's still a fundamental difference in the way people engage with a system held five inches from their face and one that's on the TV five feet away.
Games on the Vita are, in general and by necessity, designed to be played for short bursts, with frequent convenient stopping points and action that's easy to get into quickly. People look a for different experience when they hunker down on the couch, ready for an extended gaming session.
With the Vita TV, Sony awkwardly splits the market for these kinds of portable-minded games, putting developers in the difficult position of trying to cater to both audiences or (more likely) simply ignoring the newer, TV-based market and making games for the better-established portable side. And let's not forget about games that make use of the front or rear touchpads on the Vita. Sony has been pushing these features strongly as key differentiators for the portable system, but they will be entirely missing from the Vita TV. Should developers now ignore these features to expand the market for their games to the lowest common, TV-based denominator?
Then there are the issues of processing power. Yes, Vita games are closer to their console brethren than, say, Game Boy Advance games were to their competition on the PlayStation 2. But a game designed for the Vita is by necessity going to have access to less processing power and visual fidelity than one designed for the PS4 (or even the PS3). Games made for the Vita's native resolution of 960 x 544 are going to look decidedly worse when stretched out onto a 1080p HDTV screen, and they won't be able to handle as many moving parts under the hood as similar games on the PS3 or PS4.
That's fine if you're into playing great, simple games like Divekick or Lumines or Spelunky, games that are perfect for the subway or a long plane trip. But these are not the kinds of games that sell systems made for the living room. In general, people in the market for a game console want something that is going to make the most use of the expensive flat-screen TV and surround sound entertainment center they've invested in. In that environment, consumers are less likely to skimp on the actual gaming hardware and more likely to go for something that they can really show off, even if it costs a bit more.
Sony and the makers of other microconsoles might argue they are not aiming for those high-end customers. They are instead aiming to fill the market gap for people who want to play games casually and occasionally, without investing too much money. Unfortunately, that market segment is well-covered by smartphones and tablets that these customers probably already have, and it's covered even further by low-cost, dedicated portable systems for consumers that simply must have button-based controls. I don't think these casual players are too upset about playing on a touchscreen rather than a TV. They just want a simple diversion that they can pick up and play, hopefully without interrupting the episode of America's Next Top Model that's on in the background.
This isn't to say the Vita TV (or other microconsoles based on low-cost portable technology) will be a total bomb. The ability to add second-TV streaming to a PlayStation 4 is likely to be a killer app for many, and its use as a low-cost video streaming box is bound to get it some attention (though really, if you don't have a device that can stream Netflix to your TV at this point... what have you been waiting for?). As a market force in the gaming world, though, the Vita TV system seems like a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. It's a console that's outclassed by Sony's own existing hardware. |
Whether the nation faces a doctor shortage is a matter of debate. But a new study suggests there are already fewer doctors practicing than had been estimated, because of a lag in reporting retirements.
The new study, published in the Oct. 21 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, estimates that the United States has 788,000 active doctors — 65,000 fewer than calculations have suggested. The doctor work force is also younger than previously estimated, with a greater proportion of doctors in their 20s and 30s and fewer who are 65 and older.
By 2020, there will be 957,000 physicians, the new estimates show, rather than the 1.05 million previously projected. Only 9 percent will be 65 or older, or half as many as had been predicted.
The new analysis used census data to make projections.
“From 2005 to 2020, we project a 20 to 22 percent growth in the number of physicians,” said the paper’s lead author, Douglas O. Staiger, a Dartmouth economist. “But because you start with a lower number, you end up with a lower number in the future — with 9 percent fewer physicians by 2020.”
Dr. Staiger said that did not necessarily mean there would be an acute shortage of doctors but that “we need to get the baseline correct in order to make future forecasts.” |
Award Winning Actress, Mayim Bialik
The minute someone mentions modesty with respect to sexual harassment (or worse), they may as well have said that it’s OK to rape women. At least that’s the knee jerk response I keep hearing in certain circles.
That is not only a false statement; it vilifies those who consider modesty in dress a positive value. It is as if they are telling women, to dress as provocatively as they want because it doesn't matter.
Before anyone jumps all over me, I know that sexual abuse does not occur only to immodestly dressed women. But to say it doesn’t matter, I think might just be an exaggeration. A provocatively dressed woman might just generate improper thoughts which in some cases might be acted upon by men with mental issues. That modestly dressed women are also attacked doesn’t mean that dressing modestly never helps.
Let me be clear. I do not blame the victim. This is not at all what I am saying. I don’t care if a woman is wearing a bikini on 13th Avenue in Boro Park, anyone that touches her or in any way harasses her is guilty of sexual aggression. The aggressor is fully to blame and ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But those who claim that it doesn’t matter at all – that images like that don’t conjure up licentious thoughts in men are oblivious to human nature.
Just because most men will not act on those thoughts doesn’t mean no one will. If not on this women, then maybe the next. But don’t tell that to the critics. For them it is an all or nothing proposition. Women should therefore be free to dress as provocatively as they wish and ignore the temptations most men think about when they see them. If you don’t agree with that proposition, then then you are considered an ignorant misogynist - bullied into changing your mind.
Which brings me to Mayim Bialik. Ms. Bialik is an award winning actress that has earned 4 Emmy nominations for her role as Amy Fowler in the television comedy series, Big Bang Theory. She is also an observant Jew. It always intrigues me when celebrities like that become observant – especially in an environment like Hollywood that is hostile to religion. I have come to admire her for that – even though I do not agree with her egalitarian views as applied to Judaism.
Mayim’s comments extol the virtues of modesty in dress. A view that guides her own choices - considering the modest way she dresses as a layer of protection. But she was bullied into retracting comments along those lines she made in a NewYork Times op-ed. Although I understand why she did that - I don’t think she should have. There are so few people in Hollywood that have the courage to stand up for the values of modesty, it is a shame when they feel they have to retract.
New YorkTimes op-ed she said the following: Where does she get those values? I believe it is at least in part because she is has become an observant Jew who studies Torah with her ‘Partner in Torah’. She has learned and understands the beauty of dressing modestly and the high value the Torah places upon it. She knows the immodest world in which she lives – which in Hollywood operates on steroids! She spoke up about it in light of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. In aop-ed she said the following:
( W)e can’t be naïve about the culture we live in. I believe that we can change our culture, but it won’t be something that happens overnight. We live in a society that has treated women as disposable playmates for far longer than Mr. Weinstein has been meeting ingénues in luxury hotel rooms.
That caused a vicious reaction from some of Hollywood’s elite rejecting her views and accusing her of shaming the victim. – which suggests blaming the victim.
Forward: Clearly that is not at all what she said or meant. She said as much in her op-ed. But in its zeal to maintain a woman’s right to dress as immodestly as she wishes, the PC crowd with Hollywood values - buried her. Mayim has expressed hurt and believes she was completely misunderstood. From the
“I am deeply deeply hurt if any woman in particular who has been assaulted—or man—thinks that i was in any way victim-blaming…”
“How you dress and how you behave have nothing to do with whether you’re assaulted,” she said. She added that her decision to dress modestly is a personal choice that gives her and other women a feeling of comfort and a layer of protection.”
Bialik said she still believes that there was still space in the modern feminist movement for socially conservative women, although she also said, “I think this article has proven maybe not.”
Maybe not... What a sad conclusion. As I said, I don’t blame her for retracting. Her heart is in the right place. She believed that the wrong message was taken from her original comments. And that may have caused unnecessary pain to women that have experienced sexual abuse or harassment. But a fair reading of her op-ed minus the unfair criticism - would make it obvious that hurting victims was the furthest thing from her mind. |
Dear Prof. Frankel,
In the absence of European QE, you suggest that the ECB prints Euros to buy US Dollars. With respect, I wish to anticipate some moral hazards associated with this suggestion.
Since the era of QE, US Dollars are to a large degree simply US Government 30-year bonds mixed with US housing mortgages. The Federal Reserve has underwritten the US commercial banking system by hiding housing risk under cover of the lower risk of US Government default. The US Dollar has now become something akin to a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO). Major risks associated with this new instrument include the Tea Party.
Monetarists are no longer basing their decisions on the real economy, but on some hypothetical scenario which is predicated upon bond-yields in the American economy of year 2044. I worry that Mario Draghi, who inhabits the present bankrupt European economy, will start investing in Janet Yelland’s fantastical American economy of 30 years hence.
The Yelland vision is founded on the Bernanke incorporation of a 2008-style debt-instrument into the Federal Reserve QE Financing model. USD 4 trillion of this potentially toxic debt is now on the Fed’s balance sheet and on the balance sheets of various financial institutions world-wide.
Current ECB Chairman Draghi must also factor in the possibility that Future Federal Reserve Chairman, Robot Darth Vader, might not react as we expect. |
Bill Goldberg Training for REAL Kickboxing Fight ... Seriously
Bill Goldberg -- Training for REAL Kickboxing Fight ... Seriously
EXCLUSIVE
No more "fake" fighting for Bill Goldberg -- the pro wrestling legend tells TMZ Sports he's gearing up for a REAL kickboxing fight ... and he's training with one of the biggest badasses in the biz.
The 48-year-old says he's flying out to Amsterdam to train with Rico Verhoeven -- the world heavyweight champ in the Glory kickboxing league -- and he's serious about fighting.
Goldberg says he's not delusional -- he doesn't think he's going to be the next great kickboxing champ ... but he really wants the opportunity to show off his combat skills in the ring.
So far, no word on when Goldberg hopes to schedule his first fight.
BONUS -- our camera guy Adam is a HUUUGE fan of Goldberg -- who's also promoting a "Legends of Wrestling event at CITI Field -- and asked the guy for some advice on how to shoot the perfect wrestling trash-talk promo. Check it out. |
FIFA U17 World Cup: Controversy in Kolkata about ticket distribution, police complaint lodged
A group of locals, known as the Golden Card numbers, registered a police complaint on Saturday.
When the West Bengal government started constructing the Salt Lake Stadium in 1982, they floated an offer for the local sportslovers. A non-profit organization, named Society for Sports and Stadium (SSS), offered a chance to become a 'golden card-member' of the new infrastructure, by donating 10,000 Rs. (close to 1,25,000 Rs now adjusting for inflation) to the cause. The golden card-members are entitled to get free tickets for every match held at the venue.
Everything went fine for the next 35 years, but the U-17 FIFA World Cup has become the first aberration of the rule, not offering tickets to the initial patrons of the venue. This has not gone well with some of those fans, who gathered at the local police station on Saturday to launch a police complaint. While they wanted to document their protest, they didn't want it to be a spoilsport to the grand event, one of the protesters informed. "We have, hence not lodged an FIR, but a general diary," he added.
With the SSS organization now defunct, the long-time workers of the stadium complex used to send the tickets out of goodwill, but the LOC has not followed the process, a well-placed source informed.
There is disappointment also among the former footballers of the city, who have contributed for years to the lively footballing scene of the city. While Indian Football Association (IFA) asked for almost 200 tickets, they were granted only 85. Fifteen Arjuna, Padmashree and Dronacharya award winners have been handed season tickets, while a lottery would decide which footballer gets a pass for which match. The lottery was done at the IFA office by former footballers Manoranjan Bhattacharya, Dipendu Biswas, Jamshid Nassiri and Kartik Seth.
Article continues below
The demand of tickets was high in Kolkata from the moment the sale started, and the organizers are hoping that spectators will come out in numbers on Sunday. |
Source: Photographee.eu/Shutterstock
Many people (women in particular) intentionally limit their number of sexual partners because they worry it could hurt their chances of finding long-term monogamous love once they are ready to settle down. They worry that a high “number” will be a challenge for their future spouses, even if they have put their promiscuous days behind them and seek a commitment to complete monogamy.
From past research, we know that most people of both sexes prefer their partners to be on the non-promiscuous end of the spectrum. But is that because they that promiscuous individuals are simply not interested in long-term and/or not really capable of monogamy—and therefore more likely to cheat? Or is it because of the social stigma attached to dating or marrying a promiscuous person, past or present? Finally, do these views differ between men and women?
A new study addresses these questions by looking at what happens to someone’s desirability as a long-term partner if they used to be promiscuous but are now committed to monogamy.
For this study, which just appeared in & Culture, psychologist Daniel Jones of the University of Texas at El Paso recruited 180 adults (53% women; 58% white; 70% in some type of serious relationship/ ; and a mean age of 32) from “Mechanical Turk,” a diverse online pool of research participants facilitated by Amazon who complete surveys for a couple of dollars.
Jones's presented participants with descriptions of three potential romantic targets, ostensibly taken from real online personals ads, telling them to assume that the target was of the and age they would be interested in dating. The profiles contained randomized information about the target (e.g., hobbies, interests, , style, ), but differed systematically in their past and current sexual history.
The nonpromiscuous target had had sex with two people, and described himself/herself as follows:
“I am looking for someone I can have a serious relationship with. I have never been interested in just having sex with someone. I need feelings and commitment behind it."
The reformed promiscuous target had had sex with approximately 40 people, but was no longer into that. Their description read:
“I used to have a lot of casual relationships and sex in the past, but that is behind me now. I haven’t had sex with anyone for over a year and only do committed serious relationships now. I am looking for someone who wants the same thing.”
The still promiscuous target had had sex with approximately 50 people and described himself/herself in this way:
“I enjoy all kinds of relationships. I am really open. I am willing to have some casual relationships, and I am open to a more long-term relationship. I enjoy meeting and dating all kinds of people and having all kinds of relationships.”
After reviewing the bios, participants answered this simple question: ‘‘If you were single and you could choose one person, who would be most desirable for a long-term committed relationship?"
Source: Zhana Vrangalova, based on Jones, Sexuality & Culture, 2016
As you can see from the graph above, very few people of both sexes (6%) chose the "still promiscuous" target as their ideal long-term partner. This is not surprising, given that most people are looking for monogamous relationships. Moreover, most men (80%) and women (62%) chose the "never promiscuous" target as their ideal, suggesting that most people of both sexes prefer not only someone monogamous, but also someone with a limited sexual history and little interest in casual sex, past or present.
But a nontrivial minority of people—14% of men and 32% of women—chose the "reformed promiscuous" target. Choosing this target over the "still promiscuous" one suggests that these participants—like the majority—value monogamy in their long-term relationships. But choosing this target over the "never promiscuous" one suggests that for this group—unlike the majority—there is also something about an extensive sexual past that is of value, perhaps sexual , sexual skill, or an adventurous spirit.
Whatever the presumed benefits of a partner's extensive sexual past may be, women obviously valued them more than men—twice as much, in fact. This suggests that the reason men and women generally prefer less experienced partners may be different. Given the realities of the “ market,” a highly sexually promiscuous man is perhaps seen likely to be not only sexually skilled and adventurous, but also highly attractive, socially admired, and possibly also wealthy. For women, such a man might be deemed a catch, and the primary reason she wouldn’t want him for a long-term partner might be the concern that he wouldn't want to settle down into monogamy or would be incapable of staying faithful. Having the reassurance that he is indeed committed to monogamy—by learning that he’d been celibate for a year while waiting to meet "the one"—allowed fully 1 in 3 female participants to view his past as an asset.
For men, the math is a bit different. While promiscuous women may possess many of the same potentially desirable qualities as promiscuous men might, they do not necessarily need to, the societal assumption being that they can land as many as 50 partners even without conventionally traditionally attractive, charming, socially respected, or wealthy. There is a further (and inaccurate) that, unlike for men, promiscuity is “unnatural” for women, and so promiscuous woman must have some mental- issue driving her promiscuity—such as low , , , or a history of sexual abuse.
Further, female promiscuity (past or present) is more socially stigmatized than male promiscuity, potentially threatening a man’s own reputation should he marry such a partner. Finally, the risk of the formerly promiscuous woman going back to her old ways may be more evolutionarily costly for the man than a similar breach of trust would be for a woman, if it leads him to invest his time and resources in someone else’s genetic offspring.
All in all, the potential negatives of marrying a promiscuous woman—even if she’s no longer promiscuous—would appear to far outweigh the potential positives for participants.
Stereotypes, reputational concerns, and reproductive realities explain why a high “number” is riskier for women than for men who want a long-term relationship—which is the vast majority of people, including most highly promiscuous individuals. The sexual double standard is still with us. And yet, there are at least two pieces of good news for men and women with high numbers.
First, if you eventually do want monogamy, there are about 15% of men and 30% of women who would not only tolerate, but actually prefer a partner who’s had a lot of sexual experience, as long as they can be assured that you won’t be unfaithful to them. And these are only ideal choices in a hypothetical scenario: In real life, other qualities a person has might compensate for an apparently less-than-ideal high number. In other words, there’s a pretty good chance that some (many?) of those 60-80% who would ideally prefer a less promiscuous partner would nonetheless happily date or marry a more promiscuous one if other things work out (as portrayed in movies like Trainwreck).
Second, if you want long-term love but you also like your casual sex, you can have your cake and eat it too. You may not be most people’s cup of tea, but there is a nontrivial percentage of people for whom you are exactly what they are looking for. There are people who want to date and marry you not despite your promiscuity, but because of it. (Six percent may not sound like a lot of people, but it actually is. Consider: About six percent of Americans identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.) So if casual sex is something you love and don't want to give up, make sure you look for love among this six percent. As one of my favorite sex educators, Reid Mihalko, says: "Date your own species."
[This study comes with all the usual caveats as most studies in sex research—a relatively small and nonrepresentative sample, potential biases due to self-reporting, a hypothetical scenario that may play out very differently in real life, etc. So take the findings with the usual grain of salt.]
Have a casual or group sex story to share with the world? That's what the Casual Sex Project is for.
Want more sex education and sex research news? Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook as @DrZhana, or watch my daily sex educational live video streaming broadcasts on Periscope. You can also check out my website: drzhana.com.
Reference
Jones, D. N. (2016). The ‘Chasing Amy’ bias in past sexual experiences: Men can change, women cannot. Sexuality & Culture, 20, 24-37. doi:10.1007/s12119-015-9307-0 |
Federal Judge Vaughn R. Walker on Wednesday found California’s ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. In his decision, the George H.W. Bush appointee wrote: “Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.”
The immediate impact of Judge Walker’s decision appears limited to California, although there are national implications.
Ted Olson and David Boies, one-time rivals in the Bush v. Gore case, went to trial as allies in challenging Prop. 8 with a clear eye on the U.S. Supreme Court, but they still have to make their way through the appeals process.
Incidentally, if the Supreme Court ends up deciding the question of same-sex marriage based on this case, then the historic decision will keep the name Perry v. Schwarzenegger.
Here’s an important chunk from the judge’s decision (the full decision is embedded below):
Plaintiffs seek to have the state recognize their committed relationships, and plaintiffs’ relationships are consistent with the core of the history, tradition and practice of marriage in the United States. Perry and Stier seek to be spouses; they seek the mutual obligation and honor that attend marriage, FF52. Zarrillo and Katami seek recognition from the state that their union is “a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.” Griswold, 381 US at 486. Plaintiffs’ unions encompass the historical purpose and form of marriage. Only the plaintiffs’ genders relative to one another prevent California from giving their relationships due recognition. Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy — namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages.
Essentially, people have a fundamental right to marry, and Prop. 8 denies that right on the basis of gender. The law is much more concerned with gender discrimination than sexual orientation discrimination — by orders of magnitude — so it’s a boon to same-sex marriage advocates that the judge accepts and supports this view in his decision.
Actually, Walker goes even further in places. The judge wrote, essentially, that even if he found gays to be in the least protected class of people where discrimination is concerned, Prop. 8 doesn’t work. But he thinks gays actually belong in the most protected class. — PZS
Los Angeles Times: U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker said Proposition 8, passed by voters in November 2008, violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice.. His ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Plaintiffs challenge Proposition 8 under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the judge wrote. “Each challenge is independently meritorious, as Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.” Read more
Prop 8 Ruling FINAL |
The world reacted with shock, awe and no small measure of disbelief as voters made Donald Trump the next president of the United States, electing a populist firebrand who has promised sweeping changes to American policy.
CNN called the race for Trump shortly before 3:00 am ET on Wednesday, and reaction from international media was swift.
"TRUMPLAND," blared the website of the Daily Mail, which described the race as the "most extraordinary presidential campaign in modern history." The Guardian, another U.K. paper, simply said: "Trump victory stuns world."
In Mexico, media outlets were focused on a sharp drop in the value of the peso to an all-time low. "Dollar breaks barrier," read the lead headline on El Sol de Mexico, a leading newspaper in the nation's capital.
Related: Global markets tank as U.S. election results shock
The Manila Bulletin, a newspaper in the Philippines, filled its website's latest news section with U.S. election dispatches. "Some Americans look to Canada, New Zealand as Trump lead grows," read one wire service story featured by the paper's editors.
Indian news anchor Rajdeep Sardesai called it the "election to beat all elections" and a "miracle."
In Europe, many newspapers were even more direct: "United States fears total paralysis," said a headline in Spain's El Pais.
Related: Live election results and coverage
The Economist, a British publication that often trumpets its fondness for the U.S., described Tuesday evening as "Fright night." Prior to Election Day, it had published a strident editorial that warned Americans against voting for Trump.
"His experience, temperament and character make him horribly unsuited to being the head of state of the nation that the rest of the democratic world looks to for leadership," it said.
Global Times, a newspaper backed by China's ruling Communist Party, described Trump's victory in equally stark terms.
"Trump's win renders a big psychological shock, delivering a heavy blow on core political pillars in the U.S.," the paper said. "It makes people feel that the American political framework and foundations are broken."
-- Rishi Iyengar, Serena Dong and Steve George contributed reporting. |
Collaboration Beats Smarts In Group Problem Solving
Everywhere you look, from business to science to government, teams of people are set to work solving problems. You might think the trick to getting the smartest team would be to get the smartest people together, but a new study says that might not always be right.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that collaborative groups who conversed easily with equal participation were more efficient at completing sets of given tasks -- and produced better results -- than groups dominated by individuals.
Anita Woolley, an assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory, has been studying what it means to say a group is "intelligent." So she created teams of two to five people, drawn from 700 volunteers, and asked the teams to solve various kinds of problems.
"We had some brainstorming tasks, where the idea is to get as many ideas and as creative ideas as possible," she said. The teams performed other tasks where there was only one right answer, and still others where the teams had to come up with innovative solutions to a problem.
Here's an excerpt from one group's conversation:
Participant 1 (male): The problem is that we have to decide whether this star basketball player should be kept on the team despite cheating on the exam, right?
Participant 2 (female): Yeah, I think they're trying to see how we'll punish him.
Participant 3 (female): It looks like keeping a player like that would mean violating school policies.
Participant 1: Yeah, I would keep him out of the next game, unless it's a playoff. At the very minimum.
Participant 2: Yeah, I think that's the best option. He deserves at least that.
The participants in this group took turns discussing the problem, coming up with various angles and issues.
Another group attacked the same problem differently:
Participant 1 (male): I say he should not be allowed to play.
Participant 2 (female): He should not be allowed to play for the semester, at least.
Participant 3 (female): Well ...
Participant 1: I think he should not be allowed to play for his college career at all. It looks like it may just be a status thing. He just cheated on an exam. He should at least have been creative and tried to cheat effectively or something. I hate people who are treated nicely for athletics. They're just stupid.
No one else in the second group got a word in, and there were no alternatives to what the one noisy participant was proposing.
Woolley says this was an example of a moral reasoning task. She says that to do well, a group needed to consider multiple perspectives.
"In groups where the conversation was more evenly distributed, where you had better participation -- and more equal participation among all of the group members -- the groups were more collectively intelligent," Woolley says.
Not only was it annoying, but groups where one person dominated tended not to come up with as balanced and thoughtful a result -- it wasn't as intelligent as the first group's effort. When Woolley looked for the qualities that made successful groups successful, she found that the individual intelligence of group members was unrelated to the outcome.
"A few things that were related however, were surprising," Woolley says. "One was the proportion of females in the group."
As she reports in the journal Science, the more females, the higher the group intelligence, although Woolley thinks it's not so much gender as a quality of social sensitivity that women on average have more of than men.
Thomas Malone, one of Woolley's collaborators and head of the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT, hopes this research will lead to great things.
"Imagine you could go to a top management team in a company and give them a collective intelligence test that would then predict how well that team would respond to a very wide range of challenges they might face," Malone says. That could be something a board of directors might be very interested to learn.
But Steve Kozlowski, a psychologist at Michigan State University, says such a test is a ways off. He says that Woolley's study only looked at a small set of tasks.
"And it's really very, very difficult to generalize from the small set of tasks that were examined in these studies, using college students, ad hoc teams and very short periods of measurement," he says.
He's also not convinced that Woolley and her colleagues are measuring intelligence. He says they're just measuring how well groups do on a limited number of problems.
"Likening it to intelligence -- I wouldn't call it controversial, I just don't see any evidence to support it," Kozlowski says.
Still, he says there may well be such a thing as collective intelligence, but he thinks it will take a lot more work to define it. |
Dublin Airport has had its fair share of mysterious finds
A headstone with the inscription "You will never be forgotten", a toilet seat and cistern, and a live turtle are among the more bizarre items left behind by passengers at Dublin Airport.
Despite the epitaph "you will always be remembered, never forgotten", the owner of the headstone seemingly forgot all about their dearly departed and misplaced the memorial at the drop-off point to the departures area at Terminal One a few years ago, according to DAA spokeswoman Audrey O'Hagan.
A toilet seat and cistern were also found abandoned at the departures entrance in the airport.
A life-size mannequin, human ashes, false teeth and a glass eye were also items consigned to the airport's lost and found section, where they can be reclaimed within a year.
A large of number of abandoned crutches and wheelchairs have also wound up in the lost and found, leading airport staff to wonder whether "some miraculous recoveries have taken place within the terminals", according to Ms O'Hagan.
Boulder
The DAA's listing of items recently left and available for collection for a limited time also raise some interesting questions about who has been passing through the gates.
A "brown envelope" was left behind by a passenger on July 14, while a set of "cast iron dungeon keys" was found on June 11.
One passenger attempted to transport a large boulder from an Irish beach as a souvenir for their garden, even though it weighed a hefty 15kgs and could have been used as a weapon.
A large anchor chain link was also taken off another passenger for similar reasons, while chainsaws and angle grinders have been consigned to checked-in luggage for security reasons.
While airport staff are used to seeing pretty much everything go through the X-ray scanner, they were taken aback when a passenger tried to take a kitchen sink in their hand luggage, Ms O'Hagan said.
A passenger tried to get on a flight with a live turtle in their pocket, finally handing it back unharmed to a family member who was not flying. |
Brandon Wade promises ‘dangling a carrot’ is the way to go (Picture: Carrot Dating)
A controversial new dating app that encourages men to offer women gifts to go on dates with them has been slammed as sexist.
Carrot Dating works like many other dating apps by putting you in contact with prospective partners.
But instead of just facilitating an online introduction it also allows you to dangle a financial carrot at females you like the look of, in the hopes they will bite and fall into your arms.
Gifts (or bribes) such as plastic surgery and jewellery are suggested.
‘Give a dog a bone, and it will obey. Give a woman a present and she’ll… ‘ an official press release reads.
The new app has been slammed as sexist (Picture: Carrot Dating)
‘Women have all the power in the online dating world: they receive countless messages from suitors, while men struggle for even a single reply.
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‘But by “dangling” the right “carrot” in front of beautiful girls, suitors can convince anyone to say “yes” to a first date.’
Unsurprisingly not everyone is happy with the website from MIT graduate Brandon Wade, who also founded SeekingArrangement.com – a site that hoped to put ‘sugar daddies’ in contact with younger women.
Business Insider’s Christina Sterbenz said the new venture could be considered prostitution and anyone taking advantage of it was heading for an emotional fall.
‘Aside from being blatantly sexist, Wade’s app clearly won’t “build the chemistry needed to fall in love” as promised in the press kit,’ she wrote. |
Former English footballer Howard Gayle wants no parts of the oppressive, unjust system that was British colonialism.
Gayle, who became Liverpool’s first Black soccer player in 1977, recently declined a nomination for a British state honor known as the Member of the British Empire, or MBE. The now 58-year-old said accepting such an award would basically be a slap in the face to his Black ancestors who suffered abuse and enslavement at the hands of the British Empire.
“My ancestors would be turning in their graves after how empire and colonialism had enslaved them,” Gayle said.
The ex-footballer posted the difficult decision on his Facebook page Thursday, citing that his work with the U.K.-based charity, Show Racism a Red Card, is likely what earned him the nomination. According to TeleSUR, the anti-racism organization uses well-known soccer players to help educate and mobilize the younger generation against racism.
“This is a decision that I have had to make and there will be others who may feel different and would enjoy the attraction of being a Member of the British Empire and those three letters after their name,” Gayle wrote. “But I feel that it would be a betrayal to all of the Africans who have lost their lives, or who have suffered as a result of empire.”
The Toxteth-born athlete joined the youth ranks of the Liverpool Football Club back in 1974 and later signed a professional contract with the team in 1977. According to The Guardian, Gayle also played for the Blackburn Rovers, Fulham, Birmingham City, Halifax Town, Sunderland, Newcastle United, and Stoke City. He even went on to lead England to a victory in the 1984 UEFA European Under-21 Championship.
In addition, Gayle’s rise to fame as Liverpool’s first Black player was largely seen as a victory for the city’s Black community.
“It was constantly in the press that I was the first black player to play for Liverpool,” the former soccer star told Liverpool fan site This is Anfield, back in 2012. “It was a landmark as far as Black people were concerned, and I was proud to represent the Black community of Liverpool.”
Due to Britain’s dark history of colonialism, Gayle isn’t the first to have declined an honor from the MBE. According to TeleSUR, British-Jamaican writer Benjamin Zephaniah also refused the award in the name of anti-colonialism in 2003.
Millions have been oppressed by the British empire, including countries several Caribbean nations like Jamaica, India, and Australia, the news site reports.
Despite its forceful domination of foreign countries, many Brits still hold a favorable view of the empire and its past practice of colonialism — which included the genocide, slavery, and massacres of people of color. Atlanta Black Star cited a 2016 poll by YouGov, which found that 44 percent of British people thought the nation’s history of colonialism was a proud one. In contrast, 19 percent of respondents said the British Empire was bad, while 21 percent believed historic colonialism was regrettable. |
This is the biggest steaming pile of leftwing bullshit you will read today:
“Network analysis shows that the huge, established corporate media outlets, ranging from the New York Times and Washington Post to CNN, inhabit an almost completely separate world from the news consumed by rightwing voters. The sun of this “alt-right” solar system is Breitbart, around which numerous other paranoia-vendors orbit. … But something massive happened between 2008 and 2017: the ideology of the ruling elite fell apart. They kept the global finance system alive with $12tn of printed money and the philosophy of “extend and pretend”. But it’s hard to keep an ideology alive that way. People’s brains demand coherence – and what the liberal conservatism of the Wall Street Journal could not provide, the racist xenophobia of Breitbart did. We have to learn something profound from this. In an ideological crisis, facts alone do not win arguments: narratives do. The clearest difference between the liberal-democratic newspapers – including this one – and those of the right is that the former have no overarching narrative. They espouse a series of good causes. They partake in stolid investigations hidebound by numerous self-imposed rules, as a result of which nobody gets busted. Having bought the ideological self-justification that “I just report the truth”, many journalists and editors are clueless as to why this “truth” is now being walloped by outright lies. …”
Are you kidding me?
Here’s a recent headline from yesterday’s edition of The New York Times: White Supremacists Step Up Recruiting on Campus, Report Says.
“The three episodes are among more than 100 since the school year started in September that the Anti-Defamation League lists in a new report tracking efforts by white supremacists to recruit students on college campuses. Most of the events — 65 of them — have occurred since January, the report found. Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a telephone interview on Monday that hate groups have increased their presence at colleges through visits, rallies, speeches and alt-right online spaces. However, the seemingly antiquated approach of distributing fliers, often touting messages of white supremacy, has been a focus for increasing their physical presence on campuses. … The report identified several groups, including Identity Evropa, American Vanguard and American Renaissance, that have made concerted efforts to distribute fliers on campuses. Identity Evropa and American Vanguard were both founded in 2016, it said. Mr. Greenblatt said the groups were emboldened by a sort of middle-of-the-road acceptance in recent months. “In a political environment where white supremacists have felt more welcome than any time in recent memory, we saw them move from their margins to the mainstream,” Mr. Greenblatt said. …”
In this case, a black journalist wrote a story for the Jewish-owned The New York Times about two White identitarian groups who are aggressively organizing on college campuses. The black journalist interviews ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt and parrots every aspect of his narrative.
The White identitarian groups are characterized by the ADL as “white supremacists” and “hate groups” who are terrorizing “marginalized communities” by distributing fliers. They are said to be moving “from the margins to the mainstream.” What exactly does it mean to be “mainstream” on an American college campus? In practice, it means that pro-White and pro-Western student organizations are by definition illegitimate while Jewish and black student organizations are legitimate.
Take a look at Tamara Best’s Twitter feed:
On this month's reading list: "The Original Black Elite" by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor. What are y'all reading right now? — Tamara Best (@_tamarabest) February 1, 2017
Watching Beyoncé lose the album of the year was a reminder of realities that many creatives of color know all too well. — Tamara Best (@_tamarabest) February 13, 2017
Got a chance to talk black joy, activism and quote the classic song "Joy and Pain." Win. https://t.co/fMlw94fgkc — Tamara Best (@_tamarabest) February 19, 2017
The only objection The New York Times has to Richard Spencer, Identity Evropa and American Vanguard is that they are White. If they were black activists who were organizing to advance black interests, they would be fine. Black identitarians are mainstream enough to write for The New York Times. |
Following a string of innovative singles, which were all so very different from one another, The Beatles changed direction yet again. For their first single release of 1968 they went back to their roots for ‘Lady Madonna’. In a 1994 interview Paul admitted, “‘Lady Madonna’ was me, sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing … It reminded me of Fats Domino for some reason, so I started singing a Fats Domino impression. It took my other voice to a very odd place.”
Recorded on two separate days at the beginning of February 1968, the session had been somewhat hastily arranged. The Beatles were about to embark on their trip to Rishikesh in India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram.
On Saturday 3 February, they put down the basic rhythm track and returned to Abbey Road three days later for vocal overdubs and some additional piano parts, at which point It was decided that the track would really benefit from some added brass. Late that Tuesday afternoon, frantic phone calls from Laurie Gold, a session ‘fixer’ employed by EMI, brought four saxophonists hot-foot to the studio. Among them was Ronnie Scott, whose famous Soho jazz club is still an institution, and Harry Klein, a veteran of the big-band scene.
Released in the UK on 15 March and three days later in the US, a little over a month after it was recorded, ‘Lady Madonna’ topped the UK charts for two weeks, but only made No.4 in America.
George and John were to leave for India on 15 February with Paul and Ringo following four days later, and the four would be out of the country for several months. Given these circumstances, the need for a promo film to promote their new single was pressing so the band found themselves back at Abbey Road on Sunday 11 February for a studio shoot, under the auspices of the newly formed Apple Films Ltd.
When the final footage was edited, a short section of Paul leaving Chappell Studios with Cilla Black – the two had been working on her single ‘Step Inside Love’ – was added, along with some inserts of Paul at the piano. Although this footage was originally thought to date from November 1967, newly discovered documentation suggests that it was filmed in February 1968, just prior to Paul flying to India.
While at Abbey Road filming their new promo, the band were actually recording another song, ‘Hey Bulldog’, that was to be used in the Yellow Submarine movie but in the end it featured only in the British version of the film.
Listen to ‘Lady Madonna’ and other classic Beatles tracks on The Beatles Essentials playlist. |
Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino the former and possibly current boss of the Philadelphia Mafia returned to Philly recently for a probation revocation hearing leaving many wondering what is Joey’s current status when comes to La Cosa Nostra in Philly. Since his release from prison Joey has been seemingly living the good life down in Boca Raton, Florida and when asked has maintained that he has given up on the mob and is out. But many people from law enforcement to mob buffs find it hard to believe that Joey no longer has a hand in things.
“Joey Merlino”
From this recent hearing we know the feds have been keeping a close eye on Merlino since his release and claim he met with fellow Philly mobsters and other criminals in a violation of his probation down in Florida. Many believe this is yet another sign that Joey is still the current boss of the Philly mafia running things through his close associate and current acting boss Steve Mazzone. He took over as acting boss following the indictments of former boss Joseph Ligambi and most of his administration many of which were convicted.
“Steven Mazzone”
But the John Gotti of Passyunk Avenue says after doing 14 years behind bars and now on other side of 50 says he has no desire to go back. He and his lawyer say he has a fresh start down in Florida and although he misses his family has no plans to return to Philly. It seems like he is on the verge of opening up a restaurant down in Boca with some investors if he beats the parole revocation case back in Philly.
“Upcoming Merlino Restaurant in Boca”
A secretly taped conversation the feds have from back in 2010 between Joseph Ligambi , Philly mob capo Joseph “Scoops” Licata, and others in which Joey is possibly mentioned as still being the actual boss of the mafia in Philadelphia is another smoking gun for many. Many believe including some in law enforcement that Ligambi was simply handing day to day operations acting as boss for Merlino while he was away. So what do you think is Joey Merlino still the boss of the Philly mob ?
Is Joey Merlino still the boss of the Philly Mafia ? Yes (41%, 67 Votes)
Probably (33%, 54 Votes)
No (15%, 25 Votes)
Probably Not (11%, 18 Votes) Total Voters: 164
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Did you miss this Kickstarter campaign? Please check our website for how you can pre-order your Dive Computer Buddy!
Overview
Hello Kickstarters, We are back!
We are the DiveNav team.
Last spring we brought you bluebuddy - the wireless data logger for scuba divers. Then, at the end of the summer, we brought you Nitroxbuddy - the world first Smartphone Oxygen Analyzer for scuba divers.
Both projects were successful and the resulting products are now available at your local dive store or they can be purchased directly from our online store.
We REALLY like the Kickstarter community :-)
In the past 12 months we received several requests from fellow scuba divers asking basically two things: Can you design something to connect my dive computer to a tablet or a smartphone, such as an iPad or an iPhone? And, can I keep using my preferred third party dive log App?
We have been listening. And now we are bringing to you Dive Computer Buddy.
Product Description
Dive Computer Buddy (aka DCbuddy) is a wireless accessory for scuba divers that allows a diver to retrieve logs from his/her dive computer using a tablet and/or a smartphone.
Dive Computer Buddy uses Bluetooth 4.0 low energy technology and it is powered by a user replaceable CR2032 battery that should last for almost one year.
Dive Computer Buddy connects to a model-specific dive computer using a custom, model-specific cable or an infrared link. See Rewards section for more info.
Dive Computer Buddy can be used with any tablet or smartphone that supports Bluetooth 4.0 low energy technology and it is equipped with our divePAL App (or any third party diving App compatible with Dive Computer Buddy). See App sections for more info.
Product Benefits
Dive Computer Buddy's primary benefit is to make it easy and fun for you to log and share your dive memories as soon as you get out of the water:
Connect DCbuddy to your model-specific dive computer.
Launch the divePAL App (or any third party App compatible with DCbuddy).
Retrieve dive profile.
Add info to the log.
Share it with your friends.
If you are a dive instructor you could use DCbuddy as a teaching aid. Equip each one of your students with a dive computer supported by DCbuddy, then, at the end of a dive, review their dive profile with them right away and use it to point out any area that might need improvements, such as a better buoyancy control or a slower ascent rate.
Apps and supported model-specific Dive Computers
On the App front, our plan is to integrate support for DCbuddy and several families of dive computers into our existing divePAL App.
Please note that divePAL is already available for iPad, iPhones and Android smartphones. Additionally we have already included in divePAL support for Bluetooth 4.0 le devices such as our bluebuddy wireless data logger.
We expect to release versions of divePAL that support model-specific dive computers as per following schedule:
June 2014:
Suunto Cobra family (Cobra, Cobra 3, HelO2, Vyper, Vyper Air, and Zoop).
Suunto D family (D4, D6, D9, D4i, D6i, D9Tx and Dx).
July 2014:
Aeris Atmos family (XR2, Atmos AI, Elite T3, A300, A300 AI and A300XT)
Aeris Manta family ( Manta and Epic)
Oceanic Geo family (Geo, Geo 2, Atom 2 and Atom 3)
Oceanic Veo family (Veo180, Veo180Nx, Veo 2, Veo 3, Veo 250, VT3, VT4, Pro Plus 2 and Pro Plus 3)
Oceanic OC family (OC1, OCS and OCi)
Sherwood Amphos family (Amphos and Amphos Air)
Sherwood Wisdom family (Wisdom 2 and Wisdom 3)
Tusa Zen family (Zen and Zen Air)
August 2014:
Mares Puck family (Puck, Puck Air and Puck Pro)
September 2014:
Cressi Leonardo family (Leonardo and Giotto)
ScubaPro family (Galileo Sol, Galileo Luna, Aladin 2G, Aladin Square, Meridian and Chromis)
SubGear family (XP10 and XP-H).
Additionally, we plan to license our DCbuddy APIs to selected third party developers of diving log Apps so they can integrate support for our DCbuddy device into their own branded products.
During the Kickstarter campaign we have entered into agreements with 2 well known developers: More Mobile Software; the developer of the Dive Log App for iOS devices and the Dive Log DT / Dive Log Manager programs for MacOS devices and Mint Software, the developer of the well known MacDive 2 digital dive log for Mac OS X.
Please check directly with individual third party developers on their plans to support DCbuddy and their schedule.
Project Status
We started working on this project almost one year ago. We had a proof of concept last summer and we made several demonstrations at DEMA 2013 last November in Orlando.
After DEMA we moved forward with the productization phase and we now have several functional prototypes of the circuit board and its related firmware, 3D printed prototypes of the housing and several type of family-specific interface cables.
We also have developed a test App that allows us to extract relevant information from each model-specific dive computer we plan to support.
Manufacturing Plan
Upon the successful completion of the Kickstarter campaign, we will place production orders for enough kits to accommodate Kickstarter backers. We are also planning to launch a second, and larger, production lot to support our market launch. After that, we will progressively increase manufacturing volumes based on market demand.
Rewards
LIKE: $1 Reward - We like You too!
LIKE LIKE: $5 Reward - Same as above plus we will mention your name on our website.
DCBUDDY - Do It Yourself: $70 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and a male/female couple 2.5 mm audio jack connectors so you can create your own interface cable by modifying an existing dive computer download cable. Please note that you should select this reward ONLY if: a) you know how to solder, and b) you already have a download cable for any of the following dive computers: Aeris A300, A300AI, A300XT, Atmos AI, XR2 or Elite T3, Oceanic Veo180, Veo180Nx, Veo 250, Veo 2, Veo 3, VT3, VT4, OC1, OCS, OCi, Pro Plus 2 or Pro Plus 3, Sherwood Wisdom 2 or Wisdom 3, Suunto D4, D4i, D6, D6i, D9, D9Tx, DX. We will provide detailed instruction on how to modify and test the interface cable. Please note that you will have to modify the cable yourself and at your own risk. Please note that modifying the cable might void your dive computer warranty. Please check with the manufacturer of your dive computer. Also, please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported. Please check out this video for more info on this reward:
DCBUDDY - Suunto Cobra family: $90 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and a custom interface cable for the Suunto Cobra family of supported dive computers (Cobra, Cobra 3, HelO2, Vyper, Vyper Air, and Zoop). Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.
DCBUDDY - Suunto D family: $90 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and a custom interface cable for the Suunto D family of supported dive computers (D4, D6, D9, D4i, D6i, D9Tx and Dx). Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.
DCBUDDY - Oceanic Veo family: $90 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and an interface cable for the Oceanic Veo family of supported dive computers (Veo 2, Veo 3, Veo180, Veo180Nx,Veo 250, VT3, VT4, Pro Plus 2 and Pro Plus 3). This reward can also be used with the following dive computers: Aeris XR2, Atmos AI, Elite T3, A300, A300 AI and A300XT and Sherwood Wisdom 2 and Wisdom 3.Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.
DCBUDDY - Oceanic Geo family: $90 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and an interface cable for the Oceanic Geo family of supported dive computers (Geo, Geo 2, Atom 2 and Atom 3). This reward can also be used with the following dive computers: Aeris Manta and Epic, Sherwood Amphos and Amphos Air. Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.
DCBUDDY - Oceanic OC family: $90 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and an interface cable for the Oceanic OC family of supported dive computers (OC1, OCS and OCi). Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.
DCBUDDY - Mares Puck family: $95 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and an interface cable for the Mares Puck family of supported dive computers (Puck, Puck Air and Puck Pro). Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.
DCBUDDY - IR family: $100 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and a special Infrared interface that supports dive computers equipped with IR (such as Cressi Leonardo and Giotto, ScubaPro Galileo Sol, Luna and Aladin 2G, and SubGear XP10). Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.
DCBUDDY - Developer Package: $1,500 Reward - This reward is for selected App developers that would like to add support for Dive Computer Buddy to their diving apps.This reward includes one basic unit (in April) and one IR unit (in August), several interface cables (as they become available), detailed information on how to program our Dive Computer Buddy device and 10 hours of technical support. ALL GONE!!! |
Out of every four black boys in California classrooms, three failed to meet reading and writing standards on the most recent round of testing, according to data from the state Department of Education (DOE).
The state DOE administered the tests in the fall of 2016, but released the data at the end of May, after it was analyzed by CALmatters, a non-profit journalism venture dedicated to exploring state policies and politics. Over 50 percent of these boys scored in the lowest category on the test’s English section, trailing far behind their female classmates. The disparity reflects a widening gender gap in literacy scores across ethnic groups.
California published separate figures on the performance of various ethnic and economic groups, but did not offer a more detailed breakdown of how boys and girls perform within those groups, with state officials claiming that sorting the data is costly and time consuming. This recent data provides rare insight into how gender interacts with race and class in mastering basic literacy skills.
Female students hold a sizable lead over their male classmates in language arts. The gap spans all grade levels, and a higher family income does not appear to have an effect. The gap is also not unique to California, given that girls out-read boys in almost every country and at every age.
“I wouldn’t put this in the same category of severity or concern as other achievement gaps,” Tom Loveless, an education researcher for the Brookings Institution, said Thursday. “But there needs to be greater awareness of this.”
As early as fourth grade, roughly 80 percent of black boys failed to meet state reading standards. Of all ethnic groups for which data exists, black boys trailed black girls by the widest margin.
“Part of this may be structural, in having texts that aren’t relevant to the experiences and legacy of African-American boys,” said Chris Chatmon, executive director of the African-American Male Achievement program at the Oakland Unified School District. “When a lot of the curriculum you have access to isn’t familiar, or doesn’t acknowledge your past or your present, you have a tendency not to be engaged with it or want to read it.”
One longstanding explanation holds that there is some biological difference in development between boys and girls. A second circle of thought maintains that cultural norms involving masculinity and cultural cues depict reading and writing as a feminine activity.
Others point to a combination of insufficient recess time to allow boys to blow off steam, reading materials unrelated to male interests and a largely female teaching workforce.
Given that the gap persists in foreign education systems that are radically different from ours, researches have found no conclusive answer.
Follow Grace on Twitter.
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Take virtually any modern day SSD and measure how long it takes to launch a single application. You’ll usually notice a big advantage over a hard drive, but you’ll rarely find a difference between two different SSDs. Present day desktop usage models aren’t able to stress the performance high end SSDs are able to deliver. What differentiates one drive from another is really performance in heavy multitasking scenarios or short bursts of heavy IO. Eventually this will change as the SSD install base increases and developers can use the additional IO performance to enable new applications.
In the enterprise market however, the workload is already there. The faster the SSD, the more users you can throw at a single server or SAN. There are effectively no limits to the IO performance needed in the high end workstation and server markets.
These markets are used to throwing tens if not hundreds of physical disks at a problem. Even our upcoming server upgrade uses no less than fifty two SSDs across our entire network, and we’re small beans in the grand scheme of things.
The appetite for performance is so great that many enterprise customers are finding the limits of SATA unacceptable. While we’re transitioning to 6Gbps SATA/SAS, for many enterprise workloads that’s not enough. Answering the call many manufacturers have designed PCIe based SSDs that do away with SATA as a final drive interface. The designs can be as simple as a bunch of SATA based devices paired with a PCIe RAID controller on a single card, to native PCIe controllers.
The OCZ RevoDrive, two SF-1200 controllers in RAID on a PCIe card
OCZ has been toying in this market for a while. The zDrive took four Indilinx controllers and put them behind a RAID controller on a PCIe card. The more recent RevoDrive took two SandForce controllers and did the same. The RevoDrive 2 doubles the controller count to four.
Earlier this year OCZ announced its intention to bring a new high speed SSD interface to the market. Frustrated with the slow progress of SATA interface speeds, OCZ wanted to introduce an interface that would allow greater performance scaling today. Dubbed the High Speed Data Link (HSDL), OCZ’s new interface delivers 2 - 4GB/s (that’s right, gigabytes) of aggregate bandwidth to a single SSD. It’s an absolutely absurd amount of bandwidth, definitely more than a single controller can feed today - which is why the first SSD to support it will be a multi-controller device with internal RAID.
Instead of relying on a SATA controller on your motherboard, HSDL SSDs feature a 4-lane PCIe SATA controller on the drive itself. HSDL is essentially a PCIe cable standard that uses a standard SAS cable to carry a 4 PCIe lanes between a SSD and your motherboard. On the system side you’ll just need a dumb card with some amount of logic to grab the cable and fan the signals out to a PCIe slot.
The first SSD to use HSDL is the OCZ IBIS. As the spiritual successor to the Colossus, the IBIS incorporates four SandForce SF-1200 controllers in a single 3.5” chassis. The four controllers sit behind an internal Silicon Image 3124 RAID controller. This is the same controller used in the RevoDrive which is natively a PCI-X controller, picked to save cost. The 1GB/s of bandwidth you get from the PCI-X controller is routed to a Pericom PCIe x4 switch. The four PCIe lanes stemming from the switch are sent over the HSDL cable to the receiving card on the motherboard. The signal is then grabbed by a chip on the card and passed through to the PCIe bus. Minus the cable, this is basically a RevoDrive inside an aluminum housing. It's a not-very-elegant solution that works, but the real appeal would be controller manufacturers and vendors designing native PCIe-to-HSDL controllers.
OCZ is also bringing to market a 4-port HSDL card with a RAID controller on board ($69 MSRP). You’ll be able to raid four IBIS drives together on a PCIe x16 card for an absolutely ridiculous amount of bandwidth. The attainable bandwidth ultimately boils down to the controller and design used on the 4-port card however. I'm still trying to get my hands on one to find out for myself. |
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will begin building prototypes for President Trump's proposed wall along the Mexican border this summer, authorities said on Tuesday.
Agency officials said at a news briefing that the department is ready to begin testing designs on land that is already owned by the government. Four to eight designs will be built and tested, but officials didn't say when the process would actually begin.
“We own that land, have access to it and it’s a good place to start testing in a real-world environment,” acting deputy commissioner Ronald D. Vitiello told reporters at the briefing.
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Funding for Trump's border wall was not included in the budget submitted by the White House for fiscal year 2018, but DHS has allocated $20 million from other programs to pay for the prototypes.
Officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection told The Washington Post that they have received "hundreds" of designs for the border wall, but the agency has yet to choose vendors.
Designs for the wall should be at least 18 feet high and have features to prevent climbing over and tunneling beneath the structure, and vendors are instructed to make the designs "aesthetically pleasing" on the U.S. side. |
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany’s spy chief has warned that Russia should be seen as a “potential danger” rather than as a partner in building European security and said its big military exercise in summer showed an alarmingly high level of modernization in its armed forces.
Bruno Kahl, head of BND foreign intelligence, made his remarks in a speech at an event hosted by the Hanns Seidel Foundation think-tank in Munich on Monday. An audiofile of the speech was heard by Reuters on Wednesday.
Kahl’s remarks come after U.S. intelligence accusations that Moscow sought to interfere in the U.S. elections in January and followed similar charges by Spanish ministers who say Russian-based groups used social media to promote Catalonia’s independence referendum and destabilize Spain.
Moscow denies interfering in any foreign elections and accuses the West of a campaign to discredit Russia.
Kahl said it was important for Germany, the U.S.-led NATO alliance and the European Union to keep a close eye on Russian military development.
He said Russia’s large-scale Zapad exercise in summer had shown it was “very, very close” to meeting its target of modernizing 70 percent of its armed forces by 2020.
“We must stay alert. Peace in Europe is no longer a guaranteed fact,” he said.
Russia’s goal included “weakening the EU, pushing back the USA, and in particular driving a wedge between the two. That means, instead of a partner for European security, we have in Russia a potential danger,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was determined to prevent the eastward spread of European values to include Ukraine which, together with Georgia, had no chance of becoming members of NATO as long as Putin’s “world view” prevailed in Moscow,” he said.
The threat to Germany’s security had increased with Moscow’s stationing of short-range missiles in its Kaliningrad enclave, he said.
“The world player Russia is back. It will remain an uncomfortable power, and the West must see that realistically,” he said, though it was important to maintain some dialogue with Moscow despite its assertive actions. |
It can be a challenge to stand out in the very crowded ethnic restaurant market of Lakewood, let alone Cleveland. When it comes to Thai food alone there are three separate options within a single half-mile stretch of Madison Avenue. Open just under a year, Thai Thai has indeed managed not only to stand out but rise like cream to the top of the takeout menu pile for folks tired of begging owners to make their food "Thai spicy."
Thai Thai offers the perfect illustration of how less is more: less in terms of the space, less in terms of the design, and less in terms of the menu. Like a '60s-era cafe racer, this nimble eatery is stripped down to its bare essentials. That's precisely what happens when you hand the keys over to the next generation and let them do their thing.
Kiwi and brother Santi Wongpeng grew up in a restaurant family. Their parents opened and operated the original Thai Hut down the street (now run by different owners) before moving on to the Asian Grille, which they operated for about eight years until the neighborhood no longer provided them with the level of business required to sustain it. At the urging of the kids, the family came out of retirement.
"This restaurant was actually my idea," Kiwi says. "Everybody here does Thai food for Americans. That's not Thai food to me. I said, 'Why don't we do something new, something more authentic, something like street food.'"
Thai Thai is the kind of joint you'll drive right by, a nondescript storefront in a sea of nondescript storefronts. There are just 15 seats in the diminutive space, and a handful of those are simply stools at a wall-facing counter. In place of the customary pages-long laminated menu filled with dozens of dishes that everybody ignores in favor of pad Thai, this spot hands over a tidy one-sheet affixed to a clipboard. It's not just the trimmed-down quantity of offerings that stands out; it's the nature of those dishes.
Devised for the Instagram generation, Thai Thai offers guests a greatest hits-style mix of dishes that are both foreign and familiar, but always memorable. Items are annotated by Kiwi with emoji-era clips like "Try me!" and "Very tasty!" and "Most popular street dish!"
"When we were making the menu, I kind of thought back to my memories of when I was young and living in Thailand," Kiwi explains. "I thought about all the different street foods they served and we kind of mixed them together."
I've never been to Chiang Mai, but thanks to the Wongpengs I've tasted that city's signature sausage, sold at countless food stalls and markets throughout the city. The chubby housemade links ($5.50) are juicy and pungent, with floral kicks of lemongrass. Likewise, gai yang, Thai-style grilled chicken, is as ubiquitous a dish as they come on the streets of Bangkok. At Thai Thai, marinated chicken ($5) is skewered, grilled to order, and served charred and juicy. Pair that dish with some sticky rice ($5) and som tum ($7.95) and you're halfway to earning your Thai citizenship. Som tum, for the uninitiated, is a deceivingly spicy salad composed of shredded green papaya, carrots, green beans and bean sprouts in a tart and blindingly bright citrus dressing.
Thai Thai isn't the only place in town to serve pad krapow ($9.95), sometimes listed on menus as Holy Basil, but it is one of very few that tops the steamed jasmine rice with a runny fried egg, as is customary on the streets of Thailand. The habit-forming minced-meat dish has that textbook layering of sweet, tart and salty, and the standard-issue heat level is "Thai spicy" without the need to sound like a goober when ordering. For those who prefer AARP-level heat, the gentle charms of the coconut-scented massaman curry ($10.95) is like krapow with training wheels.
For those of us, on the other hand, who have no ceiling when it comes to heat, Thai Thai supplies the expected (but annoyingly rare around here) condiment caddy. One, known here simply as "Best," is a bewitching brew of chiles and roasted garlic in a sweet-tart vinegar base. That sauce is engineered to pair with Thai Thai's excellent noodle soups, like the roasted duck ($9.95), a deep, savory broth filled with duck meat, thin noodles and fresh herbs, and the seafood noodle soup ($10.95), which appears hot pink from the addition of homemade fermented bean paste.
Another clue that this is not your grandparent's Thai restaurant: Nearly half of the menu is designated as either V or VG.
"We keep our options open because we know that 40 percent of our customers are vegetarian or vegan," says Kiwi.
I never did end up trying the pad Thai, but I hear it's excellent. |
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These simulated radar graphics are meant to convey a relative sense of timing on when storms may be impacting your location. Please keep in mind these are from one model, and that one model probably doesn’t have it all right. Don’t expect the radar to look exactly like what is depicted – in either locations or exact times. While the line or complex of storms depicted here may be fairly accurate, the location/timing/number of discrete storms ahead of it may not be picked up by any model. That’s why the time window for storms will be rather large. Multiple rounds of storms may impact one location.
At 5 AM the HRRR has multiple discrete/semi-discrete storms underway across the Edwards Plateau into the Hill Country and Central Texas. Some of these will likely be severe with large hail, damaging winds, and a threat for a couple of tornadoes. The atmosphere will become more favorable for severe weather as we go into the night, even though it’s nighttime. Those discrete storms near I-35 are concerning – as the enviornment will be supportive of tornadoes. Storms will also be approaching the D/FW Metroplex further north – where some storms may be capable of producing hail and localized gusty winds.
By 9 AM storm coverage and intensity will likely have increased. Discrete supercells capable of producing tornadoes may be underway in Southeast Texas and the Brazos Valley. Further west, several strong to severe storms should be underway in the Hill Country and Central Texas. Heavy rain and some strong storms will be occuring further north in North Texas and the D/FW Metroplex. Damaging winds, hail, and some tornado threat is the concern with the complex/squall line. Discrete storms ahead of the line – or embedded supercells in the complex – may be capable of producing significant tornadoes. Please don’t let the time of morning fool you, the atmosphere will be very supportive of significant severe weather. Whether or not we have one tornado or many tornadoes will depend on how everything sets up.
By noon multiple supercells may be underway in East Texas into Southeast Texas – with a threat of strong tornadoes. A complex or squall line with widespread damaging wind potential along with hail and tornadoes may be moving into eastern North Texas, extending southward into Central Texas. We’ll likely be quite busy in this timeframe – and again, the atmosphere will be capable of significant severe weather. While this one model isn’t showing much going on around Houston at this point, the atmosphere will be primed for big issues if we get any storms going there.
By 3 PM a squall line with large hail, widespread damaging winds, and possible tornadoes looks to be moving into Southeast Arkansas into East Texas. We’ll still have to watch for discrete storms ahead of that line – and further southwest into Southeast Texas.
The next severe weather outlook from the Storm Prediction Center will be issued around 1 AM Sunday. I wouldn’t be surprised if they extended the level four risk northward a bit. Depending on how things look to come together, a small level 5 (high risk) may be issued at some point. Regardless, tomorrow features a significant severe weather risk. You need to have ways of receiving severe weather warnings, and that doesn’t include outdoor warning sirens. We’ve got an article put together here with tips, including great smartphone apps. |
Japan has a child-kidnapping problem. It’s not strangers snatching the kids on the playground or at the bus stop; the problem is that when a Japanese national divorces a foreigner overseas, he or she can abduct their children and bring them back to Japan, and the law ensures that the parent left behind has no rights to see the children or take them back home. The U.S. State Department reports that there have been over 100 such kidnappings since 1994, but according to a source, the number is closer to 400. Within Japan itself, divorce often means that one parent may have little or no access to the child. Japan’s inability to deal with child abduction partly stems from archaic family law in Japan that does not recognize joint custody. It’s a winner-take-all system. The law makes it almost impossible for the other parent to even meet the child, if the Japanese partner objects.
“Once the child is on Japanese soil, if the foreign parent tries to take them back to their home country, we have to treat him or her as a kidnapper—unless the Japanese courts have clearly given them custody,” a police officer from Tokyo told us. “Most of the time, we imagine the Japanese parent is shielding the child from domestic abuse or a poor living environment. Maybe sometimes the foreign parent is actually trying to rescue his or her child from an abusive Japanese household, but we can’t make that judgment. The non-Japanese trying to take back their child is the criminal in most cases. The law is the law.”
After 30 years of international pressure, Japan’s National Diet is expected to endorse the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction this month and approve necessary legislation possibly by the end of the year. At present, 89 countries are members of the Hague abduction convention, which went into effect in 1983. Japan is the only G8 country that is not a member.
If the Diet ratifies the treaty by the end of May, as predicted, it would extend custody rights to non-Japanese parents whose children have been taken to Japan by their former spouses. After ratification, the Japanese government will have to take steps to ensure that the treaty is actually upheld. Under the convention, the parents of abductees will have a legal framework to request their children be returned. However, the convention prohibits returning children to the country of residence if they face grave danger, including domestic violence. Questions remain as to the burden of proof that will be required for Japanese nationals who refuse to return the children, using allegations of “grave danger.”
The U.S. State Department has been conducting surveys on the number of abducted American children since 1994. The numbers are difficult to assess because not all parents report abductions to the authorities. Victims of child abduction are hard to track officially, because Japan and many countries do not consider it a vital statistic. Also, child abduction by a parent is not considered a crime in Japan once the family court grants the sole custody to one parent. However, some researchers have been keeping track of the numbers by gathering information from town-hall meetings and correspondence with the families of the abducted. According to one knowledgeable source, between 1994 and 2012, there were 278 cases involving 386 American children taken back to Japan.
“There are no official numbers,” explained Yuichi Mayama, a member of the Diet. “Even we lawmakers, when we tried to ask the government for the exact number of cases, got no real answer. The answer we got was that probably after the Hague Convention comes into effect, it may be possible to track the numbers.”
“Simply because a marriage breaks down, that does not necessarily imply that the children should lose one of their parental relations,” said John Gomez, chairman of the recently founded nonprofit organization Kizuna Child-Parent Reunion. He notes that many pediatricians and child-care experts assert that children thrive when they have relationships with both of their parents, even after the marriage is over. But there is a concept in Japanese society that after a divorce, it is natural for one parent to give up the right to raise the child. Article 766 of Japan’s Civil Code states that a family court should decide who will have custody over a child. The extent of visitation and other means of contact between the child and their parents are also made by the court. There is no joint custody in Japan.
Experts estimate that each year close to 150,000 divorced parents in Japan lose contact with their children. Some choose to do this; most have no say in the matter. While it’s obvious that international divorce in Japan is often an ugly affair that splits children from their parents, it should also be noted that domestic divorce cases are often as bad.
Takao Tanase, a lawyer who is a law professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, notes that Japan does have a criminal clause declaring child abduction a crime, and cases of domestic abduction are not unknown. “However, the first abduction is usually not treated as a crime,” he said. “After a parental dispute, once the de facto custodian is designated by the Japanese family court, the left-behind Japanese parent can be arrested by the police if he or she tries to take back the child from the custodian parent.”
In September 2009, Christopher Savoie, an American-born, naturalized Japanese father, was arrested for allegedly abducting his son and daughter from his ex-wife, who had taken them to Japan illegally. Noriko Savoie had been granted custody on the condition that she permanently reside in Tennessee, but she violated the court order when she took the children to her native Japan. A month later, Christopher Savoie was thrown in jail in Japan on child-abduction charges when he tried to take the children back to the U.S. The case brought global attention to Japan’s failure to endorse the Hague Convention.
When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited President Obama in February, he reportedly promised that Japan would join the convention on child abductions. "From the perspective of children, there is an increasing number of international marriages and divorces,” Abe told reporters. “We believe it is important to have international rules."
Joining the Hague Convention will not immediately affect divorced Japanese couples, but it may play a significant role in the transformation of Japanese society and family law.
“We recognize that even if the Hague Convention is ratified, we will have to make many changes in our domestic laws to be consistent” with the convention, councilor Mayama said in a press conference held last week. “At least the Japanese government recognizes these problems. We Japanese have a very traditional view of the family system. It may take time for these changes. We are working on the necessary legislation. Japan will try to make a change in the domestic laws by March of 2014.”
When international marriages break up, Japanese courts almost never grant custody to foreign parents, especially fathers. However, Japanese parents can also come out on the wrong side of the law.
Mika Chiba, 42, works as an accountant and she lost custody of her two sons. Shortly thereafter, her husband took their children to Manchester, and she followed him there and took him to court.
The U.K. court, citing the Hague Convention, ruled in April 2011 that Chiba’s husband had illegally abducted their two children, and therefore the family should return to Japan to decide the custody of the children in a Japanese court. The family arrived in Japan two months later, and the custody battle is currently being fought. But because there is no joint custody in Japan, and because of her nine-month absence when she was hospitalized, the children have been placed with their father, and Chiba lost visitation rights after she quarreled with her husband in July 2011. She hasn't spent time alone with her children since then.
“I think the Japanese laws should be changed to discourage abduction and allow joint custody,” Chiba said. “If both parents could look after their kids after divorce, then there would be less abduction or maybe none. I think this is the problem in the Japanese law.”
In early February, we followed a French-speaking national, who asked not to be identified, when he visited Japan hoping to meet with his daughter. He does not have custody of his child, nor did the Japanese courts grant him visitation rights.
He went to her home, but was told by his former mother-in-law that she wasn’t there. He then tried to visit her at her school the next day. He asked the school’s principal if he could give her a waterproof camera he had bought for his daughter as a birthday present. “Sir, in Japan, the child has no right to choose if she can see her [noncustodial] parent, after a divorce,” the principal said. “If I handed this present to your daughter without the consent of your ex-wife, I could be in trouble” with the police. He waited for seven hours near the school before going back to the airport and was not able to speak with his daughter or even catch a glimpse of her.
“I don’t want to fight the Japanese authorities, because it will not help me see my daughter. I cannot win their confidence if I do the bad things,” he said. “I hope my daughter will not forget her father and, when she will become an adult, she will try to find me, because she will look for her other cultural roots.”
He hopes that the ratification of the Hague Convention may spur changes in domestic law that will allow him to have some role in raising his daughter. But his hope may be misplaced.
“I think that it will be difficult to convince the hardheaded lawmakers” to fully honor the convention,” said Tsuyoshi Shiina, another Diet member. “They believe it is a matter of ‘cultural conflict.’”
Prof. Takao Tanase also believes that Japan will ratify the convention, but not fully implement it. “Japan fundamentally supports current family-law practices. That’s why there is a strong discrepancy between the domestic law and the international standards, and that will impact negatively upon the implementation of the convention in good faith,” he said. “If the Hague Convention is ratified, and foreign nations recognize that Japan really does not comply with it, there should be a lot of pressure and criticism from the international community. I am hoping that it is the international pressure that is going to push Japan into really implementing the convention.”
It seems certain that Japan will finally sign the Hague Convention, but the implementation of it may take a very long time. Parents waiting in legal limbo to be with their children hope that it will not take another 30 years.
Editor's note: After publication of this article, Mrs. Mika Chiba requested that her children's names and images, as well as some details of her personal history, be removed due to safety concerns and The Daily Beast has updated the original version of this text. |
Story highlights Historically, October Surprises have had little effect on the outcome of presidential elections
Julian Zelizer: But this year the October Surprise could have a more dramatic effect, in part thanks to technology
(CNN) As September comes to an end, presidential-election observers are beginning to wonder if there will be an October Surprise. In a campaign where the unexpected has become normalized, both parties -- but particularly Democrats -- suspect that the next month could bring a shocking revelation.
The notion of an October Surprise gained widespread popularity in the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan's campaign feared that President Jimmy Carter would announce a resolution to the Iran hostage crisis only weeks or days before Americans went to vote. While Carter was in fact working on an end to the crisis, irrespective of the election, the Iranians did not release the hostages until after Reagan's inauguration.
On the rare occasions when October Surprises have happened, they have not really impacted the outcome of the election. In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nassar nationalized the Suez Canal and the Soviets invaded Hungary shortly before the election. The crises, and Eisenhower's responses, were not determining factors in the president's landslide victory against Adlai Stevenson. He was well on his way to victory before either crisis broke.
In October 1964, one of President Lyndon Johnson's closest and most trusted aides, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a Washington YMCA for engaging in sexual acts with a man. Though Johnson feared the arrest would hurt his campaign, Johnson went on to enjoy a landslide victory against Republican Barry Goldwater.
The most dramatic incarnation of a political surprise took place in 1968. On October 31, Johnson announced that he would undertake an immediate bombing halt against the North Vietnamese in the hope of reaching a peace agreement. The announcement sent shudders up the spine of Republican Richard Nixon, whose campaign had promised that as president he would bring peace. Some people in his campaign were so worried they attempted to scuttle a settlement by promising the South Vietnamese a better deal if Nixon became president. Nixon, though, went on to win.
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The latest data on the Chinese economy released on Saturday show exports down 8% year-on-year. By any measure you pick, China’s expansion is losing steam.
But working out how much it’s slowing by is extremely hard to do.
Based on a series of different indicators, the economy is currently growing between about 4% and 7% a year. That’s not exactly a small gap, and the truth matters enormously for China, Asia and the rest of the world. The country has a ballooning debt issue that will be much harder to deal with if growth is slow.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch global economist Gustavo Reis and his team sent out a note over the weekend discussing just how much Chinese growth is slowing by a series of different measures.
One of the measures they have looked at is an analyst favourite: The Li Keqiang Index (LKI). Back in 2007, Li reportedly told a US ambassador that he personally looked at the economy with an index made up of three parts: Electricity production, rail traffic, and lending.
Here’s how those three look:
Loans are rising, but electricity production is up by less than 5% year-on-year, and rail traffic is shrinking at rates last seen during the depths of the 2008-09 financial crisis.
So it’s fair to say that it’s not a pretty picture as far as China’s Premier’s favourite economic index is concerned. Here’s how it looks in comparison to GDP:
The BAI (broad activity index) brought together by BAML economists tracks GDP much more closely — it’s a composite of 20 different indicators.
But yet another indicator, the LEAP index, which brings together “power output, crude steel output, cement output, auto sales, housing starts, railway cargo traffic and medium- to long-term loans,” suggests Chinese GDP is even more overblown than the Li Keqiang Index does.
So it’s something of a mystery.
There seem to be at least three possibilities:
The government is lying. This doesn’t seem difficult to imagine. The credibility of the Chinese government is attached to both its ability to provide growth and its ability to exert a high level of control over the economy. Slower growth isn’t something it would like to admit.
This doesn’t seem difficult to imagine. The credibility of the Chinese government is attached to both its ability to provide growth and its ability to exert a high level of control over the economy. Slower growth isn’t something it would like to admit. China’s GDP is transitioning away from industry. The BAI index that is closest to GDP finds all of the weakness is in manufacturing, while those that pay more attention to industry, like the LKI and LEAP index are lower. If the Chinese economy is shifting more towards services, things like power production will be less accurate as proxies for GDP.
The BAI index that is closest to GDP finds all of the weakness is in manufacturing, while those that pay more attention to industry, like the LKI and LEAP index are lower. If the Chinese economy is shifting more towards services, things like power production will be less accurate as proxies for GDP. It’s too complicated to capture like this. GDP as a way of calculating the economy is rough at best, and it’s possible that none of these indices capture what’s really happening in the world’s biggest developing economy.
The truth of the figures matter more to the rest of the world than they ever have before. The Chinese economy is still locked out of global financial channels in some ways, but the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said back in 2011 that it’s now the main source of real economic spillovers to the rest of the world.
In short, China can’t sneeze without the rest of the world catching a cold.
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After 118 days of unauthorised stay and a bitter stand-off with the government, former union Minister Ajit Singh on Friday finally vacated the 12 Tughlaq Road bungalow here. Singh, who had resisted eviction and demanded that the government accommodation be converted into a memorial for his father former prime minister Charan Singh, handed over the bungalow to the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), according to a senior Urban Development Ministry. The official said though Singh vacated the bungalow, he is yet to clear the penal rent for his unauthorised stay of 118 days.
After 118 days of unauthorised stay and a bitter stand-off with the government, former union Minister Ajit Singh on Friday finally vacated the 12 Tughlaq Road bungalow here.
Singh, who had resisted eviction and demanded that the government accommodation be converted into a memorial for his father former prime minister Charan Singh, handed over the bungalow to the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), according to a senior Urban Development Ministry.
The official said though Singh vacated the bungalow, he is yet to clear the penal rent for his unauthorised stay of 118 days.
The penalty for overstaying is 55 times more than the monthly rent of Rs 3,500 per month.
According to the official, it comes to over Rs 7 lakh now as the penalty will be calculated from June 27.
With the handing over the Type VIII bungalow at Tughlaq Road, the tussle over the sprawling property at Lutyens zone between the government and the RLD leader has come to an end.
Singh, who lost the elections, was served an eviction notice in June. Civic bodies later disconnected water and power supply to the bungalow.
Singh along with RLD supporters, who staged protests in the city and in Ghaziabd, demanded that the bungalow be converted into a memorial to Charan Singh.
The government, however, rejected the demand, saying the Union Cabinet in 2000 had “banned” conversion of Lutyens’ bungalows into memorials.
Ajit Singh accused the BJP government of vendetta but Union Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu said the authorities were bound by rules.
As Congress too supported the demand, Naidu retorted by asking why the RLD leader or Congress had not set up the memorial when they were in government.
Ajit Singh’s supporters clashed with police in Ghaziabd on September 18 over the move to evict him from government residence. On September 23, police detained at least 250 protesters to prevent them from gathering at the bungalow for a planned meeting demanding its conversion into a memorial.
–PTI |
JapanesePod101.com is a language course, podcast and accompanying website that offers lessons in Japanese.
It’s a “fremium” site meaning you can sign up to the site for free and access lost of resources on there, including the podcast. For the more advanced features they have a subscription service starting at just $4 a month, with a little bit of searching you can regularly find promotions and discounts too.
As far as features go, there is lots on there. The site is arranged by level from Beginner through to Advanced with each level containing 50 or so lessons. Each lesson has a podcast, a review track, dialog and downloadable PDFs with lesson notes and transcriptions.
If you sign up to Premium (I’ve only ever used basic so far) then there are lots of other features too including flash cards, slideshows, word banks and dictionaries.
You can listen to the podcasts through the site itself or download them to listen to them later. To make it even easier, if you download the “Innovative Language” app (iOS and Andriod), you can download whole sections at a time to your phone or tablet and then listen to them at your leisure. |
Australia signs free trade agreement with South Korea in Seoul
Updated
Australia and South Korea have formally signed off on a free trade agreement during a meeting in Seoul.
The Australia Korea Free Trade Agreement (KAFTA), which was secured late last year, will see tariffs on primary products that range from about 15 per cent to more than 500 per cent removed.
The foreign investment review threshold will also be lifted to more than $1 billion.
In his announcement of the formal agreement, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the free trade agreement was able to be reached because of the trust between the two countries.
"Australia and South Korea are important and natural partners," he said.
"We are democracies, we are G20 countries ... we are countries that would much rather find friends than fights," he said.
"We are able to negotiate this agreement because Australia and South Korea trust each other."
Mr Abbott hailed the agreement as a "historic moment".
"Economically, there is huge untapped potential in the relationship between the two countries," he said.
"The free trade agreement that we signed today is the first free trade agreement of your government, it is the first free trade agreement of my government and I believe it is one that we can both be very proud of."
"I am confident ... that over time, Australia can help to deliver food security, resource security and energy security to the people of Korea."
The deal with Korea is the second free trade agreement secured for Australia in two days, after Tony Abbott met with his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, in Tokyo yesterday.
That agreement will see advantages for beef and other agricultural products, with fruit and vegetables, seafood, cheese, sugar and wine among the winners.
However, earlier today, Government MP George Christensen hit out at the deal, questioning the value of an agreement that does not have a "significant benefit for Australian agriculture".
Topics: international-aid-and-trade, trade, business-economics-and-finance, federal-government, foreign-affairs, government-and-politics, korea-republic-of, australia, japan, asia
First posted |
A judge ruled a lawsuit against an IDNYC policy will be heard in Staten Island after the city tried to get it moved to Manhattan. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Trevor Kapp
STATEN ISLAND — The Forgotten Borough might as well be a foreign land for some city officials.
A Staten Island judge was asked to move a court hearing to Manhattan because city employees found it too inconvenient to get on the ferry.
The hearing involved a lawsuit filed by borough-based Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis and Assemblyman Ron Castorina Jr. in an attempt to stop the city from deleting data gathered during IDNYC applications.
The judge denied the request.
"The City's aggressive attempt to have this case moved from Staten Island to Manhattan is disappointing," said Malliotakis.
"We often say we are the forgotten borough under this administration and it’s because of actions like this."
City lawyers asked Tuesday to move the case to Manhattan court because it would be hard for officials to get to St. George for hearings. Judge Philip Minardo refused, Castorina said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio previously said he would purge the documents gathered during IDNYC applications rather than hand them over to the federal government.
His promise came after the election of Donald Trump, who has talked about deporting 2 to 3 million undocumented immigrants.
After the lawsuit was filed, the city announced it will no longer save any documents filed by applicants for municipal IDs as of January.
De Blasio launched the IDNYC in 2015 to give identification cards to residents including undocumented immigrants, the formerly incarcerated and transgender individuals for who getting regular ID is difficult.
The program has had more than 900,000 applications since it launched. It was crafted with a "destroy in case of Tea Party" clause which allows date to be erased.
The Republican lawmakers said destroying the data could create a security risk by making it impossible to trace people who obtained the cards fraudulently and harder to investigate if they used the ID to commit a crime. |
Adi had his say after Porter's words, he has been adapting well to the team, and seems happy and his play shows it. This is his first time in the US, a trip that he found out he was doing a week before. Adi is a very pleasant young man, he knows he has not just scored two goals and an assist but he is stealing the town’s hearts. Last Sunday night, had a great control in the box with his back to the goal, and instead of turning and shooting he saw Johnson in a better position for a shot and the rest was one of the candidates for MLS best goal of the week. Some quality memories from of that night, and actually the one to keep from Sunday versus the White Caps. |
Mr. Bewkes has called the idea “TV Everywhere,” but others in the industry refer to it by other names: “authentication,” “entitlement,” and Comcast has called its coming service “OnDemand Online.”
“If you look at TV viewing, it’s up, even though the questions and stories are all about the role of video games and Internet usage and other uses of time,” Mr. Bewkes said.
The first test of the new system, which will authenticate cable subscribers online and make available programs on the Web for no additional charge, will be announced Wednesday, between Comcast and Time Warner. The trial will involve about 5,000 Comcast subscribers, and television shows from the Time Warner networks TNT and TBS.
“We’re talking about taking the TV industry to a new era,” Mr. Bewkes said.
Because of antitrust concerns, the companies that create cable programming are reluctant to come together and agree on a solution. A few weeks ago, newspaper executives held a secretive meeting in Rosemont, Ill., to discuss ways to charge for news online — a gathering that critics said flouted antitrust law.
The electronic media chiefs, including Mr. Bewkes, Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal and Philippe P. Dauman of Viacom, among others, have been more careful, so as to avoid being accused of collusion: much of the discussions have been on the telephone and in private, one-on-one chats during industry events. Pricing is rarely, if ever, discussed, according to executives involved in the discussions.
“We can’t get together and talk about business terms, but we can get together to work on setting open technology standards,” said Mr. Dauman, the chief executive at Viacom, which owns cable networks like MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and BET.
But the problem is that if each goes in different directions — some offering more shows free, others holding them back only for cable subscribers — then the economics of the industry could crumble.
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“It’s the classic prisoner’s dilemma,” said Mr. Burke, referring the famous problem in game theory. “If there’s a vacuum, and some start to inch in to the water hoping others will hold back, the whole industry could be affected.”
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Unlike broadcast television, which relies solely on advertising, cable networks have another revenue stream: fees paid by cable operators. Comcast, for example, pays Disney roughly $1 billion a year to carry ESPN. This is why Hulu.com, the popular site owned by News Corporation and NBC, is mainly a destination for broadcast shows like “The Office” and “The Simpsons,” and not cable programs.
In some ways, the plan of Mr. Bewkes could be perceived as a direct shot at Hulu, which does offer some cable shows on a delayed basis, after some time has passed since the show was seen on television.
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“That stream is so important to every entertainment company that everybody is looking at that and saying, if we are not careful we could start to harm that model,” Mr. Burke said.
There is no sign of that happening anytime soon, but a recent poll by the Sanford C. Bernstein research group found that about 35 percent of people who watch videos online might cut their cable subscription within five years.
“We don’t think that it’s a problem now, but we do feel a sense of urgency,” Mr. Burke said.
And Wall Street is watching closely. The movement of video, whether it be television shows or movies, to the Internet, “is perhaps the single largest investment controversy in the media sector,” Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, wrote in a recent report.
Another analyst, Laura Martin of Soleil Media-Metrics, has said that $300 billion of market value — her calculation of the current worth of all the companies involved in television production and distribution — is at stake. She said the risk is that television’s economics could be overturned, just it has for newspapers and music.
One holdout among the major chief executives appears to be Robert A. Iger of the Walt Disney Company. At an industry conference this year he warned that gambits like TV Everywhere could be “anticonsumer and antitechnology” because such a plan would place cable programming behind a pay wall.
Mr. Iger is more interested in finding new ways to get additional fees for online content, a puzzle that has bewildered the newspaper industry.
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Last month, Comcast agreed to pay Disney a monthly fee to offer its Internet subscribers ESPN 360, the sports network’s online channel. One analyst, Richard Greenfield of Pali Research, has called that deal “a watershed event for content owners in a broadband world, albeit that event occurred with little to no fanfare.”
Meanwhile, some executives say that TV Everywhere is a simple concept, but that it has major technological hurdles. At one recent meeting of cable executives, a whiteboard displayed a list of nearly 80 potential problems with the service.
“The key is you have to be careful to protect the security” so hackers cannot get in, said Mr. Burke of Comcast.
Mr. Dauman of Viacom said: “It’s not going to be a light switch moment. It’s going to be an evolution.” |
UKIP supporters can only flourish in modern society by breaking out of their closed communities of aging bigots, experts believe.
Researchers have found that the ghettoised communities which UKIP voters live in directly lead to their deep-seated hatred of ordinary British life and extremist views about Gary Lineker being a traitor.
Dr Susan Traherne said: “By not integrating, Ukippers come to believe in worryingly irrational ideas like everyone in Turkey planning to live here and it being illegal to own a golliwog.
“It’s vital they are made to talk with normal people to show them it’s actually a bit mental to carry on like Enoch Powell because of the occasional Polski Sklep.
“But sadly they prefer to remain shut indoors, dangerously radicalising each other on Facebook, plotting the destruction of everyone under 40’s way of life.”
UKIP member Roy Hobbs said: “I’m not weird, I just don’t want to be ruled by Herr Merkel’s Brussels bumboys and think we should nuke Gibraltar to stop the dagoes getting it.
“Everyone thinks that. It’s normal.” |
Submitted by Daniel Mitchell via The Foundation for Economic Education,
A few years ago, I put together an amusing collection of stories comparing truly bizarre examples of political correctness and bureaucratic idiocy in the United States and United Kingdom.
I was especially impressed (in a you-must-be-joking fashion) that a British job placement office got in trouble for discrimination because they sought “reliable” and “hard-working” applicants. Sounds impossible to believe, but consider the fact that the EEOC bureaucracy in the U.S. went after a trucking company because it didn’t want to employ drunk drivers.
And I’ve shared jaw-dropping reports of anti-gun political correctness in American schools, as well as a proposal to ban skinny models in Britain.
Let’s expand on this collection of horror stories.
Reason reports that some bureaucrats in New York City think that it is sexual harassment for a professor to base grades in part on effort and classroom behavior.
A professor at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College was ordered to make changes to his syllabus because it amounted to sexual harassment. The professor, David Seidemann has refused to comply, and for good reason. …a university administrator expressed three grievances about the syllabus. First, and most quizzically, the grading portion of the syllabus suggests sexual harassment. It reads, “Class deportment, effort etc……. 10% (applied only to select students when appropriate).” ...Seidemann told me in an email that his department chair said “the 10% section could be construed as a prelude to sexual harassment,” and had to be changed at once. This order apparently came from the Director of Diversity Investigations and Title IX Enforcement. In the course of Seidemann’s interactions with the director, he realized something quite stunning: there was no record of anyone actually complaining about the syllabus. The university had apparently launched this investigation on its own. ...The professor refused to meet with the Director of Diversity Investigations, preferring to talk via email so that the conversation could be documented. This eventually caused the director to abandon the investigation: the matter is now officially closed, according to Seidemann. The professor is pleased with the result, but little else.
If you read the entire story, it appears that the bureaucrats decided that “effort” could be interpreted as an invitation for female students to trade sex for higher grades. At least I think that’s the implication.
In which case, there must have been rampant sexual harassment when I was young because our report cards in elementary school always included our teachers’ assessment of our “effort.” And all the way through college, I periodically had classes in which grades were based in part on “participation.”
I guess I was so young and naive that I didn’t realize my teachers and professors were inviting me to offer sex for grades (my grades often were low enough that it was probably best I didn’t run the risk of having them go even lower).
More seriously, I’m glad the professor stood up against the absurd accusations put forth by the diversity bureaucrats. I especially like that he insisted on having everything occur via email so he couldn’t be victimized by the selective memory of some pencil pushers who probably try to justify their comfortable sinecures by claiming an occasional scalp.
Bureaucrats in Knoxville, Tennessee, also seem to be amazingly skilled at seeing sexual harassment where it doesn’t exist.
The student, Keaton Wahlbon, had to take a geology quiz featuring the following question: “What is your lab instructor’s name? (if you don’t remember, make something good up).” Wahlbon followed the instructions: he didn’t remember, so wrote down the first generic girl name that came to mind—Sarah Jackson. Unbeknowst to Wahlbon, Sarah Jackson is a real person: a pornographic model. Of course, there are hundreds (thousands?) of other Sarah Jacksons in the world, and Wahlbon had no idea that his lab instructor would interpret his answer in such a specific and malicious manner. His answer was marked “inappropriate” and he received a grade of zero on the quiz. Wahlbon appealed to his professor, Bill Deane, but Deane maintained that Wahlbon had committed sexual harassment. Wahlbon contacted the head of department because, well, that’s nonsense. …no resolution has been reached yet. But according to The Knoxville News Sentinel, the university is now investigating the matter as if a complaint had been filed—even though no one has taken such an action.
Wow, this is surreal. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Wahlbon was thinking of the pornographic model when he wrote “Sarah Jackson” on the quiz. How is this sexual harassment? I don’t claim to be an expert on such matters, but I’m under the impression that harassment occurs when someone with power in a relationship makes some sort of sexual advance (or even tells a dirty joke). So how can a student harass a teacher? Or even a teacher’s lab instructor?
You can say that Wahlbon is guilty of displaying bad taste, but then we get to the issue of whether he actually meant the Sarah Jackson. If it was a more uncommon name (such as Jenna Jameson, the famous Republican-supporting porn star), then you could safely assume (though not legally prove) that he intended to make a boorish joke. But is the Sarah Jackson so famous that it’s safe to think that’s who Wahlbon had in mind? For what it’s worth, I never heard of that Sarah Jackson (though I once dated a girl with that name).
By the way, the British have similarly brainless people in their nation.
Though they express their political correctness in non-sexual ways (what a surprise), such as the principal who has banned running on the playground.
The headmaster of Hillfort Primary School in Liskeard, Dr Tim Cook, introduced the ban to prevent the little blighters injuring themselves. Instead, kids at Hillfort can blow off steam at playtime by playing with Lego, Jenga, and even dancing, as part of the school’s plan to reduce ‘negative behaviours’. Cook has responded by reassuring parents that their children are not completely prohibited from running – they are just not allowed to run across the playground. Have the nippers been given a small area to run around instead? Getting dizzier and dizzier as they charge about in circles? …Arguing that the ban is for safety reasons is pathetic. It’s running, not sword-swallowing. Grazed knees are part of growing up, and do not, or at least should not, result in lawsuits.
Fortunately, British parents seem a bit more sensible than their bureaucratic overlords. They’re petitioning to allow their kids to…gasp…do more than walk on the playground during recess.
There’s also lunacy in Australia. And since I’m a parent, I’m especially horrified about what happened to a father who wanted to protect his stepdaughter from sexting.
A man who found out that his 15-year-old stepdaughter was sexting her boyfriend proceeded to download the evidence to bring it to the school and the police to ask them to intervene. …Intervene they did. Now the dad has been convicted on child pornography charges and placed on the sex offender registry. This, despite the judge understanding exactly why the man, Ashan Ortell, 57, held onto the images. “There is no suggestion of any exploitation of them by anybody,” ruled Judge Jane Patrick, over in Australia, which is becoming as daffy as the United States. “You made no attempt to conceal the images. In fact, you were so concerned that you contacted the authorities about the images.”
If you read the entire story, I’m guessing that the cops went after the dad because he was badgering them for not doing anything about his stepdaughter. And I sympathize with the cops for choosing not to make a big deal out of two teenagers sexting, but did they really have to go after the guy for having the images when nobody thinks he had any unsavory intent or motives?
Keep in mind that this took place in the nation that awarded workers compensation to a woman who injured herself while having sex and also threatened fines against companies that pointed out the downside of a carbon tax.
All that being said, Australia is still my top choice for where to go if (when?) America suffers a Greek-style fiscal and economic collapse.
P.S. I’ve come across lots of crazy government decisions in my time, so I’m not surprised by today’s material. Though since I mentioned Greece, that government deserves some sort of prize for subsidizing pedophiles and demanding stool samples before letting entrepreneurs set up online companies.
And let’s not forget that European courts that have ruled that there’s an entitlement to free soccer broadcasts and a right to satellite TV. About as nutty as the Finnish court that ruled there’s a right to broadband access, and as crazy as the Bolivian decision that there’s a human right to receive stolen property.
P.P.S. In his speech to the 2008 Democratic Convention, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said “Government, as Barney Frank likes to say, is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”
If that’s true, then the above examples show that we “choose” to do some really foolish things. In reality, as Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit reminds us, we don’t choose. That’s why this poster contains a much more accurate assessment of what really happens when government gets involved. |
As of Tuesday, people in Ontario can buy beer at 58 locations across the province in a long-awaited move that was announced by Premier Kathleen Wynne at a Toronto Loblaws.
In the initial rollout, 25 grocery stores in the Greater Toronto Area will be licensed to sell beer, in addition to 16 in southwestern Ontario, 13 in the east and six in the north.
Two of the stores that will sell beer have yet to be listed by the province.
Below is a list of all 58 locations listed by the provincial government that will be selling beer.
The province is advising people who want to buy beer to first to check with the grocery stores before heading there.
Greater Toronto Area
Aurora
Sobeys —15500 Bayview Ave.
Etobicoke
Loblaws — 380 The East Mall.
Georgetown
Real Canadian Superstore — 171 Guelph St.
Milton
Metro — 1050 Kennedy Cir.
Mississauga
Michael-Angelo's — 4099 Erin Mills Pkwy.
Loblaws — 5010 Glen Erin Dr.
Newmarket
Real Canadian Superstore — 18120 Yonge St.
Metro — 16640 Yonge St.
Oakville
Longo's — 3455 Wyecroft Rd.
FreshCo — 2501 Third Line.
Longo's — 469 Cornwall Rd.
Oshawa
Real Canadian Superstore — 1385 Harmony Rd. N.
Pickering
Metro — 1822 Whites Rd.
Richmond Hill
Sobeys — 11700 Yonge St.
Toronto
Coppa's Fresh Market — 4750 Dufferin St.
Galleria Supermarket — 865 York Mills Rd.
Real Canadian Superstore — 51 Gerry Fitzgerald Dr.
Real Canadian Superstore — 2549 Weston Rd.
Loblaws — 17 Leslie St.
Loblaws — 50 Musgrave St.
Vaughan
Coppa's Fresh Market — 3300 Rutherford Rd.
Galleria Supermarket — 7040 Yonge St.
FreshCo — 800 Steeles Ave W.
Whitby
Farm Boy — 360 Taunton Rd.
West Ontario
Cambridge
Zehrs — 400 Conestoga Blvd.
Guelph
Metro — 500 Edinburgh Rd. S.
Hamilton (Ancaster)
Sobeys — 977 Golf Links Rd.
Hamilton
FreshCo — 700 Queenston Rd.
Fortinos — 65 Mall Rd.
Food Basics — 505 Rymal Rd. E.
Starsky Fine Foods — 685 Queenston Rd.
Kitchener
Real Canadian Superstore — 875 Highland Rd. W.
London
Farm Boy — 1415 Beaverbrook Ave.
Walmart Supercentre — 1280 Fanshawe Park Rd.
Real Canadian Superstore — 1205 Oxford St.
Food Basics — 509 Commissioners Road W.
Niagara Falls
Food Basics — 3770 Montrose Rd.
Paris
Sobeys — 307 Grand River St. N.
Windsor
Real Canadian Superstore — 4371 Walker Rd.
East Ontario
Kanata
Sobeys — 700 Terry Fox Dr.
Sobeys — 840 March Rd.
Kingston
Loblaws — 1100 Princess St.
Lindsay
La Mantia's Country Market — 50 William St. S.
Nepean
Metro — 3201 Strandherd Dr.
Orillia
Food Basics — 975 West Ridge Blvd
Ottawa (Orleans)
Farm Boy — 2030 Tenth Line.
Ottawa
Loblaws — 1980 Baseline Rd.
Real Canadian Superstore — 760 Eagleson Rd.
Sobeys — 193 Metcalfe St.
Peterborough
Sobeys — 1200 Lansdowne St W.
Sobeys — 501 Towerhill Rd.
Stittsville
Brown's Your Independent Grocer — 1251 Main St.
North Ontario
Sault Ste. Marie
Pino's Get Fresh — 219 Trunk Rd.
Sudbury
Walmart Supercentre — 2416 Long Lake Rd.
Walmart Supercentre — 1349 Lasalle Blvd.
Thunder Bay |
In September of 2014, Alton Nolen beheaded a woman and seriously injured a second at the Vaughan Foods food processing plant in Moore, OK. Nolen was an employee at the plant.
Nolen had been suspended from his job because he aggressively bullied co-workers and said he hated white people. Coworkers say he bragged that he “beat Caucasians.” After being suspended, he came back to the plant with a knife and beheaded Colleen Hufford, a 54-year-old white female. He also stabbed and nearly killed Traci Johnson, a 43-year-old white female.
Johnson was one of the people who had submitted a complaint about Nolen hating white people.
Nolen is a black Muslim who also used the aliases Jah’Keem Yisrael, and Muhammed. He attended a local mosque. The fact that he beheaded Hufford may have been inspired by ISIS videos. In 2010 Nolen was sentenced to five years in prison for assault and battery of a police officer. He only severed about two years.
Since the brutal murder, there has been a huge legal battle over Nolen’s competency.
In October of 2015, a judge ruled that Nolen was competent to stand trial. Nolen said he wanted to plead guilty.
In August of 2016, a different judge ruled that Nolen was not competent enough to enter a guilty plea. Now, six months later, that same judge has ruled that Nolen is competent enough to plead guilty. If he does not change his plea, then he could be sentenced next week. |
Brooke L. Lajiness, 38, will go on trial next month on 13 charges of criminal sexual misconduct
A Michigan mother is set to go to trial next month on 13 charges of criminal sexual conduct.
Brooke L. Lajiness, 38, was arraigned earlier this month for accosting a minor for immoral purposes and furnishing obscenity to a child.
Her pretrial has been scheduled for May 8 before a judge in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Her attorney, David I. Goldstein, told a judge Thursday that Lajiness was renouncing her probable cause hearing and her right to a preliminary examination.
Lajiness' husband has stayed married to her and has been accompanying her in court.
In a Facebook post last month, Lajiness proclaimed her love for her husband David, saying: 'In life, nothing is guaranteed,'
'So finding someone who knows all of your flaws, weaknesses and mistakes and still thinks you're amazing is something to hold onto and never take for granted!'
Her affair with the young boy allegedly began last summer, as he was graduating from middle school on to high school.
Michigan State Police Trooper Donald Pasternak testified that most of the sexual encounters happened in the back of Lajiness' car in a Lima Township driveway.
At her arraignment on March 3, Pasternak testified that he started investigating Lajiness a few weeks before, when the victim's mother walked into a police station and complained that Lajiness was having sex with her son.
Lajiness reportedly confessed later on to having sex with the teen and exchanging the nude pictures.
Police found that she started exchanging photos with the teen while he was still in middle school.
She is also facing an additional charge in relation to the photos.
Langinesswas accompanied by her husband David in court on Thursday after being accused of engaging in a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old boy
Brooke posted this photo of the two in June of 2016, around the time that the affair reportedly began
Assistant Washtenaw County Prosecutor John Vella said last week that they are looking into whether they may be more victims.
'This case involves a defendant seeking out minors for sex,' Vella said, according to M Live.
Lajiness' attorney, David I. Goldstein, said prosecutors need to focus on the case at hand.
'He keeps talking about 'minors,' but there's one,' Goldstein said.
Police say she admitted to having sex with the teen and sending nude photos to the boy
Lajiness is currently free after posting $50,000 bail.
As part of her bond conditions, Lajiness is not allowed near school property or around minors except for her own children. She is also not allowed to use computers, social media websites or to drink alcohol or take drugs.
Attorneys argued in court over whether she should be allowed to travel to Toledo to visit her family while she's free on bail. The judge ruled that she should be free to travel there, so long as she lets the court know in advance. |
The New York Jets might have to try to clinch a playoff spot this weekend without Mark Sanchez.
Jets coach Rex Ryan said Thursday that Sanchez's sore shoulder is worse than he first thought, though he still expects the quarterback to start Sunday at Chicago. If not, 40-year-old Mark Brunell would be under center.
"This one could be more of a game-time type decision than I thought it would be," Ryan said.
The Jets (10-4) will clinch a playoff berth if they beat the Bears (10-4) at Soldier Field.
Sanchez was limited in practice for the second consecutive day and "never had a ton of zip" on his passes, according to Ryan. But offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer saw it differently, offering a more optimistic evaluation.
"As he got going a little bit, he looked pretty good," Schottenheimer said. "Early in the day, Mark was trying to get loose. He had an 18-yard curl route that was awfully sharp."
Ryan wouldn't confirm published reports that an MRI exam Monday revealed a slight cartilage tear in Sanchez's shoulder, hurt during New York's second drive in last Sunday's 22-17 win at Pittsburgh.
NFL Network insider Albert Breer confirmed the report Wednesday through a league source.
Sanchez finished the game and played well through the injury. He was 19-of-29 passing for 170 yards and ran for a touchdown, stopping an eight-game interception streak.
"I still think he's going to play, but I was shocked a little bit," Ryan said. "The fact that he played the game and he looked great, I think I made an assumption that maybe I shouldn't have."
Earlier in the week, Ryan said he was 99 percent sure that Sanchez would play. The coach downgraded that number to 80 percent Thursday.
Sanchez wasn't available to the media because he talks on Wednesdays, but he has said he's "playing, that's all there is to it."
Ryan said the decision whether or not Sanchez plays will be made by the team, along with input from the quarterback. The coach said he made a mistake earlier this season when he allowed cornerback Darrelle Revis to decide if he was ready to return from a tweaked hamstring, and it worsened.
Sanchez threw more passes during practice Thursday than he did Wednesday, an encouraging sign. Both Ryan and Schottenheimer believe the decision likely will come down to Sanchez's threshold for pain, but the team won't put him in if he can't perform.
"He's still got to improve before we'll be comfortable with him out there as our starting quarterback," Ryan said. "Do we think he will? Yes, we do think he'll be better. This is what I've said the whole time about it being a sore shoulder."
Brunell, signed during the offseason after two years with the New Orleans Saints, is prepared to step in for Sanchez if needed. Brunell's last start came in the regular-season finale last year as Drew Brees rested for the Saints' eventual Super Bowl-winning push.
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"You have to be ready, that's the job of a backup," Brunell said.
Schottenheimer said the Jets wouldn't have to change much of their offensive game plan if Brunell starts, except for the fact he's left-handed.
"There'd be a few things here or there you might want to flip over and run the other way," Schottenheimer said. "For the most part, you don't change too much."
Ryan said it's "not essential" that Sanchez plays against the Bears if he's still hurting, especially since the Jets have confidence in the experienced Brunell.
"He's smart, he's done it all," Ryan said of the 18-year veteran. "We're not talking about a guy who's never done it before in his career. This guy was a Pro Bowl quarterback for a number of years. Is he as good as Mark Brunell was back then? No, because he'd be our starting quarterback. I feel comfortable with Mark, I really do."
Notes: Safety Eric Smith (concussion) was ruled out for the second consecutive game, as was RT Damien Woody (right knee). ... WR Santonio Holmes (turf toe) was limited in practice, but Ryan expects him to play Sunday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
CHENNAI: In a state which is still debating the pros and cons of the Supreme Court ban on Jallikattu (bull taming), yet another popular rural game -- the cockfighting – on Wednesday received a jolt with the Madras high court suggesting the Tamil Nadu government ban the sport."This court is custodian of not only the rights of citizens, but rights of voiceless non-humans as well," observed Justice N Kriubakaran.Refusing to grant permission for a cockfight event at a temple in Virattipathu in Madurai district, Justice Kirubakaran said: "Torture, injury, hurt, discomfort, trauma, agony, pain, distress, disturbance, sorrow, suffering, harm, shock, bleeding, brutal attack, etc., are neither synonymous nor can go together with pleasure, joy, happiness, excite, net, fun, celebration, entertainment, enjoyment, recreation and championship."Cockfight is generally conducted during festivals seasons, Justice Kirubakaran said, adding that not just birds, such fights often led to fights among their owners also. "There is s possibility of group clashes resulting in injuries to men and even loss of lives which is unwanted and avoidable.”Cockfights are also said to be conducted for betting and gambling, said Justice Kirubakaran, refusing to permit the event at Arulmigu Muniyandi temple in Viraattipathu.“Besides our forefathers, the Constitution also mandates treating animals with compassion,” he said, adding, "It is the bounden duty of every citizen to treat animals with compassion and sympathy except for necessity. Birds and animals are friends of humans."Citing constitutional mandate and the apex court ruling on Jallikattu, the judge said: "This court suggests the government to prohibit cockfight. Accordingly, the permission sought by the petitioner cannot be granted." |
LAWRENCE — The Kansas basketball team is opening and closing its 2016-17 nonconference season with a bang.
KU announced its full nonconference schedule Tuesday, with the Jayhawks beginning and ending their docket with perennial NCAA Tournament squads Indiana, Duke and Kentucky.
KU opens its regular season against the Hoosiers as part of the Armed Forces Classic on Nov. 11 in Honolulu, faces the Blue Devils four days later as part of the Champions Classic on Nov. 15 in New York and finishes its non-conference schedule against Kentucky as part of the Big 12/SEC Challenge on Jan. 28 in Lexington.
"With this schedule, once again we will rank at the top of the toughest schedules in the nation," KU coach Bill Self said in a news release. "We’ll get our share of frequent flyer miles right off the bat playing Indiana in Honolulu and Duke in New York City. We’re playing 10 of our 12 non-league games against teams which went to the postseason last year, including four NCAA teams."
After hosting Washburn and Emporia State for a pair of exhibition games on Nov. 1 and 7, respectively, the Jayhawks do not return to Allen Fieldhouse until their regular season home opener Nov. 18 against Siena. It is the latest home opener for KU since the 2005-06 season.
Following five potential neutral-site contests, the Jayhawks’ first true road contest of the year comes Dec. 22 when KU will travel to Las Vegas to face UNLV.
Other highlights on the Jayhawks’ nonconference schedule include the CBE Hall of Fame Classic on Nov. 21-22 at Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo., and home dates against Stanford (Dec. 3) and former Big 12 rival Nebraska (Dec. 10) at Allen Fieldhouse. The Cornhuskers feature former KU player Andrew White, who averaged 16.6 points and 5.9 rebounds as a junior last season.
The rest of KU’s nonconference slate includes games against UNC-Asheville (Nov. 25), Long Beach State (Nov. 29) and UMKC (Dec. 6), all at Allen Fieldhouse, and Davidson (Dec. 17) at Sprint Center.
"This schedule, like in the past," Self said, "will help us prepare for the always tough Big 12 season."
KANSAS MEN’S HOOPS SCHEDULE
2016-17 NONCONFERENCE
Nov. 1 — Washburn (Exh.)
Nov. 7 — Emporia State (Exh.)
Nov. 11 — Indiana (Armed Forces Classic)
Nov. 15 — Duke (Champions Classic)
Nov. 18 — Siena
Nov. 21-22 — TBD (CBE Hall of Fame Classic)
Nov. 25 — UNC-Asheville
NOv. 29 — Long Beach State
Dec. 3 — Stanford
Dec. 6 — UMKC
Dec. 10 — Nebraska
Dec. 17 — Davidson (at Kansas City, Mo.)
Dec. 22 — at UNLV
Jan. 28 — at Kentucky |
As New York was busy installing its brand-new bike share stations earlier this year, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare program clocked its 4 millionth ride. It was a Wednesday evening at the peak of rush hour when the milestone journey began from a station outside the State Department.
Washington, in all its geeky glory, beat every other major American city in establishing a premier bike-sharing system. When Boston, Chicago and San Francisco decided to try the trend, they turned to D.C. for guidance. And the District continues to set the standard, with its experiments using protected green lanes, programs to reach out to new riders and efforts to integrate the bike plan into a broader transit strategy.
Bike commuters wait for the green light at the intersection of 15th and Massachusetts Avenue in Northwest. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)
Embracing bike-friendly policies might seem logical for a modern metropolis, but Washington was resistant to early efforts. In 2009, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty led a polarizing push for bike lanes, including the District’s first against-the-traffic, protected lane on 15th Street NW. In light of the city’s significant economic strains at the time, his enthusiasm was seen by some as a frivolous pursuit. Now it is regarded as visionary. Mayor Vincent Gray’s recently released Sustainable DC plan calls for 75 percent of commutes to be made by public transit, walking or biking by 2032. It’s now 50 percent.
There will be bumps along the way. Despite mayoral support, new bike lanes draw opposition, as in the case of the cycle track along M Street. After members of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church complained about losing parking, the city decided in August to drop a section of the lane. Instead, bicyclists have to merge with car traffic for the block between 15th and 16th streets.
But as more residents opt for two wheels instead of four, the opposition to accommodating cyclists is fading. Bike sharing is rapidly taking hold in the suburbs, and regional planners are expanding options and road access for riders.
The man responsible for coordinating the District Department of Transportation ’s bike plans says he fell into the city’s bike culture out of necessity. “My story is not that much different from a lot of people’s stories in D.C. who discover bicycling,” Jim Sebastian says. “They discover it’s quicker, it’s more convenient, it’s cheaper and it’s more fun than driving or taking the train.”
Sebastian, who is helping coordinate for the first time all of the District’s master transit plans as part of the moveDC project,became the District’s bike program coordinator in 2001 and helped bring bike share to the city, first with a pilot program called SmartBike D.C. in 2008, then partnering with Arlington County to launch the Capital Bikeshare system in 2010.
Today, with the swipe of a credit card, residents and tourists alike have access to more than 1,800 bikes. They can become members of the system for a single day ($7), a month ($25) or a year ($75). The program encourages short rides between stations and rapid turnover. There are usage fees for every trip longer than 30 minutes. Keeping a bike for a day costs members $70.50 and non-members $94. There are 176 solar-powered stations in the District, 59 stations in Arlington, eight stations in Alexandria and, soon, 51 stations in Montgomery County.
Under Sebastian’s watch, the District has added more than 50 miles of bike lanes and 2,500 bike racks, and has more than doubled the number of people on the streets biking. But he’s not done yet. In addition to overseeing the growth of Bikeshare, which is managed by the company Alta, he’s also partnering with DDOT to complete the 20-mile Anacostia Riverwalk Trail, now 60 percent done, and the M Street cycle-track.
“He has been a real moving force behind gaining acceptance of bicycles here in the District of Columbia,” Gray says. “We’re very fortunate to have him working with us, because it is not just a job to him, it is a commitment, and that’s a big difference.”
Right now, bikes represent 3.3 percent of total commutes, Sebastian says. But he expects it to hit 5 percent by 2015.
Bike advocates such as Sebastian and the Washington Area Bicyclist Association also insist commuting isn’t their sole focus. Short trips to the grocery or library, or a recreational ride along the water, are the sorts of things they say that Bikeshare can facilitate better than Metro and buses. Indeed, a 2013 member survey showed that seven in 10 users had used Bikeshare for social activities or to run errands.
“Every city’s bike culture is a little bit different,” says Greg Billing, advocacy coordinator at WABA. “I think where we really excel is kind of how commonplace it is.”
WABA has been around since 1972, long before bike sharing captured the imagination of city planners. The organization helped lobby for bikes to be allowed on Metro during non-rush hours and to close Beach Drive to car traffic on the weekends. Now it’s offering adult biking lessons and safety instruction while continuing to lobby for more bike lanes and infrastructure.
Sebastian says part of what made Bikeshare such a success, which now drives the creation of more infrastructure for all riders, was a strong community of cyclists and a healthy regional trail system. League of American Bicyclists president and Virginia resident Andy Clarke also points to the District’s bikeable fabric of gridded streets and long boulevards.
1 of 18 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The changing face of Downtown D.C. View Photos The city’s core has seen an explosion of change in the past several years, and there’s no signs of slowing. You can expect residences along the Mall, new communities and experiments. WP Magazine looked at several proposed plans and how it would effect the city as part of the Urban Design issue. Caption The city’s core has seen an explosion of change in the past several years, and there’s no signs of slowing. You can expect residences along the Mall, new communities and experiments. WP Magazine looked at several proposed plans and how it would effect the city as part of the Urban Design issue. Kristie Conserve, front left, Meghan Simpsonm front right, and Phanuelle Duchatelier, left, along with other interns for World Learning sit in Franklin Square while having lunch. The National Park Service and the District are launching a pilot partnership to remake Franklin Park into "an active, flexible, sustainable, and historic urban park ." Lucian Perkins/For The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Projects such as the installation of a two-way cycle track in the median of Pennsylvania Avenue helped show the District’s dedication to putting cyclists on an equal footing with motorists, Clarke says. The rate of bicyclists along the iconic street tripled after the track’s installation.
But the popular cycle-track is also home to a familiar battle between the two groups. Bicyclists complain that cars, often cabs, complete dangerous U-turns across bike lanes without looking. Accidents involving bicyclists along the corridor went from nine in the previous four years to 16 during the first 14 months after the lane’s installation. Police have made efforts to warn and ticket offending drivers, but the problem persists. Enforcement was one of the city’s weak areas, according to the league’s annual bicycle-friendly ratings.
D.C. Police Department Commander James Crane agrees that there has been a learning curve for his force. “We’ve had to educate our officers that it’s usually not the biker failing to yield the right of way.”
Incidents between bicyclists and motorists, as well as between bicyclists and pedestrians, are increasing, a problem that has not gone unnoticed in the media or pro-smart growth sites such as Greater Greater Washington. Even as incidents increase, Jason Broehm, a member of the D.C. Pedestrian Advisory Council, says fatalities are decreasing. Safety measures such as high-visibility crosswalks, longer pedestrian intervals that give walkers a head start crossing the street before a light change, and photo enforcement have helped road users be more aware of each other.
A station of D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare near Farragut Square on 17th and K Streets in Northwest. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)
A bicyclist uses the center bike lanes on Pennsylvania Avenue. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)
Sebastian and Crane and groups such as WABA are working to curb the rising number of accidents as biking becomes more popular. In 2004, there were 284 bike crashes, according to data from DDOT, compared with 582 in 2011. The intersection at 14th and U streets NW had nine accidents from 2010 to 2011, the highest number of any in the District. However, the number of new bicyclists, as measured by the number observed at a given point during peak hours, continues to outpace the growth rate of accidents.
Sebastian doesn’t just want more new riders, he also wants those new cyclists coming from all over the city. David Daddio, then a master’s student in planning at the University of North Carolina, took D.C.’s Bikeshare to task last year for its many underutilized stations. He estimated that 13 percent of the stations as of 2011 received fewer than 18 total trips per day. Many of these were in Southeast Washington. As Bikeshare puts more stations here and in the city’s suburbs, critics point to these numbers in opposition.
Sebastian insists that scaling back in one part of the city is not an option. “Bikeshare is a citywide phenomenon, and it will continue to be as we expand.” He says those areas where the bike community is not yet self-sustaining is precisely where DDOT needs to double its efforts, hence projects such as the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail, which will connect the Tidal Basin to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. Bikeshare, whose majority of users are young, white, male and employed, also offers discounts on its $75 annual membership fee for low-income riders.
Sebastian’s vision for a biking community that includes all of the city is shared by Veronica O. Davis, founder of Black Women Bike. “As a biking community, anytime a new person gets on a bike, we need to celebrate that,” says Davis, who started the group after a young black girl outside a housing project exclaimed upon seeing Davis, “Mommy, Mommy, it’s a black lady on a bike.” The group has 800 members. According to the League of American Bicyclists, these women are part of the fastest-growing population of bikers nationally. In 2009, African Americans took 461 million bike trips, a 100 percent increase from 2001.
A bicyclist rides along 15th Street in Northwest which offers separate bike lanes and vegetation. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)
Though Davis has her own bike now, she says she started riding on a Bikeshare bike and that for many people, the hefty red bikes can offer a gateway to a new lifestyle. She hopes that as the program expands, more diverse users will flock to it. Current users reported saving $800 annually in travel costs.
Sebastian takes Metro and Bikeshare to work most days. His own bike, he jokes, isn’t as meticulously maintained as the Bikeshare bikes. Looking at the city’s biking boom and Washington’s spot as a national trendsetter, Sebastian says, “I don’t know if I would’ve picked D.C., but my job is to make D.C. more bike-friendly.” Now, with the growth of groups such as Black Women Bike and D.C. Bike Party, a monthly “party ride” around the city, Sebastian says, “you don’t need the government anymore to tell people to ride their bikes by building facilities and promoting riding Bikeshare. It’s happening. People are bicycling because it just makes sense.”
Leah Binkovitz is a freelance writer who lives in Bethesda. To comment
on this story, e-mail wpmagazine@
washpost.com. |
Note I am reviewing the product itself (the price point is up to you, the buyer, to decide if it's worth the cost).
As noted, the Rear Admiral package was an early backer offering that is basically the same as the current Andromeda game package ([...]:
1.) Lifetime Insurance - Never need to pay in-game currency to insure your ship. Current understanding is that insurance is supposed to be easy to earn in-game. Given the portion of the game which deals with this (Persistent Universe) is still in closed Alpha, we can only go by what information we are given. The current offering "only" gives 6-months free insurance. Afterwards, you need to buy it periodically.
2.) Deluxe Silver Collector's Box - You get a physical box for your game, vs the current offering's digital-only access. No one knows what the box looks like at this point so it's a gamble if you'll like it. That said, you can google and find images of what the box "might" look like.
3.) Spaceship-shaped USB Drive - It's a USB drive. 'nuff said. Again, no one knows what it will look like so that's a gamble.
4.) A physical CD of the soundtrack. The current offering gives a digital soundtrack.
5.) A glossy fold-up starmap. If it's anything like elite dangerous, it's likely going to be about 3' x 2' sized. A nice to have if you have the wall space for it but again, since we don't know what it'll look like, it's a gamble.
6.) Hardback "Making of Star Citizen". A "making of" isn't worth much other than to fans, in my opinion. That said, I'm a sucker for hardback books in packages.
7.) 5 spaceship blueprints. - I believe this would be physical blueprints you can display. Which ships, no one knows yet.
8.) 3" plastic spaceship model - Current consensus is it will be a "Constellation".
I believe as a whole, the package does qualify as a nice "Limited Edition" package. You get a lot of swag that is quite nice but already somewhat expensive when compared to other Limited Edition / Collectors Edition packages (Star Wars: The Old Republic and Elite Dangerous come to mind). Still, take everything above with a grain of salt as no one has even seen what the above look like once released. My rating may change as soon as I actually get a hold of the items. |
When The Magazine ceases publication this December, owner Glenn Fleishman will be closing shop on an ambitious two-year experiment in digital publishing.
It’s not a total surprise — subscriptions were already on a downward trend when Fleishman transitioned from editor to owner of The Magazine after purchasing the publication from Marco Arment last year — and it’s not a total bummer, either.
In fact, Fleishman says he’s feeling pretty good about stopping here: he’s met his obligation to provide Kickstarter backers with their one-year subscriptions, and he’s ending this fascinating experiment while it’s still profitable.
“I’m even able to pay myself an ever-declining hourly rate for my time,” said Fleishman, who spoke with Cult of Mac about what went right, what went wrong, and his feelings about pulling the plug on a project that was his full-time job for the last year and a half.
For Fleishman, this is a thoughtfully planned ending rather than a forced, last-minute exit. He counts this period of his career as one long learning process, for himself as well as for the folks behind the publishing platform he used, TypeEngine. (He even learned quite a bit about book publishing when putting together the crowd-funded print archive The Magazine, Year One.)
Nevertheless, The Magazine is shuttering, and there’s no single reason for the publication’s failure. The following are nine hard lessons he learned that contributed to the tough decision.
Topical drift can hurt: When it first came out, The Magazine was a unique thing. “It was a really great, unique idea — it was independent, it was paying people,” he said, “and it was the only one on Newsstand that was compact and lightweight. People subscribed out of interest.”
The Magazine pulled in almost 35,000 subscribers on launch (the title currently only has 7,000 to 8,000). To contrast that, Rupert Murdoch’s experiment in digital publishing, The Daily, attracted 80,000 subscribers, a sixth of what the media giant said he needed to break even.
The Magazine started out publishing a lot of personal essays that were about technology, by app developers and other folks in technology, who were also the target audience. Fleishman and Arment quickly realized that kind of content couldn’t sustain the publication.
“We started doing reported features and we started stretching,” Fleishman said. Many of the original readers weren’t interested in these new stories, even though Fleishman thinks everyone would have gotten bored by too many tech-focused personal stories.
“It would have become too blog-like over time,” he said, “with stuff like you could read elsewhere.”
Newsstand changed for the worse: “iOS 6 Newsstand was good for the publication,” said Fleishman, “but iOS 7 Newsstand was bad.” Apple, he said, lost interest in its iOS publishing hub.
“They hid it, they made it sort of ugly, and they suppressed the screen previews in the interest of flatness,” he said. Loyal subscribers canceled subscriptions, he said, because they forgot that new issues existed, even with Notifications and email reminders. It wasn’t in their face enough, something Fleishman attributes to the lack of publication-supportive design in Newsstand, which lost the little dot and any active cover previews of new issues.
“Apple’s disinterest in the Newsstand didn’t doom The Magazine,” he said, “but it certainly meant that people who were already subscribers forgot it existed, and contributed to the drop in subscriptions.”
Notifications aren’t always helpful: Apple sent out emails to subscribers reminding them that their subscriptions were about to renew. Fleishman notes that this counter-intuitively made people unsubscribe: If folks weren’t reading The Magazine because they forgot it had new issues, a reminder that they were “wasting” money each week didn’t help.
Targets can be too broad: Another thing Fleishman thinks contributed to The Magazine’s loss of subscribers was that the complement of content was just too broad. The original tagline, “For curious people with a technical bent,” was hard to pitch to both advertisers and potential readers, the latter of which consisted of tech-savvy people unhappy with the quirky stuff The Magazine was publishing as well as less-savvy folks.
The garden was walled: The publication’s website wasn’t really built out until June of last year. “We failed to capture readers early that way,” said Fleishman, “and many people still don’t realize they can read it online with a login.” Subscribers can download .epub and .mobi versions of the issues, but most didn’t take advantage.
Making a Newsstand app is labor- and cost-intensive. Fleishman isn’t sure he’d decide to go the same route today if he was commissioning a publication like The Magazine. “I would have avoided the expense of a native app,” he said, “and focused entirely on a backend with super-responsive design and eventually restyle as an app, or adopt a platform like TypeEngine.”
Not enough flash: Fleishman put in thousands of dollars and an equal number of hours designing parts of the app, but never was able to do the serious work of making the app interesting enough for people who like the flash and bang of modern media apps. People lost interest in the app itself at the same time that Newsstand was side-lining publications, making The Magazine lose subscribers faster than it was picking them up.
Not everyone can be an Internet personality: “If I were Guy Kawasaki,” said Fleishman, “I’d have 100,000 subscribers right now, but, sadly, I’m not.” Attention, he said, is an extremely scarce commodity — he was unable to attract enough interest in the writing quality alone to really bring and maintain attention to The Magazine.
Original content is tough: Building an all-commissioned digital magazine is time- and labor-intensive. The Magazine started as a publication and then became a website. Fleishman suggests it would have been better using Web content to populate a digital magazine (and points out that some sites, like Cult of Mac and The Loop, are already doing this). That way, he said, readers get all their content in one well-designed space without a publisher having to split their already beleaguered staff into yet another content stream. People love to get content in a different reading experience, he said.
Ultimately, notes Fleishman, all these factors combined to lead to the shuttering of The Magazine. Anyone starting up an independent digital magazine like it these days would be best served using a platform like TypeEngine, he said, and effectively keeping startup costs low.
The Magazine has been profitable. Nobody lost any money in the venture, which has paid out a half-million dollars to its writers. Because of that, Fleishman is not unhappy at all about having to end this part of his career, though he would do it differently if he started today.
“I would rather bring [a digital magazine] into being and make it flower,” he said, “as opposed to starting at a super-high point but with an extremely expensive and time-consuming infrastructure.”
Fleishman is currently finishing a The Magazine: The Book (October 2012 to October 2013). |
Roberto Firmino scored a hat-trick as a number of Liverpool first-team players clocked up minutes in a behind-closed-doors victory over Welsh outfit TNS at Melwood on Monday.
Those who had not featured from the start in the season opener against Stoke City were involved in the practice match today as they continue to build up fitness and sharpness.
The Reds line-up claimed a 5-1 win, with summer signing Firmino bagging a treble and Danny Ings – from the penalty spot – and Lazar Markovic also on target.
There were starts for Adam Bogdan, Emre Can, Lucas Leiva, Alberto Moreno, Divock Origi, Jordan Rossiter, Mamadou Sakho and Kolo Toure at the training base too.
LFCTV GO subscribers can watch two of Firmino’s three strikes, plus short highlights of the run-out, by clicking play above. Not yet signed up? Click here to join now.
Where are comments? |
Yesterday, the Washington Post published an editorial titled What Atheists Can’t Answer. The author, Michael Gerson, is an influential evangelical Christian and was formerly George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter.
Compared to most attacks on atheism, including a few I’ve rebutted recently, Gerson’s essay is fair and honest. He rightfully steers clear of the slanderous and unfounded insults so common in apologetic literature, conceding that human beings can be good without God. However, while he agrees that atheists can be moral, he expresses a time-worn worry:
Human nature, in other circumstances, is also clearly constructed for cruel exploitation, uncontrollable rage, icy selfishness and a range of other less desirable traits. So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? …Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.
This is a serious argument and deserves detailed consideration. Following is the text of a reply I sent to Gerson and to the Post.
Dear Mr. Gerson:
This is a response to your July 14 column, “What Atheists Can’t Answer”.
You wrote that, in the dilemma of choosing between good and evil, theism gives us reason to “cultivate the better angels of our nature.” However, any honest assessment of history would conclude that religion makes people bad at least as often as it makes them good. Religion has inspired great acts of charity and selflessness, beautiful music, art and architecture, and countless examples of human kindness and compassion. It has also inspired horrific, bloody wars, brutal inquisitions, tyrannical theocracies, fanatical campaigns of terror, and countless incidents of discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry.
Far from being a force that pulls ceaselessly toward the moral apex of the universe, religion is more like a megaphone, amplifying both the good and the bad of human nature in equal measure. This is not surprising to an atheist, because there is no objectively verifiable evidence of any god who wants people to behave in any particular way. As a result, people can without fear of contradiction invent a god who speaks for them, who confirms all their opinions and prejudices – and this is exactly what all religious people do, the liberal as well as the conservative.
You worried that atheists have no compelling answer to a person who says, “I’m going to do whatever I please.” But religion does not solve that problem. If anything, the problem is far worse when the malcontent is a theist who claims that his desires are not just some idiosyncratic expression of individual preference, but the very will of God. An atheist, at least, has no warrant to claim holy sanction or divine infallibility for his opinions, and in theory can be persuaded by reason. On the other hand, a person who sincerely believes that they are acting in accordance with the will of the creator is immune to evidence, diplomacy, and compromise – as the many religious wars still smoldering after millennia should make abundantly clear.
In your column, you said that morality cannot be anchored without reference to a higher power: that if God had not commanded us to be good, we would have no reason to be good, and no justification for condemning those who were not. This claim betrays its own incoherence, for we can then ask, why doescommand us to be moral? Does he have reasons for that edict? If so, then we too can make use of those reasons, for if they are good ones, they will stand on their own without reference to who is giving them. On the other hand, if God has no reasons for his commands, then religious morality is cut loose from any anchor. God commanded us to be merciful and kind, but that was just an arbitrary choice with no deeper significance. He could just as easily have commanded us to be vicious and cruel, andtraits would then be the definition of goodness which we were all bound to follow. Can any rational person accept such a nonsensical conclusion?
You asked what reason an atheist can give to be moral, so allow me to offer an answer. You correctly pointed out that neither our instincts nor our self-interest can completely suffice, but there is another possibility you’ve overlooked. Call it what you will – empathy, compassion, conscience, lovingkindness – but the deepest and truest expression of that state is the one that wishes everyone else to share in it. A happiness that is predicated on the unhappiness of others – a mentality of “I win, you lose” – is a mean and petty form of happiness, one hardly worthy of the name at all. On the contrary, the highest, purest and most lasting form of happiness is the one which we can only bring about in ourselves by cultivating it in others. The recognition of this truth gives us a fulcrum upon which we can build a consistent, objective theory of human morality. Acts that contribute to the sum total of human happiness in this way are right, while those that have the opposite effect are wrong. A wealth of moral guidelines can be derived from this basic, rational principle.
You said that in an atheist’s world, the desire for meaning and purpose are “a cruel joke of nature.” Nothing could be further from the truth. I am an atheist, and my life is full to bursting with meaning and purpose. I rejoice to be alive in this beautiful, complex, awe-inspiring world. I am grateful for the interactions with my fellow human beings who illuminate my mind with their brilliance, inspire me with their dedication, and offer me the chance to enter into the deep communion of love. The knowledge that our lives are finite does not make them less precious, but infinitely more so, as we know that we must seize this one opportunity while we possess it and drink deeply from the rich spring of all that life has to offer. |
Greece's New Currency
Greece is on its second bailout, with the possibility of a third bailout looming. The Guardian reports on a man in Greece who received groceries and tax services this month without spending a euro:
In return for his expert labour [as an electrician], Mavridis received a number of Local Alternative Units (known as tems in Greek) in his online network account. In return for the eggs, olive oil, tax advice and the rest, he transferred tems into other people’s accounts.
Tems is an alternative currency created by the Exchange and Solidarity Network. All transactions are recorded electronically via the network’s website. To avoid debt or hoarding, Tems has a debt floor of 300 units, and a ceiling of 1,200. Like time banks, it’s not a barter system as there’s a medium of exchange. However, the group does plan on opening a barter market in the following months.
The article implies that the Greek government is in support of such currency innovations: |
Something I’m starting to realise and accept for myself: I’m a web developer. Not an engineer. Mostly an approach & understanding difference
– Me, 6-Feb 2015
This seemed to strike a chord with a few people, and others asked if I could embellish on those thoughts. So here it is.
READER DISCOUNTSave $80 on terminal.training I've published 38 videos for new developers, designers, UX, UI, product owners and anyone who needs to conquer the command line today. $19 - only from this link
On titles
"We" love titles. Personally, in the last 5 years, I've preferred the sound of being an engineer, or a JavaScript engineer. I actually quite like software designer. But let's face it, it's all fluff.
Actually, where titles aren't fluff, is when you work in a larger company. Quite often titles relate directly to pay scales. I digress.
The engineer bit is a little less fluffy and does actually carry meaning.
Engineers
Calling yourself an engineer, when you're not actually qualified as an engineer is sort of a no-no. In fact, there's some regulation around the engineering titles - and certainly in the UK (according to the Wikipedia page), there's been petitions to protect the title.
Ignoring the regulations, to me, engineers are smart, educated (ideally in a form of engineering...) and specifically: solving complex computer engineering problems.
In a conversation (over twitter) I was having with Trek Glowacki, midway he replied with:
Take a step back and understand the real engineering goal: SRP
I wasn't aware of any engineering goal, nor what SRP stood for, nor did I really understand what the Wikipedia page was saying to me.
Honestly, I kind of feel out of my depth amongst engineers aka those people who *really" took the time to study computer science and grok the shit out of it.
I am web developer
I don't know why I thought it was uncool to be a "web developer". Perhaps because it's utterly vague.
What "web developer" does mean to me though, is this:
Someone who writes code for browsers. Likely from the school of view source, is comfortable with drop-in libraries, understands standards and best practice techniques. But mostly, a tinkerer.
I am not alone
The picture above is an (infamous) screen grab from the Web Platform introduction video. Of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The creator of The Web.
I saw a lot of posts and tweets suggesting that this was a joke, or a disservice to his work, or that the title was utterly understated.
I'm not sure it was. There's no doubt that this man is responsible for a lot more, but he is The Web Developer.
I'm proud to say that I work on that same web. Making it better (and sometimes, perhaps, a little worse).
Embrace it
I've personally learnt my web development skills over a long period of time and nearly entirely through trial and error. I suspect most of us have.
Being a web developer doesn't have to mean you have to be a JavaScript wiz, or that you don't touch the server side. By virtue of tinkering, it's quite likely you're getting better at all these things.
Coming to this realisation is by no means a slur against those people who call themselves engineers. If you do, it's quite likely I already have a great deal of respect for your knowledge and understanding if I've come across your work already.
As for me, I'm proud to say: I am a web developer. I am a tinkerer.
Posted 26-Feb 2015 under web. |
I’m not a huge Reddit fan, but it happened that I read the other day a thread about how some food bloggers focus on photography and post recipes that rarely succeed, how they make every recipe sound like it’s the best when in fact it may not be, how they make it look more like a business and less like something personal. The thread had dozens of comment from people stating the same thing and pointing towards quite famous bloggers out there whose photography and work I admired many times. I had mixed feelings reading this – on one side there’s the blogger community which I enjoy being part of and can totally relate to the work behind a blog and on the other side there’s the reader that tries the recipe, the reader that we care so much or should care about, the people we interact with who feel betrayed when a recipe fails.
I understand both parties and believe me, being a blogger is not the easy thing many people think, it’s not as fun as you might expect sometimes, making your recipes stand out is hard and oh boy, when you meet insensitive people, the Internet can be cruel. But this doesn’t mean we should post just anything and expect to form a community around a blog even though the recipes aren’t as good as we make them look in our photography. Yes, photography can be deceiving, I know it well, there’s plenty of tricks out there to make food look great so I believe this is why people feel betrayed when a recipe fails. They have high expectations, they want it to look like in the pictures, without being aware that a recipe’s success depends on many things and sometimes differently sourced ingredients can change the final result. But I still trust bloggers more than I trust recipe sites to source my recipes from. It’s probably that feeling of familiar I get when I read the stories, might be the preparation pictures you get to see sometimes, but I love reading blogs and sometimes comparing one recipe with another.
But I can totally relate to the person who had recipe failures from various bloggers, I’ve been there myself and it does bother me when I see someone saying it is the best recipe in the world – if you read more blogs you will probably find a similar recipe being presented as the best in the world and so on. It has to do with the way bloggers describe their recipe so people build these high expectations and if it doesn’t turn out according to that, they feel disappointed.
This thread also led to another thing I have been thinking about – how important is the story in a blog post compared to the recipe itself?! I’m a journalist so words are my friends, especially in writing, but I have to admit that sometimes writing more than the recipe itself is a struggle and I feel bad to just say how good the recipe is. I know it is, I don’t post recipes if I’m not happy with them, but writing entire paragraphs about how good it is and how amazing it tastes is just not my cup of tea. I tried it, it doesn’t feel like me, it feels like I’m trying to sell my recipes to you, my readers, when in fact I’m not. I want you to try the recipes I post, obviously, but only if you think you might like them, not because I say so many times in a paragraph and use all these pretty words to build a story around a recipe. But then I go to a different blog and I see this beautiful writing, studded with gorgeous words about the recipe and dessert that I feel bad I didn’t do the same … and this goes on forever. So I am curious, how important do you think the story is compared to the recipe? Do you read the stories that come with the recipes or just go to the recipe itself? Have you ever tried a recipe based on a blogger’s description?
Now let’s go back to today’s recipe which is a buttery, fragrant rhubarb cake with a crispy streusel topping. I’m not a huge fan of rhubarb, unless it comes in this classic combination with strawberries. So once the cake was baked, I made a simple strawberry compote and topped each serving of cake with it, plus a dollop of whipped mascarpone. Yes, simple mascarpone cream, whipped just to become airy. I find to be heavenly in this combination.. well, any combination, I’m a mascarpone addict!
{Streusel Rhubarb Cake} - Tort cu rubarba Print Author: Olguta - Pastry Workshop Serves:: 8-10 servings Ingredients: Cake: 4 eggs
90g sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
130g all-purpose flour
1 pinch salt
50g butter, melted and chilled
250g rhubarb, sliced
1 tablespoon cornstarch
2 tablespoons brown sugar Streusel topping: 50g butter, softened
100g all-purpose flour
1 pinch salt
2 tablespoons powdered sugar Strawberry compote: 300g strawberries
¼ cup fresh orange juice
40g sugar
2 cardamom seeds, crushed
Mascarpone cream for serving Directions: Cake: Pre-heat your oven to 350F and lined a round cake pan (22cm) with baking paper. Sift the flour with salt. Combine the eggs with sugar and vanilla in a bowl and mix with an electric mixer for 10 minutes until triple in volume. Stir in the vanilla extract then begin folding in the flour, spoon after spoon, mixing with a spatula until the flour is incorporated. Take 4 tablespoons of batter into a small bowl and stir in the melted butter. This is done because the butter (and other type of fat for that matter) tends to sink at the bottom of the bowl, forcing you to mix into the batter vigurously, thus destroying the air bubbles you effortesly incorporated in the eggs earlier. But if you do it in a small batch of dough first, the final batter won't be damaged at all. Transfer the butter mixture back into the bowl and carefully fold it in. Pour the batter in the prepared cake pan and place aside. Mix the rhubarb with cornstarch and sugar and top the cake with slices of rhubarb. Streusel topping: Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix until sandy. Spread the streusel over the rhubarb and bake the cake in the preheated oven at 350F for 35-40 minutes. Remove from the oven when done and let it cool completely. Strawberry compote: Combine all the ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over low heat and cook for a few minutes just until the fruits are softened, but not mushy. Allow it to cool completely. Serve the cake topped with mascarpone cream and strawberry compote. Wordpress Recipe Plugin by EasyRecipe 3.3.3077
Rubarba e o noutate pentru mine, am descoperit-o anul trecut multumita Lidl, caci nu prea e de gasit prin partile astea de Romanie si imi place tare in combinatie cu capsunele. Motiv pentru care tortul a fost insotit de un compot foarte simplu de capsune aromat cu putin cardamom. Si un mot de mascarpone simplu, usor batut cat sa se aereze, desi merge si frisca bine batuta, e doar o chestie de gust personal. Mascarpone e noua mea slabiciune si ma furisez si in miezul noptii pentru o lingurita din branza asta cremoasa, onctuoasa, grasa. Dar recunosc ca ultima felie de tort am acoperit-o bine cu smantana acra (ramasesem fara mascarpone si nu aveam nici frisca) si a fost la fel de buna. E genul ala de comfort food din care nu te mai poti opri din mancat.
Ingrediente:
Blat:
4 oua
90g zahar
130g faina alba
1 praf de sare
1 lingurita extract de vanilie
50g unt gras, topit
250g rubarba, felii
1 lingura amidon
2 linguri zahar brun
Topping crocant – streusel:
50g unt la temperatura camerei
100g faina alba
1 praf de sare
2 linguri zahar pudra
Compot de capsune:
300g capsune proaspete, taiate in jumatati
1/2 cana suc proaspat de portocale
40g zahar
2 pastai de cardamom, usor zdrobite
Mascarpone sau frisca pentru servire
Mod de preparare:
Blat:
Pre-incalziti cuptorul la 180C si tapetati o tava rotunda (22cm) cu hartie de copt. Amestecati rubarba cu amidonul si zaharul brun intr-un bol si dati deoparte. Mixati ouale cu zaharul si vanilia pana isi tripleaza volumul. Incorporati treptat faina cernuta cu un praf de sare. Luati deoparte cateva linguri de blat si amestecati cu untul topit. Turnati amestecul inapoi in bolul cu blat si amestecati usor cu o spatula. Turnati blatul in tava pregatita si acoperiti cu felii de rubarba.
Streusel:
Amestecati toate ingredientele intr-un bol si faramitati bine cu varful degetelor pana obtineti o compozitie nisipoasa. Intindeti streusel-ul peste rubarba si coaceti tortul pentru 35-40 minute. Lasati sa se raceasca in tava.
Compot de capsune:
Combinati toate ingredientele intr-un vas si fierbeti cateva minute pana fructele se inmoaie usor. Lasati sa se raceasca inainte de servire. |
IOWA: FIRST IN THE NATION
For the past 42 years, Iowa has held the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus, leading the way to the party nominations for the presidency. The caucus came to prominence in 1976 when Jimmy Carter used Iowa as a springboard for his presidential campaign, and a second place finish in Iowa (behind “uncommitted”) provided the momentum for him to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency of the United States.
Since 1972, the caucus has become a major national media event, garnering praise and criticism. Iowa’s grassroots politics provide opportunities for all candidates to succeed, and Iowa activists are known for their careful consideration of candidates. Nonetheless, critics charge that Iowa is unrepresentative and therefore other states might be better suited to kick off the nominating process. Whatever your thoughts on the merits (or lack thereof) of Iowa’s caucus, the caucus campaign in Iowa is unlike any campaign in any other state.
As the caucus has evolved, the state has developed a lively political culture and “retail politics” is the name of the game. Together, Iowa and New Hampshire garner approximately 50% of the media coverage of the entire nominating process. While most Americans see glimpses of the Iowa campaign on the nightly news, the real campaign in Iowa is focused not on the candidates, but on average citizens in small towns across the state. Voters meet White House hopefuls in church basements, high school gyms, small town diners, fairgrounds, picnic grounds, parades, and front porches. |
Joe Maddon pulled a Babe Ruth.
In the dugout before Game 5 of the World Series at Wrigley Field, the Cubs manager called his shot, telling Andre Dawson his team would win that night, push the series back to Cleveland and take the final two games from the Indians.
Which, as we all know, is exactly what happened.
Dawson — the Hall of Famer and Cubs legend — recounted the story Thursday morning:
"I can remember a comment he made. He's like, 'We're gonna win this game and we're gonna go on the road and we're gonna win the series,'" Dawson said. "I looked at him and he said, 'I think the guys are pressured a bit too much and we need to get away from Wrigley Field,' which obviously was the outcome."
That's not the first time we've heard the possibility the Cubs may have been feeling the pressure playing in front of the tense Wrigley faithful. But it's interesting Maddon had the same thought before the Cubs even mounted their epic comeback down three games to one in the World Series.
Dawson played six years with the Cubs and won the National League MVP in 1987 after leading the league with 49 homers and 137 RBI.
He admitted he swelled with pride watching the final two games of the World Series, likely echoing the thought of all former Cubs everywhere.
"For everyone that's ever put on a Cubs uniform, it was just joy and jubilation that it actually and finally happened," Dawson said. "There were a few bumps in the road in getting to the final result, but I was quite happy I could say I wore that uniform once and finally the fans here in Chicago got the wish and the dream that they so longed for."
Dawson also recounted his trip to Chicago the day before that epic parade and rally that featured five million Cubs fans. He even gave his daughter a warning about how wild that celebration might get at Grant Park.
Check out Dawson's full interview in the video above. |
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, left, currently holds a comfortable lead against both of his potential Democratic opponents. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)
A new Quinnipiac University poll shows three Republican incumbent senators leading their would-be Democratic opponents.
The poll released Thursday shows Ohio Sen. Rob Portman leading former Gov. Ted Strickland by 7 percentage points, a jump from the previous poll which had seen the two in a statistical tie.
Portman appears to have a significant fundraising advantage over Strickland, with $13 million in cash on hand. Strickland has lagged in fundraising in the past but has yet to release his second quarter numbers.
[ The 10 Most Vulnerable Senators ]
In Pennsylvania, GOP Sen. Patrick J. Toomey is beating Katie McGinty , former chief of staff to Gov. Tom Wolf, by 10 points.
Toomey has consistently led in polls against McGinty as well her Democratic primary challenger, former Rep. Joe Sestak when he was polled by Quinnipiac.
Similarly, in Florida, Sen. Marco Rubio has consolidated his lead over both of his potential Democratic opponents , Reps. Patrick Murphy and Alan Grayson. Republicans pushed hard for Rubio to run for re-election since he was widely seen as their best option to hold the seat.
Murphy, who has received the endorsement of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has been criticized after local news reports showed discrepancies in his resume. Rubio leads Murphy by 13 points and he leads Grayson, who is largely opposed by the Democratic establishment, by 12 points.
The poll also shows President Barack Obama's approval ratings underwater in all three states.
Get breaking news alerts and more from Roll Call on your iPhone or your Android. |
Story highlights Teresa Gilmete Badger is an elementary schoolteacher
At least two people were hospitalized after eating the food, police say
At least one person tested positive for THC, marijuana's intoxicating ingredient
A 15-year-old got sick after eating leftovers from the party
Police in Northern California have arrested an elementary schoolteacher after she allegedly brought marijuana-laced food to an after-hours employee potluck dinner.
Teresa Gilmete Badger, a 47-year-old teacher at Matthew Turner Elementary School in Benicia, was arrested Friday afternoon on suspicion of poisoning after a six-week-long investigation, said Lt. Frank Hartig of the Benicia Police Department.
After the late-November get-together in the Bay Area town, several people reported feeling ill, a police statement said.
"One of the partygoers was rushed to the hospital with severe reactions; she was hospitalized," Hartig told CNN affiliate KPIX . "The very next morning, another partygoer was taken to the hospital, because she continued to feel like she was under the influence of something."
JUST WATCHED Obama, Perry backpedals on marijuana Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Obama, Perry backpedals on marijuana 05:25
At least one of the women tested positive for THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol), the principal intoxicant in marijuana, police said.
A 15-year-old also got sick after someone at the party brought leftovers home, according to police.
During their investigation, police said they were told that Badger had "allegedly confessed her involvement to individuals who were also in attendance at the party."
She was arrested Friday and booked into Solano County Jail in Fairfield. Bail was set at $15,000.
Badger chose not to speak to arresting officers, Hartig said. |
Eric Voegelin’s critique of modernity claims that Liberalism, the creed of the Enlightenment, is “Gnostic.” Voegelin (1901-1985) drew the term “Gnosticism” from its scholarly application in theological discussion to a strain of Late Antique religiosity. The term “Gnostic” refers to that array of sects and cults, the adherents of which saw themselves, as forming a saintly elect among the perishing masses on account of their possessing, as their souls, sparks of divinity that had become trapped in the world of matter. The ancient Gnostics abhorred the world of matter and claimed to sojourn in it only as exiles from a realm of pure light, which was the “real” world despite appearances. Voegelin labeled Gnosticism an anticosmic rebellion, a rebellion against reality, emphasizing the tendency of Gnostics to construct what – borrowing from novelists Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer – he called a second reality built on principles contrary to those governing what morally and intellectually adjusted people understand to be the actual or first reality. Gnosticism for Voegelin constitutes a social pathology for the reason that the upholders of the second reality, once having invested their emotion in it, make it a fetish and regard criticism of it as lèse majesté. Organized Gnosticism tends to become a censorious war, a jihad, to protect the second reality from examination and, more aggressively, to coerce assent to the second reality’s existence.
It belongs to Voegelin’s critique of modernity as the re-emergence of Gnosticism that its object – the social pathology of the political religions – corresponds to an attitude (namely, rebuke) rather than to some specific doctrine that has persisted since antiquity. Voegelin never meant to argue that let us say the Valentinian speculation or Manichaeism as such could be identified with Marxism, National Socialism, Leninism, Feminism, Multiculturalism, or any other particular ismatic discourse. Yet, as Voegelin saw it, the ancient and the modern rebellions stubbornly resembled one another in their basic dispositions. When, therefore, in his posthumous In Search of Order (1987), Voegelin alludes to the characteristic modern “divinization of men,” he takes as his exemplar of the genus “the Feuerbach-Marx divinization of man,” whose purpose consists in “explaining divine reality as a human projection that, if returned to man, will produce full humanity.” That normative consciousness is false, that religion is false, that institutions are false and tyrannical, and that only an elite recognizes the situation: These motifs structure both ancient Gnostic speculation and modern ideological discourse – both of which envision their fulfillment in the abolition, one way or another, of existing reality.
Voegelin distinguishes the ancient and modern rebellions in this way: “At the extreme of the revolt in consciousness, ‘reality’ and the ‘Beyond’ become two separate entities, two ‘things’ to be magically manipulated by suffering man for the purpose of either abolishing ‘reality’ altogether and escaping into the ‘Beyond,’ or of forcing the order of the ‘Beyond’ into ‘reality.’ The first of the magic alternatives is preferred by the gnostics of antiquity, the second one by the modern gnostic thinkers.”
I. The magisterial analysis of pneumopathology, or spiritual sickness, that Voegelin undertakes in the final great phase of his life in the five volumes of Order and History solicits further consideration, which the discussion shall undertake in due course. But as Voegelin’s analysis of pneumopathology consummates many decades of his concerted meditation on the problem of “the modern Gnostic thinkers,” it will be helpful to begin where Voegelin himself began, in his early, sobering study of The Political Religions (1938), which heralds so much in his subsequent authorship. That book’s publication coincided with the Anschluss, with Voegelin’s loss of his teaching position, and with his flight through Switzerland to England in company with his wife. The Political Religions, like The New Science of Politics (1952), either stymied or outraged its earliest readers, or did both at once. Voegelin opens the discussion with a calculated understatement: “Speaking about political religions and construing the movements of our times not only as political but also, and primarily, as religious movements is not accepted as a matter of course yet, even though the factual situation would force the attentive observer to take this stand.” The difficulty actually worsens when one considers that the “movements” of which Voegelin writes identify themselves, not as sacral or religious but quite vehemently as secular; and that they practice open hostility to traditional creeds and churches.
And yet – in looking past the claims of the ideologies, in looking to the organization and behavior of the “movements,” the outward signs of sectarian religiosity begin to make themselves visible to an observer. Among these signs, a fanatical enmity towards any competing spiritual or doctrinal authority strongly resembles the postures that scholarship associates with the zealotries of Late Antiquity religiosity, on the one hand, and with the cultic propaganda of the period of the European religious wars of the Seventeenth Century, on the other. This recurrent attitude of absolute justification is also the shared attitude of contemporary dogmatic Liberalism and Islam – each of which thinks to use the other in the completion of its program of abolishing Christianity despite the many differences that make them finally incompatible. A generation after Voegelin’s death, the cumulus of historical material apposite to the recognition of concupiscent spirituality has greatly increased.
Voegelin’s vocabulary of spiritual aperture and closure structures the argument in The Political Religions. Already in 1938 Voegelin describes normative consciousness – the type of consciousness on which the classical political arrangement is based – as having its root in certain fundamentals that universal perception emphatically attests. As Voegelin writes, “man experiences himself as being natural [kreatürlich] and, therefore, questionable,” where the final adjective means amenable to investigation or analysis which can indeed reveal the truth about a thing. All order begins with man’s sense, as Voegelin argues, that “his soul is linked to the cosmos,” and that when he acts his actions place him in a relation “to a suprapersonal, all-powerful something,” with which the actions can either be in accord or out of tune, healthy or unhealthy. The suspicion that time is out of joint or that something is rotten in the state only makes sense in light of this intuition of a transcendent non-temporal source of temporal order – of an archetype of order or a Logos. For the ancients it resided in the visible cosmos, for Christians, in the unseen City of God. As Voegelin writes, “The Beyond surrounding us can be searched for and found in all the directions in which human existence is open to the world: in the body and in the spirit, in man and in the community, in nature [Natur] and in God.” The “spiritual religions,” which are “trans-worldly,” respond to the intuition of “the Beyond.”
The historical archive of symbolizations, including the distorted ones, makes an opportunity, however, for derailment. The living, plastic symbols can “firm up as systems, become filled with the spirit of religious agitation and fanatically defended as the ‘right’ order of being.” This type of reification of a symbol-system, invested with the full measures of anxious emotion and literal-mindedness, is closed. It takes itself for the end-point of existence or for a final codification of reality beyond which there is no further development or history. “Our time,” writes Voegelin, “is overcrowded with religious orders of this kind, and the result is a Babylonian confusion of tongues, since the signs or symbols of a language have immensely different holy, magic, and value-related qualities, depending on the speaker using them.” The subject’s relation to the symbols of this-worldly (“immanent”) faith then conforms in a debased way to a lowly thing-relation: The subject encounters the words as though the phenomena designated by them were mere items in the world; he encounters them moreover as fetishes or idols, valorized by the gestures of charismatic gurus or leaders. “Followers of the movements that want to be anti-religious and atheistic refuse to concede that religious experiences can be found at the root of their fanatical attitude, only venerating as sacred something else than the religion they fight.”
In The Political Religions, Voegelin classifies secularization under the heading of “religious developments” but in the direction of immanence rather than transcendence. He reminds readers that the “process of withering” that afflicts European civilization “has its origins in the secularization of the soul and the ensuing severance of a consequently purely secular soul from its roots in religiousness.” Later in the text, Voegelin writes this: “Precisely the secularization of life that accompanied the doctrine of humanism is the soil in which such an anti-Christian religious movement as National Socialism was able to prosper.” Once the propaganda in denial of a “Beyond” of this world has sufficiently pervaded the social domain the only possible remaining sources of valid propositions are “a powerful person,” “organization accompanied by glamour and noise,” and the combination of “force and terror.” The “powerful person” never invites his followers to test on their own the rightness of his doctrine; he promulgates it aggressively in the mode of absolute authority – thus as unquestionable Gnosis, the term that Voegelin would later employ. Voegelin observes that ideological-totalitarian states invariably imitate the trappings of sacred societies. Think of Hitler’s flag-ceremonies or the mummified bodies of the Bolshevik leaders, to which the Communist faithful must make pilgrimage.
The religiosity of the Twentieth Century ideologies combined with their reactive anti-Christian impulse had not occurred to Voegelin alone. In Metapolitics (1941), Peter Viereck devotes a chapter to “Nazi Religion versus Christian Religion” – remarkably Voegelin-like construction although Viereck in the early phase of his authorship would have had no acquaintance with Voegelin. Viereck writes, “Now that Stalin has purged the old-Bolshevik intellectuals and Soviet Russia has stopped philosophizing, [Alfred] Rosenberg remains the leading anti-Christian philosopher in the world today.” Not only, in Viereck’s view, is Nazi philosophy, as far as it is philosophy, essentially anti-Christian, but it is also essentially religious: “Through romantic incantation and mass ecstasy Nazi religion would reawaken the elemental powers of pre-civilization days.” Voegelin, himself, had he enjoyed the opportunity to read Viereck’s assertion, would undoubtedly have agreed with it, pointing out an implication that Viereck might have had but omits to record: Namely that Nazi religion, like Gnosticism, is an instance of total, world-rejecting nihilism, particularly in its attitude toward civilization. One might easily hunt up observations similar to those of Viereck in numerous works of the 1920s and 30s – in those, say, by René Guenon, José Oretga, and Nicholas Berdyaev, and by certain novelists and satirists.
In The Political Religions, to recur to it, Voegelin undertakes a critique of scientism. As he writes, “the common trend of the new symbolism is its ‘scientific’ character.” Thus Nazi race-theory is “scientific,” complete with catalogues of skull-measurements. All Marxist theory under the Soviet regime is “scientific,” with the word becoming mere reflexive approbation in official discourse. Once “the world as contents has suppressed the world as existence,” and once the “counter-formulas against the spiritual religions and their worldviews are coined and legitimated by the claims of secular science as the [sole] valid form of cognition, contrary to revelation and mystical thought”: Then, as Voegelin writes, “the inner-worldly apocalypse needs only to remove from [medieval religious] thinking the transcendent end realm… to have at its disposal a language of symbols suitable for the secular world.” The “end realm” remains, non-transcendentally, as in the sequence of Feudalism-Capitalism-Communism, after which there is no fourth term; or similarly in the National Socialist coinage of a “Third Reich,” which will also be a “Thousand-Year Reich,” that is to say, permanent and unchangeable.
A skeptic might object to Voegelin’s account of secularization that if intuiting the link to “the Beyond” belonged to human nature then the curtailment of the transcendental orientation could take place only with great difficulty. Why do the addressees of the Robespierre- or Lenin- or Hitler-appeal yield to the leader’s closed vision in the first place? The answer is that the capacity for profound intuition never develops equally in all people, nor does the capacity to articulate intuition in transparent symbols; these talents develop powerfully only in a few. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, who might well have been a Gnostic, for a few there is intuition, but for the rest there is only tuition, often at a steep price. Even the capability of understanding the symbols, once the vates or logothete articulates them, finds only unequal distribution, with increasingly diminished currency. Because pride and laziness really exist, moreover, the appeals to them, and to other base motives, always enjoy greater popularity than the admonitions against them. Whereas normative religion, which carefully admonishes everyone, preaches a higher power, humanism preaches the autonomy and supremacy of man. The majority will tend to vote for the second over the first, if only because men like to think of themselves as supreme, whereupon many will eagerly say, “we are the ones we have been waiting for” and “the debate is over.”
Viereck once again makes a similar analysis in Metapolitics. The “German Faith Movement,” as he observes, is simply a seductive appeal to the ordinary man with a slight inferiority complex intended to recruit him into uncritical approbation of the regime by elevating him to superman-status – and by training him to focus his disappointments, or rather to transfer them, to the sub-human scapegoats of the creed. Thus, for Viereck, “racism is itself less a science or philosophy than a religion an anti-Christian brand of mysticism,” which “worships blood as sacred, but only the blood of its own tribe, making it a narcissistic self-worship.” Here again Voegelin would likely be quick to notice the parallelism with the Late-Antique Gnostic creeds, which made a similar appeal based on the sharp division between election and preterition and similarly regarded the preterit as a sub-human rabble fit in its ignorance only to be abolished in the eschaton of the Pleroma.
II. Voegelin’s New Science of Politics not only constitutes the natural sequel to The Political Religions; it brings to maturity the line of thinking, stimulated by Voegelin’s clash with totalitarianism, that found its tentative discourse, only lacking one or two key symbols, in the earlier book. Yet one should avoid the temptation to underestimate The Political Religions, either on account of its brevity or its schematic construction. With its invocations of Pharaoh Akhenaton’s Aton-cult, as the first political religion, and of Joachim di Fiore (1135-1202) and the history-closing terminology of the “Third Age,” the book forecasts the subject matter not only of The New Science of Politics but also of the volumes of Order and History. The style of The Political Religions again forecasts the style of The New Science of Politics. Voegelin writes as one who participates in a “transcendent truth,” the gist of which, being universally attested, is other than an entry in the range of competing sectarian opinions. Rather, the range of opinions must be judged against the permanence of that truth. Hence the definite article in the book’s title: Not A New Science of Politics, but rather The New Science of Politics, a grammatical delimitation that outraged academic readers of the book on its appearance.
The New Science takes its place among kindred works in its time-period of the immediate post-war years, but less in the realm of non-fiction or direct political discourse than in the realm of fiction or indirect discourse and novelistic social criticism, Voegelin himself having mentioned Musil and von Doderer. The Finnish writer Mika Waltari (1908 – 1979) wrote his best-known and most powerful novel The Egyptian during the war-years and issued it in 1945 just as hostilities concluded. The Egyptian narrates in the first person the experiences of one Sinuhe who lives through the social upheaval caused by Akhenaton’s precipitous and badly calculated religious and social reforms. Waltari’s Pharaoh has had a vision, not unlike those of the Hebrew Prophets in the Old Testament, but he interprets it literally and enacts it as policy with revolutionary abandon. Near the end of Pharaoh’s deconstruction of traditional arrangements, an ex-slave tells Sinuhe: “His [Akhenaton’s] god is assuredly a very remarkable one, for he causes Pharaoh to act like a madman. Robbers and murderers now wander freely through the Two Kingdoms, the mines are deserted, and the wealth of Egypt sees no increase.”
Waltari’s Danish contemporary Martin A. Hansen (1909 – 1955) published his novel of the Thirty Years’ War, Lucky Kristoffer, also in 1945 at the cessation of hostilities. Like Waltari’s Egypt of the Tel-El-Amarna Period, Hansen’s Denmark of the early Seventeenth Century is a hellish landscape of social breakdown, homicidal fanaticism, and the insane abrogation of everything belonging to traditional law and order. Hansen’s sympathies lie with Catholicism although the Church comes in for its share of condemnation. Instead of the single half-sympathetic Pharaoh who, his vision overtaking him, would reshape reality according to it, there is the Polyphemus of innumerable convinced men each of whom has become his own spiritual authority and seeks to impose that authority on all others – or punish or eliminate them should they refuse the privilege. “During [the] lovely midsummer,” as Hansen’s narrator records, “Johann Rantzau swept the Lübeckers out of Fyn, and so many peasants lost their lives.” A young woman wants to make confession, but the narrator tells her, “All the father confessors are now extirpated.” The landscape has become “rubble and blood-stained gravel” in which men “flounder”; and “the corpses hanging in the gallows outside the ramparts [have] turned black with the rain.” Whether it is Waltari writing of the Bronze Age or Hansen of the Late Medieval period, the real reference is the shattered soul of Europe in 1945.
In composing The New Science, and in letting his intuition be moved by a novelistic sense of spiritual disaster, Voegelin took as his task nothing less than to restore “the science of human existence in society and history” in an age when “the consciousness of principles is lost.” In the last, Voegelin meant not only that contemporary political science so-called had lost sight of basic insights available only through the study of the classical texts (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante) but also that the reigning positivism of the social sciences rejected the idea of principles, confining its method to empirical description. An unstated but strongly implied sub-thesis of The New Science would be then that the contemporary political science of the mid-Twentieth Century has become merely another iteration of a general restrictive scientism, bound by its dogmatic commitment to material causality to eschew any traffic whatever with pre-modern thought and to blind itself to the important role of symbolization in the gaining of insights into the order of being. Because a symbol resists reduction to a logical proposition, the scentistic mentality rejects it as intrinsically meaningless, but in doing so it only sacrifices its faculty of cognition to its Puritan fundamentalism.
It is once more a case for Voegelin of the distinction between transparency and occlusion in the cognition of reality, for by the clarity of cognition alone man puts his soul in order. As Voegelin puts it, “if the adequacy of a method is not measured by its usefulness to the purpose of science, if on the contrary the use of a method is made the criterion of science, then the meaning of science as a truthful account of the structure of reality, as the theoretical orientation of man in his world, and as the great instrument for man’s understanding of his own position in the universe is lost.” Voegelin declares that valorizing as knowledge only those results generated by a single approved method amounts to “perversion” in the epistemological realm. That term, perversion, occurs many times in the text. Voegelin uses it to emphasize the unnatural – the spiritually sick – character of modernity. All of these indictments, including the repeated one of modern intellectual perversion, rankled the scholarly mentality, but none so much as the common thesis of the three concluding chapters, the thematic content of which the chapter-titles themselves adequately convey. They are “Gnosticism: The Nature of Modernity,” “The Gnostic Revolution: The Puritan Case,” and “The End of Modernity.” On the one hand, Modernity, once established, ought to remain eternally in place and undisturbed. On the other, since its end, as aim, can only be the abolition of man, it avoids publicity concerning that end or aim.
The critique of scientism in The Political Religions shades logically into the theory of Gnosticism as the “nature of modernity” in The New Science of Politics. Gnosticism, of which scientism is a variety, constitutes the radical case of “perversion” in the realm of knowledge and in the articulation of that knowledge in a shared, effective social symbolism; Gnosticism is meanwhile related – in its modern manifestation, as mandatory Liberalism – to Puritanism, as previous remarks will have indicated. A vast occasion for offense obviously offered itself in Voegelin’s prose to everyone from the Trotskyites to the Mayflower Society, and the situation has hardly improved with time. But it is in the nature of Gnosticism to take offense, apropos of which Voegelin observes: “One can easily imagine how indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism” or when he is told that “totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.”
To quote these particular remarks is to put the cart ahead of the horse somewhat, but the quotations have the value, exemplarily, of pointing toward one of Voegelin’s essential insights about Gnosticism as the essence of modernity. It is also important to put them in their proper historical perspective: Voegelin made those remarks more than sixty years ago – and the subsequent cumulus of experience bears them out today even more than it did in 1952. Voegelin contends that Christianity “de-divinized” politics and permitted the articulation of political forms in a purely temporal realm – a gain for human self-understanding and for freedom. The phrase Gnostic Modernity is synonymous, however, with the “re-divinization” of the political-temporal order and therefore not at all with anything that could rationally be called progress, but that must, on the contrary, be grasped as an atavism. Naturally, such “re-divinization” dissimulates itself, even appearing in the form of militant atheism, but it always renders itself identifiable through its vehement hostility to established religion and to the Tradition generally.
Citing the parallel observation made by Viereck in Metapolitics will once again be useful. In the chapter on “Nazi Religion versus Christian Religion,” in a sub-chapter entitled “The Dark Gods Awaken,” Viereck writes: “Through romantic incantation and mass ecstasy Nazi religion would reawaken the elemental powers of pre-civilization days.” National Socialism amounts, in Viereck’s characterization, to nothing less that “a bloody war of Kultur against civilization.” In the chapter on “Rosenberg as Journalist,” Viereck observed the dependence of Nazi rhetoric on figures of resentment. “The correct beginning for every Nazi pamphlet,” Viereck writes, “is to list all it damns, always a list huger in space and fervor than that of what is praised.” Thus the cognitive content, so to speak, of National Socialism is not really cognition at all – it is a spasm of petulant rage directed at the world as it is currently arranged, under the form of civilization. The Hitlerian program is nothing less than the abolition of the existing world and its replacement by another. The program requires what Voegelin calls “re-divinization” because the new world can only issue from a world-creator who triumphs over his original.
What was it that drove the atavistic program of “re-divinization,” by the dubious symbolism of which Joachim and his successors, in Voegelin’s words, “achieved certainty about the meaning of history”? In the previous “de-divinized” symbolism, history resisted its own dogmatization as a definition or “eidos.” But as Voegelin writes, “history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future.” The meaning of history, in the “de-divinized” symbolism, belongs to the transcendent realm, with the Ideal Republic or the City of God. One could say that under Christianity the meaning of history is indefinitely deferred and that the deferral helps guarantee freedom. “Certainties,” Voegelin argues, “are in demand for the purpose of overcoming uncertainties with their accompaniment of anxiety.” What unresolved issue or lacuna in knowledge gives rise to anxiety so acute that even an “illusion,” the mendacious “meaning of history,” becomes preferable to it? “Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity,” and by corollary, “the feeling of security in ‘a world full of gods’ is lost [when] the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith,” as it is by Paul and the Patres.
Voegelin denies that High Medieval Humanism and the Renaissance correspond together to a new espousal of Paganism. For one thing, Paganism had never disappeared; rather it had been absorbed by Christian philosophy and thoroughly permeated the new Christian culture of the Late Roman Empire. In addition, Paganism was an instance of healthy adjustment to the world, which is why the successor religion could absorb it without distorting itself. In this way the Renaissance in particular is not a complete novelty but a return to something like the Constantinian religious dispensation; it is a re-extension of philosophical tolerance that abolishes the dogmatic political Christianity of Justinian. The Renaissance, through its cult of beauty, also reacts against the various forms of iconoclasm – Islamic, Byzantine, Catholic, and Proto-Protestant – that interrupted the continuum of beauty of the Western Tradition in the Late Medieval Period. Iconoclasm, if it were not itself necessarily Gnostic, would nevertheless be characteristic of Gnosticism, which is the rebellion against the order of being. Normative religion, whether Pagan or Christian, affirms the order of being and calls people to reconcile themselves to it. It is unsurprising therefore to find Voegelin remarking that, “Gnosis… had accompanied Christianity from its very beginnings” and remained available in certain themes and attitudes in Scotus Erigena, Dionysius the Areopagite, and related writings.
The essential trait of modern Gnosticism consists in its “immanentist eschatology.” In Search of Order defines “immanentist eschatology” as the project “of forcing the order of the ‘Beyond’ into ‘reality.’” But the topic here is The New Science of Politics. So pervasively does “immanentist eschatology” propagate itself in Western thinking after Joachim that one fails to notice its presence in the schoolbook and encyclopedia truism that the Modern Age, so-called, succeeded the Middle Ages, pejoratively understood as an era of intellectual obscurantism and superstition. Once one puts the first term, Antiquity, in place, one has the Joachitic “eidos of history” in three phases. The third phase may assume a variety of specific shapes: Joachim’s universal monastery-utopia, Dante’s Apollinian Imperium, Condorcet’s Age of Reason, or Auguste Comte’s Church of Man. That Comte was the confabulator of Positivism reminds Voegelin that, “scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest gnostic movements in Western society.”
Voegelin takes as his sample case of a Gnostic movement erupting in a society the English Puritans. He relies on the account of Puritan agitation given by theologian Richard Hooker (1554-1600) in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594). Hooker, a Protestant whose thinking remained rooted in Aristotle and Aquinas, insisted on the intellectual continuity of the Logos from its Pagan to its Christian manifestation. Rather than being a participant in the Logos, the Puritan (Voegelin’s Gnostic) is a man with a “cause.” This “cause,” invariably moralistic and denunciatory, aims its ire at the constituted order of society in Manichaean terms of an absolute division between the good of the “cause” and the evil of the constituted society. Voegelin picks up on Hooker’s observation that the Puritan relies, not on Scripture, but on selective quotation from Scripture with tendentious commentary to propagate his agenda.
In Voegelin’s coinage, every Gnostic insurgency requires its “Koran.” He mentions that Calvin’s Institutes constitute such a “Koran” – in its mildest variety – whereas the proliferating pamphlet-literature of Puritanism waxes swiftly fanatic. With the printing press, a type of programmatic stridency begins to characterize sectarian discourse. A tendency to identify scapegoats and to urge their violent expulsion from the polity accompanies such stridency. Voegelin continues: “In the Communist movement, finally, the works of Karl Marx have become a kind of Koran of the faithful supplemented by the patristic literature of Leninism-Stalinism.” Today there are numerous Korans, just as there were numerous pamphlets in Northern Europe under the agitation of the Protest, and just as there were numerous broadsides and tracts during the heyday of Puritanism in England. Today’s pamphlets and tracts generally issue from those conspicuously non-profit enterprises called university presses. Current weird mutations of Catholicism are not excluded from this generalization.
III. Oswald Spengler remarks in The Decline of the West that the Glorious Revolution prefigured the French Revolution stage by stage, including the execution of the royal sovereign. Voegelin was certainly aware of Spengler’s thesis. In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin, drawing both on Hooker and on the Puritan pamphlets, to which Hooker refers, compares the Puritan insurgency to the Bolshevik insurgency, stage by stage. At the time of the Puritan pamphlet called Queries (1649), a threatening document in which the rebellious saints entitle themselves to “authority and rule over the nations and kingdoms of the world,” as Voegelin writes, “the revolution… had reached a stage corresponding to the stage of the Russian Revolution at which Lenin wrote about ‘next tasks.’” The pamphlet forecasts the violent insurgency to come and thus anticipates “the stage at which, in the Russian Revolution, Lenin wrote his reflections under the coquettish title, ‘Will the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?’” As Voegelin remarks, “They will, indeed; and nobody will share it with them.” English Puritan rhetoric and Russian Bolshevik rhetoric resemble Nazi rhetoric, as assessed by Viereck in Metapolitics. All three are cases of world-resentment driven to the highest pitch until it becomes a type of God-delusion.
In another Puritan pamphlet, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory (1641), Voegelin discovers the invariable nihilistic strain of the Gnostic imagination in its agitated mood. Drawing on apocalyptic imagery from the Bible, the pamphleteer gloats over the imminent destruction of the constituted order, here characterized as “Babylon.” “While God is the ultimate cause of the imminent happy change,” Voegelin wryly comments, “men should indulge in some meritorious action, too, in order to hasten the coming.” Such action, quoting the language of the pamphlet, will include “dashing the brats of Babylon against the stones.” The language of A Glimpse bears comparison with the languages of Bolshevism and Nazism. The Seventeenth-Century pamphleteering imagery doubtless put itself into practice at the time, but it also found vivid actualization under the Bolshevik and Nazi regimes and it finds contemporary actualization in the bloody deeds – recorded on video by the perpetrators – of the Neo-Caliphate calling itself the Islamic State or the Islamic State in Syria. Ideological polities, as Waltari and Hansen asserted in novelistic mode, invariably resort to the hoary practice of human sacrifice.
A previous essay to this one put under examination various Gnostic documents of the Second Century and came to the conclusion that discursively those documents represented a resurgence of sacrificial thinking: The abolition of the world means the justified holocaust of all save the elect, who alone qualify as worthy enough to inhabit the new creation. This pattern reappears in A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, in the infanticide-imagery. The world of the saints will arise on the lifeblood and sweetmeats of the unbelievers. The acknowledgment, as Voegelin writes, that, “the Scriptural camouflage cannot veil the drawing of God into man,” should not, in turn, veil the bloodthirsty character of the pamphleteer’s God. Like the Moloch of the Carthaginians, that God demands the newborn in his honor. Hence Voegelin’s judgment: “All this has nothing to do with Christianity,” even while it has everything to do with religion, in a primordial cultic sense. God, responding to “meritorious action,” will reverse all social relations, leveling the mountains of established difference, so to speak. Voegelin adds this: “In this God who comes skipping over the mountains we recognize the dialectics of history that comes skipping over thesis and antithesis, until its lands its believers in the plain of the Communist synthesis.”
In Science Politics and Gnosticism (1958), Voegelin widens the scope of such recognition. Quoting Gnostic documents at second hand from Hans Jonas’ Gnostic Religion, Voegelin avers that in them “the reader will have recognized Hegel’s alienated spirit and Heidegger’s flungness [Geworfenheit] of human experience.” Voegelin reiterates the dichotomy that he had employed in The New Science of Politics. Ancient Gnosticism sought grace through the abolition of the material world and the restoration of the Pleroma. In post-Enlightenment Gnosticism, by contrast, the subject overcomes anguish “through the assumption of an absolute spirit that in the dialectical unfolding of consciousness proceeds from alienation to consciousness of itself.” The reassimilation of the alienated element “transforms man into superman.” Structures of consciousness that in the Gnostic’s view inhibit or preclude the advent of the superman become obsessive targets of coercive correction and abolition. The ceaseless public diatribe of the modern Gnostics against everything received or traditional intends the dissolution of the abhorrently false (but to everyone else, normal) consciousness.
In its spirit of total resentment, post-Enlightenment Gnosticism insistently revalues all values; that is, it reverses all values simply because they are received, declaring presence privative and absence plenary and turning everything else on its head. Nietzsche heralded the movement as an explicit program as early as The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he argues that the action of the Greek stage refers to nothing – or rather only to the delirious vision of the chorus, intoxicated by the god (Dionysus) and seeking ecstatic escape from the horror of being. The tragic vision becomes in this reading the tragic hallucination while life, far from being exalted, as often seems to be the case in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883 – 85), is in fact degraded to meaningless animal suffering. In the 1980s in North America, Anglophone academics seized on the translations of Nietzsche’s successors, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, to provide themselves with a mechanical vocabulary of value-revaluation, the issue of which is the current in-group style of college-professor writing whose two functions are to baffle outsiders and intimidate them, on the one hand, and to affirm a sense of moral superiority based on the rhetorical annihilation of traditional morality, on the other.
While The Gospel of Truth or the Hermetica is infinitely more intellectually refined than the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, the latter is nevertheless, in style and form, Gnostic. The content (or anti-content) of the Gnostic vision (or anti-vision) need not be intellectual – indeed, it can be quite vulgar and boorish, as the PMLA often is. All the more so, then, the need for politically correct injunctions to protect shoddy doctrines against being examined in light of their coherency or their comportment with evidence and observation.
Voegelin anticipated all of this in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Because the Gnostic’s premises cannot withstand scrutiny, the Gnostic, when he acquires power, either within an institution or over a society, seeks to establish “the prohibition of questions.” Voegelin instances this implacable sanction in a sequence of close readings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In the case of Marx, “a speculative gnostic,” Voegelin begins by calling attention to a semantic sleight-of-hand in the Manuscripts, 1844. Marx asserts that human being is continuous with nature, which produced humanity; but he also asserts that humanity, in laboring to transform nature, has produced itself. In Voegelin’s comment, “The purpose of this speculation is to shut off the process of being from transcendent being and have man create himself.” Marx prestidigitates by “playing with equivocations in which ‘nature’ is now all-inclusive being, now nature as opposed to man, and now the nature of man in the sense of essential.”
Such a theory – or rather such a series of verbal slippages, masquerading as a theory – leaves hanging the question of origin. It invites interrogation because a longstanding consensus is that things are best understood in relation to their origin, the examination of which reveals a thing’s necessity. Understood in context of its origin, property, for example, reveals itself as an institution aimed at the preservation of the social order against concupiscence arising from resentment. Resentment, moreover, belongs to human nature; it is ineradicable, but it can be channeled and controlled. Marx has sided with resentment. In doing so he pits himself against the ineradicable structure of human reality. In his “speculation,” Marx, as Voegelin now registers, tries to interdict inquiry by labeling any doubt about his assertions “a product of abstraction.” Voegelin writes: “The questions of the ‘individual man’ are cut off by the ukase of the speculator who will not permit his construct to be disturbed. When ‘socialist man’ speaks, man has to be silent.”
In the case of Hegel, Voegelin begins by quoting from the preface to The Phenomenology: “The true form in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of it. To contribute to bringing philosophy closer to the form of science – the goal of being able to cast off the name of love of knowledge [Liebe zum Wissen] and become actual knowledge [wirkliches Wissen] – is the task I have set myself” (Hegel). Voegelin observes that Hegel’s phrase “love of knowledge” translates the Greek term philosophia directly and that his phrase “actual knowledge” corresponds to the Greek term gnosis. It follows that “if we translate them back into Greek… we then have before us the program of advancing from philosophy to Gnosis.” Anticipating Marx’s antics, Hegel, according to Voegelin, “conceals the leap by translating philosophia and gnosis into German so that he can shift from one to the other by playing on the word ‘knowledge’” (Voegelin). Hegel’s system, as built up on this flimsy basis and as supposedly justifying it, Voegelin sees as a “swindle.” The system itself serves “libido dominandi” purely and simply, another example of the Gnostic desire for “dominion over being.”
It is true that Hegel, apart from the egomania revealed in his construction, bequeathed to posterity many valid insights, including a defense of the inherited legal order, and indeed of many medieval institutions, against a revolutionary challenge. In categorizing Hegel’s thought in The Phenomenology as Gnostic, Voegelin does not mean to reject Hegel in toto; he means, rather, to approach the Hegelian text in a spirit of genuine criticism, which must take into consideration the verbal slippages of the exposition. It is quite possible that one can learn a great deal from a confidence trickster, but one is not compelled by that fact to become the dupe of the confidence trickster. A characteristic of the confidence trickster, however, is that he wishes to gain the supportive cooperation of his clients, who, having become attached to him, defend him even after he has cheated them; he is not content with a critical client who picks and chooses the details of the Big Deal, inspiring others with his doubtfulness. The skeptic annoys the confidence man, who insists on all or nothing – a wager that exerts its appeal on certain parties.
As for Heidegger: Voegelin, like Jonas, discerns the kernel of nihilism in his discourse. Heidegger represents in Voegelin’s judgment “the mentality that expects deliverance from the evils of the time through the advent, the coming in all its fullness, of being construed as immanent.” Like the English Puritans who, trusting their God, nevertheless saw a need for “meritorious action” on their own, Heidegger contented himself not merely to await what in one moment he referred to as a “New God”; he became a Nazi, whose first act as state-approved Rector of Freiburg was to complete the expurgation of Jewish faculty members begun by his precursor. This contemptible cleansing action affected Heidegger’s own teacher Edmund Husserl, whose emeritus privileges the new official suspended. Heidegger summarily dropped Hans Jonas from the doctoral program in philosophy, also on account of the pupil’s Jewishness.
IV. In Science Politics and Gnosticism, Voegelin repeatedly acknowledges that declaring secular modernity a sectarian religious triumph flouts the touchy self-understanding of modern secular people. Voegelin acknowledges also that his imputation concerning thinkers on the order of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that they were intellectual swindlers can only, in a modern context, arouse the ire of a large part of his readership. Perhaps even some self-described conservative readers will feel a twinge of irritation on being made acquainted with a harsh critique of Nietzsche in combination with a sustained defense of normative religious ideas about the structure of existence. Such an emotion, were it to occur, would itself be a datum explicable within the framework of Voegelin’s analysis. The sentiment easily attaches to venerated figures – and Nietzsche would be one of them – to the effect that to question their assertions is somehow to transgress the permissible. Science, in its institutional aspect, also enjoys this type of tacit immunity from criticism whereas, on the other hand, casually bashing religion is more or less a sport for many self-consciously modern people, even those who identify themselves politically by their opposition to collectivist projects and political correctness. Is sarcasm, the usual mode of contemporary discussion about anything traditional, Gnostic? Sarcasm is invariably a pose of being sure of itself; it blusters against the haunting suspicion that it can be wrong by making out that it believes that it cannot be wrong – and it typically responds to criticism by a heightening of its forced superciliousness.
Contemporary institutional discourse could hardly exist without sarcasm. Actual humor has mostly disappeared and few contemporary people would recognize it. Audiences of millions guffaw at the smarmy jokes of comedian-atheists for whom Christian religiosity is an object of scorn guaranteed not to fight back. (Sarcasm means something like “flogging a corpse.”) Is God not dead, after all, whether one is a liberal or a conservative? Are values not simply assertions, without transcendent source or justification, and therefore implemented by power alone, quite as Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, all English professors, and the spokesmen for the European Union say that they are? Is the cosmos not simply what we want it to be, as a plastic object of our Eros or lust? Nowadays people “identify” as this or that, men as women and vice versa, white as black, male infantilism as grown-up sophistication, and people with schoolteacher salaries as billionaires, no doubt. Mere preference has acquired a pseudo-ontological significance. Why I am this and not that? Why is reality thus-and-such and not otherwise, as I would have it? More cogently: Must I be as I am and is to will not the same as to be?
People hesitate to pose these questions because they hesitate to answer them. They know that the “correct” answer, the officially sanctioned answer, is “yes,” in both cases; they sense at the same time that “no” is at least as likely an answer as “yes,” maybe far more likely. Put more simply, the undeniable prohibition of questions overawes everyone so that everyone maintains silence. The fact that secular modernity defines itself, with increasing stridency and intolerance, as non-religious must be assessed, furthermore, by reference to the specific religiosity against which that antithetic self-definition occurs. In the Communist countries and in Nazi Germany, Christianity and Judaism filled this role, with the initial emphasis landing in Russia on Christianity and in Germany on Judaism. The Holocaust made anti-Semitism embarrassing for Western radicals (who are by definition on the Left) for fifty years, so that, in the United States and Europe, the Left had to concentrate on anti-Christian agitation. Now that the lingering super-ego effect of the Holocaust seems to have vanished, the Left has added open anti-Semitism to its “Glimpse of Sion’s Glory.” But the anti-Christian mood never weakens; it grows stronger. The analysis is not concluded, however.
The contemporary Left’s sympathy with Islam tells us that the Left is not, as it pretends, anti-religious, but merely anti-Christian and anti-Semitic. If Buddhism had greater purchase in the West, the Left would be anti-Buddhist too. That is to say, the Left is anti-Western and anti-normative. The Left then gleefully welcomes whatever or whoever helps it in its program of annihilating Western (Judaeo-Christian) norms. The Left indeed seems to share Islam’s contemporary religious excitation, nothing being as imitable as an adrenal spasm, so that the idea of “Globalism” can refer equally well to the latest Leftwing plan for utopian-redistributive “world governance,” using the jargon of “sustainability,” or the Islamist plan for a revived Caliphate. It is madness – “pneumopathology” – on either side. But it is also ferociously crusading, massively organized, and mutually supportive madness à deux (or rather à maint) that wants to dominate existence and monopolize the representation of truth. Voegelin’s last word on Gnosticism, the fifth, supplemental volume of Order and History, called In Search of Order, describes the spiritual straits of the early Twenty-First Century with startling lucidity.
Voegelin praises the faculty of imagination as the capacity by which people make sense of the unalterable givenness of existence, the fact that it is what it is whether one likes what it is or not. He writes movingly of the crucial difference between “the reality that reveals itself in imaginative truth” – that is, in symbols – and a parasitic exploitation of the received symbols that attacks reality from a motive of spite or envy. The first is the realm of investigation of philosophy, the nobility of the Platonic as opposed to the Marxian dialectic; the second is the instrument of Gnostic libido. Voegelin also addresses the subtle relation-in-tension between philosophy and its object, truth, preserving the Platonic insistence that the philosopher loves truth without claiming to possess it; indeed, no desire for wisdom could exist if the subject already possessed wisdom, for, as Plato notes in his Symposium, no one seeks what he already calls his own.
Voegelin writes: “Imagination, as a structure in the process of a reality that moves towards its truth, belongs both to human consciousness in its bodily location and to the reality that comprehends bodily located man as a partner in the community of being. There is no truth symbolized without man’s imaginative power to find the symbols that will express his response to the appeal of reality; but there is no truth to be symbolized without the comprehending It-reality in which such structures as man with his participatory consciousness, experiences of appeal and response, language, and imagination occur.” These words contain a lifetime’s worth of meditation. They stand in contrast, among other things, to the decades-long war on what the crusaders call stereotypes. Whole college curricula are structured around the “deconstruction” of “stereotypes.” But what is a stereotype, really? It is synonymous with a concept. But what is a concept, really? A concept, like a stereotype, is a distillation of experience. It is a tool in the kit of survival. If one were not a bit allergic to Darwin, one might even say that a concept is an item of wisdom that has proven its validity by permitting those acknowledge it and put it into practice to survive.
Imagination must be carefully distinguished from delusion, the one being spiritually healthy and the other signifying a lapse into pneumopathology. Imagination is related to truth. As Voegelin writes in the Search, “In the depth of the quest, formative truth and deformative untruth are more closely related than the language of ‘truth’ and ‘resistance’ would suggest.” This condition would be the case because truth, despite the positivistic definition of the term that prevails today, “is not… a something lying around to be accepted, rejected, or resisted.” Indeed, “imagining ‘truth’ as a thing would deform the structure of consciousness in the same manner as does the transformation of the symbols ‘reality’ and ‘Beyond’ into things for the purpose of manipulation.” Correcting the positivistic error Voegelin defines imagination as “this ability to find the way from the metaleptic experiences to the imagery of expressive symbols.” A “metaleptic experience” is an insight into transcendence that specifically does not entail the degradation of existence or demand its abolition. Whether it is Moses or Socrates, the subject of the “metaleptic experience” grasps the tension between the mortal realm and the immortal realm as belonging to the order of being and therefore, in theodical language, as justified.
For Voegelin, “man is a creative partner in the movement of reality toward its truth.” Man acts as the self-consciousness of the universe, but this can only be the case because the universe is present before him, in both senses of “before.” Voegelin writes, “If the creative partner is exposed to deformative perversion, if the creative partner imagines himself to be the sole creator of truth,” then the partner in fact alienates himself from truth and elevates himself to illusory godhood. Thus “the image of the world becomes the world itself” – the “second reality.” But only in the mind of the pervert. Now Voegelin is not one to use words casually. “Pervert” and “perverse” are vocabulary items that irritate the Liberal mind, but the defensive nature of the reaction is obvious to anyone except the Liberal. “Pervert” and “perverse” are strong words, but they remain applicable to a horrific century that has not yet fully run its course and whose perversion will no doubt fell many millions more victims before it comes to its end. That a relation exists between murky concepts and public massacres is one of the important things concerning Gnosticism about which Voegelin reminds his readers.
A concept might one day prove inadequate – that much the philosopher will readily grant. A concept might also seem to prove inadequate and then later on re-validate itself, as in the case of heliocentrism. Modern people never think of the second of those two possibilities. For them there is only steady progress or evolution that annihilates the past as it advances day by day. Wise people remain open to evidence whether affirmative of assumptions or suggestive of their inadequacy. Openness to reality is precisely the point. To participate in reality requires of the subject his willing postponement of any definitive knowledge of the whole, what elsewhere Voegelin criticizes as “the eidos of history.” The wise man according to Voegelin “is a creative partner in the movement of reality toward its truth” – who must exercise patience and faith. He knows many things, but he does not violate modesty by proclaiming to know what God knows. Virtues being in short supply always, “this creatively formative force [imagination] is exposed to deformative perversion.” In such mischievous self-deception “the creative partner imagines himself to be the sole creator of truth.” The last clause offers a definition of Gnosticism, which Voegelin concludes is “a constant in history” and therefore part of the structure of reality that imaginative participation in existence needs to visualize and understand. The cumulus of words designating pathological egocentrism suggests that the Gnostic perversion really is an historical constant. Voegelin cites “such symbols as hybris, pleonexia, alazoneia tou biou, superbia vitae, pride of life, libido dominandi, and will to power,” as having reference to the Gnostic phenomenon.
All such terms designate a subjective conviction of “autonomous ultimacy,” in which the person who feels the tension in existence cannot bear the tension and so “deform[s] the beginning of his quest into a Beginning that brings the End of all beginnings.” In 1806 possibly only Hegel felt that way – and maybe Fichte. Nowadays, it is an automatic self-conviction of the common man, degenerating at its lower end into pure petulance and narcissism. Such terms as petulance and narcissism might justifiably be added to Voegelin’s list. Not all petulance or narcissism is Gnosticism, but petulance and narcissism certainly play a role in the Gnostic self-conception and in the related behavior.
Waltari gives us the paradigm of the Gnostic evangelist in his picture of Akhenaton in The Egyptian. The Pharaoh’s policies have left Egypt a shambles, with ruin and starvation, crime and treachery everywhere, but Pharaoh himself has lost touch with reality completely: “Thebes is night to me, and so I spurn it… I put my faith in the young and children… Those who from childhood dedicate themselves to the teaching of Aton are purified, and so the whole world shall be purified.” In Pharaoh’s vision, “Schools shall be transformed, the old teachers driven forth, and new texts written for children to copy.” These programs, about which the mad sovereign speculates, were already abundantly familiar in actuality to Waltari in 1945. They are all the more so today for any discerning person.
The self-deceiver who initiates the spiritual swindle cannot entirely eliminate the awareness of his mendacity. The swindle pricks the self-deifier constantly, charging him with his pretentious bad faith. The Gnostic’s abyssal hypocrisy explains his need to propagate his delusion. The Gnostic requires the voluble seconding of others – as many others as possible – to assuage the guilt of his initial tying-into-knots of his own soul. Thus Voegelin characterized Gnosticism in all its forms as being “metastatic,” a term used in oncology to describe the tendency of cancerous cells to spread their destabilization to all cells surrounding them in a cascade of cytoplasm-corruption that overwhelms the body. Gnosticism must compel belief because it lacks belief. Gnosticism runs frightened of its own radical inadequacy from the moment it conjures itself into being. Gnosticism is likely therefore to be mortally self-limiting, but a Gnostic movement can wreak enormous civic and material destruction before it perishes ignominiously from its own spiritual rottenness.
Afterthoughts 2015: The notions of Gnosticism and nihilism, the latter with its many slogans and key words, circulate in Voegelin’s discourse concerning modernity, along intersecting paths, as though they had a peculiar gravitational attraction to one another that drew them together. In The New Science, a signal characteristic of a Gnostic movement is its ceaseless agitation or unrest. Of “reason,” in its Post-Enlightenment usage, in an essay under that name (“Reason,” 1974 – in Anamnesis), Voegelin, in discussing the modern inversion of the term’s Ciceronian meaning, writes, “The health or disease of existence makes itself felt in the very tonality of the unrest.” Further, “In the modern Western history of unrest… the tonality has shifted from joyful participation in a theophany… to the hostile alienation from a reality that rather hides than reveals itself.” According to Voegelin, Hegel built such alienation into his phenomenological system, and just so Hegel’s successor Marx rejected any participation in the given by insisting that all truly conscious men join him in the new creation of socialist man, which entailed the abolition of the existing human reality. It is hardly different in Heidegger, who subsumes much of Nietzsche’s yearning for the Superman into his negative ontology. That intellectual perversion has become reigning secular dogma is signified to Voegelin by fact that “Lévi-Strauss assures you that you cannot be a scientist unless you are an atheist,” such that “the symbol ‘structuralism’ becomes the slogan of a fashionable movement of escape from the noetic structure of reality.”
To be a self-glorifying atheist is to be already, in comparison to the benighted, a Superman, and, to paraphrase a recent revolutionary pronouncement, we Supermen are the ones we have been waiting for.
A kind of climax of this same trend appears in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in whose case, Voegelin writes, one sees “the transition from intellectual imperialism to the support of mass murder.” Merleau-Ponty has precursors, after all, a near one in Jean-Paul Sartre and another, just behind Sartre, in Dadaism. In the recorded remarks apropos the lecture “In Search of the Ground” (Montreal, 1965), Voegelin remarks that ideology, invariably having its origin in some mere part of Christianity, tends to be apocalyptic; but, “a second element is gnostic, that is, knowledge of the recipe for bringing about the more perfect realm,” the one forecast in apocalypse. The choice of the word recipe is not casual. A recipe is a set of instructions for a short-term result. An investment in short-term results signifies an impatient mentality, an infantile mentality, or a revolutionary mentality, which is the same as a savage mentality, the mark of immature humanity. In any case all these are one and the same. The Revolution, as Edmund Burke rightly called it, demands total alteration in reality now, as though the order of being might respond to a magical ukase. The order of being, however, is what and as it is, unalterably, without heed to anyone’s will, even the revolutionary’s.
The revolutionary, having put himself to an impossible task, namely abolishing the structure of reality, has set himself up to be perpetually stymied, and therefore to experience an accelerating hyperbolic increase of resentment against the stubborn object of his will – until such resentment rises to murderous heights. Insofar as the revolutionary, or Gnostic, mentality cannot at last create a new world by his own recipe, he can, at least, as he comes to believe, destroy a world – or if not the physical world (although he might try) then at least, in order to garner some perverse satisfaction, the cultural world, or those portions of the physical world called people, who, as biological entities, are vulnerable to violent and satisfying obliteration. Adoption of Gnostic premises leads by its own insidious logic to the nihilistic stance.
On the one hand, the words Gnostic and Gnosticism never occur in Father Seraphim Rose’s book on Nihilism (1968); on the other hand, Father Seraphim’s analysis of the nihilistic impulse, its origin and agenda, runs closely parallel to Voegelin’s analysis of Gnosticism, so close that the conclusion presents itself that the two thinkers must be addressing one and the same phenomenon. Father Seraphim (1934 – 1982) writes, for example, of the “messianic fervor that animates the greatest revolutionaries, a statement that squares perfectly with Voegelin’s remark about agitation being a prime Gnostic trait. Whereas for Father Seraphim Nihilism has taken several successive forms during the centuries since the Fifteenth Century – Humanism, Liberalism, Vitalism, Communism, Fascism, and even Industrialism – all of these phases are essentially anti-Traditional and therefore, because the Tradition of the West is Christian, anti-Christian. Thus while in Liberalism, this animus “is not an attitude of open hostility,” nevertheless Liberalism’s attitude towards the cultural inheritance is one of supercilious false tolerance. Classical Liberalism reduces the vocabulary of verities stemming from Christian Revelation to a collection of metaphors on the way of banishing them from usage altogether. Under Liberalism, “Truth, in a word, has been ‘reinterpreted’; the old forms have been emptied and given a new, quasi-Nihilist content.”
In Father Seraphim’s argument, “The modern mentality cannot tolerate… God”; that is, the God of Christian Revelation, who “is the supreme end of all creation and, Himself, unlike his creation.” Liberalism, in the form of the Enlightenment, creates a counter-God although perhaps a counterfeit God would be a more accurate locution. As Father Seraphim writes, “A ‘new god’ is clearly required by modern man, a god more closely fashioned after the pattern of such central modern concerns as science and business.” The “new god” may take many – even dazzling – forms but “all modern gods are of the same construct, fabricated by souls dead from the loss of faith in the true God.” In Father Seraphim’s argument, once again, atheism is at best hypocritical. Even when Liberalism has advanced through Realism and Vitalism to become active Nihilism, the atheism that it espouses, institutes, and would force on everyone through implacable “re-education,” is not God-less. Father Seraphim addresses the paradox this way: The self-proclaimed atheist is actually a partisan against God. In the case of Proudhon, for example, the polemicist “declared himself, not an atheist, but an ‘antitheist.’” The active Nihilist is theologically a rebel against God – like Proudhon or Nietzsche or Sartre.
Father Seraphim characterizes “the Nihilist faith” as “the precise opposite of Christian faith” although being opposite it also constitutes a mirror-image. Rebelliously such a doctrine founds itself on “doubt,” partly externally and partly internally directed, in the common pattern; “suspicion, disgust, envy, jealousy, pride, impatience, [and] blasphemy.” Moreover, this anti-faith consists in “an attitude of dissatisfaction with self, with the world, with society, with God,” and it cannot rest until it alters these to correspond with its own image – or abolishes, annihilates, them. It would be easy to identify specific instances of this attitude in writers like Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens, or in twenty or thirty of their contemporaries who fit the bill. More importantly, the character that Father Seraphim attributes to his active Nihilists is the same as the one that Voegelin attributes to his Gnostics whether ancient or modern.
Another incisive critic of modernity in whose pages the terms Gnostic and Gnosticism go conspicuously absent is Henri de Lubac (1896 – 1991). In The Drama of Atheist Humanism (1944), dealing with Nietzsche, Lubac composes a phenomenology of Gnostic conviction – first, that all received truths are in fact false and then, by a contradiction in terms that the convert ignores, that this revelation of total falsehood is, itself, a truth. This inverted knowledge, which justifies the murder of God, is, as Lubac writes, dizzying. The news that “God is dead” sends the mere common man reeling in vertigo, but not so the Superman: “At last, a few, rare spirits who carry in them the destiny of mankind resist the dizziness that assails them. They feel it, at first, like the others, for they are human, and more than all the rest they are aware of the enormity of what has happened and the losses involved.” Gradually it dawns on these extraordinary specimens of humanity that, learning to command their inebriation, they might grow empowered: “Their energy is equal to their perspicacity. Alone in their power to see things as they are, they bring a perfectly clear mind to bear upon the outrage they have perpetrated and thus transform the crime into an exploit.”
In reading Zarathustra, Lubac remarks how Nietzsche’s pseudo-prophet, using a pseudo-religious language borrowed from Luther’s Bible, extols his own great “loneliness” after the death of the God whom he has killed. The demiurgic responsibility now befalls the deicide to “produce out of himself – out of nothingness – something with which to transcend humanity.” Indeed, in Lubac’s commentary, “The endurance test to which [the Superman] has condemned himself will reveal to him his own divinity by bringing it into being.” Employing a word that the contemporary North-American Left of 2015 has just about made its shibboleth, Lubac writes that for the Nihilist, who is not an atheist but an anti-theist, “the corpse of God in decomposition is not… a sign of death: It is the sign of a gigantic change.” [Emphasis added] Lubac concludes that Nietzsche was just as much a revolutionary as Marx. Given the confluence of their rhetorics in the self-image of Modernity, “it was not surprising that the drama that had taken shape in human minds quickly reached the point at which it burst forth in fire and slaughter.”
The foremost commentator on Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, writes in his Voegelinian Revolution (1981) how “with the fall of faith, which broadly characterizes the modern era, an experiential alternative was demanded that lay close enough to faith to substitute for it.” As Sandoz writes, while “Gnosticism is the essence of modernity [in] Voegelin’s philosophy of politics,” nevertheless “it is not the whole of it.” Sandoz wrote those words thirty-five years ago. The passage of time has shrunk the part of the contemporary world that is not Gnostic; it has seen a marked decrease in the public influence of Philosophy and Christianity and an ever-widening metastasis of sub-Marxian and sub-Nietzschean attitudes. Thus when Sandoz reminds his readers that “the aim of Gnostic activism is the transfiguration of man into superman,” the observation will be even more poignant in 2015 than it was in 1981. A particularly repulsive variant of the Gnostic myth is currently working itself out in the West.
The Superman-goal of Gnosticism would seem to be incompatible with the radical egalitarian goal of the contemporary Left, which owns and controls all the central institutions of Western Society, including increasingly the Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church at its diocesan level and above. The apparent incompatibility of Supermanism and Multiculturalism is easily resolvable. It is important to remember that Gnosticism is perpetually parasitic: It invariably borrows the forms of Tradition so as, in the formula of Sandoz, to “supplant the truth of the soul” and, equally, to misrepresent reality, replacing it with “a counterexistential dreamworld” (Voegelin’s term). In addition, Gnosticism overlaps with Nihilism, which is implacably anti-Christian. Modernity is essentially anti-Christian. Finally, in Nietzsche’s codification, the Superman is not defined by intellectual sophistication but only by his brutal capacity not to cavil about the exercise of his will “beyond good and evil.” Under Gnostic manipulation, the word for this propensity is “peace.” The war against reality will be carried out under the password of “peace.”
The Marxian equivalent of Nietzsche’s Superman is the representative of what Lenin called the socially friendly classes – namely criminals, including murderers and rapists, who, like the revolutionaries, made war on middle class society. In Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Three Penny Opera (1933), Mack the Knife – whose exploits include burning down an orphanage in the middle of the night – is a socially friendly person. The people today euphemistically called refugees are also socially friendly from the point of view of the Multiculturalist Left. To say that the people called refugees are hostile to Western Civilization is to make an understatement. Although Western Civilization is at best vestigially Christian, both the elites of the Multiculturalist Left and their pets, those refugees, see it as Christian and hate it. Insofar as the proxies extravagantly hate and ferociously attack Western Civilization and actual flesh-and-blood Westerners, they qualify as Supermen, perfect soldiers of the Left’s Gnostic program of annihilation because even more than the Leftists they are beyond good and evil. Destruction, for the Gnostic, is a magical act that transforms reality, including the agent.
The deranged religiosity of the contemporary Western, anti-Western elites, and of their proxies, their devotion to the Cult of the Multi-Cult, fulfills the prediction in Voegelin’s mid-century analysis of the direction in Western civilization. Voegelin found a succinct portrait of the Gnostic regime in Hooker’s Laws and quoted that text in The New Science. Let the present essay close through a quotation from the Laws. “When the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded,” Hooker writes, “that it is the will of God to have those things done which they fancy, their opinions are as thorns in their sides, never suffering them to take rest till they have brought their speculations into practice.” For “the will of God” one may substitute “the agenda dictated by the doctrine.” The result will be “merciless cruelty” and the perpetration of “sacrifice,” as demanded by the mental idols. |
Image caption After Louis XVI's beheading, spectators dipped handkerchiefs in his blood
A team of scientists have said they believe an old gourd contains the blood of French King Louis XVI.
The monarch was killed by guillotine by French revolutionaries more than 200 years ago, on 21 January 1793.
The scientists said the DNA is very similar to genetic material from what is believed to be the mummified head of an earlier French king, AFP reports.
After Louis XVI's beheading many spectators were reported to have dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood.
The piece of fabric had been placed in a dried, hollowed-out gourd, leaving blood stains.
The squash was decorated with images of revolutionary heroes and the words: "On January 21, Maximilien Bourdaloue dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation".
The revolutionary souvenir has been in the hands of an Italian family for a century.
'Paternally related'
Image caption The research suggests a genetic link between the remains of Henri IV and the blood-soaked gourd
The team of experts from Spain and France has published its findings in Forensic Science International journal.
Analysis of DNA taken from blood traces found inside the vegetable container had already revealed that it probably matched someone of Louis' description but scientists could not prove it belonged to the beheaded king as they had no genetic material from any of his relatives.
However, the team managed to find a rare genetic signature shared with DNA from a mummified head believed to belong to Louis' 16th Century predecessor, Henri IV, who was killed in 1610.
In 2010, scientists said the head belonged to Henri IV, saying it shared the same physical features as those illustrated in contemporary portraits of the king.
French forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier told AFP that the study revealed that both of those sampled "share a genetic heritage passed on through the paternal line. They have a direct link to one another through their fathers".
Co-author of the report, Carles Lalueza Fox, of the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva in Barcelona, was quoted as saying that it was "about 250 times more likely that the [owners of the] head and the blood are paternally related, than unrelated". |
Just like you, Justin Verlander has heard the trade rumors. This isn’t the first time, either. Detroit Tigers General Manager Al Avila personally prepared him to brace for that this offseason, when it became clear the team would entertain discussions about the ace.
And now, with a month to go before the MLB trade deadline, that chatter will intensify.
The 34-year-old pitcher has not given up on the possibility the Tigers could make a run and claw back into the wild card picture, but he’s also well aware that he may be facing one of the biggest decisions of his life in a mere matter of weeks. The recent trade speculation brought that reality to the surface.
“I can’t say it wasn’t expected,” Verlander told The Athletic on Friday. “We’re all aware that if we weren’t at a certain point right now — the team is going to be looking at, probably, to trade some guys, so to see my name out there, I’d say really no reaction. It’s not like the... |
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands as they take part in a family photo at the APEC summit. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS
DANANG, Vietnam (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin shook hands at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit dinner in Vietnam on Friday, even though the White House said there would be no formal meeting.
Trump and Putin smiled and stood next to each other for the traditional group photograph. Then they parted to sit at different parts of the table.
The White House said earlier that no formal meeting was planned because of scheduling conflicts on both sides, though it was possible they would bump into each other.
“In terms of a scheduled, formal meeting, there’s not one on the calendar and we don’t anticipate that there will be one,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters minutes before landing in Danang.
The main meeting of leaders from APEC countries is on Saturday in the Vietnamese resort city of Danang. Trump is on the fourth leg of a 12-day tour of Asia. |
Manga, comics and art book publisher UDON had plenty to announce at San Diego Comic Con including the Kill La Kill manga and impressive selection of new art book licenses.
Udon is commitment to the Street Fighter comics series with new hardcover editions have announced that Super Street Fighter V2 is almost complete.
They've also announced that the Street Fighter World Warrior Encyclopedia that will coming next year. The reprint feature new material Ultra and included brand new artwork.
And speaking of Capcom, they've announced that The Art of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies is coming in 2015.
UDON has also secured the rights for the English-language edition of the Kill la Kill manga, which will be released in 2015
Upcoming Manga Classics include
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Emma by Jane Austen
Two new titles appearing in December 2014:
- Katamari Volume 1 the collected ShiftyLook comic by Alex Culang and Raynato Castro
- Makeshift Miracle Volume 2: The Boy Who Stole Everything by Jim Zub and Shun Hong Chan
Record of Agarest War: Heroines Visual Book and Record of Agarest War 2: Heroines Visaul Book
Shining Blade and Ark, featuring the amazing work of Tony Taka! This title collections the artwork of the Shining Blade and Shining Ark games, and is UDON’s forth title in the Shining series.
Yu-Gi-Oh Dual Art collects the artwork of Takahashi Kazuki from the Yu-Gi-Oh series, including card art, personal illustrations, manga illustrations and more.
Osamu Tezuka art books!!! Osamu Tezuka Anime Character Sketchbook is an unprecedented look into the sketchbook drawings and designs of this master artist; Osamu Tezuka Anime Character Illustrations is a unique collection of character model sheets and animations spanning his impressive body of work.
UDON will be producing an English-language version of the Professor Layton Official Fanbook, published by Level 5 and QBIST in Japan.
Gungnir Official Art Chronicle is based on an epic Norse-inspired JRPG and is part of the “Dept. of Heaven” series.
Border Break Artworks, UDON’s first full-on mecha art book! Chock full of schematics, sketches, pilot designs and background materials
Finally, they announced plans for Robotech/Macross art books More details to come soon.
.@UdonEnt at #sdcc - comic-coen debut editions of SF25: the art of street fighter & Udon's art of Capcom pic.twitter.com/mhRxtTRiDo — Deb Aoki (@debaoki) July 27, 2014
.@UdonEnt at #sdcc - The Art of Phoenix Wright - Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies - coming 2015! pic.twitter.com/wUPnnTC01H — Deb Aoki (@debaoki) July 27, 2014
.@UdonEnt at #sdcc - Katamari Damacy comics by Alex Culang & Raynato Castro (buttersafe) - part of shiftylook comix pic.twitter.com/jUw2EfFtuL — Deb Aoki (@debaoki) July 27, 2014
.@UdonEnt at #sdcc - Katamari Damacy comics by Alex Culang & Raynato Castro (buttersafe) - part of shiftylook comix pic.twitter.com/jUw2EfFtuL — Deb Aoki (@debaoki) July 27, 2014
.@UdonEnt at #sdcc - New artbook license: Yu Gi Oh Duel Art: Art of Takahashi Kazuki - 2015 pic.twitter.com/dQsGT3dqDD — Deb Aoki (@debaoki) July 27, 2014
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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime. |
The Business of the Nets: Finding Reasons to Believe
With a new co-owner, young talent and an uptempo style of play, the rebuilding Brooklyn team is sparking optimism
It has been about ten days since SI.com extolled in a headline “Don’t Look Now, But the Nets Are Fun Again.” At the time, the team was 3-2 with a solid win at home against LeBron James and the Cavaliers.
It would have been understandable to expect the worst this season. The Brooklyn Nets ended last year in the basement of the Eastern Conference and the worst record in the NBA with a paltry 20 wins. Then, in the first game of the season, the only player a casual Brooklyn fan would have heard of, point guard Jeremy Lin, was lost to a season-ending injury. With him, one might expect, went a healthy amount of optimism … and ticket sales. Still, three wins in five games earned them that Sports Illustrated headline.
Then, in a return to last year’s form, came four straight losses to the Knicks, Nuggets, Suns and Lakers. Today the Nets carry a record of 3-6 and sit in third-to-last place in the Eastern Conference.
Still, there may be hope. It’s early, they aren’t quite in the basement again, and a 33-point game from D’Angelo Russell on Halloween (the loss to the Suns) offers at least a glimmer of hope that coach Kenny Atkinson’s recipe of youth mixed with high-octane offense might make some noise.
The ownership had better hope so. Through their first five home games, the Nets are averaging the third-worst attendance in the NBA: just 15,116 per game, leaving about 3,000 empty seats. All of which might help explain that the most exciting thing out of Atlantic and Flatbush of late is the news that Alibaba co-founder and vice chairman Joe Tsai has agreed to pick up a 49% minority stake in the team along with an option to take a controlling interest in 2021. Russian billionaire owner Mikhail Prokhorov will maintain his control until then and will continue to be in charge of basketball operations as well. Tsai, as a minority owner, will not affect what you see on the court. For now.
Lofty Valuation
The deal to bring in Tsai has the team valued at $2.3 billion, beating the previous NBA record of $2.2 billion, the price billionaire and Landry’s Restaurant CEO Tilman Fertitta paid for the Houston Rockets earlier this year. This further proves the hypothesis that there is no such thing as a bad investment in the four major sports leagues anymore. According to NBA financials outlined in this ESPN article, the Nets lost an eye-popping $144 million in 2013-14 and $23.5 million last year. Its local TV deal and local revenue ranked in the same place as the team last year: Dead last. Yet still, that valuation!
Not part of the deal is the ownership of the Barclays Center itself. That will be retained by Prokhorov, while the team is expected to settle in for the long haul with a new lease to be negotiated soon.
Who is Joe Tsai?
Joe Tsai was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and was educated in New Jersey (Lawrenceville Prep) and Connecticut (Yale). In 1999 Tsai, along with Jack Ma and 16 other co-founders launched the Chinese online shopping service Alibaba with $25 million in investments from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Softbank. Eighteen years later the company, traded on the New York Stock Exchange (symbol: BABA), sports a market capitalization of nearly $480 billion.
As for Tsai, the Brooklyn Nets won’t be the first sports team he calls his own. Tsai played lacrosse in both high school and college and announced this summer that he would bring a new team to the National Lacrosse League (an indoor league), the San Diego Seals.
NBA in Asia
The NBA as a league must be excited to have Tsai on board. His strong ties to Asia will certainly come in handy as American sports grow in prominence across the Pacific.
The NBA is now the most-followed sports league online in China. During last year’s playoffs, Weibo, a major social media platform there, reported 2.9 million video views as Steph Curry and the Warriors made their run to the championship. The Warriors responded with a week-long trip there last month before the season began, including several preseason games.
Weibo’s parent company, Tencent, is in the middle of a five-year deal for the Chinese digital rights to the league’s games and other content, worth $700 million.
Finding a Way to Win Again
Still, back home in Brooklyn, all this doesn’t mean much unless the Nets can find a way to win again. With only the Bulls and Hawks sporting a worse record in the Eastern conference, it seems it will take more than the solid play of Russell to get the job done. There’s plenty of room for second-guessing about the deals involved in the team’s recent makeover. The Nets last game, the loss to the Lakers last Friday, featured great performances from two players who, under different circumstances, might have been on Brooklyn’s roster but are now leading Los Angeles in points per game: former Net Brook Lopez and rookie Kyle Kuzma, who the Lakers signed with the draft pick they got from the Nets.
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The Nets are a young team, with room to grow. Behind Russell’s average of 21.1 points per game is Rondae Hollis-Jefferson who, in his third season, is tallying up 15.7 points per game. That’s nearly double his season-long PPG average last year, a strong sign that he’s reaching his potential. After Hollis-Jefferson there’s DeMarre Carroll, Allen Crabbe and a host of other solid-but-not-stellar talent. General Manager Sean Marks has turned over virtually the entire roster since coming on board in February 2016, but it may take help from another trade to get the fire started in Brooklyn.
The other glimmer of hope lies in Atkinson’s Xs and Os. The Nets have the highest “pace factor” in the NBA, a statistic measuring the number of possessions a team has in a game. The Nets’ is over 109. The key now is to improve the efficiency of those possessions. The Nets are 15th in the NBA in that regard. That’s not too big a mountain to climb, and perhaps one well-placed personnel move can get that ranking high enough to bring back some winning ways.
Who’ll step up to fill the void, either from within the team or outside, is the No. 1 point of speculation about this rebuilding team.
Go here to read our story about how the Nets picked five local designers to supply the look for their new apparel-and-accessories line, dubbed Brooklyn Cool. |
× Gov. Walker signs bill that lifts Wisconsin’s ban on new nuclear plants
MADISON — Gov. Scott Walker has signed sign a bill lifting Wisconsin’s ban on new nuclear plants.
State regulators currently can’t approve a new nuclear plant unless a federal facility for storing waste exists and the plant doesn’t burden ratepayers. No such federal facility exists.
The bill would erase the storage and ratepayer clauses from state law, clearing the way for new plants. The bill’s Republican authors argue nuclear power is a renewable energy source and the ratepayer language duplicates other sections of state law that require regulators to determine that any new power plant won’t burden customers.
Democrats say nuclear power is too dangerous, pointing to a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant in 2011.
Walker signed the bill Friday at the Wisconsin Energy Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. |
It's taboo to admit it, but I wish my unborn baby wasn't a beastly boy!
Published: 21:05 EST, 9 December 2012 | Updated: 04:34 EST, 12 December 2012
Girl power: Esther with her daughter Kitty at home
Please, not a boy,’ I hissed at my sister Harriet. ‘If it’s a boy, I’ll just die. I can only deal with one man in my life... and sometimes that’s one too many.’
I’d just announced my second pregnancy, and a nagging fear that had started from the moment I saw my positive pregnancy test weeks earlier had grown into a full-blown conviction that I felt ashamed to admit out loud. I really didn’t want a boy.
Please don’t condemn me. I know very little about boys, coming from a family of all girls, but what I have seen I really haven’t liked. Boys are gross; they attack their siblings with sticks, are obsessed with toilets, casually murder local wildlife and turn into disgusting teenage boys and then boring, selfish men.
My husband Giles and I already have one girl, 22-month-old Kitty, and my second pregnancy had been so different and so much worse than my first, with horrid morning sickness from the outset, that I was starting to panic that there was something radically different about it, i.e. there was that alternative, dreaded gender in the mix.
There were reasons why I could confess my boy aversion only to my sister. Mothers who declare a gender preference out loud are breaking a huge taboo — the acceptable thing to say is that your only care is that the child is healthy and happy.
If someone is rude enough to press you, you must stare off into the distance with a martyrish look on your face and say: ‘Well, I suppose it would be nice to have one of each.’ And then you leave it there.
If you are like Victoria Beckham or Jools Oliver and already have three of one gender, you are allowed to hope for one or the other, but that’s the only situation in which it’s acceptable to have any opinion. Otherwise you are just a bit monstrous and ungrateful — what about all the women who can’t have children at all?
But the truth is I like girls, I understand girls and I’ve always dreaded the idea of having a boy. People say how emotionally uncomplicated boys are and how manipulative and fussy girls are. But what use is a plain-speaking boy to me? I wouldn’t know where to start. I know exactly where I am with girls and their petty mind games. I’ve played them myself. I’m a Grand Master of them.
But alas, it seemed Mother Nature had other ideas. The other day, I lay in the sonographer’s office as he moved the ultrasound wand over my already-fat stomach, and my worst fears were confirmed.
‘There are the hands, there . . .’ he said. He moved the wand around for the ‘up-skirt shot’ as my husband calls it. ‘And there are the soles of the little feet,’ he cooed. There was a loaded silence as we both stared at the white smudge on the screen between the legs.
‘Oh God, is it a boy?!’ I said, a little bit too loudly.
‘Well,’ said the sonographer. ‘You can’t confirm anything at 12 weeks, you really have to wait to 20 weeks to be sure, but . . . it does look suspicious, doesn’t it?’
I felt light-headed; was the nausea I was feeling from morning sickness or horror at the prospect of a man-child?
Out on the street I dialled Giles, with a shaking hand. He feels exactly the same as I do. His adoration, worship, love and fanatical devotion to our daughter since the day of her birth has made the idea of having a boy unthinkable.
Acceptable: According to Esther, you are allowed to to hope for a boy or a girl when you already have three of one gender like Victoria Beckham (right) and Jools Oliver (right)
When he picked up the telephone he told me he was drawing bees and cats with Kitty in her big drawing book (the one with the flowery cover, and using an assortment of strawberry scented, glittery pens with pink feathers on the ends).
‘Had the scan,’ I blurted out. ‘All fine, only one head, in the right place and all that. And, it looks like it might be . . .’ I stalled, praying he would be more enthusiastic about the prospect of a boy than me ‘. . . a BOY!’
‘Oh,’ said Giles. ‘Great!’ But I could tell his heart wasn’t in it.
He wants only girls in his life, he confessed later. Sweet little girls who will stroke his face, kiss his nose and say ‘Love you Daddy’, not little boys with their dramatic weeing, endless reeling off of statistics, messiness and demands to kick around a football on freezing, dank Sunday mornings.
He has been badly affected by a tale he was told by a father of three boys, describing how he’d spent a beach holiday last year.
‘I was being Action Dad, throwing Frisbees, rock pooling, hurling myself into waves,’ said the dad. ‘It was exhausting. We were pitched on the beach next to a dad of two girls and he was reading a book while they brushed his hair, fetched him beer and painted his toenails. I love my boys but it did look like this guy was having a pretty amazing holiday.’
This story still ringing in his ears, I knew that Giles wouldn’t be any more thrilled than I was about our impending arrival — a fact which made me feel even more guilty.
What is wrong with us? How could I — how could we — be so mean and cold as to have such a strong preference as to the gender of our unborn child? There’s a reason that it’s taboo to admit to these feelings: they are deeply unpleasant.
Yet they are not entirely without foundation.
Mummy's little girl: Esther Walker with her daughter Kitty pictured on the beach
Neither Giles nor I come from a family of men. Indeed, we are from families of women. I have three sisters. My husband has one sister. My mother has two sisters, as does my father. When casually discussing the issue of fidelity, one Christmas my father looked up from the historical biography he was engrossed in and said: ‘An affair is out of the question for me; I need another woman in my life like I need a hole in the head.’ Then he held out his teacup for a refill.
It is little wonder we are suspicious of little boys. Deeply, deeply suspicious. I once read a survey that had found families with two girls were the happiest and I chose to believe it completely.
It’s not just me. Mumsnet identifies the phenomenon of the SMOG — the Smug Mother Of Girls. They love their little girls and find boys yucky, noisy, smelly, boisterous and destructive. At playgroups, they will draw their girls closer to them when any boy comes within three feet.
It used to be that having children was just a biological imperative — you are born, you grow up, you have children and that’s it. It’s now a lifestyle choice. You’re not just a mother, you’re a Yummy Mummy, or a Boden Mum, or a Hippy Mum, a Working Mum, or a Slummy Mummy. You are a type, a tribe, a sort.
To offset the occasional hardship and boredom of looking after small children, you get in return a fashion accessory to mould in your own image, or a crazy idealised image you saw in a magazine.
Little girls, with their own interest in wholesome things and willingness to have their hair done and to wear dainty shoes, fit in with this ridiculous pursuit of the picturesque and the perfect in a way that riotous little boys do not.
For most boys don’t want to do nice things like baking, colouring in, and making up their own dances to Disney theme songs. They want to kill ants and shout, wee in clean laundry, break things, hurl cricket balls through windows and upset next door’s cat.
Girly time: Esther Walker (pictured with her daughter) likes girls and has always dreaded the idea of having a boy
And, in the end, your boys will leave you for another woman. They will get girlfriends, who will be hateful and wilful and annoying.
These girls might even — horror! — marry your son and take him, and your grandchildren, away for ever. It is the mother of the bride who is the centre of attention, it is the maternal grandmother who traditionally gets the action with the grandchildren. You stand to lose everything!
Yet, despite my fears, rationally speaking, I know I am being unfair. Of all the little boys I know — and I know an awful lot, including my three nephews — I only know two who are really horrid, whom I avoid because they are so violent and crazed.
My nephews can be charming with my daughter, throwing balls to her or bringing her toys they think she might like. They laugh until they cry when she takes a long drink of water and then gasps ‘Ahhh!’
And, by the same token, I know several vile little girls, who snatch and scream and throw tantrums and narrow their eyes at my daughter and shriek ‘No babies allowed!’ because she is a few months younger than them.
More to the point, there is no getting away from the fact that my new baby is a boy, and I have no choice but to get used to it. I will have to get used to a different nappy-changing experience and accept that there will be a lot more plastic dinosaurs in the house.
I must put aside my daydreams of Kitty and her little sister holding hands, dressed as fairies or angels. I will have to get used to the house being much noisier and being held up in the kitchen at plastic-cutlass point. I will just have to hope that Kitty and her brother can find things that they like doing together.
This will be helped by the fact that, if I’m honest, Kitty isn’t exactly like the little girls in the Boden catalogue: she won’t let me put her hair in bunches and she’s fond of heading straight to the most enormous, stinking puddle she can find and jumping in it.
In fact, while my husband and I might be worried about a little boy spoiling our vision for a sweet-smelling, calm little family with a fondness for all things pink, Kitty would probably like nothing better than a baby brother with whom she can get muddy.
Although if I send him off to playgroup wearing a tutu, that’s my business...
THE CLUES THAT KATE'S HAVING A GIRL
Science and folklore suggest that Kate Middleton will have a girl While we now know that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s baby will be third in line to the throne whether it is a boy or a girl, we are still no closer to confirming its gender. Yet science and folklore both give us clues that suggest William and Kate will have a daughter. For starters, Kate’s debilitating morning sickness, hyperemesis gravidarum, is more commonly found among women expecting girls. And the Duchess’s slim build may also hint at a royal daughter. A 2008 study at the University of Exeter showed women who consumed lower-calorie diets were more likely to have girls because female foetuses can survive on fewer nutrients. Then William’s occupation as an RAF search-and-rescue pilot could also play its part. An American study found pilots had an 80 per cent chance of having girl babies. One theory is that exposure to radiation on planes reduces the number of sperm carrying male chromosomes, but sperm carrying hardier female chromosomes are unaffected. And if Kate is spotted leaving a Kensington dermatologist, it’s odds-on for a daughter. French researchers found that mothers who suffered acne while pregnant were 90 per cent more likely to give birth to a girl due to excess levels of the female hormone oestrogen. On the other hand, there may be some truth in the idea that women who suffer cold feet will have a son. Cold feet are a symptom of poor circulation — and German scientists have found that this condition during pregnancy is often experienced among women expecting boys, though they haven’t yet been able to explain why. If all else fails, there is one final method of prediction: ask the Duchess whether she thinks she is expecting a boy or a girl. According to scientists from Arizona, women’s intuition is the most accurate gender predictor of all.
Asked to guess the sex of their child, mothers-to-be are correct 70 per cent of the time.
So, Kate, spill the beans. Is it a boy or a girl? Alice-Azania Jarvis . .
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Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, smiles at his home in Tripoli June 28, 2012. Stevens and three embassy staff were killed late on September 11, 2012, as they rushed away from a consulate building in Benghazi, stormed by al Qaeda-linked gunmen blaming America for a film that they said insulted the Prophet Mohammad. REUTERS/Esam Al-Fetori
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors opened their case against Ahmed Abu Khatallah on Monday by telling jurors he orchestrated the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Khatallah has been awaiting trial since 2014, when he was captured by a team of U.S. military and FBI officials in Libya and transported on a 13-day journey to the United States aboard a Navy vessel.
In his opening statement in U.S. District court for the District of Columbia, federal prosecutor John Crabb said Khatallah hates America “with a vengeance” and played a leading role in organizing the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.
Khatallah, he said, “didn’t light the fires and he didn’t fire the mortars but you will hear he is just as guilty as the men who lit those fires.”
Khatallah, who face charges including murder and providing material support to terrorists, sat at the table wearing a white shirt and headphones that allowed him to hear an Arabic translation of the proceedings.
Defense attorney Jeffrey Robinson denied that his client had anything to do with the planning of the attack.
“The evidence is going to show that Mr. Abu Khatallah did not participate in the attack,” he said.
Monday’s session included harrowing testimony from Special Agent Scott Wickland, who described how he tried to get Stevens and State Department staffer Sean Smith to safety as they crawled on their bellies through thick, black smoke as fire engulfed the mission.
“At first I had my hand on the ambassador and we were crawling,” he recalled.
“I was breathing through the last centimeter of air on the ground... and I am yelling to the other guys, ‘Come on! We can make it!”
“And within that 8 meters, they disappeared.”
Crabb, the prosecutor, also previewed some of the other testimony the jury will hear from witnesses who claim they heard Khatallah discuss his involvement in the attack.
One witness, who was later paid $7 million to help the United States lure Khatallah to the spot where he was captured, will tell jurors he heard the defendant say he “‘would have killed all of the Americans that night,'” Crabb said.
Crabb also showed grainy video footage from the night of the attack with images of more than a half-dozen suspected associates of Khatallah.
Khatallah appeared in one video as armed militia entered a room that held closely guarded maps and other records.
Robinson said his client went to the mission only to see what was happening and warned people to steer clear of the gunfire.
He also said some of the government’s witnesses “are people who lie.”
The trial, which resumes on Tuesday, is expected to last several weeks. |
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital -- Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project team identifies genetic changes underlying a type of B-precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia
An international team of researchers from the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital -- Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project (PCGP) and the Children's Oncology Group (COG) has identified the genetic changes that underpin a subtype of the most common cancer found in children. This form of B-precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) features genetic changes to two transcription factors known as DUX4 and ERG, proteins that closely control the activities of other crucial genes in human blood cells. The findings are published online in the journal Nature Genetics.
Leukemia is the most common type of childhood cancer, and ALL accounts for around 30 percent of cancers in children. Precursor B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) is, in turn, the most common type of ALL (around 80 percent). In B-ALL, immature white blood cells known as B cell lymphoblasts proliferate and accumulate rapidly in the blood and bone marrow.
"Our work is motivated by a lack of information on the genetic basis of many B-ALL cases," said corresponding author Charles Mullighan, M.B.B.S., M.D., a member of the St. Jude Department of Pathology. "We discovered a distinct gene pattern in blood samples from some patients in our study and wanted to determine the underlying molecular events behind this signal."
The researchers studied a group of 1,913 patients who had B-ALL to understand the subtype's genetic basis. This group of patients included children, adolescents and young adults. Microarray and transcriptome sequencing identified that 7.6 percent of these B-ALL patients had the distinctive genetic profile the scientists wanted to characterize further.
The scientists uncovered a unique mechanism for how a transcription factor leads to leukemia development.
"Our work revealed that in this type of B-ALL there is a sequence of molecular events that involves the interplay of two transcription factors," Mullighan said.
Transcription factors are proteins that bind to specific DNA sequences and regulate the expression of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA. ChIP sequencing, a method that allows researchers to analyze how proteins interact with DNA, was crucial to reveal the link between the two transcription factors. Sequencing studies identified rearrangement of the transcription factor gene DUX4 in all cases in this subtype of ALL, resulting in high-level expression of DUX4. DUX4 was shown to bind to the gene for the transcription factor ERG, leading to deregulated expression of ERG. The deregulation of ERG compromised the function of ERG either by deletion of part of the gene, or by the expression of another form of ERG (ERGalt). In both cases, loss of activity was observed for the ERG transcription factor, which led to leukemia.
"The discovery of the connection between DUX4 fusion and the aberrant ERG isoform required integrating whole-genome sequencing, RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data using novel computational approaches that we developed," said Jinghui Zhang, Ph.D., chair of the St. Jude Department of Computational Biology and the paper's first author. The genomic landscape of this subtype of B-ALL can also be visualized using ProteinPaint (pecan.stjude.org), a powerful interactive tool developed at St. Jude to examine pediatric cancer mutations and gene expression.
Co-author Li Ding, Ph.D., assistant director of The McDonnell Genome Institute and director of computational biology in the Division of Oncology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, noted: "Our data reveal that a genetic rearrangement of DUX4 is present in all cases for patients with the distinct gene expression profile identified in our study. The genetic rearrangement of DUX4 is a clonal event that is acquired early in the development of leukemia."
Co-author Stephen Hunger, M.D., chief of the Division of Oncology at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said the genetic defects underlying this relatively common subset of B-ALL were not fully understood before discovery of the DUX4 abnormalities. "These results underscore that there is still more to be learned about the genetic changes in ALL, and that this knowledge can help refine treatment for patients," he said.
The researchers hope identification of the relationships between the two transcription factors will lead to new diagnostic tests for patients. DUX4/ERG ALL is linked to favorable outcomes even when other detrimental genetic mutations are present. Currently, only transcriptome or genome sequencing helps identify the DUX4 rearrangements. The scientists say other detection methods, for example fluorescence hybridization or visual inspection of chromosomes under the microscope (karyotyping), are not sufficient to recognize genetic changes to DUX4. |
Zaatari’s occupants say they would still jump at any chance to leave. Complaints are rife about electricity, which since June has been available only at night; rationed water; and, especially, the dismal quality of the schools. Last year, classes in the camp were crammed with up to 90 children; of those who took Jordan’s 12th-grade exam, 3 percent passed.
The camp population has dropped to 79,000 from 83,000 in April (and 156,000 in March 2013).
While the rate of Syrians leaving Jordan has doubled to 120 per day in September from 60 in July, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees found that Zaatari residents are less likely to exit than those outside. Still, Hovig Etyemezian, the camp director, sees “an alarming trend” of young men selling land in Syria to finance precarious journeys to Europe.
“This is the way forward,” said a 26-year-old who left on Sunday hoping to join a cousin in Stuttgart, Germany, or former Zaatari neighbors in the Netherlands and Sweden. “I have a degree, and for five years I have not worked with my degree,” said the man, who was trained as a lab technician but has been selling stationery in Zaatari. “I want a career.”
Bassem Zuhri, 42, would love to follow him — “I wish today I could leave” — but he cannot afford $400 passports for his two wives and five children. Profits at Mr. Zuhri’s bridal shop, where poofy dresses studded with rhinestones rent for $25 a day, were slashed this summer by the $155 monthly cost of a generator. |
It’s been over two years now since I decided to get a vasectomy and I’ve never looked back. A few times I have been saddened when I was told the world needs me to have kids or when a girl was not interested in me because I can’t make a baby. However, in those rare moments I remember why I decided to do what I did and am quickly reassured it was the right choice for me. Today I share with you why I did what so few people of my age have dared to do in hopes of shedding light on a topic that is frequently brushed under the rug.
1. Almost every girl I’ve ever dated has suffered from depression or anxiety due to hormone imbalance from birth control. I decided I didn’t want to put anyone I love through that so I took on the role of birth control myself.
2. I think birth control is an equal responsibility of the man and the woman. In my mind, men and women are equal on all planes. Sure, there are some big differences between our genders, but one could not exist without the other and responsibility should lie equally on both genders. I can have a simple snip done or my female counterpart can take a daily pill, deal with a plastic ring in her vagina, wear a patch on her butt, or any of the similar measures that exist. All of these being more time and energy consuming measures than my procedure. Also female birth control takes money and both the man and woman should equally pay for that. (For any woman wanting long-term birth control, the IUD is the best option I have found and lasts up to 12 years.)
3. I don’t support the pharmaceutical industry. Besides the negative affects many women directly suffer because of birth control, the world is suffering from the pharmaceutical industry. The toxins cause negative impacts in our bodies and that impact continues when it’s flushed into our water systems, affecting humans, animals, and our natural environment. The health and well being of humankind should not be a profitable venture, yet the pharmaceutical industry is a billion or trillion dollar industry. Priorities are often skewed when money is that big of a factor and it doesn’t seem that the true health of our citizens is the number one priority. I do think there is a place for western medicine, especially for emergencies, but as it is currently being used I choose not to support it where possible.
4. People sometimes tell me that I’m exactly the type of guy that should be having children because I can raise them to make the world a better place. My mission is exactly that, to make the earth a happier, healthier place for all of us, but I don’t need my own children to do that. Instead, I am dedicating my time to educating and inspiring the masses to treat each other and our earth with respect. Let’s take for example some teachers who help raise hundreds or thousands of children in their classrooms. Those teachers don’t need children of their own in order to have a positive impact because every child is their child. I feel the same way.
5. There are just a lot of other things I’d rather do than have kids. That’s a good enough reason in itself for me.
6. There is no shortage of people on earth. The population is currently at 7 billion people and growing rapidly. Every second 5 people are born and only 2 people die. Our exploding population could make things a lot more challenging in the future and already seems to be doing so. I don’t feel a need to add onto the population myself. I do want to be clear that I think raising a child is an incredibly beautiful thing and I have the utmost respect for parents who have dedicated their lives to raising great people and doing it in a manner that is environmentally friendly. We need children and we need intelligent, caring children. Thank you to all who are currently or have raised these people!
7. I don’t want to create trash anymore. The birth control industry creates a lot of trash from the condoms and their wrappers to the plastic packages of the pills and similar products. This stuff all ends up in landfills or, worse yet, on our streets and in our waterways. I’m trying to live a life free of garbage and this is one very small part of that lifestyle. There are 100’s of ways I’ve chosen to stop making trash.
8. The decision is reversible. I highly doubt I will ever get a vasectomy reversal but if I decide to, success rates say my odds of being able to conceive is at least 50% with some doctors claiming a 95% success rate.
9. My insurance covered it. Even without insurance the procedure is very affordable, ranging from $300 to $900 on average. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than raising a child or a few decades of female birth control.
10. There are alternative ways to have a child. If I ever have a child I would rather adopt and help a child that is in despair. However, if I decide to have my own child there is always in utero and in vitro. As I’ve come to understand, the reasons to freeze sperm have lessened because doctors can go in with a very thin needle to pull sperm out. That’s good information to have but I doubt I’ll ever take that course of action either.
11. It doesn’t affect my sex life. Well, unless you take into account that it has made my sex life better. The vasectomy procedure simply cuts the vas deferens, which prevent the sperm from meeting the semen during ejaculation. The semen still comes out in an orgasm and that makes up about 95% of the ejaculation. The human body still produces sperm and it is constantly reabsorbed by the body as it does not leave the testes during ejaculation. The orgasm is the same and the ejaculation is the same in every way.
That’s it. That’s why I got a vasectomy. I’m not telling anyone else to get a vasectomy or that it is the solution to all of our world problems. However, it is an option for those who don’t want children of their own and I wanted to share my personal experience and thoughts. Although this is a separate issue I also feel the need to discuss STD’s a little bit here.
I strongly encourage anyone having sex to take all necessary responsibilities to prevent contracting or spreading STD’s. Using protection such as condoms is an obvious means of preventing STD’s but it goes much deeper than that. Having just one sexual partner that you are open and honest with is a great means for avoiding STD’s. If there is a need to, both you and your partner can be checked and share the results on paper with each other to be certain that you are both free of an STD. Honesty is absolutely necessary in sexual relationships and obviously having sex with someone else and then with your partner puts them at risk. I encourage you to be true to the words you speak with your partner. Judgment and education are also great tools to prevent STD’s and in my opinion are more important tools than condoms because you can still get an STD with the use of condoms. There are demographics that are at higher risk of STD’s, which includes people who use needles for drugs or have compromised immune systems. Be conscious of this. Avoiding alcohol and drugs is also an intelligent way to avoid STD’s as they are often involved with lack of judgement that leads to STD’s. Consciousness, rational thinking, self control, and proper judgment are extremely important in sex and in every facet of life. I encourage you to practice all of these skills. The most effective way of preventing an STD or accidental pregnancy is to not have sex. For my younger audience I’d like to share with you that I graduated from high school before having sex. I was 19 my first time and I encourage you to wait until you are emotionally ready and with a caring partner. There are so many meaningful and purposeful ways to spend our lives other than pursuing and having sex. |
by Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director
Subjects who regularly consume cannabis possess favorable indices related to diabetic control as compared to occasional consumers or non-users, according to trial data published today online in the American Journal of Medicine.
Here is a summary of the study from the website diabetes.co.uk:
Cannabis may prevent development of type 2 diabetes A new study has revealed that smoking cannabis may help protect against type 2 diabetes after researchers in the US found that regular users of the drug have better blood sugar control. Murray Mittleman, of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, analysed data on almost 5,000 patients who were quizzed about their use of recreational drugs as part of the National Health and Nutrition Survey between 2005 and 2010. They found that 2,103 had never use cannabis, 975 had used the drug in the past but were not current users, and 579 (over 10%) had inhaled or ingested it in the past month. Tests showed that current users had 16% lower fasting insulin levels and reduced insulin resistance than those who had never used cannabis. Non-users also had larger waistlines and lower levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL or ‘good’) cholesterol – both of which are risk factors for type 2 diabetes. The same benefits were seen among participants who had used the drug in the past but the associations were not as strong, indicating that the effects of cannabis use on insulin levels and insulin sensitivity wear off over time. “Previous epidemiologic studies have found lower prevalence rates of obesity and diabetes mellitus in marijuana users compared to people who have never used marijuana, suggesting a relationship between cannabinoids and peripheral metabolic processes, but ours is the first to investigate the relationship between marijuana use and fasting insulin, glucose, and insulin resistance,” said lead investigator Mittleman.
Commenting on the study, American Journal of Medicine Editor-in-Chief Joseph S. Alpert, MD, Professor of Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, wrote in an accompanying commentary: “These are indeed remarkable observations that are supported, as the authors note, by basic science experiments that came to similar conclusions.” He added: “We desperately need a great deal more basic and clinical research into the short- and long-term effects of marijuana in a variety of clinical settings such as cancer, diabetes, and frailty of the elderly. I would like to call on the NIH and the DEA to collaborate in developing policies to implement solid scientific investigations that would lead to information assisting physicians in the proper use and prescription of THC in its synthetic or herbal form.”
Diabetes mellitus is a group of autoimmune diseases characterized by defects in insulin secretion resulting in hyperglycemia (an abnormally high concentration of glucose in the blood). There are two primary types of diabetes. Individuals diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (also known as juvenile diabetes) are incapable of producing pancreatic insulin and must rely on insulin medication for survival. Individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (also known as adult onset diabetes) produce inadequate amounts of insulin. Type 2 diabetes is a less serious condition that typically is controlled by diet. Over time, diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage, hardening of the arteries and death. The disease is the third leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer.
Observational trial data published in 2012 in the British Medical Journal previously reported that adults with a history of marijuana use had a lower prevalence of type 2 diabetes and possess a lower risk of contracting the disease than do those with no history of cannabis consumption, even after researchers adjusted for social variables (ethnicity, level of physical activity, etc.) Investigators concluded, “Our analysis of adults aged 20-59 years … showed that participants who used marijuana had a lower prevalence of DM (Diabetes Mellitus) and lower odds of DM relative to non-marijuana users.”
Although subjects who consume marijuana on average have higher average caloric intake levels than non-users, the plant’s use has been associated with lower body-mass index (BMI) and lower rates of obesity.
Abstracts of today’s study, “The Impact of Marijuana Use on Glucose, Insulin, and Insulin Resistance among US Adults,” are online here. NORML has additional information and citations regarding cannabis and diabetes in our Library here. |
The president’s confusing, concerning, and ultimately crazy week continued on Thursday with a prickly Time cover package. It contained an unnerving interview between the magazine’s White House correspondent and Donald Trump. Based on his answers, the president really, really doesn’t understand modern technology, and his aversion to it could end up being a threat to national security.
Let’s just jump right into the compromising quotes. When asked about the future of America’s new Ford-class aircraft carriers, Trump began rambling about the catapults that send fighter jets speeding off the deck. To be more specific, Ford-class carriers use a new Electromagnetic Aircraft Launching System (EMALS), an innovative approach that does away with aging steam-powered catapults. Essentially, the system works like a maglev train, pushing a plane up to speed with the help of some computers. Trump jumped right into a tirade about the new-fangled technology:
You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology]. I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”
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It’s a little unclear if the president considers “planes thrown in the air” a good thing. And since Trump is a lying liar who tells dangerous lies, it’s also unclear if the unnamed Naval officer talking to the president actually said these things. However, the idea that the electromagnetic catapult system has encountered some problems in its development is not entirely false.
Just a couple of years ago, tests showed that EMALS failed 1 out of every 240 launches. That’s not good when a failure could put a $50-million jet and two pilots in the ocean, but it’s also not unusual for new technologies to suffer some bumps in the road during development. Either way, as our friends at Foxtrot Alpha point out, the electromagnetic catapult system could be essential in half a century when the USS Gerald R. Ford and the two other carriers in its class are still supposed to be in service.
“The whole idea of ripping out the launch system in the already-built Ford, and re-designing the following carriers (including the already-under construction USS Enterprise), would be ‘immensely expensive,’” Foxtrot’s Mike Ballaban writes, quoting carrier expert Dr. Robert Farley, who called Trump’s statements “totally nuts.”
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But the second part of Trump’s quote is more revealing about the president’s nefarious and perhaps dangerous tendency to discount modern technology:
It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said—and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be—“Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.
Again, ripping out “the digital” would also cost hundreds of millions of dollars and leave the Navy with outdated technology for at least the next 50 years. Trump’s idea isn’t just terrible reasoning; it’s a threat to national security.
Donald Trump, of course, is famous for not understanding how modern technology works. A little over a year ago, Gizmodo’s own Matt Novak conducted an investigation and couldn’t figure out if Trump had ever used a computer. A couple weeks after his election, our billionaire president was photographed in the cool blue glow of a MacBook Pro, but he does not look confident in what he’s doing with the machine. Trump doesn’t use email, and it appears that he uses a smartphone strictly for phone calls and tweets.
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Trump publicly acknowledges his love and daily use of obsolete technology. Beyond the years-old Samsung Galaxy phone he used throughout the campaign and during his early days in office, Trump is a big fan of TiVo because it lets him fast-forward through his precious TV shows, calling it “one of the great inventions of all time.” (Most smart TVs let you do anything a TiVo can do without the need to buy an extra box.) Because he doesn’t email, Trump sends praise and disapproval to reporters by fax. This stuff is sort of funny when it’s about Trump’s idiosyncratic love of old technology that he thinks “just works.” It’s absolutely terrifying when you think about how it might guide cybersecurity or defense strategy.
At the end of the day, we could be witnessing another Trumpian manipulation of the truth (also known as a lie) with his “I don’t understand digital, whatever” act. But all evidence points to the idea that President Trump actually doesn’t understand modern technology or its necessity in a changing world—and is willing to sacrifice national security as a result. He demonstrated this ignorance by avoiding cybersecurity policy and then appointing fellow luddite Rudy Giuliani to build his cybersecurity team. (This was a terrible idea from the start.) Perhaps looking for a win after the Comey controversy, Trump finally signed his cybersecurity order on Thursday afternoon. According to Politico, cybersecurity experts say that the order “breaks little new ground.”
Trump spews a lot of bullshit. We all know this by now. Who knows if he even talked to the Navy about the new digital catapult system. There’s a good chance he just saw some conservative pundit yelling about the cost on Fox News and decided to regurgitate those points in the Time interview. If there’s anything Trump does understand, it’s how to repeat what’s said on Fox News.
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[Time] |
Relatives of Arif Fayyaz Majeed meet Home Minister Rajnath Singh. (Source: IE photo: Deepak Joshi)
Arif Ejaz Majeed, one of the four young men from Kalyan near Mumbai who were thought to have joined insurgents of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), has reportedly been killed in fighting in Iraq.
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Arif, an engineering student, was one of four men from Kalyan who went missing from their homes in May. Arif’s family — along with the families of the other three men, Fahad Tanvir Sheikh, Aman Naim Tandel and Saheem Farooq Tanki — went to the police some days after they disappeared.
The Indian Express first reported the disappearances on July 14.
Iftikhar Khan, an uncle of Fahad Sheikh, said the news of Arif’s death in Iraq was conveyed by Saheem Farooq Tanki, who called his family in Thane on Tuesday night.
“Saheem called us at 6 pm on Monday and told us about Arif’s death. He was sobbing throughout and asked us to go and inform Arif’s family. He later called us at once again in the night to check if we had informed his (Arif’s) family,” Kashif Tanki, a relative, said.
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Saheem’s family passed on the information both to Arif’s family and to the Kalyan police.
Friends of Arif’s family said that his father, who is a doctor, was shattered by the news and was inconsolable. The family performed Arif’s last rites in absentia on Wednesday.
The Indian Express first reported the disappearances on July 14.
“The Ghaibaana Namaaz-e-Janaaza, which is a funeral prayer for times when the body is not available, was offered after the Zuhr (afternoon) namaaz by the family,” said a resident of the housing society in which the Majeed family lives. Members of the families of the other three youth were present at the namaaz, neighbours said.
The Bazaarpeth police have recorded the statements of Saheem’s family, and were on Wednesday attempting to verify the report of Arif’s death. “Saheem said that he had made inquiries about Arif’s whereabouts and well being, and learned that he had died. Saheem did not have any more details. There has been no official confirmation yet from any of the investigating agencies,” Iftikhar Khan said.
The four families live in the same Dudh Naka-Govindwadi area of Kalyan (West). The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad had picked up laptops and pen drives from the youths’ homes on the evening of July 14. Late on July 18 evening, Arif’s father, Ejaz Badruddin Majeed, had met Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Delhi, and handed him a letter, reportedly seeking action against the people who had radicalised his son and persuaded him to join the jihadis in the Middle East.
The Indian Express broke the story on July 14, 2014.
Before leaving home, Arif had left behind a letter saying “fighting has been enjoined upon you”, and telling his mother that the “angel of death” will ask him why he didn’t migrate to “Allah’s land”. In the letter, the son told his family, “May we all meet in Paradise.”
ISIS, the ruthless Sunni extremist militia which Arif, Fahad, Aman and Saheem were believed to have joined, now calls itself the Islamic State (IS). It shocked the world this month by uploading on the Internet a video of the grisly beheading of American journalist James Foley.
Police sources had told The Indian Express last month that the four men flew to Baghdad on May 23 as part of a group of 22 pilgrims intending to visit religious shrines in Iraq. Arif had called his family from Baghdad on May 24, apologising for having left without telling them.
He had claimed he had travelled in the hope of finding a job there. He had phoned again on May 25, this time to reassure his family that he was well.
Later that evening, other pilgrims on the trip told investigators, Arif, Fahad, Aman and Saheem had hired a taxi to Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad which has emerged as the epicentre of Iraq’s deadly insurgency. The four Kalyan men had gone silent thereafter. Iraqi intelligence had found Arif’s cellphone connected to a tower in the Mosul area before going dead — and on Wednesday, intelligence sources in India said Arif’s death had likely occurred in the same area.
“The radicalisation of the youths seems to have taken place online,” a Maharashtra Police official had told The Indian Express in July, “with news of atrocities in the region inflaming their passions”.
Last year, Pakistani al-Qaeda ideologue Asim Umar had called on Indians to join the global jihad. The ISIS has cited India as a key concern for global jihadists. In Internet chatrooms where Islamists congregate, messages have been posted calling on Indians to join up, to prepare themselves for what is being described as the coming communal apocalypse.
Internet propaganda has drawn thousands of young people from distant countries to the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Hundreds of volunteers from Europe, the UK, US and Australia have been reported to be participating in the wars, along with some numbers of Pakistanis. Foley’s murderer is said to have had a South London accent.
In his letter, Arif appeared to reject his family’s values. “I cried when I saw you all sinning, smoking cigarettes, taking interest, watching TV, illegal sexual intercourse, living luxurious lives, intermingling of sexes, not praying, not growing beards.These things will lead to you burning in the hell-fire,” he said.
He had harsh words, in particular, for his sister, and female cousins, who all watched television, “a professional way to ensure nudity, lewdness, obscenity and disbelief prevail. It is a major sin. In it is music, which is an instrument of Satan”.
“He was a good boy,” Arif’s father had said then. “He was very religious, never spent time in bad company, never chased after girls, never seemed attracted to violence.”
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“O Mother,” Arif wrote. “The sun is setting in the backyard of our house, behind the mountain and I have told my friend that we will meet there for our greatest journey. It is a blessed journey for me because I don’t want to live in this sinful country. At the time of my death, the angel of death will ask me why I did not make hijra (migrate) to Allah’s land, which is spacious.” |
My biggest running nightmare became reality- 4 miles into my long run Sunday afternoon, I stopped to use the restroom and was assaulted by a man hiding in a stall (that is my GPS in red lines). I fought for my life screaming("Not today, M**F**er!"), clawing his face, punching back, and desperately trying to escape his grip- never giving up. I was able to lock him in the bathroom until police arrived. Thankfully I just took a self-defense class offered at my work and used all of it. My face is stitched, my body is bruised, but my spirit is intact. #NTMF #fightingchanceseattle #ballard #runnersafety #marathontraining #womensselfdefense #myballard #fightlikeagirl #fightback #nottodaymotherfucker #youcantbreakme #instarunners #garmin #garminvivosmarthr
A post shared by Kelly Herron #NTMF (@run_kiwi_run) on Mar 6, 2017 at 10:48am PST |
Tech gadgets' plastic and metal bodies can be pretty tiresome, offering little personality and warmth - especially considering how integrated they are with our lives. Recently, wood has stepped in to fill the unnatural void. One of the oldest known materials used to build things, wood is warm, timeless and beautiful. Its durability and unique fingerprint of grain patterns also make this an ideal material to enclose a tech gadget in.
Above is an image of the Maple Phone, designed by Hyun Jin Yoon and Eun Hak Lee, who have won the Silver award at the International Design Excellence Awards 2008.
Other wooden phones have been designed, that are interesting to compare. I think the Maple Phone is the most elegant, though.
Continue for more images of the Maple Phone and other unique wooden phones > |
When George Mallari-Lee met some of his best friends in detention at Pierrefonds Comprehensive High School – all of them in trouble for reading comic books – he never imagined one day they would own their own shop.
Now he and his three friends, all comic fanatics from the West Island, are making their mark in Montreal's St-Henri neighbourhood with Crossover Comics.
The co-owners of the shop, all in their thirties, say they are living out their dream, although they admit it wasn't easy starting up a small business.
We live in the digital age, and we are selling paper-bound books. - George Mallari-Lee, Co-owner of Crossover Comics
"Happy struggles," said Mallari-Lee. "Opening any kind of small business is difficult, especially [since] we live in the digital age, and we are selling paper-bound books."
"But the reaction has been amazing. There's a lot of enthusiasm. The neighbourhood has just shown a lot of love for us."
More than superheroes
The owners of Crossover Comics say they are unlike many of the other shops around the city, which they say carry mainly superhero-based comics.
Mallari-Lee's partner Ray Silas says more than half of their shop is filled with dozens of categories of comics, far beyond the superhero genre.
Crossover Comics in St-Henri carries a wide range of comic books. (CBC)
"We have romance, crime, sci-fi: You name it, we have it," says Silas.
"If you're five years old or you're seventy years old, and you've read comics your whole life or you've never read comics, I should be able to find something for you."
They also carry a wide range of graphic novels, independently published books, board games, collectors' cards and comics for kids.
Comics in the community
Crossover Comics is also a meeting spot for weekly community gatherings.
There are board game nights, Magic collectible card game meetups and book clubs.
They've already made their way into several schools in the area, organizing after-school comic book clubs and anti-bullying and literacy workshops for kids.
For Halloween weekend, kids can stop by to trick-or-treat and walk away with a free comic.
Crossover Comics store on Notre-Dame in St-Henri is celebrating its fourth anniversary. (Kristin Falcao )
Loyal customers
A testament to their loyal customers is the store's constant traffic, despite major road construction going on outside their door.
The stretch of Notre-Dame Street from Atwater Avenue to their shop near Rose-de-Lima Street has been torn up for weeks.
Construction along Notre-Dame street outside of Crossover Comics store in St-Henri has been going on for weeks. (Kristin Falcao )
Celebrating 4 years of comics in St-Henri
The shop is celebrating its fourth anniversary this weekend with a big sale, a comic book launch and a party. Previous events have seen lineups around the block, which may be a bit tricky this year due to the construction mess outside.
Local hip hop artist Yassin (Narcy) Alsalman is launching a comic book he wrote called World War Free, based on one of his albums at the store's anniversary event.
Multimedia hip hop artist Yassin (Narcy) Alsalman wrote a comic book that he's launching at Crossover Comics' four year anniversary party. (CBC)
"I like that they're independent guys that started with a passion and created something out of it. Come support these guys, man," says Alsalman.
Crossover Comics's event starts at 11 a.m. on Saturday, at 3560 Notre-Dame Ouest. |
The dog licence tag might be one of several dog tags worn.
A dog licence is required in some jurisdictions to be the keeper of a dog. Usually a dog-licence identifying number is issued to the owner, along with a dog tag bearing the identifier and a contact number for the registering organization. If a stray pet is found with the tag, a rescuer can call the registering organization to get current contact information for the dog's owner.
Licensing a dog might require additional actions on the owner's part, such as ensuring that the dog has a current rabies vaccination. In many jurisdictions a fee, which is usually small, must be paid. Licences typically must be renewed annually or after some small number of years.
Licensing information worldwide [ edit ]
Australia [ edit ]
Dog licences are mandated by state and territory legislation but are issued by local governments (e.g., city or shire councils).[1] Hence the cost of a licence and the format of the licence tag vary across the country. Some areas, such as Victoria, require cat registration and microchipping also.[2]
Dog licences are required. There are three types of licences[3]
Individual dog licence – covers one dog for a period of 12 months
General dog licence – for owners of kennels for a period of 12 months
Lifetime of the dog licence – for the lifetime of the dog for which the licence is issued
Italy [ edit ]
Since 2008 an identification microchip is mandatory for each dog over 2 months, and a small fee is associated with it, but it does not need to be renewed.[4]
Netherlands [ edit ]
Dogs must be registered and a yearly tax is paid to the municipality based on the number of dogs. The amount differs between municipalities; for example in The Hague it is €112.80 for the first dog, €176.76 for the second one, and €224.16 for the third one.[5] Other municipalities have scrapped it like Amsterdam in 2016.[6]
New Zealand [ edit ]
Under the Dog Control Act 1996 all dogs over 3 months old are required to be registered with the city or district council the dog usually resides in. As a prerequisite, all dogs classified as dangerous or menacing, and all dogs first registered in New Zealand after 1 July 2006 must be microchipped before they can be registered.
All dog registrations expire yearly on 30 June, and must be renewed by 31 July. Each registered dog must wear a tag specifying the council, registration expiry date, and registration number of the dog, with the colour of the tag changing every year for easy identification (e.g. tags for the 2013/14 year are red). Fees for registration differ between councils, and also differ according to factors such as whether the dog is neutered, living in an urban or rural area, classed as dangerous or menacing, and whether the owner is a responsible dog owner. Fees for working dogs (herding dogs, police dogs, drug dogs, etc.) are generally lower than for pets, and seeing-eye or hearing-ear dogs are generally free or minimal cost to register.
United Kingdom [ edit ]
In England, Wales and Scotland, dog licensing was abolished in 1987. Prior to this dog licences were mandatory, but the requirement was widely ignored, with only about half of owners having one. The final rate for a dog licence was 37 pence, reduced from 37½p when the halfpenny was withdrawn in 1984. This figure was an exact conversion from 7/6 (seven shillings and sixpence) on decimalisation in 1971. The revenue went to local authorities. In 2016 it became a requirement that all dogs in England and Wales have a microchip;[7] Scottish legislation was also changed to make microchipping of dogs compulsory from 2016.[8]
In Northern Ireland, dog licences are required under the Dogs (Northern Ireland) Order 1983. As of October 2011 dog licences cost £12.50 a year, with reductions for pensioners and owners of neutered dogs.[9]
Crown dependencies [ edit ]
Dog owners in Guernsey are required to obtain a licence for each dog owned and a dog tax is payable each year.[10]
Dog licences are required.[11]
United States [ edit ]
At least some states, municipalities, and other jurisdictions require a dog license[citation needed][12] and rabies vaccination, and a license expires before the vaccine does. To prevent animal overpopulation, some jurisdictions charge a lower licensing fee if the owner presents veterinary proof that the dog has been spayed or neutered. Some parts of California and Maryland require cat licenses.[13][14] |
Image caption S Irene Virbila was asked to leave the Red Medicine restaurant. Image: Pacific Coast News
A US food critic who remained anonymous for 16 years has had her cover blown by a Los Angeles restaurant.
S Irene Virbila, who works for the Los Angeles Times, had her picture taken at the Red Medicine restaurant in Beverly Hills and was then asked to leave.
The restaurant then posted the picture on the internet.
Noah Ellis, managing partner at the restaurant, said some of Ms Virbila's reviews had been "cruel" and had cost people their jobs.
In a post on the restaurant's blog he said Ms Virbila "was recognised" while she and her party were waiting for a table.
He said he took a picture of her and then asked her to leave.
He wrote: "I asked her and her party to leave, as we don't care for her or her reviews.
I never expected that a restaurateur would stick a camera in my face S. Irene Virbila, LA Times food critic
"Our purpose for posting this is so that all restaurants can have a picture of her and make a decision as to whether or not they would like to serve her."
He said he believed some of Ms Virbila's reviews had been "unnecessarily cruel and irrational" and had "caused hard-working people in this industry to lose their jobs".
The blog post was later removed but widely reported in the US media.
Mr Ellis also included the false name under which Ms Virbila had booked her table, and her telephone number.
Ms Virbila, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, said: "I always knew at some point a blogger or somebody would take a secret photo. But I never expected that a restaurateur would stick a camera in my face."
She said anonymity was important for a restaurant critic.
Restaurants could change their behaviour or serve different food if they recognised a critic with a wide readership, she added. |
happy halloween everyone!
This is just a little thing i sketched on since halloween was approaching and i was thinking of making something for the holiday.
In here i draw cly as a vampire, inspired by carmilla (the vampire from the book, not A's other personality).
Fennel as a kind of poke-frankenstein doctor with her creepy smile.
Aoi in her werewolf form.
and finally A-chan as jason from friday the 13th since i see her as a slasher film serial killer (i had a previous sketch of her in the michael myers mask but it ended up looking weird or not really good)
Placed false prophet since i was thinking of the closest thing to a demon in tpp lore and helix since he is the most lovecraftian thing we have in our history.
Anyways happy halloween and stay safe this night. |
CGI is moving fast, very fast. Not just for added effects in movies, but also for creating completely lifelike 3D models.
The biggest problem facing the animation community is an effect called the ‘uncanny valley’. We’re confronted with this when we see something that looks nearly human, but just not quite.
Humans are so good at recognizing other humans, that’s it’s extremely hard to create a thing that looks like a normal, healthy person and not a zombie or a corpse.
It’s explained in the graph below:
We’ve become pretty good at making CGI look like it’s almost real, but the real challenge is jumping over the uncanny valley.
Japanese artists Teruyuki Ishikawa & Yuka Ishikawa — otherwise known as Telyuka — started a project in 2015 to create an extremely realistic computer-generated schoolgirl. Her name is Saya, and she has been improved on since then.
This is the 2016 version (click to enlarge):
And these are some pictures of the 2015 version (again, click to enlarge):
Even her shoes look incredibly realistic:
Take a close look at all of these pictures. How do they make you feel? Personally, I’m not sensing the uncanny valley — it just looks real.
Everything from her hair to the texture of her skin doesn’t make me feel like it’s not a real person. If I would’ve come across the image without knowing the context, I’d probably think nothing special of it.
With it becoming increasingly harder to differentiate between real and fake humans, weird things start to happen. For example, take a look at the Instagram account of lilmiquela. When she popped up on the social network a few months ago, people couldn’t figure out if she was real or not.
The illusion lasted for a while, until she posted a video of herself which was obviously fake.
However, it goes to show the line is definitely blurring — it makes me think about the future, where there might be serious confusion to see if you’re dealing with a real person or a computer-generated version of one.
What do you think? Did we destroy the uncanny valley, or is there still something off about most animated figures? Let us know in the comments.
Read next: Tireless gamer sets a Guinness World Record for the longest Football Manager game |
THE FACTS
With swine flu sweeping across the country, health officials are reminding Americans to wash their hands often to reduce the spread of the disease.
Soap and warm water have long been said to prevent the spread of infections, but is warm or hot water really more effective than cold?
In its medical literature, the Food and Drug Administration states that hot water comfortable enough for washing hands is not hot enough to kill bacteria, but is more effective than cold water because it removes oils from the hand that can harbor bacteria.
Photo
But in a 2005 report in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, scientists with the Joint Bank Group/Fund Health Services Department pointed out that in studies in which subjects had their hands contaminated, and then were instructed to wash and rinse with soap for 25 seconds using water with temperatures ranging from 40 degrees Fahrenheit to 120 degrees, the various temperatures had “no effect on transient or resident bacterial reduction.”
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They found no evidence that hot water had any benefit, and noted that it might increase the “irritant capacity” of some soaps, causing contact dermatitis. “Temperature of water used for hand washing should not be guided by antibacterial effects but comfort,” they wrote, “which is in the tepid to warm temperature range. The usage of tepid water instead of hot water also has economic benefits.”
THE BOTTOM LINE
Hot water for hand washing has not been proved to remove germs better than cold water. |
By Alex Fradera
We’re supposed to be hungry for workplace feedback: after all, it can help us to eliminate blind spots in our self-knowledge, give us focus and surpass relationship issues. Often, though, it can be a bit hard to take. On the wrong day, when the feedback’s particularly upsetting, it may even bring us to tears. If this happens to you and you’re a man, according to new research in the Journal of Applied Psychology, it could spell bad news for your career prospects.
Daphna Motro and Aleksander Ellis from the University of Arizona recruited 169 adults based in the US, with an average age 32 and mostly in active employment, and presented them with one of several versions of a 6-minute video showing a performance evaluation of a grocery store manager named Pat: a scripted role performed by actors in their early twenties, a male one in some videos, a female one in others. Participants were asked to imagine they were the supervisor, and the video was staged so that they viewed the action over the shoulder of the supervisor with Pat right in front of them. The evaluation wasn’t good: Pat had recently been rude, frequently late, and oversaw declining sales. In some versions of the video, this feedback was too much, provoking male or female Pat to tears.
In post-viewing ratings of how typical the behaviour in the meeting was, participants who viewed the version featuring a tearful female Pat didn’t find her behaviour any more strange than participants who viewed the video showing female Pat remaining dry-eyed. But for participants who saw male Pat, tears were seen as significantly atypical, and they also tended to rate him lower for competence and fitness for leadership. Men and women alike made these harsher judgments of male criers.
Concrete consequences also followed. After the video screening, participants were told that Pat was moving away from the area and was after a short recommendation letter to help her/him find new work, which the participant should draft. As an employee, despite his/her recent poor performance, Pat wasn’t a complete disaster – participants had seen a positive resume at the start of the experiment – and many participants gave positive feedback, using phrases like “I have nothing but praise for him.” However, participants who watched the video depicting a crying male Pat wrote recommendation letters with the most negative tone, as evaluated by independent judges. The article offers one particularly harsh example:
“Well, I have to be honest, I’m not putting my name on the line for a slacker like Pat, I suggest that he get to the nearest McDonald’s and start working his way up from the bottom. Based on the reports I received I can’t in good conscience recommend that anywhere hire him. With that being said, good luck, if all else fails maybe he can get a gig flipping signs.”
Publicly crying is a signal of vulnerability: a state that we are less surprised to see in women, who are meant to be tender and emotional according to stereotypes. But when men cry, it violates cultural expectations that they should be firm and in control. The new experimental data suggest that, at least in simplified scenarios, this effects our evaluations of and actions toward crying men. Now it would be important to see if this holds true in real-world contexts between people with an active history, and explore it in samples outside of the US, to establish whether for men at work – as Motro and Ellis suggest – “crying is not an option”.
—Boys, Don’t Cry: Gender and Reactions to Negative Performance Feedback
Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is Contributing Writer at BPS Research Digest |
Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III (February 3, 1969 – May 30, 2015) was an American attorney, officer in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, and politician from Wilmington, Delaware. He was the eldest of three children from the marriage of former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and his first wife, Neilia Biden. He served as the Attorney General of Delaware, a major in the Delaware Army National Guard, and a member of the Democratic Party.
Early life and family [ edit ]
Biden was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the elder son of former U.S. Senator and Vice President Joe Biden, and his first wife, Neilia (née Hunter). On December 18, 1972, Biden's mother, Neilia, and younger sister Naomi were killed in an automobile accident while Christmas shopping. Beau was less than four years old, and his brother Hunter was two years old. Both of them were present in the car when the accident took place, but survived with critical injuries. Beau suffered multiple broken bones while Hunter sustained injuries to his scalp.
According to some accounts, Beau and Hunter encouraged their father to marry again, even going so far as to ask him "when were 'we' going to get married."[1] In June 1977, eight-year-old Biden welcomed Jill Jacobs as a "second mother." His half-sister, Ashley, was born in 1981.[2]
Biden married Hallie Olivere in 2002. They had a daughter, Natalie.[3][4]
Career [ edit ]
Biden graduated from Archmere Academy, his father's high school alma mater, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity. He was also a graduate of Syracuse University College of Law, as was his father. After graduating from law school he clerked for Judge Steven McAuliffe of the United States District Court of New Hampshire.[5] From 1995 to 2004, he worked at the United States Department of Justice in Philadelphia, first as Counsel to the Office of Policy Development and later as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office. In 2004, he became a partner in the law firm of Bifferato, Gentilotti, Biden & Balick, where he worked for two years before being elected Delaware attorney general.[6]
At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, after Joe Biden was nominated for Vice President of the United States, Beau introduced his father. He recounted the auto accident that killed his mother and sister and the subsequent parenting commitment his father made to his sons, a speech at which many delegates wept.[7][8]
Military service [ edit ]
Biden joined the military in 2003[9] as a member of the Delaware Army National Guard and was a Major in the Judge Advocate General's Corps as part of the 261st Signal Brigade in Smyrna, Delaware.[10][11]
Biden's unit was activated to deploy to Iraq on October 3, 2008, and sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, for pre-deployment training,[12] the day after his father participated in the 2008 presidential campaign's only vice presidential debate. His father was on the record as saying, "I don't want him going. But I tell you what, I don't want my grandson or my granddaughters going back in 15 years, and so how we leave makes a big difference."[13]
Biden traveled to Washington, D.C., from Iraq in January 2009 for the presidential inauguration and his father's swearing-in as Vice President,[14] then returned to Iraq.[15] Biden received a visit at Camp Victory from his father on July 4, 2009.[16] Biden returned from Iraq in September 2009, his yearlong stint on active duty complete.[17] Biden had announced that during his deployment he would continue to actively serve as Delaware's Attorney General by working in conjunction with his office's senior staff in Delaware,[18] although a member of his unit related Biden saying he had turned over most of his attorney general work to his deputy so as to focus on his duties in Iraq.[19] For his service in Iraq, Biden was awarded a Bronze Star.[20] Army Chief of Staff Raymond Odierno presented Biden with the Legion of Merit for his service in the Delaware National Guard, stating "Beau Biden possessed the traits I have witnessed in only the greatest leaders." [21] He was also posthumously presented with The Delaware Conspicuous Service Cross, which is "awarded for heroism, meritorious service and outstanding achievement." [22]
Political career [ edit ]
Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden at a Justice Department press conference
In his first bid at political office, Biden ran for Attorney General of Delaware in 2006. Biden's opponent was a veteran state prosecutor and Assistant U.S. Attorney, Ferris Wharton. Major issues in the campaign included the candidates' experience and proposed efforts to address sex offenders, Internet predators, senior abuse and domestic abuse. Biden won the election by approximately five percentage points.[23]
After being elected, he appointed former Delaware Attorney General and International Judge Richard S. Gebelein as Chief Deputy Attorney General, and former assistant U.S. Attorney Richard G. Andrews was appointed as State Prosecutor. As Attorney General, Biden supported and enforced stronger registration requirements for sex offenders.[24][25]
Joe Biden resigned from the Senate following his 2008 election to the vice presidency. Governor Ruth Ann Minner named former Joe Biden aide Ted Kaufman to fill the vacant seat, but Kaufman made it clear that he would not be a candidate in the 2010 special election. This fueled speculation Beau would run at that time.[26] Biden's father stated after the announcement of Kaufman's appointment, "It is no secret that I believe my son, Attorney General, would make a great United States Senator just as I believe he has been a great attorney general. But Beau has made it clear from the moment he entered public life that any office he sought he would earn on his own ... [I]f he chooses to run for the Senate in the future, he will have to run and win on his own. He wouldn't have it any other way."[27]
In October 2009, Biden stated that he was considering a run for the Senate and that he would make a final decision in January. On January 25, Biden confirmed that he would forgo a Senate run so as to better focus on the prosecution of Earl Bradley, an infamous child-molestation suspect.[28]
On November 2, 2010, he was easily re-elected to a second term as Delaware Attorney General, beating Independent Party of Delaware candidate Doug Campbell by a huge margin.[29]
Biden did not seek election to a third term as Attorney General in 2014.[30] In the spring of that year, he announced his intention to run for Governor of Delaware in the 2016 election to succeed term-limited Democratic Governor Jack Markell.[31][32] At the time of this announcement, the cancer that would kill Biden in 2015 had been diagnosed but was in remission, although this information was not public at the time.[citation needed]
Public offices Office Type Location Elected Took office Term ends Notes Attorney General Executive Dover 2006 January 2, 2007 January 3, 2011 Attorney General Executive Dover 2010 January 3, 2011 January 3, 2015
Election results Year Office Election Subject Party Votes % Opponent Party Votes % 2006 Attorney General General Joseph R. Biden III Democratic 133,152 52.5% Ferris Wharton Republican 120,062 47.4% 2010 Attorney General General Joseph R. Biden III Democratic 196,799 78.9% Doug Campbell Delaware Independent 52,517 21.1%
Health problems and death [ edit ]
For the final few years of his life, Biden suffered from brain cancer.[33][34] In May 2010, he was admitted to Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware, after complaining of a headache, numbness, and paralysis; officials stated that he had suffered a "mild stroke".[34][35] Later that month, Biden was transferred to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and kept for observation for several days.[35]
In August 2013, Biden was admitted to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and diagnosed with brain cancer, after experiencing what White House officials called "an episode of disorientation and weakness".[36] A lesion was removed at that time. Biden had radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and the cancer remained stable.[37] On May 20, 2015, he was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, because of a recurrence of brain cancer. He died there 10 days later, on May 30, 2015, at age 46. His funeral was held at St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church in Wilmington, Delaware, on June 6, 2015. The Vice President's son's death was widely mourned within the U.S.[38] He was buried at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Cemetery in Greenville, Delaware.[33] He was survived by his wife and two children, his father, step-mother, and two siblings (a brother and a half-sister, both younger).
His funeral was attended by a large number of people, including then President Barack Obama, then First Lady Michelle Obama, their daughters Malia and Sasha, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, former US Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. At his funeral, he was given the Legion of Merit Award by General Odierno, for his services in the Iraq War. President Obama described Biden as "an original. He was a good man. He did in 46 years what most of us couldn't do in 146." At his funeral service, a solo rendition of the song "Til Kingdom Come" was performed by Chris Martin, the lead singer of the band Coldplay, of which Beau had been a fan.[40]
Posthumous awards and legacy [ edit ]
On November 4, 2015, Biden was posthumously awarded the Albert Schweitzer Leadership Award, the highest honor given by the Hugh O'Brian Youth Leadership (HOBY), for his service to mankind.[41] A portion of the 21st Century Cures Act (2016) was named the "Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot" initiative after him.[42][43][44] |
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