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When The State Sinks, Science Is The Anchor
Enlarge this image toggle caption LeoRossi/Getty Images/iStockphoto LeoRossi/Getty Images/iStockphoto
As Europe was being torn apart in the early 17th century by conflicts between Catholics and Protestants — that would lead to the devastating Thirty Years War in 1618 — the German astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote:
"When the storm rages and the shipwreck of the state threatens, we can do nothing more worthy than to sink the anchor of our peaceful studies into the ground of eternity."
The state was crumbling under the chaotic leadership of the mad Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, while different religious factions vied for power. There was no trust, institutions were failing.
In Italy, the Church was tightening its grip on free thinking, as it fought the Reformation. In 1616, Galileo was admonished by Cardinal Bellarmine, Master of Controversial Questions of the Roman College, who challenged him to either furnish real proof that the Earth revolved around the sun or to stay silent.
Kepler and Galileo feared for their lives, but wouldn't renounce their freedom to ponder the workings of nature. Each pushed his research program forward, culminating in the complete upheaval of the Aristotelian worldview later in the same century. Their heroic deeds opened the doors to the modern world.
Religious repression and wars pass, but scientific knowledge remains.
We don't live in the 17th century, but we would be naïve to think that science and its credibility isn't under attack. We witness it every day, as many politicians and non-experts challenge the careful findings of hundreds of scientists in topics ranging from the worth of vaccination to climate change.
It is paradoxical that this is happening here in America, a country that defined itself, at least until recently, by its scientific and technological prowess: the telephone; the light bulb; mechanized agriculture; machine automation in factories; atomic bombs and nuclear energy; the laser; people on the moon; personal computers; economic giants Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX; more Nobel prizes than any other country by far (353 versus 125 from the UK, with the second most), the list goes on and on.
How could this be?
This is a crucial question, one that we should all be thinking about. Many political leaders don't know science, and don't seem to take an interest in it. There is only one Congressman with a science Ph.D., Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois.
Having taught science and non-science majors in an elite university for 26 years, I see a clear divide between students that like and don't like math and the sciences, in general. There are, of course, exceptions, and this is only anecdotal evidence but, excepting students interested in patent and environmental law, most who decide to go to law school are not the ones with strong affections for the STEMS disciplines. It would be interesting to have a quantitative study on how this affects their late careers and positions on scientific issues, especially those who end up in politics.
Under pressure from lobbying interests, the results of careful scientific research become politicized and "open for public debate." Suddenly, even if you know nothing of the careful scientific methodology used to obtain a result or to reach a certain conclusion, you become entitled to a contrarian opinion based on — based on what, exactly? On hearsay and propaganda from interest groups that manipulate public opinion to serve their own purposes — usually to safeguard the bottom line for their stockholders.
The result is that scientific research and its outcomes — carefully crafted by thousands of experts across the world who spent years, decades, in training — become open for public debate as if we were talking about football, movies, or fashion. It is as if the surgeon became the judge and the judge became the engineer.
People confuse the process of doing science — self-correcting, always improving — with imprecision and uncertainty. That's a serious mistake. Science does advance in stages, as we strive to understand the workings of nature and to adapt this knowledge to the development of technologies that will improve our quality of life.
But it does advance — and we see the results of this advance everywhere. Just think of what you would find 10 years ago in a store like Best Buy and what you find there now. OLED TVs? Smart phones? Ultra-accurate GPS? Where do these come from? Who makes them? Not the politicians or others who distrust science, that's for sure. They just use these devices, taking the amazing science behind them for granted.
Kepler witnessed the state collapsing around him, and felt helpless. He couldn't pick up a sword to fight, for he was a hero of ideas and not of bloody battles. Instead, he looked up. And so did Galileo. And what they saw, and their diligence in pursuing the truth, changed the world forever.
How many potential Keplers and Galileos are out there today in grade school, growing up confused about the value of a scientific education?
There are wonderful schools and teachers doing a first-rate job, and families that take an interest in the key scientific issues of our time and share them with their children. But there is also much obscurantism, and distrust of science. I fear for our children's safety, mine included, in a world run by adults that don't understand what they are doing to it.
At least, as history has shown, political and ideological repression passes, but scientific knowledge remains. Let us work to ensure that the damage is not irreversible.
Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer — and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the director of the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth, co-founder of 13.7 and an active promoter of science to the general public. His latest book is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher's Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser |
This is a continuation of the tech talks , discussing technical topics, that I write on Sundays. For the past few weeks I have been writing about some of the techniques used in producing the gas from shales, and that will likely continue for another week or two. Because of the need to condense the topic into a relatively short post I would ask those familiar with the topics to understand that I have had to shorten the description and gloss over some details in order to keep the main theme clear. But further comments to help readers understand the techniques better (or questions when it isn't) are appreciated.
There is a simple test that I use in one of my introductory classes, where I give the students a rectangle of paper and ask them to pull it apart, then I give them a rectangle with a cut half way through it perpendicular to the length, and half-way down, and ask them to pull that apart. It tears apart much more easily, and it is how I start a lecture on the role of cracks in causing materials to fail. You apply that principle about every time you pull open a package with a serrated top. The deeper cuts focus the force you are pulling with over a small area, making it easier to part the package and extract the candy, nuts or whatever without having to pull so hard that, when the package tears, you throw the contents around the neighborhood.
Today I want to talk a little more about perforating the wall of a well, and a bit more about hydrofracing. They are not necessarily used together, but both are ways of getting cracks out from the immediate wall of the wellbore so that the valuable fluid on the other side can have an easier path into the well.
To begin with the topic of perforating a well, I have written about this earlier, but more from the point of the tools used to do the job. What I’d like to do here is to talk a little more about it from the rock point of view. As I mentioned last time the rock right around the well can be subject to a high enough pressure that it will partially fail, or crush, and this can lower the amount of fluid that can get through, or alternately it might have been damaged in some other way. By bringing in a tool with a set of shaped charges in it, and then firing these at the appropriate place this problem can be overcome.
Arrangement of shaped charges (the yellow cylinders) – when the explosive goes off the cones collapse and small liquid metal jets shoot out of the open end, through the casing, concrete and into the rock, creating a channel. (Core Labs)
The charges aren’t all necessarily fired at one time or place, even though, for the illustration below, they appear to be.
Representation of shaped charges firing and penetrating the casing, cement and wall (OSHA)
The jet of metal that shoots out of the cone will travel into the rock roughly 10 cone diameters, as a rough rule of thumb, and this carries a channel, or tunnel, out through the damaged rock into the surrounding reservoir. The collapse and creation of the channel happens very fast:
Penetration of a perforating charge into Plexiglas after 3, 12, 21 and 30 microseconds. Marks are in cone diameters. (after Konya*)
The channel is initially hollow, and drives a set of small and large cracks out into the rock around the line of the charge.
Jet penetration through Plexiglas (note the lateral cracks away from the line of penetration. The dark section is due to a change in background. (after Konya*)
However, while it is easier to show the damage that the jet does by showing how it penetrates Plexiglas, this is not rock, but it does show some of the events that occur. When, for example, (vide the discussion on jointed shale last week) the jet shoots into rock where there are clear joint planes defined, then these act to stop the crack growth (perhaps in the way that those who used to remember stopping cracks growing in old cars by drilling a hole at the end of the crack. It distributes the stress that was causing the crack to grow when focused on the tip, over a larger area so that it drops below the critical level). Or the stress is high enough to cause cracks to form and be reflected back at the jet.
Jet damage confined between two adjacent planes when the charge is fired into plates that run parallel to the direction of the jet. (after Konya*)
If the charge is not carefully designed and used, therefore, it might not be as effective as initially hoped, and this becomes even more true if the pieces of metal that are formed when the cone collapses are carried into the channel and partially block it. There are different strategies, depending on the well and the surrounding rock and it is one of those things in life where, if you got it right the results are almost immediately obvious – as is the converse.
Creating cracks that go out into the surrounding rock has become a vital part of the economic production of gas from the shales around the country, as we have discussed, and having a starting crack in the right direction, whether it is a natural joint in the rock, or a crack that has been deliberately created helps control where the crack starts and how it grows.
Crack growing out from a drilled hole in Plexiglas, the small notch at the top of the hole controlled the direction of the growth of the crack (We put ink in the hole to show how the fluid goes into the crack).
In the above picture you can see that when the hole was pressurized, a crack grew, and ink flowed into the crack, as it formed, but, when the pressure came off, the crack closed and most of the ink was forced back out of the crack. (We created the pressure by firing an air rifle pellet into the hole).
So if we are going to have a useful crack we need to have it open after we take the pressure back off – after all we need to get the fluid back out of the well, so that the gas can pass up the well for collection.
Now it is not quite as easy to grow the crack, or prop it open as I may have suggested earlier, and to explain some of the issues in a little more detail I am going to use an example and some details from the Modern Shale Gas Primer.
When you decide to frac the well, and each well is different, as is just about every location, so there is a significant amount of preparation and knowledge required to work out the procedure required at that particular point. Bear in mind that the crack that you are going to have to grow needs to stay in the shale layer, and not go out beyond it into the surrounding rock. One of the reasons for this is, apart from giving the gas a path to the well, if it goes outside the reservoir rock then the gas can escape, or, alternately, other fluids can gain access to the well. This is particularly true of the Barnett where the rock immediately below it, the Ellenberger limestones, can hold a lot of water that can muck up the gas recovery if it gets into the fractures. (Given this degree of control and the large distance below the ground to the reservoir rock, this is why a lot of the fears that the frac job will damage the ground water tend to be dramatically overstated).
In the example cited, which is from the Marcellus shale, the treatment of the frac takes a total of 18 steps, and because some of these are fairly similar I am going to go through them in groups. First the hole is treated with an acid, to clean away any remaining debris and mud from the drilling operation and to clean any fractures around the hole, so that they can be used to help the frac grow. After the acid the hole is filled with an initial polymeric fluid, largely water, but containing the “Banana Water” that I referred to in an earlier post. This is a friction reducing agent and will help carry the particles used to hold the crack open into the crack in the first place. The problem with that polymer is that some of the choices available, while good at reducing the friction to help move the particles, aren’t that good at holding the particles in suspension, and the last thing we need is for them to settle out in the bottom of the well, and so in the subsequent steps in the process as the particles (or proppants) are added, there is usually a second polymer in the mix to hold them in suspension.
Once the hole is full of the slickwater (the official term for the first polymer solution) the initial frac is made with a fine sand suspended in the fluid. To keep the crack open all along its length we need sand along the path and the crack gets narrower as it grows deeper. So for the first several stages of the crack growth the fluid is filled with successively greater concentrations of the fine sand, so that, in this way, it can penetrate to the deepest part of the fracture.
In the example cited there are some seven of these sub-stages with the fluid being pumped into the well at some 3,000 gpm but varying the fluid:proppant density to carry more and more of the particles into the fracture. Once these stages have been completed, then the job is finished by pumping an additional eight sub-stages of fluid, with this second set containing a larger size of proppant particles. In this way the area closest to the mouth of the fracture will be held wider apart to make it easier for the gas to escape. As with the first set of sub-stages, the concentration of proppant in the fluid increases as the stages progress. In total, in the example given, some 450,000 lb of proppant was used to make the fracture, together with some 578,000 gallons of water.
Once the fracture is created, then the well is flushed to clean out the different fluids, and make it easier for the gas to get out out of the rock and into the well. (It also removes any loose and ineffective proppant so that it doesn’t later become a nuisance). If you think that this would need a lot of equipment you are right!
Equipment used for hydraulic fracturing a well (Primer)
Since there is some discussion of the effects of the different constituents of the fracing fluid on local waters I thought I would end with the listing of common chemicals used in that liquid, which is provided in the Primer.
As usual this has had to be a very brief review of the technology and may have oversimplified to the point of not being clear, so all technical comments and questions are appreciated.
* The initial photos in this post were taken as part of the dissertation of Dr Konya, "The use of Shaped Explosive Charges to Investigate Permeability, Penetration and Fracture Formation in Coal, Dolomite and Plexiglas" Missouri S&T, 1972. |
While millions of Americans are watching their individual polices get canceled due to ObamaCare regulations, the new health care rules are also having a major impact on college campuses.
For decades, universities and colleges have offered students bare-bones policies. But because of the Affordable Care Act, those policies no longer cut it – and universities are forced to decide whether to offer significantly higher-cost plans or cancel coverage altogether.
The new rules affect a broad swath of American schools, especially the small ones.
At Bowie State University in Maryland, the cost of student health insurance policies went from roughly $100 a year to $1,800 a year.
The cancelled plan offered $5,000 worth of medical coverage to students for just $54 per semester. University administrators said an acceptable replacement under the Affordable Care Act would have cost $900 per semester, a 1,500 percent increase.
Students who need individual coverage are likely to find a better deal for themselves on the Maryland Health Connection insurance exchange, University spokeswoman Cassandra Robinson said.
In the end, the school decided to drop the policy for all of its 5,500 enrollees. Students were notified of the dropped coverage on the school’s website.
"Bowie State University has suspended offering health insurance for domestic students for the 2013-2014 academic year," according to the school's official website. "Due to new requirements of the Affordable Care Act which will go into effect on January 1, 2014, the cost of insurance for domestic students will increase to approximately $1800 per year."
The sticker shock didn’t sit well with some students who spoke out against the price hike.
“You’ve haven’t done anything Obama and I am disappointed in you,” one student said. Another told Campus Reform, “We don’t have that money. We can barely afford books.”
The frustration has been felt across the country as colleges and universities have to decide whether to cut coverage or offer sky-high plans that in some cases triple the cost of premiums.
In New Jersey, students who enrolled in this past semester were the first class that had to shoulder the higher premium costs. Many community colleges in Bergen and Passaic counties were forced to cut student coverage altogether.
In Cranford, N.J., Stephen Nacco, the Union County Community College Vice President of Administrative Services, says the cost of health insurance is now “more than a thousand dollars per students and that it is dramatically different” than what it had been in the past.
Students were paying so little before because the coverage they received was so scant. The costs have gone up because under ObamaCare, plans must offer coverage for services like annual checkups and alcohol abuse treatments. Because they offer a wider range of services, the premiums also increase.
According to the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities, students at nine schools in the state saw the cost of their policies triple, Paul Shelly, a spokesman for the organization told North Jersey.com.
It’s been a similar story across most of the country.
According to a 2008 study by the Government Accountability Office, about 6,000 students or about 7 percent of the total number of 18-to-23-year-olds in college, bought their own insurance, usually through plans arranged with the school.
The same study found that 60 percent of schools’ plans had coverage of $50,000 or less for specific conditions, and almost all the rest had some sort of payout caps that they will have to do away with by 2014.
In the past, students at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kan., were offered a one-year plan that cost students $445, with payouts capping at $10,000. For the 2012-2013 academic year, the payout cap was increased to $100,000 per the new health care overhaul, which meant students at Bethany would have to shell out more than $2,000 for coverage. It apparently was too much in the end.
Bob Schmoll, Bethany’s vice president for finance, told The Wall Street Journal, the school “decided not to offer coverage for our students next year” given the proposed increase in premium. Schmoll says the school could have kept the limited-coverage plan but that it would have financially not been feasible.
Administrators at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, Cornell College in Iowa and the University of Puget Sound in Washington also told students they would be dropping school-sponsored coverage. The three schools say student premiums would have gone up 10-fold. |
GUWAHATI: Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) will set up a research centre in Guwahati This decision was taken during meeting between Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and ISRO Chariman Dr. A.S. Kiran Kumar in Guwahati.According to state government statement it is for the first time that ISRO is setting up such an exclusive research facility in Assam to explore the possibility of using geospatial technology, which includes data generated through Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Satellite Remote Sensing for expediting development of Assam and using the remote sensing technology for accurate flood warning system, prevention of soil erosion and land slide.Sonowal informed Dr Kumar that State Government would provide land to the ISRO free of cost for opening the research centre. Centre will be mandated to be used extensively for colleting and interpreting satellite data over the last few decades which can be made accessible to young researchers through this Centre in Guwahati.Sonowal also informed that the State Government will ink an MoU with the Department of Space for leveraging the potentials of the State for using space technology.Sonowal also hoped that both State Government and ISRO can work together in carrying out survey in studying the depth of the Brahmaputra river which according to him would help the state government’s proposed move of dredging the Brahmaputra in its entire stretch in the State from Sadiya to Dhubri. |
As if the bone-chilling temperatures and the endless snow weren’t enough, winter 2014 will be felt well into spring.
According to allergy experts, the record-setting snowfall in some regions and the lingering below-freezing temperatures (parts of the Midwest and the East Coast enjoyed another dumping of the white stuff in this first week of spring) could mean a late flowering for trees. That means that once the temperatures do warm up, pollinating trees will be busy catching up, spewing higher than average amounts of sneeze- and sniffle-inducing allergens into the spring air.
VIDEO: What You Need To Know About The Polar Vortex
“If it warms up quickly, and gets really warm, that may mean everything starts pollinating all at once,” says Estelle Levetin, professor of biology at University of Tulsa. Generally, trees dump their allergy agents more gradually. March sees red cedars, elm, and pine trees start to bloom, followed by maple, ash, birch, and oak, and April sees the nut trees like pecan and walnut begin to pollinate in the South. Grasses and ragweed kick in later in the spring. But if spring is shortened, then that process will be telescoped into a few miserable weeks for allergy sufferers.
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Then there’s all the moisture in the ground. Melting snow has made for muddy and moist soil, and spring rains will only add to puddles and the damp conditions of an already saturated ground. That could lead to more mold, and mold spores can trigger more respiratory problems related to both allergies and asthma. As long as there is moisture, mold can grow on almost any surface, from wood to soil and buildings, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
MORE: You Can’t Hide From Allergies
There are a few things that allergy sufferers can do to reduce their symptoms, says Dr. Andrew Murphy, chief of allergy at Chester County Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Starting nasal steroids early can help, since they take up to two weeks to calm the immune system’s reaction to allergens. Keeping windows and doors closed when the weather gets warmer is also important, to reduce the flow of pollen into your home. And taking a shower before going to bed can also lower the amount of pollen you’re exposed to.
Contact us at [email protected]. |
When I first heard about The Reddit Edit, I thought it was a nifty idea.
It takes Reddit’s functional, information-laden appearance and turns it into a streamlined, colourful depiction of the top trending stories. The top three stories are displayed in an easy-to-use side-scrolling interface, plucked from five popular subreddits: /r/worldnews, /r/politics, /r/technology, /r/science and /r/pics, plus the reddit.com homepage.
You might think a project like this would be the undertaking of a web developer, but it’s the brainchild of 28-year-old British journalist Benji Lanyado. The Reddit Edit was his final project while taking front-end web development classes with General Assembly, a New-York based digital education company who have recently expanded to London.
Benji, who writes for The Guardian and The New York Times, is part of a growing number of media types that are taking it upon themselves to know how to write and code to bring their content to life. I think this is interesting, and so do a few other people.
I recently sat down for a Skype session with Benji to ask him about The Reddit Edit and his other ideas – Top5News.co.uk and Kerouapp – and the future of journalism in general.
Benji, you’ve a journalist. You’ve wandered the world as a travel writer. You’re also a web developer, and you’ve leant a hand in the development of a number of services, in the creation of Top5News.co.uk, and in particular the Reddit Edit. We’ll get to that in a moment, but can I begin by asking you how did you get into this? How did it come to pass that you had this particular set of skills? What’s the story?
Well, I’ve always been a journalist, and a journalist who is hopelessly obsessed with the web, and that’s actually how I got into journalism in the first place. A friend and I built a website at university, which was a sort of user-generated travel guide for Europe. It was actually more or less when Trip Advisor was going huge. We never got to the levels of Trip Advisor but it’s just – I think I’m quite lucky where I’m of an age where sort of growing up I was sort of digitally native. Where news only sort of properly existed on the web for me. That’s quite a lucky place to be. In terms of the whole actual skill set, I’d say my skill set has been actually fairly standard as a journalist recently. I’ve been a web producer, which doesn’t actually involve building stuff itself, but recently I have learnt how to code. Not an expert level but a proficient level. And so whereas stuff before, professionally and things on the side, like Top5News and Kerouapp involved developers, and you had to come up with the idea and then find the person that could build it, now I can code myself. Reddit Edit is the first thing that I’ve done totally from scratch, on my own. It’s quite empowering to have the ideas and then build them yourself.
How did you learn to code? Did you take it upon yourself to teach yourself? Did you go to a bookstore and just get out a whole bunch of books and burn the midnight oil? Or did you sort of rub up against a couple of developers and get a bit of knowledge in your head, get a bit knowledge imparted from them?
BL: I actually cheated, and I paid for a course. I’ve done stuff like Code Academy before. It’s decent. You get a basic understanding. I know I’m the kind of person that needs someone that I can consistently ask questions. There’s a company called General Assembly who has recently located to London, they’re a New York based start up, and they’re utterly fantastic. It was actually a 10 week course, 2 lessons a week. And by the end of that, I was proficient in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I’m actually going to be doing another course with them to get more backend stuff, so I’m doing a Ruby on Rails course. They were amazing. The best thing about it is that it’s an intense course. So, you almost sort of get fed the fundamentals during classes and then you go away and then you cram as much as you can on top of that. And, also, I’m lucky – through my work, through my social life – I know quite a lot of developers. And one of the greatest things that I’ve found about developers is that they want to help and that everyone that plies their trade they’re good at. So, pretty much every day, I’m pestering any developer I know when I get stuck with something, or I’ve got a little problem that I want so solve. And so, I did the course. And I would so recommend that people throw themselves in – yeah, you’ve got to pay a little bit of money, but it’s a proper investment, but I think it basically increases your skill set. And in journalism right now, to have that range of skills – to be able to write and code, two seemingly very complementary skills, but at different ends of the spectrum – they help an awful lot.
JB: And obviously this investment has paid off. It’s started to reap some dividends because you came up with the idea of Reddit Edit and you were able to bring that concept to reality. So, to Reddit Edit – what does it do? How did you come up with the idea and what do you hope to achieve with it?
BL: Well, I’ve found myself – I’m relatively new to Reddit, I’ve only been going on it for about 6 months. I’ve always been aware that it’s this vast community of people sharing links. To be honest, I initially thought it was all puerile and a little bit silly – you know, full of GIFs and pictures of cats – but actually what I’ve increasingly realised is that it’s an incredible source of news, and of quirky interesting stories from around the world. I would consistently find stories there, and two days later or three days later they would be in the features section of The Guardian, or The Telegraph, or the Huffington Post. It’s probably the greatest bit of news sourcing software out there. The way that it sorts things according to popularity is a pretty interesting. You know, it’s a bit of a litmus test for what the Internet is interested in. So anyway, I kept on finding myself being captivated by the people on Reddit but Reddit itself, from a visual point of view, I’ve always found to be a visual disaster. Now a lot of people would argue that the point of Reddit is to put as much information as possible on a page, so that’s how it has to be. It has to be a vomit of links. I had the thought of making it pretty and making it much more user friendly. And also a lot less intimidating. I think a lot of people arriving on Reddit, having heard it’s a really important site, look at it and go, “oh, I can’t be bothered”. So I wanted to make something that used an open API and make it very, very simple and also give just the top stories. These days people don’t have time. You just want the three most important. So I think that’s something that is increasingly wanted within the news-reading public.
So, would you say that it’s bringing the concept of Reddit to a broader audience perhaps? Perhaps a less technically-oriented audience – more of a layperson, if you will? I mean, what do you see as the applications of it?
I hope it does that. It will never – at least I hope it never – it will never be able to compete with Reddit for pure numbers. That site has got millions and millions of people on it every day. What I hope it will do more than anything else is show people how bloody brilliant Reddit is. I think there are lot of people that perhaps use The Reddit Edit that have might not even used Reddit itself properly before. I think that’s the main thing. I hope people realise that Reddit is actually a fantastic discovery mechanism, and if the Reddit Edit helps them do that, because it’s slightly more UX friendly and design focused.
You and I used Reddit quite closely, I imagine, because of our backgrounds and because of the industry in which we work, but for other people out there – I think it’s reasonable to say – Reddit has more or less demonstrated that it does have the potential to be harnessed as a sort of crowd-sourced fact-checking engine, or news gathering resource, or discovery mechanism. What do you think is the impact of Reddit and the way in which Reddit Edit, as in invention which sits on top of that, will have for journalism? What do you think these sorts of APIs on curated, social news platforms will mean for the future of journalism? What role do you think they’ll serve in the media landscape?
That’s a very good question. I hope they make things simpler because that’s one of the major challenges within the news landscape at the moment – it’s just pure noise. You combine Twitter, with Redditt, with Facebook and actually we are utterly bombarded with news. And it’s very difficult to work out what – not what the essentials are, but sometimes you just want to be like, “shut up and tell me what to read”. And I hope things like the Reddit Edit – because it’s taking the cream off the top of the crowdsourcing pile. It’s sort of letting Reddit do all the chattering and discussion and upvoting and downvoting about what matters, and then you skim off the top. It’s quite a selfish enterprise, really, because you’ve got all these millions of worker bees really working out what matters and doesn’t, and you’re just sort of reaping the fruits of the labour. But to be honest, that’s what people want, and I think that’s what people need, because everybody’s just so overwhelmed. And I think, that kind of Top 5 News idea, is “this is what I need to read, the rest: sorry I don’t have time.” I hope that’s something that makes news consumption something a slightly more enjoyable and simpler experience for people.
Clay Shirky once famously said there’s no such thing as information overload, there’s just filter failure. So do you see endeavours like this as a means to grab a whole bunch of information that’s user-generated and user-curated and sift through it and serve it to people that might not be particularly well-versed with Reddit? Do you see it serving a role in helping channel this fire hose of information that social media offers to a broad audience?
Yes, well I hope so. I think those are bold aims for something that’s essentially a small project, but I hope it helps with that. It’s similar to another website I’ve made for the UK and US news called Top5News.co.uk and Top5News.net, which basically scrapes the most popular articles from various websites and puts them onto a single page. And so, again, it’s trying to be very much like what Clay Shirky was talking about – a kind of filter on top of too much information. And, of course, he’s right, there’s no such thing as too much information because you need that as a kind of global fact-checking mechanism, just making sure that things get out there. That’s why the Internet is so wonderful. But I do hope that it can kind of provide a bit of a filter on top of it, to show what people are interested in. I think that metric is something that’s fascinating and we don’t get enough. When news is given to you it’s usually either a.) what editor’s think matter or b.) what’s the latest. And the thing that often gets missed out in all of that is – what are people actually reading? Even if that is people – you might find out the most popular article on The Guardian’s website is actually about David Beckham’s pants. But The Guardian might not want you to see that or to be in people’s faces – it might be a bit self-perpetuating. But they still want to know what everybody is reading. The entire flip side is that maybe what’s the most important is what nobody’s reading. Certainly, for a kind of popularist point of view, that metric, what people are focusing on right now and what people are interested in right now, is massive. And I think people want it, and want to be served in that respect.
Now, you’ve touched upon some of your other projects. You mentioned briefly Top5News.co.uk. But can you tell us more about Kerouapp in particular? What I understand it to be is a sort of social media slash map mash up, if it’s fair to describe it as such. How do you see news consumers and journalists using that service in particular in the future?
The whole idea of Kerouapp is to tell a story geographically, and that can be live or in the past. The way it works is a journalist, or anyone really, authorises Kerouapp to track their Twitter account, and then every single tweet that they do that is geotagged gets displayed on a map. So, you’ll in real time be watching a journalist. The Guardian have used it; they sent one of their journalists across most of southern Europe to find stories about the Euro debt crisis. And you could watch, you could see where he was. Every time he tweeted, or tweeted an image, it would appear on this map and it would draw a line to the next place, and then the next place, and then the next place. It’s an alternative way of live reporting things. So, whereas in live blogs you’ll have a stream of updates of people showing what they can see, and writing what they can see, Kerouapp takes that and applies it to a map. Again, it’s a little side project, but it’s been used quite a few times by The Guardian, by the BBC and by Time Out. It’s trying to add a richness that didn’t exist before. It’s the simplest thing as well. As a journalist, you need a smartphone and a Twitter account, and that’s it. You can stream all the traditional elements of reportage: images, audio, video, text; it all appears via Kerouapp on the news map.
How important do you think it is that journalists start to really embrace this very different – very similar, but many respects very different – mode of storytelling?
I personally think it’s non-negotiable. I think if you’re a journalist these days that at least doesn’t have a bit of a handle on it, then you shouldn’t be a journalist. Admittedly, we are at an odd sort of slight crossroads, where you’re finding a lot more senior and experienced journalists, who are incredible within their field, but who don’t have a handle on all the modern means of reporting and communication – and that doesn’t mean that they don’t count, are redundant, and should get out and make the tea, because their expertise are invaluable. However, for the new generation of journalists, it’s – first of all, it’s instinctive. In the same way most newspaper organisations, these days have to try so hard, having social media editors all pushing their staff to using this stuff. In the future it will be knee-jerk, it’ll be instinctive.
This is an excellent segue way to the next concept that I want to explore, which is that you’ve written on your blog and perhaps elsewhere of this great importance of journalists and developers to collaborate and to produce these new ways of storytelling. But you’ve hinted that perhaps this intersection of ideas and skills is yet to really take hold in most newsrooms. Why do you think that’s the case and how do you think this can be rectified?
I think there are a variety of reasons why I think journalists and developers don’t work closely together enough. One of them is a very sort of structural one, which is almost historic. Back in the day, in the pre-digital age, journalist was a very upstairs downstairs enterprise. You had upstairs making the stories and the layouts, and doing all the creative bits, and the print room underneath was churching out the actual product. So, it’s a kind of brains and brawn delineation. And when the digital age kicked in, developers were sort of shoved downstairs because they were making the new digital means of production. I think because of the legacy of that, there’s still a lot of editors and journalists who think of developers as the IT department. You know, people who will come and update Windows or make sure the CMS is working properly. The point is, over the last 10 years, you’re increasingly getting these sort of rock star developers who aren’t only incredible programmers, with a real eye for design and client side stuff, they really get journalism as well. So, if news organisations harvest those talents equally, really extraordinary things can happen. However, most news organisations are sort of strange cross. They can’t work out if they’re a media organisation or a technology organisation. I think in a technology company you’ve got a fairly standard way of working with products. So, you have product cycles and you have sprint cycles – the most important thing is getting your products made. And that doesn’t allow for developers to do the other stuff, the more experimental stuff when working with journalists. It’s quite an important thing to reconcile. You need to make sure the developer is doing the things he needs to do, the same with journalists, but also collaborating.
As a follow up question, I wonder if you might be able to cast your eyes into a crystal ball for a moment? Digital technologies are continuing to disrupt traditional media business models; here in Australia and elsewhere, we’ve seen newspaper circulations falter. We’ve seen audiences fragment. There’s been some high profile departures. We’ve seen an explosion in the use of social media. It’s a big, broad question but given all the subject matter we’ve discussed, and keeping it in mind, what do you think the future of journalism looks like?
With these things, I think you just have to go on hunches, and there’s a few dead certainties. Print, as a product, will inevitably dramatically decrease. It certainly won’t disappear. They’ll get to a stage where they’ll be a rise in boutique publications. Magazines are thriving. I don’t know what the situation over there is, but here really design-savvy boutique magazines are doing really well. Newspapers, as a print product, will go that way. You might find that The Guardian or The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age will start to have a production run that’s ten times smaller than what it is right now, but it will cost, let’s say, six bucks or five pounds a copy. It’s re-working that as a product that will actually have a proper audience, rather than continuing to flog print runs of hundreds of thousands or millions. It’s just not sustainable. As for online, again, I’m not really sure what the situation is over there. See, the wonderful thing about Australia is that economically you’re thriving compared to us over here. I’d hope, and I honestly don’t know if this is the case or not, that within that there is plenty of experimentation going on, and media companies trying new things. Now is the time to experiment than any other time, because everything’s changing so much. I think people that experiment the most now will gain the most. Some of the most interesting things over a little while have been coming out of the States. I often look at some of the traditional media companies and wonder what on earth they’re doing, and how they intend to be existing in five or 10 years time. In the States you’re seeing companies like Gawker and the Huffington Post and Slate, and these are digital only publications. We’re getting to a stage now where, not only in terms of readership – they’ve been ahead in terms of readership for ages – but in terms of respect, in terms of a position that they’re held in the landscape – the Huffington Post won a Pulitzer this year, which is absolutely no surprise whatsoever, despite the fact that some of their content is rubbish, because they are doing some really impressive things. I think that kind of balance – increasingly there’ll be more and more digital publications that kick the traditional publications out of the park. And the establishment and production costs of these companies are so much lower than the New York Times. Now, I’m not sure if that’s the case within Australia, but it’s not the case in Britain, which is bad, because it still is the mainstream media here that has the lion’s share of the market. We don’t have a Gawker, we don’t have The Huffington Post, we just don’t have those kind of publications here – which is slightly to do with our sort of history. We’ve had pretty much every corner of the market covered by mainstream media and it’s very difficult to break that stranglehold, whereas in the States, they are where they are because they didn’t have that kind of gossip industry. They had things like The Inquirer or – not The Inquirer, I can’t remember what it’s called – but they never had tabloids like Britain. So sites like Gawker and Huffington Post really found it and penetrated it. In Britain, there really isn’t that area of the market to penetrate. Sorry, I’m rambling.
No, not at all.
Where I hope it will be, which is maybe a little different to where I think it will be – I really hope that within Australia and the UK that we can get to at least that level, which is a digital-only style commanding as much respect from – who cares about journalists, but respect from the public. So, you know, I read this thing on the Sydney Morning Herald but I also read this thing from some local digital start up. I think without those companies the major media companies aren’t forced to innovate or change much. I think you need that competition to realise how you ought to do things differently. I hope that’s an accurate belief.
Here in Australia, in answer to one of your questions, I think newspapers now have started to appreciate the challenge that Internet technologies and “being digital” pose to their businesses. Very recently, as I said, we saw some editorial departures at a few mastheads. Now being “digital first” has become the mantra of media executives across the land. They’re restructuring newsrooms. They’re downsizing staff in a some areas. It’s been big news here in Australia. With that in mind, and the importance of the Internet, and the importance of digital technology in general, what sort of skills do you think young journalists and student journalists should either be taught at university or should take it upon themselves to learn now? What do they need to know so that they’re geared towards the future?
I think that’s a really good question, and having learnt very recently this proficient level of HTML, CSS, JavaScript – basic sort of coding languages. I know this sounds a bit silly, but I genuinely think that I sort of saw the light. I was a web producer over at The Guardian for the last few years, something that involves working with developers from time to time. It’s kind of coming up with digital ideas and then working to make them happen. I now feel sort of slightly embarrassed that during that entire period I was working with developers and working with digital products – and I knew the basics, I knew roughly how things worked, and I was a decent translator between some of the much more senior editors and the technologists – but now I properly understand the nuts and bolts of how a digital product is made, and I’ve made one myself. Even from a base level of making digital decisions. Anyone making digital decisions – and essentially that’s an editor – editors are making digital decisions all the time, journalists are making digital decisions all the time, so are product managers, I think you have to understand how these things work. Even if it’s the basic, entry level “this is how a website is built”, “this is how a database works”, “this is the page in which your article appears and why it is constructed that way” – if people can just get their heads around that, they’ll have a real advantage against people who don’t. So, I think increasingly the division between of labour between the technologists who make the website, and the journalists provide the content, those boundaries are going to start coming down. I’m working on something at the moment and I’m really hoping it’s going to see the light of day, even though I’ve scared a lot of the editors that I’ve spoken to. I’ve been commissioned to write an article about a play. I want to go there, and I want to build a website for that article. So, essentially, not only writing the article, making the article – and even that, it’s not something scalable across an entire organisation. Stuff like that, if you’re an emerging journalist, if you can offer all those things, I think hopefully editors and media organisations will realise you’re a cut above the rest. If you can write an article, and then create all the backend and the data stuff around it, I think you become slightly more than the traditional digital journalist. The caveat to that … it’s interesting you talking about these departures at the top level of Australian media organisations because despite all of these all of these positive – hopefully positive – technical changes and the sort of up skilling of the average journalist what I think is crucial is that you have proper organisations that get it. That sounds like a very simple thing: do they get it? And, additionally, are they willing to surround themselves and delegate to people who get it? I think news organisations have to get that. The world has changed. Therefore, the people running these organisations have to get the new world. They can’t necessarily be from the old world, trying really hard to get the new world, they have to really get it. Otherwise they’ll be torn apart by the truly digital companies, by people who truly get the new landscape.
Final question. Where to from here? What’s next for you?
I don’t know. I’ve only been freelance for about a month now. I decided to go freelance with the intention of starting to build products myself, and starting to work in a different way, and basically building things rather than writing things – so yeah, the answer is I don’t know. I’m going to be working with media organisations. Working on sort of bits and bobs, and projects and articles to pay the bills. But I want to do something different. Basically, I don’t know, but the biggest thing that I’m doing, that I’m most excited about, is the next stage of the programming course which is this Ruby on Rails course I’m doing with General Assembly London. Which should complete the circle of being able to fully program websites and make stuff. Once I’ve got that, I’ve got quite a few ideas, like things I want to do with The Reddit Edit involving much more complex backend database stuff. I think people will find it quite fun and exciting. I want to learn more programming languages. I want to be able to do more. As I said, it’s so empowering to be able to have an idea and be able to do it yourself, and then crack on with more fun side projects like the Reddit Edit and Top5News.co.uk. And who knows? One of them might actually sort of start properly propelling upwards and then we’ll go from there.
Great stuff. Benji, thank you for your time.
No worries. Thanks a lot.
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Like a hand searching for a glove, keratoconus eyes search for contact lenses that provide just the right fit.
Those who have lived with keratoconus for decades, or even a few years, have likely experienced different vision correction options including rigid gas permeable lenses, and the increasingly popular large-diameter scleral lenses.
Many KC patients find scleral lenses provide better vision, and are more comfortable since the edges of these lenses rest outside the cornea on the sclera (the white part of the eye). However, the art of finding a proper fit remains a challenge. Contact lens prescribers must take into account irregularities of the cornea surface and the shape, height, and location of the ‘cone’. The use of topography to create a map of a patient’s cornea shape has assisted greatly in identifying areas of concern in fitting KC patients. Knowing the irregularities of an eye, the contact lens fitter must use trial and error to find the best fit from among pre-manufactured lenses.
New technologies are constantly being applied to solving the problem of the “perfect fit”. EyePrintPRO is an impression technology that offers the latest attempt to plot the contours of a keratoconus eye. This very promising method was introduced in 2013.
The EyePrintPRO process consists of first making an impression of the eye using a tray filled media that creates an exact model of the front of the eye. The impression process takes only a few minutes to complete. One benefit is that the procedure can take place almost anywhere and no topographical instruments are needed. The impression is then sent to the laboratory at EyePrint Prosthetics where the model version is processed by a 3D scanner. Working from this 3D model of the eye, EyePrint designs and manufactures lenses that fit a patient’s unique ocular surface. The lenses are then shipped back to the practitioner.
Dr. Paul Blaze, OD of Coast Optometry in Huntington Beach, CA is a referral site. Dr. Blaze says, “I am excited about the new system for my hard-to-fit contact lens patients. I’ve fit these lenses on several patients who were unable to wear other scleral designs; I can obtain the perfect vault over the cornea with a soft landing on the sclera.”
In addition, Dr. Blaze notes that standard topography systems do not capture enough data to get precise information. Corneal topography will look at the central cornea (7 to 9 millimeters (mm) of the diameter). Since most scleral lenses have a diameter of 15-20 mm, the information about the peripheral part of the eye comes from the reflection of the tear layer rather than the actual ocular surface. The EyePrint impression process obtains information of the entire front of the eye (approximately 26 mm).
Since the scleral shell cover is manufactured for the individual, the cost of these lenses is higher than that of prefabricated scleral lenses. For some patients, it may prove to be worth the extra expense. EyePrintPRO is only available at selected locations. Please visit their website at www.eyeprintpro.com to learn more about this new technology and for provider locations.
You can find out more about Dr. Blaze and Coast Optometry at www.drblaze.com. |
BILL NUMBER: AB 1471 AMENDED BILL TEXT AMENDED IN SENATE JULY 11, 2007 AMENDED IN SENATE JULY 5, 2007 AMENDED IN ASSEMBLY APRIL 10, 2007 INTRODUCED BY Assembly Member Feuer (Principal coauthor: Assembly Member DeSaulnier) ( Coauthors: Senators Cedillo, Perata, Romero, and Scott ) FEBRUARY 23, 2007 An act to amend Section 12126 of the Penal Code, relating to firearms. LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST AB 1471, as amended, Feuer. Firearms: microstamping. Existing law defines unsafe handguns as failing to pass certain tests, or lacking certain features, as specified. This bill, the Crime Gun Identification Act of 2007, would, commencing January 1, 2010, expand the definition of "unsafe handgun" to include semiautomatic pistols that are not designed and equipped with a microscopic array of characters that identify the make, model, and serial number of the pistol, etched in 2 or more places on the interior surface or internal working parts of the pistol, and that are transferred by imprinting on each cartridge case when the firearm is fired. Those provisions would be subject to specified certification procedures by the Department of Justice regarding the use of that technology. By expanding the definition of "unsafe handgun," the manufacture, sale, and other specified transfer of which is a crime, this bill would expand the scope of an existing crime, and thereby impose a state-mandated local program. The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement. This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this act for a specified reason. Vote: majority. Appropriation: no. Fiscal committee: yes. State-mandated local program: yes. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS: SECTION 1. This act shall be known, and may be cited as, the Crime Gun Identification Act of 2007. SEC. 2. Section 12126 of the Penal Code is amended to read: 12126. As used in this chapter, "unsafe handgun" means any pistol, revolver, or other firearm capable of being concealed upon the person, as defined in subdivision (a) of Section 12001, for which any of the following is true: (a) For a revolver: (1) It does not have a safety device that, either automatically in the case of a double-action firing mechanism, or by manual operation in the case of a single-action firing mechanism, causes the hammer to retract to a point where the firing pin does not rest upon the primer of the cartridge. (2) It does not meet the firing requirement for handguns pursuant to Section 12127. (3) It does not meet the drop safety requirement for handguns pursuant to Section 12128. (b) For a pistol: (1) It does not have a positive manually operated safety device, as determined by standards relating to imported guns promulgated by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. (2) It does not meet the firing requirement for handguns pursuant to Section 12127. (3) It does not meet the drop safety requirement for handguns pursuant to Section 12128. (4) Commencing January 1, 2006, for a center fire semiautomatic pistol that is not already listed on the roster pursuant to Section 12131, it does not have either a chamber load indicator, or a magazine disconnect mechanism. (5) Commencing January 1, 2007, for all center fire semiautomatic pistols that are not already listed on the roster pursuant to Section 12131, it does not have both a chamber load indicator and if it has a detachable magazine, a magazine disconnect mechanism. (6) Commencing January 1, 2006, for all rimfire semiautomatic pistols that are not already listed on the roster pursuant to Section 12131, it does not have a magazine disconnect mechanism, if it has a detachable magazine. (7) Commencing January 1, 2010, for all semiautomatic pistols that are not already listed on the roster pursuant to Section 12131, it is not designed and equipped with a microscopic array of characters that identify the make, model, and serial number of the pistol, etched or otherwise imprinted in two or more places on the interior surface or internal working parts of the pistol, and that are transferred by imprinting on each cartridge case when the firearm is fired, provided that the Department of Justice certifies that the technology used to create the imprint is available to more than one manufacturer unencumbered by any patent restrictions. The Attorney General may also approve a method of equal or greater reliability and effectiveness in identifying the specific serial number of a firearm from spent cartridge casings discharged by that firearm than that which is set forth in this paragraph, to be thereafter required as otherwise set forth by this paragraph where the Attorney General certifies that this new method is also unencumbered by any patent restrictions. Approval by the Attorney General shall include notice of that fact via regulations adopted by the Attorney General for purposes of implementing that method for purposes of this paragraph. The microscopic array of characters required by this section shall not be considered the name of the maker, model, manufacturer's number, or other mark of identification, including any distinguishing number or mark assigned by the Department of Justice, within the meaning of Sections 12090 and 12094. (c) As used in this section, a "chamber load indicator" means a device that plainly indicates that a cartridge is in the firing chamber. A device satisfies this definition if it is readily visible, has incorporated or adjacent explanatory text or graphics, or both, and is designed and intended to indicate to a reasonably foreseeable adult user of the pistol, without requiring the user to refer to a user's manual or any other resource other than the pistol itself, whether a cartridge is in the firing chamber. (d) As used in this section, a "magazine disconnect mechanism" means a mechanism that prevents a semiautomatic pistol that has a detachable magazine from operating to strike the primer of ammunition in the firing chamber when a detachable magazine is not inserted in the semiautomatic pistol. (e) As used in this section, a "semiautomatic pistol" means a pistol, as defined in subdivision (a) of Section 12001, the operating mode of which uses the energy of the explosive in a fixed cartridge to extract a fired cartridge and chamber a fresh cartridge with each single pull of the trigger. SEC. 3. No reimbursement is required by this act pursuant to Section 6 of Article XIII B of the California Constitution because the only costs that may be incurred by a local agency or school district will be incurred because this act creates a new crime or infraction, eliminates a crime or infraction, or changes the penalty for a crime or infraction, within the meaning of Section 17556 of the Government Code, or changes the definition of a crime within the meaning of Section 6 of Article XIII B of the California Constitution. |
Nothing all that unusual for a Minnesotan to clear the walk of a neighbor who is out of town. But then again, how many of those lifting the shovel are 101 years old?
Richard Mann, born March 8, 1914, looked out last week and saw what a light snowfall had left, then did what had to be done for his traveling next-door neighbor in the 1500 block of Western Avenue N. in St. Paul
Another neighbor across the street made a visual record of Mann’s gesture, put it online and the rest is viral history: more than 575,000 views in less than a week.
“Mr. Mann, I was looking out my window and I’m filming you right there at this time Mr. Mann,” said Keven O’Bannon as he tromped across the street toward the stocking-capped centenarian with the posture of a man decades younger and a strong, clear voice. “You’re 101 years old, and you’re out here shoveling the neighbor’s snow?”
Mann, a great-grandfather, chuckled as he leaned on the upright shovel and replied, “Well, he’s out of town, and I’m not exerting myself. I’m not going to overdo it. I can use the exercise. … I know what my limitations are.”
O’Bannon said neighbors usually get to Mann’s walk first, right after a snowfall, but he was out there ahead of them this time.
“We usually try to come out here and catch your snow,” O’Bannon told Mann. “It was such a light snow … that we didn’t really get out here.”
My neighbour is 101 years old... Check out Mr. Mann Posted by Keven Lifecoach O'Bannon on Friday, January 8, 2016
Paul Walsh • 612-673-4482 |
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Fredric Aasbø was thinking that his Toyota 86-X had definitely been out of action for too long since its European tour and demos at the end of last year. But at home in Norway, freezing temperatures and seemingly impassable roads would be no obstruction to blowing away the cobwebs. In fact, the worse the conditions, the more likely it would appear that Norwegians are to organise an event. Get a hundred or so cars, fit some spiked snow tyres, find a frozen lake: and voila. You have Gatebil On Ice.
But just turning up on the day with what he had at the close of 2012 wouldn’t be enough: Fredric had something up his sleeve for Gatebil On Ice courtesy of his friends at KRB Trading.
I’d flown in to meet Fredric from the UK, which had been suffering under a blanket of snow that had virtually paralysed the country. Then I arrived in Norway, and everything was put in context. This is a country which is under snow for a good six months of the year. A blanket of snow? This was more like a carpet bombing! I traded my compact rental car up to a Subaru 4×4 just to be safe and felt a lot better about things…
But it’s all about attitude: in the UK for sure there’s not the investment in infrastructure, but also people just aren’t used to driving in slippery conditions. Over here, these kind of road conditions are normal, and drivers adjust their approach accordingly. It also helps that winter tyres are a legal requirement.
Driving through Norway is never a chore, and the frozen harbours around the Bygdøy promontory were absolutely beautiful, and were worth the risk of wild snapping away out of the window.
KRB Trading are located about an hour to the south-west of Oslo: a blast down the snowy motorway from the capital and then a short run on local roads parallel with the frozen Drammenselva river – one of Norway’s largest waterways, which heads inland from the big Drammensfjord on the coast.
KRB’s relationship with Fredric goes deep: they were heavily involved in the engine for the 86-X project…
…which in itself went back to Fredric’s previous Supra ride. They’ve also worked with rallycross legend Sverre Isachsen over the years – he lives relatively locally. Norway is a big country, but everybody is a close neighbour it appears!
So, what do KRB Trading do exactly? One look inside their main building made it pretty clear. Kai Bakken and his crew live and breath turbocharging. I’ve never seen so many turbos in one place. You could turbocharge the whole earth with the quantity of blowers in their stock! Shelves and boxes groaned under the weight of turbos of every size and shape.
As the sun sank over the horizon and the bitter cold set in, attention turned to KRB’s relatively recent addition to their arsenal: a fully equipped, purpose-built dyno room built just over a year ago.
Fredric rolled up with the 86-X snug in its trailer – and snug was an understatement. The ultra-wide Rocket Bunny bodykit means the car fits in with just centimetres to spare…
Safely out of the trailer, Fredric backed the Toyota into the garage to get hooked up to the dyno life support system.
It was time to play turbos.
There would be two main changes for the 86-X’s first run-out of 2013: the first was a Comp billet cartridge turbo upgrade.
With the extra power the former was expected to deliver, the second addition would be even more critical given the surface: studded Pirelli WRC-spec snow tyres.
After getting so used to seeing the 86-X hunched down with its wide rubber straining at the arches at insane camber, it looked very strange with its almost tricycle configuration for the ice: The front wheels stayed out wide, whereas the rears were housed right inside the arches – more on this in the following story.
So while Fredric and the KRB team got to work, I went exploring around the rest of the KRB workshops in search of the KRB Audi S1: the Gatebil Dragon. I found its heart…
…and then in a separate workshop I came across its body.
Kai has completely stripped the Audi back to the spaceframe: that will be refinished and repainted, whilst the mechanicals and bodywork will also get overhauled.
Actually, although the engine is of course a fundamental part of the Audi’s awesomeness, Kai reckons this block of metal is the key – and it’s also one of the most expensive things in the build: its Sellhom 4WD gearbox and differential.
The suspension, hubs and brakes are also due a service: coolant from an engine blow-up last year had corroded the gold anodising on the A-arms.
An important addition for the car is a set of air-jacks, which will save not just on time but also potential damage and having to cart around a big trolley jack to every event. The aim is for the Audi to be back on track by May.
Back in the dyno room things were getting interesting. With each test run the garage doors would be pulled down to help soundproof the area (KRB have good neighbours that they’d like to keep that way), and the revs would rise as new mapping were tried out.
The excitement grew as the numbers got bigger: on the screens we watched as each result surpassed the last (except for one where the graph drew an alarming boomerang shape due to a misplaced sensor!).
By the end of the session, Fredric had 913nm of torque and 685hp at 1.65 bar of boost to play with. Impressive! And remember that this is an almost stock VVTI 2JZ with a 6067 Comp turbo and some serious work from KRB and SWR Performance.
The drop off after peak torque was expected as the stock cams let off a little at the top, but it was delivering insane power from 3,000rpm, with a great midrange and solid power curve. Of course, the 86-X is not just the sum of the parts but the result of hard work by all the people involved.
There was a celebratory mood as the car was packed up ready for the next day…
…where the car would be in completely new territory – and all that torque would be delivered through those tiny ice tyres! The lake didn’t look like it would stand a chance…
Smiles all round – and time for some serious social media sharing.
The next morning, with the translucent pre-dawn light, the team assembled back at KRB. This year this poor KRB Audi would be staying under the snow rather than drifting round on it…
…but a customer’s car that KRB were also responsible for was already on its trailer and ready to go.
It was seriously cold…
Our convoy was soon ready to move off, so it was then time to navigate to Sigdal and the lake.
The roads were exciting, I think it’s best to say.
It was also pretty clear who else was on their way to Gatebil On Ice! None of us had heard a Nissan Patrol that sounded like this one: its diesel had obviously seen some serious blowing, and the thing was deliberately sideways through most corners – helped by its tractor-like rubber!
Arriving at the lake, it was clear that this really was going to be a hell of a day. Fredric’s Supra was also on hand, one of a huge selection of cars of every possible style. After all, this was still Gatebil.
Out around the lake, a team of ploughs carved round at breakneck speeds. Taking these…
…and sprinkling in a lot of this…
…guaranteed that the number plate on the front of this Pontiac summed up what was ahead. Mayhem on ice. And that’s coming up next!
Jonathan Moore
Gatebil On Ice 2013 |
A lot of you have lamented that I haven't been doing videos lately, or at least not as often as I used to. The sad fact is I'm trying to make a business out of my efforts here, and there is just no money in doing videos... until now! I was blown away by the popularity of my Let's Play with iVCS3 video, so with your help I'd like to do more and make it a series! With Patreon contributions I'll be able to spend more time in front of the camera, and less doing all the behind the scenes stuff that actually makes money.
I'm not looking to make a fortune off this, but I am trying to make a career out of all of my work here at discchord. With Patreon I can still release videos for everyone to enjoy; without having to rely on YouTube's paid subscriptions or pay-per-view scheme.
Video Description: |
Recently, a young man walked into the bar where I was working, sat down, and told me that I was pretty. It just flew out of his mouth by accident; he’d obviously had a few. His vibe wasn’t slimy or aggressive. He just seemed excited to discover that a woman he found attractive would be opening his next beer. Convention suggests that the most normal and appropriate response from me would be a display of gratitude, but I wasn’t thankful. I just felt instantly beleaguered in a very familiar way.
I blankly responded that his thoughts on my appearance were not interesting to me and asked him what he’d like to drink. He stood there, drunk and caught off guard by his own boldness as well as my reaction. He tried to focus, knowing that the next move was his, his face reflecting the hazy fear that any dude who is at least trying to come correct feels when facing one of modern courtship’s classic gambles: I really do not want to be "that guy" versus this might just be crazy enough to work. He chose to hedge both ways and began slowly trying to dig himself out, struggling to enunciate and choose his words carefully but choosing the wrong ones. He bumbled between a handful of partially formed apologies before announcing that he felt awful, because I was clearly annoyed and he “would hate to offend such a pretty girl.”
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I was so flattered that I instantly got super wet. Just joking! I was disgusted. It was 1 a.m. and I was tired. I wasn’t feeling combative enough to tell him to get lost immediately, especially knowing that he wouldn’t necessarily see the straight line between his actions and the punishment. But I also wasn’t in the mood to rah-rah a drunken stranger toward a potential enlightenment. Attempting diplomacy, I gave him a beer and put him in time out, instructing him to take 10 minutes to think about why even just his final statement was offensive. He wandered to the end of the bar and sat there in a fog.
After a little time had passed, I noticed his posture straighten and I turned to face him. His expression was solemn as I walked toward him, expecting at the very least an unconvincing performance of contrition. Instead, he stood up, took out his wallet, and tried to give me $10—not for drinks but because “sometimes you just have to pay for things.” Yes, this person had spent his time-out arriving at the conclusion that 10 whole dollars was enough to compensate me for feeling exposed, trapped, degraded and simultaneously invisible and on display at my own dumb job. I felt like a human sigh. “Just leave, please,” I said, and then he left.
As I step back and consider the way this story ended, my own generosity embarrasses me. I’m certainly not always that kind. But maybe I’m framing what I’m about to tell you with that particular anecdote to prove that I’m generally down to let a well-meaning dude off the hook if he acts right. When I was younger, I would sometimes even rescue these kinds of men from their own lingering discomfort by being sweet, because women are trained to reward men for all sorts of things by being sweet. I don’t do that anymore, because I’ve realized that smoothing it over with a stranger who has made me feel degraded usually feels more degrading than the actual offense and placating men in this way is a waste of my time. I should have known better than to even try with this dude, because I have already wasted so much of my time in parallel situations; every woman you know has wasted so much of her time.
I totally understand that it’s difficult to know when it is an appropriate time to give women sexual attention. The modern woman is baffling. We are on Tinder and we ball whoever we want and nobody is really allowed to judge anymore and we are feminists and we are easily angered by perceived degradation and we have a lot of feelings about words like "consent," which make your dick scared and we also might want you to pull our hair when we fuck. I imagine it feels impossible to know how and when to express your interest without offending women. It is a minefield, the stakes are high and nobody is safe.
Telling a woman that you think she is beautiful can seem very innocuous; sometimes it is. Sometimes, it will make her day. All this depends on context and I cannot explain when it is and is not OK, because that is like trying to explain intuition. Intuition about what will and won’t offend women is really just a set of odds, based on your lizard brain tabulating and comparing the outcomes of many similar previous interactions. But it’s important to recognize that these odds are skewed because women so often swallow their discomfort or indignation in order to keep the peace—especially if they are at work. Obviously all women have different boundaries and I’m not trying to slide into some essentialized decree about what women do and don’t want, but I think that a lot of mutual discomfort could be avoided if dudes would generally try to figure out whether a woman is interested before trying to figure out how to fuck her.
Although these situations are too nuanced and contextual to come down to do’s and don’ts, there are certain things to consider before giving sexual attention to a female bartender or server. Consider the power dynamic: Women will make more money if their patrons like them; often, their managers will scold them if they react negatively to what we have collectively deemed to be acceptable attention. Where does that leave the woman? She is expected to smile and say thank you, even if she feels mildly affronted, even if she finds you disgusting—although you would likely never detect this as she is forced to suspend these opinions at work.
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Imagine you have a boss who repulses you, and one day, in front of a group of your peers, he presents you with a gift. It isn’t your birthday, but you have been singled out. “Open it,” he implores, beaming. “It’s just for you. You are going to love it.” You open it slowly, as everyone watches. You know that you are going to hate it, because you hate your boss, and you can feel yourself shrinking as you prepare to degrade yourself by pantomiming gratitude. You remove the final layer of tissue, and underneath it is a porkpie hat. A porkpie hat, made of leather. “Yay,” you say. “I totally love this.” You go home and drink a lot. You know you don’t deserve it, but you kind of hate yourself.
Across professional and personal contexts, women are beginning to articulate why we often feel dehumanized by the kind of sexual attention that might have seemed benign 10 years ago; we’re getting better at creating boundaries that work for us. But as we’ve become increasingly vocal about how things actually make us feel, the whole scene has become rightfully terrifying for the people trying to bag us. Dudes who are trying to respect and maybe fuck us are now in a double bind in which these two agendas seem very difficult but necessary to merge. The inverse of this, as I’ve experienced it, at least, is equally paradoxical: How am I supposed to reconcile wanting men to be attracted to me with not wanting to be objectified?
When I was younger, I couldn’t understand how to make this equation work. In my early 20s, I pretty much wanted all guys who weren’t my relatives or Nazis to want to fuck me, because that was the same as wanting them to like me. Playing into that dynamic generally felt like garbage, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I just knew I couldn’t figure out how to get what I wanted and feel respected.
Consider the way that this whole setup warps young women: Many women learn that they are most useful as bodies and that their bodies are most useful for sex before they even hit puberty. Most women I know learned that their sex parts were different than the rest of their bodies because boys or men put their hands or eyes or words all over those parts of us before fuck meant anything but a bad word.
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I’ve always been tough, but it has taken me a long time to realize how much of that toughness grew on me as a coping mechanism; how much of that toughness is damage. Men have fucked with my dignity since I was a child, but the things that have happened to me have happened to all of us. When the bad things that happen are normal, you become tough. It’s devastating how tough I am.
So, as a 30-year-old woman who has been through a range of horribly exploitative sexual and emotional experiences—you know, just like pretty much every woman you know—I really don’t want to know anymore if a stranger finds me attractive. Not right out of the gate. Hell no. There are so many more interesting things about me than my body. Do you even care about them? This is why I cherish my friendships with straight dudes who would never try to fuck me even if we are trashed, and is probably part of why I hang out with a lot of queer people.
This is why I’ve gone home in tears after someone I respect says they think I’m smart and funny and interesting and they’d like to have a drink and rap about the world, and then just tries to fuck me after I patiently dodge their advances all night. Were they not even paying attention? Did they even want to rap about the world with me? I am still, as a grown woman, trying not to mentally respond to that situation by thinking: “Well, that person just wanted to fuck you. Maybe you are not really that smart or interesting.” That precise feeling is one that I don’t really think straight dudes can fully relate to: You are invisible, but they still want to fuck you. They do not see you or hear you. They still might rape you. This is why somebody putting their eyes all over me or immediately telling me they like the way I look is no longer flattering. Because it makes me feel fucking invisible.
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I know this is confusing. Assholes have wrecked the whole concept of spitting game, and there is no longer a blueprint for how to hit on women. As far as expressing your interest in a woman while she’s working, I’m not saying it’s impossible to do this respectfully, but consider the stakes before you impose your desire on another human being. Receiving sexual attention from a stranger just affirms that everyone is clocking us every moment and deciding how much we matter based on whether or not they like what they see. If you’re going to holler at somebody while they’re working, try to gauge her interest in your interest before you put it on her. If you’re working really hard to make her see how great you are, she is probably working even harder to escape the conversation without hurting your feelings. If she seems to be down, try building rapport in the same way that you would with anyone you don’t care about seeing naked. Talk about things you like to talk about and ask her what she thinks. Perhaps mention a thing you are doing in the coming days and leave room for her to invite herself. My favorite male bar patron stealth game is someone saying “I’m thinking about leaving soon,” and then trailing off with casual implication.
As a baseline, in any context, treat women like people you are not engaging with primarily because you might get to put your dick inside of them. When you are out in the world--at a bar, at a show, making time with a lady--and you realize you’d like to get down with her, put your game on pause and feel out her vibe. It is very likely that this woman can detect your interest. Try laying back. The process of you getting laid should not feel like you are angling for victory in a war of attrition. You getting laid should not require lengthy negotiations, disingenuous angles, or both of you getting blotto enough to just cave already. If you’re feeling her, look at her like an individual with a mind and a voice, and then, guess what? You might see parts of her you never would have seen otherwise, and she will be happy that you took the time to see her, and then maybe you guys will be so happy to see each other that you fuck each other's brains out. |
I know this is the wrong website to write this on but im not sure who else to ask. I typed in ‘Australia housing forum’ and this website was the first to come up. I am homeless and I have a disability and am on centrelink disability pension. I have been homeless since October last year.
I am on the department of housing priority list. They have told me I am at the very top of the list.
I have been waiting for an offer of housing for months now. I was so happy that I got an offer last week and I said straight away I would take it. They said by legal requirement I had to look at the flat first. When I went to look at the flat in Waterloo I was actually attacked by hundreds of fleas as soon as I entered the property. I was so scared and I went to the department of housing office and I was still actually covered in fleas so they definitely believed me. And now I am waiting for another offer and im so worried its going to be more and more months until they call me.
They have a private rental subsidy (called PRS) where the department of housing pays most of the rent for you to live in a place in the private rental market. It means that I would be able to have accommodation straight away. However they said to me that because I am too far UP the listing I cant get this. They said they only offer it to people who are further down the waiting list. I find this unbelievable because it seems that people who have less urgent needs then me can get assistance with accommodation before me but I just have to wait wait wait.
I have a rash all over my body from going for several weeks without a shower. I stayed in refuges but found them to be more dangerous then sleeping on the streets because the other people there did drugs and were violent and abusive. So mostly I have been staying on friends lounges but there is only so much that you can do this.
By the way, my disability is mild in that I only need a walking stick and I am not in a wheelchair or anything. I had a companion dog who I had to give to a friend to mind and I really need to find a place so I can get her back because I feel so lonely and lost without her.
Every time I call department of housing they say that a place will become available soon but I dont believe it. As I have been waiting so many months now I am really depressed and have no hope. I just wish they would approve me for the private rental subsidy in which case I would have a house straight away. Please can anyone offer any advice or know who I should talk to? |
Migrants and refugees seeking asylum in Germany attend a German-language class at the shelter where they live while their asylum applications are processed. (Alexander Koerner/Getty Images)
Muslim immigrants in Germany have an easier time finding a job and building a community than those in Switzerland, Austria, France and Britain.
That's according to a new study from the Bertelsmann Foundation. The researchers spoke to more than 10,000 Muslims who were either born in Europe or arrived before 2010, which means they did not interview the millions who traveled to Europe from Syria and the Middle East during the recent refugee crisis. In 2015, Germany took in nearly a million migrants and asylum seekers.
There are 4.7 million Muslims in Germany. According to researchers, 96 percent said they felt connected to the country.
About 60 percent now hold a full-time job, and an additional 20 percent are employed part time. These rates are similar to those for ethnic Germans, and higher than Muslim employment rates in the other western European countries studied. It's probably thanks to Germany's booming economy. “The international comparison shows that it is not religious affiliation that determines the success of opportunities for integration, but the state and the economic framework,” Stephan Vopel, an expert on social cohesion at the Bertelsmann Foundation, told German broadcaster DW.
[In Germany, a new ‘feminist’ Islam is hoping to make a mark]
Muslim migrants do lag, however, when it comes to finding good jobs — they make less money than their German peers. And the most religious Muslims, who often dress differently and require time to worship during work hours, struggle to find employment in Germany. Devout Muslims had an easier time finding employment in the United Kingdom. Bertelsmann Foundation researchers suggested that that was because Britain has done a better job of leveling the playing field for pious Muslims, allowing female police officers, for example, to wear headscarves.
Critics say that the most recent data from Germany's Federal Agency for Labor paints a less rosy picture. About half of the able-bodied employees without work right now are migrants.
The report also found that 73 percent of the children born in Germany to Muslim immigrants now speak German as a first language. (Those numbers are high in France, too, as many Muslims came from countries that used to be French colonies.) And 93 percent of German-born Muslims said they spent free time with Muslims and non-Muslims.
[At 15, she joined ISIS after converting to Islam. Now this German teen wants to go home.]
On education, things don't look quite as good: 36 percent of Muslim youths leave Germany without having completed any degree. (That number is much lower — about 11 percent — in France.)
Although Muslims feel welcome in Germany, Germans aren't always so eager to have them — about 19 percent of non-Muslims in Germany said they don't want Muslim neighbors. Those rates were high across Europe — more people said Muslims were their least preferred neighbors than any other demographic category, including foreigners, gays, Jews, people of color, atheists, Christians and big families. (One exception: In the U.K., those surveyed preferred Muslim neighbors to big families.)
“When it comes to participation of Muslims in society, [it] isn't as bleak as it is often presented in the media,” Ayse Demir, spokeswoman for the Berlin-based Turkish community organization TBB, told DW. “It shows that a lot of Muslims feel integrated, but there is a lack of acceptance — and that's also our perception. Participation isn't a one-way street: It needs to come from both sides.” |
Ande Whall Special Roll 7 (SR7) Raw Denim – Just Released
Kicking off 2014 the right way, Ande Whall just announced his next limited run of denim in his Special Roll series – the Special Roll 7 (SR7). As many here know, Whall was dealt a serious blow back in April 2011 when his entire studio suffered catastrophic damage as a result of the brutal earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand.
Thankfully, our favorite Kiwi got right back on the proverbial horse and has managed to pick up steam since the disaster nearly three years ago. Compared to the SR6, the SR7 utilizes a slightly lighter, 14.25 Oz. white-line selvedge that has been naturally indigo-dyed. As a result of these qualities and the left hand twill weave, Ande Whall states the denim boasts some serious vertical slubbiness. Certainly won’t argue with him there.
Compared to the SR6 as well, one will notice the New Zealander has opted for a toned-down aesthetic with the SR7 and moved any eye-catching finishings to the interior. Rather than use the exterior pockets as a showcase area – as we saw in the SR6 with the vidid poncho cloth – this section is completely clean and bare of any detailing. Instead, it’s the interior pocket lining that received some more love and is equipped with a 18 colour “Roping Cowboy” USA-made print.
In true form, Ande Whall continues to bring the goods on the construction front. The back pockets feature the signature wing stitch design and a fusion of gold and faded lemon thread run along felled seams. As is the case with his past models, he’s constructed the rise and seat with hand felled seams which is not only a more uncommon technique, but also lends greater reinforcement and sturdiness.
As mentioned earlier, the SR7 is a very limited edition run. Only 21 pairs are available in total across all cuts – super slim (Cobra), Slim (Mustang), Regular (Caribou), and Loose (Buffalo) fits – and can be purchased directly from his site.
Details
Name: Ande Whall Special Roll 7 (SR7)
Weight: 14.5oz.
Fit: Super Slim (Cobra), Slim (Mustang), Regular (Caribou), and Loose (Buffalo)
Denim: 100% cotton, white-line selvedge, left hand twill, naturally indigo-dyed
Source: Okayama, Japan
Other details: “Roping Cowboy” pocket lining Reinforcing X-bar tacks on back pockets Branded leather back patch Copper Riveted Stress Points Peek-a-boo selvedge detail on coin pocket
Available at: Ande Whall (Cobra, Mustang, Caribou, Buffalo) for $275.00 |
The other day, as I was surfing through pictures of medieval torture devices (don't ask), I kept noticing that many such tools were invented by, or at least used in, the Spanish Inquisition. Soon I found myself jumping from one site to another learning more and more about this joint venture between the ultra-conservative government of 15th Century Spain and many of the higher-ups and rank-and-file Christian warriors within the Roman Catholic Church at the time. I found it fascinating, gruesome, and most upsetting, still relevant to the world today.
The Spanish Inquisition began in the late 1470s when Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella wanted to do away with many of their political adversaries. These opponents were called the conversos, former Jews and Muslims who had been forced to convert to Christianity but had nevertheless managed to rise through the Spanish political and business ranks.
Threatened by their growing power, the King and Queen concocted a plan to purge these competitors from their positions in government and business. Because the couple knew that they didn't have any secular basis for taking on the conversos, who were by most accounts law-abiding and peaceful citizens, they decided to enlist the aid of the Cathoilc Church to lend some religious credibility to their planned attack.
To that end, the royal couple tooks steps to create an Inquisition, the purpose of which would be to identify false converts (fake conversos) within the Spanish Empire.
Initially, the Pope rejected the request. But after the King and Queen threatened to withdraw Spain's troops from defending the Vatican and leaving Christianity undefended against the growing threat of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the Pope caved and issued the Exigit Sinceras Devotionis Affectus, through which the Inquisition was established in the Kingdom.
Although the papal bull stated that the Inquisition was to be a religious institution, it gave the King and Queen exclusive rights to name the inquisitors. As a result, the King and Queen were, by 1480, running what was essentially a secular witch hunt (pardon the mixed metaphor) aimed at purging the Kingdom of political enemies, and did so with the blessing and the full assistance of the Church and its priests.
One can see why three hundred years later, the founding fathers of the United States decided it was time to erect a wall between church and state. And when you see what happens next, you'll be glad that you were born in America in the 20th Century, and never had to endure the type of shit that so often occurs when the Church joint ventures with the State to whack political dissidents and religious competitors. |
LABOR leader Bill Shorten is believed to be preparing to further cut Labor ties to the union movement by scrapping rules that restrict ALP membership to those who belong to a union.
The move, according to senior ALP sources, would be the most significant symbolic reform to the ALP in decades and send a message to the community that Labor was no longer run by unions.
The Labor leader is expected to make an announcement on further reforms to ALP structures within weeks in an attempt to limit damage to Labor ahead of the government’s royal commission into the union movement.
Sources close to Mr Shorten, a union leader before he entered parliament, revealed he had privately decided to make the symbolic break with the industrial base for the good of the party. He would have to take the reforms to the party’s next national conference, which is not until 2015.
During a Press Club speech yesterday, Mr Shorten hinted at the reforms, claiming the ALP needed to broaden its appeal. He wants to more than double the ALP’s membership from 45,000 to 100,000.
“When it comes to modernising our relationship with the unions, we have to. Let there be no one under any doubt. I think we have to,” Mr Shorten said yesterday.
“We have to appeal to people who might think they don’t want to be in a union but they’d like to be involved with the Labor Party.”
While many ALP branches do not strictly enforce the rule that requires members to be in a union, the fact it remains is regarded as a powerful symbol of Labor’s union ties.
Senior Labor sources agreed that removing the rule would be a “powerful symbolic gesture that Labor is interested in its future”.
“It’s a starting point,” a senior federal Labor source said.
“It would send an appropriate message to the community that the Labor Party is not run by the trade union movement.”
Senior Labor sources confirmed Mr Shorten had told them he was committed to the reform, despite the likelihood of a dangerous backlash from unions and left wing elements of the ALP.
It is expected he would get the backing of the powerful NSW right faction of the party, which has led the way in reforming and democratising the party since the corruption scandals that have rocked the NSW branch.
NSW Labor will be the first to have direct-elected delegates to the party’s national conference and has always maintained 100 per cent rank and file preselections.
But the move to broaden the membership of the branches is regarded as vital to being more representative of the community and bringing Labor back to the middle political ground. |
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Science Magazine is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I’m reading my AAAS Newsletter, and I find the following blurb (emphasis mine):
Virginia Panel Releases Coastal Flooding Report. A subpanel of the Secure Commonwealth Panel of Virginia released a report containing several recommendations for dealing with risks posed by coastal flooding. The report, which is largely based on data from a 2013 report by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, predicts a sea level rise of 1.5 feet within the next 20 to 50 years along the Virginia coast.
My bad number detector started ringing like crazy. Let me convert that to metric and see where we get. A foot and a half is 450 mm. Global sea level rise these days is on the order of two to three mm per year. This is also about the rate of rise that has occurred over the last century. To rise a foot and a half at the historical (and current) rate would take from 150 to 225 years. OK, we’ll need to shorten that for local subsidence, but still … so I go to take a look at the underlying report I linked to above.
I get the report, and I’m reading through it, and I bust out laughing. There’s been a recent thread here on Watts Up With That regarding consensus. I thought that this was a marvelous example of the modern and meaningless use of the term “consensus” (emphasis mine).
The future of sea level change in Virginia is most appropriately forecast by reference to the state-of-the-science synthesis and recommendations prepared for the National Climate Assessment (Parris et al. 2012). The consensus of scientists working on this report is that by 2100 global sea level will be between 8 inches and 6.6 feet above the level in 1992. When modified by local and regional factors this information provides the best available basis for planning. SOURCE
The “consensus” is that sea level rise by 2100 will be between eight inches and seven feet? Oh, that’s just too good. And how is that floor-to-ceiling estimate the “best available basis for planning”?
In any case, the report allows us to run the numbers. According to the report, they have allowed 2.7 mm/year for local subsidence, viz:
Therefore the future sea level scenarios presented in Figure 16 are the global scenarios modified to include local subsidence (estimated at 2.7 millimeters/year or about 0.1 inch/year).
To get that 450 mm (1.5′) of rise in 50 years would require that the seas rise by no less than nine mm per year. If we allow 2.7 mm/year for subsidence as they did, it would have to rise at 6.3 mm per year, starting now and continuing for fifty years.
And it gets worse. To get that foot and a half of rise in 20 years would require that the seas immediately start rising at 22.5 mm per year, call it 20 mm per year after subsidence. I note in passing that this rate is the maximum rate mentioned in the underlying document … in other words, they’ve taken the absolute worst and most ludicrous estimate, 6.6 feet by the year 2100, and called that the “best available estimate for planning”? … spare me …
And how fast is the sea level rising around Virginia, including subsidence? There’s a curious side story. I google subsidence Virginia tide. First link returned? “Making sense of senseless sea level scares in Norfolk Virginia“, right here at WUWT. Goes to show the global reach of this blog, you don’t get to the top of the Google food chain unless lots of folks link to your post …
In any case, that post shows the trend of sea level rise at Sewells Point VA is 4.4 mm/yr and 3.8 mm/yr at Portsmouth, Virginia. IF the subsidence is in fact 2.7 mm/year, this puts the Sewells Point sea level rise without subsidence at 4.4 – 2.7 = 1.7 mm/year … and at Portsmouth, 3.8 – 2.7 = 1.1 mm/year rise excluding subsidence.
So it looks like in Virginia, IF we make their assumption of 2.7 mm/yr of subsidence, the sea level itself is historically going up at no more than two mm per year … and they claim it’s going to jump immediately to three to ten times the historical rate? Fuggedaboutit.
Here’s the crazy part. In parallel with the current “hiatus” in warming, we have seen a deceleration in the rate of sea level rise. I discussed an attempt to explain this “pause” in sea level rise in my post “Sea Water Level, Fresh Water Tilted“. Anthony also discussed this slowdown here.
Now, the alarmists started this booshwa about an impending and dangerous acceleration in sea level rise back in the 1980s. James Hansen has repeated this claim of impending acceleration for decades, as have many others. It’s become a recurrent meme for the alarmists, repeated around the world. And for all of that time, there hasn’t been the slightest sign of any increase in the rate of sea level rise. None at all, and indeed, instead of acceleration, we’ve seen deceleration.
However, when it comes to climate alarmism, facts don’t seem to be important in the slightest … welcome to post-normal science, where actual observations and real-world data are just an insignificant detail.
w.
PS—the usual request. If you disagree with someone, please quote the exact words you disagree with. Otherwise, nobody knows what you are referring to, and misunderstandings multiply.
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In an interview with The Daily Beast, Charles Dance revealed that there is active discussion about a possible Game of Thrones movie.
“There’s talk of eventually trying to do a feature film, but I don’t know which of the storylines,” says Dance, who plays Tywin Lannister in the HBO series. “There’s so much to cram into a film.”
That’s not a lot to go on, but there are a lot of possible directions they could take with a film. Perhaps they use a feature film as a series finale, but it’s hard to speculate on that since the series’ ending hasn’t been written yet. Of course, Game of Thrones made clear last season that they’re not going to be slavishly devoted to George R.R. Martin’s novels, so perhaps they’ll just take things in their own direction anyway. Another possibility is a prequel film, maybe adapting Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg series of novellas, which tells stories of the young, future king Aegon V Targaryen and future Kingsguard commander Ser Duncan the Tall, set 90 years prior to Game of Thrones. Or, they could focus on other major historical events from the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, perhaps a film about Robert’s Rebellion, or one of the other major wars in Westeros. |
We have reached our first threshold!
One hundred thousand of us have decided to GET MONEY OUT of politics once and for all by forming the foundation of a massive nationwide wave.
This is a monumental task that we can only achieve with a single shared long-term goal: To force debate and passage of a Constitutional amendment to ban all private money in politics.
And a laser focus on our short-term actions: Sharing this undertaking by making digital waves to reach out to one other person to tell them what we are doing and why. My ONLY objective between now and next summer's Presidential conventions is to make this group BIGGER.
As you know there is a massive wave developing around the issue of our democracy being sold at auction in the election process (94% of the time the top money-raiser wins); there is a critical need for all of us to align to intervene to save ourselves and our country.
Today tens of thousands of "occupiers" are marching and walking out in a single wave of protest. Anger and frustration are rampant -- but it is only if we can put the positive harness of real action on this wave that can free all of us from this bought system.
We are being heard and winning support, but we at this point are people bringing a knife to a gunfight with a heavily financed auction-based democracy. Which is why, the most immediately impactful use of our collective communications power and energy -- is to devote all of it -- to helping others understand why WE are doing this and ask them to consider joining us.
One hundred thousand is the perfect number to start that process and we share unprecedented tools for information sharing with each other -- a tool that has never existed before -- we must deploy it. For us, it is only if we are massive, aligned around a single pinprick of agreement that we stand a chance. The possibilities for growth are unprecedented and spectacular!
Our greatest barrier to growth is two-fold:
Our own decision to invest time and energy in growing. If every one of us doesn't make the decision to tell at least one other person about GetMoneyOut.com -- we will not benefit from asymmetrical growth. (100k...200k....400k....800k...1.6m...3.2m...6.4m...12.8m....25m...51.2m...102.4m!)
But to do this will require an unprecedented level of TRUST, RESOLVE and PATIENCE among us as partners. This is why as this develops it will continue to be run transparently, with integrity.
I've hired former lobbyist, Jimmy Williams to move this project forward. You'll be hearing from him shortly. I have hired the law firm of Morgan Lewis to secure the trademark's to "Get Money Out." This will allow us to issue non-commercial licences to all who want to sell T-shirts/bumper stickers etc. and to create a bullet-proof integrity policy to ensure that neither I or anyone else can forfeit to potential of this singular group so we can all win the trust of our fellow Americans and GET MONEY OUT!
We know our country stands at great risk, but we also have massive untapped potential. Let's seize it. |
Police are investigating the homicide of a 26-year-old man who was shot after police say he brandished a handgun and sexually assaulted a woman.Watch reportThe name of the man has not been released pending notification of family members. It happened around 9:25 p.m., Thursday, in the 3800 block of North Rampart Street.Police said the 26-year-old man approached a man and woman as they were walking. They said he then produced a gun and demanded that they walk to a building that was being renovated. Once they entered the yard, investigators say, the man sexually assaulted the woman at which time the adult male disarmed the man and fatally shot him."We were sitting in our living room and heard two loud pops," said Jim Leonard.Leonard lives across the street from the old Frederick Douglass High School currently under construction, where authorities said the incident occurred."Within minutes of hearing the gunshots cops were everywhere," Leonard said."I would have probably done the same thing," said Tony Napolitano.Bywater resident Napalitano called the actions of the shooter "appropriate" considering the circumstances."It's a shame a life was lost, but if it was me, I probably would have acted in the same way," Napolitano said.Detectives recovered the handgun from the scene and are in the process of determining where the weapon came from.The man and woman were interviewed and released. No charges are expected.
Police are investigating the homicide of a 26-year-old man who was shot after police say he brandished a handgun and sexually assaulted a woman.
Watch report
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The name of the man has not been released pending notification of family members. It happened around 9:25 p.m., Thursday, in the 3800 block of North Rampart Street.
Police said the 26-year-old man approached a man and woman as they were walking. They said he then produced a gun and demanded that they walk to a building that was being renovated. Once they entered the yard, investigators say, the man sexually assaulted the woman at which time the adult male disarmed the man and fatally shot him.
"We were sitting in our living room and heard two loud pops," said Jim Leonard.
Leonard lives across the street from the old Frederick Douglass High School currently under construction, where authorities said the incident occurred.
"Within minutes of hearing the gunshots cops were everywhere," Leonard said.
"I would have probably done the same thing," said Tony Napolitano.
Bywater resident Napalitano called the actions of the shooter "appropriate" considering the circumstances.
"It's a shame a life was lost, but if it was me, I probably would have acted in the same way," Napolitano said.
Detectives recovered the handgun from the scene and are in the process of determining where the weapon came from.
The man and woman were interviewed and released. No charges are expected.
AlertMe |
ISLAMABAD, April 4 (APP): Lauding the favourable financial position and improved security situation in the country, over a dozen of French companies Tuesday expressed their keenness to bring in investment in Pakistan through enhanced trade and cooperation in diverse areas.
“Pakistan has favourable financial position and the security situation has improved tremendously during the last two to three years,” Chairman of France-Pakistan Business Council of MEDEF Intl and President of Total Global Services, M Thierry PFLIMLIN told media here at the residence of French ambassador.
M Thierry PFLIMLIN was heading a delegation of 16 French companies, which was currently on a visit to Pakistan from April 4 to 6, after a gap of 12 years.
“We have identified the fields of cooperation in agriculture, where Pakistan has huge potential i.e. processing of food, hydro-electric and renewable energy, digitalization of industry, electronics, IT, LNG storage and re-gasification etc,” he along with other members of the delegation told newsmen.
To a question, M Thierry PFLIMLIN said the main objective of their visit was exploratory and to understand Pakistan and the business opportunities it offered.
About the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), he said, it was a wonderful project, adding, Europe could also bring in investment for increased cooperation with Pakistan.
The three-day long programme of the delegation would give French companies the opportunity to better understand what were the Pakistan economic priorities and how was the business environment, as well as to engage in fruitful discussion with Pakistan business community, particularly, with members of Pakistan Business Council.
The visit was a concrete follow-up of the meeting organized at MEDEF Headquarters in Paris in September 2016 between the French companies and Minister for Finance and Economic Affairs Muhammad Ishaq Dar, who was accompanied by Chairman Board of Investment (BoI) Miftah Ismail and a Pakistani delegation.
M Thierry PFLIMLIN along with other members of the delegation said they had “very deep and fruitful conversation” with the officials of BoI and the ministries of petroleum, planning, commerce and food.
They also appreciated that Pakistan had highly professional and educated people. The French delegation also called on President Mamnoon Hussain and exchanged views on matters of mutual interest.
The delegation will visit Karachi on Wednesday and meet the representatives of Pakistan Business Council. Later, the French ambassador hosted a reception for the delegation and thanked them for visiting Pakistan.
The reception was attended among others by federal ministers Khawaja Muhammad Asif, Sikandar Hayat Bosan and Senator Lt Gen ® Abdul Qayyum.
M Thierry PFLIMLIN in his remarks at the reception referred to their visit after 12 years and said they would not take such a long time to visit Pakistan again. |
Could you explain more about what the rebranded plugin does that is deceptive? Is it something like every few clicks the commission goes somewhere other than where the site operator expects (i.e., back to the author of the rebranded version)?
Once you install the plugin, what exactly does it say that confuses the user? How does one implement the commission process normally and what does this plugin do to change that? Do you have screenshots?
If you can explain exactly how this deceives the public then file a complaint with the FTC: https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/ They have gone after malware/spyware in the past that didn’t disclose what it was doing and this sounds similarly deceptive.
I don’t think this is a GPL/copyright issue because the GPL gives anyone the right to rebrand your plugin, modify it, etc. Engaging in fraud isn’t itself a violation of copyright law, so you should focus instead on explaining what false or misleading statements this rebrander makes. [Edit: Although, if they also remove your copyright notices, etc. so as to make it look like the code you wrote was written by them, then that is definitely (C) infringement and a violation of the GPL as well. It’s not clear to me from your post how far they went to cover their tracks.) |
Note: If you’re a business model nerd like me, this post is likely to interest you despite the fact that it also involves a transparent promotion for my startup. However, if the normal mechanisms of capitalism feel icky to you, I understand. Feel free to skip this one. But I promise it is interesting.
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The big problem with startups is that most of them fail. Still, lots of people are willing to take that risk because the upside potential is so high. Also, failing makes your odds of succeeding with the next startup much higher. It turns out that failure is an excellent teacher. But any way you look at it, startups are risky business.
Startup incubators reduce their risk by pooling a bunch of startups together and hoping that at least one is a big winner that pays for all the losers. This is similar to the concept of investing in an index fund instead of picking individual stocks. Diversification is a great way to spread risk, but the tradeoff is that the upside potential is watered down by the losers in the pack.
In a perfect world you would have the upside potential of a startup with the risk profile of an incubator. The closest anyone gets to that perfect world is an initial product and a few pivots before running out of cash. A three-pivot startup is like a mini-incubator in itself. It takes three separate swings at the ball and hopes at least one of them connects. But three swings is not many when you consider how often startups fail. Is there a business model that does better?
I hope so, because my startup WhenHub is designed from the ground up to be similar to the risk profile of an incubator but in the form of a single startup. We accomplish that by creating useful products that have universal appeal across thousands of different applications. If the public gets excited about any one of those thousands of applications, we probably have a way to monetize.
Our startup’s domain is time, including any kind of schedule, historical timeline, curriculum, itinerary, you name it. We take those “stories” of time and turn them into interactive visualizations you can share. That means literally every human over the age of 12 has dozens of potential uses for what we do. It’s good for families, businesses, schools, and any other kind of organization.
We like to compare WhenHub to office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the Google equivalents. If you ask me who the target market is for any of those applications, I would say the question makes no sense. People of all types use those products for thousands of distinct reasons. WhenHub is like that, by design.
Obviously we can’t completely match the risk profile of an incubator because we have one team of people, and ideally you want to diversify both the people and the products to get the best risk control. But our team has happily worked together for a long time, no drama, and that’s all good news. I don’t see that changing unless the people change. And we all seem happy at the moment. (Thrilled, actually. This phase is the most fun.)
WhenHub is both a Studio product that you access with your web browser plus an app that does real-time travel visualizations. Both parts of WhenHub are designed to have thousands of potential uses.
Before designing WhenHub we met in person with some of the smartest investors in the startup world. One well-known billionaire told us he only likes startups that have the so-called network effect, and so we designed to that. WhenHub gets more valuable as more people use it, and it is hard to leave once you are in it. (Like Facebook, for example.)
One of the most successful angel investors in the country told us he likes startups that can grow without advertising, so we designed to that standard too. Our “time stories” piggyback on any headline that is already viral and we add visual appeal to make sharing attractive. For example, at the end of this post is a Whencast of the NFL Playoff season. (Sports schedules are a tiny part of what we do.)
Another famous investor told me he doesn’t like to invest in anything that a teen wouldn’t use. The WhenHub app is perfect for teens heading to casual meet-ups. And the we expect schools to be big adopters of the WhenHub scheduling features. So teens will be all over it, we hope, once we get their attention. And their parents and teachers will do that for us. The Network Effect will drag them in.
We’ll be looking for several million in funding in the next month or so. If you are a qualified investor and you want a sneak-peak at the pitch deck, you can contact me at [email protected]. We like advice too.
Business reporters are welcome to use the same email if you want to hear more about our business model.
—
Here’s an example of how WhenHub piggybacks on current events that the public already cares about. This example is the NFL playoff schedule, but it could be any current event. You can add the schedule to your own calendar, or share with others via email, or on social media, and we will keep it updated throughout the playoffs. You can even embed it in your blog with a copy-paste to HTML, like I did below.
This map-style visualization is one of many options. click the icon in the lower right corner to see full screen. |
Glam metal band Warrant lead singer Jani Lane was found dead yesterday in Los Angeles.
Lane's body was discovered at the Comfort Inn in Woodland Hills. He was 47 years old.
Lane (born John Kennedy Oswald, later changed to John Patrick Oswald) is survived by four children -- Taylar, Brittany, Madison and Ryan -- and his wife Kimberly, as well as his sisters Marcine, Michelle and Victoria. Lane lost his father, Robert Oswald, in 1994, and his mother, Eileen, passed in 2004.
Lane is best known as the singer for the band Warrant, a rock band that rose to fame in the late-1980's and early 1990's. Their hits include the songs Heaven, Down Boys, and Cherry Pie. Lane quit the band in 1993, only to rejoin the following year. But he resigned once more in 2004, and was absent for four years before eventually returning again. That reunion lasted less than a year, before Lane's third and final departure from the band.
Although there has been speculation this morning as to the cause of death, so far no information has been confirmed, and an investigation is ongoing.
Those of us who came of age in the 1980's remember Warrant well, and remember Lane as an always friendly and cheerful face amid the otherwise grimacing visage of rock and metal at the time. He also exhibited a good sense of humor, and could be self-depreciating in an offhand and good-natured way. My condolences to his family and friends over their terrible loss. |
MANY people have a different approaches to football — mine is to use it as a vehicle for enjoyment; having a laugh, spending time with your mates, going to the home games with my Dad, seeing friends before and after the match, ending up in places in Europe I’d never go to otherwise (you wouldn’t go to Augsburg on holiday, would you?), and having loads of fun when Liverpool are really good at football. It’s a bit grim for 90 minutes when the Reds are grim, but you still find ways of enjoying it.
So at the minute, I’m enjoying things quite a lot. It’s fun, we’re winning, we look really good at football, we’ve scored nine goals in our first two home league games, won at Arsenal and Chelsea, and really do look like we’ll have a go at trying to win the title. Although I’d feel considerably happier if I woke up tomorrow morning and found out that Gavin Peacock had got inside the heads of the whole Manchester City squad and whisked them off to Canada to join him in his Church, but what can you do? We play the cards we’re dealt.
That’s what I’m in football for anyway, I suspect it’s what plenty of people are in football for. But there are people who clearly aren’t. Being right on the internet is more important to them. Rewind a few months and there were plenty of people absolutely irate that Jürgen Klopp had the temerity to sign a player they didn’t really want in Sadio Mane and that it was a stupid signing. You see, being aggressively vocal is really important to these people.
Personally, I’ve watched him plenty of times this season and wish we’d not bothered signing him and instead have signed someone who can sit in front of the back four, run around loads, kick people and maybe pass the ball ten yards on occasion if he’s feeling adventurous. Or not, but these people do actually exist. I always suspect the vociferous internet lads don’t take as much pleasure in Liverpool scoring as the rest of us do because they long for being able to tell you that they told you so, and Mane looking every inch a £30m footballer doesn’t really help you.
Personally, I quite like being wrong. Presuming I’ve been negative about someone. I was wrong about Mario Balotelli and I didn’t enjoy that, I was wrong about Fabio Borini and I didn’t like that either — maybe the issue here is that Serie A isn’t as good as I think it is? Who knows, either way, I got those wrong. Football has a habit of doing that, we’re all wrong about football plenty of times.
After Burnley I wrote this piece — What We Have Seen So Far From Jürgen Klopp’s Reds — I put forward two opinions and I now want to delete the internet because they’re embarrassingly wrong.
Firstly, James Milner — I wasn’t having him as a left-back. He looked slow in that game, didn’t know what he was doing and I think him not being at it cost us that day more than a lot of people realise.
Since then, I’ve been very, very impressed. At Spurs he survived being quite clearly targeted for the last half hour when Spurs attempted to turn the screw on the Reds, he didn’t wilt, blocked every cross, fought for every ball and was very good. Since then, there’s been more of the same. He has an attitude to crosses that basically says “Well you can try and stick that ball in there but it’s not going to happen.” Teams have tried to get at him, but such is his football intelligence he’s able to adapt to the role far easier than anyone could have expected. Bar maybe Jürgen Klopp — funny how the fella who knows more about football than me and you was right again. He could appoint Roy Hodgson as his assistant and I’d probably be fine with it, such is the hold he has over me.
It’s worth remembering that while full-back is a specialist position there’s an argument to say that if a player is so good at defending, why aren’t they playing centre-back? And if they’re so good at attacking then why aren’t they playing as a winger? The Full-Back Union will try and kill me, but there’s an element of validity in it. If Tony Evans reads this I’m expecting him to turn up at my front door and tell me about Steve Nicol for three hours.
Milner is a very good football, why shouldn’t he be a good full-back? With the benefit of a month’s hindsight it’s easy to see why it’s worked. It’s not just the defensive side that’s been good either — the attacking side is also very much acceptable and fits in to the team. On Monday Night Football, Klopp was lured into saying that we basically play 2-1-7 as a formation at times.
This means that our full-backs, Milner and Nathaniel Clyne, play very high up the pitch — so, instead of having a left-back there, we have James Milner offering an attacking option. We know from last season that he is an exceptional crosser of the ball and his passing game is good. The give-and-go with Philippe Coutinho for Adam Lallana’s opener on Saturday was a reasonable example. Quick, one touch football that set Coutinho free into space. Good footballers play good football.
His ability to beat a man while also looking like he’s running in quick sand also impresses. I was really against this as a concept at first, but I’m fully on board with it now.
I think I also owe Jordan Henderson a massive apology. I was incredibly critical of him at Burnley, though in mitigation he had an absolute nightmare in East Lancashire. However, I think we genuinely have to draw a huge line through that game and treat it like an anomaly. Anything that happened that day didn’t happen.
So Jordan, sorry. I remember in the summer there was a bizarre question people were asking about Joe Allen and why he was leaving yet Jordan Henderson was still here. Allen hadn’t demonstrated, in four years at the club, that he was on the same level as Henderson yet there we were with what felt like a majority opinion that Henderson was inferior to Allen.
If you were to argue that now then I think the Men in White Coats would be called for, such has been Henderson’s level the last month. Ordinarily you would not look at Henderson as being someone who would be suitable for a role that effectively is the third most defensive position on the pitch. He’s all about energy and quick passing and the role is typically about discipline and intelligence. This isn’t to say that Henderson is an unintelligent football, it’s just not something you would associate him with.
Klopp has ripped up the rule book on this position, though, and given Henderson the job of being the deep lying playmaker who shuttles from side to side, moves the ball quickly and backs up the play. Take the Chelsea goal for example, he was far higher up the pitch than you would expect a player of that position to be.
I’ve spent the last year or so wondering if Henderson would find his role in this side and been trying to figure out what it would be if so. Obviously, we don’t have much evidence to go on but the last few games have shown great promise. Top teams with attacking intent have been in opposition, as have Championship sides, sides that’ll be in and around the top half, as well as a side who’ll be involved in relegation scrap. He’s been suited to all.
Players like Willian and Eden Hazard were attacking us at Chelsea and they created very little, some excellent Spurs players attacked us at White Hart Lane and again not much for the keeper to do. Really good attacking sides have been stifled by the Reds, with what we all thought was an attack-minded midfielder sat in the ‘six’ — as Klopp likes to call it — and James Milner at left-back.
These may well be square pegs in round holes in the long term, I’d expect that Milner definitely is, but for now they look to fit perfectly. We might have had better players this season, and if you asked me to rank our lads one to five I may struggle to put them both in the top five, but in terms of expectations of achievement in their roles, relative to what they’ve actually achieved, they’re clearly my one and two. I expected Emre Can to walk back in to this side, now I can’t see when he gets a game.
Up the Square Peg Reds. |
Vancouver Canucks forward Mike Santorelli earned a roster spot at training camp in the fall of 2013 by showing up in the best shape of his life and slowly securing a top-six spot in the Canucks lineup. Santorelli - who was born and grew up in Vancouver - accomplished this despite being on a one-year, two-way contract.
Though he missed the latter part of the season with injury, Santorelli and agent JP Barry believe that the versatile, undersized, two-way forward has done all of the "value rebuilding" he needs to do, in order to secure a multi-year contract. It's just that the Canucks aren't offering him a multi-year contract...
From Iain MacIntyre of the Vancouver Sun:
#Canuck Mike Santorelli likely headed to market July 1. Agent JP Barry said team only offering 1 yr + centre can do better as UFA. — Iain MacIntyre (@imacVanSun) June 27, 2014
So the Santorelli-era in Vancouver lasted only modestly longer than the John Tortorella-era, which seems oddly appropriate. |
NFC Controller in blue
After tearing down the iPad Air 2 earlier this week, iFixit has now moved on to the iPad mini 3, which also received a minor update during Apple's October 16 iPad event. Unlike the iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3 saw few internal improvements, gaining a new gold color option and a Touch ID fingerprint sensor.As expected, iFixit's teardown reveals many of the same parts that were used in first Retina iPad mini, now called the iPad mini 2. It continues to use the same 7.9-inch display, A7 processor with M7 coprocessor, 5-megapixel camera, and 802.11n Wi-Fi.There is one new addition, which is directly related to Touch ID and the iPad mini 3's ability to support in-app Apple Pay payments. Like the iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3 includes a 65V10 NFC controller manufactured by NXP.There is no accompanying NFC antenna to allow the tablet to make NFC-based payments within stores, but there has been strong speculation suggesting the NFC chip is where Apple Pay's "Secure Element" is located. According to Apple, the Secure Element is a dedicated chip that stores encrypted Device Account Numbers, which replace credit card numbers for security reasons.Though the iPad mini 3 and the iPad Air 2 are not able to make payments within stores, they can make Apple Pay payments within participating apps and thus utilize both the Secure Element and Device Account Numbers.NXP's own site details the use of a specific integrated circuit designed for handling and storing secure data on its website, stating the technology has been integrated into its NFC controller chips. While the 65V10 is not mentioned by name, its appearance in both the iPad Air 2 and the iPad mini 3 suggests that it is indeed being used for its security function rather than its NFC function.Aside from the inclusion of the 65V10 NFC chip, which is located in a spot on the logic board that was previously left blank, there are few other notable features about the iPad mini 3. iFixit did find that the tablet has new home button cabling to support Touch ID and home button brackets that are securely affixed by hot glue, which makes removing the home button a much more difficult task.Like the Touch ID cable in the iPhone 5s, the location of the Touch ID cable in the iPad mini 3 makes screen repairs very difficult, as the cable is easy to sever when opening up the display. Due to the glue and the precarious position of the Touch ID cable, the iPad mini 3 earned a repairability score of 2 out of 10 from iFixit.Apple's iPad mini 3 is currently available in both retail stores and from Apple's online store , with prices that start at $399. |
Nebraska state Sen. Bill Kintner (Facebook)
An antigay Nebraska Republican state senator is under pressure to resign over a sexually explicit video of himself that was found on his state-issued computer.
According to the Lincoln Journal-Star, the scandal has prompted the state’s Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts to call for Sen. Bill Kintner (R-Papillon) to resign.
The call comes at the conclusion of a year-long investigation into Kintner’s online activities that began when Kintner himself contacted the Nebraska State Patrol regarding “what he believed to be a potential internet scam that occurred while the senator was in Massachusetts using his state computer,” said a State Patrol spokesman on Friday.
The investigation’s findings have been handed over to ethics watchdog group The Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission, which is expected to weigh in on the scandal Aug. 5.
Gov. Ricketts said on Friday that he had spoken with Kintner on the phone and urged him to resign “if the allegations were true.”
“Due to the ongoing investigation of this issue, I have been unable to say anything publicly,” the governor said in a statement. “If the allegations are true, Senator Kintner needs to resign.”
Investigators have not disclosed the contents of the video or described it except to say that it is a “sexually explicit video involving Kintner.”
Kintner is married to the governor’s chief policy advisor, Lauren Kintner. He has been outspoken to the point of insensitivity on a number of issues.
Blogger Joe.My.God. reported that Kintner “has loudly opposed same-sex marriage, gay adoption, and transgender rights. He has also publicly declared that Christians should let gays know their business isn’t wanted by providing them with bad service.”
Last year, when arguing on the senate floor against a path to citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, Kintner used the racial slur “wetbacks” to describe Latino immigrants entering the country. A class of fourth graders was taking a tour of the senate chambers at the time.
In June of 2015, Kintner posted a grisly photo of a beheaded woman on his Facebook page as part of a post expressing his support for the death penalty. He later took it down, but said it was only because the post’s comment thread was getting too unruly. |
A Saturday Night Kind of Pink – Houndmouth returns home for the holidays with a show that even Krampus couldn’t hate. Katie Cummins Recently, I was scrolling through Twitter when I came across a tweet. A man had tweeted that he told someone from Louisville that he didn't like Houndmouth and, as it turned...
Life in Liquor Alauryn Moore, Writer On the morning of July 30, Louisville citizens took to the streets, even though it was cloudy and raining, and headed toward the closest Family Dollar to object to the corporation’s...
River Town Sound- Part Three of our Series Exploring Louisville’s Evolving Music Culture Evan Showalter It was just another Saturday in Georgetown, Indiana. Middle-aged men and women filed into a run-down Pizza King, ready to eat and listen to the night’s entertainment. Miles...
Recent Culture Stories |
Well, in 2000 an economist named Ben Bernanke offered a number of proposals for policy at the “zero lower bound.” True, the paper was focused on policy in Japan , not the United States . But America is now very much in a Japan-type economic trap, only more acute. So we learn a lot by asking why Ben Bernanke 2011 isn’t taking the advice of Ben Bernanke 2000.
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Back then, Mr. Bernanke suggested that the Bank of Japan could get Japan’s economy moving with a variety of unconventional policies. These could include: purchases of long-term government debt (to push interest rates, and hence private borrowing costs, down); an announcement that short-term interest rates would stay near zero for an extended period, to further reduce long-term rates; an announcement that the bank was seeking moderate inflation, “setting a target in the 3-4% range for inflation, to be maintained for a number of years,” which would encourage borrowing and discourage people from hoarding cash; and “an attempt to achieve substantial depreciation of the yen ,” that is, to reduce the yen’s value in terms of other currencies.
Was Mr. Bernanke on the right track? I think so — as well I should, since his paper was partly based on my own earlier work. So why isn’t the Fed pursuing the agenda its own chairman once recommended for Japan?
Part of the answer is internal dissension. Two weeks ago, the committee that sets monetary policy declared that conditions “are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through mid-2013” — that is, it didn’t even promise to keep rates low, it just offered an observation about what the state of the economy is likely to be. Yet, even so, the statement faced serious internal opposition, with three inflation hawks on the committee voting against it and calling it a mistake.
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The larger answer, however, is outside political pressure. Last year, the Fed actually did institute a policy of buying long-term debt, generally known as “ quantitative easing ” (don’t ask). But it faced a political backlash out of all proportion to its modest effect on the economy, culminating in Mr. Perry’s declaration that any further monetary easing before the 2012 election would be “almost treasonous,” and that if Mr. Bernanke went ahead and did it, “we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”
Now just imagine the reaction if the Fed were to act on the other and arguably more important parts of that Bernanke 2000 agenda, targeting a higher rate of inflation and welcoming a weaker dollar. With prominent Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan already denouncing policies that allegedly “debase the dollar,” a political firestorm would be guaranteed.
So now you see why I don’t expect any substantive policy announcements at Jackson Hole. Back in 2000, Mr. Bernanke accused the Bank of Japan of suffering from “self-induced paralysis ”; well, now the Fed is suffering from externally induced paralysis. In effect, it has been politically intimidated into standing by while the economy stagnates. And that’s a very, very bad thing.
Political opposition has already crippled fiscal policy; instead of helping to create jobs, the federal government is pulling back, acting as a drag on output and employment.
With the Fed also intimidated into inaction, it’s hard to see any end to the ongoing economic disaster. |
Image copyright JOLENE LAVERTY Image caption The incident happened at the Australian National University in Canberra
Four people have been injured by a student wielding a baseball bat in a classroom at an Australian university, according to police.
The suspect, an 18-year-old man, had been seated when he rose and assaulted a lecturer at the Australian National University in Canberra, police said.
He then allegedly attacked students who went to her aid, before being subdued.
Police said it was too early to determine a motive for the attack. The suspect was not known to authorities.
Detective Supt Ben Cartwright said campus security had restrained the man until police arrived.
"I believe one the students has actually taken the baseball bat from the student with it, and run away with it, and then returned later and given it to police," he said.
Three women and a man were taken to hospital with injuries not considered to be life-threatening, police said.
Motive unclear
Detective Supt Cartwright said the suspect was not known to police or intelligence agencies.
"It is too early to know the motivation behind this alleged assault and at this stage [police] have not ruled anything out," he said.
The university's deputy-vice chancellor, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, called it an "isolated and random incident".
"The second thing I want to do is to acknowledge the remarkable bravery of our students and our staff during this incident," she said. |
More than 100 top chefs wrote to the Telegraph this week criticising new EU rules on allergen labelling in restaurants, warning that creativity and spontaneity in the kitchen will be compromised as a result of having to inform customers about the presence of 14 allergens in their dishes. I wrote last year about the disappointing attitude of prominent chefs towards people with special dietary needs, and I’m still disappointed in the likes of Albert Roux and Prue Leith, who should be leading the way in making it easier for everyone to enjoy good food.
I have coeliac disease, an autoimmune condition which means that like 1% of people in the UK, I can’t digest gluten – the protein in wheat, rye and barley. If I accidentally eat it, I can become very ill. When coeliacs ingest gluten, it also damages the stomach lining, impairing their ability to digest food and absorb nutrients. It’s no joke, and it’s certainly not a fad, so I get irritated when I hear the elite complaining about having to cater for people like me.
I prefer restaurants that have proper labelling on the menu. Apart from easily being able to see what I can order, I can avoid awkward conversations with clueless servers, and bad attitudes from chefs. I’ve experienced both when asking about the availability of gluten-free food, from eye rolls to staff being downright rude or refusing to cater for me, to the point where I’ve even walked out. I didn’t choose to have this illness, so I refuse to patronise any restaurant that treats me like an inconvenience because I want to eat out, just like everybody else. The EU legislation is going to make my life easier.
Customers do, of course, have some responsibility. If you’ve asked for gluten-free food, don’t make any exceptions for the chips with the seasoned flour coating or the croutons on the salad. I know a caesar salad isn’t quite the same without them, but if you want your condition to be taken seriously, you have to be consistent.
I find it difficult to believe those 100-plus chefs haven’t got the knowledge and ability to adapt to the market. I know some of the allergens are a bit obscure – lupin seeds, for example – but I don’t know of many dishes that require those as an essential ingredient. Is it really that hard to put a few letters on a menu? It’s a shame they’re not embracing it as an opportunity to be more creative. When I was diagnosed, I suddenly had to change the way I cooked and baked. I’m now more adventurous in the kitchen. I’ve had to experiment with recipes to make gluten-free versions of my favourite foods, and dairy-free creations for my dad’s wife, who suffers from a dairy allergy. I even made a gluten-free wedding cake for friends last year, which was every bit as decadent as anything you’d get from a “normal” baker.
Smart restaurateurs are embracing the trend, such as 2 Oxford Place in Leeds, which has a 100% gluten-free kitchen and menu, along with dairy-free, vegetarian and vegan options. Tt is not a big chain – it’s a small, local business, exactly the kind that Leith thinks will be damaged by the new law. No evidence of this in Leeds, with 2 Oxford Place frequently booked out and online reviews rating it “excellent”. When you consider that 2% of UK adults are diagnosed with a food allergy and one in 100 have coeliac disease, the attitude of Britain’s top chefs is looking pretty outdated and churlish.
• This article was amended on 17 March 2015. An earlier version said that Michel Roux was among the chefs who had written to the Telegraph criticising new EU rules on allergen labelling in restaurant. That is not the case; the chef who did so was Albert Roux |
METRO VANCOUVER — Vancouver Canucks centre Manny Malhotra continued his training regimen for the possibility of a National Hockey League season Friday — this time with a major change to the playing surface.
Malhotra, who is about to enter his third season with the Canucks, traded in the ice for the soccer pitch and took part in the Vancouver Whitecaps’ two-hour training session at Inter River Park in North Vancouver.
An established guru in hockey’s faceoff circles, the 32-year-old from Mississauga, Ont., took his try at midfield. Rarely, if at all, did he look out of place.
Clad in a navy blue jersey with his familiar No. 27 on the back, Malhotra took part in a number of drills and scrimmages, missing on a few good looks but scoring a hat trick during one of the prolonged mini games.
“It was fantastic, a lot of fun for me,” said Malhotra, who, during a scrimmage, spun Jun Marques Davidson around with a beautiful move through the legs of the Whitecaps’ true No. 27.
“I grew up playing soccer. I’ve always dreamed of what it would be like to train with a pro team, so it was an incredible experience. I was definitely nervous just trying to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself.”
The opportunity to train with the Whitecaps came after the Canucks community department began working on a cross promotion with the local Major League Soccer side.
Malhotra, whose wife Joann is the sister of Steve Nash, a part-owner of the Whitecaps, eagerly jumped at the training session when offered the chance.
“I thought he did very well,” said Whitecaps coach Martin Rennie. “He’s an excellent athlete and obviously he’s played soccer growing up and that’s a shame for Canadian soccer that he chose to play hockey. He’s got a lot of quality and hopefully he enjoyed it.”
Once the session concluded, Whitecaps captain Jay DeMerit took Malhotra aside to work on numerous fundamentals, including volleys, headers and, finally, blasting the ball home from about 15 metres out.
A veteran of 855 NHL regular season games and a first-round pick, seventh overall, of the New York Rangers in 1998, Malhotra had to choose between hockey and soccer as a teenager.
“When I was 13-years-old, I grew up playing soccer, that was my first sport,” he said. “I started getting into both soccer and hockey and playing at a competitive level, travelling quite a bit. (I) remember my father saying I had to make a decision — soccer or hockey. And I decided, being in Canada, there’s a lot more opportunity to play hockey a lot farther in life and in higher levels. So I decided to make the decision then.”
There was a running joke after training that perhaps the Canuck would be in line for a MLS contract.
“I think probably lower his wage demands first,” Rennie quipped.
“I’d take it in a heartbeat,” Malhotra added with a laugh. “I was joking with my wife about … pending a lockout, possibly changing careers. It’s always been a joke in our household, but like I said, you come out here, see these guys do it live, see what they do best, it makes those dreams when I’m playing in men’s league calm down a bit.”
It may have been fun, but it was hardly easy. Malhotra had heavy beads of sweat pouring off the side of his sun-drenched head well after the session ended. There are subtle similarities with respect to conditioning for athletes between the two sports, but there are some obvious differences, as well.
“This is such (an) aerobic sport. You look at these guys running around here like rabbits, no real slowing down in their game, hardly sweating, some of them,” said Malhotra. “For us, we’re used to 30-second, 40-second practice drills and getting your rest in, so we’re quite anaerobic, sprint-based sport. So to do these four-minute drills is … quite taxing.”
Malhotra has been skating with his Canucks teammates at UBC in preparation for training camp, although it appears more each day the NHL owners will lock out the players, as the league and players’ association have hit a stalemate in CBA talks.
“Whatever happens on (Sept. 15), we’ll continue to keep in shape and make sure we’re ready for the beginning of the season,” he said.
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I’ve been meaning to write a brief entry about careers in IT. After reading Ethan’s CCIE vs Experience and First Job articles, and remembering Tony’s Dare to be Stupid article, I thought I’d rudely insert myself into the conversation. This is more of a rant than anything, so I may meander a bit…
I never finished my degree. I wish I had, but not in IT. Now that I’m older and looking backwards on the things I could have done differently, I would have finished a degree in anything but IT. I’ll tell you why: Even in IT, an IT degree is useless. Unless you are graduating from MIT, or Stanford, or some other school of similar stature then get a degree in anything but IT. Get a degree in business or education or some other engineering discipline… anything.
The very best folks in IT don’t strictly need certifications or degrees because, as a matter of fact, the curriculum for these things in most cases is never really current and doesn’t really teach you all the things you need to know to succeed. Certifications are slightly more useful than degrees I think, they can help you get started. Ethan covered some of this in his article though, so I won’t harp on it. Where I will diverge from Ethan is that there is one other thing besides experience you really need to have to be successful in IT: You need to “get it.” Specifically, I mean you should be fairly auto-didactic. You should be able to “figure it out” when you need to.
Look, the people that set themselves apart are driven to succeed in this field. They think about it constantly. They can’t *not* think about it. Some love it. However, they don’t all love it and sometimes they even wish they could walk away from it and never think about it again. They tell themselves that this year they won’t work ridiculous hours as much or they won’t come home and listen to some silly website’s podcasts or read blogs or blow another $50 or $100 on some O’Reilly, CiscoPress, or Wiley book. But they do anyways. Knowledge and understanding mean more points of analysis. Ultimately, there is supreme joy when balance is reached in the ant farm. There is a sort of unattainable Nirvana that we grasp for where the Rube Goldberg contraption is perfectly balanced at every point. When this kind of person gets a glimpse of that, it feels good. And it keeps that fire burning.
You may not be driven that completely hard, but if I’m interviewing you, I’m not going to ask you about whats on your resume. I’m going to see what you will do after you get hired to be a route/switch implementation engineer when someone asks you to work on a SQL database for the monitoring system. Or if they ask you to try and stitch some open source tools together with Perl so you have some semblance of NetFlow collection in your network. What will you do when path-redirection fails between a Callmanager and an Avaya PBX? I don’t care if you’ve never troubleshot a VoIP problem before, you are being asked to now. Sorry you didn’t get $10k in training for it… use the internet. Figure it out.
Some people would say thats just not fair, but your answer to this will determine if you get to (a) grind through low-level projects and issues or if you get to (b) work multi-vendor, multi-discipline projects and issues that speak to the overall design and architecture of the network.
Degrees and Certs can round out the picture. Unfortunately, I’ve sat through interviews with other “IE” level certified folks that just didn’t “get it.” The passion wasn’t there. I’ve had to work with folks that when asked to do something not in their job description would say stuff like “Not my job.” Its not pleasant. Sometimes it really isn’t your job or a good use of your time, but sometimes noone else is going to do it or even *can* do it. If you really love technology, if you “get it” than you should be excited by these kind of challenges.
This is where Tony’s article really is a good one. Read it. Dare to be stupid. If you get that “IE” the most important thing you should have learned is that you really aren’t an expert in anything. You should have realized that networking, let alone IT as a whole, is vast and its just not possible to know it all.
If you have the passion, if you like the challenges, than for the love of all that is holy… don’t get a degree in IT. You will teach yourself infinitely more that is infinitely more relevant soon enough. Besides you never know when that business degree will come in handy.
So where to start though? How do you get that snowball at the top of the hill on the ground and rolling? Wherever you are at, find something and become the “go-to” person for it. ANYTHING. There is always something, even if its not strictly related to what you were hired to do, that is neglected in the network. Maybe its DNS. NMS. Maybe its the SNA stuff that is never going away. It could be a database, a collection of scripts… who knows. Find these thing(s) and learn them. Think about ways to do it better. Document it. Own it. Learn how it relates to the business and the rest of the environment.
Second, you need to learn how to become an “expert” (realizing that you never really are) in anything as quickly as possible using the internet, books (Safari is great when you only need the two paragraphs from that 900 page $90 book), and whatever resources you have available to you. Learn how to read standards. Learn how to look at packet captures from multiple points in the network so you can see what those standards look like in action. Teach yourself the basics of programming and a scripting language or two. You may never use the ones you pick initially, but once you get the hang of it then learning other languages as required won’t take as long. Learning how to learn… learning how to think takes time. And humility.
Develop a “spidey-sense” for when things aren’t right. This will take time, but you’ll get there. Some people I’ve met… I swear they are witches. How they can intuit stuff borders on ESP. You should be driving towards that. You know what helps *tremendously* here? Learn other vendors. You know what I’m talking about. It doesn’t matter what your SE or that distinguished engineer tells you… it *does* help to know about other vendors. Especially if you are driven to understand technology. You will start asking all kinds of new questions when you go down this path…
Eventually as you progress in your career, your experience and your resume will start to speak for itself. When you speak, people will hear that you are the type of person that can assess a situation and can intuit technology. When I start asking you off-the-wall questions that have nothing to do with OSPF (I don’t care if its your favorite protocol, nobody aside from Russ White or Jeff Doyle really knows all the bits and fields in every packet type), you’ll be able to speak to how you would tackle that kind of problem and where your entry points are for gaining an understanding of it.
Its this kind of drive that shows me that when something weird in the network does break (you know.. the thing you did get hired to keep passing packets) you are more likely to understand the problem with the resources available to you and fix it.
You won’t be escalating with Cisco’s TAC for months trying to get multicast to work again… hopefully. |
International deal-making fundamentally hinges on assessments of national self-interest by the parties involved. This seemingly obvious statement both explains the persistent failure of the global climate change negotiations and offers a pathway to success.
The 2009 Copenhagen climate conference demonstrated the difficulty of reaching an international treaty. PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY IMAGES
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — agreed in Rio in 1992 and ratified by 195 countries, including the United States — was premised from its very first words on the idea that “change in the earth’s climate and its adverse effects are a common concern of humankind.” It sought to organize global action to address a threat to the global commons — the atmosphere and climate system on which all life on earth depends. Such global action, however, depends on national governments, whose first responsibility is to their own people and well-being. For that reason, the climate negotiations have faltered. Nations could not agree on who is to blame, on how to allocate emissions, or on projections for the future. Many have argued that emissions limits are inimical to their short-term economic interests. Some depend on fossil fuel production, and others perceive fossil fuel development as the only route out of extreme poverty, even as others have begun to pursue a more sustainable future.
Meanwhile, reports about climate change science are increasingly gloomy. Vast systemic change is more apparent every year, and the latest reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as this month’s National Climate Assessment in the U.S., bring even more bad news.
Fortunately, environmental transformation and technological change are not waiting for this paralysis of political agreement to end. Cleaner energy sources — renewable energy, especially wind and solar, as well as the least carbon-intensive fossil fuel, natural gas — are increasing their penetration of the world’s energy markets, too slowly but with increasing momentum. Electronic sensors and controls are enabling better management of energy demand and more intelligent energy use — a catalytic change. Coal remains globally dominant, but without widespread deployment of carbon capture technologies, its days are probably numbered. Cleaner alternatives are advancing in part because of concerns about climate change, but more importantly because technological progress is making them more attractive, economically and politically.
This plan would change the psychology of climate change from one of burden to opportunity.
What once seemed a mirage is becoming a reality: The world can now glimpse the prospect of an economy largely dependent on abundant, inexhaustible, affordable clean energy. We are in the early stages of a global race to supply a set of new technologies and scalable systems — likely the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century.
These changes are becoming more clearly recognized and understood, but the current negotiating framework is not designed to encourage each nation to pursue them based on its own interests and national advantages. We think the time has come for the international community to alter its collective climate strategy, cease the search for the impossible all-encompassing top-down agreement — described unattractively as “burden sharing” — and instead encourage an approach that builds on national self-interest and spurs a “race to the top” in low-carbon energy solutions. This would change the psychology of the climate change issue from one of burden to opportunity, and change the likely outcome from one of hand-wringing about failure to excitement about tangible action to build a better world. This is the lens through which to view the prospects for a new climate agreement at international talks in Paris in 2015.
A new agreement should recognize that a simple one-formula-fits-all framework is not feasible: We don’t know how to allocate emissions among nations, the global economy makes this impossible anyway, and the early differentiation between developed and developing economies is no longer valid. Instead, a new start is needed, based in part on what has been called “pledge and review”: Nations will pledge concrete steps to reduce their carbon emissions and periodically submit their progress to the international community for review.
Rather than strive for an elusive, binding global treaty, the idea is to encourage countries to make strong national commitments in their own economic self-interest and then roll those up in the Paris agreement, which would not take the form of a treaty and thus would not need to be ratified. Countries would be motivated to take these actions in response to competition, both economic and political; international peer pressure; and the aspirations of their own people. The overarching goal is to spur national action to bend the carbon curve downward in a meaningful and measurable fashion, giving greater certainty to the private sector to innovate and invest in low-carbon technologies. This is the world’s best option for accelerating progress and averting catastrophic climate change.
In the 17 years since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, very little movement has occurred. The U.S. Senate failed to ratify the treaty largely because of fears that emissions limits would unfairly harm certain sectors of the economy, and developed and developing countries have been at odds over historical responsibility for emissions. Globally, limits on emissions seemed to be limits on prosperity and growth, and the defenders of the status quo — powerful industry groups, concentrations of sovereign wealth, and ideological warriors — argued that climate activists were seeking to sabotage the modern industrial economy.
The shift to a low-carbon economy is occurring even without a legally binding global agreement.
Happily, technological progress is defusing that argument as the passage of time and the increased intensity of climate impacts make the need for concerted action ever more urgent. Public and private investment in research, development, and deployment of clean energy technologies is yielding results.
This shift to a low-carbon economy is occurring even without the Holy Grail of most climate negotiators — a new “legally binding” global agreement. Countries, states, cities, and companies are taking action, partly out of concern about climate change, but also because such action is in their own economic interest — either directly (through money-saving efficiency measures like LED street lights) or indirectly (by saving lives now cut short by air pollution). As the market for low-carbon technologies expands, they will improve further in performance and price and become even more competitive.
While the higher initial capital cost of clean energy technologies remains a hurdle, over time the lack of fuel costs for renewable energy (such as sunlight or wind) is the offsetting cost variable. The cost savings from energy efficiency similarly produce a predictable and attractive rate of return. Indeed, one recent survey found that investments in low-carbon solutions generate a positive return of 33 percent. On the other side of the equation, it has long been recognized that the price of fossil fuels does not reflect their many external costs, including air pollution, political and security risks, and damage from climate change.
China’s recent history exemplifies both the historic tension between development and climate and a pathway to reconcile them. Coal fueled the country’s remarkable economic growth but also produced unhealthy air and intolerable environmental damage. In response, China’s leaders are engineering a serious shift toward wind and solar energy, greater energy efficiency, and development of shale gas, based on political and economic self-interest. This reversal may lead to greater alignment on climate policy among China, the United States, and the European Union and also influence other developing countries.
Through these examples and many others, a new path is emerging toward accelerated progress on climate change, based on a theme of opportunity as the shift to renewables and increased efficiency produces new businesses, more jobs, cleaner air and water, and better public health. The political reality is that countries increasingly will see that this path is in their own self-interest. They should be encouraged to compete for advantage in a race to the top, rather than bicker over emissions limits.
The Paris climate conference, scheduled for December 2015, is the setting for action on a new long-term global agreement. Central to success will be four principal elements.
The first is an affirmation of global objectives. Nations should reassert the world’s commitment — first stated in the 1992 Framework Convention — to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” as well as the agreement in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord to limit the increase in global temperatures to 2 degrees C. They should link this vision to specific and measurable national commitments that will signal a global turn from words to action and a new can-do attitude for addressing climate change.
The second is making those national commitments to emissions reductions. As an interim step, heads of state at the Climate Summit in September 2014 in New York City should discuss and affirm this new approach as the central direction for the Paris negotiators. They should be encouraged to outdo each other with new and stronger commitments to specific actions in each of the four “building block” areas agreed in the 2007 Bali Action Plan — mitigation, adaptation, technology, and finance. In that way, they can position themselves as investing in the emerging clean energy economy, as protecting their farmers and others who depend on a predictable climate, and as caretakers of future generations — consistent with their own national self-interest. By the time of the Paris conference in 2015, all countries should have clearly stated five-year commitments for 2020 and long-term goals — with reviewable interim milestones — for the period beyond 2020.
A coordinated global price on carbon should be considered after 2020 if progress is inadequate.
This building block strategy is building momentum. The United States has been advocating a bottom-up approach since Copenhagen, and at talks in Warsaw last November countries were invited to communicate their intended contributions to emissions reduction by the first quarter of 2015. The largest immediate impact will come from reducing powerful but relatively short-lived pollutants, like black carbon (especially soot from cooking fires), methane, and HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons, used in cooling equipment), and by stabilizing the world’s forest cover. Such steps can be taken relatively inexpensively through partnerships that can include coalitions of companies as well as governments.
As a third element of the package, leaders in Paris must agree to a systemic review of their emissions reductions pledges. It is unlikely that the Paris commitments by themselves will immediately put the world on a trajectory consistent with the 2 degrees C target. For that reason, negotiators must set up a review process through which an international body like the IPCC would monitor progress and report back at three-year intervals. There is no appetite yet in the international community for a mechanism to force action by countries that offer weak pledges or none at all. Both carrots and sticks — participation in a global carbon trading system, for example, or the imposition of border tax penalties based on carbon pricing — are options that could be considered in the future. A coordinated global price on carbon — the most economically efficient path to reduce emissions — should be considered after 2020 if progress is deemed inadequate. Considerable political obstacles remain, but leading companies — from Google to ExxonMobil — are preparing for this eventuality by adopting internal carbon prices for use in making investment decisions.
Finance is the final key to a global deal. At Copenhagen in 2009, the United States memorably pledged that developed countries would mobilize $100 billion a year in climate change assistance for the rest of the world by 2020.
MORE FROM YALE e360 UN Panel Looks to Renewables as the Key to Stabilizing Climate In its latest report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes a strong case for a sharp increase in low-carbon energy production, especially solar and wind, and provides hope that this transformation can occur in time to hold off the worst impacts of global warming.
READ MORE In its latest report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes a strong case for a sharp increase in low-carbon energy production, especially solar and wind, and provides hope that this transformation can occur in time to hold off the worst impacts of global warming.
At a time of fiscal retrenchment in the West, the chance of that pledge being met in the form of additional development assistance is approximately zero. The pledge is eminently achievable, however, in the context of global energy investment, which has an annual flow a dozen times as large as the amount pledged in Copenhagen.
The capital needed for a global shift to low-carbon energy systems can be mobilized from highly liquid but risk-averse institutional investors, such as pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds, which have assets of more than $80 trillion. The way to attract these funds is to engage public finance entities as partners to reduce investment risk, particularly in developing countries, and ensure safe, predictable returns.
Whether driven by a price on carbon, a reduction in fossil fuel subsidies, or continuing technological innovation, national action and large-scale investment to transform the world’s energy systems can initiate a more optimistic era of concrete progress on climate change. Combined with a compelling global vision, public-private collaboration, and a pledge to return to the negotiating table at regular intervals until success is achieved, this is a strong and forward-looking package that could be agreed in Paris in 2015. It would deliver what, more than anything else, the world needs — a decision to act, not just negotiate. It might even be led by the world’s two largest emitters of CO2 — the United States and China. It is already consistent with the U.S. position, China appears ready to bring forward new commitments, and the two countries are actively collaborating on climate and energy in a number of ways.
Whether such steps will be enough to avert climate catastrophe remains unclear. Even if the major industrialized economies were able to reduce their emissions completely, the prognosis for the earth’s atmosphere would still be grim if resource-rich developing countries do not change course. What Paris can do is help accelerate the pace of technological adoption and change, toward the day when the cleanest energy sources are also the cheapest and thus become dominant. The payoff will be improved public health and increased economic well-being. Most importantly, the global climate will be prevented from going off the rails. |
User Info: Samsaric_Spiral Samsaric_Spiral 5 years ago #1
In the SMT games, the Judeo-Christian faiths seem portrayed as being extremist or one-sided. For example, in SMT II you kill YHVH on all the paths, including Law, due to extreme authoritarianism and megalomania. Moreover, SMT I seems similar to IV in that it has an implicit bias for neutrality, and the main neutral hero in I is Lao Tzu . I feel as if Kaneko and other creators of SMT series, find moral dualism and monotheism destructive due to absolutism, hence why YHVH/Ahura Mazda always seems to have an extreme plan that involves unneeded sacrifices. In SMT I, Lao Tzu explains neutrality is the best due to "balance"; it is a central tenet of Japanese Soto and Rinzae Zen, Thervadan Buddhism (called Middle-Way), and it possesses a strong parallel with the Daoist conception of Wu Wei. Moreover, in SMT IV, neutrality also seems to possess more of a preference due to spending 15 more hrs on that path, having a more complete ending, not killing Isabeau, and etc. Moreover, in SMT IV's DLC Archangel I M is alluded to be lying about the archangels. Nuking Japan was YHVH's intention all along and fits well with the previous games . In Nocturne, Lucifer is also portrayed as better than YHVH, due to him not damning the protagonist for his choice, but the Great Will or YHVH express great disapproval, even threatening to have the protagonist endlessly suffer much like Aleph in SMT II. How is this not another stab at the existence of a power-hungry, monotheistic creator God?
I do not think dismissing these criticisms on the basis it is "just a game" is valuable. When Salman Rushdie wrote Satanic Verse, criticizing many problems he saw in Islam, does it make sense to ignore the criticisms on the basis of it just being a "book" or "artwork"? Also, I do not think the games' notions of "right" or "wrong" are entirely* based off one's own perspective of what. I am not an art student, but I feel as if every piece of art is made with some biases from the creators. In SMT games, there is evident criticism against the Judeo-Christian faiths that is not fair to dismiss or ignore. It's not just a game! It is challenging our beliefs in what we find just or fair.
Here are some questions for people who don't agree:
1. If the games were NOT to have criticism against Judeo-Christian faiths, why research in-depth into it? Obviously, the developers put more research into all the theology, and they don't ever seem to portray the angels, YHVH, or any other Law-centered character as benevolent in the main series. I am ignoring DeSu:OC for now.
2. Why do the developers depict Zurvan (from Zoroastrianism) and other Zoroastrian creatures in the older Majin Tensei games the same way as YHVH and his angels? It's due to their criticism against moral dualism and monotheism, for Christianity and Islam are generally agreed to be a carbon-copy of Zoroastrianism, the first monotheistic and morally dualistic religion. They had a reason to implement these mythological figures too.
That's enough for now...
I possibly feel as if these games also possess a Shinto bias due to the fact none of the polytheistic demons possess more authority than the other, trying to control its followers, but I have not spent enough time evaluating this specific claim. I am for certain the Japanese population, on average, is not fond of Christianity, especially considering only S. Korea accepted it. Here is another topic I have a feeling will get me flamed, but this time I feel more assured in what I perceive. This deals with the themes of the SMT games, so it is not off-topic or flaming. Due to freedom of speech, I am able to express this in a civilized manner, and if this topic gets deleted, it would be bad.In the SMT games, the Judeo-Christian faiths seem portrayed as being extremist or one-sided. For example, in SMT II you killMoreover, SMT I seems similar to IV in that it has an implicit bias for neutrality, and the main neutral hero in I is. I feel as if Kaneko and other creators of SMT series, find moral dualism and monotheism destructive due to absolutism, hence why YHVH/Ahura Mazda always seems to have an extreme plan that involves unneeded sacrifices. In SMT I,Moreover, in SMT IV,Moreover, in SMT IV's DLC Archangel I. In Nocturne,I do not think dismissing these criticisms on the basis it is "just a game" is valuable. When Salman Rushdie wrote Satanic Verse, criticizing many problems he saw in Islam, does it make sense to ignore the criticisms on the basis of it just being a "book" or "artwork"? Also, I do not think the games' notions of "right" or "wrong" are entirely* based off one's own perspective of what. I am not an art student, but I feel as if every piece of art is made with some biases from the creators. In SMT games, there is evident criticism against the Judeo-Christian faiths that is not fair to dismiss or ignore. It's not just a game! It is challenging our beliefs in what we find just or fair.Here are some questions for people who don't agree:1. If the games were NOT to have criticism against Judeo-Christian faiths, why research in-depth into it? Obviously, the developers put more research into all the theology, and they don't ever seem to portray the angels, YHVH, or any other Law-centered character as benevolent in the main series. I am ignoring DeSu:OC for now.2. Why do the developers depict Zurvan (from Zoroastrianism) and other Zoroastrian creatures in the older Majin Tensei games the same way as YHVH and his angels? It's due to their criticism against moral dualism and monotheism, for Christianity and Islam are generally agreed to be a carbon-copy of Zoroastrianism, the first monotheistic and morally dualistic religion. They had a reason to implement these mythological figures too.That's enough for now...I possibly feel as if these games also possess a Shinto bias due to the fact none of the polytheistic demons possess more authority than the other, trying to control its followers, but I have not spent enough time evaluating this specific claim. I am for certain the Japanese population, on average, is not fond of Christianity, especially considering only S. Korea accepted it. |
Recently we caught up with Zak Bagans while he and his “Ghost Adventures” crew were in the middle of shooting the new season and got the scoop on when you’ll be able to visit his haunted museum in Vegas and what you can expect next from Travel Channel’s paranormal juggernaut show.
The question on the minds of lots of fans is simple… When will they be able to visit Bagans’ museum of haunted objects that was featured in the show “Deadly Possessions”?
“The building [that houses the museum] is from 1938, and we have confirmed that people have died inside of it over the years,” Bagans tells us. “We brought in a pair of construction workers from Los Angeles who specialize in set design. After being there just a short while, they both, literally, ran out of my building and quit after having experiences inside. As a result construction has slowed a bit, thus resulting in a delay in opening the museum to the public. Rest assured I’m as anxious to get this place open as anybody, and as soon as I have a concrete opening date, you’ll be the first to know about it.”
Interestingly enough, “The construction guys quitting actually caused us to investigate the place for an episode of ‘Ghost Adventures.’ The museum… it will touch you. You hear voices. You feel cold energies pass through you. There’s never been anything like it.”
Speaking of the new season and what to expect from the show that started it all:
“In the new season we decided to return to Winchester Mystery House. Our first investigation there was the ONLY one in ‘Ghost Adventures’ history that we had to stop in the middle of because of something very serious that happened to me. We also have an episode coming up in which for the first time Billy [Tolley] completely loses himself during an investigation of a demonic infestation, which results in some of the most chilling evidence to date. That place is described as the ‘House of Evil.’”
Four remaining brand-new episodes from last season will premiere beginning on July 16th.
For more info visit “Ghost Adventures” on Travel Channel, and “like” “Ghost Adventures” on Facebook. In addition be sure to follow @GhostAdventures, @Zak_Bagans, @JayWasley, @AaronGoodwin, and @BillyTolley on Twitter using the hashtag #GhostAdventures. |
Linguistic map of Schleswig in the mid-19th Century.
North Frisian is a minority language of Germany, spoken by about 10,000 people in North Frisia.[3] The language is part of the larger group of the West Germanic Frisian languages. The language comprises 10 dialects which are themselves divided into an insular and a mainland group.
North Frisian is closely related to the Saterland Frisian language of Northwest Germany and West Frisian which is spoken in the Netherlands. All of these are also closely related to the English language forming the Anglo-Frisian group.
The phonological system of the North Frisian dialects is strongly being influenced by Standard German and is slowly adapting to that of the German language. With a number of native speakers probably even less than 10,000 and decreasing use in mainland North Frisia, the North Frisian language is endangered. It is protected as a minority language and has become an official language in the Nordfriesland district and on Heligoland island.
Classification [ edit ]
The closest relatives of North Frisian are the two other Frisian languages, the Saterland Frisian of north-western Lower Saxony, Germany, and the West Frisian language spoken in the northern Netherlands. Together, the three sub-groups form the group of Frisian languages.
English is also closely related to Frisian. The two languages are classified in a common Anglo-Frisian group, which is grouped among the Ingvaeonic languages, together with Low German. The related Low German has developed differently since Old Saxon times and has lost many Ingvaeonic characteristics.[4]
Dialects [ edit ]
Overview [ edit ]
The North Frisian dialects can be grouped into two main dialectal divisions: mainland and insular dialects. Altogether, both groups have 10 dialects.[5] The dialect spoken on the Halligen is one of the mainland dialects though. Typically, one distinguishes between the following 10 dialects, which have been spoken since the beginning of Frisian linguistic studies in the 19th century:
Insular North Frisian
Sylt Frisian (Söl'ring)
Föhr-Amrum Frisian (Fering/Öömrang)
Heligolandic Frisian (Halunder)
Mainland North Frisian
The mainland and insular dialects clearly differ from each other because they were shaped by Frisian immigrants in different centuries. The islands of Sylt, Föhr and Amrum were colonised in around AD 800, and the mainland was settled by Frisians in AD 1100.
Also are various influences of neighbouring languages on the dialects. On Sylt, Föhr and Amrum and in parts of the northern mainland, there is a strong Danish (South Jutlandic) influence, but on Heligoland and the rest of mainland North Frisia, the Low German influence is predominant. Moreover, there has historically been little exchange between the dialects and so hardly any lingua franca could develop and there was no cultural centre in North Frisia for which the dialect could have had a leading role.
Samples [ edit ]
The sentence displayed below in many variants reads, "'Shine, old moon, shine!', cried Häwelmann, but the moon was nowhere to be seen and the stars neither; they had all already gone to bed" (based on Theodor Storm's Der kleine Häwelmann).[6]
Insular
Söl'ring (dialect of Sylt)
"Ljucht, ual Muun, ljucht!" skriilt Häwelmann, man di Muun wiar narigen tö sen en uk di Stiaren ek; ja wiar al altermaal tö Bēr gingen.
Fering-Öömrang (dialect of Föhr and Amrum)
"Locht, ual muun, locht!" rep Heewelmaan, man a muun wiar nochhuaren tu sen an a stäären uk ei; jo wiar al altermaal tu baad gingen.
Heligolandic (dialect of Helgoland)
"Lochte, ool Muun, lochte!" rüp Heäwelman, oawers de Muun wear naarni tu sin'n en uk de Steern ni; dja wear al allemoal tu Baad gingen.
Mainland
Northern Goesharde Frisian, Hoorninger Fräisch variety of Langenhorn
"Jocht, uule moune, jocht!" biilked Hääwelmoon, ors e moune waas närngs to schüns än da steere ok ai; ja weern al aal to beede gingen.
Wiedingharde Frisian
"Ljocht, uuile moone, ljocht!" biilked Hääwelmuon, män e moone was näärgen to schüns än uk e steere ai; jä würn al altomoale to beerd gingen.
Halligen Frisian (although it is spoken on the Halligen islands, it is linguistically grouped with the mainland dialects)
"Jaacht, uale mööne, jaacht!" bölked Hääwelmoon, man de mööne woas näärngs to siinen än de steere uk ee; jä weern al altomaole to beed giangen.
Mooring (dialect of Bökingharde)
"Jucht, üülje moune, jucht!" biiljked Hääwelmoon, ouers e moune wus nargne tu schüns än e stääre uk ai; ja wjarn ål åltumååle tu beed lim.
Note that, despite the differences between the dialects, the Fering and Öömrang are highly similar; in this example nearly identical.
The following table further demonstrates the similarities and differences between the various dialects.[7]
Extinct dialects [ edit ]
The Eiderstedt Frisian on the Eiderstedt peninsula were abandoned in favour of Low German during the 17th and 18th centuries. In contrast to the northern hundreds, Eiderstedt was economically strong and wealthy and was oriented towards the southern, Low German parts of Schleswig-Holstein. Moreover, there was a strong Dutch immigration during the 16th century.[8]
A similar situation was to be found on the island of Strand, which was destroyed during the Burchardi flood. The population of the eastern, remaining part of Strand, the modern Nordstrand, did not succeed in rebuilding the dikes on their own. Therefore, many Frisian speaking people left their homeland on Strand or were otherwise not able to maintain their native language against mostly Dutch-speaking immigrants. On Pellworm, the western remainder of Strand, the repair of the dikes was quickly accomplished and so the Frisian language was still spoken in the 18th century, until it also vanished due to changes in population structure. The old Strand Frisian was presumably closest to Halligen Frisian.
Likewise close to Halligen Frisian was the Wyk Frisian that used to be spoken in Wyk auf Föhr until the town completely shifted to Low German. The Wyk dialect is thought to have developed from the dialects of immigrants from the Halligen and Strand island.
The dialect that most recently died out is Southern Goesharde Frisian which became extinct with the death of its last speaker in the early 1980s. Other mainland dialects are also facing extinction.
North of the German-Danish border North Frisian was spoken only in some marsh-farms, located directly at the border.[9]
Due to the large number of dialects there is no original native name for the North Frisian language as such. E.g. the Wiedingharde and Halligen Frisians call their language freesk, in the Bökingharde it is called frasch, and in the Goesharde likewise fräisch or freesch. While these names all translate to "Frisian" the native names of the insular dialects refer to the particular islands as in Fering, Öömrang, Söl'ring or Halunder. E.g. "Frisian" would mean "fresk" in the Föhr dialect.
The North Frisians eventually agreed upon the inter-dialectal name "friisk" which corresponds to the West Frisian native name "frysk". This designation is today mostly used when the North Frisian collectivity is addressed or in the names of official institutions such as Nordfriisk Instituut, Friisk Foriining or Friisk Gesäts. The northern section of the Interfrisian Council has however kept its name "Frasche Rädj" in the Mooring dialect.
Phonology [ edit ]
Despite the strong differences among the North Frisian dialects, there are still some traits of phonology that are more or less common to all dialects. Among them is the lowering from [ɪ] to [a], which is mostly complete in the central dialects but is only at the stage [ɛ] or [eː] in the periphery. For example, the word "fish" translates to Mooring fasch and Fering-Öömrang fask but Söl'ring fesk (cf. Low German: Fisch/Fisk, Danish: fisk, German: Fisch, Dutch: vis).
The distribution of the lenition of the unvoiced plosives p, t and k is similar as they have become voiced plosives and partially even developed to fricatives in the central dialects. That can be demonstrated from the verb "to know": Mooring waase, Fering-Öömrang wed, Sölring weet, Halunder wet (cf. West Frisian witte, Low German weten, German wissen).
The North Frisian dialects differ from modern Standard German by a more diverse system of diphthongs and consonants. All of the dialects have an additional line of palatalizations, which is uncommon for a Germanic language. Until recently, an additional number of dental consonants that changed the meaning of a word occurred in the dialect of Föhr. In general, it can be noted that the insular dialects feature a relatively complicated consonantal system, but the mainland dialects have more diverse vowels.
Recently, the phonological system of the North Frisian dialects has been strongly being influenced by Standard German and is slowly adapting to its system.[10]
Current situation [ edit ]
Officially, the number of North Frisian speakers ranges from 8,000 to 10,000[3] but linguists propose significantly lower numbers. In 2007, Århammar estimated a total of 5,000 speakers inside and 1,500 to 2,000 speakers outside North Frisia proper.[5] Exact surveys do not exist.
North Frisian is an endangered language, as in most places, children no longer learn it. In UNESCO's Red Book of Endangered Languages, North Frisian is classified as "seriously endangered".[11] Exceptions are a few villages on the islands of Föhr and Amrum and the Risum-Lindholm area. Especially in the western parts of Föhr, the language community is still relatively common.[5] The number of speakers on Föhr and Amrum alone is estimated to around 3,500. The other dialects are, in fact, seriously endangered, like Karrharde Frisian, Central Goesharde and Halligen Frisian.
The elementary and grammar school on Amrum is called Öömrang Skuul and, among other subjects, focuses on teaching the local dialect. Fering is also taught in schools on Föhr and the Risum Skole/Risem Schölj in Risum-Lindholm on the mainland is a combined Danish-North Frisian elementary school.
All speakers of North Frisian are at least bilingual (North Frisian and Standard German). Many are trilingual (North Frisian, Standard German and Low German) and, especially along the Danish border, quadrilingualism used to be widespread (North Frisian, Standard German, Low German and South Jutlandic).
In Schleswig-Holstein, North Frisian is protected by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages as a minority language. On 24 December 2004 a state law became effective in Schleswig-Holstein that recognises the North Frisian language for official use in the Nordfriesland district and on Heligoland.[12]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
General references
Walker, Alastair G.H.; Ommo Wilts (2001). "Die nordfriesischen Mundarten". In Horst H. Munske. Handbuch des Friesischen – Handbook of Frisian Studies (in German and English). Tübingen: Niemeyer. ISBN 3-484-73048-X. |
Updated 03/12/2015: Galpin unveiled the first images of first production Rocket - a car dressed in a beautiful black with exposed carbon fiber racing stripes. The car was presented at Amelia Island.
The Mustang Rocket will be available in very limited numbers though Galpin’s Ford dealer network or the select hand-picked Ford dealers around the world. While the company hasn’t given any official word on pricing, the talk around the LA Auto Show floor put its sticker price just over the $100,000 mark.
Fisker and the guys at GAS didn’t stop there. The suspension is updated with fully adjustable shocks, enabling owners to dial in the style of performance they want. Large, 21-inch wheels are wrapped with Pirelli P-Zero rubber.
The Rocket features a substantially reworked body with a new front end, hood, and wider fenders — all crafted from carbon fiber. Under the Rocket’s hood lies the Mustang GT’s original 5.0-liter V-8 but with a Whipple supercharger forcing air down its throat. The spinning screws give the Coyote engine an impressive 725 horsepower. It’s all routed through the ‘Stang’s six-speed manual gearbox.
Fisker and GAS president Beau Boeckmann first started working on the idea after the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance back in August 2014. The two worked feverously to ready the design sketches and performance upgrades for the car — and boy, has it paid off.
While Ford was busy making a huge splash with the 2016 Mustang GT350, Henrik Fisker and Galpin Auto Sports pulled the covers off their super-Mustang creation, the Rocket. But this isn’t a one-off SEMA late-comer, it’s the first in a series of low-volume Mustangs set for production by GAS.
Updated History
Updated 11/21/2014: Galpin and Fisker unveiled the Rocket and the 2014 Los Angeles Auto Show and announced that the production will begin in early December, with first delivers to start in early 2015.
Exterior
Things around the side are equally sculpted with large dual inlets at the rear haunches that lead into extra-wide fender flairs.
Henrik Fisker served his days in the upper brass of several automakers and is a very accomplished designer. You’ll remember he pinned the BMW Z8, along with the car that bore his own name, the Fisker Karma. Fisker takes the Mustang to a new level with the Rocket. Its custom front bodywork features a very sloped hood and large, hexagonal grille with integrated lighting. The twin hood scoops are said to be reminiscent of the 1968 Shelby GT500, Boeckmann’s admitted favorite car.
Things around the side are equally sculpted with large dual inlets at the rear haunches that lead into extra-wide fender flairs. Those flairs help cover the massive, 21-inch wheels that are bolted to 15-inch, high-performance Brembo brakes.
The Rocket’s rear end continues the trend with its sculpted decklid spoiler, matching hexagonal license plate surround, and functional lower air diffuser. Quad exhaust pipes peek from under the car and belt the magical tune from the blown V-8.
Interior
The Rocket doesn’t rock the Mustang’s stock interior either.
The Rocket doesn’t rock the Mustang’s stock interior either. The team stitched up a some bright-red leather upholstery on the seats, center console, and center stack. Carbon-fiber accents have been integrated into the dashboard and door panels. The look is just different enough from stock to be interesting, but doesn’t interrupt the new design of the 2015 Mustang.
Though the company hasn’t stated, Rocket customers will likely be able to spec their Mustang’s interior however they want with Ford’s extensive option list.
Drivetrain
GAS took Ford’s mighty DOHC 5.0-liter Coyote V-8 and gave it an equally mighty tune.
Here’s where the fun begins. GAS took Ford’s mighty DOHC 5.0-liter Coyote V-8 and gave it an equally mighty tune. Added is a Whipple supercharger that takes the 435-horsepower V-8 up to 725. That’s a lot of ponies — 290 to be exact.
Sadly there isn’t much more information floating around about any other modifications done to the powertrain. Likely mods are larger fuel injectors, an ECU tune, headers, free-flow cats, and of course an easy-breathing air intake.
Prices
The Mustang Rocket will begin production this December, with deliveries starting in early months of 2015. Customers can expect a price of just over $100,000, including the Mustang.
Competitors
When you make an announcement the way Henrik Fisker and Galpin Auto Sports did, you open yourselves up to a lot of questions; in this case, open-ended comparisons. Seeing as the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat seems to be the pony car of the moment, it’s only natural for the Rocket to be lined up against it.
No one’s going to be wowed about the Challenger SRT Hellcat’s looks. Save for some aerodynamic upgrades, the Challenger SRT Hellcat largely kept its neo-retro design. That’s not a bad thing because part of the car’s appeal is a rich history that dates back to the first use of the "Challenger" name in 1958.
The real selling point of the Challenger SRT Hellcat is its 6.2-liter, supercharged, HEMI V-8 that pumps out an incredible 707 horsepower and 650 pound-feet of torque.
Independent testing of the muscle car indicated that it hit 60 mph in 3.6 seconds with a quarter-mile time of 11.7 seconds. Gnarly, indeed.
Conclusion
Fisker and his pal Boeckmann have created a wonder spin-off of the already fantastic 2015 Mustang. With added lightness thanks to the carbon fiber and added horsepower thanks to the supercharger, the Rocket will surely live up to its name. While modded Mustangs are nothing new, the fact these guys are building something repeatable and taking the idea into production, really speaks volumes about the car. |
Cory’s been on my list for a Karate Kid commission for a while now, and I’m so glad we finally made this thing happen. Cory has been tearing it up on the martial arts action in Legend of the Shadow Clan and I knew he would rock it on this commission. Cory chose the unstoppable Juggernaut as the opponent for Mr. Val Armorr because he wanted to play with their differences in size in the composition and he did an outstanding job. I really love the angle here and the way characters are just coming right at each other, no fear from either of them. I also quite like the motion lines and the little texture designs on Karate Kid’s wristbands. Later, Simon Gough came in and worked his magic, adding some incredible colors and somehow making this piece even more awesome! Thanks for the awesome commission, Cory and Simon!
“Nothing Can Stop The Juggernaut!” Except for Karate Kid’s foot in his face, that is! Cain Marko is ridiculously powerful, but he’s never been the smartest or most skilled fighter. As long as Val can avoid his blows, I think he’d definitely find a way to either knock Juggy out or contain him. But of course I’m a little biased.
If you like this piece then please do go buy some books featuring Cory's work and/or go commission him yourself. |
PHILADELPHIA -- Typically Eagles wide receivers and tight ends spend extra time after practice catching balls out of the JUGS machine, but rookie Jordan Matthews didn't do that on Tuesday.
No, after Tuesday's practice Matthews broke routine and spent several minutes attacking a blocking sled nearby trying to "perfect every aspect of the game," as he put it on his way to the locker room.
The Vanderbilt product and second round draft choice probably had good reason to spend extra time refining his blocking skills because Eagles head coach Chip Kelly said Wednesday that the team doesn't have plans to move Matthews from the slot to the outside anytime soon.
"Could you [move him outside]? Yeah. Are we? No," Kelly said prior to Wednesday's practice. "He's playing slot receiver for us right now. To move him outside, that doesn't help us in terms of where we are. We need to have a big, physical slot in there, that's really what we're looking to do right now and he's still got a long ways to go as a slot receiver."
Matthews, the Eagles second-round draft choice had a breakout performance in Week 3 hauling in his first two career touchdowns in an eight catch for 59 yard game against the Washington Redskins.
Through the first quarter of the season Matthews is third on the team in receiving with 15 catches for 141 yards and two scores. The Eagles only have six passing touchdowns so far this season and the rookie receiver accounts for one third of them.
At 6-foot-3, 212 pounds Matthews certainly fits the bill for the bigger receiver that Kelly covets in his offense, specifically in the slot where the receiver is responsible not only for underneath routes but also plays a key role in run blocking as well. Matthews has the build, but perhaps more importantly he seems to have the drive to succeed in that role as well.
"If that's my role that the coaches have me do, then I'm going to be the best slot receiver in the NFL each day in practice and in the games," Matthews said. "That's going to be my goal. "If that's my responsibility and that's my role, then that's what I'm going to focus in on and that's what I'm going to do."
After a sluggish start in the preseason and accounting for just three catches in the first two games, Matthews has come on like gangbusters in the past two weeks accounting for 12 receptions for 87 yards and two touchdowns over that span.
"I think it just comes down to me being more comfortable out there in the offense," Matthews said. "Nick [Foles] is already an elite quarterback. You can put anybody out there and Nick can make him look good.
"I'm just getting more comfortable so the more comfortable I get, the better that's going to be for both of us. Of course, you can't overlook practice because we go out there and practice with a purpose. We don't just go through the motions, we go full speed, Nick's finding me in certain spots on the field that he thinks he can hit me in the games and it's showing up on film each Sunday.
"We just have to keep building, getting better at it and I think it's going to help us a lot."
Jordan Matthews 9 Gallery: Jordan Matthews
Follow Matt Lombardo on Twitter @MattLombardo975 . Find NJ.com Philadelphia Sports on Facebook |
In a fight for great software architecture, our hands are often tied by the shortcomings of frameworks or languages we work with. Simple tasks like downloading a photo and presenting it in a view, updating a view when underlying data changes, or propagating user input to a model tend to introduce unnecessary complexity to our code.
Problem is that we’re so used to thinking in terms of value assignments that we try to apply same approach to situations that require something different. Assignment is a one-time operation. It’s low-level. It’s good for static values. Assignment is, however, terrible for dynamic data. In order to accommodate prices that change, followers that rise or faces that get prettier we need something of a higher level. We need to think in terms of bindings.
In this post we’ll present a solution that makes binding of dynamic data to user interfaces as simple as it gets, giving you an opportunity to focus on what needs to be done, rather than on how to do it.
Problem analysis
Let’s explore a simple example of dynamic data. Say that we’re developing some kind of a discussion thread feature. We’ll consider a one-thread scenario. Thread will have a name and a list of posts. Each post will be composed of a body and number of likes. In the real world, models would have more properties like user reference or a date, but we’ll ignore those as they are not important for our problem analysis.
class Thread { var name: String var posts: [Post] } class Post { var body: String var likeCount: Int }
We need a view that will display the thread. Let’s define a view with a name label and a posts table view composed of a post cells.
class ThreadView { var nameLabel: UILabel var postsTableView: UITableView } class PostCell { var bodyTextView: UITextView var likeCountLabel: UILabel }
What’s left is coupling all that together. Say we’re doing it from a view controller.
class ThreadViewController: UIViewController, UITableViewDataSource { var thread: Thread var threadView: ThreadView override func viewDidLoad() { super.viewDidLoad() threadView.nameLabel.text = thread.text threadView.postsTableView.dataSource = self } func tableView(tableView: UITableView, numberOfRowsInSection section: Int) -> Int { return thread.count() } func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell { let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("PostCell") as PostCell let post = thread.posts[indexPath.row] cell.bodyTextView.text = post.body cell.likeCountLabel.text = "\(post.likeCount)" return cell } }
Simple enough. Sure, but there is problem. Users can write posts. Thread name might be updated. Some of the currently visible posts might even get liked. What will happen to our view? Exactly – nothing. Data from the model is assigned once. Any subsequent change to it will not be reflected in the view. Your likes won’t count. We don’t want that to happen, do we?
OK, but what are our options?
There are a couple of ways to fix that. The simplest and probably dumbest solution would be to expose methods on the view controller that update its state, then give the model the reference to the view controller and have it call exposed methods whenever change occurs. Oh, and also to say goodbye to any future reusability of those components, to simple object graphs, to single responsibility principle and other “unimportant” principles.
A better solution would be to have the model define a protocol that parties interested in observing its changes would implement. In that case, thread view controller would implement the protocol and register itself to the model as an observer (a delegate). This approach makes components more reusable but it’s cumbersome to implement, especially if you have many models. When you think about it, it’s actually same as the first approach, just wrapped up in nice colors.
Another solution might be to use Key-Value-Observing mechanism to observe data changes and update the view accordingly. While this approach keeps architecture simple, it’s quite hard to use and, due to its nature, unsafe in some situations. You need to be vigilant while adding and removing observers. You also need to manually downcast objects, as KVO is not type-safe. Additionally, you can’t do “fine grain” observing of an array, so you’d have to reload whole table regardless of the kind of array update.
Of course, you could do something totally different. For example, you could introduce a Functional reactive paradigm to your architecture with ReactiveCocoa framework and use streams and signals to solve the issue. While it’s a good solution, it introduces a whole new paradigm as well as the complexity you might not need.
What we would like is something as simple as static assignment, but without the burden of additional protocols, complexities or limitations.
A Swift solution
In order to keep the view up to date with the underlying data, we must somehow observe changes in the data and propagate them to the view. There is no way to have some third party observe the changes of a variable, but if you give it some thought, same thing can be achieved by wrapping a variable in an object and updating its value through that object. Now we have a way to intercept changes and notify interested parties of what happened.
In order to do that, we’ll use a neat Swift feature called property observers. Additionally, we’ll use generics to make our wrapper compatible with any type. Let’s call it Dynamic, as it encapsulates dynamic data.
class Dynamic<T> { var value: T { didSet { // Inform interested parties } } init(_ v: T) { value = v } }
That should be straightforward – a class that encapsulates a value of generic type T. Setting of a value is intercepted by didSet property observer. What’s left if to inform interested parties that change occurred, but before we can do that, we need to define what those parties actually are. Time for another round of thinking.
What’s on the other end of our problem? A view. All kinds of views. Sometimes even something other than a view, maybe another model or an action. It makes sense to think of that side of the problem as a task that needs to be done – view updated, model changed or an action performed. Tasks can be defined by a closure, and that’s how we’ll define our task. We’ll call that task closure Listener and define it as follows:
typealias Listener = T -> Void
In other words, Listener is a closure that accepts a value of generic type T and performs some task with received value. It doesn’t return anything.
Next, we need to somehow couple our Dynamic and our Listener, so that a Listener gets called whenever a value of a Dynamic changes. We could have a property on the Dynamic that retains a Listener, but that would not be a good idea because we don’t want tasks to be owned by the data. We want tasks to be alive when they are needed (for example while the view is alive) and we want them out of our way when we don’t need them. For that reason, we’ll wrap them in an object.
We are aiming for a type that can encapsulate a Listener closure and that can be bound to the Dynamic so that data changes can trigger closure calls. Let’s call it Bond as it creates a bond between a Dynamic and a Listener. Here is the definition:
class Bond<T> { var listener: Listener init(_ listener: Listener) { self.listener = listener } func bind(dynamic: Dynamic<T>) { // Bind to given dynamic } }
Nothing too hard. To wrap things up, let’s implement actual binding support. For that, we’ll need to extend the Dynamic with an array of Bonds and implement didSet property observer so it iterates over that array and calls wrapped closures.
class Dynamic<T> { var value: T { didSet { for bondBox in bonds { bondBox.bond?.listener?(value) } } } var bonds: [BondBox<T>] = [] init(_ v: T) { value = v } } class BondBox<T> { weak var bond: Bond<T>? init(_ b: Bond<T>) { bond = b } }
Notice how we’ve wrapped array elements in a helper class named BondBox. That’s because we don’t want to strongly reference bonded Bonds. Their life cycle is their own business.
Actual binding is done by appending Bonds to bonds array. We’ll do that in bind method of class Bond.
class Bond<T> { var listener: Listener init(_ listener: Listener) { self.listener = listener } func bind(dynamic: Dynamic<T>) { dynamic.bonds.append(BondBox(self)) } }
That’s it – we have our binding mechanism. We can use our thread name property as an example. For start, we’ll make it dynamic String instead of just String, like this:
var name: Dynamic<String>
Setting of a value is done through value property:
name.value = "Steve"
How do we bind it to nameLabel? First we create a Bond with a closure that updates the label.
let nameBond = Bond() { [unowned self] name in self.nameLabel.text = name }
Then we bind it:
nameBond.bind(name)
Mission accomplished. Whenever a value of name property changes, the text of nameLabel will also change to newly set name.
Brushing it up
Although presented solution solves the problem of complex architecture and is type-safe, it’s still inconvenient to use and potentially unsafe. We have to create Bonds, retain them, write closures and worry about strongly referencing self.
If we think a bit more about it, it becomes obvious that the views themselves should provide Bonds to which we could attach Dynamics. For example, task of updating the label doesn’t change, it’s always: “update the text property to new value”. Doing that manually is bad, but fortunately, Swift allows us to extend existing types with new functionality.
Let’s explore how that would work on a label. We’ll extend it, so it provides another property – a Bond object:
private var handle: UInt8 = 0; extension UILabel { var textBond: Bond<String> { if let b: AnyObject = objc_getAssociatedObject(self, &handle) { return b as Bond<String> } else { let b = Bond<String>() { [unowned self] v in self.text = v } objc_setAssociatedObject(self, &handle, b, objc_AssociationPolicy(OBJC_ASSOCIATION_RETAIN_NONATOMIC)) return b } } }
Looks somewhat ugly, but it’s actually very simple. As UIKit is an Objective-C framework, we can use associated objects mechanism to associate arbitrary object to a UILabel. In this case, we’re associating a Bond object with a closure that updates label’s text property. We can do similar thing for other types of views like image views, text views, buttons, sliders, etc.
Let’s see how that simplifies our bindings. Instead of creating and retaining a Bond object, writing a closure and dealing with self, we can do this:
nameLabel.textBond.bind(name)
Much easier and safer, but there is still room left for an improvement. We could define a custom operator that replaces that bind method.
infix operator ->> { associativity left precedence 105 } public func ->> <T>(left: Dynamic<T>, right: Bond<T>) { right.bind(left) }
With that, we can bind our data to view like this:
name ->> nameLabel.textBond
It can get even better. Let’s define a common protocol for types that can be “bonded to” like this:
public protocol Bondable { typealias BondType var designatedBond: Bond<BondType> { get } }
It defines the designatedBond property. In case of UILabel, the designated bond would be textBond, in case of an image view it might be imageBond. For example:
extension UILabel: Bondable { var designatedBond: Bond { return self.textBond } }
Reason we want it defined through protocol is that we want to perform certain actions on objects that adhere to it without caring of what concrete type object really is, which could be UILabel, UIImageView, UISlider or something else. Why? Because of this:
public func ->> <T, U: Bondable where U.BondType == T>(left: Dynamic<T>, right: U) { left ->> right.designatedBond }
It overloads the ->> operator so it can bind a Dynamic to an object that adheres to Bondable protocol (given that generic types match – you cannot bind an image to a label).
With that, our binding is reduced to something as simple as:
name ->> nameLabel
Awesome.
Handling mismatching types
Let’s consider likeCount property. It’s a number, so we’ll redefine it as follows:
let likeCount: Dynamic<Int>
How do we bind it to a label? If you’re thinking about
likeCount ->> likeCountLabel
you’re mistaken. Problem is that likeCount holds an Int value, but label expects a String value. That line would not even compile, which is a good thing as it means that our solution is type-safe. We need to somehow add support for type transformations. In functional paradigm that’s called mapping. As Swift partially leans toward the function paradigm, let’s see how a map function that operates on a Dynamics would look like.
func map<T, U>(dynamic: Dynamic<T>, f: T -> U) -> Dynamic<U>
For the sake of length of this post, let’s ignore implementation details. You can look it up on GitHub should you be interested. You will find the link at the bottom.
What map does is converts Dynamic of some type T to a Dynamic of some type U. It does that by applying given closure that converts value from type T to type U. With that, we can solve out like count problem.
map(likeCount) { "\($0)" } ->> likeCountLabel
It’s also possible extend Dynamic class with map function and do binding like this:
likeCount.map { "\($0)" } ->> likeCountLabel
With all that, we can now rewrite our initial example with new approach. We need to convert static properties of the model to dynamic ones
class Thread { let name: Dynamic<String> let posts: [Post] } class Post { let body: Dynamic<String> let likeCount: Dynamic<Int> }
and update the view controller to do binding instead of assignment
class ThreadViewController: UIViewController, UITableViewDataSource { var thread: Thread var threadView: ThreadView override func viewDidLoad() { super.viewDidLoad() thread.text ->> threadView.nameLabel.text threadView.postsTableView.dataSource = self } func tableView(tableView: UITableView, numberOfRowsInSection section: Int) -> Int { return thread.count() } func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell { let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("PostCell") as PostCell let post = thread.posts[indexPath.row] post.body ->> cell.bodyTextView.text post.likeCount.map { "\($0)" } ->> cell.likeCountLabel.text return cell } }
Looks almost identical to initial version, but with significant difference in that the data is now bonded to user interface and any change to it will be automatically reflected in views.
There is one problem though – it works great for scalar types, but what about arrays? How do we update the table view when new posts arrive?
Arrays are special
When dealing with arrays, we are usually not interested in the change of the array object as whole, rather in changes that occurred within the array itself like insertions, deletions or updates.
Bond object allows us to observe only value changes, and value is in this case an array as whole. In order to observe fine-grain changes, we need a special kind of Bond. For example a Bond defined in following way:
class ArrayBond<T>: Bond<Array<T>> { var insertListener: (([Int]) -> Void)? var removeListener: (([Int], [T]) -> Void)? var updateListener: (([Int]) -> Void)? }
It would allow us to register different listeners for different events. Each listener is a closure that accepts an array of indices of elements that have been changed in bonded Dynamic. Removal listener also receives elements that are removed.
Our Dynamic doesn’t know when and how to call these new listeners, so we would need a special kind of Dynamic. One with additional methods for array manipulation. We would need something that would work as following example:
let posts = DynamicArray<Post>() let myBond = ArrayBond<Post>() myBond.insertListener = { indices in println("Inserted posts at indices \(indices)") } myBond.updateListener = { indices in println("Updated posts at indices \(indices)") } posts ->> myBond posts.insert(Post(...), atIndex: 0) // prints: Inserted posts at indices [0] posts[4] = Post(...) // prints: Updated posts at indices [4]
What’s interesting with that is that it would allow us to extend a table view with a Bond that acts as its data source. The Bond would accept Dynamics of UITableViewCell type and we could use map function to convert posts to cells, like this:
class Thread { let name: Dynamic<String> let posts: DynamicArray<Post> } class Post { let body: Dynamic<String> let likeCount: Dynamic<Int> } class ThreadViewController: UIViewController, UITableViewDataSource { var thread: Thread var threadView: ThreadView override func viewDidLoad() { super.viewDidLoad() thread.text ->> threadView.nameLabel.text thread.posts.map { [unowned self] (post: Post) -> PostCell in let cell = self.tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("PostCell") as PostCell post.body ->> cell.bodyTextView.text post.likeCount.map { "\($0)" } ->> cell.likeCountLabel.text return cell } ->> self.tableView } }
It would allow us to populate and bind whole screen with few simple binding operators. Going through the implementation details of how it could be achieved is beyond this post, but concepts are very similar to ones presented for scalar values.
Conclusion
Presented solution boils binding problem down to just one operator. It’s simple, powerful, type-safe and multi-paradigm – just like Swift. It allows you to think differently when coupling data with the view and makes the whole process smooth.
You can find implementation of presented concepts on GitHub in a framework named Bond. It includes both implementation of scalar Dynamic and Bond classes, as well as implementation of vector DynamicArray and ArrayBond classes. You can find it at https://github.com/SwiftBond/Bond. |
Once again on Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks
By Patrick Martin
13 April 2016
Sunday night’s broadcast of the CBS News program “60 Minutes” drew public attention to the longstanding US government cover-up of a major aspect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks: the role of Saudi government officials and Saudi money in supporting the network of Al Qaeda operatives while they were in the United States preparing the suicide hijackings of four jetliners.
For nearly 15 years, successive administrations have blocked publication of the final chapter of the report prepared by a joint congressional committee on the 9/11 attacks, because the 28 pages of this chapter summarize evidence of an official Saudi connection to the hijackers. Fifteen of the 19 were Saudi citizens.
The co-chairmen of the bipartisan panel, Democratic Senator Robert Graham and Republican Representative Porter Goss, have long urged the release of the chapter on the Saudis, and disputed US government claims that there was a valid “national security” reason for the continuing censorship. Nothing more was involved, they said, than an effort to avoid embarrassing the Saudi monarchy, next to Israel the most important US ally in the Middle East.
The “60 Minutes” segment did not make public any new details of the Saudi-9/11 connection, or reveal any of the specific pieces of evidence reviewed in the 28-page chapter that continues to be held in a vault in a Capitol Hill basement. Congressmen and senators may read the chapter, but may not bring their staff, take any notes, or speak about the contents of what they have read.
CBS correspondent Steve Kroft interviewed five high-level former officials who have read the 28 pages, all calling for their declassification. In addition to Graham and Goss, these include three members of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission appointed by President Bush: former Senator Robert Kerrey and former Representative Timothy Roemer, both Democrats, and former Pentagon official John Lehman, a Republican.
All five of these men maintain close connections with US diplomatic, military and spy operations. Goss left Congress to become CIA Director, Roemer was US ambassador to India, and all have carried out high-level foreign policy missions for the US government. So their decision to participate in the “60 Minutes” program has the character of a public demonstration by a section of the military-intelligence apparatus, directed at putting pressure on the Obama administration and the Saudi monarchy.
The timing of the broadcast is suggestive, coming only 10 days before President Obama travels to Saudi Arabia to visit King Salman and hold talks on the Iraq-Syria war, the nuclear deal with Iran, and other contentious issues. There is also mounting tension between Saudi Arabia and the United States over economic policy, since the Saudi decision to maintain high levels of oil production despite the dramatic slide in oil prices has bankrupted much of the US-based fracking industry.
Even without making public any new details from the 28-page chapter, Senator Graham made an effective argument to substantiate his claim that the official claim of no Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks has no credibility. He told “60 Minutes,” “I think it is implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn’t speak English, most of whom had never been in the United States before, many of whom didn’t have a high school education, could’ve carried out such a complicated task without some support from within the United States.”
Graham’s language is significant, since it could suggest not only official Saudi support to the hijackers during their months in the US—the focus of the “60 Minutes” report—but support to the hijackers by other individuals or other agencies, including the US government itself. It was reported after 9/11 that the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta, was well known to the US government, and had been under surveillance during his residence in Germany before he came to the United States to get flight training.
Two other hijackers, the San Diego-based Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were also known to the US government. The CIA had observed them participating in an al Qaeda planning meeting in 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and placed them on a “watch list” for FBI monitoring if they came to the United States. Nonetheless, under circumstances that have never been clarified, the two men were allowed to enter the United States on January 15, 2000, landing at Los Angeles International Airport, eventually going to San Diego where they attended flight training school, preparing for their role as pilots of hijacked planes on September 11, 2001.
The “60 Minutes” report makes no reference to how al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar entered the US, or the claims and counter-claims between the CIA, the National Security Agency, which monitored their phone calls, and the FBI, which conducts domestic counterterrorism, over which agency was responsible for permitting them to operate so freely. Instead, it focused entirely on what the two men did once they arrived in Los Angeles.
They needed money, a place to live, and a mosque, and found all three through the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. As correspondent Steve Kroft summarized it: “The two Saudi nationals, arrived with extremely limited language skills and no experience with Western culture. Yet, through an incredible series of circumstances, they managed to get everything they needed, from housing to flight lessons.”
During the interview, Kroft asked Graham whether Saudi government, charities, or wealthy benefactors were involved in aiding the hijackers. “All of the above,” Graham replied.
Two Saudis played the main role: Fahad al-Thumairy, a diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, and Omar al-Bayoumi, who held what Kroft described as “a no-show job at a Saudi aviation contractor outside Los Angeles while drawing a paycheck from the Saudi government.” According to Senator Graham, Bayoumi was listed as a Saudi agent in FBI files.
The “60 Minutes” narration continues: “Bayoumi found them a place to live in his own apartment complex, advanced them the security deposit and cosigned the lease. He even threw them a party and introduced them to other Muslims who would help the hijackers obtain government IDs and enroll in English classes and flight schools.”
Bayoumi was in regular contact with the imam of a San Diego mosque, Anwar al-Awlaki, the same individual who a decade later was assassinated by a CIA drone-fired missile in Yemen. At that time, however, although “60 Minutes” did not discuss this, Awlaki was considered a “moderate” by US security agencies. He later moved to Falls Church, Virginia, and after 9/11 was in regular contact with Pentagon officials, before breaking with the US government and moving to Yemen.
Anticipating Saudi government claims that the 9/11 Commission report exonerates the Kingdom of any responsibility for the terrorist attacks, “60 Minutes” interviewed an attorney who is suing Saudi Arabia on behalf of the families of 9/11 victims, as well as Senator Kerrey, a member of the 9/11 Commission. Both agreed that the sentence in the report long cited by the Saudi government and its apologists, that the Commission “found no evidence that senior Saudi officials individually funded al Qaeda,” was deliberately crafted to leave open the possibility that lower-level officials did in fact fund al Qaeda and aid the hijackers. Kerrey added, “You can't provide the money for terrorists and then say, ‘I don't have anything to do with what they're doing’.”
Kerrey said that the Commission had neither the resources nor the authority to conduct a thorough investigation of the Saudi connection. In truth, the entire 9/11 Commission was a whitewash, not only of Saudi Arabia but of the vast US military-intelligence apparatus, which was certainly tracking the activity of some, if not all, of the future hijackers. The $15 million budget for the commission to investigate an attack in which nearly 3,000 people were killed was only one quarter of the $60 million spent by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to investigate Bill Clinton’s relations with Monica Lewinsky.
Perhaps the most significant comment in the “60 Minutes” report was the statement by former representative Goss, later CIA director, that it was the FBI Director Robert Mueller who played the main role in maintaining censorship of the 28-page chapter on the Saudi connection to 9/11. Why would the FBI be in charge of deciding whether US relations to Saudi Arabia would be affected by release of the document? That would normally be a concern of the State Department, CIA or Pentagon.
There is every reason to believe that the “60 Minutes” report was triggered by ongoing bitter conflicts within the US security apparatus relating, not to the investigation into 9/11, nearly 15 years old, but to the deepening crisis in US imperialism’s current interventions in the Middle East, which includes bitter conflicts with the Saudi monarchy, long Washington’s most reliable stooge in the region.
The author also recommends:
What the September 11 commission hearings revealed
[22 April 2004]
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For decades, the U.S. military has been accused of exposing service members and the public to chemical and biological warfare agents and simulants. Fears have been stoked by the Cold War's Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD) project, which, in the process of determining the characteristics of large-area CB agent delivery mechanisms, may have exposed troops to dangerous simulants and nerve agents. Then there's the the Bari incident, when soldiers and sailors were swimming in mustard agent when Germans bombed U.S. ships in that Italian harbor. And let's not forget the late-50's field testing of LSD and other hallucinogens like Agent BZ.
The Department of Defense (DOD) release of information on such efforts has been slow, sporadic, and uncoordinated at times. But now, the DOD is trying to consolidate this information, and ensure that the public – especially those folks who may have been exposed to bad stuff – can learn more about these efforts from the horse's mouth, so to speak. The DOD Force Health Protection & Readiness Policy and Program Office is sponsoring an easy-to-use web site that provides information on testing and potential exposure cases associated with chemical and biological warfare agents and simulants. The site breaks out the history into three periods - World War II, Project 112/SHAD cases, and other Cold War cases (which covers testing sites such as Fort Detrick, Edgewood Arsenal, and Dugway Proving Ground). Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, strategic communications director for the Military Health System, explained their intent.
“This is a new Web site that we have created to put together for all those who may have interest in everything that we have been able to uncover and understand about the chemical and biological testing of warfare agents done from probably the early 1940s up through 1975,” said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick... “The CB [chem-bio] exposures Web site explains why the testing was done, where it was done, what was used in the testing, and really what
DoD learned from the testing,” he said.
The DOD medical community is doing their best to identify all unclassified information on past CB warfare testing and the personnel involved. And they're using all forms of communication to get the word out on it. That's a pretty rare combo, in the Defense Department. As a history freak who enjoys getting an inside view on how the military developed its CB
weapons capability, I'm loving it.
Now some may say that DOD was forced to reveal this information due to Congressional pressure. That may be. But much of this test information was, for a long time, kept clandestine for good reason. These were weapon development activities in which the Soviet Union was very interested. And even today, there's nothing quite as good as the traditional CB warfare agents developed during the Cold War. It could save another nation or terrorist group a good deal of research if the wrong data were released. One might also point out that there's no discussion of theGulf War illness controversy. But, technically, there's been no agreement that these illnesses were caused by exposure to CB warfare agents. So put aside the critical comments and enjoy the sunshine on these fascinating records. |
THE WOMAN who was involved in a topless brawl in Doon four years ago and a second fight with a different female two weeks ago says she feels “ashamed”.
After the story on the website last week, Sharon Cahill, aged 36, from Doon came in to the Limerick Leader office.
Sharon identified herself as the person involved in both incidents. The first one occurred when parents were dropping their children to school and the second when they were collecting their little ones. Both fights occurred on a public street.
“It was very upsetting for school children to be looking at that. It is not like I get any kicks out of doing anything like that because I don’t. I have kids myself. I am ashamed of my life over it all. No kids should have to look at that,” said Sharon, who spoke to the Leader to stress that she has “no arguments with anybody”.
“It is not like I am going around making enemies around the whole of Doon. I don’t want to have enemies. I don’t want any hassle. I want to put all this behind me,” said the mum of four children aged 19, 17, 11 and 4.
Sharon says she is friends again with the woman who she had the topless brawl with in 2013. That incident got so heated that the clothes were torn off each other and they both ended up in a state of undress. No charges were ever brought against either of them in relation to it.
“I am even talking to that woman again. Of course I am ashamed by it. What happened that time – I shouldn’t have got involved but we’re friends again,” said Sharon.
She says the latest run in – over two weeks ago – was “only pulling hair” and “lasted two minutes”.
The two women started off as friends but Sharon alleges she was revving her car outside her house, playing loud music, calling to her home and full of “fighting talk”.
She claims a text was sent to her daughter which said: “I’m gonna dig up your father and throw him through the window.” This referred to Sharon’s former deceased partner.
“That was about two weeks before it happened [on Tuesday, June 13]. She was driving up the street in Doon and as she was driving the window was going down. She called me a ‘tramp’ and said ‘your’re doing nothing’,” alleges Sharon.
“I went over and then the two of us took off. It was only pulling hair, it was only a two minute thing on the road. I’m actually ashamed of my life. I didn’t even go out over the weekend because I’m afraid of my life the minute I go in somewhere, someone is going to say it to me. I am sick of it. I wasn’t expecting to see that on the front page of the Leader,” added Sharon.
It is understood the other woman has made a complaint to gardai but Sharon hasn’t.
“Everybody has a past. I believe everybody deserves a second chance. I am after grabbing my second chance. I just want to raise my children and put all this behind me,” she concluded. |
Story highlights President Barack Obama interviewed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer
Obama said Russian proposal on Syria chemical weapons was a "potentially positive development"
Obama said the the United States would maintain pressure on Syria
The president plans to address the nation on Syria on Tuesday
Russia's proposal for Syria to surrender its chemical weapons to international control was a "potentially positive development," but could be a stall tactic, President Barack Obama told CNN on Monday.
"We're going to run this to ground," Obama said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, adding that the United States will work with Syrian ally Russia and the international community "to see if we can arrive at something that is enforceable and serious."
A 'breakthrough' on the horizon?
Obama said the new proposal that emerged Monday from Russia resulted from his threat to attack Syria for violating an international ban on using chemical weapons, as his administration contends occurred on August 21 in suburban Damascus.
He and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke about the Syrian chemical weapons and the U.S. push for a military response at last week's G20 summit in St. Petersburg, Obama told Blitzer.
JUST WATCHED Obama on chemical weapons and Syria Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Obama on chemical weapons and Syria 08:16
JUST WATCHED Obama: Assad's threats not credible Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Obama: Assad's threats not credible 01:20
JUST WATCHED Ex-weapons inspector: Devil in details Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Ex-weapons inspector: Devil in details 05:32
JUST WATCHED Did Kerry offer Syria a way out? Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Did Kerry offer Syria a way out? 02:32
"We have not seen these kinds of gestures up until now," the president said. "The fact that the U.S. administration and I have said we are serious about this, I think, has prompted some interesting conversations."
The Russian proposal could lead to a "breakthrough," but would require follow-up while maintaining pressure on Syria and Russia by continuing his push for Congress to authorize a military attack, Obama said.
In an apparent response to some lawmakers who have questioned U.S. interests in a potential military strike, Obama said Syria's chemical weapons "pose a significant threat to all nations and to the United States, in particular."
"That's why 98 percent of humanity have said we don't use these. That protects our troops, and it protects children like the ones that we saw in those videos inside of Syria," the president said, referring to video footage that showed people writhing near death.
The U.S. government says more than 1,400 people died in the attack.
Obama to keep beating the drum on Syria
Obama will make a televised address from the White House on Tuesday night as part of the administration's offensive to build support for military action in Syria. His interview with CNN was one of six television interviews on Monday in his effort to reach the public directly.
"If we can accomplish this limited goal without taking military action, that would be my preference," Obama said. "On the other hand, if we don't maintain and move forward without a credible threat of military pressure, I don't think we'll actually get the kind of agreement I'd like to see."
Obama told ABC that there was no time limit for an agreement.
Syria welcomed Russia's proposal Monday, paving the way for a possible diplomatic solution to the crisis that comes amid Syria's two-year civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people, according to U.N. estimates.
Obama acknowledged that an agreement on the Russian proposal may not solve Syria's underlying civil war, "but it does solve the problem that I'm trying to focus on right now, which is making sure that you don't have over 400 children gassed indiscriminately by these chemical weapons."
When asked by PBS about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's claim that the U.S. is lying about his use of chemical weapons, Obama said there can be no diplomatic solution if the Syrian president keeps make statements that are "untrue."
"I think that if we can come up with a mechanism to get these under control, verify and enforce that they are not being used, then we should do everything we can to pursue that," Obama said. "But ... that's not going to happen if Assad thinks that he can lie his way through this and eventually the world forgets the images of those children who were gassed."
Al-Assad's military lacks capability, Obama said
Obama also sought to tamp down the specter of a threat from Assad for the United States to "expect every action" in retaliation for potential military strikes in Syria.
"Mr. Assad doesn't have a lot of capability. He has capability relative to children, he has capability relative to an opposition that is still getting itself organized and are not professional trained fighters," Obama said. "He doesn't have a credible means to threaten the United States."
However, Obama said it was possible for Iran and Hezbollah to launch "asymmetrical strikes," but dismissed them as nothing more than "the kinds of threats that we are dealing with around the world."
He told NBC that he had yet to decide how he would proceed if Congress voted against authorizing force.
In light of the upcoming anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, Obama said the date brings heightened security, but he cautioned that "we're not going to be able to protect ourselves 100 percent of the time against every threat" and that the key was to be prepared without over-reacting. |
William Francis Kemmler (May 9, 1860 – August 6, 1890) of Buffalo, New York, was a convicted murderer and the first person in the world to be legally executed using an electric chair.
Biography [ edit ]
Early life [ edit ]
William Kemmler was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Both of his parents were immigrants from Germany and both of them were alcoholics.[1] After dropping out of school at age 10, having learned neither how to read nor write, Kemmler worked in his father's butcher shop. His father died from an infection that he received after a drunken brawl and his mother died from complications of alcoholism. After his parents died, he went into the peddling business and earned enough money to buy a horse and cart, although at this point he was becoming a heavy drinker. In one episode involving him and his friends after a series of drunken binges, he said he could jump his horse and cart over an eight-foot fence with the cart attached to the horse. The attempt was a failure, and his cart and goods were destroyed in the incident. He was known to friends as "Philadelphia Billy," and his drinking binges were very well known around the saloons in his Buffalo neighborhood. Kemmler was reportedly slender, with dark brown hair. He spoke both English and German.
Murder, trial, and appeals [ edit ]
Kemmler was accused of the March 29, 1889 murder of Matilda "Tillie" Ziegler, his common-law wife,[2] who had been killed with a hatchet. He was tried and convicted of murder on May 10, 1889. On May 13 he was sentenced to death. As of January 1 of that year New York had instituted death by electrocution, the first such law ever. Kemmler's sentence was to be carried out at New York's Auburn Prison via the new electric chair, a device invented in 1881 by Buffalo, New York dentist Alfred Southwick which, after nine years of development and legislation, was ready for use. Kemmler's lawyers appealed, arguing that electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment.
The attempt to carry out Kemmler's execution was pulled into the AC/DC "war of currents" between George Westinghouse, the largest supplier of alternating current equipment, and Thomas Edison, whose company ran its equipment on direct current. The alternating current that powered the electric chair (a current standard adopted by a committee after a demonstration performed at Edison's laboratory by anti-AC activist Harold P. Brown showing AC's lethality) was supplied by a Westinghouse generator surreptitiously acquired by Brown. This led to Westinghouse trying to stop what seemed to be Brown and Edison's attempt to try to portray the AC used in Westinghouse electrical system as the deadly "executioners current",[3] actively supporting Kemmler's appeal by hiring lawyer W. Bourke Cockran to represent him. However, the appeal failed on October 9, 1889 and the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the case on the grounds that there was no cruel and unusual punishment in death by electrocution.[4]
Execution [ edit ]
On the morning of his execution, August 6, 1890, Kemmler was awakened at 5:00 a.m. He dressed quickly and put on a suit, necktie, and white shirt. After breakfast and some prayer, the top of his head was shaved. At 6:38 a.m., Kemmler entered the execution room and Warden Charles Durston presented Kemmler to the 17 witnesses in attendance. Kemmler looked at the chair and said: "Gentlemen, I wish you all good luck. I believe I am going to a good place, and I am ready to go."[5]
Witnesses remarked that Kemmler was composed at his execution; he did not scream, cry, or resist in any way. He sat down on the chair, but was ordered to get up by the warden so a hole could be cut in his suit through which a second electrical lead could be attached. This was done and Kemmler sat down again. He was strapped to the chair, his face was covered and the metal restraint put on his bare head. He said, "Take it easy and do it properly, I'm in no hurry." Durston replied, "Goodbye, William" and ordered the switch thrown.
Sketch of the execution of William Kemmler, August 6, 1890
The generator was charged with the 1,000 volts, which was assumed to be adequate to induce quick unconsciousness and cardiac arrest. The chair had already been thoroughly tested; a horse had been successfully electrocuted the day before.
Current was passed through Kemmler for 17 seconds. The power was turned off and Kemmler was declared dead by Edward Charles Spitzka.
However, witnesses noticed Kemmler was still breathing. The attending physicians, Spitzka and Carlos Frederick MacDonald, came forward to examine Kemmler. After confirming Kemmler was still alive, Spitzka reportedly called out, "Have the current turned on again, quick—no delay."
In the second attempt, Kemmler was shocked with 2,000 volts. Blood vessels under the skin ruptured and bled and some witnesses erroneously claimed his body caught fire. The New York Times reported instead that "an awful odor began to permeate the death chamber, and then, as though to cap the climax of this fearful sight, it was seen that the hair under and around the electrode on the head and the flesh under and around the electrode at the base of the spine was singeing. The stench was unbearable."[5] Witnesses reported the smell of burning flesh and several nauseated spectators unsuccessfully tried to leave the room.[6]
In all, the entire execution took approximately eight minutes. The competitive newspaper reporters covering the Kemmler execution jumped on the abnormalities as each newspaper source tried to outdo each other with sensational headlines and reports. A reporter who witnessed it also said it was "an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging." Westinghouse later commented: "They would have done better using an axe."
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
General references [ edit ] |
Mohan Bhagwat Mohan Bhagwat
The RSS on Tuesday in its mouthpiece Organiser admitted that the BJP is not in a comfortable position in Delhi and added that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has reclaimed its lost ground in the city.
It has also said that the Arvind Kejriwal-led party has rejuvenated its cadres. It has accepted that the BJP chose Kiran Bedi as its CM candidate after receiving negative response from the field.
"The top BJP leadership after receiving adverse feedback from field against the Delhi BJP, inducted Kiran Bedi and projected her as BJP's chief ministerial nominee," the article says.
The article talks about the resentment in the state unit after Kiran Bedi was inducted in the BJP and made the CM candidate by the party's central leadership and adds that the party has gained after that. |
This week, a magnitude-6.2 earthquake struck southern Japan, killing two and leveling 19 homes just after a 6.9-magnitude quake hit Myanmar, where it was felt for hundreds of miles but did little damage. Naturally, the Asian media attempted to connect these two events, insinuating or outright stating that these quakes represented the first wave, and that apocalyptic escalation must be inevitable. Fortunately, you can’t believe everything you read in Indian newspapers.
“When headlines like these become a bit too common, you know that they point to something bigger,” an extremely lazy journalist wrote in Firstpost, citing several other recent quakes and tremors felt on the subcontinent. Meanwhile, The Express back in England went with the following headline: “Scientists fear ‘the Big One’ is COMING as FOUR major earthquakes strike in 48 hours.”
That’s a good headline, but it’s not how tectonics work. Here’s why:
1) Medium sized earthquakes are very common
There have been 36 earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or larger around the globe in 2016, and that’s completely normal. Most of these have occurred in the Pacific “Ring of Fire” region, because that’s the region of the world that is most prone to earthquakes.
Humans measure the significance by their impacts to humans, not by their magnitude. So they make news when they occur in heavily populated areas, areas that are not used to earthquakes, or areas where poor infrastructure allows for significant damage. Headlines are not a good measure of global earthquake activity.
2) Earthquakes don’t cause other, distant earthquakes
An earthquake in one part of the world will not set off another thousands of miles away. Earthquakes are often followed by aftershocks, as the Earth’s crust readjusts to its new position, but effects are local and die out usually over several days. But for the most part, each fault does its own thing, independently of those around it. The planet certainly does not start to rumble softly and then build up to a “megaquake,” as these articles suggest.
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3) Scientists measure earthquake hazard and never predict quakes
Seismologists have no way of accurately predicting when an earthquake will occur. What they can measure is earthquake hazard. They can observe a particular fault and calculate the energy bound up in the fault as the plates crush together. Then they can say, that if all of that energy were to suddenly become unbound all at once, an earthquake of a given magnitude would result.
That’s what seismologist Roger Bilham, the expert quoted in these articles, was talking about when he said: “The current conditions might trigger at least four earthquakes greater than 8.0 in magnitude. And if they delay, the strain accumulated during the centuries provokes more catastrophic mega earthquakes.”
That’s the potential energy stored in the faults of the Himalayan region, and it says nothing about when or how that energy will released. Bilham never correlated recent earthquakes in Asia with this hazard, in fact, the quote was pulled from a Times of India article written back in January.
4) Moderate earthquakes decrease hazard
If anything, moderate earthquakes on a given fault reduce the eventual risk of the Big One. As tectonic plates push together, they slowly build up energy. With a moderate quake, some of that energy is released. But not enough to dampen the stored energy in a significant way. It takes 1,000 magnitude-6 earthquakes to release the energy stored in a single magnitude-8 (the Richter scale, remember, is logarithmic.)
See, it’s easy to predict that the Big One is coming, because the Big One is always coming. There will always be periodically devastating earthquakes in areas that are prone to them. We can talk about probability and risk, but at the end of the day, the big devastating earthquakes of the future will come on their own schedule. |
Mississippi State University’s Society for the Advancement of Creation Science — in case you were wondering just how Mississippi the campus could get — hosted a guest lecture yesterday by none other than Creationist Kent Hovind.
That would be the same Kent Hovind whose doctoral thesis from the unaccredited Patriot Bible University opens with the line, “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind.”
As the Southern Poverty Law Center noted, Hovind isn’t just a run-of-the-mill Creationist. He’s also a former felon:
He earned the inmate number for refusing to withhold payroll taxes from his Dinosaur Adventure Land staff, destroying records, mail fraud, filing false documents and threatening his investigators. Kent and his wife Jo were found guilty of their crimes in 2006 and sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2007. The theme park and additional property was also seized.
Hovind was released from prison in 2015. None of the students who invited him seemed to know or care about that — which isn’t really an issue for me. He served his time. And while this is technically taxpayer money being used to sponsor a Creationist, registered student groups have the ability to bring in speakers of their choice if they jump through all the bureaucratic hoops. There’s nothing illegal or ethically problematic going on here.
But maybe they shouldn’t have wasted their time since last night’s event appeared to be a bust . (The video doesn’t embed, however the link to it is right here .) There are a number of empty seats in the front of the auditorium — though the camera admittedly doesn’t pan out or show us the full space — and the end of the talk is met with tepid applause that dies out rather quickly. Then again, based on the backwards way Hovind does math, he probably thinks there were thousands of people in the crowd…
I guess we should be happy that a Creationist couldn’t fill an auditorium in Mississippi? It’s progress in a twisted wacky way.
(Thanks to Bill for the link) |
As confirmed by various outlets, character actress Betsy Palmer has died. She was 88.
Palmer was best known to modern audiences as Pamela Voorhees, the mother of the immortal, mask-wearing killer Jason Voorhees from the Friday The 13th films—though fans of the series will note that Pamela herself is the killer in the first movie, as she’s taking revenge on the careless teenagers who foolishly tried to reopen Camp Crystal Lake after another group of careless teenagers allowed her son to die there years earlier. Though it has become an iconic role, Palmer was reportedly not too fond of it at first, and she told MovieWeb in 2009 that she only took the part so she could afford to buy a Volkswagen Scirocco. However, thanks to fans coming up to her over the years and telling her how touched they were by Pamela Voorhees’ backstory, she eventually came to appreciate it—even if she didn’t really understand why people liked it.
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In addition to her famous role in Friday The 13th, Palmer also had parts in countless movies and TV shows dating back to the early 1950s. She was a recurring player on game shows like I’ve Got A Secret and To Tell The Truth, and she made appearances in everything from The Love Boat, to CHiPs, to Knot’s Landing, Columbo, and Just Shoot Me. She also had small roles in movies like Mr. Roberts and The Tin Star—both of which starred Henry Fonda—and appeared in a number of Broadway productions.
She is survived by her daughter, Melissa, who—according to that MovieWeb interview—suggested buying a Volkswagen Scirocco in the first place. |
Time spent by plumbers, decorators and carers driving to their first customer of the day counts towards the 48-hour working week, a European court has ruled, in a decision the government admits will drive up costs for businesses.
In a defeat for the British government, the European Court of Justice ruled that time spent by tradesmen travelling between their home and their clients is “work”.
The judgement amounts to a significant tightening of European labour rules, and could force thousands of British companies to hire more workers to remain in the law.
The ruling could also force companies to pay higher salaries to avoid breaking minimum wages laws, as well as giving employees more breaks, lawyers warned.
It comes as David Cameron has scaled back plans to regain Britain’s opt-out on the working time directive as part of his renegotiation with the European Union. The Telegraph has been told that Mr Cameron has stepped back from seeking a full opt-out over social legislation, and is now seeking a more modest declaration that employment law is a national competence.
Under the EU Working Time Directive, British employees cannot work more than 48 hours in a week unless they choose to opt out.
Under UK government guidelines, time spent travelling at work does count towards the target. But “normal travel to and from work” and “travelling outside normal working hours” does not.
The court ruling contradicts that. Judges in Luxembourg adjudicated in a case brought by workers at Tyco, a Spanish company that installs burglar alarms.
While workers drove for up to three hours to clients’ premises, the company counted their working day for the purposes of the directive from the moment they arrived at the first client to the moment they left the last one.
The court ruled that was wrong, and said travelling time counts as “work” for employees such as tradesmen who do not have a fixed office.
The judges dismissed arguments from British government lawyers that declaring travelling time as work could be abused by dishonest employees to carry out personal business, saying it was up to companies to prevent that.
They added that their judgement that travel time counts as work “cannot be called into question by the argument of the United Kingdom Government that it would lead to an inevitable increase in costs, in particular, for Tyco.”
Glenn Hayes, a partner at law firm Irwin Mitchell, said: “In certain industries, such as the care industry, it will have a huge impact.
“If you bid for a contract, and your costs go up, it could be potentially astronomical.”
Phil Allen, a partner in employment law at Weightmans said the ruling may “significantly increase” the amount of an employee’s day counted as work.
“Whilst this decision is not about the national minimum wage, which is not subject to European law and the wording of the Act is different, it may also have implications for what employees must be paid. There is often a degree of overlap between the way the two regimes are interpreted, so an impact on minimum or living wage cannot be discounted.”
The ruling provoked anger among business groups who argue European courts are too powerful.
Robert Oxley, Campaign Director of Business for Britain said: “'This is not a question of more or less protection for workers. It's a question of whether EU bureaucrats and judges control these matters or whether British voters and courts control them.”
Allie Renison, the head of trade policy at the Institute of Directors, said the European Court of Justice had “become a red-tape machine, tormenting firms across Europe.”
“The Working Time Directive needs to be reviewed, in order to resolve the lingering questions which are now being ruled on by the ECJ. Ensuring that employers do not have additional costs and burdens sprung upon them like this must be a core element of the Prime Minister’s renegotiation efforts.”
Anthea McIntyre, a Conservative MEP, said: “This could add significantly to the costs of businesses and interfere with long-established business practices. It could hit smaller firms particularly and that would be bad for growth and bad for jobs."
A spokesman for the Business Department said: “We are carefully considering the implications of this judgement”. |
Looking for the purr-fect gift for the cat-loving lady in your life? Look no further than the Hull Seaside Animal Rescue's 2014 Kittendales calendar.
Each month features a shirtless young man holding an adorable rescue kitten, and 100 percent of the money made from the $20 calendars goes directly to caring for felines at the Massachusetts no-kill shelter.
Since the first calendar's release in 2008, more than $80,000 has been raised for the animal rescue.
The Kittendales project was conceived in 2007 when the shelter's board of directors was brainstorming how to fundraise.
Photographer Joanne Berman offered to shoot the calendar at no cost, and the shelter started looking for volunteers to become the first Kittendale models.
"The response from the guys was overwhelming," the Hull Seaside Animal Rescue website reads. "Their willingness to donate their time and desire to be a part of this venture, for the benefit of the kitties, was extraordinary!"
Check out some of the men from the Kittendales calendars past and present in the photos below.
Related on MNN:
'Kittendales': Shirtless men do their part to get kitties adopted
The 2014 "Kittendales" calendar features shirtless men posing with adoptable kittens. All proceeds benefit the Hull Seaside Animal Rescue. |
TONIGHT! Grown men hit balls with sticks… Lloyd does delivery for the truck… and people we haven’t heard of win games we don’t care about.
But first: this.
The Montero was originally made in New York, and it showed. Raw potential rumbled under raw meat, yet its limitations were quickly uncovered when actually asked to perform. For the longest time they didn’t even know what it was. It wore the tools of ignorance proudly, and handled terribly for such a highly touted model.
It only got uglier over time. Last year was pretty much rock bottom. It had the aerodynamics of well, me. The power was still available in fits and starts, but erratic contact made the overall experience frustrating and overwhelming. Of course you also have to talk about its overall handling and top speed. The Montero went from zero to 60… eventually. Cornering: terrible. Acceleration: terrible. It had more trouble getting to third base than James May at University. Attempts at performance enhancement were ineffective and not to industry standard.
Most manufacturers would have given up at this point. Zdurienciek, though, is not most manufacturers. A crack team was sent to the desert with Montero, quietly chipping away for months. They toiled to rediscover what was lost, stripping it down and rebuilding from scratch. They saw something. They knew they could bring it back, better than ever. And damn if they weren’t right.
They shed over 20% of the weight, presumably by replacing the body with a carbon-fiber shell. Every internal system was overhauled to run on cleaner fuel. It took everything they demanded of it, then asked for more. And what showed up this spring… was aSTAWNishing.
Behold: The 2015 Montero Sport Model.
Sleeker. Fitter. More coordinated. And dare I say it? Just… happier. Now losing all that weight, you might wonder if it detracts from what lured us all to the Montero in the first place. Well wonder no more, because it’s still there:
For all of its potential, though, the Montero Sport may be more concept car than everyday speedster. It’s a victim of a crowded product line. The manufacturer Zduriencik has a bit of an embarrassment of riches this year, from the 240 million dollar Cano R-Type and the PT Cruzer, to last year’s sensational Seager Roadster, and a bewildering array of sport utility vehicles roaming the field. Even the oddly named yet rebuilt and repurposed LogDog would appear to be a mainstay of Zduriencik’s offerings. It relegates the Montero Sport to a job not unlike an American vice-president: be available for brief excursions, don’t make any weird noises, and wait for someone more important than you to die.
And yet. Sometimes, we can appreciate change and reinvention, not because it’s desperately needed or soon to be reused to improve another model or trade in for something shinier. Sometimes, it really is about the journey. What is Zduriencik willing to do, even in the face of failure and sunk cost? What can you remove from something like a Montero, and have it retain all the best of its… Montero-ness?
I can’t shake the feeling that this is somehow all a metaphor. Which is really a good way of making anything more profound than it really is. I mean, consider the last few things I said… now play them back in your head… but with the knowledge that IT’S A METAPHOR.
… Sublime. Isn’t it?
Hammond has his Pagini Zonda. May, his Fiat Panda.
Me? I don’t just have a Montero.
When I grow up… IF I grow up… I want to be a Montero Sport. |
The Worldwide Leader In Sports visited Astros Training Camp over the weekend. ESPN is normally happy to keep Houston in a black hole or continue to take jabs at the quality of the team, except Houston's own Robert Flores (who is always showing love for H-Town). Britt McHenry sat down with Astros manager A.J. Hinch, second baseman Jose Altuve, outfielder George Springer, and starting pitcher Dallas Keuchel.
A.J. Hinch talked about his clubhouse philosophy and allowing his players to embrace their personalities.
Jose Alutve, who joined the beard movement, spoke about the newest additions to the Astros roster.
George Springer did his best James Dean impression, finding the coolest way to sit in a chair during his interview. He always looked an orange version of the Hulk. Springer talked about his injury last season and returning to action.
Dallas Keuchel talked about his beard and his success from last season.
It's interesting that Springer and Keuchel were put in front of the camera instead of more veteran players like Scott Feldman and Jed Lowrie. But it speaks to these young players growing and taking hold off the team and the national attention. |
FT. MEADE, Maryland – A day after a government forensic expert testified that he'd found thousands of diplomatic cables on the Army computer of suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, he was forced to admit under cross-examination that none of the cables he compared to the ones WikiLeaks released matched.
Special Agent David Shaver, a forensic investigator with the Army's Computer Crimes Investigations Unit, testified Sunday that he'd found 10,000 U.S. diplomatic cables in HTML format on the soldier's classified work computer, as well as a corrupted text file containing more than 100,000 complete cables that had been converted to base-64 encoding.
Six months after Manning was arrested for allegedly leaking documents to WikiLeaks, the site began publishing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables that ranged in date from December 1966 to the end of February 2010. But Shaver said none of the documents that he found on Manning's computer, and that he then compared to those that WikiLeaks published, matched the WikiLeaks documents.
Shaver wasn't asked how many cables he compared to the WikiLeaks cables, or which dates those cables had, he just said he matched "some of them." In re-direct examination, however, he noted that the CSV file in which the cables were contained was corrupted and suggested this might indicate that it had not been possible to pass those cables to WikiLeaks for this reason. The defense objected to this assumption, however, noting that Shaver could not speculate on why the cables were not among those released by WikiLeaks.
The cross-examination of Shaver focused on establishing that there might have been legitimate reasons for the State Department cables to be on Manning's computers, since intelligence analysts were given access to them to do their job. One of Manning's superiors testified earlier in the hearing that he had sent a link to Manning and other analysts directing them to the location where they could find the cables.
The defense also established that it's possible Manning's computer could have been used by someone else – it was already established in previous testimony that he shared his work computers with another soldier – and also raised questions about the possibility that other soldiers knew Manning's password and therefore could have logged into his computer using his credentials and user profile.
In addition to the State Department cables found on Manning's computer, Shaver also testified Sunday that he'd found links between evidence on Manning's laptop and two other WikiLeaks releases: the so-called "Collateral Murder" Apache helicopter video and Gitmo prisoner assessments.
Last April, WikiLeaks began publishing a trove of more than 700 Guantanamo Bay prisoner assessment reports.
Shaver discovered scripts for Wget – a web-scraping tool – on Manning's computer that pointed to a Microsoft SharePoint server holding copies of the Gitmo documents. He ran the scripts to download the documents, then downloaded the ones that WikiLeaks had published, compared them and found they were the same, Shaver testified.
He also said he found two copies of the Apache video on Manning's work computer in unallocated space.
But Shaver was forced to admit on Monday that he was not aware that soldiers in the secure facility Manning worked in had been viewing that controversial video and talking about in December 2009, months before WikiLeaks published it. That, the defense seemed to suggest, would explain why a copy might be on Manning's computer.
A second government forensic witness, a private contractor named Mark Johnson who works for Mantech International, testified that he examined the forensic image of Manning's personal laptop, a Macbook Pro. On that computer he discovered chat logs of conversations that Manning allegedly had with former hacker Adrian Lamo. Johnson revealed that the Adium chat program was installed on Manning's computer and was used to conduct the chat with Lamo.
In a screen shot of the chat log shown in court, Manning's name was completely spelled out, as opposed to Lamo's version of the chat logs – which the hacker gave authorities in May 2010 – and showed Manning's chats under the name Bradass87.
Manning's former roommate at Forward Operating Base Hammer also testified on Monday to say that he and Manning shared a room from October 2009, when they first deployed to Iraq, up until the time Manning was arrested in May 2010.
Specialist Eric Baker, a military police officer, said that he and Manning rarely talked. But he told the court that Manning “used the computer quite often" and said that when he'd wake up in the middle of the night Manning would be on the computer. He never saw what was on Manning's screen, he told the court. |
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said he will not run for a new term in office in September elections, but rejected demands that he step down immediately and leave the country, vowing to die on Egypt's soil, in a television address Tuesday after a dramatic day in which a quarter-million protesters called on him to go.
Mubarak said he would serve out the rest of his term working to ensure a "peaceful transfer of power" and carry out amendments to rules on presidential elections.
But the half-way concession - an end to his rule months down the road - was immediately derided by protesters massed in Cairo's main downtown square.
Watching his speech on a giant TV set up in Tahrir square, protesters booed and waved their shoes over the heads in a sign of contempt. "Go, go, go! We are not leaving until he leaves," they chanted, and one man screamed, "He doesn't want to say it, he doesn't want to say it."
The 82-year-old Mubarak, who has ruled the country for nearly three decades, insisted that his decision not to run had nothing to do with the unprecedented protests that have shaken Egypt the past week. "I tell you in all sincerity, regardless of the current circumstances, I never intended to be a candidate for another term."
"I will work for the final remaining months of the current term to accomplish the necessary steps for the peaceful transfer of power," he said.
Mubarak, a former air force commander, resolutely vowed not to flee the country. "This dear nation .. is where I lived, I fought for it and defended its soil, sovereignty and interests. On its soil I will die. History will judge me like it did others."
"It is not my nature to betray or abandon the responsibilities," said Mubarak, who promised "to restore the security and stability of the homeland."
U.S. president Barack Obama, who spoke to Mubarak for 30 minutes after his announcement, said in a press conference that, "he recognizes the status quo is not sustainable, change must take place."
Mr. Obama continued: "Now, it is not the role of any other country to determine Egypt's leaders. Only the Egyptian people can do that. What is clear, and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak, is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful. It must be peaceful, and it must begin now."
Complete Coverage: Anger in the Arab World
Live Blog Day 8: Crisis in Egypt
The news comes after a day in which at least a quarter-million people - and perhaps as many as 2 million - flooded Cairo's main square Tuesday in a stunning and jubilant array of young and old, urban poor and middle class professionals, mounting by far the largest protest yet in a week of unrelenting demands Mubarak to leave after nearly 30 years in power.
Mubarak's announcement that he won't run for re-election is unlikely to satisfy protesters' demands and he injected his comments with some observers' greatest fear that the demonstrators' honest and peaceful protests are being exploited by groups who want to disrupt the stability of Egypt, said CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk, from the U.N.
Mubarak has been nearly silent so far in the face of the protests.
The New York Times, citing unnamed U.S. diplomats, reports that U.S. President Barack Obama may have been instrumental in pressuring Mubarak not to seek another term, "effectively withdrawing American support for its closest Arab ally."
U.S. Quietly Urges Mubarak to Skip Next Election
The State Department had dispatched a retired senior diplomat - former ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner - to meet with Egyptian officials, and Wisner delivered Mr. Obama's message to Mubarak himself, the Times reported.
A senior American official told the Associated Press that Wisner told Mubarak the U.S. saw his presidency at an end and urged him to prepare for an orderly transition to real democracy with elections.
Wisner and Mubarak are friends and the official said the retired ambassador made clear that it was the U.S "view that his tenure as president is coming to close."
Tuesday's crowds - determined but peaceful - filled Tahrir, or Liberation, Square and spilled into nearby streets, among them people defying a government transportation shutdown to make their way from rural provinces in the Nile Delta. Protesters jammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, with schoolteachers, farmers, unemployed university graduates, women in conservative headscarves and women in high heels, men in suits and working-class men in scuffed shoes.
They sang nationalist songs and chanted the anti-Mubarak "Leave! Leave! Leave!" as military helicopters buzzed overhead. Organizers said the aim was to intensify marches to get the president out of power by Friday, and similar demonstrations erupted in at least five other cities around Egypt.
The military promised on state TV Monday night that it would not fire on protesters answering a call for a million to demonstrate, and recognized the "legitimate demands by honorable citizens," a sign that army support for Mubarak may be unraveling as momentum builds for an extraordinary eruption of discontent and demands for democracy in the United States' most important Arab ally.
Emboldened by the tacit support of the military, the coalition of groups opposing Mubarak has said that it will consider talks about a transition to democracy only after Mubarak resigns, Al Jazeera reports.
Tens of thousands - and by some reports as many as a million - people gathered in the coastal city of Alexandria in a parallel protest. There were conflicting reports about pockets of violence at that protest, with some observers saying between 100 and 300 people may have been killed.
The United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, referred in a statement Tuesday to "unconfirmed reports suggesting as many as 300 people may have been killed so far, more than 3,000 injured and hundreds arrested."
Mubarak would be the second Arab leader pushed from office by a popular uprising in the history of the modern Middle East, following the ouster last month of Tunisia's president.
After Egypt, How Will the Dominoes Fall?
The movement to drive Mubarak out has been built on the work of on-line activists and fueled by deep frustration with an autocratic regime blamed for ignoring the needs of the poor and allowing corruption and official abuse to run rampant. After years of tight state control, protesters emboldened by the Tunisia unrest took to the streets on Jan. 25 and mounted a once-unimaginable series of protests across this nation of 80 million people - the region's most populous country and the center of Arabic-language film-making, music and literature.
The repercussions were being felt around the region, as other authoritarian governments fearing popular discontent pre-emptively tried to burnish their democratic image.
Jordan's King Abdullah II fired his government Tuesday in the face of smaller street protests, named an ex-prime minister to form a new Cabinet and ordered him to launch political reforms. The Palestinian Cabinet in West Bank said it would hold long-promised municipal elections "as soon as possible."
The chairman of the powerful U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. John Kerry, gave public voice to what senior U.S. officials have said only privately in recent days: that Mubarak should "step aside gracefully to make way for a new political structure."
Meanwhile, the Obama administration on Tuesday opened talks with a possible successor to Mubarak, with prominent democracy advocate Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei.
The context of the discussions with Nobel peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei wasn't immediately public.
The U.S. ambassador in Cairo, Margaret Scobey, spoke by telephone Tuesday, the embassy said. ElBaradei has taken a key role with other opposition groups in formulating the movement's demands for Mubarak to step down and allow a transitional government paving the way for free elections. There was no immediate word on what Scobey and ElBaradei discussed.
"The U.S. Embassy in Cairo has been especially busy in the past several days with an active outreach to political and civil society," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in a message posted to Twitter. "As part of our public outreach to convey support for orderly transition in Egypt, Ambassador Scobey spoke today with Mohamed ElBaradei."
In an interview with Al-Arabiya television, ElBaradei rejected an offer late Monday by Vice President Omar Suleiman for a dialogue on enacting constitutional reforms. He said there could be no negotiations until Mubarak leaves.
ElBaradei, the former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, invigorated anti-Mubarak feeling with his return to Egypt last year, but the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood remains Egypt's largest opposition movement.
ElBaradei hailed the armed forces for their "alignment with the people." He said he was speaking on behalf a large portion of the opposition coalition, but did not represent them officially or completely.
"We all know that the first legitimate demand set by the people is the departure of President Mubarak, so that we would start a transitional era, and build a new Egypt on the basis of stability, freedom and democracy," ElBaradei said. "I expect and hope that today's protest would be the last, and that President Mubarak would understand that it is time for him to go in order to avoid more bloodshed."
ElBaradei also signaled a Friday deadline for Mubarak's departure.
Banks, schools and the stock market in Cairo were closed for the third working day, making cash tight. Long lines formed outside bakeries as people tried to replenish their stores of bread, for which prices were spiraling.
An unprecedented shutdown of the Internet was in its fifth day after the last of the service providers abruptly stopped shuttling Internet traffic into and out of the country.
Cairo's international airport remained a scene of chaos as thousands of foreigners sought to flee.
The various protesters have little in common beyond the demand that Mubarak go. Perhaps the most significant tensions among them is between young secular activists and the Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to form a state governed by Islamic law but renounced violence in the 1970s unlike other Islamist groups that waged a violent campaign against the government in the 1980s and 1990s. The more secular are deeply suspicious the Brotherhood aims to co-opt what they contend is a spontaneous, popular movement. American officials have suggested they have similar fears.
"The longer this plays out, the more things begin to unravel … it creates political openings. And what we've learned through history is often not the first phase or even the second phase that matters, it's the third or fourth phase," Dr. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told CBS' "The Early Show" Tuesday. "And clearly the religious radicals … [will] try to exploit any political openings, which is why it's important that sooner rather than later a dialogue starts to take place, Mubarak leaves office and order is restored and the economy gets started up again." |
Link to this page: https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/20566
Posted on 19 April 2015 at 14:53 GMT
Cardiff: Only TUSC can be trusted to save services
"You are the first person who has made any sense in this election," said one council worker at our stall, after we explained we're building the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) because none of the existing parties in power can be trusted to end austerity and fight the cuts.
We organised a protest against the latest cuts planned for the Youth Service in Cardiff on the Saturday after the TUSC party political broadcast aired.
140 youth workers were sacked by the Labour council last April, but that's just the beginning of the cuts for this service. Under the radar, plans are being hatched to all but dismantle it. In July, street-based youth workers will have their hours slashed. Many youth centres are barely open already, with some having lost a majority of their full-time staff, but in six months time, once the election is safely out of the way, the Labour council plans to close half of them completely.
We are losing our youth service because we do not have representatives who are willing to stand up and fight the cuts. A PCS union member who had stopped by to sign our petition said she thought the TUSC broadcast was "the only one full of genuine people", and she's right!
The reason why the present parties in power are either openly embracing austerity or opposing it in words until the slightest pressure is put on them, is because none of them are rooted in the communities and organisations of ordinary working-class people - those who are at the sharp end of the cuts.
TUSC supporters understand that to change direction, we can't trust the existing mass parties to act for us: We've got to do the job ourselves and build a new party. |
Nothing will bring a smile to your face faster this holiday season than the opening number of “La La Land,” Damien Chazelle’s new movie that’s poised to reinvigorate the Hollywood musical.
The scene is a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway. It’s sunny — it’s always sunny in LA — but the drivers are hermetically sealed off from the weather, from each other, in their air-conditioned cars. Horns honk, windows roll down, music drifts from radios. And then, for no apparent reason, a woman jumps out of her car, throws her arms open to the sun and starts singing. Soon everybody’s singing and dancing around and atop their cars. An exasperating traffic jam turns into a big, bold, bright showstopper.
The scene evokes Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and “An American in Paris.” Throw in nods to “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of La Rochefort” — director Jacque Demy and composer Michel Legrand’s charming French movie musicals of the 1960s — and you have cinematic confection.
Chazelle had those performers and movies in mind when he made “La La Land.”
“I fell in love with live-action musicals — with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly — when I was 18,” says Chazelle, who grew up in Princeton, NJ. “I loved the creative bravado. When someone starts singing, those movies just jump to a whole new resister, unapologetically. Not everything has to be grounded in psychological reality. If you’re happy enough, you break into song. That was par for the course in old Hollywood, and I wanted to get back to that simplicity.”
Caught in the traffic jam are the movie’s stars, Emma Stone, as a struggling actress, and Ryan Gosling, a down-on-his-luck musician. He honks at her. She blows him off. But in true old Hollywood fashion, their paths cross again. On their first date, when love comes in and takes them for a spin, they dance among the stars at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
“La La Land” received rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival last summer and is generating strong Oscar buzz. But the movie almost didn’t take flight. When Chazelle brought the idea to Hollywood executives, he was greeted with skepticism. “Chicago” won six Oscars, including Best Picture in 2003, but it was based on a hit Broadway musical that everybody knew. “La La Land,” an original film musical, would be expensive, with no guarantee that contemporary audiences wouldn’t smirk at singing and dancing from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
“I think they crunched the numbers in the backroom and saw that it just didn’t add up,” says Chazelle. “It may be phony math, but there’s a certain kind of logic to it.”
Chazelle switched gears and made a small, dramatic movie instead — “Whiplash,” which won three Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor for J.K. Simmons. (Simmons has a charming cameo in “La La Land.”) Chazelle now had clout with the studios, and could start peddling “La La Land” again. He found the perfect producer in Marc Platt, a musical theater fan who, when he wasn’t producing hit movies such as “Legally Blonde,” brought a little show to Broadway in 2003 called “Wicked.”
It has grossed, to date, more than $4 billion worldwide.
“I loved ‘Whiplash,’ so it’s probably true that had Damien come to me with the phone book, I would have produced it,” says Platt. “But I believe in film musicals — ‘The Sound of Music’ tells its story beautifully — and when Damien walked me through his script shot by shot, it was clear he was lovingly looking back a the old musicals but also stretching the form.”
For all its spontaneous singing and dancing, “La La Land” has a naturalistic look. Los Angeles, the movie’s ever-present backdrop, is both romantic and gritty. In one scene, a group of girls in brightly colored dresses are singing and dancing down their way down an LA street. There’s a palm tree, but look closely at the street and you’ll see oil slicks and cracks in the pavement.
“I have a love-hate relationship with Los Angeles,” says Chazelle. “It seduces me at one moment and then utterly crushes me and disgusts me at another. That alone is fodder for a musical.”
“Astaire and Rogers. Hepburn and Tracy. They had chemistry. Emma and Ryan have it, too. It’s old-school and wonderful.” - Producer Marc Platt
The characters portrayed by Stone and Gosling experience the seduction and disappointment of the LA dream factory. Their love affair takes some unexpected twists, but their attraction for each other is always palpable.
“There is a quality to Emma and Ryan that is old-fashioned Hollywood,” says Platt. “Astaire and Rogers. Hepburn and Tracy. They had chemistry. Emma and Ryan have it, too. It’s old-school and wonderful.”
Stone and Gosling had some experience singing and dancing. She did a nice turn as Sally Bowles in the Broadway revival of “Cabaret” a couple of years ago, while he got his start on the Disney Channel’s reboot of “The Mickey Mouse Club” in the early ’90s. But it’s fair to say neither was the modern-day incarnation of Charisse and Kelly. So they went to work in the rehearsal studio with “La La Land” choreographer Mandy Moore.
“I worked with them separately at first, because I didn’t want it to be the blind leading the blind,” Moore says. “I wanted to build up their confidence. You don’t want someone else in the room giggling at you because you can’t pick it up right away.”
As it turned out, Stone was a quick study, nailing the routines and then, later, adding nuance. Gosling was slower, but, says Moore, added his personal style right away. When she put them together, they clicked.
When you see them on-screen, a Rodgers and Hart line is sure to cross your mind: “Isn’t it romantic?”
If “La La Land” is a hit, is a Broadway stage version a possibility?
“Certainly, when I’m involved,” says Platt.
Chazelle says, “I would be scared out of my mind. I’ve never done theater. I have no idea what I would do with it onstage. But never rule anything out.” |
CLOSE American Millennials say they would rather live in a socialist or communist country than a capitalist democracy. Veuer's Nick Cardona (@nickcardona93) has that story. Buzz60
There's a massive hemorrhaging of young voters from Trump and the GOP. They're handling it by trolling them out of the middle class.
In Philadelphia in 2010. (Photo11: Jeff Fusco, Getty Images)
Fellow old people, imagine a candidate so lit that he’s backed by nearly three out of four voters ages 18 to 29. And imagine that the candidate getting your fam turnt (translation: your pals super excited) is not a YouTube star or a transgender activist determined to oppose cruel bathroom laws or (the way too conservative) Barack Obama in 2008. This new member of your squad is 60-year-old former Goldman Sachs executive Phil Murphy — who in January will become the first Democratic governor of New Jersey since 2009.
Murphy’s fire (yeah, hot) performance with younger Millennial voters was nearly matched by 58-year-old Democrat Ralph Northam, a former Army surgeon and the next governor of the commonwealth of Virginia. He won about seven out of 10 voters ages 18 to 29, a group that doubled its turnout from 2009 to 2017. And like Murphy, he isn’t exactly the next Harry Styles.
More: Tax bill race to break Trump's populist promises: Who's winning?
More: Don't cut taxes for rich people like me: Walt Disney grandniece Abigail
The string of Democratic victories on Election Night 2017 falls well within the tradition of the party not holding the White House cleaning up in off-year elections. But what’s notable is that younger voters are generally mad AF at President Trump and ready to clap back at the ballot box — right as Millennials are prepared to eclipse Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation of eligible voters.
While Trump is already historically unpopular for a new president, his appeal to America’s closest to death is keeping his ratings afloat, according to pollster William Jordan. Among younger voters, however, the president has already sunk to the level of George W. Bush in 2008 — after W had led America into the Hurricane Katrina debacle, two failed wars and the beginning of the Great Recession.
And it was likely W’s repellence to younger voters as much as Obama’s appeal to them that helped Obama win 66% of the 18-to-29 vote in 2008 as young people flooded to the polls in numbers that hadn’t been seen since 18-year-olds got the vote in 1972.
So how is Trump’s GOP handling a hemorrhaging of young voters who are establishing voting patterns that could last the rest of their adult lives?
By trolling them out of the middle class.
How does the GOP tax plan, which has now passed the House and Senate in differing but rhyming versions, hurt young people?
Cosmopolitan’s Robin Marty counted the potential ways: higher taxes, more expensive student loans, rising insurance premiums, underfunded public schools, lower home values and a withering safety net.
“What’s very clear through all of this is that the group that most pays are the younger people,” Eugene Steuerle, of the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, told The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein.
It just makes sense that when you cut taxes for the richest Americans and corporations, the winners are the people who’ve had the longest time to accumulate wealth, businesses and stocks. In other words, older people. It’s the younger people, meanwhile, who are most likely to be punished by cuts Republicans will likely demand to pay for these tax giveaways and a deficit that was rising even before this budget-busting scheme — especially since they have continually promised to reserve cuts to social programs such as Medicare and Social Security for people who aren’t yet eligible for them.
And the GOP tax plan is far from the party’s only policy that seems finely tuned to tick off the newest generation of voters.
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POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media
Repealing "net neutrality" protections isn’t popular with voters from either party and could be especially disastrous for the Republican Party if it ends up compromising the Internet experience Millennials grew up expecting.
They don’t like obstacles to birth control, either. “Few Millennials have moral qualms about birth control, and they generally support policies to make contraception widely available and affordable,” according to a 2015 poll by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute.
In a new NBC News/GenForward poll, only 19% of Millennials identified with the Republican Party, and 71% said the GOP does not care about people like them.
Sure, there are still warning signs for the Democrats that Republicans’ collapse with young voters won’t translate into electoral gains. The same NBC News/GenForward poll found that 71% of Millennials want a third party, and in 2016 white Millennials voted more like their parents than their multiracial peers.
Even so, there isn’t a third party yet on the horizon, and the Millennial generation will be the most diverse America has ever seen. And for now, their No. 1 issue is health care, according to that NBC News/GenForward poll. They seem much more worried about the government coming for their insurance than their guns.
The future is happening, and Republicans are betting trillions of dollars against it. It’s enough to make you wonder why they aren’t even trying to fix a problem that — like Trump’s court appointees — could last for generations. Maybe they know something we don’t know?
Well, there is that old conservative proverb: If you can’t beat them, stop them — from voting.
Jason Sattler, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is a columnist for The National Memo. Follow him on Twitter: @LOLGOP.
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to [email protected].
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WASHINGTON -- With shouts of "Shame on you!" echoing in the chamber, the U.S. Senate failed to muster sufficient support Wednesday for a gun-buyer background check bill that's supported by nearly 90 percent of Americans.
It also voted down other key measures and counterproposals, defeating a string of amendments in a series of procedural votes that likely doomed any major legislation to curb gun violence.
The background check measure -- painstakingly crafted by the bipartisan duo of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) -- was seen as the key to passing the first legislation in decades to address the sorts of mass slaughters that so recently horrified the country in Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six educators were gunned down at an elementary school, and in Aurora, Colo., where 12 people were killed in a theater.
The amendment failed 54 to 46, falling short of the 60-vote threshold needed to break a filibuster. That failure upset anew victims of the Sandy Hook shootings and other slaughters who watched from the Senate gallery.
"Shame on you!" shouted two women in the gallery after the vote. One was Patricia Maisch, who grabbed the third clip from the gunman who opened fired at then-Rep. Gabby Giffords in the Tuscon., Ariz., shooting in 2011. The other was Lori Hass, whose daughter was injured in the Virginia Tech shootings six years and one day ago.
"I think we're going to continue to work for the right thing to be done. I think the senators who voted against this will have to live with that vote, and I think they're going to have to account for themselves," said Peter Read, whose daughter, Mary, was among the 33 killed at Virginia Tech.
An angry and disappointed-looking President Barack Obama also hammered the vote in a Rose Garden speech on Wednesday.
"All in all, this is a pretty shameful day for Washington," Obama said.
"The American people are trying to figure out -- how can something that has 90 percent support not happen?" Obama said.
He was echoed by other victims of mass shootings who watched the Senate vote.
"I was extremely disappointed," said retired Col. Bill Badger, one of the people who tackled Jared Lee Loughner in Tucson. "When 90 percent of the people want something, and the senator votes against them, the next election, we're going to take care of those senators, because they're not representing the people."
Passage of the background check amendment had been seen as key because it represented a bipartisan agreement in a highly polarized debate. It also would have preserved a major part of the overall bill that many advocates against gun violence saw as a minimum step toward stemming gun massacres.
Stronger measures up for a vote also failed, including a ban of assault weapons sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that went down 40 to 60, in spite of an impassioned plea from the senator.
"I know how this is going to end, and the despair and the dismay of the families standing out there whose safety we need to protect, and we don't do it. I am really chagrined," said Feinstein, who argued that lawmakers with six-year terms should have the fortitude to take tough votes.
"Show some guts," Feinstein said.
The only significant steps that all sides agreed on were stemming illegal trafficking of weapons and improving mental health efforts, but even an amendment written with NRA input to crack down on trafficking failed 58 to 42.
A vote on improving mental health services was delayed until Thursday.
The background check measure would have expanded the current check system to cover sales of weapons on the Internet and at gun shows.
Democratic aides privately conceded that with the failure of background checks, the rest of the bill would likely go down. One described it as a "pyrrhic victory," noting that a majority of the Senate backed the bill that is so popular outside the halls of Congress. "It's the farthest we've come," said the aide, speaking on background to talk freely.
The aides saw little hope of it being resurrected, although leaders kept that option open.
Opponents, citing a National Institute of Justice study, argued that the expanded check system would have laid the groundwork for a national registry of gun owners, although the measure expressly forbid such a step, with a 15-year jail sentence for anyone who tried to do that.
They also called it a useless step that would achieve little.
"Expanded background checks would not have prevented Newtown," said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who offered an alternative measure with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) lacking new background checks. That measure also failed, 52 to 48.
But Toomey said his amendment would have at least been a modest step in the right direction.
"The goal was to see if we can find a way to make it a little bit more difficult for people who have no legal right to have a gun for them to obtain it," Toomey said. "That was the goal."
The Senate failed to meet it.
CORRECTION: This post originally incorrectly stated Chuck Grassley's state. He is a senator from Iowa. Patricia Maisch's first name was also misstated.
Final Vote For Manchin-Toomey Background Check Deal: |
File - In this file photo taken Wednesday, April 13, 2016, Eli and Shuli Barzilai hold a copy of the Birds' Head Haggadah, the text read around Jewish dinner tables on the Passover holiday, in their home in Jerusalem. Last year, the descendants of German Jewish lawmaker Ludwig Marum requested the Israel Museum pay compensation for the famed Bird's Head Haggadah. They say the Haggadah was snatched from their grandfather's family after he was rounded up by the Nazis and later sold to the predecessor of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem without their consent. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty, File)
JERUSALEM (AP) — The grandchildren of a prominent Jewish victim of the Nazis are renewing their fight for title to the world’s oldest illustrated Passover manuscript, hoping newly-unearthed documents will boost their claim to a prized jewel of Israel’s leading museum.
Last year, the descendants of German Jewish lawmaker Ludwig Marum requested the Israel Museum pay compensation for the famed Bird’s Head Haggadah, a medieval copy of the text read around Jewish dinner tables on the Passover holiday.
They say the Haggadah was snatched from their grandfather’s family after he was rounded up by the Nazis and later sold to the predecessor of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem without their consent.
One of the grandsons, 75-year-old Eli Barzilai, said he met with the museum last May and has corresponded with it since.
The museum acknowledges the Bird’s Head Haggadah was in the family’s possession before the Nazi epoch, but has asked the family to offer documentation about what happened to the Haggadah from the time the Nazis arrested their grandfather in 1933 until an unrelated Jewish man from Germany arrived in Jerusalem and sold the Haggadah in 1946.
The family has no written proof that the manuscript was stolen. But over the last few months, Barzilai has acquired documentation from a German archive he says proves that Hermann Kahn, the man who sold the Haggadah, did not have the financial means to purchase it in the first place — lending support to the possibility that he obtained it illegitimately.
“Hermann Kahn could not have been able to buy the Haggadah ... because of unending financial difficulty,” Barzilai said in an interview in his Jerusalem home.
The family’s lawyer in Israel, Meir Heller, says the relevant archival documentation will be presented to the Israel Museum.
The family wants the Bird’s Head Haggadah to remain on display at the museum, but seeks financial compensation and wants the museum to rename it the Marum Haggadah, after their grandfather, Ludwig Marum.
“It will be a shame if we have to go to court,” said Heller. “An injustice has been done, and the museum must correct that injustice.”
The museum says it is open to receiving new information on the Haggadah’s ownership history and continuing discussions with Barzilai, but considers the ownership matter to have been resolved in 1984. At that time, Marum’s daughter wrote the museum that she believed the immigrant who had brought the Haggadah to Jerusalem “had no right to sell it,” but that the family wanted it to remain at the museum “for the benefit of the public.”
Written in southern Germany around 1300, the Bird’s Head Haggadah has long been a riddle, largely because of its strange illustrations of Jewish figures.
Marc Michael Epstein, an expert on the manuscript, believes the figures have the heads of griffins, a beloved mythical creature, offering a positive representation of Jews while skirting a biblical prohibition against depicting human likenesses.
Marum, a Jewish lawyer from the southern German town of Karlsruhe who served in Germany’s parliament and was an opponent of Hitler, received the Haggadah as a wedding gift, according to his family. In 1933, the Nazis paraded Marum and other opponents across town before taking them away, and Marum was later killed at the Kislau concentration camp.
In 1946, a Jewish lawyer named Shimon Jeselsohn, who worked with Marum in Karlsruhe and fled to Jerusalem after World War II, read in the newspaper about a special Haggadah purchased by the Bezalel National Museum, the forerunner to the Israel Museum. He recognized it from Marum’s law office and was curious how it ended up in Jerusalem.
Kahn told Jeselsohn a Jewish doctor had given it to him, but the doctor denied it, and when Kahn offered no further explanation, Jeselsohn became suspicious. He tracked down Marum’s daughter to notify her. Over the years, Jeselsohn, now deceased, continued to encourage the family to seek an arrangement with the museum.
The family had no further information about Kahn until late December 2016, when German historians in Karlsruhe mailed more than 1,000 photocopied documents to Barzilai, including files pertaining to Kahn’s correspondences with German authorities.
Barzilai said the documents reveal that Kahn, a schoolteacher, was low on cash. He made multiple requests for funds from the German authorities to help him pay for his ill wife’s medical treatment, and at one point apparently paid his apartment rent in dining room furniture.
Like other Jews, Kahn was fired from his teaching job, the documents show, and he took a low-paying, part-time job teaching drawing classes at a Jewish school — during which time Barzilai thinks Kahn may have obtained the Haggadah.
In 1939, Nazi officials offered Kahn a chance to leave Germany, and with financial support from his brother-in-law, Kahn shipped his household items to what was then British-ruled Palestine.
According to one document, neighbors reported seeing Kahn hiding valuables in the upholstery of the sofas he was packing up. Barzilai believes this is a clue that the Haggadah was in that shipment.
While Kahn was en route to Palestine, World War II broke out and he got stuck in Switzerland. He arrived in Jerusalem in 1945, retrieved his belongings from storage, and sold the Haggadah a year later.
Barzilai does not think Kahn himself stole the Haggadah, but that he may have gotten it from someone else after Nazis arrested his grandfather.
The Haggadah is at the root of an uncomfortable battle pitting a Jewish family against Israel’s leading museum, which considers itself a caretaker of heirless Judaica once owned by Holocaust victims.
Another sore spot is that David Jeselsohn, the son of the lawyer who advocated for the family’s rights to the Haggadah, is a leading donor of the Israel Museum and has encouraged Barzilai to drop the case.
“Because of all the past, and my father ... I am always ready to meet (Barzilai) and ready to help him,” David Jeselsohn said in a telephone interview from Switzerland, where he has a home. “But if he wants facts to be changed, he must come up with new facts.”
Barzilai said he hopes Jeselsohn will help reach an agreement acceptable to all sides.
Jeselsohn’s father “did so much for this case,” he said. “We would like the Jeselsohn family to continue the father’s path.”
___
Follow Daniel Estrin at www.twitter.com/danielestrin |
Apple has released a statement called "Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy," claiming it has not been involved in the NSA's PRISM program.
Furthermore, Apple claims it does not provide "any government agency" with direct access to its servers, and that "any government agency requesting customer content must get a court order."
That doesn't mean the agencies aren't asking for data. According to Apple, the company has received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data from Dec. 1, 2012, to May 31, 2013.
"Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities," claims Apple.
SEE ALSO: Does the NSA Really Get Direct Access to Your Data?
Earlier this month, reports from The Washington Post and The Guardian, claimed that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple and several other internet companies have been part of the NSA's PRISM program, allowing the NSA access to customer data.
Despite the reports, most companies denied involvement with the program.
You can read Apple's full statement here.
Thumbnail image via iStockphoto, Veni |
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Aug. 25, 2015, 1:13 AM GMT / Updated Aug. 25, 2015, 12:49 PM GMT By Hasani Gittens
IndyCar driver Justin Wilson has died from a head injury he sustained in a race over the weekend, racing officials announced Monday evening.
"Anyone who follows our sport knows Justin is one of the most highly respected people in our business. He will be missed," IndyCar CEO Mark Miles said in announcing Wilson's death.
"He was a great guy, one of the few, if only, guys who was friend of everyone in the paddock," said driver Ed Carpenter, who was with Miles, representing all IndyCar drivers. "As challenging as today is and yesterday was, he was doing what we all love to do."
Wilson's brother, Stefan Wilson, also a racecar driver, later said on Twitter, "Can't even begin to describe the loss I feel right now. He was my Brother, my best friend, my role model and mentor. He was a champion!"
Andretti Autosport, for whom Wilson drove, said that "while Justin was only part of the Andretti lineup for a short time, it only took a second for him to forever become part of the Andretti family."
It added: "His life and racing career is a story of class and passion surpassed by none."
The 37-year-old father of two was struck by a large piece of debris from another driver's car following a single-car accident Sunday at Pocono Raceway.
MotorSportsTalk: Justin Wilson Dies at Age 37
A heavy piece of the nose from Sage Karam's car appeared to strike the British driver in the head before the debris ricocheted high into the air. Wilson did not appear to have control of his car as it veered left and directly into an interior wall.
The series heads to Sonoma, California, on Wednesday to begin preparing for the finale, in which six drivers remain eligible to win the title Sunday.
IndyCar has had its share of safety issues since the season opener at St. Petersburg, Florida, where debris from a car sailed over the grandstands and struck a fan in the concession area. The woman hit said in a lawsuit filed against IndyCar her skull was fractured. She contends she fell backward and hit her head after she was struck by debris.
IndyCar made a series of rule changes to fortify the many parts and pieces on its new aerodynamic body kits, but the nose that flew off of Karam's car is not a tethered part. The series was also forced into action during the buildup to the Indianapolis 500 after three cars went airborne during practices.
"Motor racing is never going to be 100 percent safe. If it was, there would be nobody in the grandstands," racing legend Mario Andretti told The Associated Press on Monday. "But we've come a very, very far way in terms of safety. Now this will be looked at it and addressed appropriately."
Andretti called this "a perfect storm, and the thing that every driver fears: getting caught up in somebody else's mistake." |
Zach Allen only received one assurance from the Rutgers coaching staff before selecting Piscataway as his transfer destination in June.
"Coming in late - I have might have a disadvantage, people think - but they promised me that everyone was going to have an equal opportunity," Allen said, "and if you know what you are doing, you are going to have a good chance to win this job."
It became clear that Rutgers held up its end of the bargain Monday when coach Chris Ash released a depth chart that listed Allen and Chris Laviano as co-starters.
Allen's arrival from TCU bumped both Hayden Rettig and Giovanni Rescigno - Laviano's chief challengers last season and in spring camp - to the second-team offense.
"It's my job, coming in late, to know the playbook and to get everything done that I need to get done before camp starts," Allen said. "I felt like I put myself in a good place to be able to compete for this job."
Rutgers went in search of leadership and consistency at quarterback after spring camp ended with unsatisfying results.
Allen is hoping to provide those attributes because he lacks experience, having thrown two passes in one game over three seasons at TCU.
In fact, Allen played wide receiver last season in an effort to get on the field.
"Zach's done a great job this whole summer," Ash said. "That's why we brought him in. He's a mature kid, he's an intelligent kid. The transition to quarterback from what I saw today looked pretty smooth.''
Either Laviano (11 starts) or Rettig (one) took every snap for Rutgers last season, and those two plus Rescigno have been with Ash's staff since it started in January.
"They want you to be a leader, to know what you are doing, to be able to be a game-manager and run the offense," Allen said. "You don't have to be a superstar. You don't have to make crazy plays. But you have to run the offense."
Ideally, you have to be run in the offense, too.
QB Chris Laviano develops thicker skin
Rutgers is looking for a dual-threat to operate its spread offense. None of the other quarterbacks involved in the competition share Allen's mobility.
"The spread is different everywhere you go," Allen said. "There are some similarities and there are a lot of differences. The concept of going fast and trying to catch the defense off guard is the same.
"The playbook here is different. A lot of different formations. Just a lot of different things the defense has to prepare for, which is cool as an offense. You can just go fast with your base offense and they have to prepare everything else."
Allen said he is "happy" with the speed at which he is learning in advance of the Sept. 3 season opener.
"Definitely he can be ready in four weeks," offensive coordinator Drew Mehringer said. "He's one of those guys that if you tell him he can't do it, he'll get himself in position to succeed."
The 6-foot-3, 206-pounder moved well on rollouts during Monday's practice but his passes needed to be crisper. That will happen with more practice, he said.
"I'm confident in my ability," Allen said. "Going through all summer - throwing 7-on-7 and working 1-on-1 with the receivers - I feel I've knocked the rust off. It's only going to get better for all of us quarterbacks."
Allen, who had multiple suitors as a transfer, said he saw Rutgers as a team "on the rise."
As Rettig, a LSU transfer, has pointed out in the past, in can be difficult to join a team that already has its pieces in place and immediately command a leadership role.
"It's different when you come to a new school and you don't know the people," Allen said, "but as time goes on and you work out with them, you grind with them, you sweat with them, you end up building a relationship.
"When I first got here I texted a lot of the receivers. We threw a lot 1-on-1. I hung out with the O-linemen, trying to get accompanied with everyone the best I could. It's a great opportunity to come out here and lead a team and try to win the job."
Ryan Dunleavy may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @rydunleavy. Find NJ.com Rutgers Football on Facebook. |
Six international human rights groups have petitioned the United Nations to freeze its counternarcotics aid to Iran until that country abolishes the death penalty for drug offenses.
In a jointly signed Dec. 12 letter released Wednesday by the groups, they argue that the freeze is justified because of “the widening gulf between Iran’s rhetoric and the realities of the justice system.”
Iran executes more prisoners than any other country except China, with 500 to 625 executed last year, according to United Nations estimates. At least half of the condemned were convicted of drug trafficking.
Yury Fedotov, chief executive of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a Vienna-based agency that has provided millions of dollars to Iran’s counternarcotics efforts, has been in discussions with Iranian officials about the executions, which are at odds with the agency’s human rights guidelines. |
The newest bout of Rand Paul reaming comes after his recent trip to Iowa where the senator met with 15 evangelical pastors known for having clout with faithful GOP caucus goers. Much to the chagrin of libertarians everywhere, Paul assured the neoconservative crowd that he does not support ending the war on drugs (favoring decreased sentences instead) and that he is an advocate for the “traditional family unit.” In his speech he clarified:
“I’m not advocating everyone go out and run around with no clothes on and smoke pot… I’m not a libertarian. I’m a libertarian Republican. I’m a constitutional conservative.”
Didn’t we already know this? Is he not a member of the Republican Party? Paul has all but officially announced his candidacy in the 2016 election, and don’t we all know it’s never too early for the Republicans to begin campaigning – it’s going to take a lot of time to undo the damage done by recent Republican leaders. As Rand himself has said, “We have to evolve, adapt or die.”
Though many self-proclaimed libertarians hoped a Rand Paul presidency would yield all the policies (or lack of) pushed by his father, Ron Paul. Here’s the thing, though: Rand is not his father’s political doppelganger. He is more conservative and more mainstream – and he’s never tried to hide that fact.
Politics is an ugly, zero-sum game. Those who win are scarcely ever the most deserving; they are the ones who most successfully play the game. It wasn’t brilliant political ideas that won Obama the White House in 2012, but ingenious marketing strategy and vigilant Romney bashing. Obama maintained the extremist vote (and their contributions) as well as an overwhelming majority of support from three key demographics: Hispanics, women, and African Americans. It seems that Rand is taking a page out of the Democrat’s playbook by trying to appeal to the voting base at large without offending anyone – from moderates to neocons – even if this comes at the detriment of his earliest fans: the libertarians.
But we must recognize, liberty lovers, we are still the minority. It’s not going to be easy – perhaps even possible – to have an authentic libertarian candidate elected into the White House today. Reeling from the persisting War on Terror and an insecure economy, America is still afraid of freedom and of a society capable of self-regulation. With the ever-deepening schism in political orientation and divided government, no candidate will be electable if she or he cannot garner support from independents, moderates, idiots, and extremists alike.
So Rand Paul traveled to Iowa and made a case with influential neoconservatives on why he should be their candidate in 2016, and he left with a collection of new supporters. “I see a very good future for Rand Paul here in Iowa,” said Evangelical Brad Cranston of Heritage Baptist Church. “He has a Biblical world view. When you start with that, you really get us listening.”
Emotional appeal will win people over every time. Rand Paul is playing the game of politics well, and he must continue to do so if there can be any path for him that leads to the White House. |
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If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don’t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.
For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”
What does this ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.
As recently as 1960, the creed was our national consensus. Running that year for the Democratic nomination, candidates like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey genuinely embraced the creed, differing from Republicans only in how its elements should be realized.
Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened? Many of the dynamics of the reversal can be found in developments across the whole of American society: in the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class, and in the plight of the working class caught in between.
In my 2012 book “Coming Apart,” I discussed these new classes at length. The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture. The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage. Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it. Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away.
Historically, one of the most widely acknowledged aspects of American exceptionalism was our lack of class consciousness. Even Marx and Engels recognized it. This was egalitarianism American style. Yes, America had rich people and poor people, but that didn’t mean that the rich were better than anyone else.
Successful Americans stubbornly refused to accept the mantle of an upper class, typically presenting themselves to their fellow countrymen as regular guys. And they usually were, in the sense that most of them had grown up in modest circumstances, or even in poverty, and carried the habits and standards of their youths into their successful later lives.
America also retained a high degree of social and cultural heterogeneity in its communities. Tocqueville wrote of America in the 1830s as a place where “the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people.” That continued well into the 20th century, even in America’s elite neighborhoods. In the 1960 census, the median income along Philadelphia’s Main Line was just $90,000 in today’s dollars. In Boston’s Brookline, it was $75,000; on New York’s Upper East Side, just $60,000. At a typical dinner party in those neighborhoods, many guests would have had no more than a high-school diploma.
In the years since, the new upper class has evolved a distinctive culture. For a half-century, America’s elite universities have drawn the most talented people from all over the country, socialized them and often married them off to each other. Brains have become radically more valuable in the marketplace. In 2016, a dinner party in those same elite neighborhoods consists almost wholly of people with college degrees, even advanced degrees. They are much more uniformly affluent. The current median family incomes for the Main Line, Brookline and the Upper East Side are about $150,000, $151,000 and $203,000, respectively.
And the conversation at that dinner party is likely to be completely unlike the conversations at get-togethers in mainstream America. The members of the new upper class are seldom attracted to the films, TV shows and music that are most popular in mainstream America. They have a distinctive culture in the food they eat, the way they take care of their health, their child-rearing practices, the vacations they take, the books they read, the websites they visit and their taste in beer. You name it, the new upper class has its own way of doing it.
Another characteristic of the new upper class—and something new under the American sun—is their easy acceptance of being members of an upper class and their condescension toward ordinary Americans. Try using “redneck” in a conversation with your highly educated friends and see if it triggers any of the nervousness that accompanies other ethnic slurs. Refer to “flyover country” and consider the implications when no one asks, “What does that mean?” Or I can send you to chat with a friend in Washington, D.C., who bought a weekend place in West Virginia. He will tell you about the contempt for his new neighbors that he has encountered in the elite precincts of the nation’s capital.
For its part, mainstream America is fully aware of this condescension and contempt and is understandably irritated by it. American egalitarianism is on its last legs.
While the new upper class was seceding from the mainstream, a new lower class was emerging from within the white working class, and it has played a key role in creating the environment in which Trumpism has flourished.
Work and marriage have been central to American civic culture since the founding, and this held true for the white working class into the 1960s. Almost all of the adult men were working or looking for work, and almost all of them were married.
“In today’s average white working-class neighborhood, about one out of five men in the prime of life isn’t even looking for work; they are living off girlfriends, siblings or parents, on disability, or else subsisting on off-the-books or criminal income.”– Charles Murray
Then things started to change. For white working-class men in their 30s and 40s—what should be the prime decades for working and raising a family—participation in the labor force dropped from 96% in 1968 to 79% in 2015. Over that same period, the portion of these men who were married dropped from 86% to 52%. (The numbers for nonwhite working-class males show declines as well, though not as steep and not as continuous.)
These are stunning changes, and they are visible across the country. In today’s average white working-class neighborhood, about one out of five men in the prime of life isn’t even looking for work; they are living off girlfriends, siblings or parents, on disability, or else subsisting on off-the-books or criminal income. Almost half aren’t married, with all the collateral social problems that go with large numbers of unattached males.
In these communities, about half the children are born to unmarried women, with all the problems that go with growing up without fathers, especially for boys. Drugs also have become a major problem, in small towns as well as in urban areas.
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Consider how these trends have affected life in working-class communities for everyone, including those who are still playing by the old rules. They find themselves working and raising their families in neighborhoods where the old civic culture is gone—neighborhoods that are no longer friendly or pleasant or even safe.
These major changes in American class structure were taking place alongside another sea change: large-scale ideological defection from the principles of liberty and individualism, two of the pillars of the American creed. This came about in large measure because of the civil rights and feminist movements, both of which began as classic invocations of the creed, rightly demanding that America make good on its ideals for blacks and women.
But the success of both movements soon produced policies that directly contradicted the creed. Affirmative action demanded that people be treated as groups. Equality of outcome trumped equality before the law. Group-based policies continued to multiply, with ever more policies embracing ever more groups.
By the beginning of the 1980s, Democratic elites overwhelmingly subscribed to an ideology in open conflict with liberty and individualism as traditionally understood. This consolidated the Democratic Party’s longtime popularity with ethnic minorities, single women and low-income women, but it alienated another key Democratic constituency: the white working class.
White working-class males were the archetypal “Reagan Democrats” in the early 1980s and are often described as the core of support for Mr. Trump. But the grievances of this group are often misunderstood. It is a mistake to suggest that they are lashing out irrationally against people who don’t look like themselves. There are certainly elements of racism and xenophobia in Trumpism, as I myself have discovered on Twitter and Facebook after writing critically about Mr. Trump.
But the central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class. During the past half-century of economic growth, virtually none of the rewards have gone to the working class. The economists can supply caveats and refinements to that statement, but the bottom line is stark: The real family income of people in the bottom half of the income distribution hasn’t increased since the late 1960s.
During the same half-century, American corporations exported millions of manufacturing jobs, which were among the best-paying working-class jobs. They were and are predominantly men’s jobs. In both 1968 and 2015, 70% of manufacturing jobs were held by males.
“The central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class.”– Charles Murray
During the same half-century, the federal government allowed the immigration, legal and illegal, of tens of millions of competitors for the remaining working-class jobs. Apart from agriculture, many of those jobs involve the construction trades or crafts. They too were and are predominantly men’s jobs: 77% in 1968 and 84% in 2015.
Economists still argue about the net effect of these events on the American job market. But for someone living in a town where the big company has shut the factory and moved the jobs to China, or for a roofer who has watched a contractor hire illegal immigrants because they are cheaper, anger and frustration are rational.
Add to this the fact that white working-class men are looked down upon by the elites and get little validation in their own communities for being good providers, fathers and spouses—and that life in their communities is falling apart. To top it off, the party they have voted for in recent decades, the Republicans, hasn’t done a damn thing to help them. Who wouldn’t be angry?
There is nothing conservative about how they want to fix things. They want a now indifferent government to act on their behalf, big time. If Bernie Sanders were passionate about immigration, the rest of his ideology would have a lot more in common with Trumpism than conservatism does.
As a political matter, it is not a problem that Mr. Sanders doesn’t share the traditional American meanings of liberty and individualism. Neither does Mr. Trump. Neither, any longer, do many in the white working class. They have joined the other defectors from the American creed.
Who continues to embrace this creed in its entirety? Large portions of the middle class and upper middle class (especially those who run small businesses), many people in the corporate and financial worlds and much of the senior leadership of the Republican Party. They remain principled upholders of the ideals of egalitarianism, liberty and individualism.
And let’s not forget moderate Democrats, the spiritual legatees of the New Deal. They may advocate social democracy, but they are also unhappy about policies that treat Americans as members of groups and staunch in their support of freedom of speech, individual moral responsibility and the kind of egalitarianism that Tocqueville was talking about. They still exist in large numbers, though mostly in the political closet.
But these are fragments of the population, not the national consensus that bound the U.S. together for the first 175 years of the nation’s existence. And just as support for the American creed has shrunk, so has its correspondence to daily life. Our vaunted liberty is now constrained by thousands of petty restrictions that touch almost anything we want to do, individualism is routinely ignored in favor of group rights, and we have acquired an arrogant upper class. Operationally as well as ideologically, the American creed is shattered.
Learn more: GOP education reform gets trampled by Trumpmania
Our national identity is not altogether lost. Americans still have a vivid, distinctive national character in the eyes of the world. Historically, America has done a far better job than any other country of socializing people of many different ethnicities into displaying our national character. We will still be identifiably American for some time to come.
There’s irony in that. Much of the passion of Trumpism is directed against the threat to America’s national identity from an influx of immigrants. But the immigrants I actually encounter, of all ethnicities, typically come across as classically American—cheerful, hardworking, optimistic, ambitious. Keeping our national character seems to be the least of our problems.
Still, even that character is ultimately rooted in the American creed. When faith in that secular religion is held only by fragments of the American people, we will soon be just another nation—a very powerful one, a very rich one, still called the United States of America. But we will have detached ourselves from the bedrock that has made us unique in the history of the world. |
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Key Features |
On Nov. 1, 2007, the National Security Agency hosted a talk by Roger Dingledine, principal designer of one of the world’s leading Internet privacy tools. It was a wary encounter, akin to mutual intelligence gathering, between a spy agency and a man who built tools to ward off electronic surveillance.
According to a top-secret NSA summary of the meeting, Dingledine told the assembled NSA staff that his service, called Tor, offered anonymity to people who needed it badly — to keep business secrets, protect their identities from oppressive political regimes or conduct research without revealing themselves. In the minds of NSA officials, Tor was offering protection to terrorists and other intelligence targets.
As he spoke to the NSA, Dingledine said in an interview Friday, he suspected the agency was attempting to break into Tor, which is used by millions of people around the world to shield their identities. Documents provided to The Washington Post by former agency contractor Edward Snowden show that he was right.
Beginning at least a year before Dingledine’s visit, the NSA has mounted increasingly successful attacks to unmask the identities and locations of users of Tor. In some cases, the agency has succeeded in blocking access to the anonymous network, diverting Tor users to insecure channels. In others, it has been able to “stain” anonymous traffic as it enters the Tor network, enabling the NSA to identify users as it exits.
Tor works by encrypting traffic repeatedly as it flows across a global network of servers, mostly run by volunteers. The traffic, which can include e-mails, information from a Web site and almost anything else on the Internet, is supposed to arrive at its destination with no identifying information about its origin or the path it took.
View the document NSA combats 'The TOR problem' Annotated slides from a National Security Agency presentation showing how the agency identified anonymous users of the Tor encryption program.
The Snowden documents, including a detailed PowerPoint presentation, suggest that the NSA cannot see directly inside Tor’s anonymous network but that it has repeatedly uncloaked users by circumventing Tor’s protections. The documents also illustrate the power of the NSA to at least partially penetrate what have long been considered the most secure corners of the Internet.
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory first developed Tor more than a decade ago as a tool to allow anonymous communications and Web browsing. It was embraced by privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and continues to receive substantial federal funding. Tor is now maintained by Dingledine’s nonprofit group, the Tor Project.
The State Department trains political activists worldwide on how to use Tor to protect communications from the intelligence services of repressive governments. But the anonymity service also has become popular with criminals — especially dealers of illicit drugs, military-grade weapons and child pornography — and terrorists seeking to evade tracking by Western intelligence services.
One of the documents provided by Snowden said an NSA technique code-named EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE had succeeded in unmasking 24 Tor users in a single weekend. The same operation allowed the NSA to discover the identity of a key propagandist for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the group’s offshoot in Yemen is known, after he posted information and instructions on the group’s Web site.
NSA anti-anonymity techniques are now also being used by law enforcement agencies. In August, civilian security researchers detected an FBI operation against an alleged child pornography ring that used a Tor-based Web server called Freedom Hosting. The FBI mounted a cyberattack to unmask the location and owner of that anonymous server, using precisely the technique described as EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE.
The Washington Post is not releasing certain details from the documents, including the name of the al-Qaeda operative. Documents about the NSA’s attempts to penetrate Tor were also shared with the British newspaper the Guardian, which published a report on the effort Friday.
In a statement, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who oversees the NSA and other intelligence agencies, said that the intelligence community “seeks to understand” tools that facilitate anonymous communication. He added that it does so because of the “undeniable fact that these are the tools our adversaries use to communicate and coordinate attacks against the United States and our allies.”
The intelligence community “is only interested in communication related to valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes,” Clapper said.
There is no evidence that the NSA is capable of unmasking Tor traffic routinely on a global scale. But for almost seven years, it has been trying.
Since 2006, according to a 49-page research paper titled simply “Tor,” the agency has worked on several methods that, if successful, would allow the NSA to uncloak anonymous traffic on a “wide scale” — effectively by watching communications as they enter and exit the Tor system, rather than trying to follow them inside. One type of attack, for example, would identify users by minute differences in the clock times on their computers.
Dingledine expressed no surprise that the NSA has tried to defeat efforts at anonymity. In the interview, he said the weaknesses in Tor described in the PowerPoint presentation likely could be exploited only against a relatively small number of individual users. That, he said, is reassuring.
“If those documents actually represent what they can do, they are not as big an adversary as I thought,” he said.
The Tor Browser Bundle, available for free at www.torproject.org, was downloaded 40 million times last year. Until a recent security upgrade to the Firefox browser, which is incorporated in the bundle, the NSA could trick the browser into leaking the real Internet address of a targeted user. One slide described these tactics as “pretty much guaranteed to succeed.”
Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that develops Firefox, declined to comment.
One document provided by Snowden included an internal exchange among NSA hackers in which one of them said the agency’s Remote Operations Center was capable of targeting anyone who visited an al-Qaeda Web site using Tor.
“The ROC currently [operates] against certain extremist web forums at the moment,” the employee wrote. “I am under the impression that they can serve up an exploit” — hacker jargon for malicious code — “to pretty much anyone that visits the particular web forum, though.”
“Like any tool, [Tor] can be used for something good, and it can be used for something bad,” said Garth Bruen, a Boston-based investigator who studies Internet crimes. “It’s all about how people are using it, and criminals have been using it to great advantage. . . . It’s a nightmare.”
An FBI agent told an Irish court last month that Freedom Hosting, unmasked with NSA-devised techniques, was among the largest purveyors of child pornography in the world, according to news reports. Silk Road, an online marketplace some called “the eBay of illicit substances,” also relied on Tor — and was targeted by the FBI. Federal officials arrested the alleged founder and shut down the site Wednesday.
Privacy advocates, however, say Tor is valuable and should be protected even if it is sometimes used by criminals. “Tor is networking technology,” said Christopher Soghoian, an American Civil Liberties Union technology expert. “It is no different from a postage stamp or a highway. Good people use highways, and bad people use highways.”
The NSA documents portray a years-long program to defeat what the agency called “The Tor Problem,” with the agency repeatedly updating its tactics as Tor’s developers made changes to the network.
The NSA also altered tactics as Mozilla introduced new versions of Firefox. In anticipation of a new release of Firefox, one agency official wrote in January that a new exploit was under development: “I’m confident we can have it ready when they release something new, or very soon after :).”
In late 2006, when the NSA prepared a working paper on methods to defeat Tor, the anonymous network had an estimated 200,000 users and 1,000 servers. Among the secret NSA documents were lists of hundreds of servers the agency believed to be “nodes” on that network.
Along with EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE, the agency’s cover names for Tor attacks have included MJOLNIR, MOTHMONSTER and EGOTISTICALGOAT. A similar program at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, the NSA’s close counterpart, was called STUNT WORM.
One NSA PowerPoint presentation provided by Snowden is titled “Peeling Back the Layers of TOR with EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE.”
The agency began identifying browsers that were using Tor by noting how the encryption program reset what’s called the BuildID — a 14-digit code representing the exact date and time when that version of Firefox was released. On versions using Tor, the BuildID is reset to “0.” That feature made it hard to distinguish one Tor user from another, but it also allowed the NSA to pick out Tor-enabled browsers from among all others in use at any given moment.
“It’s easy!” a slide describing the technique said.
Mozilla issued a patch to Firefox that would protect newer versions of the browser against such an attack, though the NSA documents make clear that research into new exploits remains active.
One PowerPoint slide sums up a multistep method for learning the identity and location of Tor users and implanting NSA code in the browser. It ends with a final bullet point saying, “Win!”
Ashkan Soltani and Julie Tate contributed to this report. |
After the cancellation of Milo Yiannopoulos’ campus appearance Wednesday night, UCPD will not charge the Berkeley College Republicans — the campus group that invited him — the $6,372 security fee previously associated with the event.
The original agreement between BCR and the campus stipulated that BCR would reimburse the campus for the security fee after the event, according to UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof. The security fee, however, would have been allocated solely toward UCPD security inside the event. Security outside the event, where the protests took place, was covered under UCPD’s budget.
“(BCR) won’t be required to pay it because the event never actually took place,” Mogulof said. “They’re not going to be charged for event security for an event that didn’t happen. The additional security outside the venue … is not the responsibility of the Berkeley College Republicans.”
Last month, UCPD estimated that the security fee would cost about $7,500 to $10,000, but the charge was later reduced, according to BCR Internal Vice President Pieter Sittler.
BCR Treasurer David Craig said an anonymous donor who financed part of the security fee had two conditions for donating: that he remain anonymous and that the event occur. Because the event was canceled, BCR must refund the donor, Craig said.
“I’m told by (an) adviser in the ASUC that any donation to a club from the outside source can be reversed in 10 days,” Craig said.
Mogulof emphasized that waving BCR’s security fee is standard procedure: No student organization would be charged for event security were the event canceled.
“This isn’t an exception,” Mogulof said. “This is standard policy.”
Contact Chantelle Lee, Harini Shyamsundar and Jessica Lynn at [email protected]. |
The Arkansas Senate has approved a measure aimed at forcing Amazon to begin collecting state sales taxes, a plan that's backed by Wal-Mart and lawmakers who say the state is missing out on up to $100 million in tax revenue from the e-commerce giant. The Senate on Monday approved by a 23-9 vote legislation out-of-state companies with no physical presence in the state to collect the tax if they sell more than $100,000 worth of products or make at least 200 transactions. Arkansas is one of a handful of states where Amazon doesn't have a distribution center or office and doesn't collect sales taxes. The measure would allow Arkansas to seek court action to collect the tax revenue from sellers. The bill now heads to the House. Click or tap here to read SB140. (Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
The Arkansas Senate has approved a measure aimed at forcing Amazon to begin collecting state sales taxes, a plan that's backed by Wal-Mart and lawmakers who say the state is missing out on up to $100 million in tax revenue from the e-commerce giant.
The Senate on Monday approved by a 23-9 vote legislation out-of-state companies with no physical presence in the state to collect the tax if they sell more than $100,000 worth of products or make at least 200 transactions. Arkansas is one of a handful of states where Amazon doesn't have a distribution center or office and doesn't collect sales taxes.
The measure would allow Arkansas to seek court action to collect the tax revenue from sellers. The bill now heads to the House.
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Click or tap here to read SB140.
(Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
AlertMe |
A homeless man allegedly held up a Clackamas-area bank Friday, demanded $1, then sat down and waited for police to arrive.
Timothy Dean Alsip, 50, was arrested without incident by Clackamas County sheriff's deputies. He was booked into the Clackamas County Jail on suspicion of second-degree robbery with bail set at $250,000.
Alsip is set to be arraigned Monday in Clackamas County Circuit Court.
Deputy Mark Nikolai, sheriff's office spokesman, said a man entered the
, at 10:20 a.m. and approached a teller.
"He handed over a note saying 'This is a hold up. Give me a dollar,'" Nikolai said. After receiving $1, he "had a seat in the lobby."
Alsip, who told police he had no permanent address, does not have a criminal record in Oregon.
Nikolai said deputies determined that Alsip sought to be arrested so he could get medical care. He said Alsip exhibited strange behavior over the past week, including flagging down citizens so they would call 911. Nikolai said Alsip also called 911 himself to complain of various imaginary problems such as being hit by a car, suffering from dental pain and overdosing on drugs.
"His behavior today is consistent with the behavior he has displayed over the last week," Nikolai said.
Nikolai urged anyone with information about Alsip or the incident to call the sheriff's confidential tip line at 503-723-4949. Confidential text messages can be sent to CRIMES (274637 on a cell phone keypad), with the keyword "CCSO" as the first word in the message.
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At last, some good emerges from the debauched raids on the taxpayers of New South Wales by notorious former Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid.
In the wake of Obeid’s conviction for misconduct in public office, Bill Shorten finally plucked up the courage to ignore internal ALP opposition and open the door to the missing link in Australia’s mosaic of anti-corruption enforcers, a federal anti-corruption commission.
The right wing of the NSW ALP is so seared by the damage to its standing as a result of various ICAC findings that it cannot divorce factional political pain from the general betterment of government.
As the election campaign wound down, the opposition leader did little more than dip his toe in the water, stating that if he became prime minister he would support the reignition of a senate inquiry into the pros and cons of a national integrity commission, a corruption watchdog the Greens have advocated for years and the major parties have resisted.
Peter Slipper, Craig Thomson, Securency, Manildra, the Free Enterprise Foundation, Australian Water Holdings – the diary of dodgy dealing goes on and on.
In the past few weeks alone, you can add to that the revelations that Parakeelia, the Liberal-owned software provider, has funnelled $1 million of taxpayers’ money to the Coalition and that the department of immigration has referred 132 allegations of corruption – many of them disputed – to the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity.
These have been matters of passing interest in this election build-up, crowded out by the half-truths of scare campaigns promoted by both Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten.
There is some remorse within the upper echelons of the Labor Party that its longstanding refusal to endorse a federal anti-corruption or integrity commission denied them the ability to campaign on corruption and to boost its chances at the ballot box today.
The opportunity was passed up at last year’s ALP national conference, when a motion to embed a federal integrity commission in the party platform was withdrawn at the last minute.
Then shadow special minister of state Gary Gray, who has since retired from parliament, argued an ICAC-like body was only needed “where there is a lack of institutions to protect the integrity of public processes and the public interest”. “This is not the case federally,” he added.
The immigration department cases alone would suggest otherwise. This week, the ABC’s 7.30 revealed widespread visa fraud, including allegations of shonky migration agents with links to the department, openly boasting they could get around the requirements of Australia’s 457 temporary work visa scheme.
George Williams, dean of law at the University of New South Wales, has long argued for a national integrity commission to fill the gaps the state anti-corruption bodies are unable to address.
“The arguments for such a body are overwhelming,” he says. “The litany of corruption and other scandals over a long period of time demonstrates that there is a need for a co-ordinated, national approach to anti-corruption. Past assumptions that corruption was limited to the state and territory level can no longer be sustained.”
Williams says it’s surprising that the long list of scandals has not led to change. “I think that, more than anything else, demonstrates just how powerful the vested interests are in this area.”
Among those vested interests are the major parties. The Coalition is adamantly opposed to anything like a national ICAC, and until this week Labor has rejected repeated efforts by the Greens to establish such a body.
The reason was simple. The right wing of the NSW ALP is so seared by the damage to its standing as a result of various ICAC findings that it cannot divorce factional political pain from the general betterment of government.
One figure who stood out from the ALP crowd was John Faulkner. As Kevin Rudd’s special minister of state, Faulkner fought against often virulent resistance from within Labor for greater transparency and accountability in politicians’ use of taxpayers’ money.
Today, he remains convinced that the absence of such measures is destroying Australian democracy. Similarly, he argues that a national integrity or anti-corruption commission is one of the missing links, denying genuine accountability at the national level. But within the Labor Party he remains close to a lone voice.
During the last serious debate on the issue in the senate, in May 2014, Faulkner carefully declared that he thought the idea of a national integrity commission “had merit” – carefully because he knew the private member’s bill promoted by then Greens leader Christine Milne had not been discussed by caucus and would not be supported.
“In my view, the sorts of issues being raised at the NSW ICAC do not miraculously stop at state or territory borders,” Faulkner said, “and it is reasonable that this parliament consider how we can strengthen the Commonwealth government’s integrity and its resistance to corruption.”
Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus would not say whether Shorten’s campaign team contemplated making more of Parakeelia and the immigration rorts during the election, or whether the issues were left so as not to divert attention from Labor’s assault on the government over Medicare.
As the election campaign started to wind up, Dreyfus was handing out how-to-vote cards at a pre-polling centre in his Melbourne electorate of Isaacs and lashing out at the Liberals and Parakeelia. “On the face of it, this is a gross misuse of taxpayers’ funds to raise money for the Liberal Party and it comes on top of revelations that Parakeelia itself may have breached the Corporations Act.”
Reflecting the reservations within the Labor Party over a federal anti-corruption body, Dreyfus was circumspect: “Labor abhors corruption in all its forms and in all walks of life. In the last parliament, Labor supported a senate inquiry to consider establishing a federal ICAC.”
That inquiry came to a premature end, with its hearings incomplete and without a report, when parliament was prorogued ahead of the election.
In the 2010 hung parliament, the Greens signed a formal five-page, seven-point agreement with Julia Gillard. The agreement promised at point 4.3(b) to establish “within 12 months a Parliamentary Integrity Commissioner”.
It would “provide advice, administration and reporting on parliamentary entitlements” and also “investigate and make recommendations ... on individual investigations” as well as “provide advice to parliamentarians on ethical issues”.
Labor never honoured the undertaking. “We worked hard to pursue the idea,” Ben Oquist, chief of staff to then Greens leader Bob Brown, says, “but in the end to no avail.”
Enthusiasm for a national anti-corruption commission is at its highest among the Greens and Nick Xenophon’s NXT, followed closely by former Palmer United Party members Jacqui Lambie and Glenn Lazarus, and the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party’s Ricky Muir. All have campaigned for a national anti-corruption commission, but the issue has gained little traction.
The Greens’ Richard Di Natale and Nick Xenophon are keeping their cards close to their chests, with the South Australian independent refusing to say whether he would use the issue as a bargaining chip to enable the government to re-establish the Australian Building and Construction Commission should Turnbull not have a joint sitting majority in his own right after the election.
Opinion polls suggest the prospects of another hung parliament have receded as the election campaign descended from the warm spring weather of May into the freezing depths of winter, but if there were another hung parliament, crossbenchers would have real power in both the houses and a commission would have the best chance of emerging.
For all that, Di Natale, Xenophon and Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie are not prepared to make a federal ICAC a condition of guaranteeing supply to an aspiring prime minister, should they be in a position to do so.
Even though the Greens are the one party that has campaigned hard on the issue, Di Natale says: “No, we’re not going to put ultimatums forward. I don’t think that lays the groundwork for a negotiation in good faith.”
The Australian Democrats discovered the price of good faith in their GST negotiations with John Howard after the 1998 election. Then leader Meg Lees had laid down a set of conditions under which the Democrats would agree to support a GST, but gave several of them away in the negotiations. Lees lost her leadership and 10 years later the party had lost its last seat in the senate.
For Greens supporters, accountability may not share the high priority of the environment, but the same may not be the case for Xenophon, who has made transparency and good governance his watchwords.
As Williams points out, only if the crossbenchers in the house of representatives are prepared to use their muscle should they get the chance is there any prospect of the establishment of an anti-corruption commission with teeth at the national level.
In 2010, the Greens had it in writing, but in the end even that amounted to nothing, as did Wilkie’s agreement with Gillard on gambling reform.
Coalition politicians have often cited Australia’s standing in Transparency International’s global corruption perception rankings as evidence there is no need for a national integrity commission.
Trouble is that since 2012, Australia has slipped seven places to 13th worldwide, with the Berlin-based organisation citing lack of action and complacency by successive governments to curb public-sector corruption as the reasons. |
Friday, May 20, 2011 | 9:25 AM
(Cross-posted from the Google Lat Long Blog)
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Cultural Intelligence
Spring 2016
Socialists and progressives who seek to remake society have typically claimed that their efforts have a scientific basis. Frequently, they accuse their conservative opponents of being anti-science. They dismiss the warnings of Burke, Hayek, and other conservative intellectuals who doubted the ability of the individual scientist-reformer to fully comprehend the social order he proposes to overthrow.
Ironically, there is a growing body of academic research that supports the conservative view of the social process. Thanks to work in a number of related fields, collected in some exceptionally important books published in just the past few years, it is becoming increasingly apparent that progress tends to arise from the evolution of decentralized trial-and-error processes more than from grand schemes launched by planners and revolutionaries.
Economists and scholars of public policy are not the only ones conducting this research; students of human behavior are also finding support for Burke and Hayek's theses — that the knowledge embedded in social norms and practices is vast compared to the knowledge of even the brightest, most educated individuals. As individuals, we cannot figure out very much by ourselves, but we learn a remarkable amount from others. In short, some social scientists in recent years have been building (or rebuilding) a powerful case for cultural intelligence.
One implication of their findings and arguments is that two sets of institutions in particular — markets and traditional social and familial practices — are the most important products of the process of social evolution building on cultural intelligence because they are the foremost means by which that process operates in free societies. It should hardly surprise us, therefore, that these two sets of institutions are also the foremost targets and objects of scorn of today's progressive planners.
This suggests that we should be concerned about the ideas that are being transmitted by the dominant institutions in the United States — the media, higher education, and the teaching profession. These institutions tend to impose strong conformity to the progressive narrative, which treats our culture as creating large classes of victims and views expert social engineering as the right approach for solving problems. If our leading cultural institutions are thus geared toward suppressing cultural intelligence, we need to think about how to change them.
That effort could begin by taking account of several recent books — all published in this decade and intended more or less for a general audience beyond the narrow confines of the academy — that offer a multifaceted case for thinking anew about how societies make progress. Our progressives should pay them some attention.
ECOLOGISTS AND ENGINEERS
Understanding cultural intelligence first requires a better understanding of culture itself, and recent studies have yielded some important discoveries. Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist, summarized this research in a recent book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. He writes:
The key to understanding how humans evolved and why we are so different from other animals is to recognize that we are a cultural species. Probably over a million years ago, members of our evolutionary lineage began learning from each other in such a way that culture became cumulative....[K]nowledge began to improve and aggregate — by learning from others — so that one generation could build on and hone the skills and know-how gleaned from the previous generation. After several generations, this process produced a sufficiently large and complex toolkit of practices and techniques that individuals, relying only on their own ingenuity and personal experience, could not get anywhere close to figuring out over their lifetime.
Culture, in this sense, allows us to make use of much more knowledge than what we possess as individuals, indeed more than any one person could ever really hope to possess. It does this not just by serving as a kind of library — a repository of facts and figures and recipes — but by functioning as something like a common brain for countless people. Henrich continues:
The secret of our species' success resides not in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brains of our communities. Our collective brains arise from the synthesis of our cultural and social natures — from the fact that we readily learn from others (are cultural) and can, with the right norms, live in large and widely interconnected groups (are social). The striking technologies that characterize our species, from the kayaks and compound bows used by hunter-gatherers to the antibiotics and airplanes of the modern world, emerge not from singular geniuses but from the flow and recombination of ideas, practices, lucky errors, and chance insights among interconnected minds and across generations....[I]nnovation in our species depends more on our sociality than on our intellect, and the challenge has always been how to prevent communities from fragmenting and social networks from dissolving.
Henrich points out many ways in which humans have evolved to transmit and receive information from one another. We have an aptitude for language and for imitation. We have an instinct for identifying prestigious individuals to copy and learn from. Cultural norms can also be selected by evolution, without our necessarily being consciously aware of how they promote our welfare. For example, Henrich endorses the theory that monogamous societies prospered in part because monogamous marriage reduces violent competition among men.
Among the most important things we learn collectively is an approach to solving problems. In fact, our trial-and-error method of dealing with challenges can sometimes work so effectively as to actually persuade us that we are not following such a method at all but have found some brilliant formula for managing our complex world. The very prowess of decentralized problem-solving can undermine our appreciation of it.
Indeed, the degree to which we do or do not appreciate this approach to problem-solving has a lot to do with some of our political divisions, and with some heated disputes among policymakers, intellectuals, and other elites. In his recent book Foolproof, financial journalist Greg Ip says of economic-policy analysts:
Philosophically, they fall into two schools of thought. One, which I call the engineers, seeks to use the maximum of our knowledge and ability to solve problems and make the world safer and more stable; the other, which I call the ecologists, regards such experts with suspicion, because given the complexity and adaptability of people and the environment, they will always have unintended consequences that may be worse than the problem we are trying to solve.
A major theme of Ip's book is that attempts to ensure safety through regulatory policy frequently cause more catastrophic failures. For example, government provision of flood insurance encourages more people to move into flood-prone areas, increasing the cost of damage when floods do occur.
The ecologist point of view, which acknowledges the cultural character of our species and the bottom-up character of the sort of problem-solving in which we frequently engage, was expressed in this way by George Mason University economist Donald Boudreaux last year:
When a biologist encounters in a living organism a physical or behavioral trait that is unusual or unfamiliar, and that does not contribute to survival in any way that is immediately obvious to the biologist, the biologist's professional instinct is to think hard about that trait in order to identify its likely genetic benefit to its possessor. That professional instinct is sound. The biologist, upon encountering such an unfamiliar trait in an organism, does not leap to the conclusion that she has encountered an instance of "nature failure." The biologist, of course, recognizes that nature and natural selection are never perfect; sometimes living creatures are indeed saddled with traits that do indeed reduce their genes' chances of survival. But this possibility of "nature failure" is not the competent biologist's first go-to explanation whenever she cannot quickly, and within the conclusions of current theory, grasp the reason why natural selection might have created in the organism this unusual or unfamiliar trait.
Boudreaux argues that economists should have a similar respect for evolved economic practices. But instead they tend to leap quickly to the conclusion that their models show "market failure," which can be corrected through policy engineering.
The economists who have gained power at institutions like the Federal Reserve Board and the International Monetary Fund fall into what Ip would call the engineering camp. Many of these officials, as well as some of the heads of central banks in other countries, were trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They share a common approach to social problems, one which emphasizes the economist's ability to identify and correct "market failure."
After starting from nothing during World War II, MIT's economics department came to dominate the profession over the next two decades. The department's distinctive approach involved using small mathematical models of optimization subject to constraints. Because this combination of engineering and economics seemed well-suited to solving problems of wartime resource allocation, MIT was well funded by the Department of Defense. Economic engineering spread rapidly to other universities and grew to dominate the profession.
The engineers believe that policy experts should be in charge of key elements of the economy. They want the Federal Reserve Board, and especially its chairman, to play a strong role in regulating financial stability. However, as Ip points out, financial stability can be an elusive goal. Policies that increase confidence in the short run can over time result in overconfidence, leading to excessive risk-taking and ending in a severe crisis.
The economic engineers will say, as they have concerning the Fed's performance during and after the 2008 crisis, that without the Fed our economic performance would have been much worse. But this is an untestable assertion. Moreover, it is sobering to observe that the U.S. economy has suffered from recessions with at least as much frequency and severity since the Fed was created in 1914 as it did before.
Those same engineers believe that health-care policy also ought to be managed by experts. Former senator Tom Daschle explicitly called for the equivalent of a Federal Reserve to take charge of our health-care system. The Affordable Care Act called for the creation of an Independent Payment Advisory Board, composed of 15 experts who would set payment policies for Medicare. Some economists of the engineering persuasion, such as leading health-policy expert David Cutler, believe that, when independent experts are given such authority, they can create incentives that will lead to better health care at lower cost.
To an ecologist, the idea that a centralized bureaucracy could successfully manage the performance of skilled health-care professionals seems implausible. The doctor who is with the patient is in the best position to judge the most appropriate treatment. Moreover, much of medical knowledge comes from doctors experimenting with slightly different protocols and reporting the results to one another. Replacing this evolutionary process with a set of fixed national standards would thwart medical progress. Substituting top-down control for the cultural intelligence of the medical profession would likely be a step backwards.
Evolution, not intelligent design, is how societies advance.
ADAPTED CULTURES
Such evolutionary social advancement has itself been the subject of some important research and writing in the last few years. Science journalist Matt Ridley's most recent book, The Evolution of Everything, argues that we observe the decentralized, incremental, trial-and-error process of evolution in all human endeavors, including culture, law, business, and technology. Like Henrich, Ridley argues that we tend to overstate the importance of the individual genius or leader while understating the gradual, cumulative nature of change.
In the field of technology, for example, Ridley points out that many important inventions were discovered independently at nearly the same time. These include the electric light bulb, the telephone, photography, and the steamboat. Ridley's explanation for this is that successful inventors deal in "the adjacent possible," meaning small adaptations or re-combinations made possible by preceding work.
Conversely, one might observe that when a visionary tries to implement an idea before its time, the result is failure. For example, in 1993, long before the iPhone and the iPad, Apple attempted to market a small personal device called the Newton. It flopped, probably because other technologies, including the internet and the cell-phone network, were too immature.
In the concluding section to his book, Ridley writes that "bad news is manmade, top-down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves." But why might it be that plans imposed by powerful leaders tend to work out poorly, while evolutionary trial-and-error tends to work well?
One reason may be that individual intelligence is less significant than overall average intelligence among large groups. That is the suggestion made by economist Garett Jones in his recent book, Hive Mind. He writes,
[C]onsider this one fact: your own, individual IQ score isn't that good at predicting how much you'll earn over the course of your life....Now set that next to another fact — that nations with the highest test scores are about eight times more prosperous than nations with the lowest scores — and you can see the paradox of IQ.
The paradox is that your own intelligence seems to have a weaker effect on your income than does the average intelligence of those around you. Jones considers a number of possible explanations. Not surprisingly, many of them involve culture. For example, people with high IQ scores tend to be better at cooperating and at creating institutions that promote cooperation.
To grasp why it might not be paradoxical that the intelligence that surrounds you might be more important than your own, consider this thought experiment: Suppose that you were suddenly placed without any possessions in an unfamiliar environment, such as a remote tropical village or the Alaskan wilderness. Your own skills and knowledge would have very little value in such an environment, and your very survival would be in doubt. Yet other humans, who would score far below you on IQ tests, have mastered such environments, and it would be a great boon for you to be able to learn from them.
Henrich even goes so far as to argue that, as isolated individuals, humans are not particularly intelligent in comparison with chimpanzees. It is not the hardware of our brains that makes us superior. It is instead the software that is loaded into our brains by cultural learning. In fact, Henrich's central thesis, in terms of this metaphor, is that the hardware of human brains evolved to be able to run the software of cultural learning, and that we are the only species that evolved in this manner. To use a different computer metaphor, we are not born with much in the way of individual intelligence and knowledge. Instead, we download cultural information from the "cloud": our family and friends, teachers and mentors, books, electronic media, markets, and other cultural institutions.
Henrich emphasizes that cultural learning itself follows an evolutionary process:
[C]ultural evolution is often much smarter than we are. Operating over generations as individuals unconsciously attend to and learn from more successful, prestigious, and healthier members of their communities, this evolutionary process generates cultural adaptations. Though these complex repertoires appear well designed to meet local challenges, they are not primarily the products of individuals applying causal models, rational thinking, or cost-benefit analyses. Often, most or all of the people skilled in deploying such adaptive practices do not understand how or why they work, or even that they "do" anything at all. Such complex adaptations can emerge precisely because natural selection has favored individuals who often place their faith in cultural inheritance — in the accumulated wisdom implicit in the practices and beliefs derived from their forbearers [sic] — over their own intuitions and personal experiences.
This paragraph is highly reminiscent of Friedrich Hayek's views about how markets work. Markets coordinate across many people the tacit knowledge that resides with individuals. In contrast, the would-be economic planner, who makes decisions by "applying causal models, rational thinking, or cost-benefit analyses," works with an information set that is woefully inadequate to the task.
Henrich and Ridley both point to the development and the effects of monogamous marriage in promoting successful societies as an example of how societies evolve. Ridley writes,
Societies that chose "normative monogamy," or an insistence upon sex within exclusive marriage, tended to tame their young men, improve social cohesion, balance the sex ratio, reduce the crime rate, and encourage men to work rather than fight. This made such societies more productive and less destructive, so they tended to expand at the expense of other societies.
Ridley claims that settled agriculture created economic inequality that was conducive to polygamy, but some societies, particularly those influenced by Christianity, adopted the cultural norm of monogamy. He continues,
[A]s soon as farming came along, 10,000 years ago, powerful men were able to accumulate the resources to buy off and intimidate other men, and to attract low-status women into harems....[I]t was not such a good deal for low-status men, who remained single, or high-status women, who had to share their partners' attention. If only to try to satisfy the low-status men, societies that allowed widespread polygamy tended to be very violent toward their neighbours. This was especially true of pastoral societies reliant on sheep, goats, or cattle....[H]erders from Asia and Arabia not only experienced chronic violence, but kept erupting into Europe, India, China and Africa to kill men and abduct women. However, in some of these settled civilizations trading cities grew up, and these generated a wholly new selective pressure — towards monogamy, fidelity and marriage....This transition to monogamy is a big theme of Christianity and an incessant preoccupation of the early Church fathers.
The institution of monogamous marriage helps to ensure that more men will have access to women. From the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, by giving men a chance to reproduce, monogamy encourages peace.
Henrich estimates that 85% of human societies permitted polygamous marriage. Where the norm of monogamy holds sway, it is reinforced by elaborate rituals and social expectations:
Social norms about sexual fidelity mean not only that the husband is monitoring his wife's sexual and romantic life, but so is the rest of the community....This has a psychological impact on the husband, motivating him to invest more in his wife's offspring (because they are more likely to be his).... On the husband's side, norms that constrain his sexual behavior also inhibit — not prevent — him from diverting resources away from his family in efforts to obtain extramarital sexual opportunities....[A] community is now monitoring him, and violations of these norms can affect his relationships well beyond that with his wife and her kin.
Henrich writes that humans underwent a kind of "self-domestication" process. That is, we gained control over harmful tendencies, such as violence and low investment in children, by adopting cultural norms like monogamous marriage. Societies that adopted such norms were able to prosper and expand.
These societies often evolved in this direction by respecting more ordered and productive behavior, and thereby making such behavior prestigious. This phenomenon of prestige, Henrich argues, plays an important role in cultural learning in our own time too. We have evolved to respond to cues about prestige in choosing the models from whom we learn:
Across human societies, we see that seeking prestige, often more than wealth itself, drives much human behavior. However, prestige derives from success, skill, or knowledge in locally valued domains. While not infinitely malleable, what constitutes a valued domain is amazingly flexible. The differential success of societies and institutions will hinge, in part, on what domains are valued.
Henrich contrasts prestige with dominance. Dominant individuals influence others through coercion and threat. While this induces lower-status individuals to obey, it does not create bonding and learning. Prestige, on the other hand, influences through persuasion and deferential agreement. When we perceive that someone has high prestige, we want to imitate them and get as close to them as possible.
Prestige is important to us because we depend so much on our cultural intelligence. We need to know from whom to obtain our learning. We instinctively feel that we can thrive by imitating prestigious individuals.
CULTURE AND POLICY
Evolutionary anthropology emphasizes the importance of culture. Human intelligence is not embedded in the hardware of the individual brain. It is found in the software that we download from our cultural "cloud." Our knowledge does not come from our individual brilliance. Instead, it comes from our ability to learn from one another and from the past. Progress comes from small experiments and cultural evolution.
The implications of all this for how we govern ourselves and our societies are enormous. The importance of cultural intelligence implies that we should be skeptical of giving any individual or small group of individuals the responsibility to exert vast power over society. We should be wary of the social engineers and instead listen to the social ecologists.
In the case of economics, this suggests that markets are better suited than government to exploiting and expanding cultural intelligence. Henrich writes that an important lesson of cultural intelligence is that, for the greatest economic success,
we should take a page from cultural evolution's playbook and design "variation and selection systems" that will allow alternative institutions or organizational forms to compete. We can dump the losers, keep the winners, and hopefully gain some general insights during the process.
This is exactly how markets work. They allow businesses and other organizations to compete, with the profit-and-loss system serving to weed out losers and reward winners. The market has emerged in a way that facilitates cultural learning. The attempt to design something better can easily backfire by suppressing or distorting the evolutionary process.
In the case of political institutions, Ridley writes, "everywhere, political institutions show a tendency to change much more slowly than the society around them." He makes this sound like a bug, but perhaps it is a feature. Rapid change of political institutions would at worst mean revolutionary violence and at best create instability in the "rules of the game."
In his book Knowledge and Power, George Gilder develops the idea of information theory, in which information is conveyed by variable signals operating within a stable, low-noise medium. It could be that what we should want out of our political system are conditions to provide a low-noise medium that allows markets and other competitive institutions to maximize the signal production favorable for evolution. In other words, in an ideal world, if we were eager to accelerate the pace of progress, we would try to create a steady political environment with set rules to provide ideal conditions for market competition.
But Henrich offers this sobering reflection:
Over time, history suggests that all prosocial institutions age and eventually collapse at the hands of self-interest, unless they are renewed by the dynamics of intergroup competition. That is, although it may take a long time, individuals and coalitions eventually figure out how to beat or manipulate the system to their own ends, and these techniques spread and slowly corrode any prosocial effects.
This often happens in business. When management changes its incentive system, the initial effect is to improve the alignment of work effort to corporate goals. But over time, employees learn how to maximize personal rewards within the system while undertaking minimal effort to achieve corporate goals. Thus, it becomes necessary to periodically revise the rules concerning bonuses, promotion requirements, and so on.
What does this mean for the American political system? Is it destined to "eventually collapse at the hands of self-interest"? And what about our culture and its institutions? Have those, too, been gamed by the most successful for their own benefit?
There is no question that the institutions of our culture seem today to offer less to the less privileged than they used to. In recent years, for instance, scholars Charles Murray, Kay Hymowitz, Robert Putnam, and others have documented what Putnam calls "bifurcated marriage patterns," in which higher-income women tend to have children after they are married and tend to stay married, while lower-income women tend to have children out of wedlock and not to remain married for long.
The institution of marriage may also be threatened by the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and income. When some men have vastly more resources than other men, this may translate into unequal access to women. In this context, it is chilling to note this passage from Ridley:
Surely the explanation for most killing lies in the fact that natural selection has endowed human beings with the sort of instinct that means that (in [Martin] Daly and [Margot] Wilson's words) "any creature that is recognizably on track towards complete reproductive failure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its present life trajectory."
Do bifurcated marriage patterns and increased economic inequality pose a threat to peace? If so, what might be done to change this trajectory?
Jones, in Hive Mind, offers a reason for optimism in the form of the Flynn effect, named for social scientist James Flynn. He and others have found that there has been a significant upward trend in average IQ scores. Although tests do not go back that far, Henrich estimates that the average American 200 years ago had an IQ that would equate to 70 today. (Today, a score of 100 is average.) If our individual hardware is that much better, surely we are capable of running much better cultural software.
Perhaps the main policy implication of the importance of cultural intelligence is "follow the prestige." Because prestige is such a key element in people's choice of cultural learning, much depends on how we assign prestige. In Henrich's words, "the differential success of societies and institutions will hinge, in part, on what domains are valued." If we choose well the domains that are valued, then prestige will accrue to people from whom we want others to learn. If we choose poorly, then the social norms that people live by and enforce on others will be harmful ones.
Economist Deirdre McCloskey has devoted several volumes to the thesis that the Industrial Revolution took place where and when it did because of what she calls "bourgeois dignity." That is, the domains of production, commerce, and innovation, which had been held in contempt throughout much of history, suddenly were granted respect. This in turn caused what she calls "The Great Enrichment," by unleashing the forces of economic improvement and progress that we have enjoyed ever since. The prosperity and freedom we enjoy may be functions, in large part, of our society's choosing (or coming gradually over time) to value some very constructive behaviors and traits.
MISPLACED PRESTIGE
The power of prestige to direct societal evolution suggests that what a free society chooses to value and admire is enormously important. This may not be great news for our own free society.
Today, the domain of profit-seeking business does garner some respect, and surely more than in some periods of our history. But the non-profit sector is much more prestigious. It's easy to see why: Non-profits can present themselves (often honestly, not cynically) as working in pursuit of social improvements and high ideals. But non-profits still have backers to please, and it is far from obvious that their incentives are "healthier" for society than those of for-profit firms. For-profit firms are accountable to ordinary consumers, and so in effect to the public at large. Non-profits are accountable to the elites who fund them.
The prestige of traditional social norms, meanwhile, is clearly declining in our society, and, to the extent that such norms are necessary for stable, prosperous lives, this is a serious problem. Our popular culture works relentlessly to undermine the prestige of people who follow traditional social norms, and there are very few institutions pushing in the opposite direction.
College campuses are centers of contempt for business and for cultural norms alike. There, prestige is accorded to those who denounce entire classes of people as villains and who claim to speak on behalf of other classes labeled as victims. It is ironic that our institutions of higher education are so often the sources or drivers of our contempt for these two institutions — the market and the family. Both institutions are the products, and also the settings, of the kind of evolutionary process that appears to be responsible for the enormous economic, political, and social progress that the modern West has made. They have made possible a society successful, wealthy, and comfortable enough to reject the foundations of its own success.
But we cannot sustain such a society if we persist in rejecting those foundations. In order to accept them, we must first understand them. The failure of the contemporary academy to treat as prestigious and valuable our evolved and evolving social institutions is rooted in a failure to acknowledge that such evolution — rather than the engineering and management approach to social change advanced by today's academic economists, sociologists, and political scientists — is how society in fact advances. It is a failure of the academy in its own terms: a failure to grasp the truth and to acknowledge it.
The spate of recent books making the case for cultural intelligence suggests that some academics are intent on addressing that failure. Let us hope they succeed. |
Good Evening Gold Trading Lovers
Yellow Metal is moving in a small range after the huge fall in a previous week.We were expecting little bit more downward movement before a new bounce.The gold move lower but remain above the daily support level.XAUUSD is moving between the range 1211 and 1230 from a couple of days.Today I am sharing update 4-hour chart to predict next possible movement.Please go through the gold analysis written below.
4 Hour
Yellow Metal is trading between small range and forming a rising wadge in 4-hour time frame chart.Lower High and higher high movement helping us to spot the resistance and support levels.Our main thoughts are bearish and we are looking for the break of support line to jump in the bearish trade for minimum target 1211 and maximum 1201-05.Alternately if XAUUSD breaks its resistance which is mention in a red line in the hourly chart below, It will invalidate our bearish thoughts and may take price towards new high around 1281-85 which is also the main resistance of trend.Please keep in mind we will consider break after the closing of a 4-hour candle.Please have a look at a 4H chart below to get the idea.
Support & Resistance
Hourly Support : 1219-21
-Hourly Resistance : 1231-33
Daily Support : 1201-05
Daily Resistance 1249-51
Note: Never risk more than 2% of your account capital in single trade.Always trade with the proper risk management plan.
Feel free to comment below if you have any concern regarding charts and analysis.Your feedback is always welcome and help us to improve.
Wish you good luck and happy trading
Mati Ur Rehman
Gold Analyst @ Dailygoldanalysis.com |
The Germans are not amused these days. Look everywhere from tabloids to the blogosphere, and it seems that the public mood has reached boiling point. Loth to shoulder another national debt increase and finance another bailout, the Germans have started questioning everything from the wisdom of supporting Greece to the common euro currency, or indeed the merits of the European integration project altogether. This might be strange for a country that is nudging ever closer to full employment, and which is about to recapture its position as the world's leading exporter of manufactured goods from the Chinese. But the Germans say they've had enough: no more underwriting of European integration, no more paying for this and that, and certainly no more bailing out the Greeks.
What is truly strange, however, is the brevity of Germany's collective memory. For during much of the 20th century, the situation was radically different: after the first world war and again after the second world war, Germany was the world's largest debtor, and in both cases owed its economic recovery to large-scale debt relief.
Germany's interwar debt crisis started almost exactly 80 years ago, in the last days of June 1931. What had triggered it was Germany's aggressive borrowing in the late 1920s to pay reparations out of credit. A credit bubble resulted, and when it burst in 1931, it brought down reparations, the gold standard and, not least, Weimar democracy.
Having footed the resulting massive bill, after the second world war the Americans imposed the London debt agreement of 1953 on their allies, an exercise in debt forgiveness to Germany on the most generous terms. West Germany's economic miracle, the stability of the deutschmark and the favourable state of its public finances were all owed to this massive haircut. But it put Germany's creditors at a disadvantage, leaving it to them to cope with the financial aftermath of the German occupation.
Indeed, the London debt agreement deferred settlement of the reparations question – including the repayment of war debts and contributions imposed by Germany during the war – to a conference to be held after unification. This conference never took place: since 1990, the Germans have steadfastly refused to reopen this can of worms. Such compensation as has been paid, mostly to forced workers, was channelled through NGOs to avoid creating precedents. Only one country has challenged this openly and tried to obtain compensation in court: Greece.
It may or may not have been wise to put the issue of reparations and other unsettled claims on Germany to rest after 1990. Back then, the Germans argued that any plausible bill would exceed the country's resources, and that continued financial co-operation in Europe instead would be infinitely more preferable. They may have had a point. But now is the time for Germany to deliver on the promise, act wisely and keep the bull away from the china shop. |
The biggest story to come out of the Democratic caucus in Iowa, beyond Clinton’s razor-thin margin of victory, was the overwhelming generational divide within the party. So far this split has been explained by political differences over health care and income inequality within the Democratic Party, but polling suggests a similar generational divide exists over Israel and could just as much define where the party is headed.
In announcing the “The Great Democratic Age Gap” Ronald Bronstein writes in The Atlantic, “The most powerful lesson from the Iowa caucus results is that Democrats are facing not just a generation gap, but a Grand Canyon-sized chasm.” The New Yorker declared “Bernie Sanders Just Changed the Democratic Party.” What those articles are referring to is this:
84% of people aged 17-29 supported Sanders in the Iowa caucus.
14% supported Clinton, 600% less. pic.twitter.com/oKChuocavj — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 2, 2016
The results were striking and entrance polls to the caucuses seemed to point to a clear trend: Democratic caucus goers in Iowa under the age of 45 supported Sanders, and above it supported Clinton. This is not the first time we’ve seen polls with this stark divide within the party. For the last several years we have been seeing polls showing that the Democratic base is slowly divorcing itself from Israel, and much of that dropping support is happening along generational lines as well.
In December 2014 Shibley Telhami and Katayoun Kishi wrote in the Washington Post on a recent American public opinion survey on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the trends they pointed out was the generational divide brewing within the party on the issue:
Generally, younger adults (ages 18 to 29) tend much more to want the United States to lean toward neither side. But among young Democratic respondents, the results are more striking: Among those who want the United States to lean toward one side or the other, more young people want the United States to lean toward the Palestinians than toward the Israelis (12 percent vs. 10 percent, respectively). This attitude is unique among this age group, as only 5 percent or less of Democrats in each older age group want the United States to lean toward the Palestinians.
This was also seen in the summer of 2014 while Israel was attacking Gaza. A Gallup poll taken at the time found young people and Democrats increasing saw Israel’s actions as “unjustified“:
51% of Americans 18-29 years old think the Israeli attack is unjustified. Most support from Israel comes from ages 50 and up …the majority of Republican identifiers back what Israel is doing. Meanwhile, Democrats take the opposing view, with nearly half saying Israel’s actions are unjustified.
And this is was not the first time this trend was identified. A year earlier the late Leonard Fein reported on a Pew Research Center survey for the Forward and asked, “Is Israel Losing Young Democrats?” Fein wrote,
When it comes to Americans favoring Israel over the Palestinians, Israel wins by a wide margin — 54% to 8%. Alas, if that’s as far as you read, you will be woefully underinformed. For that number is only for Americans aged 65 and older (though the next age bracket down, 50-64, is pretty much the same). In the 30-49 age bracket, Israel drops to 47%, and the Palestinians inch forward to 11%. And in the 18-29 bracket, Israel is favored by 36%, the Palestinians by 19%. This profusion of numbers can, I know, be daunting, but their gist is plain: A chasm separates Democrats and Republicans when it comes to sympathizing with Israel. And if, as some analysts believe, the Democrats’ general advantage with young people is likely to persist, that chasm may well grow.
Getting closer to the election year, last February Gallup produced several polls at the height of the controversy over Benjamin Netanyahu’s invitation to address Congress. Those polls also showed that Republican support for Israel was much stronger, with the percentage of Democrats sympathizing with Israel dropping almost 15% from the previous year, and that older Americans of both parties tended to have a more favorable view of Israel. Then, this past summer, pollster Frank Luntz made news with a survey of Democratic Party “elites” which found 47% of Democrats agreed that Israel is a racist county.
What does this mean today? It means the issues that Bernie Sanders has used to energize his young base should also include a fundamental rethinking of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
So far Sanders has stayed away from foreign policy beyond his opposition to the Iraq War. But challenging Hillary Clinton’s growing embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu offers him another opportunity to draw a progressive distinction between him and his opponent, and polling suggests that his emerging base would support him if he did. A November 2015 survey by Telhami found (PDF), “While Republicans overall have a much more favorable views of Netanyahu than unfavorable ones, Democrats have a more unfavorable view of the Israeli leader by a ratio of about two to one. In general, older Americans admire the Israeli leader far more than the younger ones.”
Back in 2014 Telhami and Kishi predicted this very moment, and the possibility that a candidate like Sanders could harness this shift in the Democratic base during the 2016 primaries,
While the Israeli-Palestinian issue is itself not so central [in Democratic primaries], it is part of a new Democratic identity and a subset of a broader human rights issue that Democrats care about. Just as with other issues that help mobilize Democratic voters, no aspiring politician can afford to look ahead to national elections by bypassing their Democratic electoral base in the primaries. If public opinion continues on its current trajectory, especially among Democrats, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may very well play a greater role in electoral politics in the years to come.
So far it hasn’t. But all indications show that the age cohort that makes up the Sanders’s base is pulling away from Israel. The only question is whether the candidate himself will follow. |
The New York Times, yesterday, published an obituary of “psychic” Sylvia Browne that is strikingly accurate without giving her more credit than she’s due.
What makes it worth reading aren’t the descriptions of the major details of her life, but how the reporter suggests that her claim to fame was suspect all along.
This is how William Yardley puts it:
Sylvia Browne, a self-proclaimed psychic…
Right from the start, an important disclaimer, considering that there was no proof she had any supernatural powers.
Her misses were included in the piece along with her few lucky hits:
She often took credit for accurately predicting that the government intern Chandra Levy would be found dead in Rock Creek Park in Washington — though law enforcement officials had been searching that area since shortly after she was reported missing in May 2001. More than once, with the television cameras rolling, Ms. Browne told the parents of a missing child that their son or daughter was dead — sometimes she would say precisely where — only for the child to be found alive later…
And the piece doesn’t gloss over her primary source of cash:
… much of her income came from customers who paid $700 to ask her questions over the telephone for 30 minutes.
The obituary doesn’t flat-out say she was a con-artist but we’re able to infer as much with little work on our part.
And the final paragraphs just set us up for a laugh at her expense:
… In 2012, she made a brief video that she said was intended to put at ease people who were concerned that the world would end on Dec. 12. “Although I do believe that the world will sustain itself, I don’t believe we’re going to be here after about 95 years,” she said. “People get very concerned about that, but it’s not going to be some type of horrible monster coming out of the sea and eating you or tearing your flesh off and throwing people down into a pit of hell. A loving God would not do that to anybody. You have to think logically.”
Of all the things Browne was known for, thinking logically wasn’t one of them.
Is the article disrespectful? I’m inclined to say no. It’s honest. Browne was notable as much for the criticism she drew as she was for her books and talk show appearances.
The question we should be asking is why all articles written about people who make supernatural claims don’t include these sorts of disclaimers, that their claims have no basis in evidence. All too often, we see the media talk about psychics and near-death-experiencers and pastors as if they have some kind of special beyond-this-world power. The truth is far less interesting, yet you rarely see objective analyses of their beliefs in the mainstream media. |
Tomorrow, the Office of Public Engagement at the White House is hosting a meeting with a number of transgender activists and leaders working on federal policy around trans issues — for the first time in American history. Via the Washington Blade:
[White House spokesperson] Inouye said the meeting will be the first ever for the Office of Public Engagement where transgender issues are the sole focus of discussion. “While transgender issues have been covered in previous OPE meetings, and transgender leaders have been included in other OPE meetings, this would be the first time OPE has held a meeting solely focused on transgender issues,” Inouye said. Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said she plans to attend the meeting. “This is the first president who has allowed trans people — really allowed LGBT people — to bring forward problems and then advocate for them,” Keisling said. “In the Bush administration, we couldn’t even do that. They wouldn’t even listen to us. They didn’t care what our problems were. In fact, they were making most of our problems.”
While the meeting is closed to the press and the attendees don’t seem to be specifying initiatives they’re going to address, the National Center covers a range of issues in their organization, including employment, access to health care and immigration detention standards. “I’m not going to prioritize them that way just so you can have a good story,” said Keisling. “We’re going to say, ‘Here’s our agenda.’”
I’m really curious to see how this meeting plays out; hopefully, it won’t just be one — but one of many meetings reaching toward real policy goals around trans rights. In the meantime, I think this is a fantastic first step. |
Donald Trump on Thursday held a private meeting with Sen. Ted Cruz, who has thus far refused to endorse him. | Getty Cruz gets convention speaking slot after Trump meeting Cruz has not yet agreed to endorse Trump.
Ted Cruz has accepted an offer from Donald Trump to speak at the Republican National Convention.
The announcement came several hours after Cruz and Trump held a private meeting on Capitol Hill, their first since the end of the primaries. During the meeting, a Cruz spokeswoman said, “Mr. Trump asked Sen. Cruz to speak at the Republican convention, and Sen. Cruz said he would be happy to do so.”
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Cruz's announcement caps weeks of speculation about whether Cruz would address delegates in Cleveland. But it doesn’t answer one lingering question: whether Cruz will endorse Trump. During the final weeks of the primary contest, Trump and Cruz clashed repeatedly — with Trump at one point insinuating that Cruz’s father may have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said “there was no discussion of any endorsement.” She added that the two also spoke about future judicial appointments — an issue of intense interest for Cruz, a former Texas solicitor general.
The meeting was also attended by Jeff Roe, Cruz’s former campaign manager, and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, according to two sources.
The meeting was held at the National Republican Senatorial Committee building on Capitol Hill. Earlier in the day, Trump met with a room full of senators in the building to discuss the campaign. Many party strategists have expressed concern about how Trump’s behavior on the trail will impact their ability to retain control of the chamber this fall. |
SYDNEY radio station 2UE believes it has uncovered proof of a “secret meeting” between Jarryd Hayne and Roosters coach Trent Robinson.
The station was tipped off by a listener, who took this photograph of the San Francisco 49ers player and Robinson at a Sydney hotel recently.
Presenters John Stanley and Garry Linnell revealed the sighting on Tuesday morning, which was described as a “secret meeting” by another 2UE presenter on Twitter.
John and Garry on @NewsTalk2UE reveal a secret meeting has taken place between Jarryd Hayne and the Sydney Roosters #NRL — Troy Dodds (@troydodds) January 11, 2016
Hayne’s potential return to the NRL — particularly with the Roosters — has been a popular rumour in recent months.
The Daily Telegraph reported Roosters supremo Nick Politis and Penrith counterpart Phil Gould were set for a bidding war to land the former Parramatta Eel’s signature in November.
But Hayne has regularly affirmed his commitment to continuing to pursue his NFL career, including when he arrived at Sydney airport after returning from San Francisco last week.
“Obviously with a new coach on board, hopefully he wants me back and, if that’s the case, I’ll be back to Santa Clara, California," Hayne told reporters.
And by the looks of his response to this latest speculation nothing has changed. “This is all time!” Hayne tweeted in reply to another post about his meeting with Robinson. “You say hello to a coach and media make a story out of it.”
😂😂😂 this is all time! You say hello to a coach and media make a story out of it. https://t.co/OHNR2VAoXG — jarryd hayne (@JarrydHayne) January 11, 2016
The Sydney Morning Herald reported the meeting took place on the eve of a match between former players from Liverpool and the Socceroos.
“One of the organisers of the exhibition match was Roosters training staff member Hayden Knowles — one of Hayne’s closest friends — who had organised for Robinson to spend some time with former Liverpool coach Gerard Houllier,” the SMH report said.
“Hayne, a Liverpool FC fan himself, was also in town promoting the event and joined former NSW Blues teammate Robbie Farah at the Liverpool Legends hotel to meet some of the players.”
Some believed Hayne’s midseason demotion to the practice squad could trigger a return to Australia.
But on reflection, Hayne accepts the six-week relegation may have saved his NFL career.
Arguably the best performance of Hayne’s season came against the Lions in the 49ers’ penultimate game of a hugely disappointing 5-11 campaign.
It was Hayne’s return game from his time on the outer and he excelled with five receptions and nine carries for a combined 47 yards after being activated as a running back.
“It was great being in the practice squad,” the former NRL ace said after returning home to Sydney on Wednesday for a holiday. “Obviously I got a lot of reps at running back. I had to mimic the other teams that we were playing.
“We played some really good teams. We played against the (Atlanta) Falcons against Devonta Freeman, who is one of their best rushers, and (against) the Seattle Seahawks, where it was Marshawn Lynch and Thomas Rawls.
“We worked extremely hard and all the guys do. That’s probably one of the biggest things; that everybody works really hard and for me to give me the opportunity in those last two games, I was very thankful.
“I really didn’t realise how much I was going to play in that Detroit game, so that was huge and gave me a lot of confidence and being out there for a long period.”
Hayne says now that the 49ers’ playbook “is pretty much embedded in my brain”, he’ll try to relax with the family after his rollercoaster debut season before hopefully return in April to San Francisco, who retain the 27-year-old’s contract rights.
“It’s going to be the task to switch off,” Hayne said.
“Obviously with the playoffs coming up, it’s going to be fun watching that and I guess diagnosing their defence and offence. “I’m still a student of the game, so there is always going to be a learning process that I enjoy.”
— with AAP |
It was love at first fight. In front of an Air Canada Centre crowd desperately in need of something to cheer, the biggest name in the Maple Leafs’ latest makeover punched in for work Tuesday and was a hit. Or several hits if you ask Colin White’s face. In truth, Dion Phaneuf had them at the introduction. Then, building on that thank-heavens-you’re-here welcoming ovation, the former Flame began forging anew his reputation for cast-iron leadership, whether it be with his shoulder, his right fist or his relentless chirping.
Dion Phaneuf scraps with New Jersey Devils defenceman Colin White during the first period of NHL action at the Air Canada Centre. (FEB. 2) ( CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR ) Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Dion Phaneuf and New Jersey Devils left wing Dean McAmmond battle for the puck during the 2nd period of NHL action at the Air Canada Centre on Feb. 2, 2010. ( CARLOS OSORIO / Toronto Star )
Three minutes in, he laid his first big hit on Travis Zajac. Seven minutes in, he dropped the gloves when White took exception to his hit on Zach Parise. Finally, a bit of truculence that meant something. “I made the hit and (White) came over. He’s sticking up for his teammate. I wasn’t going to say no,” said Phaneuf, with the kind of logic that Leafs fans, always enamoured of their tough guys, appreciate. In the midst of a 3-0 Toronto victory over the high-flying New Jersey Devils, a local hero was born.
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“I want to be known as a guy who leads on the ice, whether that’s practice or games. I want to work as hard as I can to help this team by playing my game and that’s hard every shift,” said the 24-year-old, making it clear the affection was mutual. “It was a great honour to put this jersey on tonight and be a part of this organization. The fans were unbelievable. To be on this side, playing in front of them, it meant a lot to me. It was a very special game in my career.” The Leafs won. But, more important, they showed all is not lost. With this season a washout and the Leafs in the long-standing business of selling hope instead of playoff tickets, they actually provided some. The new blood came as advertised with the three players who arrived in weekend trades contributing to the victory.
Phaneuf was tough in his own end, showed good wheels, fired rockets from the blue line - “in the general direction of the net,” coach Ron Wilson chided - and seemed to instantly make defensive partner Francois Beauchemin more at ease. Goaltender Jean-Sebastien Giguere wasn’t overly challenged by a Devils team that pumped five shots past Toronto netminders on Friday in an overtime win, but a shutout is a shutout and he, undoubtedly, stopped a couple that would have slipped past predecessor Vesa Toskala. He was only the second Leafs goaltender to record a shutout in his debut, following in the footsteps of Ed Belfour.
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Fredrik Sjostrom, the add-on winger when the Leafs cleaned house on Sunday, indeed looks very fast, helped on the penalty kill - a unit that desperately needed help - and picked up as assist. Perhaps most heartening was the trickle-down effect from the presence of both Phaneuf and Giguere. With Beauchemin as exhibit A, the Toronto defence simply looked more controlled and patient. Luke Schenn, with some attention deflected, continued his recent calm, steady play and now has a role model in Phaneuf for his style of game. And Carl Gunnarsson - we’re back to that hope thing again - also made some clever plays with puck while teamed with Schenn. A blueline corps that looked like a disaster some nights - such as the last time it faced the Devils - didn’t Tuesday night. Phaneuf’s leadership extended beyond the on-ice belligerence. He talked incessantly on the bench and in the dressing room between periods, helping to keep his teammates pumped. “He’s gung-ho. He seems to love hockey. It rubs off,” said Wilson. “You could hear him talking between periods in our coaches’ office which is almost two rooms and three doorways away. You could hear him the whole time. Which I don’t think anybody in the Leafs’ room, especially the younger guys, has experienced.” “I’ll pay him by the word. He’s full of energy.”
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-NegativeZero- Profile Joined August 2011 United States 2066 Posts #2 yay coriolis aesthetics i maek map
algue Profile Joined July 2011 France 1346 Posts #3 Perfect map to place a destructible plate on the golds rly ?
Jvattic Profile Joined September 2014 Germany 24 Posts Last Edited: 2014-12-14 17:08:33 #4 Like it! Sceptic about the cliff at each natural though. As a zerg the fear of tank and medivac harass is strong when i see something like this on 2nd or 3rds. I am no expert though, might be just fine. Also a little narrow for my taste.
moskonia Profile Joined January 2011 Israel 1448 Posts #5 Blink, always think about blink when designing layouts.
Uvantak Profile Blog Joined June 2011 Uruguay 1380 Posts Last Edited: 2014-12-14 18:19:51 #6 Looks excellent, i love the golds, the asymmetric spawns, and fully agree with algue about the plates, but... Blink stalkers :/
Shit sniped by Mosko >.< @Kantuva | Mapmaker | KTVMaps.wordpress.com | Check my profile to see my TL map threads, and you can search for KTV in the Custom Games section to play them.
SwedenTheKid Profile Joined July 2014 567 Posts #7 Very pretty map Casual Mapmaker
IeZaeL Profile Joined July 2012 Italy 962 Posts #8 Map's been uploaded to NA and EU as " Contact LE " , since for some unknown reasons you can't publish it with the word " First". Good job blizzard. Author of Coda and Eastwatch.
Tya Profile Joined April 2013 44 Posts Last Edited: 2014-12-15 00:11:22 #9 On December 15 2014 03:42 IeZaeL wrote:
since for some unknown reasons you can't publish it with the word " First". Good job blizzard.
I don't really like doing things like this, but I was curious, so i went to check and see if that was the case. Seems like "first" is a viable map name. I'd imagine "First Contact" was taken since it's a pretty common term. I don't really like doing things like this, but I was curious, so i went to check and see if that was the case. Seems like "first" is a viable map name. I'd imagine "First Contact" was taken since it's a pretty common term.
eTcetRa Profile Joined November 2010 Australia 816 Posts Last Edited: 2014-12-15 03:48:54 #10 Now this I like. Sick job leZaeL.
But yeah, blink all day. Retired Mapmaker™
FlaShFTW Profile Blog Joined February 2010 United States 8205 Posts #11 im assuming cross spawns for this map right? side by side spawns both vertically or horizontally is advantaged to the player with the gold... Writer #1 KT and FlaSh Fanboy || Woo Jung Ho Never Forget || Author of the SC:R Power Rank
Uvantak Profile Blog Joined June 2011 Uruguay 1380 Posts #12 All spawns enabled Flash, horizontal will probably be extremely problematic if Iez decides to keep it. @Kantuva | Mapmaker | KTVMaps.wordpress.com | Check my profile to see my TL map threads, and you can search for KTV in the Custom Games section to play them.
EatThePath Profile Blog Joined September 2009 United States 3939 Posts #13 yeah, what?? gold bases asymmetric...? Comprehensive strategic intention: DNE
-NegativeZero- Profile Joined August 2011 United States 2066 Posts #14 Yeah this really needs to be cross only. Not only are the golds asymmetric, but they have 3 entrances while the corresponding standard bases have only 2, so just replacing the gold bases with standard bases wouldn't work. i maek map
reps)squishy Profile Blog Joined July 2013 United States 603 Posts Last Edited: 2014-12-15 08:44:51 #15 When I looked at this map I instantly felt a bit a of de ja vu . I don't recognize the name of the map at all or even the layout. I played a bit of broodwar and had a interest in obscure maps and asymmetrical maps which could be the link to the de ja vu. The map gives off a vibe of this is a broodwar map while other recreated maps like Match Point don't. But I feel like the instinctive feelings I had were shot down when I looked closer at the map and seen that this map has to be played on cross spawn and the gold bases have gases taking away from the mineral only feel that the broodwar map gave. SC2 has a really hard locked the map has to be 2 player map should have watch towers. The map is a step in the right direction. But making the map feel more I need to expand but if I expand here (the gold) I miss out on gas but expanding here (middle base) there is the risk of the distance being exploited. Lastly allowing all spawn (gold patching hugely required) will make the map far more interesting when it comes time for 4th bases and both players are spawned horizontally to each other forcing the player to either end the game on 3 bases or take a base that is farther away which is unseen in sc2 at the moment. The map should make the player think and have to make decisions based on the map along with the in game ones. ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ
Phaenoman Profile Joined February 2013 568 Posts Last Edited: 2014-12-15 11:07:10 #16 Other than the texturing/ aesthetics, which is of course one of the best out here, u have copied the map more or less. So I can't see any design readjustments for Sc2.
The obvious blink issue, the lack of forced-cross spawn and the possible siege postions u can get. I mean how asymetric should a map be? Where are we going? Maps with rotational symmetry having all spawns playable are not known to be fair, but giving one player gold minerals...
I like how some ppl here still do not criticize those things just bcuz they read "IeZaeL"... Again I love what u doing in general, but this is just bad designwise... U cannot break mapmaking rules that way, just becuz u know them well... Random is hard work dude...
algue Profile Joined July 2011 France 1346 Posts #17
+ Show Spoiler +
Or at least try to givean idea to save the map from being buried under the complains about blink stalker : Or at least try to givean idea to save the map from being buried under the complains about blink stalker : I'm saving ESPORTS right now : rly ?
IeZaeL Profile Joined July 2012 Italy 962 Posts #18 Thanks for the feedback , just wanted to point out that I read them all , even if I dont reply back. Going to change the map with the release of the entire 5-map pack. Author of Coda and Eastwatch.
Uvantak Profile Blog Joined June 2011 Uruguay 1380 Posts #19
This still won't fully address the possible issues of giving a player a gold base tho, in TvZ a terran that's good and knows how to set up his army with widowmines would still have an advantage when parade pushing, but when/if the parade is stopped then Terran will become highly exposed to ling/bling harass, that's the match up that worries me the most.
Also currently the normal horizontal third is highly harassable, specially by terran bio, this when spawning on cross spawns could become problematic, but players still have the optional third so it shouldn't be too much of and issue (maaaaaaybe on ZvP with P taking a third).
Also the map will surely need reworks to avoid cannon rush, we all love the way your cliffs look (at least i do) but as they are now they are not well suited for competitive play.
http://imgur.com/a/psGYG
+ Show Spoiler + i gotta go now, so i couldn't finish trying all the possible spots.
I still love the map, love the asymmetry & love the flow. I don't consider the map needing to be forced cross negative, Iez you could move the small level 1 path that's used for decoration near the gold bases to the same level the bases are on, remove the trees and add some LoS blockers, that way the player that decides to risk it and take the gold when players spawn vertically will first need to over-extend and secure the area where the small bridge starts so he can't get harassed as easily, this small over extension should be enough for players to scare away a big % of players, and only those that have strategies thought out for the map would take the base.This still won't fully address the possible issues of giving a player a gold base tho, in TvZ a terran that's good and knows how to set up his army with widowmines would still have an advantage when parade pushing, but when/if the parade is stopped then Terran will become highly exposed to ling/bling harass, that's the match up that worries me the most.Also currently the normal horizontal third is highly harassable, specially by terran bio, this when spawning on cross spawns could become problematic, but players still have the optional third so it shouldn't be too much of and issue (maaaaaaybe on ZvP with P taking a third).Also the map will surely need reworks to avoid cannon rush, we all love the way your cliffs look (at least i do) but as they are now they are not well suited for competitive play.I still love the map, love the asymmetry & love the flow. @Kantuva | Mapmaker | KTVMaps.wordpress.com | Check my profile to see my TL map threads, and you can search for KTV in the Custom Games section to play them.
IeZaeL Profile Joined July 2012 Italy 962 Posts #20
So you are telling me to do some sort of "bridges" like Frost got ? Thats exactly what i was thinking. Take a look at Red Rock Ridge by lefix.
As of now I added some deadspaces to the main to reduce blink imbaness ... still gotta test it ingame tho. Damn Uvantak thank you for the writeup , love it when people actually test the map ingame , especially since i never do itSo you are telling me to do some sort of "bridges" like Frost got ? Thats exactly what i was thinking. Take a look at Red Rock Ridge by lefix.As of now I added some deadspaces to the main to reduce blink imbaness ... still gotta test it ingame tho. Author of Coda and Eastwatch.
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A ghost bike commemorating a singer killed in a collision with a skip lorry has had a removal order fastened to it by Hackney council.
Family and friends put up the tribute to 28-year-old Shivon Watson who was crushed to death at a roundabout while cycling to work.
She was trapped between the lorry and railings as she and the vehicle turned left on March 10, 2010. Paramedics tried for an hour to resuscitate her but she died at the scene near Victoria Park.
Ms Watson, also known by her stage name Shiv Lizzy, was a successful musician and charity worker. The council issued the removal notice last Tuesday after saying it had received complaints from members of the public.
Her mother Annette Darch said just one person had complained and no one at the council had discussed the matter with her, adding: “We heard rumours that it might be taken away when we went up for the anniversary but everyone around there is happy for it to stay. Just one person complained apparently. They should not do it. And it would be nice to be consulted.”
Chris Peck of CTC, the national cycling charity, said: “It must be terrible for family and friends who want to preserve the memory of her and have that wiped out and taken away. The bikes serve to motivate people to campaign for better road safety and remind them of lives lost on the road. There should be a way of working with the family to have the ghost bike retained.”
Laura Woods, spokeswoman for road safety charity Brake, said: “Roadside memorials, such as a ghost bikes, provide a vital reminder for other drivers and for communities in which there have been deaths on the road and can be a comfort to families who have suffered a sudden and violent bereavement through a road crash.” Ghost bikes — bicycles painted white and often adorned with floral tributes — were conceived to highlight road safety and are put up at the exact location where a cyclist has been killed.
Boris Johnson has supported the installation of the memorials, and gave the go-ahead for a permanent tribute for Eilidh Cairns at Notting Hill Gate after the removal of a memorial left her sister Kate “utterly bereft”.
A Hackney council spokesman said: “In practice we only seek to remove temporary memorials where we have received complaints, as in this case, or where memorials are not maintained or pose a risk to safety. Although the seven-day notice period has expired, we will not remove the memorial until we have discussed this with the family.” |
Protesters rally in Washington DC before marching to the Department of Justice to demonstrate against the Trump administration’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images A man protests against the decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy at the San Jacinto Plaza in El Paso, Texas. Photograph: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
The Irish emigrant community in the US has reacted with anger at the decision of Donald Trump’s administration to end protections for undocumented children of illegal immigrants.
The US president is shutting down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Daca, programme that prevents the deportation of immigrants brought illegally to the US as children. It was established during the Obama era.
Almost 800,000 undocumented children of illegal parents, dubbed “Dreamers”, are set to lose the amnesty signed by the last president under an executive order that bypassed the US Congress.
Mr Trump is giving Congress six months to try find agreement on legislation to replace the Daca programme, leaving many immigrant families, including some Irish, facing a nervous wait.
“People are sickened over, just heartbroken,” said Orla Kelleher, executive director of the Aisling Irish Community Centre in New York.
Ms Kelleher said that she personally knows a number of Irish families in New York who benefited from Daca and they were “absolutely devastated and understandably very concerned.
“These children were brought here as babies and children not knowing or understanding of what the consequences would be of trying to do the right thing. These are people who only see this country as their home for so many years. The next six months will be interesting but in a concerning way,” she said. Related Why the American ‘Dreamers’ programme needs to be saved
Patrick, an immigrant from Cork whose daughter received a work permit and driving licence under Daca, said that she was now “very worried” about President Trump’s decision.
“It is back to being nerve-wracking again. It is fightening really because you never really know what is going to happen. We are back to the stage where we are living on pins and needles again,” said the New England resident, who is now a US citizen.
His daughter came to the US when she was 12 and is now in her 30s and “totally Americanised,” having spent longer in the US than in Ireland.
“She is living day-to-day with Daca. It is a little bit of relief but you can’t do very much with it, other than work,” he said. “We have had a lot of deaths in the family at home, my parents, and my aunts and uncles. She could never leave the country.”
Ronnie Millar, executive director of the Irish International Immigrant Centre in Boston, said that people were mostly angry at Mr Trump’s move. He said they see it as “a betrayal” given his mixed signals, saying that he had “a great love” for Dreamers while removing a measure that protects them.
“There is generally a sense of real disappointment and real anger in the Irish community and the broader immigrant community that this was a low move,” he said.
The vast majority of Dreamers are from Central and South America.
Billy Lawless, the Chicago-based Irish Senator for the diaspora, said the number of Irish who benefitted was “a handful rather than hundreds”.
“I am disappointed and very worried,” said Mr Lawless, who described Mr Trump’s move as “inevitable” given his rhetoric on immigration.
He expressed hope in at least 30 Republicans coming out to support a “congressional fix” suggested by Democratic senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. |
As gas prices and oil profits soar, Bush promotes giveaways to corporations
By Joe Kay
30 April 2008
US President George W. Bush used a White House press conference Tuesday to trot out his familiar litany of right-wing proposals, ostensibly intended to address rising gas prices and the growing economic crisis facing millions of Americans.
The proposals are all designed in one way or another to increase the power of the oil companies, even as these conglomerates have begun posting record profits for the first quarter of 2008. Bush proposed opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling, increasing incentives to companies for refinery construction, and blocking new regulations and emissions targets for domestic energy producers.
Bush sidestepped questions on his administration’s position on a limited proposal, advanced by Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate John McCain, for a summer moratorium on the federal gas tax. Such a move would have only a marginal impact on gasoline prices.
Bush said there was no “magic wand” to deal with gasoline prices, and he blamed Congress for blocking previous energy bills that included some of his proposals.
Rising gasoline prices are beginning to have a major impact on the living standards of millions of people in the United States and internationally. In the US, prices on Monday topped $3.60 a gallon, a record in inflation-adjusted terms and more than 21 cents above the price just two weeks ago. The price for diesel fuel, used in trucks, tractors, and other vehicles, is at a record $4.20 a gallon.
According to a poll conducted on behalf of the Kaiser Family Foundation, 44 percent of the American population now cites the price of gasoline as a “serious problem”—more than any other economic concern. The effects are predictably felt most keenly by those earning the least. About 63 percent of those with incomes of less than $30,000 said gasoline prices were a serious problem.
In a country where the automobile is the primary and often only available means of transportation, it is not uncommon for a worker to have to fill his or her gasoline tank several times a week, compounding the impact of any price increase and putting a severe dent in household budgets already strained by rising food and other costs.
In some parts of the country, gasoline prices are soaring much higher than the national average. In San Francisco, California, average prices topped $4.00 a gallon over the weekend. The statewide average was $3.91.
In Europe, prices are sharply higher as well. In England, where regressive taxes make up much of the price, gasoline is close to £1.10 per liter, or about $10 a gallon.
In the US and in England, many independent truckers are unable to turn a profit off hauling goods, as the cost of filling a tank with diesel can now exceed $1,200. The cost of transport often exceeds truckers’ pay. On Monday, about 100 truckers staged a protest in Washington, while dozens converged on London. Independent truckers staged slowdowns and stoppages throughout the country at the beginning of the month.
Within this context, the position of the Bush administration is essentially to do nothing. White House press secretary Dana Perino emphasized this point on Monday, saying, “I think it would be disingenuous and unfortunate for American consumers for them to be led to believe that there is a short-term fix [to gasoline prices]. There’s not going to be one.”
The proposals from the Democrats are no more serious. In addition to the tax moratorium, Clinton is proposing a suspension of oil input into the Strategic Petroleum reserve, a marginal increase in spending on alternative energy sources, and an increase in fuel economy over a period of 20 years. Obama has rejected the tax moratorium on the grounds that companies would just increase their prices to make up the difference, and supports fuel economy standard increases and alternative energy investment.
None of the candidates are capable of raising the basic issue: that the energy market, so critical to the livelihood of billions of people and to the functioning of the world economy, is largely controlled by private companies, and that these companies exercise enormous influence over the political establishment in the US.
As usual, the oil companies and wealthy investors are reaping fortunes off of the economic hardship inflicted upon the vast majority of the population. The current sharp spike in gasoline prices has been driven largely by the rise in crude oil prices, which reached close to $120 a barrel on Monday—once considered an unimaginable price. The average price of oil in the first quarter was $97.94, up 68.9 percent from a year ago.
There are a number of factors behind the increase in oil prices, including rising demand from China and India and a weak US dollar, in which oil is priced. One of the principal factors, however, is the flood of cash into basic commodities, including oil and food, as wealthy investors have liquidated holdings in more risky financial assets and are looking for hedges on inflation. This is creating a new bubble in commodity markets, forcing billions of people around the world to pay the higher prices generated by artificial demand.
Whatever the cause, the rise in oil prices has been a boondoggle for oil companies, which have begun announcing their first quarter 2008 profits this week. Europe’s two biggest oil producers, Royal Dutch Shell and BP, announced profits on Tuesday that far exceeded analysts’ expectations.
The combined profit for the two companies was close to $17 billion—$9.08 billion for Shell and $7.6 billion for BP. These figures include earnings attributed to the rise in oil prices. If this rise is factored out (as is done in the so-called current cost of supplies figures), Shell’s profits were $7.8 billion and BP’s were $6.6 billion. That is, at least $2 billion in profit for the two companies can be attributed solely to the recent rise in oil prices.
Analysts expect the profits for Exxon Mobil, the largest private energy company, to soar to $11.2 billion in the first quarter, an increase of 22 percent over 2007. If the company’s profits exceed expectations, however, it could beat its fourth quarter profits from 2007 of $11.66 billion—the record for a US company.
Of course, the top executives and investors will benefit enormously from these windfalls. Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson received an 18 percent raise in 2007, pulling in $21.7 million. The oil companies will also give back billions to investors in the form of stock buybacks and dividends.
The news from Shell and BP came as a surprise to analysts, who have been concerned about profit troubles in the refinery component of production, which transforms crude oil into useable products like gasoline and diesel. Giants like Shell and BP, and US companies Exxon and Chevron, are vertically integrated, including in their operations both oil extraction and refining.
In fact, independent refinery operations are fairing poorly, which could indicate that gasoline prices will continue their upward march over the next several weeks as refiners struggle to raise their own profits. Valero Energy, a refiner, reported a 77 percent drop in first quarter net income on Tuesday, complaining that it had been unable to shift all of its increased costs (from purchasing crude oil) onto consumers.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, “While the price of gasoline has been rising at the pump, those increases have so far been modest in comparison to oil. In a bid to save their bottom lines, companies operating refineries, especially on the West Coast, are reducing their output. That would likely drive fuel prices higher.”
The Sacramento Bee reported that some of California’s refineries “have had problems returning to full production following their usual winter-spring overhauls,” and that this has contributed to the near-$4 a gallon price of gasoline in that state. There are indications that refiners have in the past artificially manipulated capacity and downtime in order to influence prices.
The integrated oil giants can make windfall profits on either the oil extraction or refining (the upstream or downstream) sides of the energy market. Last summer, when gasoline prices were at $3.22 a gallon, much of the profits were booked on the refining end, and attributed to a shortage in refining capacity. This has been the long term trend, as oil companies have shut down refineries in response to low prices.
In this context, Bush’s insistence Tuesday that Congress grant incentives to increase refining capacity is absurd. Bush noted on several occasions, “It’s been more than 30 years since America built its last refinery.” This fact—an indictment of the state of American infrastructure—has been a product of a deliberate policy of reducing refining capacity in order to force gasoline prices up. The oil companies have no interest in building new refineries, with or without tax incentives.
Prices of basic foods such as rice and wheat also have soared in recent months. Among the factors behind this price explosion is the shift to ethanol production, which has increased demand on some food items, particularly corn in the US. Ethanol production, which Bush championed on Tuesday, has largely been intended as a boondoggle for agribusiness. Also on Tuesday, Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest processors of grains and other foods, posted a 42 percent increase in its quarterly profits ending on March 31.
The ability of the oil companies to maintain record profits has been facilitated greatly by the enormous consolidation of the industry over the past 20 years. The top five energy companies now control about 15 percent of global oil production, more than 50 percent of US domestic refinery capacity, and 62 percent of the retail gasoline market.
The entire structure of energy production on a global scale is completely irrational. However, the consolidation of the energy industry has made the rational solution clearer: There is no conceivable reason why these giant corporations—which straddle the globe in search of profits, have done much to encourage war and colonial occupations in key strategic areas, and have worked assiduously to block any attempt to deal with global warming—should remain in the hands of private individuals and under the sway of the profit motive.
Instead, the giant productive forces that control the lives of billions—including the energy and food infrastructure of the globe—must be transferred into public utilities, socially owned and democratically controlled. |
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Santa Cruz High School is closed on Wednesday as the Santa Cruz Police Department and FBI agents investigate the threat of a mass shooting.According to Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark, the principal received an email last night threatening that a mass shooting would happen at the school on Wednesday. As of 7 p.m. Wednesday, officials had not made a decision on whether Santa Cruz High would be open for classes on Thursday. Clark said student safety is the number No. 1 priority. Someone sent the email to Principal Karen Edmonds at 8:43 p.m. Tuesday, and Clark said it came from a "server using sophisticated encryption."Edmonds called police two minutes later."We want to know who sent this, and where it was sent from, to determine the seriousness of their intentions," Clark said.PHOTOS: Santa Cruz High School closed because of threat"Some of these masking email services are becoming more sophisticated. We are going to use every resource we have to identify the person responsible for this," Clark said. While working throughout Tuesday night, the superintendent and police decided the best course of action for student safety was to close the school. A reverse 911 call and campus safety alert email were sent out to students and parents at 6 a.m. Santa Cruz City Schools district held a press conference at 1 p.m. to release additional information.Superintendent Kris Munro said no specific students were named in the email. The email said the entire student body and some staff members would be targeted. "The email indicated an intention to create a mass casualty situation with students and staff at the campus. This wasn't like a manifesto list of individuals. To protect the integrity of the investigation, we are not releasing the specific content of the email," Clark said.The email mentioned specific weapons and locations.No other principals in the district received email threats, Munro said.A meeting for parents will be held at Kaiser Permanente Arena at 7 p.m. Wednesday. VIDEO: Santa Cruz High students, officials react to threatSanta Cruz police are encouraging anyone with information to call their investigators at 831-420-5820, or send an anonymous tip by calling the tip line at 831-420-5995.Check back with KSBW.com for updates on this developing story. |
Jun 28, 2013; Washington, DC, USA; Washington Wizards general manager Ernie Grunfeld speaks to the media during a press conference to introduce Otto Porter Jr. at Verizon Center. Porter was selected with the third pick of the first round in the 2013 NBA Draft. Mandatory Credit: Rafael Suanes-USA TODAY Sports
The Washington Wizards and San Antonio Spurs are reportedly interested in Giannis Bourousis, who’s considered a top Euroleague player
July 1st is going to be the busiest day of the summer for NBA executives.
The first day of free agency is going to be filled with blockbuster moves, head scratching signings and straight up confusion. This summer, virtually every team in the league has enough cap room to make a splashy move. The Washington Wizards are among those teams.
Since everyone has beaten the Kevin Durant topic to death, we won’t even bother rehashing what happened. The Wizards have to focus on other free agents, even if they are obscure.
Finding a gem in free agency could make the difference between a first round playoff exit and a trip to the conference finals.
Often times the players that make the most impact are the ones that fly under the radar; the ones casual fans have never heard of.
The teams with the best scouts, in particular the San Antonio Spurs, always find a way to get the lead on players we’ve never come across. That won’t change this summer.
According to EuroHoops, the Spurs and the Washington Wizards are interested in Giannis Bourousis.
A total of six NBA teams are interested on Giannis Bourousis and as Eurohoops can confirm the Washinton Wizards and the San Antonio Spurs are two of the suitors.
Per EuroHoops, Bourousis “was the MVP of Liga Endesa and the best center in Euroleague.” That’s kind of impressive.
Like most of you, I’ve never heard of the player nor will I pretend to know how good he is. But, l have excellent YouTubing and Googling abilities that I’ve put to the test in order to learn more about the district’s potential savior.
Bourousis can obviously space the floor. At the next level, he would probably be considered a stretch five. He also seems to have solid court vision, which is a huge plus for bigs in the NBA.
From the other things I’ve gathered, he doesn’t seem like a great defender nor someone who would excel against quick-footed bigs. That applies to plenty of other bigs, though. Bourousis’ game could be compared to Mo Speights’.
The 32-year-old apparently had interest from NBA teams after going undrafted over a decade ago, but he’s finally interested in coming over.
At his age and limited versatility, it’s hard to imagine a situation where a team will pay him a ton of money.
Like other international players did last year, such as Marcelo Huertas with the Los Angeles Lakers, Bourousis would likely take a non-guaranteed contract assuming he’ll make the roster.
If the Spurs are interested, then he must be good. I mean, it’s the Spurs…
Washington has 10 open roster spots and players see the opportunity. I would be surprised if Bourousis chose the Washington Wizards over the Spurs, but his chances of making the team might be higher in D.C. |
A reference to the Keystone XL pipeline was chopped from Hillary Clinton's memoir due to political considerations, according to the latest batch of stolen emails posted Thursday on Wikileaks.
While writing the book "Hard Choices," Clinton initially included a reference to the pipeline at the urging of her daughter, Chelsea, according to a 2014 email purportedly sent to her current campaign chair John Podesta.
"She decided to write about Keystone because her daughter suggested that it would be a glaring omission and look like an even worse dodge if she left it out," said the note from Clinton speechwriter Dan Schwerin.
The note said the passage was crafted with some help from Podesta, then edited by Bill and Hillary Clinton. The ill-fated phrases referred to Keystone XL as a tough choice amid the transition to a clean-energy economy. They concluded with Clinton refraining to take sides, out of respect for her successor John Kerry, who led the project review as Secretary of State.
Her book editor apparently wanted the section dropped — because it read like a political dodge.
Schwerin wrote: "(Editor Jonathan Karp says) it 'reads like you're punting on an issue I don't think readers are expecting you to address in the first place. Unless you feel some need to mention it, I'm not sure what the gain is. You say you're waiting for the study before making a determination, but I question whether any study is capable of defining a clear course of action, and some readers might think that relying on a study is a stalling tactic."'
It was apparently edited out at the last minute. Schwerin called it: "A change that apparently is still manageable in the production process even at this late date (let's hope it doesn't open the floodgates)."
Numerous other messages released by Wikileaks show how Clinton wrestled with the pipeline issue, which became a major Canada-U.S. irritant.
They show how her campaign team struggled with the timing, and tone, of her surprise announcement last year that she'd oppose the project — which was officially nixed shortly thereafter by President Barack Obama.
Demonstrator Sharon Garlena and others rally against the Keystone XL pipeline proposal outside the White House in Washington in January 2015. (Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press)
The latest batch of Podesta emails show how the campaign tracked the immediate media reaction to the announcement.
"Most liberals and liberal orgs are just happy that she came out with her position," campaign staffer Milia Fisher purportedly wrote to Podesta, after the September 2015 announcement.
"There are a few people... calling it a Pope-(visit)-related news dump, which is a little insane."
The Clinton campaign does not generally comment on the contents of emails published by Wikileaks, calling them an effort by Russian intelligence to sway the results of the U.S. election.
The Keystone XL pipeline would have carried more than one-fifth of Canada's oil exports to the U.S. Proponents hailed it as a cleaner, cheaper, safer way to carry oil already going to the U.S. by train — and pointed to several State Department studies that concluded it would not raise greenhouse-gas emissions.
Opponents of the project said those reviews were based on unduly optimistic assumptions about the long-term prospects for the oil industry, and some movement leaders candidly declared that their goal was simply to damage the fossil-fuel industry wherever possible.
Calgary-based pipeline-maker TransCanada Corp. has filed a $15-billion NAFTA claim against the U.S. government, arguing that while it racked up expenses, it was being misled by the Obama administration that the decision would be based on the technical merits, not politics.
The pipeline has been a minor issue in this current election, with Donald Trump and the Republicans promising to revive the project. |
Wind and solar power competing evenly with their fossil fuel counterparts without federal subsidies could come in just a few years in Texas and other areas, while it may take another 15 years or more in other parts of the country, according to reports released this week.
The “paradox” slowing renewable power growth somewhat is that the regions with the greatest natural resource potential for wind and solar, like the southwest and mid-continent, already have relatively cheap power prices that make it harder for wind and solar to compete, while the northeastern part of the country with more expensive power has weaker resource potential, according to the “Journey to grid parity” report from the Deloitte Center for Energy Solutions.
The key factors contributing to wind and solar power becoming more competitive include the ever-decreasing manufacturing costs for renewable power projects, improving power generation efficiency from wind and solar technological enhancements, the projected increase of natural gas prices from greater global demand and more U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas, and the anticipated need for more power generation from the expected retirement of more older, coal-fired power plants, the report contends.
However, grid parity for wind and solar may take a decade longer in many parts of the country if legislators on Capitol Hill do not extend the production tax credit for wind and the solar investment tax credit — the benefits for both expired tax credits run out after 2016, according to the report.
“Renewable power generation reaching grid parity without federal or state subsidies, except in certain markets possessing the most robust renewable resources and having relatively high wholesale power market prices,” the Deloitte report finds. “Indeed, without dramatic cost declines and improvements in efficiency and utilization, it is unlikely some parts of the U.S. can reach grid parity without federal or state incentives within the next 10 to 15 years.”
Onshore wind is expected to achieve parity faster than solar in most parts of the nation, including Texas, which already leads the nation in wind power. Buoyed by the production tax credit, transmission expansion projects, ample land and strong wind, Texas accounted for 22 percent of the nation’s wind power generation last year.
If the tax credit goes away, wind power will be temporarily disadvantaged in Texas, but parity could be achieved as soon as 2020 in the state, the report concludes.
But the glut of cheap natural gas from the shale boom and ample power capacity in Texas make it tougher for renewables in Texas, even with strong wind and solar resources. Nearly 11 percent of the electricity consumed in Texas in 2015 through October comes from wind power.
While Texas currently has very little solar power generation, there are several projects currently in development.
Reaching grid parity for renewables also should receive a boost from the federal Clean Power Plan, which is being challenged in federal court by Texas and 25 other states, that seeks to combat climate change by reducing carbon emissions at existing power plants, especially coal plants.
The American Wind Energy Association is pushing for Congress to extend the federal tax credits and released a new “Wind Vision” report this week. Using federal data, the report contends wind power in Texas could supply Texas with 27.6 percent of its electricity in 2020 and 37.8 percent by 2030.
“By 2030, wind energy produced in the state would avoid over 80.6 million metric tons of carbon pollution a yea, or 16.9 million cars’ worth of emissions,” the report states.
Nationwide, wind could generate 20 percent of the country’s electricity by 2030 and 35 percent by 2050. |
In a new development in Tesla’s direct sales battle, it looks like it might be about to lose its right to sell cars in Missouri despite currently operating stores in Kansas City and St. Louis. The automaker has been in the state since 2013, but now a judge is siding with the local dealership association against Tesla.
The St.Louis Post-Dispatch reports:
“After Tesla opened stores in University City in 2013 and Kansas City in 2014, the Missouri Auto Dealers Association sued the Missouri DOR and its director in January 2015, alleging its direct-to-consumer model violates state law.”
Interestingly, in order to sell its cars in Missouri and obtain a dealership license, the automaker had to authorize itself to sell its cars in the state. Its application read “Tesla Motors … authorizes Tesla Motors” to sell Tesla vehicles.
Today, Judge Daniel Green ruled on Missouri Auto Dealers Association (MADA) case and wrote:
“a single entity may not manufacture vehicles for sale in Missouri and possess a Missouri new motor vehicle dealer license,”
Now Tesla is not losing its current licenses for the Kansas City and St. Louis stores, but it will not be able to renew if the judgment stands after Tesla’s appeal, which is clearly putting its business in Missouri in jeopardy.
MADA successfully managed to sue the Missouri DOR in order for the government to force consumers to buy their vehicles through third-party dealerships.
As we often reported in the past, Tesla doesn’t use the third-party franchise dealership models like most automakers in the US and instead owns all of its stores. It is still struggling to instate its distribution model in several states, like now in Missouri, where the auto dealer associations are pushing back and trying to force Tesla to use their model through legislation preventing automakers to own auto dealerships.
One of the main reason why Tesla refuses to go through third-party dealerships is their proven inability to sell electric vehicles either due to the lack of desire or knowledge. Of course, the other important reason is that dealerships make most of their profit on servicing the vehicles they sell, while Tesla aims not to make a profit on service.
A recent study gave reason to Tesla for selling electric vehicles through company-owned stores. |
CINCINNATI (Reuters) - While U.S. President Barack Obama tries to claw back bonuses paid to AIG employees, Americans facing pay cuts and job losses are outraged that some refuse to share the pain of the recession.
“It’s not fair,” said Nancy Johns, echoing millions of Americans who watch with disbelief as Washington and Wall Street battle over whether to recover millions in corporate bonuses paid out by firms that received government bailouts.
AIG, an insurance giant that is being kept alive on a taxpayer-funded $180 billion lifeline, is paying out $165 million in bonuses for 2008. It has argued that it is legally obliged to meet employee retention payments.
Ordinary people have trouble understanding that logic.
Johns was working as a daycare provider in Cincinnati in 2007 when the economic downturn hit. The subsequent slump in daycare demand led to her work hours being cut from 40 hours a week to 25 — dropping her weekly paycheck to just over $200.
“You couldn’t get enough hours to buy food for your kids,” said Johns, who has a five-year-old daughter. She quit her job, the family sold their second car, and she spent $20,000 to go back to school to retrain as a medical billing specialist.
Her year-long struggle has eased now that she has a job handling medical paperwork, but she’s outraged that some at the top rungs of the income ladder are helping themselves to big payouts while the less fortunate lose their jobs and homes.
“There were no guarantees for us,” she said.
Others question the financial merit of paying out bonuses in companies that were on the brink of the collapse until the government stepped in.
“I always thought bonuses were contingent on a job well done, not for simply showing up, or mindlessly driving the company over a cliff,” said Dave Blank, a medical supplies salesman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“So what have those bonus-worthy executives done so well?”
CONCESSIONS MADE
In Arizona, unemployed manager Don Yows, 50, is furious about the AIG bonuses, which have prompted threats from the Obama administration and lawmakers in Congress and made newspaper headlines across the country.
“My frustration is two-fold: why they feel they are entitled to it, it’s a level of arrogance. I’m angry, angry. And number two, how they’ve gotten away with it so far,” said Yows, who lost his technology job in December.
“I’m looking for any job ... bonuses aren’t even a part of the consideration, it’s just getting a job and being gainfully employed right now.”
A belief that Americans have made concessions to help save jobs, especially in hard-hit sectors such as the auto industry, has helped to fuel the popular outrage over the corporate bonuses.
Thousands of white-collar workers have accepted unpaid furloughs, Congress forced U.S. automakers to wring concessions from their employees before receiving federal aid, and many workers have swallowed pay freezes.
At the same time others, particularly on Wall Street, say the furor over bonuses has been blown out of proportion. They note that the payouts represent a sliver of government bailout funds and resulted from legally binding contracts.
That argument, however, rankles Tony Montana, a spokesman for the United Steelworkers of America, which represents workers in industries as diverse as steel and nursing.
“A lot of companies have come to our union and said ‘Please let us renegotiate our contract,’” Montana said. “Our union has been very pro-active and very flexible with our employers because we do recognize the circumstances.”
“It is unfair to expect rank and file union members around the country to accept concessions or cutbacks while CEOs and other executives are raking in the benefits from their lucrative employment contracts,” Montana said. |
This article is about the American Old West outlaw. For the pirate, see Bartholomew Roberts . For other uses, see Black Bart (disambiguation)
Charles Earl Boles (b. 1829; d. after February 28, 1888), also known as Black Bart, was an English-born outlaw noted for the poetic messages he left behind after two of his robberies. Often called Charley by his friends, he was also known as Charles Bolton, C.E. Bolton and Black Bart the Poet.[1] Considered a gentleman bandit with a reputation for style and sophistication,[1] he was one of the most notorious stagecoach robbers to operate in and around Northern California and southern Oregon during the 1870s and 1880s.
Early life [ edit ]
Charles Boles was born in Norfolk, England to John and Maria Boles (sometimes spelled Bolles). He was the third of ten children, having six brothers and three sisters. When he was two years old, his parents immigrated to Jefferson County, New York, where his father purchased a farm four miles north of Plessis Village in the direction of Alexandria Bay.
California Gold Rush [ edit ]
In late 1849, Boles and his brothers David and James joined in the California Gold Rush, prospecting in the North Fork of the American River near Sacramento. They traveled home in 1852, but Boles later returned with his brothers David and Robert. Both brothers fell ill shortly after their arrival and died. Charles Boles remained in California for another two more years before giving up again.
In 1854, Boles (who now used this spelling) married Mary Elizabeth Johnson. By 1860, they were living with their four children in Decatur, Illinois.
Civil War [ edit ]
On August 13, 1862, Boles enlisted as a private in Company B, 116th Illinois Regiment (his name is spelled "Boles" in the company records). He was a good soldier and became a First sergeant within a year. Boles was seriously wounded at the Battle of Vicksburg, and took part in Sherman's March to the Sea. He received brevet commissions as both second lieutenant and first lieutenant, and on June 7, 1865, was discharged with his regiment in Washington, D.C.. He returned home at last to his family in Illinois.
Prospecting again [ edit ]
In 1867, Boles went prospecting for gold in Idaho and Montana. In a surviving letter to his wife from August 1871, he told her of an unpleasant encounter with some Wells, Fargo & Company agents and vowed to exact revenge. His wife never heard from him again, and in time she presumed he had died.
Criminal career [ edit ]
Boles adopted the nickname "Black Bart" and proceeded to rob Wells Fargo stagecoaches at least 28 times across northern California between 1875 and 1883, including a number of times along the historic Siskiyou Trail between California and Oregon. He only left two poems – at the fourth and fifth robbery sites – but this came to be considered his signature and ensured his fame. Black Bart was quite successful, often taking in thousands of dollars a year.
Ironically, Boles was afraid of horses and made all of his robberies on foot. Together with his poems, this earned him notoriety. He supposedly never once fired a weapon during his years as an outlaw.
Boles was invariably polite and used no foul language, despite its appearance in his poems. He dressed in a long linen duster coat and a bowler hat, using a flour sack with holes cut for his eyes as a mask. He brandished a shotgun, but never used it. These features became his trademarks.
First robbery [ edit ]
On July 26, 1875, Boles robbed his first stagecoach in Calaveras County, California, on the road between Copperopolis and Milton. He spoke with a deep and resonant tone as he politely ordered stage driver John Shine to "throw down the box". As Shine handed over the strongbox, Boles shouted, "If he dares to shoot, give him a solid volley, boys". Seeing rifle barrels pointed at him from the nearby bushes, Shine quickly handed over the strongbox. Shine waited until Boles vanished and then went to recover the empty strongbox, but upon examining the area, he discovered that the "men with rifles" were actually carefully rigged sticks. Black Bart's first robbery netted him $160.
Last stagecoach robbery [ edit ]
His last holdup took place on November 3, 1883, at the site of his first robbery on Funk Hill, southeast of the present town of Copperopolis. Driven by Reason McConnell, the stage had crossed the Reynolds Ferry on the old road from Sonora to Milton. The driver stopped at the ferry to pick up Jimmy Rolleri, the 19-year-old son of the ferry owner. Rolleri had his rifle with him and got off at the bottom of the hill to hunt along the creek and meet the stage on the other side. When he arrived at the western end, he found that the stage was not there and began walking up the stage road. Near the summit, he saw the stage driver and his team of horses.
McConnell told him that as the stage had approached the summit, Boles had stepped out from behind a rock with a shotgun in his hands. He forced McConnell to unhitch the team and take them over the crest of the hill. Boles then tried to remove the strongbox from the stage, but it had been bolted to the floor and took Boles some time to remove. Rolleri and McConnell went over the crest and saw Boles backing out of the stage with the strong box. McConnell grabbed Rolleri's rifle and fired at Boles twice but missed. Rolleri took the rifle and fired as Boles entered a thicket. He stumbled as if he had been hit. Running to the thicket, they found a small, blood-stained bundle of mail he had dropped.
Boles had been wounded in the hand. After running a quarter of a mile, he stopped and wrapped a handkerchief around his hand to control the bleeding. He found a rotten log and stuffed the sack with the gold amalgam into it, keeping $500 in gold coins. He hid the shotgun in a hollow tree, threw everything else away, and fled. In a manuscript written by stage driver McConnell about 20 years after the robbery, he claimed he fired all four shots at Boles. The first missed, but he thought the second or third shot hit Boles, and was sure the fourth did. Boles only had the one wound to his hand.
Investigation and arrest [ edit ]
When Boles was wounded and forced to flee, he left behind several personal items. These included his eyeglasses, some food, and a handkerchief with a laundry mark F.X.O.7. Wells Fargo Detective James B. Hume found these at the scene. Hume and detective Harry N. Morse contacted every laundry in San Francisco about the laundry mark. After visiting nearly 90 laundries, they finally traced it to Ferguson & Bigg's California Laundry on Bush Street and were able to learn that the handkerchief belonged to a man who lived in a modest boarding house.
The detectives learned that Boles called himself a mining engineer and made frequent "business trips" that coincided with the Wells Fargo robberies. After initially denying he was Black Bart, Boles eventually admitted he had robbed several Wells Fargo stages, though he confessed only to crimes committed before 1879. Boles apparently believed the statute of limitations had expired on those robberies. When booked, he gave his name as T. Z. Spalding, but police found a Bible, a gift from his wife, inscribed with his real name.
The police report said that Boles was "a person of great endurance. Exhibited genuine wit under most trying circumstances, and was extremely proper and polite in behavior. Eschews profanity."
Conviction and imprisonment [ edit ]
Wells Fargo only pressed charges on the final robbery. Boles was convicted and sentenced to six years in San Quentin Prison, but he was released after four years for good behavior, in January 1888. His health had clearly deteriorated due to his time in prison; he had visibly aged, his eyesight was failing, and he had gone deaf in one ear. Reporters swarmed around him when he was released and asked if he was going to rob any more stagecoaches. "No, gentlemen," he replied, smiling, "I'm through with crime."
Final days [ edit ]
Boles never returned to his wife after his release from prison, though he did write to her. In one of the letters he said he was tired of being shadowed by Wells Fargo, felt demoralized, and wanted to get away from everybody. In February 1888, Boles left the Nevada House and vanished. Hume said Wells Fargo tracked him to the Visalia House hotel in Visalia.[5] The hotel owner said a man answering the description of Boles had checked in and then disappeared. Black Bart was last seen on February 28, 1888.
Copycat robber [ edit ]
On November 14, 1888, another Wells Fargo stage was robbed by a masked highwayman. The lone bandit left a verse that read:[citation needed]
So here I've stood while wind and rain
Have set the trees a-sobbin,
And risked my life for that box,
That wasn't worth the robbin.
Detective Hume was called to examine the note. After comparing it with the handwriting of genuine Black Bart poetry, he declared the new holdup was the work of a copycat criminal.
Rumors and theories [ edit ]
There are rumors that Wells Fargo had paid off the aging bandit and sent him away to keep him from robbing their stages, though Wells Fargo denied this.
Some believe that Boles moved to New York City and lived quietly for the rest of his life, dying there in 1917, though this was never confirmed. Others believe the unlikely tale that the former poet bandit with failing eyesight had gone to the wilds of Montana or perhaps Nevada for another try at making a fortune.[citation needed] Johnny Thacker, a Wells Fargo detective who had participated in Boles's arrest, said in 1897 that he knew Boles to have gone to live in Japan.[6]
Verses [ edit ]
Boles, like many of his contemporaries, read dime novel–style serial adventure stories which appeared in local newspapers. In the early 1870s, the Sacramento Union ran a story called The Case of Summerfield by Caxton (a pseudonym of William Henry Rhodes). In the story, the villain dressed in black and had long unruly black hair, a large black beard, and wild grey eyes. The villain, named Black Bart, robbed Wells Fargo stagecoaches and brought great fear to those who were unlucky enough to cross him. Boles may have read the Sacramento Union story. He told a Wells Fargo detective that the name popped into his head when he was writing the first poem, and he used it.
Boles left only two authenticated verses. The first was at the scene of the August 3, 1877, holdup of a stage traveling from Point Arena to Duncans Mills, California:
I've labored long and hard for bread,
For honor, and for riches,
But on my corns too long you've tread,
You fine-haired sons of bitches. — Black Bart, 1877
The second verse was left at the site of his July 25, 1878, holdup of a stage traveling from Quincy to Oroville, California:
Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the coming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,
And everlasting sorrow.
Let come what will, I'll try it on,
My condition can't be worse;
And if there's money in that box
'Tis munny in my purse. — Black Bart
List of crimes [ edit ]
1870s [ edit ]
1880s [ edit ]
July 22, 1880: In Sonoma County, the stage from Point Arena to Duncans Mills (same location as on August 3, 1877; Wells Fargo added it to the list when he was captured).
September 1, 1880: In Shasta County, the stage from Weaverville to Redding. Near French Gulch, Bart said, "Hurry up the hounds; it gets lonesome in the mountains."
September 16, 1880: In Jackson County, Oregon, the stage from Roseburg to Yreka, California. This is the farthest north Bart is known to have robbed.
September 23, 1880: In Jackson County, Oregon, the stage from Yreka to Roseburg (President Rutherford B. Hayes and General William T. Sherman traveled on this stage three days later). On October 1, a person (Frank Fox?) who closely matched the description of Bart was arrested at Elk Creek Station and later released.
November 20, 1880: In Siskiyou County, the stage from Redding to Roseburg. This robbery failed because of the noise of an approaching stage or because of a hatchet in the driver's hand.
August 31, 1881: In Siskiyou County, the stage from Roseburg to Yreka. Mail sacks were cut in a "T" shape, another Bart trademark.
October 8, 1881: In Shasta County, the stage from Yreka to Redding. Stage driver Horace Williams asked Bart, "How much did you make?" Bart answered, "Not very much for the chances I take."
October 11, 1881: In Shasta County, the stage from Lakeview to Redding. Hume kept losing Bart's trail.
December 15, 1881: In Yuba County, near Marysville. Bart took mail bags and evaded capture due to his swiftness afoot.
December 27, 1881: In Nevada County, the stage from North San Juan to Smartsville. Nothing much was taken, but Bart was wrongly blamed for another stage robbery in Smartsville.
January 26, 1882: In Mendocino County, the stage from Ukiah to Cloverdale. Again the posse was on his tracks within the hour and again they lost him after Kelseyville.
June 14, 1882: In Mendocino County, the stage from Little Lake to Ukiah. Hiram Willits, Postmaster of Willitsville (present-day Willits, California), was on the stage.
July 13, 1882: In Plumas County, the stage from La Porte to Oroville. This stage was loaded with gold and George Hackett was armed. Bart lost his derby as he fled the scene when it was determined that the Wells Fargo agent in LaPorte had supplied hardware to bolt down the strongbox. His derby was traced to him eventually through the laundry mark. The same stage was again held-up in Forbestown and Hackett blasted the would-be robber into the bushes. This was mistakenly blamed on Bart.
September 17, 1882: In Shasta County, the stage from Yreka to Redding; a repeat of October 8, 1881 (same stage, place and driver), but Bart got only a few dollars.
November 24, 1882: In Sonoma County, the stage from Lakeport to Cloverdale; "The longest 30 miles in the World."
April 12, 1883: In Sonoma County, the stage from Lakeport to Cloverdale; another repeat of the last robbery.
June 23, 1883: In Amador County, the stage from Jackson to Ione.
November 3, 1883: In Calaveras County, the stage from Sonora to Milton.
Legacy [ edit ]
In geography [ edit ]
In some areas where Black Bart operated, notably Redwood Valley, California, there is a traditional annual Black Bart Parade featuring a man dressed as Black Bart playing him as a stereotypical Old West villain. Also in Redwood Valley, California, the road leading from California State Route 20 to Hell's Delight Canyon is called Black Bart Trail. There is a large rock at the side of Highway 101 on the Ridgewood Summit between Redwood Valley and Willits known by locals as "Black Bart Rock", though it is not the actual rock behind which Black Bart was reputed to have hidden while robbing stagecoaches (that rock having been lost in a series of highway improvements over the years).[7] In Duncans Mills, California, there is a plaque commemorating Black Bart and featuring his first poem. In Oroville, there is a road named Black Bart Road, as well as a stone mortar monument with a description of a robbery that took place at the scene.
In literature [ edit ]
Black Bart is a villain in The Stagecoach, an album in the Lucky Luke Belgian comic book series by René Goscinny and Morris. While the hero manages to shoot and disable Bart's shotgun, he is unable to catch him. The depiction of the outlaw is extremely accurate and includes a transcription of his poems. It also mentions that Black Bart was identified and caught on the basis of a laundry mark.
Black Bart's life and exploits and his pursuit and capture by Hume and Morse are the subject of the 2017 novel The Ballad of Black Bart by Loren D. Estleman.[8] The book was named Best Fiction in its "True West Best of the West 2018 Western Books" by True West Magazine.[9]
In film and television [ edit ]
Dan Duryea starred as Black Bart in a 1948 film produced by Universal Studios, Black Bart.[10]
In 1954, Arthur Space played Black Bart in the eponymous episode of Jim Davis's syndicated western television series, Stories of the Century.[11]
Don Beddoe played Black Bart in the 1954 episode "Black Bart The PO8" of the western anthology series Death Valley Days, hosted by Stanley Andrews. In the story line, Black Bart is a debonair poetry-writing former school teacher who turns to stagecoach robbery after his first holdup, a prank, pays handsomely. Wells, Fargo & Co. detectives track him down through a laundry mark. He was also pursued with a romantic interest by his landlady, Winona Webb (Helen Brown). He spent six years in the penitentiary, never to be heard from again.[12]
In music [ edit ]
He inspired on Blue Lotus album Across The Canyon.[13]
The song "Black Bart" by Danish rock band Volbeat is based on his robberies and features lines taken directly from his poems.
Further reading [ edit ]
Lawman: The Life and Times of Harry Morse (1998) by John Boessenecker
References [ edit ] |
A genus of flowering plants belonging to the spurge family
Not to be confused with Euphoria . For the family commonly called "euphorbias", see Euphorbiaceae
Euphorbia as a small tree: Euphorbia dendroides as a small tree:
Euphorbia is a very large and diverse genus of flowering plants, commonly called spurge, in the spurge family (Euphorbiaceae). "Euphorbia" is sometimes used in ordinary English to collectively refer to all members of Euphorbiaceae (in deference to the type genus), not just to members of the genus.[1] Some euphorbias are commercially widely available, such as poinsettias at Christmas. Some are commonly cultivated as ornamentals, or collected and highly valued for the aesthetic appearance of their unique floral structures, such as the crown of thorns plant (Euphorbia milii). Euphorbias from the deserts of Southern Africa and Madagascar have evolved physical characteristics and forms similar to cacti of North and South America, so they (along with various other kinds of plants) are often incorrectly referred to as cacti.[2] Some are used as ornamentals in landscaping, because of beautiful or striking overall forms, and drought and heat tolerance.[3][4]
Euphorbias range from tiny annual plants to large and long-lived trees.[4] The genus has over[3] or about 2,000 members,[5] making it one of the largest genera of flowering plants.[6][7] It also has one of the largest ranges of chromosome counts, along with Rumex and Senecio.[6] Euphorbia antiquorum is the type species for the genus Euphorbia.[8] It was first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1753 in Species Plantarum.
The plants share the feature of having a poisonous, milky, white, latex-like sap, and unusual and unique floral structures.[3] The genus may be described by properties of its members' gene sequences, or by the shape and form (morphology) of its heads of flowers. When viewed as a whole, the head of flowers looks like a single flower (a pseudanthium).[3] It has a unique kind of pseudanthium, called a cyathium, where each flower in the head is reduced to its barest essential part needed for sexual reproduction.[3] The individual flowers are either male or female, with the male flowers reduced to only the stamen, and the females to the pistil.[3] These flowers have no sepals, petals, or other parts that are typical of flowers in other kinds of plants.[3] Structures supporting the flower head and beneath have evolved to attract pollinators with nectar, and with shapes and colors that function the way petals and other flower parts do in other flowers. It is the only genus of plants that has all three kinds of photosynthesis, CAM, C3, and C4.[3]
The genus can be found all over the world.[3] The forms range from annual plants lying on the ground, to well-developed tall trees.[3] In deserts in Madagascar and southern Africa, convergent evolution has led to cactus-like forms where the plants occupy the same ecological niche as cacti do in deserts of North and South America.[3] The genus is primarily found in the tropical and subtropical regions of Africa and the Americas, but also in temperate zones worldwide.[citation needed] Succulent species originate mostly from Africa, the Americas, and Madagascar.[citation needed] A wide range[citation needed] of insular species can be found.[citation needed]
Misidentification as cacti [ edit ]
Among laypeople, Euphorbia species are among the plant taxa most commonly confused with cacti, especially the stem succulents.[9] Euphorbias secrete a sticky, milky-white fluid with latex, but cacti do not.[9] Individual flowers of euphorbias are usually tiny and nondescript (although structures around the individual flowers may not be), without petals and sepals, unlike cacti, which often have fantastically showy flowers.[9] Euphorbias from desert habitats with growth forms similar to cacti have thorns, which are different from the spines of cacti.[9]
Etymology [ edit ]
The common name "spurge" derives from the Middle English/Old French espurge ("to purge"), due to the use of the plant's sap as a purgative. The botanical name Euphorbia derives from Euphorbos, the Greek physician of king Juba II of Numidia (52–50 BC – 23 AD), who married the daughter of Anthony and Cleopatra.[10] Juba was a prolific writer on various subjects, including natural history. Euphorbos wrote that one of the cactus-like euphorbias (now called Euphorbia obtusifolia ssp. regis-jubae) was used as a powerful laxative.[10] In 12 BC, Juba named this plant after his physician Euphorbos, as Augustus Caesar had dedicated a statue to the brother of Euphorbos, Antonius Musa, who was the personal physician of Augustus.[10] In 1753, botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus assigned the name Euphorbia to the entire genus in the physician's honor.[11]
Description [ edit ]
The plants are annual, biennial or perennial herbs, woody shrubs, or trees with a caustic, poisonous milky latex. The roots are fine or thick and fleshy or tuberous. Many species are more or less succulent, thorny, or unarmed. The main stem and mostly also the side arms of the succulent species are thick and fleshy, 15–91 cm (6–36 in) tall. The deciduous[citation needed] leaves may be opposite, alternate, or in whorls. In succulent species, the leaves are mostly small and short-lived. The stipules are mostly small, partly transformed into spines or glands, or missing.
Inflorescence and fruit [ edit ]
Like all members of the family Euphorbiaceae, spurges have unisexual flowers.
In Euphorbia, flowers occur in a head, called the cyathium (plural cyathia). Each male or female flower in the cyathium head has only its essential sexual part, in males the stamen, and in females the pistil. The flowers do not have sepals, petals, or nectar to attract pollinators, although other nonflower parts of the plant have an appearance and nectar glands with similar roles. Euphorbias are the only plants known to have this kind of flower head.[12]
Nectar glands and nectar that attract pollinators are held in the involucre, a cuplike part below and supporting the cyathium head. (The "involucre" in the genus Euphorbia is not to be confused with the "involucre" in family Asteraceae members, which is a collection of bracts called (phyllaries), which surround and encase the unopened flower head, then support the receptacle under it after the flower head opens.)
The involucre is above and supported by bract-like modified leaf structures (usually in pairs)[citation needed] called cyathophylls', or cyathial leaves. The cyathophyll often has a superficial appearance of being petals of a flower.
Euphorbia flowers are tiny, and the variation attracting different pollinators (and the human eye), with different forms and colors occurs, in the cyathium, involucre, cyathophyll, or additional parts such as glands that attached to these.
The collection of many flowers may be shaped and arranged to appear collectively as a single individual flower, sometimes called a pseudanthium in the Asteraceae, and also in Euphorbia.
The majority of species are monoecious (bearing male and female flowers on the same plant), although some are dioecious with male and female flowers occurring on different plants. It is not unusual for the central cyathia of a cyme to be purely male, and for lateral cyathia to carry both sexes. Sometimes, young plants or those growing under unfavorable conditions are male only, and only produce female flowers in the cyathia with maturity or as growing conditions improve.[citation needed]
The female flowers reduced to a single pistil usually split into three parts, often with two stigmas at each tip.[citation needed] Male flowers often have anthers in twos.[citation needed] Nectar glands usually occur in fives,[13] may be as few as one,[13] and may be fused into a "U" shape.[12] The cyathophylls often occur in twos, are leaf-like, and may be showy and brightly coloured and attractive to pollinators, or be reduced to barely visible tiny scales.[citation needed]
The fruits are three- or rarely two-compartment capsules, sometimes fleshy, but almost always ripening to a woody container that then splits open, sometimes explosively. The seeds are four-angled, oval, or spherical, and some species have a caruncle.[citation needed]
Xerophytes and succulents [ edit ]
In the genus Euphorbia, succulence in the species has often evolved divergently and to differing degrees. Sometimes, it is difficult to decide, and is a question of interpretation, whether or not a species is really succulent or "only" xerophytic. In some cases, especially with geophytes, plants closely related to the succulents are normal herbs. About 850 species are succulent in the strictest sense. If one includes slightly succulent and xerophytic species, this figure rises to about 1000, representing about 45% of all Euphorbia species.
Irritants [ edit ]
The milky sap of spurges (called "latex") evolved as a deterrent to herbivores. It is white, and transparent when dry, except in E. abdelkuri, where it is yellow. The pressurized sap seeps from the slightest wound and congeals after a few minutes in air. The skin-irritating and caustic effects are largely caused by varying amounts of diterpenes. Triterpenes such as betulin and corresponding esters are other major components of the latex.[14] In contact with mucous membranes (eyes, nose, mouth), the latex can produce extremely painful inflammation. Therefore, spurges should be handled with caution and kept away from children and pets. Latex on skin should be washed off immediately and thoroughly. Congealed latex is insoluble in water, but can be removed with an emulsifier such as milk or soap. A physician should be consulted if inflammation occurs, as severe eye damage including permanent blindness may result from exposure to the sap.[15] When large succulent spurges in a greenhouse are cut, vapours can cause irritation to the eyes and throat several metres away. Precautions, including sufficient ventilation, are required.
Uses [ edit ]
Detail of poinsettia flowers and immature fruits
Euphorbia hybrid An oldhybrid
Euphorbia obesa
Several spurges are grown as garden plants, among them poinsettia (E. pulcherrima) and the succulent E. trigona. E. pekinensis (Chinese: 大戟; pinyin: dàjǐ) is used in traditional Chinese medicine, where it is regarded as one of the 50 fundamental herbs. Several Euphorbia species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), like the spurge hawk-moths (Hyles euphorbiae and Hyles tithymali), as well as the giant leopard moth.
Ingenol mebutate, a drug used to treat actinic keratosis, is a diterpenoid found in Euphorbia peplus.
Euphorbias are often used as hedging plants in many parts of Africa.[16]
Systematics and taxonomy [ edit ]
Euphorbia corresponds to what was its own former subtribe, the Euphorbiinae.[citation needed] It has over 2000 species.[3] Morphological description using the presence of a cyathium (see section above) is consistent with nuclear and chloroplast DNA sequence data in testing of about 10% of its members. This testing supports inclusion of formerly other genera as being best placed in this single genus, including Chamaesyce, Monadenium, Pedilanthus, and poinsettia (E. pulcherrima).
Genetic tests have shown that similar flower head structures or forms within the genus, might not mean close ancestry within the genus. The genetic data show that within the genus, convergent evolution of inflorescence structures may be from ancestral subunits that are not related. So using morphology within the genus becomes problematic for further subgeneric grouping. As stated on the Euphorbia Planetary Biodiversity Inventory project webpage:[3]
Previous morphologically based delimitations of subgenera or sections within the genus should not be taken at face value. The genus is in fact rife with striking examples of morphological convergence in cyathial and vegetative features, which justifies a global approach to studying the genus to obtain a proper phylogenetic understanding of the whole group.... The bottom line is that a number of clades have been placed inside or outside of Euphorbia at different times... few of the subgeneric circumscriptions hold up under DNA sequence analysis.
According to a 2002 publication on studies of DNA sequence data,[17][18][19] most of the smaller "satellite genera" around the huge genus Euphorbia nest deep within the latter. Consequently, these taxa, namely the never generally accepted genus Chamaesyce, as well as the smaller genera Cubanthus,[20] Elaeophorbia, Endadenium, Monadenium, Synadenium, and Pedilanthus were transferred to Euphorbia. The entire subtribe Euphorbiinae now consists solely of the genus Euphorbia.
Selected species [ edit ]
See List of Euphorbia species for complete list.
Hybrids [ edit ]
Euphorbia has been extensively hybridised for garden use, with many cultivars available commercially. Moreover, some hybrid plants have been found growing in the wild, for instance E. × martini Rouy,[23] a cross of E. amygdaloides × E. characias subsp. characias, found in southern France.
Subgenera [ edit ]
Simplified diagram of relations in subtribe Euphorbiinae
The genus Euphorbia is one of the largest and most complex genera of flowering plants, and several botanists have made unsuccessful attempts to subdivide the genus into numerous smaller genera. According to the recent phylogenetic studies,[17][18][19] Euphorbia can be divided into four subgenera, each containing several not yet sufficiently studied sections and groups. Of these, Esula is the most basal. Chamaesyce and Euphorbia are probably sister taxa, but very closely related to Rhizanthium. Extensive xeromorph adaptations in all probability evolved several times; it is not known if the common ancestor of the cactus-like Rhizanthium and Euphorbia lineages was xeromorphic—in which case a more normal morphology would have re-evolved namely in Chamaesyce—or whether extensive xeromorphism is entirely polyphyletic even to the level of the subgenera.
Esula
Rhizanthium
Chamaesyce
Euphorbia
References [ edit ] |
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Police using riot batons have clashed with refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, beating one unconscious and leaving several others injured.
A group of around 300 refugees protested yesterday morning against what they say is a failure by local authorities to process them quickly enough towards mainland Europe.
The demonstration largely involved Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis, who told reporters they had received no help from the Greek government and were running out of money.
One refugee was taken away in an ambulance after the clashes, which were the third such incident in as many days.
The Greek islands are at the centre of the growing refugee crisis, as one of the first landing points for boats sailing over from Turkey.
On Saturday, a newborn baby died as his parents arrived in a boat on the shores of the island of Agathonisi. The boy was taken to a hospital on the nearby island of Samos, where he was pronounced dead.
More than 13,000 people have been moved to the Greek mainland from the islands since last Monday, the country's coastguard said, including a ferry of 2,500 on Saturday alone.
In Lesbos, the mayor of the island's main town demanded the government to more to address the situation.
“An island of 85,000 people has taken on the burden of a huge humanitarian crisis,” Spyros Galinos said. “We are calling the people of Lesbos not to participate in the upcoming polls and we are clearly stating our intention not to set up ballot boxes, if there is no immediate action.” |
Turkey intends to open an embassy in East Jerusalem, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday, days after leading calls at a summit of Muslim leaders for the world to recognize it as the capital of Palestine.
It was not clear how Turkey would carry out the move, since Israel controls all of Jerusalem and calls the city its indivisible capital.
But Palestinians want the capital of the state they seek to be in East Jerusalem, which Israel took in the 1967 war and later annexed in a move not recognized internationally.
The Muslim nation summit was a response to President Trump’s Dec. 6 announcement that he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. That broke with decades of American policy and with the international consensus that the city’s status must be left to Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. |
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