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TBILISI, DFWatch–Georgia’s ruling coalition agrees to some changes in the election system, but won’t scrap the so-called majoritarian system, a demand by NGOs and opposition parties. By postponing the removal of the ‘majoritarian‘ system, the coalition heeded the advice of former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili. The coalition’s spokespersons say that the 2016 election will be held with a mixed proportional-majoritarian system, as in the last election. The coalition plans to increase the minimum threshold for majoritarians to 50 percent and proposes to redraw the borders of majoritarian districts. Davit Usupashvili, Speaker of Parliament, said after the coalition leaders’ meeting with Ivanishvili that there is no need to carry out radical changes before the upcoming parliamentary election. But other political parties disagree; they all think the system needs to be changed. Under today’s law, parliament should consist of 77 members elected through the proportional system and 73 through the majoritarian, a first-past-the-post system with the added criteria that a candidate must receive at least 30% of votes to win. Georgia’s election system has been criticized both domestically and abroad. Since the 1990s, international organizations have recommended amending it and removing the majoritarian system. The reason is that a first-past-the-post system doesn’t guarantee the principle of the weight of votes, as the number of voters differ between districts from where majoritarians are elected. For example, there are more than 100,000 voters in Kutaisi but only 1,500 voters in Kazbegi. The recommendation Georgia has received from abroad is to have an equal number of voters in each majoritarian district. While the government believes it is important to keep the majoritarian system, the opposition and NGOs claim the government needs such a system because it is easier to manipulate. When they were in opposition, the politicians now in government criticized the government for keeping the majoritarian system, which they then regarded as unfair. It didn’t contribute to the development of the legislative assembly and the development of the political parties in the country, they argued. They also accused Saakashvili of wanting this system in order to maintain power Getting rid of the majoritarian election system was one of the election promises made by the Georgian Dream coalition in the 2012 election, but they did not follow through on their promise after coming to power. And vice versa, the National Movement refused to scrap the majoritarian system while that party was power, but now its leaders demand changes, together with other parties and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). A few days ago, President Giorgi Margvelashvili joined the opposition and NGOs in supporting a reform of the electoral system. The former speaker of parliament signed a memorandum about abolishing the majoritarian system, but now he shares position of the GD coalition. The president’s parliamentary secretary Giorgi Kverenchkhiladze told DFWatch that the president welcomes the coalition’s readiness to change the election system but it is unclear to him why the change must be postponed five years, as there is full support across the political spectrum for a reform right now. Kverenchkhiladze referred to Margvelashvili’s annual state of the nation speech, in which he said that the majoritarian system has to be replaced by a more fair system. “The president remains committed to his position,” he said.
"The American people should know that anti-choice leaders like Janet Porter will support anyone regardless of what they have done to women or others in their quest to outlaw abortion." Rusty Thomas, director of the extremist anti-choice group Operation Save America, told the attendees that he had appeared to support Moore “without hesitation” when contacted about it. Drew Angerer/Getty Images A who’s who of activists known for their extreme views on abortion held a press conference Thursday in defense of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore amid allegations that Moore abused and harassed teenage girls. Janet Porter, the president of anti-choice group Faith2Action behind the “heartbeat” legislation at the state and federal level that promises to outlaw legal abortion, led the event. Addressing the crowd, she noted that the Moore campaign did not organize the press conference and the group of speakers “had actually called the campaign” and had asked Moore to come. Porter, who is considered too extreme for Christian talk radio, claimed that the allegations were part of a “firing squad to assassinate his character,” referring to the Republican candidate. “If the left can try to assassinate the character of Judge Roy Moore, then none of us is safe,” she said. Rusty Thomas, director of the radical anti-choice group Operation Save America, told the attendees that he had appeared in order to support Moore “without hesitation” when contacted about it. “You need to know judge, you do not stand alone,” Thomas said. The anti-choice activist had already donated to Moore’s campaign. Flip Benham, who formerly directed Operation Save America, appeared at the event in defense of Moore. He criticized the United States for allowing same-sex marriage and legal abortion. Benham noted that if he “had to go back 40 years and look back at” his past, he too “would be in serious trouble.” Get the facts, direct to your inbox. Subscribe to our daily or weekly digest. SUBSCRIBE “When we get close to overturning Roe v. Wade, the pro-abortion side comes out with every trick in the book, every dirty trick in the book, every dirty tactic they can think of,” said Andy Schlafly, an attorney for Phyllis Schlafly Eagles and the son of notorious Equal Rights Amendment opponent Phyllis Schlafly. He added that “we need someone in the Senate” like Moore for his “strength of character.” Porter released a statement prior to the press conference pointing to Moore’s hardline opposition to abortion rights as a reason for her support of the Senate candidate. “I trust Judge Roy Moore,” she said. “Judge Moore has been a personal friend and a friend of life for decades,” she continued, criticizing Moore’s opponent, Democrat Doug Jones, for his pro-choice views. Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, has monitored Porter’s work at the state and federal level. The Faith2Action leader’s latest move didn’t come as a surprise. “The American people should know that anti-choice leaders like Janet Porter will support anyone regardless of what they have done to women or others in their quest to outlaw abortion,” Copeland told Rewire. Porter orchestrated an Ohio GOP attempt to end legal abortion as early as six weeks into a pregnancy—before many people know they’re pregnant. The “moderate” Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) vetoed the total abortion ban in favor of an equally unconstitutional 20-week ban, but Republican legislators have resurrected it as a pending bill in the current legislative session. Porter subsequently convinced Rep. Steve King (R-IA), an unabashed white nationalist, to debut the federal version in Congress while both attended the funeral of Phyllis Schlafly, as People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch first reported. Porter’s leadership of the Moore press conference aligns with her increasingly prominent role on the national stage. Porter ran two Capitol Hill press conferences for King, the most recent after King’s contentious hearing on the total abortion ban. And she partnered with Tom DeLay, the former U.S. House of Representatives majority leader convicted on campaign finance violations that were later overturned on appeal, to lobby Vice President Mike Pence and his staff. Porter and activists who spoke at the event are among many anti-choice leaders who have steadfastly supported Moore despite the allegations against him. Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, told Rewire last week that allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore were “far-left baloney” and “absolutely ridonkulous.” Moore, who has denied the allegations that he abused minors, said at the conference that it was an “honor” to have the support of those who spoke on his behalf.
Baskets have never been so controversial. Hillary Clinton’s now-infamous “baskets of deplorables” jibe ignited a fierce political spat online: Trump got angry, Clinton somewhat apologized, and then Trump used an Obama quote to attempt a checkmate. It all started when Clinton, speaking at a LGBT fundraiser in New York, described half of Trump’s supporters as comprising “a basket of deplorables.” “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables … the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it,” Clinton said, even though admitting she was being “grossly generalistic.” She went on to say that these people “are not America.” Hillary Clinton just insulted millions of hard-working Americans simply because they don't want to vote for her.https://t.co/utnuAkvdcJ — Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) 10 сентября 2016 г. .@HillaryClinton Attacking your opponent is one thing. Attacking the American ppl is another. We're not deplorables, we just don't like U — Wayne Dupree (@WayneDupreeShow) September 10, 2016 Trump immediately jumped on the comment calling it “SO INSULTING” and claimed it would cost Hillary dearly at the polls. Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people. I think it will cost her at the Polls! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 10 сентября 2016 г. He quickly changed his tactics to try and play to Clinton’s supporters claiming he would respect them regardless of whether they vote for him or not. While Hillary said horrible things about my supporters, and while many of her supporters will never vote for me, I still respect them all! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 10 сентября 2016 г. Donald Trump Jr. jumped in to remind the Clintons that they have a “deplorable” political record of their own. Dear Clintons, You know what's deplorable? Being Impeached!!!#BasketOfDeplorables — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) 10 сентября 2016 г. Even the graves of dead veterans saw a piece of the action, a picture of which Trump Jr. also retweeted. Not to be outdone Eric Trump joined in with this zinger. Unfortunately, he used an old rally photo and incorrectly attributed it to Florida, which the unforgiving internet soon pointed out. Clinton issued an apparent apology, claiming to regret the comment but adding that she “won't stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign.” Trump then showed a strong hand when he retweeted a 2012 tweet from President Obama reading “RT if you agree: We need a President who is fighting for all Americans, not one who writes off nearly half the country.” Originally aimed at Mitt Romney, the tweet’s context is a blow to Clinton who is probably still searching through Trump’s backlog for something of similar context. RT if you agree: We need a President who is fighting for all Americans, not one who writes off nearly half the country. — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) 18 сентября 2012 г. #BasketofDeplorables soon trended online, with Twitter users on both sides of the fence getting in on the action. Having trouble separating the #BasketOfDeplorables from some of the tweets I see in my mentions. pic.twitter.com/13cxqhVVaV — Taniel (@Taniel) September 10, 2016 Clinton should talk about how Wall Street-funded neoliberals sold out working people before labeling Americans a #BasketOfDeplorables. — Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) 10 сентября 2016 г. @realDonaldTrump oh no, an insult?! I can't think of any other presidential candidates who insult people... — Rory Klein (@rory_klein) September 10, 2016 Trump supporters then created the hashtag #DeplorablesForTrump to show their support for the candidate and outrage at Clinton. One tweet read: “#Hillary is truly anti-American. She hates us. For once she told the truth”.
- Will Ospreay has officially signed a contract with New Japan Pro Wrestling. He first appeared for the company at NJPW Invasion Attack, where he lost an IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship match to KUSHIDA. - Dave Meltzer noted on this week's Wrestling Observer Radio that there have been talks of possibly recasting Prince Puma on Lucha Underground in the event that Ricochet leaves the company. It's also been said that Ricochet was made a large offer to remain there. - Earlier this week, legendary wrestling venue Korakuen Hall in Japan displayed a shrine to the late Hayabusa. Hayabusa passed away in March at the age of 47. You can check out a photo of the shrine below. - New Japan Pro Wrestling will not air on AXS TV tonight. The show has been pre-empted for AXS' coverage of the NOLA Jazz Festival. Source: F4WOnline
It’s a little before six in the morning and quite cold on the beach. It’s low tide, and the sand is wet and hard-packed and stony. This early on a Sunday, there are often only two people here, on the California coast just north of San Diego. Patricia Churchland is throwing a rubber ball into the ocean for her two dogs (Fergus and Maxwell, golden retrievers) to fetch. Her husband, Paul Churchland, is standing next to her. They are both wearing heavy sweaters. They are in their early sixties. They are tall—she is five feet eight, he is six feet five. They come here every Sunday at dawn. Pat is constantly in motion, throwing the ball, stepping backward, rubbing her hands together, walking forward in a vigorous, twitchy way. She has pale eyes, a sharp chin, and the crisp, alert look of someone who likes being outside in the cold. (Even when it is sunny, she looks as though she were enjoying a bracing wind.) She seems younger than she is: she has the anxious vitality of a person driven to prove herself—the first to jump off a bridge into freezing water. Paul stands heavily, his hands in his pockets. He is still. He nudges at a stone with his foot. He looks up and smiles at his wife’s back. He has a thick beard. He looks like the sort of person who finds it soothing to chop his own wood (and in fact he is that sort of person). Paul and Pat met when she was nineteen and he was twenty, and they have been married for almost forty years. They are both Canadian; she grew up on a farm in the Okanagan Valley, he, in Vancouver. They have two children and four grandchildren. They live in Solana Beach, in a nineteen-sixties house with a small pool and a hot tub and an herb garden. Each summer, they migrate north to a tiny island off the Vancouver coast. Both are professors of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. They have been talking about philosophy together since they met, which is to say more or less since either of them encountered the subject. They test ideas on each other; they criticize each other’s work. At this point, they have shaped each other so profoundly and their ideas are so intertwined that it is impossible, even for them, to say where one ends and the other begins. Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person. Some of their theories are quite radical, and at the start of their careers the Churchlands were not always taken seriously: sometimes their ideas were thought silly, sometimes repugnant, verging on immoral. In those days, they formed a habit of thinking of themselves as isolates aligned against a hostile world, and although they are now both well established in their field, the habit lingers. “For the first twenty-five years of our career, Pat and I wrote only one paper together,” Paul says, “partly because we wanted to avoid—” “We wrote more than that,” Pat says. “Together? I thought ‘Stalking the Wild Epistemic Engine’ was the first.” “There was ‘Functionalism, Intentionality, and Whatnot.’ ” “O.K., so there’s two. In the early stages, when Pat wrote her papers she said, ‘Paul, you really had a lot of input into this, should we put your name on it?’ I’d say, ‘No, I don’t want people saying Pat’s sailing on Paul’s coattails.’ ” The guiding obsession of their professional lives is an ancient philosophical puzzle, the mind-body problem: the problem of how to understand the relationship between conscious experience and the brain. Are they different stuffs: the mind a kind of spirit, the brain, flesh? Or are they the same stuff, their seeming difference just a peculiarly intractable illusion? And if they are the same stuff, if the mind is the brain, how can we comprehend that fact? What can it possibly mean to say that my experience of seeing blue is the same thing as a clump of tissue and membrane and salty liquid? Think of some evanescent emotion—apprehension mixed with conceit, say. Then think, That feeling and that mass of wet tissue—same thing. Or think of the way a door shutting sounds to you, which is private, inaccessible to anyone else, and couldn’t exist without you conscious and listening; that and the firing of cells in your brain, which any neuroscientist can readily detect without your coöperation—same thing. The terms don’t match, they don’t make sense together, any more than it makes sense to ask how many words you can fit in a truck. That is the problem. In the past, it seemed obvious that mind and matter were not the same stuff; the only question was whether they were connected. Everyone was a dualist. In the seventeenth century, Leibniz thought that mind and body only appeared to interact because God had established a perfectly synchronized harmony between them (an ingenious theory impossible to refute). Descartes believed that the mind was composed of a strange substance that was not physical but that interacted with the material of the brain by means of the pineal gland. Nowadays, few people doubt that the mind somehow is the brain, but although that might seem like the end of the matter, all that’s necessary to be clear on the subject, it is not. It is not enough to imagine that the brain houses the mind (in some obscure cavity, perhaps tiny intracellular pockets), or gives rise to the mind (the way a television produces an image), or generates the mind (a generator producing current): to imagine any of those things is to retain the idea that the mind and the brain are distinct from each other. The problem is not one of knowledge; the problem is our obdurate, antediluvian minds that cannot grasp what we believe to be true. Some philosophers think that we will never solve this problem—that our two thousand years of trying and failing indicate that it’s likely we are no more capable of doing so than a goat can do algebra. Others believe that someday a conceptual revolution will take place, on a par with those of Copernicus and Darwin, and then all at once it will be clear how matter and mind, brain and consciousness, are one thing. Paul and Pat Churchland believe that the mind-body problem will be solved not by philosophers but by neuroscientists, and that our present knowledge is so paltry that we would not understand the solution even if it were suddenly to present itself. “Suppose you’re a medieval physicist wondering about the burning of wood,” Pat likes to say in her classes. “You’re Albertus Magnus, let’s say. One night, a Martian comes down and whispers, ‘Hey, Albertus, the burning of wood is really rapid oxidation!’ What could he do? He knows no structural chemistry, he doesn’t know what oxygen is, he doesn’t know what an element is—he couldn’t make any sense of it. And if some fine night that same omniscient Martian came down and said, ‘Hey, Pat, consciousness is really blesjeakahgjfdl!’ I would be similarly confused, because neuroscience is just not far enough along.” Philosophers have always thought about what it means to be made of flesh, but the introduction into the discipline of a wet, messy, complex, and redundant collection of neuronal connections is relatively new. Nowadays, it seems obvious to many philosophers that if they are interested in the mind they should pay attention to neuroscience, but this was not at all obvious when Pat and Paul were starting out, and that it is so now is in some measure due to them. The Churchlands like to try, as far as possible, not only to believe that they themselves are thoroughly physical creatures but also to feel it—to experience their thoughts as bodily sensations. They have never thought it a diminishment of humanness to think of their consciousness as flesh—quite the opposite. And they are monists in life as they are in philosophy: they wonder what sort of organism their marriage is, its body and its mental life, beginning when they were unformed and very young—all those years of sharing the same ideas and the same dinners. When they met, Paul and Pat were quite different, from each other and from what they are now: he knew about astronomy and electromagnetic theory, she about biology and novels. But as time went on they taught each other what they knew, and the things they didn’t share fell away. Their family unity was such that their two children—now in their thirties—grew up, professionally speaking, almost identical: both obtained Ph.D.s in neuroscience and now study monkeys. Paul sometimes thinks of Pat and himself as two hemispheres of the same brain—differentiated in certain functions but bound together by tissue and neuronal pathways worn in unique directions by shared incidents and habit. This is not a fantasy of transparency between them: even one’s own mind is not transparent to oneself, Paul believes, so to imagine his wife’s brain joined to his is merely to exaggerate what is actually the case—two organisms evolving into one in a shared shell. “It’s funny the way your life is your life and you don’t know any other life,” Pat says. “I don’t know what it would have been like if I’d been married to—” “A patent lawyer?” “Something like that. It’s hard for me to imagine.” “I think the two of us have been, jointly, several orders of magnitude more successful than at least I would have been on my own,” Paul says. “I’d like to understand that better than I do; I presume it’s got something to do with the brain. You could say, well, we exchanged a lot of oxytocin, but that’s probably one per cent of the story.” (Oxytocin is a peptide produced in the body during orgasm and breast-feeding; when it is sprayed into the noses of experimental subjects, they become more trusting and coöperative.) “To what extent has Pat shaped my conceptual framework and hence my perceptions of the world, and to what extent have I done that for her? I think the answer is, an enormous extent. But I don’t know how to unwind it.” “We’ve been married thirty-six years, and I guess we’ve known each other for forty-two or something like that. That’s a long time.” “Thirty-seven years. Weren’t we married in ’69? Almost thirty-eight.” “That is a long time.” The tide is coming in. A few more people have arrived at the beach—there are now a couple of cars parked next to the Churchlands’ white Toyota Sequoia. Pat and Paul walk up toward the road. The dogs come running out of the sea, wet and barking. Pat Churchland grew up in rural British Columbia. Her parents owned an orchard—in the summer the Okanagan Valley is hot enough for peaches. “We used to regale people with stories of life on the farm because they thought it was from the nineteenth century,” Pat says. “You had chickens, you had a cow,” Paul says. “We didn’t have an indoor toilet until I was seven. We had a two-holer, and people actually did sit in the loo together. I know it seems hilarious now.” When Pat was a teen-ager, she worked in a fruit-packing plant. Neither of her parents was formally educated past the sixth grade. In her understanding of herself, this kind of childhood is very important. To her, growing up on a farm in the middle of nowhere means that you have no patience for verbiage, you are interested only in whether a thing works or not. And if it doesn’t work you had better figure out how to fix it yourself, because no one is going to do it for you. When Pat went to college, she decided that she wanted to learn about the mind: what is intelligence, what it is to reason, what it is to have emotions. She found that these questions were not being addressed in the first place she looked, psychology—many psychologists then were behaviorists—but they were discussed somewhat in philosophy, so she started taking philosophy courses. She met Paul in a Plato class, her sophomore year. She soon discovered that the sort of philosophy she was being taught was not what she was looking for. At the time, in the nineteen-sixties, Anglo-American philosophy was preoccupied with language—many philosophers felt that their task was to untangle the confusions and incoherence in the way people spoke, in the belief that disagreements were often misunderstandings, and that if our concepts were better sorted out then our thinking would also be clearer. This held no great appeal for Pat, but one thing led to another, and she found herself in philosophy graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. The department was strong in philosophy of science, and to her relief Pat found people there who agreed that ordinary language philosophy was a bit sterile. At Pittsburgh, she read W. V. O. Quine’s book “Word and Object,” which had been published a few years earlier, and she learned, to her delight, that it was possible to question the distinction between empirical and conceptual truth: not only could philosophy concern itself with science; it could even be a kind of science. After a year, she moved to Oxford to do a B.Phil. Philosophy at Oxford at the time was very far from Pittsburgh—quite conservative, not at all empirically oriented. Nobody seemed to be interested in what she was interested in, and when she tried to do what she was supposed to she was bad at it. It was all very discouraging. She was beginning to feel that philosophy was just a lot of blather. “The idea seemed to be that, if you analyzed your concepts, somehow that led you to the truth of the nature of things,” she says. “It was just garbage.” She was about to move back to Canada and do something else entirely, maybe go into business, but meanwhile Paul Churchland had broken up with the girlfriend he’d had when they were undergraduates and had determined to pursue her. He came over to Oxford for the summer, and they rented a little house together on Iffley Road. Paul had started thinking about how you might use philosophy of science to think about the mind, and he wooed Pat with his theories. At Pittsburgh, where he had also gone for graduate school, he had learned to be suspicious of the intuitively plausible idea that you could see the world directly and form theories about it afterward—that you could rely on your basic perceptions (seeing, hearing, touching) being as straightforwardly physical and free from bias as they appeared to be. He concluded that we cannot help perceiving the world through the medium of our ideas about it. It’s not just a matter of what we pay attention to—a farmer’s interest might be aroused by different things in a landscape than a poet’s—but of what we actually see. In the course of that summer, Pat came to look at philosophy quite differently. “I stayed in the field because of Paul,” she says. “Gradually, I could see all kinds of things to do, and I could see what counted as progress.” Philosophy could actually change your experience of the world, she realized. And if it could change your experience of the world then it had the potential to do important work, as important as that of science, because coming to see something in a wholly different way was like discovering a new thing. Paul didn’t grow up on a farm, but he was raised in a family with a practical bent: his father started a boat-works company in Vancouver, then taught science in a local high school. His mother took in sewing. “I guess I have long known that there was only the brain,” Pat says. “When you were six years old?” Paul says. “Well, no, of course not.” “I remember deciding at about age eleven or twelve, after a discussion with my friends about the universe and did God exist and was there a soul and so forth,” Paul says. “I’d been skeptical about God. My parents weren’t religious. I would ask myself, What do you think thinking is? And I’d say, I guess it’s just electricity.” Paul as a boy was obsessed with science fiction, particularly books by Robert Heinlein. He vividly remembers “Orphans of the Sky,” the story of a young man named Hugh Hoyland. Hugh lives in a world called the Ship, which is run by scientists—all except for the upper decks, where it is dangerous to venture because of the mutants, or “muties,” who live there. One day, Hugh is captured by an intelligent two-headed mutie named Joe-Jim, who takes him up to the control room of the Ship and shows him the sky and the stars. All at once, Hugh realizes that what he had been told were inscrutable religious metaphors were in fact true: the Ship is not the whole universe after all but merely a thing inside it, and it is actually making some sort of journey. He tries to explain this to the scientists, but they tell him he is talking nonsense. How could the Ship move when the Ship is all there is? “Orphans of the Sky” is a classic philosophical fable, a variant of Plato’s story about prisoners in a cave who mistake shadows cast on the wall for reality. Its moral is not very useful for day-to-day work, in philosophy or anything else—what are you supposed to do with it?—but it has retained a hold on Paul’s imagination: he always remembers that, however certain he may be about something, however airtight an argument appears or however fundamental an intuition, there is always a chance that both are completely wrong, and that reality lies in some other place that he hasn’t looked because he doesn’t know it’s there. Paul’s father had a woodworking and metal shop in the basement, and Paul was always building things. He planned eventually to build flying saucers, and decided that he was going to be an aerodynamical engineer. He stuck with this plan when he got to college, taking courses in math and physics. But the summer after his first year he found himself hanging around with a group of friends who could make sophisticated arguments about the existence of God. Paul was at a disadvantage not knowing what the ontological argument was, and he determined to take some philosophy classes when he went back to school. Although he was trained, as Pat was, in ordinary language philosophy, by the time he graduated he also was beginning to feel that that sort of philosophy was not for him. When he got to Pittsburgh, Wilfrid Sellars became his dissertation adviser. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, a few years before Paul became his student, Sellars had proposed that the sort of basic psychological understanding that we take for granted as virtually instinctive—if someone is hungry, he will try to find something to eat; if he believes a situation to be dangerous, he will try to get away—was not. Concepts like “beliefs” and “desires” do not come to us naturally; they have to be learned. Nor were they simply descriptive: we do not see beliefs, after all—we conjecture that they are there based on how a person is behaving. No, this kind of ordinary psychological understanding was something like a theory, a more or less coherent collection of assumptions and hypotheses, built up over time, that we used to explain and predict other people’s behavior. In writing his dissertation, Paul started with Sellars’s idea that ordinary or “folk” psychology was a theory and took it a step further. If folk psychology was a theory, Paul reasoned, it could turn out to be wrong. It had happened many times, after all, that understandings that felt as fundamental and unshakable as instincts turned out to be wrong. Our folk geology—the evidence of our eyes and common sense—told us that the earth was flat, and while it still might look that way we accepted that it was an illusion. Our folk biology told us that if we slammed a hand in a door we would feel pain at the point of contact—and, while we still felt pain in the hand, we now knew that the pain signal had to travel away from the hand to the brain before we experienced it. Folk psychology, too, had suffered corrections; it was now widely agreed, for instance, that we might have repressed motives and memories that we did not, for the moment, perceive. Surely it was likely that, with progress in neuroscience, many more counterintuitive results would come to light. How probable was it, after all, that, in probing the brain, scientists would come across little clusters of “belief” neurons? It wasn’t that beliefs didn’t exist; it was just that it seemed highly improbable that the first speakers of the English language, many hundreds of years ago, should miraculously have chanced upon the categories that, as the saying goes, carved nature at its joints. It might turn out, for instance, that it would make more sense, brain-wise, to group “beliefs about cheese” with “fear of cheese” and “craving for dairy” rather than with “beliefs about life after death.” Mental life was something we knew very little about, and when something was imperfectly understood it was quite likely that we would define its structure imperfectly, too. It was only rarely that, in science, you started with a perfectly delimited thing and set out to investigate it; more often, your definition of what it was that you were looking at would change as you discovered more about it. (“Consider the medieval physicists who wondered what fire could be,” Pat says. “They identified a range of things that they thought were instances of fire: burning wood, the sun, comets, lightning, fireflies, northern lights. They couldn’t give a definition, but they could give examples that they agreed upon. Jump now to the twentieth century. The category of fire, as defined by what seemed to be intuitively obvious members of the category, has become completely unstuck. Turns out that burning wood is actually oxidation; what happens on the sun has nothing to do with that, it’s nuclear fusion; lightning is thermal emission; fireflies are biophosphorescence; northern lights are spectral emission.”) Why, Paul reasoned, should we assume that our everyday psychological notions are any more accurate than our uninformed notions about the world? Why should we suppose introspection to be infallible when our perception is so clearly fallible in every other way? Paul speculated that it might, someday, turn out that a materialist science, mapping the structure and functions of the brain, would eliminate much of folk psychology altogether. Some folk categories would probably survive—visual perception was a likely candidate, he thought. Attention, perhaps. Representation. But not much more than that. Pat and Paul married in 1969 and found jobs together at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg. “Winnipeg was basically like Cleveland in the fifties,” Pat says. “Very innocent, very free. The kids look back on those years in Winnipeg as being . . .” “A great bonus?” “Yes. Despite the weather. You’d just go out on your front steps and holler when it was dinnertime. You’d have no idea where they were.” “There wasn’t much traffic. The kids were like a flock of pigeons that flew back and forth from one lawn to another.” The University of Manitoba was not the sort of place to keep close track of a person’s publications, and, for the first time, Pat and Paul felt that they could pursue whatever they liked. Pat decided that if she was ever going to really get at the questions she was interested in she had to know more about the brain, so she presented herself to the medical school and asked permission to study neuroanatomy and neurophysiology with the medical students. While she was at Oxford, she had started dipping into science magazines, and had read about some astonishing experiments that had been performed in California on patients whose corpus callosum—the nerve tissue connecting the two cerebral hemispheres—had been severed, producing a “split brain.” This operation had been performed for some years, as a last-resort means of halting epileptic seizures, but, oddly, it had had no noticeable mental side effects. Then someone had come up with the idea of stimulating the hemispheres independently, and it had been discovered that the severing did indeed produce some rather strange results. If the word “hat,” for instance, was shown only to the right side of the visual field (controlled by the verbally oriented left hemisphere), the patient had no trouble saying what it was, but if it was shown to the left (controlled by the almost nonverbal right hemisphere), he could not—indeed, he would claim not to have seen a word at all—but he could select a hat from a group of objects with his left hand. “It was amazing that you could physically separate the hemispheres and in some sense or other you were also separating consciousness,” Pat says. “In one way, it shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose, if you think that the mind is the brain. On the other hand, the fact that you can separate a sense of self—that was tremendously important. People had done split brains before, but they didn’t notice anything. They thought, What’s this bunch of tissue doing here—holding the hemispheres together? But you don’t need that, because they’re not going to go anywhere, so what is it? You had to really know the physiology and the anatomy in order to ask the questions in the right way.” “There were cases when a split-brain patient would be reading a newspaper, and, since it’s only the left brain that processes language, the right brain gets bored as hell, and since the right brain controls the left arm the person would find that his left hand would suddenly grab the newspaper and throw it to the ground!” Paul says. “Well, it wasn’t quite like that. It wasn’t like he was surprised. It just kind of happened.” Some of the experiments sounded uncannily like cases of spiritual possession. One patient had a pipe placed in his left hand that he could feel but not see; then he was asked to write with his left hand what it was that he had felt. His left hand began very slowly to form the letters “P” and “I”; but then, as though taken over by a ghost, the hand suddenly began writing quickly and fluently, crossed out the “I” and completed the word “PENCIL.” Then, as though the ghost had been pushed aside again, the hand crossed out “PENCIL” and drew a picture of a pipe. It seemed, the experimenters concluded, that the left hemisphere, impatient with the left hand’s slow writing, had seized control of the hand and had produced the word “PENCIL” as a guess, based on the letter “P,” but then the right hemisphere had taken over once again and corrected it. There appeared to be two distinct consciousnesses inside a person’s head that somehow became one when the brain was properly joined. Or one self torn in two. At the medical school in Winnipeg, Pat was assigned a brain of her own, which she kept in the lab in a Tupperware pot filled with formaldehyde. Later, she observed neurosurgeries, asking the surgeon’s permission to peer in through the hole in the scalp to catch a glimpse of living tissue, a little patch of a brain as it was still doing its mysterious work. She attended neurology rounds. The first neurological patient she saw was himself a neurosurgeon who suffered from a strange condition, owing to a lesion in his brain stem, that caused him to burst into tears at the slightest provocation. He would sob and shake but at the same time insist that he was not feeling in the least bit sad. This made an impression on her, partly because she realized how it would have flummoxed a behaviorist to see this complete detachment of behavior and inward feeling and partly because none of the neurologists on the rounds were surprised. The condition, it appeared, was not all that uncommon. She encountered patients who were blind but didn’t know it. “That really kicked the slats out of the idea that you can learn very much about the nature of the mind or the nature of the brain by asking what’s imaginable,” she says. “It’s not imaginable to me that I could be blind and not know it, but it actually happens. So its being unimaginable doesn’t tell me shit!” Each evening, after the children were in bed, she would teach Paul everything she had learned that day, and they would talk about what it meant for philosophy. They later discovered, for instance, that the brain didn’t store different sorts of knowledge in particular places—there was no such thing as a memory organ. Even dedicated areas like the visual cortex could be surprisingly plastic: blind people, and people who could see but had been blindfolded for a few days, used the visual cortex to read Braille, even though that would seem to be a thoroughly tactile activity. All this boded well for Paul’s theory that folk-psychological terms would gradually disappear—if concepts like “memory” or “belief” had no distinct correlates in the brain, then those categories seemed bound, sooner or later, to fall apart. Gradually, Pat and Paul arrived at various shared notions about what philosophy was and what it ought to be. They agreed that it should not keep itself pure: a philosophy that confined itself to logical truths, seeing itself as a kind of mathematics of language, had sealed itself inside a futile, circular system of self-reference. Why shouldn’t philosophy concern itself with facts? Why shouldn’t it get involved with the uncertain conjectures of science? Who cared whether the abstract concepts of action or freedom made sense or not? Surely it was more interesting to think about what caused us to act, and what made us less or more free to do so? Yes, those sounded more like scientific questions than like philosophical ones, but that was only because, over the years, philosophy had ceded so much of the interesting territory to science. Why shouldn’t philosophy be in the business of getting at the truth of things? They were confident that they had history on their side. In the classical era, there had been no separation between philosophy and science, and most of the men whom people now thought of as philosophers were scientists, too. They were thought of as philosophers now only because their scientific theories (like Aristotle’s ideas on astronomy or physics, for instance) had proved to be, in almost all cases, hopelessly wrong. Over the years, different groups of ideas had hived off the mother sun of natural philosophy and become proper experimental disciplines—first astronomy, then physics, then chemistry, then biology, psychology, and, most recently, neuroscience. Becoming an experimental discipline meant devising methods that allowed propositions to be tested that had previously been mere speculation. But it did not mean that a discipline had no further need of metaphysics—what, after all, would be the use of empirical methods without propositions to test in the first place? Philosophy could still play a role in science: it could examine the concepts that scientists were working with, testing them for coherence, and it could serve as science’s speculative branch, imagining hypotheses that were too outlandish or too provisional for a working scientist to bother with but which might, in the future, yield unexpected fruit. In 1974, when Pat was studying the brain in Winnipeg and Paul was working on his first book, Thomas Nagel, a philosopher at Princeton who practiced just the sort of philosophy that they were trying to define themselves against, published an essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Imagine being a bat, Nagel suggested. You are small and covered with thin fur; you have long, thin arms attached to your middle with webbing; you are nearly blind. During the day, you hang upside down, asleep, your feet gripping a branch or a beam; at dusk you wake up and fly about, looking for insects to eat, finding your way with little high-pitched shrieks from whose echoes you deduce the shape of your surroundings. “Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far),” he wrote, “it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” The purpose of this exercise, Nagel explained, was to demonstrate that, however impossible it might be for humans to imagine, it was very likely that there was something it was like to be a bat, and that thing, that set of facts—the bat’s intimate experience, its point of view, its consciousness—could not be translated into the sort of objective language that another creature could understand. Humans might eventually understand pretty much everything else about bats: the microchemistry of their brains, the structure of their muscles, why they sleep upside down—all those things were a matter of analyzing the physical body of the bat and observing how it functioned, which was, however difficult, just part of ordinary science. But what it is like to be a bat was permanently out of the reach of human concepts. This shouldn’t be surprising, Nagel pointed out: to be a realist is to believe that there is no special, magical relationship between the world and the human mind, and that there are therefore likely to be many things about the world that humans are not capable of grasping, just as there are many things about the world that are beyond the comprehension of goats. But if the bat’s consciousness—the what-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat—is not graspable by human concepts, while the bat’s physical makeup is, then it is very difficult to imagine how humans could come to understand the relationship between them. To describe physical matter is to use objective, third-person language, but the experience of the bat is irreducibly subjective. There is a missing conceptual link between the two—what later came to be called an “explanatory gap.” To argue, as some had, that linking consciousness to brain was simply a matter of declaring an identity between them—the mind just is the brain, and that’s all there is to it, the way that water just is H2O—was to miss the point. Nagel’s was the sort of argument that represented everything Pat couldn’t stand about philosophy. “Various philosophers today think that science is never going to be able to understand consciousness,” she said in her lectures, “and one of their most appealing arguments—I don’t know why it’s appealing, but it seems to be—is ‘I can’t imagine how you could get pain out of meat, I can’t imagine how you could get seeing the color blue out of neurons firing.’ Now, whether you can or can’t imagine certain developments in neuroscience is not an interesting metaphysical fact about the world—it’s a not very interesting psychological fact about you.” But when she mocked her colleagues for examining their intuitions and concepts rather than looking to neuroscience she rarely acknowledged that, for many of them, intuitions and concepts were precisely what the problem of consciousness was about. Those were the data. Most of them were materialists: they were convinced that consciousness somehow is the brain, but they doubted whether humans would ever be able to make sense of that. Part of the problem was that Pat was by temperament a scientist, and, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett has pointed out, in science a counterintuitive result is prized more than an expected one, whereas in philosophy, if an argument runs counter to intuition, it may be rejected on that ground alone. “Given a knockdown argument for an intuitively unacceptable conclusion, one should assume there is probably something wrong with the argument that one cannot detect,” Nagel wrote in 1979. “To create understanding, philosophy must convince. That means it must produce or destroy belief, rather than merely provide us with a consistent set of things to say. And belief, unlike utterance, should not be under the control of the will, however motivated. It should be involuntary.” The divide between those who, when forced to choose, will trust their instincts and those who will trust an argument that convinces them is at least as deep as the divide between mind-body agnostics and committed physicalists, and lines up roughly the same way. When Pat first started going around to philosophy conferences and talking about the brain, she felt that everyone was laughing at her. Even thoroughgoing materialists, even scientifically minded ones, simply couldn’t see why a philosopher needed to know about neurons. Part of the problem was that, at the time, during the first thrilling decades of artificial intelligence, it seemed possible that computers would soon be able to do everything that minds could do, using silicon chips instead of brains. So if minds could run on chips as well as on neurons, the reasoning went, why bother about neurons? If the mind was, in effect, software, and if the mind was what you were interested in, then for philosophical purposes surely the brain—the hardware—could be regarded as just plumbing. Nobody thought it was necessary to study circuit boards in order to talk about Microsoft Word. A philosopher of mind ought to concern himself with what the mind did, not how it did it. Moreover, neuroscience was working at the wrong level: tiny neuronal structures were just too distant, conceptually, from the macroscopic components of thought, things like emotions and beliefs. As far as Pat was concerned, though, to imagine that the stuff of the brain was irrelevant to the study of the mind was no more than a new, more sophisticated form of dualism. Software and hardware, immaterial spirits and pineal glands—it was Descartes all over again, she would fume to Paul when she got home. This was what happened when a bunch of math and logic types started talking about the mind, she thought—they got all caught up in abstractions and forgot that humans were animals. The mind wasn’t some sort of computer program but a biological thing that had been cobbled together, higgledy-piggledy, in the course of a circuitous, wasteful, and particular evolution. Yes, of course neuroscience felt pretty distant from philosophy at this point, but that was only—why couldn’t people see this?—because the discipline was in its infancy. The connections hadn’t been filled in yet. What she objected to was the notion that neuroscience would never be relevant to philosophical concerns. That seemed to her just plain stupid. When Nagel wrote about consciousness and the brain in the nineteen-seventies, he was an exception: during the decades of behaviorism, the mind-body problem had been ignored. But then, in the early nineteen-nineties, the problem was dramatically revived, owing in part to an unexpected rearguard action launched by a then obscure long-haired Australian philosopher named David Chalmers. Chalmers is a generation younger than the Churchlands, and he is one of a very few philosophers these days who are avowedly dualist. He believes that consciousness isn’t physical. It’s pretty easy to imagine a zombie, Chalmers argued—a creature physically identical to a human, functioning in all the right ways, having conversations, sitting on park benches, playing the flute, but simply lacking all conscious experience. So if one could imagine a person physically identical to the real David Chalmers but without consciousness then it would seem that consciousness could not be a physical thing. Maybe consciousness was actually another sort of thing altogether, he thought—a fundamental entity in the universe, a primitive, like mass, time, or space. This theory would be a kind of dualism, Chalmers had to admit, but not a mystical sort; it would be compatible with the physical sciences because it would not alter them—it would be an addition. As Chalmers began to develop his theory of consciousness as a primitive, the implications started to multiply. Once you had separated consciousness from biology, a lot of constraints simply disappeared. If consciousness was a primitive like mass or space, then perhaps it was as universal as mass or space. Perhaps even systems like thermostats, he speculated, with their one simple means of response, were conscious in some extremely basic way. You could start talking about panpsychism—the idea that consciousness exists, in some very basic form, in all matter, even at the level of the atom. On the face of it, of course, he realized that panpsychism sounded a little crazy. And there was a pretty good philosophical argument against it (of the customary form: either it’s false or it’s trivial; either you are pushed into claiming that atoms are thinking about cappuccinos or you retreat to the uninteresting and obvious position that atoms have the potential to contribute to larger things that think about cappuccinos). But he found it appealing anyway, and, despite its mystical or Buddhist overtones, it felt to Chalmers, at root, naturalistic. He liked the idea that humans were continuous with the rest of the world, even the inanimate parts of it, even stones and rivers—that consciousness penetrated very deep, perhaps all the way down into the natural order of things. Right from the beginning, Pat was happy to find that scientists welcomed her. They certainly were a lot friendlier to her than many philosophers. When she started attending neuroscience conferences, she found that, far from dismissing her as a fuzzy-minded humanities type, they were delighted that a philosopher should take an interest in their work. At a conference in the early eighties, she met Francis Crick, who, having discovered the secret of life, the structure of DNA, as a young man, had decided that he wanted to study the other great mystery, consciousness. “Francis discovered Pat at a meeting back East and was amazed that a philosopher had all the same prejudices that he did,” Paul says. “He invited her out to the Salk Institute and, on hearing that she had a husband who was also interested in these things, invited me to come out, too. We came and spent, what was it, five days?” “Yes, we did.” “He was still having weekly meetings with you when he knew he was dying. You would come home despairing at making headway with him.” “He thought the strategy of looking for the neural correlates of consciousness was likely to be fruitful, but I became very skeptical of it. It seemed to me more likely that we were going to need to know about attention, about memory, about perception, about emotions—that we were going to have to solve many of the problems about the way the brain works before we were going to understand consciousness, and then it would sort of just fall out.” “He was one of the people who made the problem of consciousness respectable again,” Paul says. “Some people in science thought that it was a ghost problem. The behaviorists thought talk of inner subjective phenomena was a waste of time, like alchemy.” “There were lots of neuroscientists who thought consciousness was such a diffcult issue that we’d never get there.” The psychologist and neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran turned up at U.C.S.D. as a junior faculty member around the same time Pat and Paul arrived. Paul met him first, when Ramachandran went to one of his talks because he was amused by the arrogance of its title—“How the Brain Works.” Then Pat started observing the work in Ramachandran’s lab. She saw him perform a feat that seemed to her nearly as astonishing as curing the blind: seating at a table a patient suffering from pain in a rigid phantom arm, he held up a mirror in such a way that the patient’s working arm appeared in the position of the missing one, and then instructed him to move it. As if by magic, the patient felt the movement in his phantom limb, and his discomfort ceased. Pat spent more and more time at Ramachandran’s lab, and later on she collaborated with him on a paper titled “A Critique of Pure Vision,” which argued that the function of vision was not to represent the world but to help a creature survive, and that it had evolved, accordingly, as a partial and fractured system that served the more basic needs of the motor system. These days, many philosophers give Pat credit for admonishing them that a person who wants to think seriously about the mind-body problem has to pay attention to the brain. But this acknowledgment is not always extended to Pat herself, or to the work she does now. “Although some of Churchland’s views have taken root in mainstream philosophy, she is not part of it,” Ned Block, a philosopher at New York University, wrote in a review of one of her books. “Unfortunately, Churchland . . . approaches many conceptual issues in the sciences of the mind like the more antiphilosophical of scientists.” Although she tried to ignore it, Pat was wounded by this review. But it was true; in some ways she had simply left the field. Although she often talks to scientists, she says she hasn’t got around to giving a paper to a philosophy department in five years. These days, she often feels that the philosophical debate over consciousness is more or less a waste of time. There is one area of traditional philosophy, however, in which Pat still takes an active interest, and that is ethics. She and Paul are the two philosophers in an interdisciplinary group at U.C.S.D. that is trying to drum up funding for research into the implications of neuroscience for ethics and the law. “I think the more we know about these things, the more we’ll be able to make reasonable decisions,” Pat says. “Suppose someone is a genetic mutant who has a bad upbringing: we know that the probability of his being self-destructively violent goes way, way up above the normal. How do we treat such people? Do we wait until they actually do something horrendous or is some kind of prevention in order? Should all male children be screened for such mutations and the parents informed so that they will be especially responsible with regard to how these children are brought up?” “Why not?” Paul says. “I guess they could be stigmatized.” “There’s a guy at U.S.C. who wanted to know what the activity of the frontal cortex looked like in people on death row, and the amazing result was this huge effect that shows depressed activity in frontal structures. These people have compromised executive function. Now, we don’t really know whether it’s a cause or an effect—I mean maybe if you’re on death row your frontal structure deteriorates. But of course public safety is a paramount concern. We don’t want these people running loose even if it’s not their own fault that they are the way they are.” “Well, given that they’re such a severe danger to the society, we could incarcerate them in some way,” Paul says. “We could put a collar on their ankles and track their whereabouts. We could say, We have to put this subdural thing in your skull which will monitor if you’re having rage in your amygdala, and we can automatically shut you down with a nice shot of Valium. It’s like having somebody who’s got the black plague—we do have the right to quarantine people though it’s not their fault. Heinlein wrote a story—” “We’re back to Heinlein! How funny.” “This just reminded me. He had wild, libertarian views. The story concerned how you treated people who were convicted by criminal trials. Either you could undergo a psychological readjustment that would fix you or, because you can’t force that on people, you could go and live in a community that was something like the size of Arizona, behind walls that were thirty feet high, filled with people like you who had refused the operation. The story was about somebody who chose to go in. What annoyed me about it—and it would annoy you, too, I think—was that Heinlein was plainly on the side of the guy who had refused to have his brain returned to normal. He tells this glorious story about how this guy managed to triumph over all sorts of adverse conditions in this perfectly awful state of nature.” Paul stops to think about this for a moment. “You and I have a confidence that most people lack,” he says to Pat. “We think we can continue to be liberals and still move this forward.” “I’m not so sure,” Pat says.
An ambitious German-led project to supply Europe with solar energy from the deserts of North Africa will start with a meeting on July 13, an executive from the German insurance giant Munich Re told the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Tuesday. The project involves a consortium of about 20 firms -- including Siemens, Deutsche Bank, and energy companies like RWE -- and will cost 400 billion ($555.3 billion), according to Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek. Jeworrek said the initiative aimed to "present concrete plans in two to three years' time," and start the flow of energy to Europe within a decade. Munich Re will lead the project, and the meeting in July will formally establish the group. The consortium plans to fund a project called Desertec, which envisions relatively low-tech solar thermal power -- using mirrors in the desert to heat up water, which drives turbines in a local power plant -- rather than an array of high-tech photovoltaic cells. Jeworrek declined to list all 20 members of the new funding group, but said the German Economy Ministry and the Club of Rome, a non-governmental organization based in Zürich, were also involved. From the Maghreb to Europe The Desertec plan requires a new grid of high-voltage transmission lines from the Maghreb desert to Europe. No new technology needs to be developed, according to Hans Müller-Steinhagen, who works at the German Aerospace Center and has researched the feasibility of Desertec for Germany's Environment Ministry. The idea has existed for years, but the high cost of building the infrastructure has kept investors away. Müller-Steinhagen told SPIEGEL ONLINE last year that similar power plants have operated in the American west for years, and work on independent plants has started in Spain, Algeria, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. But the projects have languished, in part because of the price of oil. "After the solar thermal power plants were built in California and Nevada," Müller-Steinhagen said, "people lost interest in solar thermal power because fossil fuels became unbeatably cheap." Jeworrek said the new initiative, which promises to be the largest green-energy project in the world, could provide around 15 percent of Europe's energy needs. But German firms can't do it alone -- Desertec would require cooperation among a number of different governments and firms. One important prerequisite, Jeworrek suggested, was political stability. "We're very optimistic about Italy and Spain," he said. Desertec was developed by a network of scientists and politicians called the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC). Last year French President Nicolas Sarkozy indicated interest in the idea -- and in working with Mediterranean nations in general -- but Jeworrek reserved judgment on French participation. "The French are still relying heavily on nuclear energy," he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Tuesday.
A sign marks the entrance to a gender neutral restroom at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vt., in 2007. (Toby Talbot/AP) A federal judge has denied a transgender teenager’s request to allow him to use the same bathroom as his peers at his public school in Virginia. Instead, the judge ruled Friday, the teenager must continue using a separate, private bathroom that he has said makes him feel “singled out and humiliated.” Gavin Grimm, a teenage boy who was born female, used the boys’ bathroom for seven weeks with no problem, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought a lawsuit against the Gloucester County School Board on his behalf. But then parents heard about the teen using the boys’ restroom and complained. The school board passed a rule, 6 to 1, that restricts the bathrooms to students of the “corresponding biological genders.” Grimm and the ACLU challenged the school board policy, and the U.S. Justice Department weighed in in Grimm’s favor. “Singling out transgender students and subjecting them to differential treatment can also make them more vulnerable to bullying and harassment, a problem that transgender students already face,” the Justice Department wrote. “Allowing transgender students to use the restrooms consistent with their gender identity will help prevent stigma that results in bullying and harassment and will ensure that the District fosters a safe and supportive learning environment for all students, a result that is unquestionably in the public interest.” But on Friday, Judge Robert G. Doumar of the Eastern District of Virginia denied Grimm’s request for a preliminary injunction, which would have allowed him to use the boys’ bathroom upon returning to school. “We are deeply disappointed with the court’s decision and will appeal as quickly as possible to ensure that Gavin does not have to endure this harmful and stigmatizing policy a single day more than necessary,” ACLU attorney Joshua Block said in a statement. In the ACLU statement, Grimm said: “It is difficult to face another school year of being singled out and treated differently from other students. I am determined to move forward because this case is not just about me, but about all transgender students in Virginia,” Related: A transgender teen used the girls’ locker room. Now her community is up in arms. Fairfax school board adds transgender protections, after heated debate
It was just one of several signals that the Oct. 19 election that gave Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a majority Liberal government might renew the country’s role as a leader in global development. Arriving at his offices in the Pearson Building, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion was greeted by cheers from civil servants. Trudeau himself, steeped in internationalism almost from the crib, has been abroad for much of his first month in office. This week, Michael Messenger, president of World Vision Canada, visited Canadian-funded aid projects in South Sudan, one of the most difficult places to survive, especially for children. ( World Vision / Paul Bettings ) To a large extent, buffing a tarnished image will depend on Canada’s commitment to foreign aid. While campaigning, the Liberals said the Harper government had shifted aid priorities to “reflect political and commercial interests to the detriment of the needs of the poorest and most fragile countries.” They promised to restore Canada’s status as an “engaged player on the world stage.” Organizations on the front lines of world poverty, heartened by the new tone, will be watching carefully to see if Liberal deeds match good intentions. Article Continued Below Over the last decade, Canada has been a diminishing actor in foreign aid, with spending falling to $4.2 billion in 2014, down from $5.6 billion two years earlier. Despite long-standing pledges to commit 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income to foreign aid (a level first championed by former prime minister Lester Pearson), the level fell last year to 0.24 per cent. After a respectable start on the foreign aid file, the former Conservative government announced in 2010 a five-year freeze on development assistance in order to address its deficit at home. The freeze was scheduled to end this year, but was extended in the April budget. As well as the reduced funding, there were concerns as well that the Harper government had shifted assistance from sub-Saharan Africa, where need is acute, to better-off countries with trade potential. Mariha, an 8-year-old Syrian refugee, says, "The only thing that keeps us warm through the day is the blankets that (UNHCR/World Vision) gave us. But it's not enough. We have very thin clothes. I get cold when I walk through the snow (to gather wood for the night)." ( Ralph Baydoun ) While the Conservative government won applause for its role in improving maternal, newborn and child health, the overall reviews on development were poor. In fact, the declining role was so great, according to the Canadian International Council, that Canada had essentially become an international “free rider.” Aid organizations, for their part, took Trudeau’s cabinet appointments in portfolios relevant to their work as an indication that improvements might be afoot. In Dion they have a foreign affairs minister well-versed in environmental issues and climate change as a major factor in need. International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland brings a long-standing concern with inequality to her post. Article Continued Below And the appointment of Quebec’s Marie-Claude Bibeau, who formerly worked at CIDA, is “one of the first times we’ve seen a minister of international development who actually has a background in international development,” said Julie Delahanty, executive director of Oxfam Canada. The new ministers won’t want for warnings or advice. Ottawa’s McLeod Group, promoting human rights, equality and sustainable development, estimates that more than a billion people live in abject poverty. Julie Delahanty, executive director of Oxfam Canada, says she's pleased to see "a minister of international development who actually has a background in international development." Countries simply can’t develop if their people are hungry, sick and uneducated, it says. Poverty discourages investment, results in political instability, violence and conflict, is a breeding ground for pandemic and increasingly unmanageable population shifts, exacerbates international environmental problems, and can spawn and nurture terrorism. So ending poverty is no mere act of charity, but is in the “long-term self-interest” of Canada and the developed world. Some foreign aid players hope to see Canada bump Overseas Development Aid funding to 0.34 per cent of Gross National Income in the new government’s first budget. But no one expects them to reach the oft-stated goal of 0.7 per cent overnight. “We’d like to see the government providing a 10-year plan for how they’re going to increase ODA to 0.7,” Delahanty said. Stephen Brown, a University of Ottawa political science professor, has written in the Star that Canada should also uncouple aid from Canadian commercial interests to focus on poverty and inequality and must also re-engage with NGO partners. The prospect of a more collaborative approach gladdens aid agencies. “We have the practical knowledge and the relationships within country to really inform — from an evidence-based perspective — what can work,” said Cicely McWilliam of Save the Children Canada. Stephen Brown, a University of Ottawa political science professor, says Canada should also uncouple aid from Canadian commercial interests to focus on poverty and inequality. Gillian Barth, president of CARE Canada, said: “We have a country full of amazing experts in a wide variety of areas, and I think those experts were one of the best-kept secrets in Canada.” Correction - January 4, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled Julie Delahanty's surname.
If there’s one thing Detroit natives take pride in, it’s their city’s legacy of making stuff. And if there’s another thing, it’s Detroit’s revival after decades of post-industrial decline. Mark Wallace seems equally excited about both. Three years ago, Wallace founded Detroit Wallace Guitars, a small company that makes professional grade, vintage-style guitars out of reclaimed wood salvaged from dilapidated, historically significant buildings across the Motor City. Most recently, Wallace unveiled a line of guitars made from the remains of Detroit’s Brewster Wheeler Recreation Center, where boxer Joe Lewis once trained and Diana Ross and other members of The Supremes hung out as kids. “It was one of the first housing projects in the U.S.,” says Wallace of the now-demolished residential buildings at Brewster-Wheeler. The adjacent rec center, which is now being renovated, was filled with old benches made of maple wood that was perfect for the body of a guitar. “Now we’re making guitars from benches that Diana Ross probably sat on,” he says. The guitars, which start at $2,600, aren’t built for amateur garage bands and beginners. In fact, Wallace says, some of them wind up adorning the walls of local bankers and art collectors. The rest, of course, go to serious musicians. “I’ve got a guy who’s played with Bruce Springsteen named Stewart Francke,” Wallace says. “He has a ’58 Rickenbacker, a Telecaster. He says he only wants to play on our guitar.” Related: How Fender Is Reinventing Online Guitar Lessons For The Age Of Distraction In Detroit, there’s no shortage of spare wood lying around. After years of working in real estate and learning woodworking to help rehab his own properties, Wallace had become fairly well-versed in the types of wood that could be found in local buildings. About a decade into his real estate career, he came across a nonprofit that worked with homeless people and taught them how to properly salvage materials from the blighted, often crumbling buildings that have proliferated since Detroit’s decline as a major manufacturing hub. After seeing some of the samples that were coming out of houses and historical buildings, Wallace began to think about how the materials could be repurposed in a meaningful way. For Wallace, himself a guitarist who played in local punk and bluegrass bands, his brainstorming led him to another of Detroit’s great legacies: Music.
So far, what scientists have learned from the Dawn fits with what they thought. “Science doesn’t have to go back to the drawing board right now,” Dr. Russell said. The scientists report their Vesta findings in six articles in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. Photo One of the surprises is that two giant craters near the south pole of Vesta formed relatively recently: one of them a billion years ago, the other at least two billion years ago. On other solar system bodies like the Moon, such giant impacts occurred very early in the history of the solar system, about four billion years ago. The mineralogical measurements also confirm that a class of meteorites that have been found on Earth came from Vesta, very likely ejected by the impact that created the giant craters. Vesta’s pockmarked surface could also help tell why the pieces of the asteroid belt never became a planet. After Vesta formed, the gravity of newly formed Jupiter stopped further growth. The traditional view is that Jupiter’s pull accelerated the Vesta-size asteroids so that they smashed themselves apart instead of gently coming together. Jupiter would have scattered away many of the original asteroids, but slowly. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. An alternate idea, however, is that Jupiter, nudged by leftover gas and dust in the early solar system, migrated inward to where Mars orbits today, scattering away the asteroids, and later was pulled outward again by the gravity of Saturn, and in its wake pulled back some asteroids. “Vesta is definitely super interesting for the work that we did,” said Kelvin Walsh, a research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., whose computer simulations indicated that this could explain the current asteroid belt and why Mars is small compared with Earth and Venus. He is not a member of the Dawn team. The 2,000 craters on Vesta cataloged by the Dawn scientists could tell the history of impacts, and if Dr. Walsh is right, there might be fewer than would be predicted by the traditional picture. The Dawn spacecraft has been orbiting Vesta since last July. This August, it will propel itself away from Vesta and head toward Ceres, which is slightly farther out from the Sun, but of a much different makeup. While Vesta is all dense rock and metal, Ceres appears to contain large amounts of ice. That could help solve another open question of the solar system: Where did Earth’s water come from? Advertisement Continue reading the main story It might have come from Ceres-like bodies that formed farther out in the solar system and then were pulled in by a migrating Jupiter, Dr. Walsh said.
The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement attracted little attention when it was forged in 2005. That changed with negotiations to admit five new countries, most notably the US. And now, says Rick Shera, things are getting seriously weird. Yes, it's a copyright thread … It's one way of negotiating, I guess: leak a document containing multiple extreme positions and then gracefully back down in the face of inevitable objection from other parties fuelled by local community uproar - arriving at terms that are at least as good if not better than what you were really after. And the US is playing that game like a master if its latest leaked the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) chapter is anything to go by. Mind you, it had some ground to make up after its embarrassing stumble with ACTA. Positions as extreme as the latest US IP chapter surely cannot be anything other than blatant negotiation bullying. Even the RIAA (who must have had a large input into the paper given its focus on phonograms) could not in its wettest dreams expect to have New Zealand and other parties take such a large axe to our IP laws ... could they? But, without further ado, here are the lowlights in terms of the main changes which we would need to make to New Zealand law: • Rights holders would be allowed to prevent parallel imports (which are currently allowed under New Zealand trademark law). We know how important it is to many old school rights holders to divide the world into artificial zones so that they can maintain archaic differential pricing and release dates. I don't imagine therefore that they will be consenting to parallel imports - so this is effectively a ban. • Strengthened geographical indications - the champagne producers have managed to stop us describing our bubbly as champagne - expect the same thing to happen to brie, parmagiano reggiano, Gouda, Edam and the like. Even Yorkshire pud and American hot dogs might not be safe. • Massive extension of copyright terms, from life of author plus 50 years, to 70 years. Works with unknown or no human author to 95 years. In some cases even extensions out to 120 years. We've come a long way since the Statute of Anne and then the American Constitution set basic copyright terms at 14 years, just because the US wants to continue to extract monopoly pricing on Mickey Mouse (who would have been in the public domain years ago if it were not for these extensions in the US). And remember, we're pretty much on our own on this one as far as Common law countries go - Australia, another party to the proposed TPPA, has already succumbed to some of these longer copyright terms so will be looking to even the playing field. I say that because the Australian Government Productivity Commission has just concluded that its Free Trade Agreement extension of copyright terms has been negative (PDF) for Australia, but then goes on to say that Australia should look at redressing the deficit by having its other trading partners cave in as well. • Circumventing a Technological Protection Measure (TPM) will to be a criminal offence even if the work it protects is in the public domain or you want to exercise fair dealing rights like educational use or current affairs reporting. We'll also need to make sure that we change our curent regime so that region coding and zone access controls are protected (we decided to specifically state that such artificial measures were NOT protected when we changed our TPM law in 2008). • The return of s92A guilt on accusation, repeat infringer, termination of internet accounts - 3 strikes or whatever you want to call it. So, the US wants us to effectively scrap the last 3 years of consultation around the replacement of section 92A and the reasonably balanced (but still not perfect) approach we are working towards in the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill due to be passed in the next couple of months. Imagine you're an ISP who has to bear the cost of gearing up for that regime only to be told later in the year that its Ground Hog Day and we're all going back to the section 92A debacle. • Forcing us to reverse the decison recently taken to exclude software patents per se. • Introducing statutory damages (which give rights holders windfall damages up to 3 times their actual losses). No doubt the copyright trolls will like that. Add to that full recovery of lawyers' fees plus presumptions in favour of rights holders (so they don't need to first prove they there is any copyright or that they own it). All of this will effectively give anyone wanting to claim IP rights a huge advantage. We know that many IP claims are in fact made by companies wanting to shut down competition or by those wanting to stifle criticsm. IP law should not be used for these sort of ulterior motives. • ISP policing of IP rights incuding a requirement for ISPs to give up their customers' identities when they receive a mere allegation from a rights holder. • Criminal liability even where the infringement has no commercial value at all. • Pushing Courts to impose imprisonment as the default sentence for infringement even where no monetary benefit is obtained. These last two are particularly well hidden - the provisions actually refer to criminal liability for infringements on a commercial scale. But, when you read the fineprint, commercial scale includes significant wilful ... infringements that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain. And, as if the US version of the TPPA itself wasn't bad enough, if we sign up to this, we'd also be agreeing to enter into 7 other international IP treaties. These include ones, like the two WIPO internet treaties, that we have already debated and decided NOT to accede to. Plus others that we have decided are not of pressing concern. All this by the end of this year. That's why I say that these suggestions from the US, if we agreed to them, overall would represent huge changes to our IP laws not seen in the last 20 years. The galling thing about all of this too is that we have been debating these issues for many years in a rational, multistakeholder, consultative manner not in the secretive manner in which TPPA is being railroaded through. In the copyright arena for example, we started to look at how our law should deal with digital creativity 10 years ago with MED's publication of two comprehensive papers on IP in the digital age. Since then we've debated specific proposals in various legislation - Patents Act, Trade Marks Act, Copyright Act, plant varieties etc - they've all been revised to take account of these issues. Parliament and successive Governments have repeatedly approved the fine balances that we have arrived at. This would run a coach and horses through much of that but at least our officials are not having a bar of it (PDF). They need our support. It's somewhat patronising to now be told that we effectively got it all wrong and need to make fundamental changes ... but, oh, wait a minute, we're not going to tell you what those changes are. (See also the podcast of my TPPA interview with Kathryn Ryan, Nine to Noon, 16 March 2011.) Rick Shera is an Auckland intellectual property lawyer and @lawgeeknz on Twitter. This post is re-published from the original on Rick's blog.
What I Did Today Instead of Working WHERE ARE YOU (trailer script) OPENING Begin panoramic shot of a vast, unnamed metropolis teeming with life. As we hover over the skyscrapers, the music begins to build softly, establishing a dark, dire theme. Voiceover of VELMA and SHAGGY. VELMA “So, how are you doing today, Norville?” SHAGGY “Huh?” VELMA “How are you adjusting to the medication?” SHAGGY “Oh. Right. I’m good.” Cut to a scene of the streets, people walking in great bustling crowds. We settle on a view of a humble building at the corner of a crosswalk. Music begins to climb. VELMA “And the episodes?” SHAGGY “Good.” We enter the building from a first-person shot, walking into an elevator. Cut to a hallway, settling on a door with a sign reading “DR. VELMA DINKLEY, PSYCHOLOGIST.” VELMA “What about the voices?” SHAGGY “Good.” Cut to the interior. VELMA peers over a clipboard at SHAGGY, sitting in a chair across from her. VELMA “And the hallucinations? This…other personality?” SHAGGY looks over her head to her desk, upon which sits a colossal, snarling hound, grinning with sharp teeth (SCOOBY). SHAGGY “…good.” Music begins in earnest. Cut to next scene. Dark city streets, police tap everywhere. SHAGGY flashes a dirty badge to cops as he pulls his way under the tape. A blonde, good-looking detective grins as he shows up. FREDDY “Norville, you son of a bitch. You made it.” SHAGGY “Yeah. Well. You called.” FREDDY “I wasn’t sure they’d let you out of the looney bin so quick, eh? Thought maybe they’d want to keep you until all the voices in your head stopped.” SHAGGY looks at FREDDY blankly. FREDDY laughs and claps him on the shoulder. FREDDY “Just kiddin’, man. You know how we do it.” SHAGGY “I used to. What’ve you got here?” FREDDY “A real fucking mess is what I’ve got.” Cut to flashes of images. A body draped in a sheet. A pool of blood. A face of glistening meat. Only half a second per image. FREDDY’s voice dubs over. FREDDY “Third one in two months. Same M.O., every time. Killer leaves plenty of mess, but takes the face with him when he leaves.” SHAGGY “So, you thought you’d share this with me. You know how I feel about this shit.” FREDDY “Yeah, I know that. Because I know you’re the best at this shit. We fucking still tell the same stories at the bar about your glory days, Norv.” Cut to images of newspaper clippings featuring SHAGGY reading: “BOY DETECTIVE MAKES GOOD,” “KILLER UNMASKED,” “GHOST HOAX HALTED.” SHAGGY “That was a long time ago, Jones. I don’t do that shit anymore.” FREDDY “You’ll want to do this one, pal, trust me.” SHAGGY “What makes you so sure?” FREDDY “She asked for you, personally.” Music hits its climax. Cut to blake manor. DAPHNE coils over a desk, smiling seductively at SHAGGY. DAPHNE “The killer’s striking at people…close to me, Norville. He’s sending me a message. I can’t have people like that in my city.” SHAGGY “I do this, I’m not doing it for you.” DAPHNE “Not even if I give you a Scooby Snack?” SHAGGY slams his fists on the table. SHAGGY “DO NOT. JOKE ABOUT THAT.” Pan to several scenes in quick succession: SHAGGY kneeling beside a corpse, weeping; SHAGGY chasing someone down an alleyway, gun drawn; SHAGGY peering into some dark corner with a flashlight; and everywhere, blood, corpses, death. Music begins to climb. Flash across the screen: “COMING THIS FALL…” SHAGGY (voiceover) “It’s too much. Everywhere I fucking look, nothing but blood and bodies. No faces.” Cut to scene, SHAGGY sitting in a corner, weeping. SHAGGY (voiceover) “Everyone around me’s wearing a fucking mask. I don’t know what’s real or what’s fake anymore.” Cut to scene, VELMA kneeling down to console him. SHAGGY (voiceover) “Everyone says you’re not real, that you can’t talk. But sometimes it feels like you’re my only friend.” Cut to scene. The large, snarling hound stares intently at SHAGGY and smiles. SCOOBY “Ruh roh.” Cut to text: “THE MYSTERY CONTINUES.” Cut to scenes, SHAGGY chasing down criminal, tackling him to the ground. Pointing a gun to his head, laughing maniacally. SHAGGY “Now, let’s see who’s really the monster…” Gunshot. Cut to black. Plain white text: “WHERE ARE YOU.” Yeah. Essentially, Michael Lunsford and I both have way too much time on our hands.
Swedish police have been criticized by locals for allegedly failing to adequately respond to riots in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby on Monday which resulted in several burnt-out cars, aggravated thefts and assaults. No-one has been arrested over the riots. Between 30-50 people were involved in the unrest which broke out at around 8pm on Monday following the arrest of a wanted person at a metro station in the area, according to police. Police fired several warning shots when people began setting cars on fire, throwing stones and looting local stores. A police officer and a journalist were injured in the clashes and taken to hospital. READ MORE: Stockholm riots spark online debate over Sweden's 'no-go' areas Authorities say the situation was brought under control shortly after midnight by an increased police presence in the area, with no further disturbances reported. However, residents have criticized the police for waiting too long before taking action against the rioters, reports Dagens Nyheter. District Police Commissioner Jan Evensson told DN that investigations into the riots will determine if authorities responded quickly enough: "If it turns out that it took too long, then we will definitely improve.” READ MORE: Dramatic footage shows cars ablaze in Swedish riot (VIDEOS) The incident also sparked a heated debate online over what constitutes a ‘no-go’ zone, often used by the media when referring to disadvantaged suburbs.
The decision by the Ukrainian parliament to allow companies from the US and EU to co-manage the country’s gas pipelines could lead to the country being left with no gas supplies in the coming winter, an MP has warned in an emotional online address. Nikolay Rudkovsky, an independent MP in Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, believes the law allowing 49 percent of Ukraine’s national gas transportation system (GTS) to be managed by foreign companies is a big mistake. “People, my advice to you is: buy firewood and coal! After the Law on reforming the management system of the united gas transportation system of Ukraine (#4116) was passed today, our country has been left with almost no chances of staying with gas,” Rudkovsky said on Facebook, following the Rada session. “Don’t the MPs understand that we are now guaranteed to have a winter with no heating?” he asked. The bill, proposed by PM Arseny Yatsenyuk, has raised much controversy among Ukrainian MPs, who rejected it several times before the final approval on Thursday. One of the rejections, on July 24, is believed to have prompted Yatsenyuk’s resignation move, which was eventually dismissed by the Rada. Rudkovsky might have voiced the fears of quite a number of the bill’s opponents when he tried to speak out against passing of the bill on Thursday, but was silenced by the Rada Chairman Aleksandr Turchinov. “We don’t get a single cubic meter of gas from Russia now. This law gives away Ukrainian gas transportation system to the US,” Rudkovsky had time to say, before his microphone was switched off, according to ITAR-TASS. Turchinov accused the MP of lobbying for Russian interests. Rudkovsky has asked Ukrainians to write petitions to the government, calling for the bill’s cancelation. “We can’t allow dozens of other Alchevsks to happen.” Around 1,500 people were left without gas in the town of Alchevsk, Lugansk Region of eastern Ukraine, earlier in August due to a malfunctioning gas pipe. Rudkovsky’s post has inspired dozens of worried comments, with Ukrainians sharing stories of electricity and water shortages they are already encountering, as well as fears of more to come. Earlier this month, Kiev announced turning off hot water throughout the city in an attempt to save gas for the winter months. The Ukrainian authorities have voiced concern over the country’s ability to ensure winter heating. Rudkovsky believes the government “failed” preparation for the winter. “There are other right ways of solving this problem, but the government does not hear me. I advised them to buy heating oil and transfer heating facilities to coal,” he said. Meanwhile economic experts doubt Ukraine will actually be able to find the EU and US investors for its gas transportation system. Mikhail Korchemkin of East European Gas Analysis believes it’s the make such investments, as the future of the gas market in vague, Vedomosti reports. Energy Intelligence analysts argue the conflict in the east of Ukraine makes the project risky in general.
(Editorial) – The LA Galaxy are having an underwhelming start to the 2016 season. They crashed out of CONCACAF Champions League with a 4-0 loss at Santos Laguna. They did pull off a great comeback win over D.C. United, but followed that up with a lackluster loss to the Colorado Rapids on Saturday. The performances have been a bit uninspiring as well. An older roster already has some injuries at important positions. There’s still some major issues at forward, yet head coach Bruce Arena appears content to trot out Robbie Keane with Giovani dos Santos despite their lack of chemistry. But there’s another concern. LA Galaxy Midfield: Stuck with Gerrard for Better and Worse For all the depth the Galaxy have, there’s no clear back up for midfielder Steven Gerrard. Stevie G’s had some good moments in MLS. He’s had some bad moments. But with the current roster, the LA Galaxy midfield is doesn’t have any great alternatives. They’ll have to take the good with the bad. This team is pretty much stuck with Gerrard as the starting central attacking midfielder. Let’s break this down. Gerrard has been good and bad: The 35-year-old Englishman started his LA Galaxy career with a bang, getting a goal and an assist in a 5-2 California Clásico victory over the San Jose Earthquakes. Gerrard got just one goal and two assists in the remaining 12 games of the season. This isn’t entirely his fault though. Just weeks before his debut, rumors begin to swirl about Dos Santos signing with the Galaxy. He ultimately did. We’ve seen midseason DPs change and mess up chemistry for MLS teams before. Two midseason DP signings compound that even further. But both they and their team usually bounce back the following year. So far the Galaxy are still figuring things out and so is Gerrard. Here’s a heatmap of Gerrard’s first two games of the MLS season (courtesy of Squawka.com). The match against D.C. is on the right; the match against Colorado is on the left. In both cases, the Galaxy are defending the bottom goal. Without context, this looks like a box-to-box midfielder’s heat map. There’s some dense spots in the defensive half of the field. We also see some spots on the corners, so the player is taking some set pieces. In the context of Gerrard’s role with the team, this isn’t great. Arena’s 4-4-2 with the ‘Y Midfield’ puts Gerrard in the middle of the Y. This heat map shows that Gerrard isn’t getting as far forward as expected for an attacking mid. From watching the first two games, we know Gerrard is taking some set pieces and corners. So several of those touches in the final third are not from the run of play. Some of this is Gerrard’s fault. Some of it isn’t. The forward situation is still a mess. It’s hard to go forward with confidence as the central attacking midfielder when you don’t know what your strikers are doing. The Galaxy also played that second game at altitude, which is never easy in preseason. Gerrard did create a few chances and went the full 90 minutes in that match, which is encouraging. He’s also getting used to a new midfield partner in Nigel de Jong, who is new to MLS. Still, most of Gerrard’s actions are in the defensive half. He needs to get involved in the attack. Furthermore, he has only one assist and no goals this season. A world class player should be able to make something happen regardless of what’s going on around him. At age 35, Gerrard isn’t what he was at Liverpool. He’s lost a step. He doesn’t have as many of those spectacular moments in him. The team still needs to a few more games to get their fitness up and (hopefully) figure out their chemistry issues. I give Gerrard another month to get fit and comfortable because of his age. If he hasn’t improved by then, that means he’s probably plateaued and this is what he could be for the rest of the season. The bench options aren’t that great: The Galaxy have De Jong, Rafael Garcia, Baggio Husidic, and Jeff Larentowicz as their other central midfielders. De Jong and Lartentowicz are both defensive midfielders by nature. So is Garcia. That leaves Husidic as the only other player who’s a box-to-box midfielder. While I think Husidic can be a starting caliber player, I’m not sure he can do it for 30 games at 90 minutes a game. He’s also capable of playing all four midfield positions, so he’s more valuable to Arena as the first substitute off the bench. Like a utility knife, he’s versatile and can come in and fill whatever role is needed based on how the game is going. If Gerrard is struggling come May, I’d give Husidic a chance at that starting position. Husidic won’t bring as much offensive creativity, but he’ll be more solid defensively. Gerrard certainly has a more powerful shot and cross. Husidic is an inch taller than Gerrard but isn’t as broad. Because he’s only 28-years-old, he’s probably more durable. Arena probably won’t play the kids: The Galaxy do have several academy kids who fit the mold of a central attacking midfielder. There’s Bradford Jamieson IV and Raul Mendiola. To a lesser extent there’s Ariel Lassiter (certainly more of an underneath striker than a No. 10). The thing is the Galaxy are in win now mode and Arena loves his veterans. He’s been very hesitant to play his kids, unlike most of MLS. This is a concern. Still, I’m not sure any of the kids would be remotely ready to take on that task. For a team rebuilding, it would be fine. Not for the league’s powerhouses. Not for a team expected to compete for trophies.
Listeners who have closely followed Iceland’s burgeoning black metal scene over the last decade know that there has been considerable cross-pollinization among bands in the vanguard of that surging movement. Sinmara is perhaps the best example, with a line-up that includes members of such other groups as Svartidauði, Slidhr, Wormlust, and Almyrkvi. Their 2014 debut album Aphotic Womb (which we had the privilege of premiering) was a gripping display of what such a creative collaboration could produce. Since then, Sinmara have released only one other song, “Ivory Stone”, which appeared on their split with Misþyrming early this year (reviewed here). But Sinmara now return with a new EP, and once again we’re fortunate to host its premiere. The new EP, consisting of three interconnected songs, is named Within the Weaves of Infinity. It will be released on August 24th by Terratur Possessions on vinyl and CD and by Oration on cassette tape. However, as of today it’s available digitally via Bandcamp. We have the full stream below, along with some impressions of the music and news of a forthcoming Sinmara tour. Aphotic Womb was an arresting album, but listening to Within the Weaves of Infinity gives the impression that Sinmara pushed themselves even harder this time, reaching for even greater heights, and the result is a terrifically dramatic and wholly immersive experience. The songs flow together, creating an almost relentlessly intense and spine-tingling suite of unearthly perils. The title of the EP itself seems to announce grand ambitions, and the music delivers on that promise. These are dense, pulse-pounding storms of sound — intricate, well-plotted, and gripping. The music is otherworldly in its atmosphere, creating a sense of grim pageantry, like a portrayal of an armageddon in which vast, superhuman forces rage in a final harrowing conflict. Though it would be misleading to call the music “symphonic”, it nevertheless brings to mind the grandeur, the power, and the richly textured tumult of an orchestra in a crescendo. As those familiar with Aphotic Womb well know, Sinmara make use of dissonance to create unnerving tension and mind-warping sensations of interdimensional terror. But here, the dissonance is not overpowering; the songs also include waves of sweeping harmonious melody, albeit melodies that are melancholy, bereaved, hopeless, and yet at times heart-swelling in their evocative force. Swirls of shimmering lead guitar provide glimpses of ethereal yet eerie beauty within the cyclonic tumult. In one of the few moments on the EP (in “Ormstunga”) when the music’s surge fully subsides, chiming notes ring out mystically and mysteriously; you still don’t feel like you’re standing on familiar solid earth, but you’re now peering through a different dimensional membrane. As on Aphotic Womb, the performance of the rhythm section on this EP is a standout. The drumming in particular is complex and often unexpected in its bursts of blasting and reverberating booms, while the deep flexing thrum of the bass enhances the sense that you have been brought within the presence of a storm — a storm that’s either building, raising the hair on your arms through the threatening electricity in the air, or a torrent that has fully broken open in a near-cacophonous fury. The vocals match the music’s intensity. These enraged howls, often rising into fiery cries of exultation, or perhaps manifestations of a splintering sanity, add fuel to the frenzy, augmenting the sensations of paranormal delirium that come at you across the breadth of the EP. Yet it’s worth repeating that there’s also something majestic and grand about this three-song trip, something “epic” that arches over all of it, a dimension of the experience that pulls you well out of yourself, beyond the soundscapes that are bleak, blasted, and hostile. It proves again that Sinmara are a force to be reckoned with. Within the Weaves of Infinity features artwork by Artem Grigoryev. It was produced by Stephen Lockhart at Studio Emissary. Pre-order links are below — and after our stream of the EP, check out the flyer for the Astral Maledictions Tour scheduled to run from November 30 through December 10, in which Sinmara will be joined by Sortilegia, Almyrkvi, and II. Check their Facebook page for further details about the tour. SINMARA on this recording: Ólafur Guðjónsson – Vocals Garðar S Jónsson – Guitars (Almyrkvi) Bjarni Einarsson – Drums (Slidhr, Wormlust) Þórir Garðarsson – Guitars (Svartidauði) Stephen Lockhart – Bass (Rebirth of Nefast) Pre-order (cassette): http://oration.bigcartel.com/product/preorder-sinmara-within-the-weaves-of-infinity-cassette-edition Pre-order (digital): https://sinmara.bandcamp.com/album/within-the-weaves-of-infinity Terratur Possessions: https://terraturpossessions.com/ Sinmara Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sinmaraofficial
Brisbane Roar FC has announced its partnership with The Coffee Club will not be renewed for the coming season. The club’s current front-of-shirt sponsorship deal with the organisation concluded on 30 June, 2015. The association between the Roar and The Coffee Club began in November 2007 and was one of the longest-running sponsorships in the Hyundai A-League. “Brisbane Roar Football Club has valued the support of The Coffee Club over many years,” the club’s chairman Chris Fong said. “Both organisations have shared many successes together and we thank The Coffee Club for their support as we both take on new challenges ahead.” The Coffee Club Director Emmanuel Drivas said that the national café network is proud to have been part of one of the most successful partnerships in Australian sport. “Today marks the end of a longstanding, successful relationship with the Brisbane Roar,” he said. Brisbane Roar FC is now considering new commercial partnerships for the 2015/16 Hyundai A-League season.
Clemson University researchers found that beer pong balls may carry dangerous bacteria, The Associated Press reported. The balls collected by student researchers from parties over one weekend found salmonella, listeria, E. coli and staph, according to the AP. The study found a high level of bacteria transferred to the beer when balls went into cups. For those unaccustomed to drinking games of the youth, beer pong is played by tossing ping pong balls across a table into cups of beer (sort of like the bucket game from Bozo the Clown). If one lands a ball in a cup, their opponent must drink the beer from the cup. Oh you mean those balls that get touched by hundreds of college students a night? Those round pieces of plastic that are rolled around in countless hands and bounce on disgusting frat house floors, sometimes rolling under the couch or into the bathroom? Those things are dirty you say? A hoax spread on the Internet in 2009 linked beer pong to herpes. That rumor started with news outlets picking up a fake story from a humor website, before it was eventually debunked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There is a small amount of good news for any devoted beer pong players: sickness is not guaranteed.
Seeking Justice for China’s ‘Underage Prostitutes’ BEIJING, China — Four and a half years ago in a small village on the outskirts of the coastal city of Yingkou in northern China, a woman stopped a 12-year-old girl outside the child’s school and lured her into a car. “If you don’t come with me, I will beat you every time I see you. You will not have any more good days in your life,” state media reported her saying. The woman and an accomplice allegedly used similar threats to bring seven other rural schoolgirls to a rented apartment. There, the girls were stripped, beaten, and kept in one locked room. Over 18 days in September 2011, they were taken to hotels and raped repeatedly by at least four men, including a retired local government official and a village head. The men reportedly paid the two kidnappers up to $270 each visit. The girls were beaten into submission and forced to watch and wait their turn, according to official media. State news agency Xinhua said that the youngest victim, a 12-year-old referred to in reports under the alias Yang Yun, knelt in front of her mother after police brought her home, bowed her head and said: “Mom, I was sold.” Five of the girls were between 14 and 17 years old; two other victims were just 13. But after the suspects’ arrest, they were not charged with kidnapping or rape, but instead with “engaging in sex with underage prostitutes,” a criminal classification that legal experts claimed had shamed the victims into silence. It is unclear whether the perpetrators were ever punished. Hundreds labeled as “prostitutes” in China have been exploited in similar ways, according to government statistics, although cases are likely underreported. Following years of lobbying from activists, Chinese lawmakers have finally struck out the controversial crime and reclassified it as rape. But China’s laws are still riddled with loopholes that allow perpetrators of sex crimes against children to escape justice. And the ongoing crackdown on human rights lawyers and civil society — including the Feb. 1 shuttering of Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center, the legal aid organization responsible for the campaign against the “underage prostitutes” classification — is only making things worse. China doesn’t regularly provide estimates of the number of children forced into sex work in the country, but police said they rescued more than 24,000 abducted women and children in 2011, many of whom were bound for prostitution rings. Child trafficking cases have been growing since 2001. There were 176 cases of underage sex crimes between the years 2000 and 2004 with 240 people sentenced, but in 2009 alone, authorities arrested 175 people in relation to underage sex crimes. Among these cases, those that involved an exchange of money were usually classified as “engaging in prostitution with an underage girl” rather than the more serious crime of rape. (No official breakdown of the cases is available.) A report from the UN-backed counter-trafficking group COMMIT found that rural girls and young women in China are especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation for profit or sale into marriage by traffickers. In an interview with Foreign Policy, veteran women’s rights activist Feng Yuan said it’s an “ugly problem fueled by the traditional belief that taking a girls’ virginity is like getting a trophy.” As Feng noted, “Men are willing to pay large sums for the opportunity.” Years later, the Yingkou case still troubles human rights lawyer Lü Xiaoquan, who was deputy director of Zhongze, the organization which led the push against the “underage prostitutes” designation, until its apparent forced closure on Feb. 1. When the pale, bespectacled 34-year-old took over representation for the girls in 2012, prosecutors in Liaoning province had already charged seven suspects with the crime of “engaging in prostitution with an underage girl.” The offense did not require a finding that the sex was nonconsensual. Legal scholar Duan Xiaosong described that crime in her 2014 study as one of the most controversial offenses in Chinese criminal law, since it suggests children could have the ability to freely choose sex work. When lawmakers rewrote key sections of China’s Criminal Law to introduce that offense in 1997, they originally intended to give better protections to underage girls involved in prostitution, thinking that they were too young to be punished even if they had agreed to sex work. Instead the measure created legal loopholes — like allowing a defendant to dodge culpability by claiming no knowledge of the victim’s underage status — that have helped offenders avoid harsh penalties, according to Duan. Sitting in a plastic chair in the cluttered office where he had worked since graduating from law school, Lü said the law’s wording made the Yingkou victims too ashamed to cooperate with police. “The girls were not prostitutes; they were child victims,” Lü said. But instead of seeking retribution, the girls’ families accepted compensation from the suspects to stay quiet. In the end, six of the girls received $1,575 each, one girl got $3,042, and Yang Yun, who was reportedly raped at least three times, was compensated $4,563. “After that they said they told me they didn’t need a lawyer anymore,” Lü said, with a shake of his head. “Even now I don’t know if the people who exploited them were punished for any crimes. I cannot find information online, and the victims’ parents tell me they don’t know the results of the case either,” Lü said. The older girls in the Yingkou case received less compensation from their attackers, probably because some laws in China have two categories for minors: those under the age of 14, and those aged 14 to 17. It’s a legal oddity that downplays the severity of offenses against girls in that middle range — the crime of “engaging in prostitution with an underage girl” only applied to offenses involving girls under the age of 14. Lü said a mother of a 14-year-old victim tried, unsuccessfully, to convince police that her daughter’s birth certificate was wrong and the girl was in fact 13 years old at the time of the kidnapping. It is unclear from media reports whether prosecutors filed any charges in relation to the rapes of five Yingkou girls aged 14 or older. The problem is long running. A case from 2008 had first raised wider public awareness and sparked a campaign to fix loopholes in sexual assault legislation. That year, Lu Yumin, a tax official in the southern city of Yibin, paid $912 to have sex with a 13-year-old virgin but initially escaped with only 15 days’ detention and a $760 court-ordered fine. After he was arrested and charged with “engaging in prostitution with an underage girl,” the man insisted that he had not known her true age. Soon Chinese news websites were awash in information about the case. Yibin police reportedly said that paying to have sex with an underage girl was not a crime as long as the offender is unaware of the child’s age and if the sex was “consensual.” The case enraged the public. Thousands of people discussed the case online, with many saying that the apparent loophole was “an insult to the intelligence of all Chinese people.” In August 2009, authorities surprisingly reversed course and a local district court sentenced the tax official to 10 years in prison for the crime of rape — not for sex with an underage prostitute. Buoyed by public support, Lü and other lawyers lobbied the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s pro forma legislature, to treat all sex with children as rape. They delivered proposals to lawmakers in 2010, 2013, and 2014, but these efforts failed to amend the law. Finally, in August 2015, the NPC approved the proposal to reclassify the crime of “sex with underage prostitutes” into rape. The previous maximum penalty for the crime was 15 years behind bars. With the new classification, the crime could mean life in prison, or in some cases, death. Advocates celebrated the decision, telling FP that it is a rare example of how years of advocacy can lead to legal reform. In November 2015, lawmakers also implemented another change to the criminal law to recognize male victims of sexual assault. This issue highlights the uneven legal reforms China has made in recent years. On the one hand, China’s leaders have shown a willingness to recognize that bad lawmaking has led to serious unintended consequences, and to make subsequent moves to fix loopholes and improve practices. On the other hand, the state appears to be working in overdrive to strike fear into human rights lawyers. Rights protections and grassroots advocacy have long carried serious risks in China, but since Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the situation has deteriorated even further. Since summer 2015, over 300 human rights lawyers and activists from across China have been detained, summoned by police, or have disappeared, according to the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group. Even Zhongze, which stood at the forefront of the campaign to banish the concept of the “underage prostitute,” was shuttered on Feb. 2016, likely a target of the government’s ongoing clampdown on civil society. Some advocates who lobbied on women’s rights issues formerly believed their work was less politically sensitive than causes like forced demolitions or religious freedom. But this changed in March 2015 when five Chinese feminists were arrested and jailed for over a month. The women were reportedly planning to distribute stickers featuring slogans against sexual assault, including a call for police to arrest sexual-harassment suspects. But the recent legal amendments still do not go far enough, said legal experts who spoke to FP. China has one of the lowest ages of consent in the world, at 14 years old. It is “usually the case” that someone who raped a 13-year-old will receive a harsher sentence than someone who raped a 14-year-old, said veteran criminal lawyer Chen Youxi. Activists find this distinction unacceptable, and point out that China is party to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which defines a child as anyone under the age of 18. “Young people really cannot freely ‘consent,’” said Jerome Cohen, professor and co-director of the US-Asia Law Institute at New York University School of Law. “One question to consider is whether the age should be higher than under 14.” Maya Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, also noted that rape carries a more lenient minimum sentence of three years, compared to the minimum five-year sentence for the defunct crime of “engaging in prostitution with an underage girl.” Even with tougher laws on the side of victims, Chinese police often lack the training and ability to help. “Police come into contact with many sex workers but often they are male officers, and they are not taking the time to talk to women and listen to their stories,” said Matt Friedman, an international human trafficking expert and CEO of the Mekong Club, which educates companies on how to identify signs of forced labor. Friedman said there are many other ways to reduce sexual violence, such as raising the minimum and maximum sentences for sexual offenses, setting up prevention systems in schools, and training police to better identify and assist victims of forced prostitution. “The mere improvement of the legislative framework should be seen as the starting point rather than the outcome,” said Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director for the U.K.-based NGO Amnesty International. As China’s clampdown on activists and human rights lawyers continues, there seems to be little momentum going forward to stop sex crimes against children. China is expected to pass a foreign NGO management law in 2016 that could block most local groups from receiving foreign funding, and more local organizations like Zhongze may see their sources of funding dry up or be forced to shut down as a result. Meanwhile, criminals are finding new ways to lure young victims. Last month in Fuqing, a city in the southeastern province of Fujian, a man who posed as a school principal and raped several underage girls was sentenced to only nine years in jail. When asked whether he would find ways to continue working in the future on cases like these, Lü said with what sounded like a forced laugh that he could not comment. “We are thinking about what we can do now,” he said. Top Image: One Yingkou victim hiding under a blanket in her home. Image Credit: Lü Xiaoquan. Correction, Feb. 3, 2016: China’s criminal law now recognizes male victims of sexual assault. A previous version of this article cited a November 2015 article in the state-run China Daily which said that the criminal law would recognize male victims of rape. The accuracy of that article has since come into question; portions of the above have been removed or updated accordingly.
What NetJets did for private jets, Donenfeld’s The Culinistas is doing for private chefs: making luxe affordable. For $300, plus groceries, her team of chefs cook eight personalized dishes that will last a week. The service is now available in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago and Donenfeld has expanded into cookbooks and television appearances. "In whatever incarnation tomorrow’s generation has its Martha Stewart-like role," says restaurateur Danny Meyer, "Jill Donenfeld is likely to play it." Maxime Bilet 29 Head Chef The Cooking Lab A young influential in the pool of food scientists and inventors. He co-wrote the 6-volume book,"Modernist Cuisine." Joe Campanale 27 Restaurateur Dell’anima, L’Artusi, and Anfora Opened first restaurant, Dell’anima, at age 23. Now also owns L’Artusi and a wine bar: Anfora. Formerly a sommelier. Gavin Chanin 25 Founder, Winemaker Chanin Wine Company Learned to make wine with Jim Clendenen at Au Bon Climat winery when he was 18. Melissa Elsen 28 Co-Founder Four & Twenty Blackbirds Co-owns and operates this unique Brooklyn pie shop with her sister. Danny Meyer is a fan. Kevin Gillespie 29 Executive Chef Woodfire Grill The Atlanta native was a fan favorite on Top Chef’s sixth season. Currently working on two cookbooks. Sam Gorenstein 27 Executive Chef The Raleigh Hotel The Rising Star Chef nominee has worked at Union Pacific, Centro and BLT Steak. Newest project is The Raleigh Hotel. Jonathan Grahm 27 Owner Compartes Chocolatier The "chocolate boy" (nickname given by Teri Hatcher) became a CEO at 15; now has 7 shops in Japan and upcoming wholsesale launch. Emma Hearst 25 Chef/Owner Sorella The youngest Iron Chef America competitor stays true to her Italian roots. Bobby Heugel 28 Owner Anvil Bar and Refuge The James Beard nominee and bev-master keeps a smart list of cocktails and concoctions in his bar. Nicolas Jammet, Nathaniel Ru, Jonathan Neman 26, 26, 27 Co-Founders Sweetgreen 3 Georgetown students started a fast-casual shop investing in a sustainable business practice. Now in 10 major cities. Jordan Kahn 28 Chef/Owner Red Medicine Took his first job at 17 at Thomas Keller's French Laundry, then joined Per Se's pastry team. Carlin Karr, Teague Moriarty, Matt McNamara 25, 28, 29 Wine Director, Chef/Owner, Chef/Owner Sons & Daughters Opened a SF restaurant in 2010 and already received a Michelin star. Greens plucked from private garden. Alan Kropf 28 Publisher/Founder Mutineer Magazine Runs a magazine that actually lives up to its name, causing mutiny in bev. culture. Lena Kwak 26 Chef/Co-Founder The French Laundry,Cup 4 Cup Partnered up with Thomas Keller to bring us “Cup 4 Cup” (healthy gluten-free flour—and guilt)! Luke Livingston 27 CEO Baxter Brewing Company The canned beer evangelist’s brewery sold nearly 5K barrels during its first year, and is still expanding. Aaron London 28 Executive Chef Ubuntu Restaurant The master of veggie cuisine staged at Daniel and Café Boulud before landing his "dream restaurant" at Ubuntu where he started as a sous chef. Brendan Marshall 28 CEO Kitchit MBA Stanford grad started a catering service for bespoke soirées. In private beta service with 1K users waiting in line. Thomas McNaughton 27 Chef/Owner Flour + Water Previous sous chef of SF's Gary Danko, Quince is now refining pizza, pasta with 2 ingredients: Flour + Water. Justin Morrison 27 Co-Founder Sightglass Coffee Opened SF-based coffeebar and roastery Sightglass in ‘08 with his brother, and now gaining a cultish following. Jennifer Pelka 29 Managing Editor Gilt Taste Founder of the ultra-hip Gastronomista.com; she now oversees the GiltTaste.com. Zach Pollack 27 Chef/Co-Owner Sotto He opened the OC's Pizzeria Ortica in '09 with Steve Samson. Now they've partnered again with LA's Sotto. Olivier Rassinoux 28 General Manager DBGB Kitchen and Bar The Boulud boot camper started as Floor Manager, then Maitre d’ at Bar Boulud before filling the GM position at DBGB. Mark Ramadan, Scott Norton 25, 25 Co-Founders Sir Kensington's Gourmet Scooping Ketchup The two made ketchup out of their Brown U dorms before fully launching in 2010. Currently sold in 1K+ restaurants. Jesse Schenker 29 Chef/Owner Recette Fusing French techniques with contemporary American dishes at Recette. Max Sussman 29 Chef de Cuisine Roberta's Published 1st cookbook after college, now doughing away at Roberta's, the 2 star pizzaria with a dash of Brooklyn spice. Alejandro Velez, Nikhil Arora 24, 24 Co-Founders Back To The Roots Started a business selling grow-your-own-mushroom kits using 1 million lbs of recycled coffee grounds. Justin Warner 27 Chef/Co-Owner Do or Dine Following Bed-Stuy Do or Dine motto, he left The Modern to open Bklyn "fine-diving" restaurant recognized by Michelin. James Watt, Martin Dickie 29 Co-Founders BrewDog Brewery Based in Scotland and inspired by U.S.-style brewing, the boys are restructuring the UK's craft beer revolution.
It's becoming increasingly clear that agencies like the NSA have been collecting information on American citizens as they try to monitor international communications, and according to a recent report the CIA is doing the same thing with financial transactions. The Wall Street Journal reports that the CIA has been building a large database of international money transactions in its efforts to track the funding of terrorist organizations across the globe. The activities are sanctioned by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but much like the recent revelations about online address books, US citizens are getting caught in the middle. The program collects records from international money transfers, but that includes those that either begin or end in the United States. As such, financial and personal data for Americans sending money abroad is swept into the database. In some cases Social Security numbers may even be collected, though according to the report transactions that are solely between parties in the US are not part of the program. The resulting database then works like other similar operations we've come to learn about in recent months: after the information is collected in bulk from participating companies, information on US individuals is masked under a court-ordered mandate unless individuals have been deemed to be of important to the foreign intelligence community. It operates under Section 215 of the Patriot Act According to the Journal, the program was instigated in the wake of the September 11th attacks, when it was discovered that terrorists had moved around $300,000 into US-based accounts without raising any red flags. It was then institutionalized in 2006, and now operates under Section 215 of the Patriot Act — one of the statutes at the heart of the NSA's surveillance operations. Former government officials tell the Journal that the collection program has helped discover relationships between terrorists, but that's not likely to provide much comfort to Americans who are concerned that their government has been reaching too far.
Those of you who have noticed will have noticed, eventually, that I have been increasingly focused on my theory of the trans-brain which says – if I may avoid nomenclature for a minute – that your brain is everywhere. My theory was originally stated here, gained momentum thanks to the New York Times here, saw the desperation of its opponents here, and was supported by a budding neurophilosopher here. Instead of continuing to focus on the present and future, I think it is important for me to show how my theory is grounded in the scientific tradition. Two views of the brain dominated the pre-, during-, and post-Englightenment period. One was defended by Descartes and Newton. The other view was developed by someone no one has heard of, Thomas Reid. Thomas Reid pointed out that the Descartes of the world believe that the brain has things in it that it perceives. In other words: I am not seeing a tree in the world, I am seeing a tree in my brain. That’s what the Descartes and Newtons think. To this, Reid issued a resounding “Nein!” Allow me to quote Reid. [T]he brain has been dissected times innumerable by the nicest anatomists; every part of it examined by the naked eye, and with the help of microscopes; but no vestige of an image of any external object was ever found. The brain seems to be the most improper substance that can be imagined for receiving or retaining images, being a soft moist medullary substance” (Inquiry into the Intellectual Powers of the Human Mind II, iv [256b], quoted in another book, pg. 80). The other book goes on to quote Reid again: “We are so far from perceiving images in te brain, that we do not perceive our brain at all; nor would any man ever have known that he had a brain, if anatomy had not discovered, by dissection, that the brain is a constituent part of the human body” (ibid ibid, ibid [257a], quoted in ibid, pg. ibid). Do simulacrums of my pathbreaks get any more fortuitous? Gleaming from these difficult passages are truths Reid gleaned which were far ahead of his, as it was, Sits im Leben. First, Reid is quite right that the brain is unsuited to receive images. We know from the theory of the trans-brain, and from an elementary application of Pascal’s razor, that it is quite enough to say that the eyes are what see objects. It is remarkable that Reid was able to know this through pure reason alone. We today only know it because animal rights organizations have allowed us to experiment on dogs and rats, which have remarkably similar visual systems to apes, which are similar to us. The transitive genomic principle will get you the rest of the way. Anyhoozle, Reid points out that we really don’t perceive “our brain” at all – because we use it itself to perceive! The subject of perceiving cannot be its own object, according to the widely accepted Universal Grammar. Yet – and here Reid reveals himself as a scathing rhetoricalist – because of “anatomy” we now “know” we have brains, which are “constituent part[s] of the human body”! Reid’s point is this: If the brain is a mere constituent of the human body, and perception happens in brains looking at themselves, and yet this is impossible, then we can’t actually see! But we couldn’t see anyway because we’re really just looking at our brains! But if we are looking at our brains, then we can see after all! But if we can see, then it can’t be with our brains! But if it is not with our brains, and it is with our brains, then our brains must be more than we have supposed them to be. Hence, if I may return to the vulgar colloquial, your brain is everywhere. For those of you who don’t understand words, here is a zenn diagram of the differences between Reid and his discontents. Advertisements
By: Associated Press April 15, 2016 DEBARY, Fla. (AP) -- A Florida man was arrested after deputies say he hanged his mother's dog from a tree and threatened to commit suicide during an eight-hour standoff. Volusia County Sheriff's deputies say 24-year-old David Rivera was arrested Thursday and jailed on a $2,000 bond. Online records didn't indicate whether he has a lawyer. According to a news release, when police responded to Rivera's home, his mother told them she had been arguing with him and telling him he would have to move out if he didn't find a job. She said during the argument, Rivera hanged her 5-year-old Chihuahua from a tree using a dog chain. Rivera then climbed 30 feet up the tree and tied a metal cable around his neck and a tree limb and threatened to jump. He eventually surrendered.
Louisiana State Rep John Labruzzo (R) has introduced “feticide” legislation to ban all abortion in his state and sentence women and doctors who violate the ban to 15 years hard labor. The law would make no exceptions for cases of danger to the health of the mother, incest or rape, and would essentially be an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade in the state of Louisiana. In previous attempts to manipulate, penalize and reward women’s reproductive choices, Labruzzo has also suggested Louisiana law should pay poor women to be sterilized and well-to-do women to crank out more financially secure kids into the American gene-pool. From the New Orleans Times-Picayune: Worried that welfare costs are rising as the number of taxpayers declines, state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, said Tuesday he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied… It also could include tax incentives for college-educated, higher-income people to have more children, he said. Julie Mickelberry, spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of the Gulf Coast, denounced Labruzzo’s actions as sham politics, intended not really to impact local law, but to give legal ammo to anti-choice groups in a federal setting: “The bill is purely political. It’s not at all about preventing abortion—he said it himself…his intention is to give anti-choice groups a bill they can take to court.” Related Stories: Pregnant Woman Who Attempted Suicide Now Charged With Murder Pregnany? South Dakota Proposes Mandatory CPC Counseling Prior To Abortion The Republicans’ War On Women Photo credit: dreamstime
The room is dim. Four musicians tinker with their instruments as a fifth, the front man, walks onstage. A slight but noticeable crescendo accompanies his entrance. He is tall with a strong build. A large paper mache head rests on his broad shoulders, covering his face and giving him a nondescript expression. This is Frank. Frank feels for a cable around the microphone stand and connects it to the head. As he begins a cult-like incantation over the increasingly chaotic froth of sound, we can’t help but expect something to happen befitting his strange appearance. But at the moment we think the scene will meet our anticipation, the sound system overloads and sparks fly out from the amplifiers. This moment sums up Frank. At times it feels like it should be sweeping in scope, but ultimately the film exists on a far smaller and more intimate scale. Its narrative meanders and its off-center nature is often darkly hilarious. Director Lenny Abrahamson and co-writers Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan play with a frenetic emotional spectrum, sometimes jumping sharply between bleak and bright beats. That fake head’s appearance remains unchanged throughout the film. Underneath, Michael Fassbender is left with only his shoulders to express himself. The slightest slump reveals a devastating shift in feeling. He sinks deep into Frank’s elusive demons and adds an affecting duality to the mysterious character. His deadpan earnestness is wonderfully ridiculous and strangely engaging. Domhnall Gleeson is our proxy as Jon, an office worker and aspiring musician. The film’s opening sequence masterfully establishes his character. We see him stare out at the ocean, mouth closed, as his voiceover makes stumbling attempts at songwriting. When Jon walks through his town, he continues to throw these lyrical ideas at the fourth wall to see what sticks. Talk about “show, don’t tell.” By cinematic happenstance, Jon meets Don (Scoot McNairy), the manager of a little-known band with the barely-pronounceable name “Soronprfbs.” After their keyboard player’s suicide attempt, the band looks for someone to replace him. Jon rapidly accepts. They go to a secluded cabin in the woods where they spend nearly a year recording the band’s ostensible masterpiece. Jon schemes to make it their big break. The increasingly ridiculous hashtags he affixes to tweets about the band’s progress are a welcome humorous spice. Frank moves meditatively through its 95 minutes. Abrahamson understandably spends most of his time, and ours, focusing on the titular character’s eccentric creative process. The role requires much of Michael Fassbender, whose recognizable face is covered for nearly the entirety of the film, leaving Frank to start literally describing his hidden facial expressions. When we finally do see beneath the giant paper mache head, the effect is neither shocking nor comforting. The transition is seamless thanks to Fassbender’s commendable consistency. He carries Frank’s enigmatic persona with physicality, expertly conveying emotion through the slightest changes in body language. Gleeson is equally compelling in his perhaps too-familiar role as a fame-hungry everyman, but it’s Maggie Gyllenhaal who cuts deepest. As Clara, the band’s foul-mouthed synth and theremin player, she easily owns all of her scenes. Her acting is fittingly subtle for a character who obsessively controls nearly everyone around her. Her absolute commitment to getting what she wants manifests in the film’s funniest and most surprising scene. But for its ending, which all too dismissively sweeps an important issue of mental illness under the rug, Frank offers an affecting window into the artistic mind. The denouement fails to fully acknowledge this serious undercurrent running throughout, and in so shrugging loses some of its heft. That lapse isn’t enough to offset the film’s unique charm. Frank drops a few threads too abruptly, but like any good performer, it left me wanting more. Movie Verdict: Win Score: 92% ~ Nate This article was published in its original form in The Massachusetts Daily Collegian on September 11, 2014.
In an interview, Mr. Mahaney said stock-based compensation could “distort the quality” of a company’s earnings and “make them look stronger than they are.” Mr. Mahaney has identified Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Alibaba as among the tech companies that are highly dependent on stock to pay their employees. In a report, he wrote that Twitter’s stock-based compensation over the last two years accounted for 39 percent of the company’s revenue, on average, the highest percentage of any Internet company. LinkedIn, whose share price is down about 48 percent this year, did not respond to requests for comment. Twitter, whose stock is down more than 20 percent this year, also did not respond to a request for comment. Another tech company that Wall Street analysts are examining for its stock-based compensation expenses is Workday, which sells human resources and financial management software. The company is expected to increase its stock compensation about 48 percent in its 2017 fiscal year, which is faster than its revenue is projected to grow, according to Sarah Hindlian, an analyst at Macquarie Group. In an illustration of how stock-based compensation expenses can affect a company’s results, Ms. Hindlian says Workday’s margins are projected to be around negative 25 percent for fiscal year 2017. But when the company’s $370 million in stock-based compensation is excluded from results, its operating margins are much better, coming in around zero. Workday’s heavy reliance on stock-based compensation has been a factor in Ms. Hindlian’s projections for the company’s share price. Last month, she forecast that Workday’s stock would trade at $49, down from its current price of about $77. She has a sell recommendation on the stock. Ms. Hindlian says that while it can be reasonable for companies to pay workers a lot in stock, the practice can become scary when the stock starts to fall. “Particularly with software companies, you run the risk of losing your leading salespeople, engineers and developers when the stock falls, because employees feel like they’re getting a pay cut,” said Ms. Hindlian, who also rang the alarm on LinkedIn’s use of stock-based compensation over a year ago.
It is not at all clear that Obama particularly wants Clinton’s advice about how to win the presidency, but many Democrats believe it is increasingly clear that he could use it. Bill Clinton's advice to Barack Obama There they were in Harlem on Thursday, the 42nd president and the Democrat who hopes to be the 44th, for a two-hour lunch hour chat at Bill Clinton’s office. It is not at all clear that Barack Obama particularly wants Clinton’s advice about how to win the presidency — after all, he kept the former president at a cool distance, with just occasional phone calls, for months — but many Democrats believe it is increasingly clear that he could use it. Story Continued Below The fact that Obama is even with or behind John McCain despite so many favorable trends for Democrats shows that there is still plenty he could learn from the master — the political Houdini who is the only Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win two terms. We do know that Clinton was happy to share his thoughts. He recently offered 10 minutes of “here’s what Obama needs to do” wisdom while standing in the popcorn line with someone he just met at a New York movie theater, according to one Democrat privy to the conversation. The Clinton-Obama meeting was closed. We don’t know for sure what they said. But it is not hard to make an educated guess. Here, based on 16 years experience watching Bill Clinton campaign — and interviews with a half-dozen veterans of his political teams — is a reasonably safe bet about his campaign advice to Barack Obama: 1. Don’t make this about you. Clinton is always skeptical of politicians who try to win races on the basis of their life story or supposed personal virtues. Those can be nice side dishes (“The Man from Hope”) but they can’t be the main entrée. Voters just don’t care that much about you. They care about themselves and what you will do for them. Clinton believes, plausibly, that this is why he emerged from sex scandals and all manner of other controversies with his job approval ratings intact. “What Bill Clinton always told me is, ‘If we make this about their lives instead of mine, we’ll be better off,'” recalled Paul Begala, who served as strategist in the 1992 election and the second-term White House. “It’s always about the voters, never about the candidates.” What’s more, the politics of biography can turn in an instant, as happened to John F. Kerry in 2004 when what was supposed to be an asset — Kerry’s Vietnam service — was turned into a distraction and even liability by the Swift Boat Veterans. Clinton thinks Obama has erred by putting too much focus on himself and on his supposedly transformational brand of politics — it’s too airy, and it puts him at risk of being branded a hypocrite when, as inevitably happens, he needs to play rough. 2. Define yourself through policies — yours and theirs. Clinton would often dismiss proposed speech drafts handed him by his staff writers with a mocking phrase, “Words, words, words!” He has never thought much of Obama’s rhetoric-driven campaign. While Obama has plenty of policy proposals, there are not many that he has managed to make recognizable signatures, the way Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it” in 1992. Most people know Obama claims to represent “Change you can believe in.” But Clinton believes people won’t believe him — or any politician — unless change is defined with specificity. That means describing, in language that sounds plausible rather than partisan, what you believe in versus what the other guy believes in. 3. Have more fun. Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton are both obsessed with how — as they see it — Republicans have perfected the art of the bogus attack, the distracting wedge issue, “the politics of personal destruction.”
Life is a game. This is your strategy guide 682k shares Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Real life is the game that – literally – everyone is playing. But it can be tough. This is your guide. Basics You might not realise, but real life is a game of strategy. There are some fun mini-games – like dancing, driving, running, and sex – but the key to winning is simply managing your resources. Most importantly, successful players put their time into the right things. Later in the game money comes into play, but your top priority should always be mastering where your time goes. Childhood Life begins when you’re assigned a random character and circumstances: The first 15 years or so of life are just tutorial missions, which suck. There’s no way to skip these. Young adult stage As a young player, you’ll have lots of time and energy, but almost no experience. You’ll find most things – like the best jobs, possessions and partners – are locked until you get some. This is the time to level up your skills quickly. You will never have so much time and energy again. Now that you’re playing properly, your top priority is to assign your time as well as possible. Every single thing you do affects your state and your skills: This may sound simple, but the problem is you won’t always know what tasks to choose, and your body won’t always obey your commands. Let’s break it down. How to obey your own commands Many players find that when they choose to do something – say “go to the gym” – their body ignores them completely. This is not a bug. Everybody has a state, which you can’t see directly, but looks something like this: If your state gets too low in one area, your body will disobey your own instructions until your needs are met. Try studying when you’re exhausted and hungry, and watch your concentration switch to Twitter. Your willpower level is especially important. Willpower fades throughout the day, and is replenished slightly by eating, and completely by a good night’s sleep. When your willpower is low, you are only able to do things you really want to. Every decision you have to make costs willpower, and decisions where you have to suppress an appealing option for a less appealing one (e.g. exercise instead of watch TV) require a lot of willpower. There are various tricks to keep your behaviour in line: Keep your state high. If you’re hungry, exhausted, or utterly deprived of fun, your willpower will collapse. Ensure you take consistently good care of yourself. Don’t demand too much willpower from one day. Spread your most demanding tasks over multiple days, and mix them in with less demanding ones. Attempt the most important tasks first. This makes other tasks more difficult, but makes your top task more likely. Reduce the need to use willpower by reducing choices. If you’re trying to work on a computer that can access Facebook, you’ll need more willpower because you’re constantly choosing the hard task over the easy one. Eliminate such distractions. A key part of playing the game is balancing your competing priorities with the state of your body. Just don’t leave yourself on autopilot, or you’ll never get anything done. Choosing the right tasks Choosing the right tasks at the right time is most of the game. Some tasks mostly affect your state, e.g. Others mostly affect your skills: You need to put time into things that ensure a healthy state – like food and sleep – to keep your willpower high. And then you need to develop your skills with what you have left. Some skills are more valuable than others. Good ones can open up whole paths like a tech tree: Others are dead ends: Combinations of skills are the most effective. It’s very hard to max out one skill to be the best – in fact, that’s often impossible. But it’s much easier to get pretty decent at lots of related skills that amount to something bigger, e.g. See how psychology just helped you become both rich and attractive? You should study that. Where you live Your environment has a constant impact on your stats, skills, and your chances of levelling up. It’s possible to play the game well almost anywhere, but it’s a lot easier in certain places. If you’re female and in the wrong country, for example, you can’t unlock many achievements. The odds of anyone being born in their optimal location are virtually zero, so research your options, and consider moving early. Location is a multiplier to all of your skills and states. Finding a partner Attraction is a complex mini-game in itself, but mostly a byproduct of how you’re already playing. If you have excellent state and high skills, you’re far more attractive already. A tired, irritable, unskilled player is not appealing, and probably shouldn’t be looking for a relationship. Early in the game it can be common to reject and be rejected by other players. This is normal, but unfortunately it can drain your state, as most players don’t handle rejection or rejecting well. You’ll need to expend willpower to keep going, and willpower is replenished by sleep, so give it time. 80% of finding someone comes down to being your most attractive self, which – like so much in life – just means putting your time in the right places. If you’re exercising, socialising, well nourished and growing in your career, you will radiate attraction automatically. The remaining 20% is simply putting yourself in places where you can meet the right people. Money money money Later in the game you’ll have to manage a new resource called ‘money’. Most players will find money increases throughout the early game, but that this actually introduces more problems, not less. The most important rule of money is never to borrow it, except for things that earn you more back. For example, education or a mortgage can be worthwhile (but are not necessarily so, depending on the education or the mortgage). Borrowing to buy new shoes is not. Depending on your financial ambitions, here are a few strategies to bear in mind: Not fussed about money. The low-stress strategy: simply live within your means and save a little for a rainy day. Be sure to make the best of all the time you save though, or you’ll regret it. Well off. Choose a career and environment carefully, and be prepared to move often to move up. You’ll need to invest heavily in matching skills, which will cost you time, and be careful not to abuse your state or you’ll burn out. Mega rich. Start your own business. It’s almost impossible to get rich working for someone else. Riches do not come from work alone, they come from owning things – assets – that pay back more than they cost, and your own company is a powerful asset you can create from scratch. Compound your winnings into more assets, and eventually they can remove your need to work at all. Later life Your options change as the game progresses. Marriage and children will reduce your time and energy, and introduce more random elements into the game (“Emergency diaper change!”). This makes it harder to develop yourself as quickly. Older characters usually have more skills, resources and experience, unlocking quests that were previously impossible, like “owning a house”, or “writing a (good) novel”. All players die after about 29,000 days, or 80 years. If your stats and skills are good, you might last a little longer. There is no cheat code to extend this. At the start of the game, you had no control over who you were or your environment. By the end of the game that becomes true again. Your past decisions drastically shape where you end up, and if you’re happy, healthy, fulfilled – or not – in your final days there’s far less you can do about it. That’s why your strategy is important. Because by the time most of us have figured life out, we’ve used up too much of the best parts. Now you’d best get playing. Enjoyed this? Get future posts emailed to you. Keep reading
Israeli border police shot dead a Palestinian who stabbed an officer in Jerusalem on Sunday (November 29), a police spokesman said, the latest attack in a two-month wave of violence. Near a main gate of Jerusalem’s walled Old City, the Palestinian pulled out a knife and stabbed a border policeman in the neck, moderately wounding him, before being shot by officers, the spokesman said. “Moments ago, Israeli police officers responded to a terrorist attack that took place by a 38-year old Palestinian man who stabbed an Israeli border police officer in the area. The terrorist was shot and killed at the scene,” Israeli police spokesperson Mickey Rosenfeld said. Almost daily Palestinian stabbings, car rammings and shootings have killed 19 Israelis and one U.S. citizen since October 1. Israeli forces have killed 94 Palestinians, many of whom were carrying out assaults and others in clashes with police and troops. Many of those killed have been teenagers. Palestinian allegations that Israel was trying to alter the religious status quo at a Jerusalem holy site, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, where al-Aqsa mosque stands, and to Jews as the Temple Mount, have partly fuelled the violence. Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A Palestinian man who allegedly stabbed an Israeli policeman, was killed on Sunday at the Damascus Gate of East Jerusalem's Old City. Non-Muslim prayer is banned around al-Aqsa and Israel has said it will not change that. But more visits in recent years by Jewish religious activists and ultra-nationalist Israeli politicians to the complex, where two biblical temples once stood, have done little to convince the Palestinians. Overnight in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, Israeli forces shut down and confiscated equipment from a Palestinian radio station, the third in recent weeks, that the military said, "has repeatedly broadcasted content which promotes and encourages terror and acts of violence against Israeli civilians and security forces." The station owner, Talab al-Jabar, told Reuters that the broadcaster, called Dream, was not inciting, rather reporting on events. "They want to shut down the free voice and to shut down the Palestinian media. In their statement they say that we are radios that incite people, if they see that we are inciting when we cover everything they do against our Palestinian nation so we are inciting. I can tell you that 'Dream' radio will be back on air very soon and it will be stronger," he said.
Former welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre, who vacated his title to take an indefinite break in 2013, has signed an agreement to return to the UFC. On Friday, UFC president Dana White told the Los Angeles Times that St-Pierre, 35, signed the deal on Thursday after a lengthy negotiating process. The deal reunites the UFC with one of its most consistent pay-per-view draws. Editor's Picks Who should Georges St-Pierre face in his return fight? With Georges St-Pierre set to return to UFC in 2017, should he face Michael Bisping, Conor McGregor, Anderson Silva or someone else? Brett Okamoto breaks down the best and most sensible options. "He's back. I'm excited," White told the Times. "We worked at it for a long time and finally got it done." St-Pierre (25-2), the longest-reigning 170-pound champion in UFC history, hasn't fought in 39 months, since his split-decision victory over Johny Hendricks at UFC 167. He walked away following the grueling and disputed win, citing a need for time off while questioning the UFC's drug-testing policies. In July 2015, the UFC introduced a policy enforced by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). A return date and opponent have not yet been announced. White mentioned the winner of the UFC 209 welterweight title rematch between champion Tyron Woodley and Stephen Thompson as a possible foe for St-Pierre. He also mentioned middleweight champion Michael Bisping, who claimed last October that he verbally agreed to the fight, forcing White to shut down the rumor. White also teased that St-Pierre has talked about the possibility of cutting down to 155 pounds. Georges St-Pierre had a 12-fight winning streak when he took an indefinite break in 2013. He hasn't lost since 2007. Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images St-Pierre previously announced his intentions to return last July, but a new deal was never finalized. In October, GSP publicly stated he had terminated his existing contract with the UFC and announced himself as a free agent, citing a breach of contract for the promotion not offering him a fight. Hours later, the UFC responded and claimed that he remained under contract. The two sides appeared to grow further apart in November, when St-Pierre joined former Bellator MMA CEO Bjorn Rebney and a group of fellow fighters in publicly aligning with the Mixed Martial Arts Athletes Association (MMAAA). White told the Times that two friends of St-Pierre's played a key role in brokering the deal in recent days. The Times identified the individuals as boxing coach Freddie Roach and St-Pierre's CAA agent, Nick Khan. St-Pierre, a native of Quebec, has worn the UFC's welterweight crown on two occasions. He was on a 12-fight winning streak when he walked away and hasn't lost since a 2007 first-round knockout to Matt Serra, widely considered among the greatest upsets in UFC history. St-Pierre avenged that loss three fights later.
Image copyright AP Image caption Turkey insists there is no need to let the Syrians in Officials in the EU have urged Turkey to let in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees trapped on its border at Kilis after fleeing fighting. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said there was a moral, if not legal, duty to provide protection. Turkey says the refugees are receiving food and shelter inside Syria and there is no need to allow them to cross. About 35,000 Syrians have fled a Syrian government offensive on rebel-held positions near Aleppo. Ms Mogherini said the EU was providing funding to Turkey to make sure it had the "means, the instruments, the resources to protect and to host people that are seeking asylum". In November, the EU clinched a deal with Turkey, offering it €3bn (£2.3bn; $3.3bn) to care for Syrian refugees on Turkish soil. Ms Mogherini's call was echoed by EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn and Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders, whose country currently holds the EU presidency. "I look at these images of people standing at the Turkish border and I just wanted to underline the message people who are in humanitarian need should be allowed in," said Mr Koenders. However Kilis governor Suleyman Tapsiz said the move was not necessary. "Our doors are not closed but at the moment there is no need to host such people inside our borders," he said. Turkey already hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees - 2.5 million. In the past few days, the Syrian army - backed by Russian air strikes - has made a series of gains around Aleppo, Syria's largest city. On Thursday, 60 donor countries meeting in London pledged billions of dollars to ease the plight of Syrian refugees. About 4.6 million people have fled Syria since the civil war began in 2011. Another 13.5 million are said to be in need of humanitarian assistance inside the country. The Syrian war and Aleppo March 2011: Anti-government protests erupt across Syria, but Aleppo is initially untouched as a result of a state crackdown February 2012: As the rebellion turns into a conflict, clashes between rebels and the government are reported with increasing frequency in Aleppo province July 2012: The battle for Aleppo begins. Rebels make swift advances, but are unable to consolidate their gains and the city becomes divided 2013: The government begins bombarding rebel districts with barrel bombs, causing thousands of casualties September 2015: Syria launches a fresh offensive in the wake of Russia's intervention in the conflict February 2016: The government captures towns north of Aleppo, threatening to encircle the city Aleppo profile
Ice Age Co-Stars: Horses, Camels And Cheetahs Mammoths and saber-toothed cats may be the most famous beasts of the Ice Age. But they shared the prairie with horses and camels, too—both of which evolved in North America and crossed the ice bridge into Eurasia, before disappearing here. Matthew Kohn and Christopher Hill talk about the lesser-known fauna of the Ice Age. IRA FLATOW, HOST: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're broadcasting live from Boise, Idaho. And Idaho, you may not know, is not only famous for its potatoes. Just a couple of hours from here are the Hagerman Fossil Beds, where the skulls and skeletons of hundreds of early horses have been dug up. These fossils are the earliest known examples of the equus genus, relatives of today's zebras and horses and donkeys. And that's right - horses evolved here in the grasslands of North America before going extinct here also. But they weren't alone. There were a lot of unusual creatures roaming around North America during the Ice Age, ones you don't hear much about, as much as the mammoths and the saber-toothed cats. Did you know that camels lived here too, alongside supersized bison, American lions that are bigger than the African lions, and cheetahs. And this is safari-quality stuff. But you'd have to be a caveman to have gone on safari in those days because many of those large beasts disappeared around 10,000 years ago, just as humans were entering upon the scene. Were they hunted to extinction? Where did they go? Killed off by disease? Or could the culprit have been then climate change also? And why did most of the large mammals die out where the small ones lived on to modern-day time? Just a few of the mysteries about our North American fauna, and that's what we'll be talking about for the rest of the hour. We won't be taking calls today, but if you're here in the audience, I invite you to step up to the mic and ask a question. You can also tweet us @scifri at S-C-I-F-R-I, and go to our website at sciencefriday.com, where you'll find links to the topic, and you can leave a message also. Let me introduce my guests. Matthew Kohn is a distinguished professor in the Department of Geosciences here at Boise State University. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY. MATTHEW KOHN: Thanks Ira, pleasure to be here. FLATOW: You're welcome. Christopher Hill is associate dean of the Graduate College at Boise State University. He's also associate professor of anthropology here. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY. CHRISTOPHER HILL: Thank you, Ira. FLATOW: You know, this is - this I think is certainly knew. When we were talking about topics we were going to talk about when we came to Boise, is talking about the menagerie of animals, Christopher, that were here at one point. You always hear about the mammoths and the saber-toothed cats, but there's a whole lot of other stuff like camels here. HILL: Sure, there were both plant-eaters like camels and bison. Down in Idaho we had musk ox and caribou. So there were a lot of plant-eaters, and then there were meat-eaters like saber-tooth cats. FLATOW: So you mean the camel was here before it was out there in the desert in another continent in the Middle East? HILL: Sure, the camel evolved in North America. It started off as something about the size of a rabbit about 20, 40 million years ago, and over time the population's changed, and it became even larger than the kinds of camels we see today. So there were gigantic camels for a while. And then around 11,000 years ago camels disappeared in North America. FLATOW: Did they go someplace? (LAUGHTER) FLATOW: I mean... HILL: They became fossils. FLATOW: They became fossils, and you have found those fossils of the camels. HILL: Yes, so we found examples of camels in Southern Idaho and in Montana, and they're connected with all these other animals you were talking about. FLATOW: Did they evolve into the camels that you see in other parts of the world? HILL: Sure, so they spread across probably from Alaska to Siberia and into Asia and then became the different types of camels we see all over the world. FLATOW: Wow. Matthew Kohn, you've studied the horses from the Hagerman Fossil Beds. Tell about that. It must be very exciting. You found a lot of stuff in that bed. KOHN: Well, one of the things I do, my specialty is really in stable isotope geochemistry. FLATOW: What? KOHN: Stable isotope geochemistry. And so what we do is we analyze the ratio of stable isotopes of oxygen and carbon to learn something about the ecosystems and the plants that were living in the area at the time. So what we analyze are scraps of tooth enamel, and they're tooth enamel from these different animals that lived here. Some of them are from Hagerman horse. There were also some camels, mastodon. We've analyzed some beavers as well. FLATOW: And these are all found in this one spot? What makes that spot so special that all of these fossils were found? KOHN: Well it's one of the more fossiliferous localities in the... FLATOW: We keep doing these F-things, I'm going to run out of... (LAUGHTER) FLATOW: Why would they be all there in that one spot? KOHN: Well, those particular kinds of sediments turn out to be quite fossiliferous. Hagerman has an extremely well-exposed sequence of sedimentary rocks. They're all about three to four million years old. And there is one particular locality, the Hagerman Horse Quarry, where hundreds of horses were discovered, their fossils were discovered back in the late 1920s, early 1930s. FLATOW: And how does the Hagerman Horse fit in with the modern horses and zebras of today? KOHN: Yeah, it is the earliest representative of the genus equus. So you have to think about horses. There used to be many, many different genera of horses across North America. There are individual localities in - from about 14 or 15 million years ago, where there will be seven or eight different genera of horses, not just species, but these are the actual genera, whereas today we only have one genus, the genus equus. So these genera evolve, and over time the genus equus evolved. Hagerman is the earliest representative, as far as I know, of the genus equus, and from that genus then spread out all of the different species of equus. FLATOW: So the big mystery, we had the horses, we had lions that were bigger than lions in Africa, Christopher? HILL: That's right. FLATOW: Giant lions, how big? HILL: About 20 percent bigger than the African lion. And there were other kinds of large cats. FLATOW: Such as? HILL: There was a saber-toothed cat. FLATOW: We call it the saber-toothed tiger, right? Is that a... HILL: Please don't say that. (LAUGHTER) FLATOW: I won't say that. HILL: So there's another saber-toothed cat called homotherium, and we've found examples of that. And besides the American lion, there's also a puma, but it looks sort of like a cheetah, so it's sometimes called the American cheetah. FLATOW: And they all disappeared about 10,000 years ago, and that's the big mystery of where they went - they became fossils - and what happened to them. And your theory is about what happened. HILL: Well, it's an important experiment we have in the natural history to look at these examples of animals that went extinct and to try to figure out what might have been the reasons why they went extinct. And the two big reasons, usually, that are discussed are either changes in the environment, like global warming events or global cooling events, or also predation, like.. FLATOW: Hunters. HILL: Hunters. And one example of that would be over-hunting by humans. FLATOW: These were the Clovis people? HILL: In North America, the old Stone Age people that lived right at the end of the Ice Age are called the Clovis people, based on an archaeological site in Clovis, New Mexico, where the first spear point was found with mammoth, mammoth bones. FLATOW: Would it be that they suddenly learned how to be better hunters? HILL: Well, so one argument is that there was a human population, a small human population here, maybe before 11 or 12 thousand years ago, but they didn't know how to use spear points to hunt these large animals, and then around 11,000 years ago that population learned how to use spear points, these large spear points, to hunt the animals. FLATOW: Matthew, you were shaking your head about all of this. KOHN: Oh, absolutely, yeah. Those are the two hypotheses: rapid climate change, changes in the environment or ecosystems, and then over-hunting by humans. I should say not all of the large animals went extinct, right? We still have deer, we still have moose, we still have antelopes, and they lived back in the same time period that all of these - you know, we consider them exotic animals - were living here too. FLATOW: The bison were living back then, right? Why didn't they get hunted for extinction if they were hunting? KOHN: Well, we almost did, didn't we? (LAUGHTER) FLATOW: Well, that was just 100 years or so ago, right? KOHN: Well, that's true. FLATOW: But they were a little heartier, maybe, Christopher? HILL: There are some examples, or many examples, of bison kills connected with a time right after Clovis, called the Folsom Period, around 10,500. And that was - most of those sites connected with Folsom are connected with bison, whereas Clovis sites are connected with mammoths. But the bison is an example of an animal that probably came to North America between two and one hundred thousand years ago and then survived in different versions until about 11,000 years ago. So it went through different climate change episodes, and then right around 11,000 years ago, apparently there was a bottleneck, a decrease in the population. The numbers of bison and all the bison that live in North America now are from a group that was a fairly small group that almost went extinct around 11,000 years ago. FLATOW: Quick question before the break, yes. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Ira, I think you're wonderful, first of all. Thanks for coming to Boise. Can families take their children to Hagerman to see the fossils that you have explored? HILL: You can certainly go to Hagerman Fossil Beds, and you know, it's a public area. You can walk around. But in general, the fossil localities themselves are not open to the public. And in general, all federal lands are prohibited from vertebrate fossil collection. Private lands, of course you talk to a landowner, but federal lands are generally protected. FLATOW: We have a tweet coming in from Jado(ph), who says: Don't forget about the giant ground sloth, the short-faced bear and the giant armadillo. Those are - we're not forgetting now. HILL: We've analyzed them. (LAUGHTER) FLATOW: How big were these animals? Were they bigger than the kind we have today, or are they... HILL: Ground sloths are, what, seven feet tall? KOHN: Yeah, there was a ground sloth called Megalocnus that was found at Hagerman, and it was probably seven or eight feet tall, and it was probably one of the smaller of the ground sloths. And a version of that ground sloth also went extinct around 11,00 years ago. An interesting thing about the ground sloths is that their - we were talking earlier in the previous hour about what is native and non-native, what would be an exotic animal. This is an example of an animal that would - originated in South America and migrated into North America. And there are other examples of that also. A living example would be a porcupine. It's an example of - the ancestors of porcupines came from South America. On the other hand, we were talking about bison, and they are also an exotic animal if you look at geologic time scales. They came to North America between two and one hundred thousand years ago. FLATOW: Wow. All interesting stuff. We're going to take a break and come back more - and talk more with Matthew Kohn and Christopher Hill, and questions from the audience, talking about the lions and tigers and - no tigers. No more saber-toothed tigers. We're not going to call them that anymore. So we'll be right back after this break. Stay with us. I say, we'll be right back. Don't go away. (APPLAUSE) (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) FLATOW: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking this hour about the beasts of the Pleistocene, like mammoths and camels and early horses and why they suddenly disappeared about 10,000 years ago. My guests are Matthew Kohn, distinguished professor at the Department of Geosciences; Christopher Hill, associate dean of the Graduate School, all here at Boise State University. Our number is 1-800 - but we're not going to take calls today. We're going to take calls - hopefully - people stepping up to the mic here. Let me ask you, Matthew, as we begin: This must have happened - if there was a climate change, this must have happened over a really short period of time, did it not? What would be the estimate on that? KOHN: Well, it's interesting because when we talk about climate change on the Earth, there are different parts of the Earth that respond more or less rapidly. So when we look at places at high latitudes, they respond very quickly to climate change. We see that today, that the arctic is responding very quickly to global warming. When people have looked at the Greenland ice cores, they have found evidence for climate change that is very rapid, this is the transition from the Glacial Period into the warm period of the Holocene, on timescales of decades or even less than decades. Now, once that occurs, there's a huge ice cap over North America, it takes thousands of years for that ice cap to disappear. So there's some parts of the climate system that respond more slowly, but there are other parts that are very sensitive, and they respond very quickly. FLATOW: Yeah, we're watching the Arctic respond very quickly these days. KOHN: Exactly. FLATOW: Let's go to the - let's go to the audience here. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: To the question earlier, we took our children to the Hagerman National Fossil Beds Visitor Center, which was really interesting for them. They became junior rangers. But a ranger that was there explained to us that the majority of the fossils they found of the Hagerman horse all died at the same time. And so I had questions if you had theories as to how they died. KOHN: Yeah, so the Hagerman horse fossils, I mean we're talking about a single quarry that - where over 200 individuals were excavated, mostly as skulls or jaws but also some complete skeletons. In general, these deposits are called bone beds, and they're really two different kinds of generations of bone beds. One is a gradual accumulation - for example, a watering hole that might have animals that accumulate every year until finally you have a lot, or you can have a catastrophic event. And the theory, the prevailing theory for Hagerman horse, those horse fossils, is that it was a catastrophic event - for example, a flash flood that could've taken out a herd of horses. Or they could've been killed upstream and washed downstream and deposited in that location. But it is viewed by most people as a catastrophic accumulation. FLATOW: Thanks. We have a tweet poured in from MichaelDeGraff(ph), who says: To the lady who wanted to show your kids the fossils, please take your kids to the National Park Service Visitor's Center at Hagerman, so you can get - I'll go here and I'll come back here. Yes, ma'am. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Going back to the Pleistocene overkill versus climate change hypothesis, Matt and Chris, it seems - I'm not a hunter, but it would seem pretty to take out a seven-foot sloth, but maybe not so easy to take out a giant cat. So did the cats go extinct because they lost their prey, or were people actually maybe hunting them? HILL: You know, there aren't any examples that I know of where we have evidence of people hunting the carnivores, like the saber-toothed cats. But there is an example where one of the saber-tooth cats, homotherium, we found a den that contained lots of examples of baby mammoth teeth in that den. So it's an example where the homotherium, that ancient cat, probably went extinct not because of over-hunting but because its prey went extinct, and that's one example that we have of that. FLATOW: Was it a scary time to be a person? We've got these - all these big animals that might be coming after you... KOHN: Ira, maybe it was a delicious time. (LAUGHTER) FLATOW: No beer. No... (LAUGHTER) FLATOW: Yes, ma'am. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: With the advancement of technology, can you evaluate multiple evidences at the same time and create a probability of one theory versus another theory more easily than maybe 10 or 20 years ago? FLATOW: Christopher? HILL: Well, there are lots of different ways we could kind of try to answer the questions about over-hunting or climate change. And some of them are - we find bones that we can't identify based on what they look like. And it might be that we could use techniques like DNA to test those bones to see if they're actually extinct animals or animals that still persist today. Another big question when we're looking at the different models, the different ideas connected with extinction, is the timing. Do we have people there before or after the extinction event? And today we have much better precision in terms of being able to estimate, measure and estimate the timing for extinctions. FLATOW: Would there be enough people around at that point to wipe out all these animals? HILL: Well, that's a good question. I think there were very low numbers of people at that time. So one idea would be that overkill was a contributing factor but not the only factor that combined to lead to the extinctions at the end of the Ice Age. FLATOW: OK, let's go here, and then I'll come back here, yes. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: So I'm curious what it takes to identify a new species from the fossil record. It seems like in the past, you know, somebody will find a fragment of a skull and declare it a new species. I'm wondering what's the threshold. Do you need an entire skeleton? Do fragments count? How does that work? KOHN: Most species - genera and species are identified based on tooth morphology, and that's largely because - well, for a couple reasons. One is it's distinctive, and so different species have different crenulations to their tooth enamel and so on. But the other thing about teeth is they're incredibly well-preserved. So they're very resistant to physical abrasion and to chemical decay, and so that's one of the best materials that we have. It's not the only thing that is used to identify different species, and so the morphology of the skull and the shape of the limb bones is also used, although the limb bones and body bones, generally called post-cranial material, is generally less well-preserved than the skull material. FLATOW: Before - you want to follow up? UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Well, I just was going to say I'm a dentist, I just happen to be a dentist, and I see tons of different morphology in teeth in humans. I don't know if that's different from other species, but it's just a coincidence. FLATOW: They could use you over there at the dig. (LAUGHTER) KOHN: But it's also true, there is internal variability to any tooth morphology that one might be willing to assign to a particular species. So it has to be a morphological feature that exceeds some threshold that is identified by looking at populations of teeth. FLATOW: OK. Yes, sir. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Hi. I was glad to hear you say that hunting was a contributing factor because I'm a retired science teacher, and I remember before plate tectonics came in, I was starting to teach. And then plate tectonics came in, and it started to explain things. And they had that theory about everybody running across the land bridge, slaughtering animals and populating North America. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: And then they figured out that you'd have to have tribes of people every few years picking up and moving down to make that happen. And so my question is: You know, as we find more and more evidence, like Kennewick Man or like other spear points, not just in Clovis, New Mexico, but on the Eastern Seaboard, maybe near New York, and they find these things around, how does that register for you as a teacher, professor and a scientist, in changing how we view the theories that we once purported as being the best theory, and now we've got to move on because it's obvious there's new evidence. So how do you guys address that? That's my question. HILL: Well, the great thing is we're getting more and more information. We're getting larger samples and samples that we can study in a lot more detail. So you're right. I think if we were in a radio show 20 years ago, we would talk about Clovis, and Clovis would be the first real good example of people in North America. And today, with more discoveries, there are some possibilities of older things, older than Clovis. And that would then connect with the question of extinction. If there are already human groups in North American prior to Clovis, why didn't they cause the extinction? So there are all these new discoveries that then lead - help us test our explanations, test our hypotheses. FLATOW: We were a radio show 20 years ago and did talk about Clovis. (LAUGHTER) FLATOW: Apologies to the audience. We've run out of time for this segment. We're going to thank you both for taking time to be with us today, and it was very interesting, talking about all the species that have become extinct. And thanks again. HILL: Thank you. KOHN: Thank you. (APPLAUSE) FLATOW: Matthew Kohn, Christopher Hill from Boise State University. Copyright © 2012 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. 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Pics It's probably the greatest scientific experiment of our time (or at least the biggest), a 27km round tunnel that fires trillions of protons in opposite directions over 11,000 times a second at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light lying under the Alps in Europe. The entrance to the Large Hadron Collider beauty The Large Hadron Collider is literally trying to answer questions about life, the Universe and everything, investigating the last physical mysteries of how this crazy Universe called home got started. Its investigations include probing the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which it is theorised make up the mass of 95 per cent of the cosmos, finding out what the deal is with quarks, and, of course, looking for that pesky Higgs boson. The so-called God particle, which physicists hypothesise gives mass to visible matter in the macrocosm, has been spotted, though of course its discovery throws up more questions than answers. Now the LHC is going to rev up its engines (so to speak) to 13 trillion electron-volts (TeV) in order to prove or disprove supersymmetry, and look into some of the mysteries of the Standard Model of particle physics. Physicists hypothesise that there are even more particles in the TeV energy range, so adding a bit more juice to the LHC should help answer some questions and, if all goes well, confirm some theories. To ramp up the energy, LHC engineers need to tinker about with all the bits of the huge project, making sure they can handle the new higher energies, in a two-year process known as the long shutdown. Aside from prepping the collider for greater things in 2018, the shutdown also gave one lucky Reg hack the opportunity to see its insides. To say the complex straddling the border of France and Switzerland is impressive is a vast understatement. The Alps tower over the site, which is swarming with thousands of people a hell of a lot smarter than your humble writer. But naturally, the small group of journos is itching to descend around 100m underground to the tunnel. Step this way, Dr Freeman The lift to the beauty experiment The first stop on the tour was the LHCb experiment, where boffins are investigating basic questions about antimatter and looking for signs of the elusive dark matter. If an appropriate sense of awe had not already been instilled in the LHCb visitors by the amazing experiment, the sheer magnitude of the collider in general, massive warehouses, and myriad important-looking wires and tubing, it certainly was when we had to start going through radiation safety airlock structures and passed signs with orange alarm lights attached. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other, raising the interesting question of how the Universe ever came into being, since all the matter made in the Big Bang should have exploded along with its opposite number. LHCb wants to figure out why that didn't happen and along the way, look out for beauty quarks, a rare type that only exist for about a million millionth of a second in the experiment and could help point to a whole new family of particles that may make up some of the dark matter in the universe.
Last summer, I sat in the office of Michael Coteau, Ontario’s Minister of Children and Youth Services, and I was frustrated beyond belief. Coteau had earlier been deputized by the Ontario Liberal government as the minister responsible for the Anti-Racism Directorate, and I requested the appointment to share my concerns over the way systemic racism was playing out in the nonprofit sector. At the time, I was not only having difficulty finding financial support for the nonprofit organization I helped found to support youth of colour in tech, but I’d become something of an outlet for the anxieties of other founders of colour. Regardless of our goals, the shortfalls in government support were always the same: too much funding was being concentrated in the hands of massive nonprofits, and not enough was being allocated for small, local startups that focused on communities of colour. Coteau and I discussed these shortfalls, and his assistant eagerly took notes. I recommended to other nonprofit founders that they communicate with Minister Coteau’s office, and as far as I’m aware, his staff was not only active in reaching out and consulting with local organizations, but they held multiple community consultations to find new ways of supporting the ones they hadn’t reached individually. Earlier this year, Minister Coteau announced the Ontario Black Youth Action Plan, which included a $47-million budget aimed at supporting more than 10,000 Black children and closing the systemic gaps that continually leave them disadvantaged. Many of the recommendations in the plan included ones that were suggested during the several consultations held by Coteau’s office. While the Ontario Black Youth Action Plan is by no means a comprehensive fix (as noted by my colleague Melayna Williams), I bring this up because there’s something important about Coteau’s approach that should be noted as the 2018 election season draws close. When Coteau was named head of the Anti-Racism Directorate, he avoided making grand pronouncements, and avoided patting himself on the back for simply listening to the frustrations that have boiled over in the community for decades. When he announced the plan, he announced it with a budget, a strategic plan, and a concrete end goal. In other words, he didn’t just tell. He showed his work. Last week, a collective of Black Canadians from across the country convened at the Toronto Reference Library to attend the National Black Canadian Summit, hosted by former Governor General Michaëlle Jean. There were several speakers at the summit, including Ontario Court Justice Donald McLeod and Halifax city councillor Lindell Smith. But John Tory also made an appearance, proudly touting Toronto City Council’s action plan to confront anti-Black racism. The $1-million Action Plan is noteworthy on its own merit (if rather paltry, compared to projects like the proposed $1.6-billion park situated above Union Station’s rail decks). But there was something rather inauspicious about Tory, standing in a room full of Black Canadians, touting a plan to combat the forces he’d been called on from the moment he donned the Mayor’s chain, and had since shamefully failed to confront. There’s no million-dollar plan capable of wiping away the tarnish that Tory brought on himself when he continuously punted on the carding issue, until forced to capitulate in the face of massive protest action led by Black Lives Matter Toronto. In fact, more than a year since he agreed to a public and open discussion with Black Lives Matter, no such meeting has taken place. There’s no announcement or promise that Tory can make that would cause the community to forget when the Toronto Police Services Board (upon which Tory serves as a member) adjourned their July meeting and walked out on Desmond Cole. Cole made headlines at that meeting when he engaged in peaceful protest, got arrested, and walked away from his Toronto Star column in order to force the Board’s conversation on the alleged police assault against Dafonte Miller. It took Tory a shamefully long time to even address anti-Black racism as a problem in Toronto, and by the time he announced it, he had already become a symbol. John Tory is far from the only politician in this country who could use a lesson in showing, not telling. On Dec. 10, British Columbia Premier John Horgan announced his government would move forward with the controversial Site C hydroelectric dam. The project will flood thousands of hectares along the Peace River valley, displace local farmers, submerge Indigenous burial grounds, and wipe out fishing in the area for at least a generation. In his announcement, Horgan detailed the financial downsides of cancelling the project, and put on a very earnest face as he declared, “I am not the first person to stand before you and disappoint Indigenous people.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberal government have also had numerous challenges in living up to expectations from marginalized communities. The inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women has failed Indigenous families, all but collapsing into a bureaucratic quagmire, with calls for the resignation of its chief commissioner, Marion Buller. As Maclean’s has reported, that failure stems at least in part from the government’s desire to produce a quick result in time for the next election. Marijuana decriminalization also looks as if it will not only fail communities that have been severely impacted by overpolicing and disparate prosecution, but will enrich the politically and law enforcement-connected at the expense of those communities. At a time when voters are becoming more polarized, more skeptical, and more hopeless, fragile promises and empty gestures won’t cut it. There is nothing progressive or applause-worthy about apologizing to communities in the same breath as announcements that promise to do them further harm. Championing half-measures to address decades of systemic racism, and reworking laws into decorative filigrees to pin on the lapels of the rich and well-connected, aren’t going to bring voters back to the polling stations. By no means is Minister Coteau a paragon. After all, he still has plenty of work cut out for him in addressing and undoing the harm done by the province’s Children’s Aid Societies. But at the very least, he had the backbone to stand before Black communities, absorb the criticism non-defensively, promise to do better, and then make good on that promise. As we draw closer to the next round of elections, his peers ought to be the ones taking notes.
Atlanta - Driver Tale of the Tape Clint Bowyer (No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford Mustang) 14/1 · One top five, six top 10s · Average finish of 20.444, 13th-best · Average Running Position of 16.926, 12th-best · Driver Rating of 81.6, 11th-best · 129 Fastest Laps Run, series-best · 3,245 Laps in the Top 15 (55.1), 11th-most · 508 Quality Passes, eighth-most Kurt Busch (No. 1 Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet Camaro ZL1) 20/1 · Three wins, six top fives, 13 top 10s; one pole · Average finish of 13.368, fourth-best · Average Running Position of 13.176, seventh-best · Driver Rating of 96.1, fourth-best · 294 Fastest Laps Run, ninth-best · 4,123 Laps in the Top 15 (66.3), sixth-most · 729 Quality Passes, third-most Kyle Busch (No.18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry) 5/1 · Two wins, five top fives, seven top 10s; one pole · Average finish of 13.368, fifth-best · Average Running Position of 13.253, ninth-best · Driver Rating of 92.7, eighth-best · 269 Fastest Laps Run, 10th-best · 3,816 Laps in the Top 15 (61.4), 10th-most · 632 Quality Passes, fourth-most Chase Elliott (No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro ZL1) 10/1 · One top five, three top 10s · Average finish of 7.667, series-best · Average Running Position of 9.284, series-best · Driver Rating of 96.4, third-best · 39 Fastest Laps Run, 13th-best · 865 Laps in the Top 15 (88.3), series-most · 147 Quality Passes, 12th-most Denny Hamlin (No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry) 15/1 · One win, four top fives, seven top 10s; one pole · Average finish of 18.316, 11th-best · Average Running Position of 12.391, sixth-best · Driver Rating of 94.3, sixth-best · 307 Fastest Laps Run, third-best · 4217 Laps in the Top 15 (67.8), fifth-most · 587 Quality Passes, sixth-most Kevin Harvick (No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford Mustang) 4/1 · Two wins, seven top fives, 13 top 10s; two poles · Average finish of 13.95, sixth-best · Average Running Position of 12.196, fifth-best · Driver Rating of 99.4, second-best · 517 Fastest Laps Run, eighth-best · 4321 Laps in the Top 15 (66.1), seventh-most · 627 Quality Passes, fifth-most Jimmie Johnson (No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro ZL1) 25/1 · Five wins, 14 top fives, 16 top 10s · Average finish of 10.95, second-best · Average Running Position of 9.785, second-best · Driver Rating of 102.8, series-best · 361 Fastest Laps Run, 12th-best · 5130 Laps in the Top 15 (78.4), fourth-most · 742 Quality Passes, second-most Brad Keselowski (No. 2 Team Penske Ford Mustang) 8/1 · One win, three top fives, six top 10s · Average finish of 16.5, eighth-best · Average Running Position of 10.49, third-best · Driver Rating of 95.5, fifth-best · 139 Fastest Laps Run, sixth-best · 2585 Laps in the Top 15 (78.7), third-most · 446 Quality Passes, ninth-most Kyle Larson (No. 42 Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet Camaro ZL1) 8/1 · One top five, three top 10s · Average finish of 14.2, seventh-best · Average Running Position of 13.192, eighth-best · Driver Rating of 84.8, ninth-best · 18 Fastest Laps Run, seventh-best · 1082 Laps in the Top 15 (66), eighth-most · 213 Quality Passes, 11th-most Joey Logano (No. 22 Team Penske Ford Mustang) 6/1 · Two top fives, four top 10s; one pole · Average finish of 16.667, 10th-best · Average Running Position of 16.724, 11th-best · Driver Rating of 82.6, 10th-best · 165 Fastest Laps Run, fourth-best · 1973 Laps in the Top 15 (50.1), 12th-most · 359 Quality Passes, 10th-most Ryan Newman (No. 6 Roush Fenway Racing Ford Mustang) 100/1 · Two top fives, nine top 10s; seven poles · Average finish of 19.45, 12th-best · Average Running Position of 17.064, 13th-best · Driver Rating of 78.3, 12th-best · 99 Fastest Laps Run, second-best · 3013 Laps in the Top 15 (46.1), 13th-most · 538 Quality Passes, seventh-most Martin Truex Jr (No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry) 8/1 · Three top fives, eight top 10s; one pole · Average finish of 16.632, ninth-best · Average Running Position of 10.944, fourth-best · Driver Rating of 93.5, seventh-best · 198 Fastest Laps Run, fifth-best · 4956 Laps in the Top 15 (79.7), second-most · 839 Quality Passes, series-most Odds courtesy of the Westgate Las Vegas Super Book
(Fortune Magazine) -- The tangled web of subprimes has claimed more than its share of victims in recent months: homeowners by the hundreds of thousands, to be sure, but also those who created, packaged, insured, distributed, and ultimately bought what should have been labeled "junk mortgages" but which by a masterstroke of marketing genius received a more respectable imprimatur. "Skim milk masquerades as cream," warned Gilbert and Sullivan over a century ago, and sure enough, today's subprimes, packaged into financial conduits with monikers such as SIVs and CDOs, pretended to be AAA-rated cubes of butter. Financial institutions fell for the ruse, and now we all suffer the consequences. Defaults are rising, the dollar's sinking, and -- good Lord! -- even Google's (Charts, Fortune 500) stock price is going down. Something must really be wrong. It is. What we are witnessing is essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system, a complex of leveraged lending so hard to understand that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke required a face-to-face refresher course from hedge fund managers in mid-August. My Pimco colleague Paul McCulley has labeled it the "shadow banking system" because it has lain hidden for years, untouched by regulation, yet free to magically and mystically create and then package subprime loans into a host of three-letter conduits that only Wall Street wizards could explain. It is certainly true that this shadow system, with its derivatives circling the globe, has democratized credit. And as the benefits of cheaper financing became available to the many as opposed to the few, placating and calming waves of higher productivity and widespread diversification led to accelerating economic growth, incomes, and corporate profits. Yet, as is humanity's wont, we overdid a good thing, and the subprime skim milk has soured. Still, to equate rancid milk with a breakdown in today's banking system is a bit much, don't you think? Aren't our central bankers coming to the rescue with lower interest rates, and doesn't Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson finally have a plan to steady Citigroup (Charts, Fortune 500) and friends with a "super-SIV"? They are, and he does -- but cheap financing and SIV bailouts may not be enough to restore confidence in a shadow system built on fragile foundations. Financed conduits supported by $1 trillion of asset-backed commercial paper were constructed on the basis of AAA ratings that suggested -- no, practically guaranteed -- that the investments could never fail: no skim, just the cr�me de la cr�me. Now, as the subprimes undermine those structures and the confidence in them, it is a stretch of the imagination to suggest that 75 basis points of interest rate cuts by the Fed will bring back the love. As the commercial-paper market shrinks by hundreds of billions of dollars a month, central banks worldwide are facing a giant stress test of the shadow banking system. The publicized and photographed overnight "runs" on Countrywide and Britain's Northern Rock in mid-August were nothing compared to what's taking place in the shadows of the real banking system. How does one protect during a run "deposits" that no one can see? To be blunt, what does it mean for your pocketbook? To understand where future losses may lie, it makes sense to ask which investments did especially well during the shadow's formation. Home prices have been the obvious first hit -- down 5% nationwide already, with perhaps another 10% to go over the next several years. Following in lockstep have been financial stocks with subprime exposure, to be joined in short order by consumer-based equities, as jobs and disposable income falter. These investments thrived as the shadow worked its voodoo; now its curse will sap money from the pockets of any and all who believed in its black magic. Importantly, add to the list of investment victims the strength and viability of our national currency. The SIVs and CDOs of years past supported the dollar at unrealistic levels as foreign investment in the hundreds of billions poured into our markets. Now, with confidence waning, the visible but unphotographable run from George Washington into the euro, the yen, and other currencies is under way. Protecting an American-made pocketbook should begin by seeing that purchasing power is more likely to be enhanced via investments in strong currencies, not weak ones. More than ever, your portfolio should have a international perspective and include non-dollar-denominated assets. Investors should anticipate that the shadow's successor will be a more conservative, less risk-oriented banking system. The shadow writes, and having writ will move on to new sources of wealth creation in faraway corners of the globe. Go with it.
Beachside memorials and religious services have been held across Asia to mark the 10th anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 220,000 in one of modern history's worst natural disasters. The devastating December 26, 2004, tsunami, triggered by a 9.3-magnitude earthquake, struck a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean rim. It eradicated entire coastal communities, decimated families and crashed over beaches full of tourists the morning after Christmas. Survivors waded through a horror show of corpse-filled waters. As part of Friday's solemn commemorations, survivors, government officials, diplomats and families of victims gathered in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and elsewhere. Moments of silence were planned in several spots to mark the exact time the tsunami struck. 2004 Tsunami A 9.3 earthquake off Indonesia triggered the tsunami that killed at least 220,000 people Indonesia: 170,000 Sri Lanka: 31,000 India: 16,400 Thailand: 5,400 Other Asian countries: 200 East Africa: 300 Al Jazeera's Step Vaessen, reporting from Indonesia's Aceh province, worst affected by the tsunami, said an official ceremony there would would be attended by the vice president. "There will be prayers, songs and poetry but most importantly most of the survivors will have their own commemoration services. They will have their prayer sessions in their villages, sometimes villages very near to the sea where they can remember what happened ten years ago," she said. Aceh was the closest to the earthquake epicentre. At least 170,000 people were killed there. Sri Lanka is marking the anniversary with a symbolic ride of a train the tsunami had derailed, killing 1,270 passengers. The train will be powered by the same locomotive and feature five of the original carriages. In Thailand, 5,395 people were killed, among them about 2,000 foreign tourists. Almost 3,000 people remain missing. RELATED: The Thai village that escaped the tsunami Al Jazeera's Veronica Pedrosa, reporting from Khao Lak, said the Swedish government is organising a commemoration at the Orchid resort. She said "543 Swedes were killed at this resort alone". "It is indeed a very difficult moment and I think that's what's different about the way it's being commemorated here in Thailand, that so many people from all over the world were here because they were foreign tourists," she said. Thai commemoration ceremonies will be held in several other locations, including Ban Nam Khem, a southern fishing village destroyed by the wave. Government agencies and several non-governmental organisations responded to the disaster across the region by building houses for the victims and providing fishing gear and trawlers to fishermen. But the help does not seem enough. Many survivors still struggle and have barely managed to rebuild their lives. While billions of dollars of aid have poured in, some have regained prosperity but others find their lives still hanging by a thread, and a $400m warning system built to help keep residents safe has been undermined by mismanagement and waste.
If you had to explain humanity to a logical outsider, you would have a hard time sounding sane as you got to the part where you tried to explain that tens of thousands of people show up 81 times a year in 30 stadiums around the country to yell at men in pajamas who hit a ball with a stick and run in a circle. Of course, we do a lot that would be hard to explain. Sports are supposed to be an escape. We sit and forget about the day-to-day stress for three hours. We yell at an umpire, we laugh with our friends, and when we get back to the real world, the blade of frustration seems to have dulled a bit. It gives us something safe to talk about with estranged relatives or friends; it gives us a harmless way to blow off steam. This is the role of sports. This is why 43,934 people came to Globe Life Park tonight to watch the Texas Rangers. But the tone at the stadium, already a bit muted from the poor result on the field, became downright morose tonight, as just a few miles east of one of those stadiums, the world was burning. Multiple police officers had been shot by a sniper. At least one died. Just minutes before, by all accounts, they had been examples of what we all hope that police officers will be: posing with pictures, communicating. Doing their best to work through the unease. And the protest, too, was peaceful. Was there anger? Sure. But anger and peace can coexist. And right up until the end of tonight’s protest, that’s what happened. And then, as people started to leave, someone opened fire with a very large gun, and took human lives. I’m not going to politicize it; there’s more than enough of that to go around. But this didn’t happen elsewhere; it was in our Dallas. You recognized the landmarks on TV. You’ll hear the names of the victims soon, and you’ll know someone that knows someone that knows them. You’ll be angry; you probably already are. There are things to remember in times like this; things that get lost in the back-and-forth. They are the quiet things that whisper truth in the middle of a tug-of-war for your ears. Here is the whisper: Love is hard. Hope is hard. Broad Generalizations are easy Reaction is easy. Love your enemies. There are people who will tell you that all police officers are corrupt. Ignore them. I’m thankful that the good outnumber the bad. I want to write about people who kept the peace tonight. I want to write about the civil servants in my city that ran towards the sound of gunfire to protect the people of my city. I want to honor the lives that ended tonight. There are people who will tell you that all protesters are thugs. Ignore them. I’m thankful for the people who see a problem and are brave enough to peacefully stand and unflinchingly stare power in the eyes and say that justice is worth whatever price they must pay. As America slowly continues to wake up to a fracture that must be set to heal, I want to honor the lives that have been taken in unjust ways. None of this is easy. But while we are busy ignoring those who would speak simple untruths, it is also important that we speak. Speak love those around you; love to those who are not around you. Cultivate your empathy, and assume the best in everyone. It will hurt. You will be disappointed. You will be overwhelmed. But I think the world is relying on you, on me, on us. Tonight, we need to engage, not escape. I’m sorry I’m not providing much in the way of escapism. This is an unorthodox game story, as I’ve hardly made mention of the game thus far. I promise this will be the only time I do this. We will need our three hours a day for as long as we can get it this year, I’m certain of that. But tonight, there are more important things happening. Things that are too important to escape. Be strong. Be brave. Love with all you’ve got. NOTES: The Rangers lost the game 10-1. Chi Chi Gonzalez gave up 4 runs and threw 124 pitches in 4⅔ innings. Shawn Tolleson gave up the other 5 in his one inning of work. Jared Hoying pitched an inning and gave up a home run, but threw some pretty entertaining eephus pitches that the scoreboard thought might be a knuckleball. “That wasn’t no knuckleball, just a slowball,” he smiled afterwards. The Rangers only got two hits through the first 8 innings. In the 9th, Rougned Odor tripled and scored on an Elvis Andrus single. That was it for Texas tonight. More notes (and my first “I didn’t stick to sports” intro of the year) in today’s Daily. Copyright 2016 WFAA
Like everyone else on the planet, I’m still processing what happened last week. Not so much how it happened -- that’s pretty clear. But rather what the implications are for all the groups that President Elect Trump threatened during his campaign, and for the worst of his supporters now emboldened in their hate, bigotry and anger. We’ve already seen the first hints of what’s to come -- a White Nationalist as a senior advisor in the White House, promises to begin deportation of immigrants, pally chats with Putin and of course a rash of hate crimes across the country. And while many on the left are twisting themselves into pretzels to avoid being mean to the other side (how did we let this happen, how did we make him so angry so he did this to us. It must be our fault, how can we be better so this doesn’t happen again. Boo Hillary!), Trump and his cronies have made clear that they won’t stop until any meaningful opposition - from protesters, from the media, from anyone else - is silenced. I have a lot more to say on all of the above, and I’m still trying to figure out what’s appropriate for Pando and what should probably be written elsewhere. But there's one question that defintely needs to be addressed on these pages: How much blame does the tech industry bear for all of this? The answer is simple too: A ton. Some of that blame is deserved directly. That is, some companies and individuals in Silicon Valley actively made decisions that helped boost Trump and silence other candidates, in particular Hillary Clinton. Peter Thiel (a Pando investor, I’m eternally ashamed to say) is an obvious candidate for direct blame. Not only did he support and fund Trump but now he has joined a transition team headed by a Vice President Elect who is openly anti-gay, on behalf of a President Elect openly anti- everything that Silicon Valley is supposed to stand for. It’s shocking, but lest it surprise you too much, remember that Peter Thiel, like Mike Pence, believes in Creationism over evolution. And like Donald Trump, Peter Thiel has declared war on the First Amendment. Oh, and always remember that in Trump’s administration, every seat at the table has a little tent card with the word “asshole” written on it in neat calligraphy. There’s always going to be a place at that table for someone like Peter Thiel. You can add to the list of direct blame folks like Palmer Luckey and, of course, online media outlets like Breitbart. You can also add Wikileaks which, we were all told, was about using radical transparency to keep Americans safe from government tyranny but in fact turned out to be about secretly backchanneling with Putin to deliver his brand of tyranny hot and fresh to American soil. More interesting, and in some ways more disgusting, is the much broader category of people and companies in the Valley who didn’t directly support Trump - in fact often opposed him in their public statements -- but who deliberately failed to take very basic steps to halt his rise. Chief amongst those culprits are Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. People inside both companies have confirmed that early on in Trump’s campaign, a decision was made to exempt him from the usual standards and rules governing trolling. At both companies it was decided, right at the very top, that presidential candidates are a special case and that it serves the interests of democracy to allow them to say whatever the hell they want, any time, unfiltered. Hence we saw Trump use tweets and status updates to attack minorities, defame and abuse women, and ultimately lie, cheat and steal his way to the White House. The policy was ludicrous. Presidential candidate or not, if Donald Trump marched into a branch of Wendy’s and began abusing other patrons and smearing ketchup on the windows, he would be asked to leave. Free speech is one thing, vandalism and abuse is quite another. But Dorsey and Zuckerberg decided they were fine giving special treatment to Trump, which in turn emboldened his supporters to use those same platforms to behave in those same ways. Some of those supporters were banned (often for much less dangerous comments than the candidate himself was making) but by that time Zuck and Jack were so cowed by the idea of offending Trump supporters and prompting a backlash that they failed (and indeed have still failed) to take the most basic steps to ensure deliberately false and inflammatory stories were not widely distributed on their platforms. Here Mark Zuckerberg deserves a special medal for services to bullshit. Even now -- after Trump literally held an interview in which he credited Facebook and Twitter for helping him win -- Zuckerberg is denying that Facebook bears any responsibility for the outcome of the election. “We’re a technology company not a media company,” is his latest pathetic mantra. Guess what, Mark? You’re both -- just like Rupert Murdoch’s company (before the big split, at least) was at once a news company (Wall Street Journal, Fox News et al), an entertainment company (20th Century Fox, Fox News et al) and a technology company (MySpace, a big chunk of Hulu etc etc). Imagine how ridiculous Rupert Murdoch would sound if 1% of all stories in the Wall Street Journal were shown to be deliberately false and Murdoch simply pointed to his movie holdings and said “but we’re an entertainment company!” You don’t get to just tell people what you are in order to dodge your moral and legal responsibilities. You are what you do, and what people use you for. And what people used Facebook for during this past election was to decide who to trust with their vote. And by the way. By the fucking way. The fact that Zuckerberg has still refused to fire Peter Thiel despite Thiel now being a formal part of Trump’s transition team is so far past shameful and embarrassing that we might need to coin some new words. Perhaps he thinks keeping one of Trump’s lieutenants on staff will keep Facebook safe when the Purge comes. In which case, his self-delusion is even greater than I thought. My hope, during the next few months, is that companies like Facebook and Twitter will be forced to take meaningful action to get their houses in order -- to ensure that the rise of hate crimes in America is not represented on their platforms, and to take basic steps to alert users when media organizations are deliberately lying to them. Perhaps they’ll take the problem seriously when they realize just how angry their users are. Or when it dawns on them that, while they’re pussyfooting around not wanting to offend Trump voters, the new president is busy thinking up laws that will give him unprecedented control over speech and unprecedented access to our data. We shall see. Sadly we’ll also likely see a lot more dipshittery like Shervin Pishevar (another Pando investor, God help us) and his dreams of lopping off California as its own separate country. Smarter folks than I have pointed out all the reason why his plan is even more loopy than the hyperloop, so I’ll simply add this: If Pishevar fills the leadership positions of his brave new world with the same type of people he’s promoted in his Valley career, then he’s describing a world run by Uber bros, dictators, and a guy who left a noose on his business partner’s chair. The tech industry faces what its own luminaries might call a “come to Jesus moment”. A time to decide whether it plans to make those meaningful concrete steps to slow the rise of tyranny in America (remember when that kind of rhetoric seemed like hyperbole?) or to remain cowering in inaction until the jackboots come marching down the hallways of One Hacker Way. Meanwhile, we should keep an eye out for a third category of Valley mogul. Those who stayed quiet, or even opposed Trump, during the election campaign, but now see business opportunity in his victory. We’ve started to see the rhetoric already in Washington: Of course I opposed fascism and tyranny when Trump was running for office, but now he’s been elected (albeit without winning the popular vote), it’s my patriotic duty to offer the new president any help I can in carrying out his policy proposals. In politics, there’s some justification for that kind of pivot: The opposite being gridlock where everyone suffers. But seeing Valley folks offer their services to the new administration treads an incredibly fine line between patriotism and profiteering. And as for actually building tools to profit from Trump’s brand of hate, well... Just this morning as I was writing this piece, a friend sent me a tweet from David Byttow, who you’ll likely remember as the disgraced founder of Secret. That is, the teen bullying app that was shuttered in 2015 after a blizzard of press (including here on Pando) about how Byttow was willfully and enthusiastically profiting off teenagers being driven to consider suicide. Byttow promised he was getting out of the slander space and instead launching an enterprise company. Well guess what? Now that America is run by the ultimate online bully, Byttow has decided to bring Secret back… Secret V2 is coming. It's too important for it to not exist. — David Byttow (@davidbyttow) November 13, 2016 And, just in case you were inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that Secret II will be used by Trump’s targets and victims to ensure free speech, a follow up tweet made clear who the service will be positioned to: The more "deplorable" Trump was labeled, the less likely a growing group of people were willing to openly/honestly discuss their support. — David Byttow (@davidbyttow) November 14, 2016 Yep, poor Trump supporters who are too scared to make their views known under their real name. A bullying and hate speech app for the age of Trump! Let’s call the this a “come to Satan" moment. With so much money and so few standards of decency available under the Trump administration, I suspect it won’t be the last one we see from Silicon Valley. Update: I've just launched a Patreon campaign to help expand Come to Satan. You can add your support here.
Cities: Skylines developed a vibrant community, and came about as a direct response to a certain other city builder that went down the opposite path, making it our Community Champion of the year. We'll be posting the rest of our awards and personal picks daily as we approach the end of the year, which we're collecting on our main GOTY page. Chris Livingston: 2013’s SimCity was an ugly exercise in what not to do. With online-only play, strict limits on city size, and no mod support, EA frustrated and angered fans of the city building genre. Thankfully, the tiny development team of Colossal Order stepped in carry the torch while deftly avoiding all of EA’s blunders. Offline play means no worrying about servers or connections, yet there’s still a communal feel to Skylines thanks to extensive mod and asset support, which means players can easily download the custom creations of others (now 60,000+ in number) including a mod that expands the already large buildable area. In fact, there’s even a mod in the works for multiplayer support! See, we like online play, when it’s optional. Colossal Order also listened to player feedback, later adding a much-missed day/night cycle (alongside paid DLC) and the ability to tunnel underground. Most importantly, they understand what still seems to elude some publishers: mod support is healthy for both sides of the equation. It extends the lifespan of the game, keeps people talking about it months after release, can increase sales, and lets players fix problems, tweak gameplay to their liking, and contribute and share their own work and creativity with others. The game itself is one I’ve kept dipping back into months and months later, in part because there are so many new mods and assets every time I pop into the Workshop, and in part because I find it incredibly enjoyable and satisfying to play. I’m not a great city manager or a master builder, and the game is definitely tipped in my direction, difficulty-wise. None of my cities have failed, really, and I understand that many players want a bigger challenge, but for me it’s about the enjoyment of watching something continue to grow, albeit a bit crookedly, even if I’m not watering it in all the right places. Tyler Wilde: I spoke to Cities: Skylines lead designer Karoliina Korppoo earlier this year, and she told me that the dev team uses popular mods as inspiration for official updates. What a lovely, symbiotic relationship: modders make the game more fun for everyone, and Colossal Order can direct its update efforts toward the most desired changes and additions with that feedback. The whole thing—the game, the mods, Colossal Order’s patches and After Dark add-on—is about as PC gaming as you can get. On an open platform, no one has to settle. If we want to add something to a game, we mod it in. If we think it’d look nice with a bluish tint, we inject one. And if it just isn’t the game we want (and launches about as well as my first Kerbal Space Program rocket), a small developer steps in and makes the game they wanted to play. If there’s passion for something, it’ll find it’s way to the PC, the way Xenonauts recalled classic X-Com, and Black Mesa brought us back to Half-Life 1, and Cities: Skylines gave us a city simulator without overzealous online aspirations. And aside from how well Cities has served a community hungry for a better city builder, it’s just a good game. It’s not especially challenging—you might try Prison Architect for that—but it’s full of little details to manage and soothes me into a creative rhythm of balancing and designing and building that can last hours. It’s exactly the feeling I want from a city builder.
PRINCETON, NJ -- Most Americans believe President Obama will win the presidential election this fall, even though the race has been highly competitive for most of the year. Americans' expectation that Obama will win has been remarkably consistent, virtually unchanged since May despite three intervening months of campaigning. The results are based on an Aug. 20-22 USA Today/Gallup poll. Americans' prediction of who will win is significant since they have generally been correct in predicting the winner of past presidential elections. Of course, Americans' beliefs about who will win are influenced by their preferences. Those who say they would vote for Obama if the election were held today overwhelmingly believe he will win, by an 86% to 9% margin. One reason Obama has the edge in overall predictions about the election is that Romney voters are less positive that their candidate will prevail, with 28% saying Obama will win, compared with 65% who believe Romney will win. Election predictions also show expected party differences, although Democrats are more optimistic about their candidate's chances (80% say Obama will win) than is the case among Republicans (60% say Romney will win). By 58% to 35%, independents say Obama will win. This is the case even though independents' vote preferences have been closely divided this year. Most Believe Quality of President Depends on Outcome Americans clearly think the outcome of the election has consequences for the quality of the next president, as nearly seven in 10 think only one of the two candidates would make a good president. That includes 38% who say only Obama would be a good president and 31% who say only Romney would be. Twelve percent believe both men would make good presidents, while a slightly higher percentage, 17%, believe neither would. In 2008, 25% thought both Obama and John McCain would make good presidents, roughly twice as many as say so about Obama and Romney now. The current figure is more in line with the 15% Gallup measured in September 2004 for that year's contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry. As expected, Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly think only their party's candidate would be a good president. More independents say only Obama would be a good president than say only Romney would. However, independents are also more likely to say neither would be a good president than to say both would be. Obama supporters are significantly more likely to believe he would be a good president -- 90% say so, including 75% who say only he would and 15% who say both he and Romney would be -- than Romney supporters are to believe Romney would be a good president (76%). Implications Although the presidential race between Obama and Romney has generally been a tight one, Americans by a fairly wide margin expect Obama to win. That could be because he is the incumbent, and incumbents are generally more successful than not at winning a second term in office. The implications of this "expectation" measure on voter behavior and the election outcome are not clear. At this point, a significantly higher percentage of Republicans say they will vote for Romney than believe he will be able to beat Obama in November. These partisan views on the part of Republicans that their candidate is the underdog could motivate them to campaign for their candidate and get out and vote, or could be discouraging and end up suppressing their vote. Similarly, Democrats' confidence that their candidate will win could encourage them to get out and vote to make sure that is a reality, or could cause complacency and lower their turnout percentage. During the last three months, Romney's campaign efforts have done little to persuade Americans that he is likely to win the presidency. He will have a prime opportunity this week at the Republican National Convention to make his case to voters as to why he should be elected, that he would make a good president, and to convince them that he is a viable contender for the presidency. Sign up to get Election 2012 news stories from Gallup as soon as they are published.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - A California Assembly panel delayed action on Monday on a bill to end sales taxes on tampons and sanitary napkins, an exemption already enacted in five other states in a growing movement against what sponsors say is a tax that unjustly targets women. The measure has garnered bipartisan support in the Democratic-controlled California legislature, but the Assembly’s Revenue and Taxation Committee placed the bill on the panel’s “suspense file,” meaning its fate will be determined early next month. Enactment of the bill would reduce state and local revenues by an estimated $20 million a year. Supporters of the measure say menstrual products should be treated like any other “necessity of life,” including food products and other health care items, such as prescription drugs, which are exempt from sales taxes. “This is fundamentally about gender equity,” bill co-author Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia said in remarks to the committee. “We don’t tax any other non-optional health product that is needed every month, uniquely, by one gender for 40 years of life.” Sponsors of the bill say the “tampon tax” poses a particularly unfair financial burden on the 4.6 million women living in poverty in California. Five states - Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and New Jersey - already exempt feminine hygiene products from sales taxes, and nine states other than California are considering legislation to do so, supporters say.
Source: NASA/Wikipedia Commons When I was growing up, the list of planets in our solar system included a small planet far from the Sun called Pluto. Then, a number of objects about the same size as Pluto began to be discovered. Some were even bigger than Pluto. A body of scientists, the International Astronomical Union, redefined the term planet and changed the classification of Pluto from “planet” to “dwarf planet.” A number of non-astronomers have found this demotion of Pluto hard to take. Indeed, the backlash has been so strong that some NASA scientists want to reclassify Pluto and several other large bodies in the solar system as planets. Why do people have a hard time reclassifying Pluto? This question was explored in a paper by Alexander Noyes and Frank Keil in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Memory and Language. These researchers point out that many categories people form are based on the opinions of experts. Most people don’t know how to define a planet, what constitutes a particular microbe, or the factors that make something a quark. Instead, we assume the experts know what items belong in these categories, and we generally accept their definitions. Once something is placed into a category, though, other factors take over. In particular, people generally act as though category members share some unseen essence that makes them a member of a category. We assume that there is something about microbes, planets, and quarks that make them what they are. This idea is called essentialism. You can even use this in essences as joke. Suppose someone asked you, “Is John a painter?” You could say—dismissively—“Well, he paints.” This works as an insult, because categorizing someone as a painter seems to suggest that they have some essential characteristic that makes them a painter above and beyond the action of painting. In several experiments, Noyes and Keil gave people examples of scientific concepts and asked them several questions about the degree to which they believed that category had an essence. The questions focused on whether the category had boundaries, was objective (versus subjective), could be discovered by experts, and whether knowing something was a member of the category was meaningful. These questions relate to how strongly people believe the particular category has an underlying essence. When people were asked whether they would accept an expert’s definition for a new scientific object, they generally agreed to do so. However, when people were told that an object was having its classification changed by experts, people were less willing to accept the change. The more that they felt the object had an essence, the more strongly they resisted the change. Of course, people don’t always resist changes in categories. For example, some categories are created strictly by rules. In baseball, the strike zone is defined by the rules of the game. Indeed, when I was young, the strike zone consisted of the area over home plate at a height from the batter’s knees to the batter’s shoulders. Now, the strike zone goes only from the knees to the middle of the batter’s torso. People accept this change, because it is not a natural kind. It is defined as part of the game of baseball. In addition, people are willing to accept a change in categories when they find out that the original classification was based on fraud. In one final study in the paper, participants were told that an initial classification of an item was based on results of studies that were fraudulently reported. In this case, they accepted new definitions by experts. These results demonstrate what happens when the rules for doing science conflict with the underlying psychology of people’s concepts. Even people who are prone to accept the authority of scientists for certain kinds of concepts can have difficulty changing their beliefs about how things are classified. This does not come from a mistrust of science, but rather from the difficulty changing beliefs about what lies at the essence of something that used to belong to a particular category. See me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+. See Two Guys on Your Head book Brain Briefs. My books Smart Thinking, Smart Change and Habits of Leadership. As well as the radio show Two Guys on Your Head.
MONUMENTAL Island looks anything but. This pile of black rocks rises starkly out of the cold, choppy seas south of Baffin Island, on Canada’s remote north-east coast. The tides here are among the strongest in the world yet, despite the inhospitable feel of this place, its waters are rich in marine life. Suddenly a solitary polar bear lopes into view on land, just a few metres from the shore. He doesn’t look real at first, but he is very much alive. He is also apparently extremely hungry, noticeably scrawnier than some of the glossy giants shown on the BBC’s Frozen Planet. His thin frame is normal for this time of year, naturalist and photographer Dennis Minty says. “They’re waiting for the sea ice to return (so they can go out to catch seals for food). He will probably make it.” His last comment relates to growing concern about the impact of global warming. Each year the sea ice returns later than the last, leaving the bears waiting longer for food. This one, like others, has been eking out an existence on wild berries, which are plentiful on much of the land in this part of the world. A dark mark on his rump suggests this bear may have overdone the fruit, and he is instantly christened Squirty by Washboard Hank, who lampoons the unfortunate bear in song. The wisdom of this is debatable, given that Hank and the 120 very-well-fed passengers from the Adventure Canada cruise ship are currently bobbing up and down in dinghies less than 100 metres from Squirty, an excellent swimmer with a keen sense of smell. Thankfully, the bear decides we’re not worth the effort, and we all get back aboard the liner safely to resume our two-week cruise from Greenland to northern Canada. Hank is one of five Canadian musicians on board, here to entertain anyone for whom the Arctic and sub-Arctic scenery, history and wildlife are not enough. In Nuuk, the Greenland capital, he is quickly surrounded by Inuit boys, all curious about this one-man-band. There are several Inuit on board, including cultural experts, whose personal stories are fascinating. It’s easy to feel as though we are the first people to ever set foot on these shores. But as archaeologist Lena Onalik says, “If you are looking around thinking this would be a good place to camp, someone else did too.” With endless courses for every meal and a warm bed on board, I suspect no one is itching to pitch a tent on land any time soon. For Inuit like 29-year-old Onalik, however, these harsh circumpolar lands hold their hearts, hopes and dreams. Onalik’s grandparents lived here, and more than once during the trip she cries, overcome by her feelings about what was lost when her people finally left these remote lands after missionaries, government officials and traders all moved out. One settlement we visit dates back five centuries and was still inhabited up until the 1980s. As an archaeologist, Onalik now helps to preserve what’s left, pointing out the remains of traditional sod houses she helps to excavate. Another Inuit, Jobie Unatweenuk, 28, is a bear monitor, armed to protect passengers on shore. The polar bear attack that killed a British schoolboy in northern Norway last August was a horrific reminder of just how dangerous these animals can be. Passengers must follow instructions to the letter, and not wander off by themselves. We are in the Torngat mountains, in one of Canada’s most remote and beautiful national parks, richly coloured in autumnal reds and yellows. The more energetic passengers hike together up a peak, grazing on the plentiful berries. At the top is a traditional inukshuk, a stone figure often used like a Scottish cairn to show travellers the way. In the meantime, down near the shore, a gentle group walk has had to change course after a female black bear with cubs is spotted ahead. Back on board, the never-ending entertainment ranges from a book group with author Kathleen Winter to a Hank Williams memorial concert, where making your own silver sheriff badge is encouraged. Hank leads the noisiest workshop, showing a small but delighted group of passengers how to make an instrument called a kazoo, with which to annoy the larger, less delighted group of passengers trying to read or have a drink nearby. Wisely, the divers – on board to explore the possibility of underwater adventures for future passengers – don’t mention the mako shark they encountered until after the much-heralded polar dip has taken place. The almost relentless focus on ‘fun’ can get a little wearing, and it is hard to find time and space to relax and enjoy the sight of an iceberg or the fin of a passing whale. Clearly, though, plenty of people really enjoy Adventure Canada’s approach, with returning passengers including one couple doing three two-week cruises back to back. Some guests are as knowledgeable as the ship experts in various fields, from map-making to ornithology. Further south, as the land becomes less remote, we stop at the town of Botwood, where the world’s first commercial transatlantic flight landed in 1937. Sadly, the seaplanes of the past didn’t last so that’s one adventure we cannot have. • A 13-night Greenland and Wild Labrador cruise costs from £2,528 per person through Adventure Canada (00 1 905 271 4000, www.adventurecanada.com). The charter flight from Toronto to Greenland costs around £633 per person. • Canadian Affair (0141-223 7515, www.canadianaffair.com) offers direct flights from Glasgow to Toronto from £318 return with Air Transat. • One-way flights from St John’s, Newfoundland, to Toronto, Canada, cost around £200. . • A double room costs from £125 at the Delta St John’s Hotel, 120 New Gower Street, St John’s, Newfoundland, A1C 6K4, Canada, (00 1 709 739 6404, www.deltahotels.com). • Double rooms cost from £49 at the Holiday Inn Express Glasgow Airport, St Andrews Drive, Glasgow Airport, Glasgow (0871 423 4876, www.hiexpress.com) • Julia Horton flew courtesy of the Newfoundland and Labrador Tourist Board (00 1 709 729 2830, www.newfoundlandlabrador.com)
(CNN) -- A Russian lawmaker found stuffed in a barrel of cement last week may have been killed over unpaid debts, investigators said on Monday. Mikhail Pakhomov, 36, was reported missing early last week, according to a report from the state-run RIA-Novosti news agency. On Thursday, some of the politician's personal property was found in a car searched during a traffic stop near Moscow. His body was later found in the barrel of cement in the basement of a private garage in a village near Moscow. Pakhomov served in the city parliament in Lipetsk, a city of a half-million people about 700 kilometers (430 miles) south of Moscow. He was a member of the ruling United Russia party. Twelve people have been arrested in connection with his death, investigators told RIA-Novosti. The investigation continues, but investigators said Pakhomov may have been killed because of debts he had not paid off.
MaidSafe Development Update MaidSafe Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 25, 2015 It has been an exceedingly busy summer at MaidSafe and it seems like a good point to recap on what we have working on and how we see things rolling out as we move forward. Since our last major update, when we announced the network running end-to-end, we have been adding some pretty significant features and making several enhancements. Amongst the highlights, we implemented Unified Structured Data, a change that enables the network to only recognise two primary data types; immutable and structured data. The repercussions for what this enhancement brings to the network is significant. Not only do they allow the reduction of network traffic (reducing load and making it more efficient), it also removes much complexity and enhances the security of the network. It is anticipated that Unified Structured Data will lay the groundwork for features such as smart contracts and global computation. For those looking for more technical detail you can visit the proposal as it was implemented here. We also recently completed work on the Decentralised Naming System (DNS), essentially the SAFE Network’s version of Internet domains. Keen to avoid many of the issues that we experience with the existing system, such as being centrally controlled by an entity, the SAFE Network provides a way to look up data related to any name. So, no more ‘http’ and a lot more ‘safe:’. At the end of August we released an example application showing this functionality and the example itself can be downloaded here. This was a really exciting development as it enabled us to get more (in addition to the Crust, Self Encryption and Routing examples released early summer) software into the hands of users. In essence, the DNS example enabled users to set up a local network, add files to it (even a website) and then view them using a Firefox extension across multiple platforms. MaidSafe focus a lot on usability and it is therefore great to see comments like this (from Justin Chellis): “I am not great at things like this, but it worked very easy for me..” Receiving positive feedback is a real motivator for all at MaidSafe, it’s proof that we are making very clear progress toward our goal of providing the average man, woman and child, access to technology that keeps their digital information safe. In addition to adding features, we have also had to spend some time going back and tidying up sections of code that were inevitably less than perfect given the pace at which we are working. A technical debt sprint has just finished and we are pleased to see much increased stability in the network. This effort is all being helped by our recently launched bounty program which enables MaidSafe to benefit from the work of several community developers, who between them submitted 12 pull requests over a 2 week period. It’s great to be able to harness the passion of external developers in a way that is mutually beneficial and we are really looking forward to seeing the bounty program flourish. In the immediate future we are planning the next round of development and there are some big ticket features being planned, these include: uTP Hole Punching — This will enable the nodes (clients and vaults) to talk to each other beyond NAT boundaries and facilitate users to join and become part of the network by contributing their computing resources. Crowd sourced infrastructure has arrived! Messaging Infrastructure — This will be a really fun deliverable, but is also a big one. The messaging APIs for inter-node communication would be put in place and potentially the addition of the MaidSafe Public Identity in this iteration. It would allow chat engines and clients to work on SAFE-Network. Messaging Infrastructure and Launcher implementation — It is anticipated that Launcher would be the only application that users gives their credentials (PIN, Keyword and Password) to. Launcher would then authorise apps on behalf of the user, giving each one of them a sandbox environment to work with. This not only prevents Apps from knowing the user credentials, but also removes the ability for them to tinker with folders/data of other Apps or user’s files and folders. So, we think that 2 more development sprints will see us reach Dev Bundle 2, a network that anyone can join remotely, store and retrieve data and farm for test safecoin. At this point, it will also be possible for third party developers to start building apps for the network. As we continue the roll out of the network, we will be replacing the existing MaidSafe website with two new sites, one that is focussed toward end users and farmers, and the other to provide developers with a clear channel into using the network. All in all, very exciting times ahead and we’re very grateful to have you on this journey with us.
The government shutdown may be over, but its effects will be felt in next year's tax season. The IRS has announced that it will be delaying the date when it will start accepting tax returns by about two weeks. The 2014 season will start sometime between January 28th and February 4th, a week or two later than its original date of January 21st. The agency says this is because the shutdown — during which about 90 percent of the IRS was inoperational — put its QA operations three weeks behind. "Programming, testing and deployment of more than 50 IRS systems is needed to handle processing of nearly 150 million tax returns," reads the statement. "Updating these core systems is a complex, year-round process with the majority of the work beginning in the fall of each year." That doesn't mean Americans will be getting a later deadline. The April 15th cutoff is set in stone, so we'll basically just see a shorter filing season and delayed refunds, though it's possible to apply for a six-month extension. Budget deadlock also set the 2013 season back by eight days, as the IRS had to implement last-minute changes passed as part of Congress' agreement. Just like last year, the IRS is urging people not to send paper filings early, since they won't be processed any sooner, and electronic filings remain its method of choice. For now, we'll have to wait until December to find out when the season actually starts.
The Philadelphia Eagles are now 0-1 in the 2015 NFL regular season schedule after being beaten by the Atlanta Falcons by a final score of 26-24. It was a shaky performance from the Birds in white and midnight green. Here are 10 things we learned from this game. There is a lot to discuss, so let's get right to it. 1) Chip Kelly needs to be more aggressive The decision to go for the field goal on fourth down late in the game instead of trying to get a first down was so bad. The Eagles were carving up the Falcons defense. There was no reason for the offense to doubt themselves there. Even if the Eagles make that kick, they're only up by one and there's still plenty of time for the Falcons to get some points. Kelly's in his third year now and it's apparent he's just not the aggressive risk taker (AKA "Big Balls Chip") he was at Oregon. That's disappointing. 2) The Eagles need to run the football The Eagles were supposed to get back to the running game. The team traded away LeSean McCoy and replaced him by signing DeMarco Murray and Ryan Mathews. They also still have Darren Sproles. Yet, the Eagles only ran 16 times for 63 yards. Not good enough. The Eagles can't spend all that money in running backs and then get away from their identity. Even if the Falcons are stacking the box, I thought the whole idea here was to get physical runners who can grind out the tough yards. The Eagles abandoned the run game too early in this one after some early failures. Speaking of the run game, here's a really weird stat: REALLY weird thing: DeMarco Murray (No. 29) scored his 29th career rushing TD. Ryan Mathews (No. 24) scored his 24th career rushing TD. — Brandon Lee Gowton (@BrandonGowton) September 15, 2015 3) Darren Sproles is still really good Speaking of running backs: Sproles has been such a valuable player to this Eagles team. It will never cease to amaze me the Eagles got him at the cost of a mere fifth round pick. Sproles finished with five carries for 50 yards and seven receptions for 76 yards against the Falcons. Maybe the Eagles weren't kidding when they said they wanted to get him more involved in the offense. 4) Sam Bradford showed promise but needs to be better Bradford didn't come out as sharp as the Eagles would have hoped in this one. His passes were off target early on. It was clear there were timing issues with his receivers. He really got things cooking in the second half, however, going 20 for 22 prior to the final drive. Considering this was his first real game since 2013, Bradford did OK relative to expectations. Moving forward, he needs to be better. One big concern was that he didn't really look to go deep too often. That's obviously been an issue with him in the past. To his defense, it was hard to tell if he ever had anyone open deep. 5) Concerns about the offensive line are legitimate The Eagles didn't seem to feel very confident in their offensive line, especially when it came to run blocking. Kelly even explained part of the reason why the team kicked a field goal late in the game is because they didn't get great push on third down. The big guys up front seemed to mostly hold up well in pass protection, though Jason Peters did get beat cleanly by rookie Vic Beasley at least once. 6) More Kiko Alonso, less DeMeco Ryans This isn't hard. Alonso is clearly the better player. Ryans is a savvy veteran but that doesn't matter a whole lot when you're missing tackles and looking slow in coverage. The good news here is it seemed like the Eagles got away from Ryans in the second half. 7) Byron Maxwell is not a shutdown cornerback Byron Maxwell did not play well against the Falcons, but I don't think he's a bad cornerback. Julio Jones is really, really good. He's a tough matchup for any defensive back. With that said, Maxwell also struggled against some of Atlanta's other wide receivers. His struggles are certainly concerning for the Eagles. Maxwell legitimately looked like the real deal in training camp and preseason this summer, so it's hard to believe he's a total fraud at this point. Much like his teammates, he needs to be better moving forward. 8) Malcolm Jenkins needs to learn how to catch a football Jenkins is a good player and a good guy, so I hate to harp on him ... but he really needs to stop dropping crucial interceptions. He did this a couple times late last year, including one against the Seahawks. These missed opportunities are killer. Jenkins dropped two picks on Monday night. Even if he gets one, that could have been all the difference. Maybe Jenkins could benefit from some extra time on the JUGS machine. Dropped picks aside, Jenkins did make a huge tackle on third down at the end of the game to force a punt. 9) The sky isn't falling Some people might not want to hear it, but this loss could have been way worse. The fact that the Eagles were able to rebound in the second half could be a positive sign moving forward if the Eagles can build on that success. The Eagles honestly look like a team that could benefit from more practice and more playing time as the season goes on. Philadelphia's roster went through so much change this offseason and it's apparent they weren't all on the same page at times against the Falcons. Bradford really needs to work on his timing and communication with his pass catchers, for example. Remember, it's only Week 1. 10) The pressure is on to beat the Cowboys It's Dallas week now. The Eagles can't go down to 0-2 in the conference to start the season. They really need to win at home. A win over the Cowboys puts the Eagles back on track and helps eliminate some of the concerns after this Falcons loss. The good news for Philly is that the Cowboys will be without several key players, including: star receiver Dez Bryant, starting guard Ronald Leary, linebacker Rolando McClain, and pass rushers Randy Gregory and Greg Hardy. The Eagles need to take advantage.
"The Killing" has been revived. Again. A final six-episode season is coming to Netflix. Series stars Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman will return. “The rich, serialized storytelling in ‘The Killing’ thrives on Netflix, and we believe that it is only fitting to give Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder a proper send off," Cindy Holland, vice president of original content for Netflix, said in a statement. "We are looking forward to offering fans -- both existing and new -- a series that we know is perfectly suited for on-demand viewing." Creator Veena Sud is also on board the final season. "It's a true testament to 'The Killing' creator Veena Sud, and the stellar cast led so compellingly by Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman, that fans remained so passionate about the show. We’re gratified that our partners at Netflix recognized this, and are giving us the opportunity to complete the story in a way that will be satisfying to our loyal audience," David Madden, president, Fox Television Studios, said in a statement. No word on when the new season will bow.
A hellscape surrounded it: the tall, once-gleaming corners of what was known once as "Turner Field." Once, people walked these spaces, and purchased beer in aluminum mock-bottles to drink while watching a game, and living life as people did in the now-distant year 1997. Now, only feral dogs and the merciless wind inhabited its spaces, a picture of desolation itself. We approached from the east, staying downwind to prevent possible scavengers from picking up our scent. Ahead, we found the stadium. Its profile was sorrow itself, a devastated shell of a former age. The damage boggled the mind. How anyone had made it in this stadium for 17 years, much less five minutes? The human soul can endure far more than suspected, far more than anyone dared conceive even in their most ghoulish nightmares. That was the only possible explanation for living among such rubble, and doing it for so long. I bet they only had one Waffle House in here, I thought out loud to myself. The filth of three generations covered the ground: We somehow moved through it, driven only by the desire to see the face of decay itself. Time had devastated the once-proud temple of sport, and parts were literally falling off of it as we moved. I looked up, and saw the threads of Turner Field unraveling before my very eyes. We needed to move fast. The entire building was seconds from falling down around our ears. Devastation. I looked down, and saw the shadow of some forgotten horror: It could have been just water stains, but I'm pretty sure it was something way worse, like the shadow of a spherical thing incinerated by a nuclear flash. Something like a giant novelty baseball, or Cee-Lo. We moved in the dying light. On the wall, a sign written for the long-dead, indicating some mysterious distance in the primitive imperial units of the late American period. Devolution must have set in by this point, as a sign indicating direction was written without words, and now pointed to...to what? What was it trying to tell them? And what was it telling us, now, standing amidst the rubble of a dead people? The dust of ages covered everything. I should have worn gloves, but the urge to reach out, to touch something human, to come into contact with ruin itself. This that is dead was once alive, I thought to no one in the silence. Who were these strange people of the past? Why were they so fond of the University of Alabama? What were these ghostly messages from the past? What was a Taco Mac? Where was it? AND WHAT DID IT MEAN? We had no answers, but then--- --oh god-- WALKERS. We fled quietly but quickly before they caught our scent. As I retreated, I passed one last mystery, a broken promise from the dead to the miserable living. No you won't, I thought to myself. You won't ever call again. More from SB Nation MLB: • Why do the Braves need a new stadium? • The many strikeout faces of Alex Rodriguez • MLB Hot Stove \| 5 clubs that will shape the MLB offseason • Presenting SB Nation's 2013 MLB Awards • Death of a Ballplayer: Wrongly convicted prospect spends 27 years in prison
Time was all you needed to write a novel was a good idea and a pocketful of gumption. Well, we’re in modern times now, and you’d be a silly, silly person not to take advantage of all the great software available out there. Here are some of my favorite tools, presented in order of when they show up in my novel-writing process. Hopefully, you find something useful here! Disclaimer: Some of the software below costs money, but just like hiring an editor or an artist to do your cover, there are some things you just have to shell out the cash for. And if you don’t have the cash, you’ll have to find a way. Focus Writer (free, tip! ) gottcode.org/focuswriter/ I use this in my day-to-day scratch writing. That is, whenever I’m not working on a novel and just want to play around with some story ideas, I open up Focus Writer, put the date at the top, and just go. I also use it when I’m starting a novel and looking for a way into to the story. Once I log a few “chapters” in Focus Writer, I copy them over to Scrivener to keep things organized. The best part is in the name; Focus Writer gives you a distraction-free environment for writing. No Facebook or Twitter integrations are available at all. Scrivener ($45) literatureandlatte.com I used Scrivener on my very first novel and every novel since, but don’t let that cloud your judgment. While it is full-featured and does many wonderful things, I primarily use it for organization and motivation. Creating individual files for chapters helps move them around or insert something new if necessary. The chapter list on the left (which can be organized into folders as well) gives you an overview of how the novel is structured and how it flows. In terms of motivation, Scrivener provides both per-project and per-chapter word count targets. Tell it you want to write 2,000 words per chapter and it’ll let you know how far away you are and when you hit the goal. Only 1,000 words to go… Only 500 words to go… It is available for both Windows and Mac. FreeMind (free) Office 365 ($99/yr) I know, the last thing an aspiring author wants to do is pay money for software. However, there really is no getting around this one. Microsoft Word is a necessity. And at some point, you’re gonna have to Natural Reader ($89???)
To get to Bandosingh Hazaari’s bhang shop in Hyderabad, India, you have to follow the gods. In the maze of nameless alleys in Dhoolpet, a working-class neighborhood in the southeastern Indian city of Hyderabad, enormous fiberglass figures of Hindu gods and goddesses peek out of temple doors and between buildings. It’s a part of the city that’s known for creating and selling these 30-foot avatars, which are used in festivals and parades. “In the haze of a bhang-laced thandai, the mundane doesn’t matter so much.”It’s also known for selling bhang—cannabis leaves that are crushed, mixed into drinks and sweets, and often served during Hindu holidays like Holi, the celebration of color and spring. During the festival, which falls on Mar. 17 this year, crowds gather in Indian cities to throw colored powder and water on friends and strangers, leaving the streets tie-dyed and the air hazy with ribbons of rainbow dust. In a country where possessing and selling cannabis is generally prohibited, and where levels of cannabis use are low relative to other countries, it’s one day of the year when consuming marijuana is socially acceptable. There are even Bollywood songs extolling bhang’s virtues: While the observance of Holi varies by community and region, serving bhang is part of the celebration in many Indian homes. The intoxicant takes many forms—from simple pills, or golis, created by mixing the leaves with water, to sweet bhang lassis, where the cannabis is ground up and added to heavy milk with almonds, sugar, and other flavors. It can also be packed into Indian mithai, or sweets made with nuts and condensed milk, and decorated with silver and gold edible foil. In its diluted form, bhang offers a mild buzz or high. Consuming it in larger quantities is akin to smoking weed, and vendors like Hazaari claim that the substance can put you to sleep for three days straight. On a warm spring afternoon, just a few days before Holi, the 50-year-old Hyderabad native sat on a dusty plastic chair in his dark warehouse, surrounded by divinities. Hazaari said thousands make their way to Dhoolpet during the festival to find bhang, which he sells in the form of small, cake-like sweets for 50 rupees (less than one dollar) each. He instructs customers to share each piece among six people for a mild high, or among four people for a stronger effect. Bhang is sometimes mixed into desserts for Holi. (Ankita Rao) “This is our culture, something passed down from our saints,” he told me, smiling beneath his white beard and weathered skin. It is not, he added, a drug, but rather an integral part of the Holi celebration—just like the practice of people washing colors (and, symbolically, their sins) off their body. In Hinduism, bhang is associated with Lord Shiva, a popular deity who is often regarded as the religion’s supreme god. Some passages in ancient Hindu scriptures describe a plant with spiritual properties that Shiva discovered and brought down from the heavens for humans to consume. Shiva is often depicted with a chillum, or smoking pipe. According to Travis Smith, an expert on Hinduism at the University of Florida, cannabis is an element of the faith’s yogi or sadhu (ascetic) culture, and “part of the yogi’s toolbox.” In places like the Indian city of Varanasi, a holy spot for Hindus along the Ganges river, many sadhus smoke marijuana from chillums. The drug’s psychoactive properties make people sensitive to the energies in their body, Smith explained, and facilitate meditation. He added that bhang is not particularly dangerous or habit-forming, and that its use during Holi is similar to the tradition of drinking eggnog during Christmas. “It is still considered a vice, but because of this sacred association with Shiva, it is respectable,” he said. AP Photo/Altaf Qadri (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri) (AP Photo/Anupam Nath) Not all Hindus share Smith’s view. Kamala, a 45-year-old woman selling clothes in the Dhoolpet marketplace, told me that her family doesn’t approve of the tradition, which they view as a form of drug use. The Dhoolpet neighborhood where she grew up and still lives is “painted top to bottom” during the Holi festival. But it is only during the latter part of the day—when people re-emerge from their homes wearing fresh white clothes and greeting each other—that she and her children start to celebrate. “It’s different for everybody, but this is our way of doing Holi,” she said. (AP Photo /Manish Swarup) (AP Photo/Tsering Topgyal) When India signed a UN drug treaty in 1961, the terms gave the country 25 years to rein in cannabis use while mandating crackdowns on harder drugs like opium in the meantime. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi prohibited marijuana in 1985, though officials made an exception for bhang—“as it is not made from cannabis resin or from flowering tops.” Indian state governments now regulate the production and distribution of the substance, authorizing certain vendors, most famously the Bhang Shop in Jaisalmer, to sell their products on a small scale. But it isn’t difficult to find unauthorized bhang vendors in many cities and villages, especially around Holi and Maha Shivaratri, a festival dedicated to Lord Shiva. A tourist reads the Bhang Shop’s menu in Jaisalmer, in northwestern India. (Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski) Smith said that despite the widespread use of bhang, it remains part of a counterculture and is not always accepted in upper-caste families. But on a day like Holi, when the “upturning of general social norms” is encouraged, the substance is imbued with a more spiritual meaning. As one Times of India article noted in the run-up to Holi this year: The explosion of colours is a ventilator of suppressed group or personal drives that allow temporary reversal of the rules of social engagement. Men are chased and harassed by women in villages of [Uttar Pradesh] while Brahmin elders and village heads are hounded and ridiculed, but they don’t complain. For such liberated social behaviour, intoxicants act as catalysts and enrich the expression and experience of role reversal. In the haze of a hashish smoke or headiness of bhang-laced thandai [a cold drink], and the consequent preoccupation with a higher universe, the mundane doesn’t matter so much. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade) (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade) As Hazaari, the bhang merchant, sees it, the intoxicant is something to be carefully enjoyed and generously shared. Each year during Holi, he gives out plates of free bhang-laced desserts at a nearby temple. “Each color on Holi has a meaning: red means happiness, white means peace,” he said. “And this bhang is God’s prasad”—a holy blessing. This post originally appeared at The Atlantic. More from our sister site: This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.
Hello everyone, the first commission is now finished and it's for who asked me to draw Sunset Shimmer and Twilight (a ponified version of Sci Twi) at the beach, enjoying the time together They both cuddle in the warm summer sun while the sea's calm splash sounds is relaxing and supports the atmosphere^^ Actually, working on this piece was quite simple, but I guess it was my fault that I had problems with focussing on it heh... Drawing the ponies went quite well but the background was somehow taking pretty long, at least it felt like it. After a while, I was thinking that the ponies do not fit into the scene, so I had to balance this with a few additional colours. In the end, i hope you like this piece and enjoy the view^^ Thanks again for commissioning me! Time: around 6 hours Time: around 5 hours If you want to support me, make sure to check out my Patreon. Every little bit helps me to keep my work possible and is very much appreciated. Thank you^^ Lupi's Patreon Lupi's Twitter Lupi's YouTube channel Lupi's Picarto
"I knew that day that the ideologies of my past career were no longer relevant to the future that I want, that I demand for my children. Friday changed everything. It must change everything. We all must begin anew and demand that Washington's old way of doing business is no longer acceptable. Entertainment moguls don't have an absolute right to glorify murder while spreading mayhem in young minds across America. And our Bill of Rights does not guarantee gun manufacturers the absolute right to sell military-style, high-caliber, semi-automatic combat assault rifles with high-capacity magazines to whoever the hell they want. It is time for Congress to put children before deadly dogmas. It's time for politicians to start focusing more on protecting our schoolyards than putting together their next fundraiser. It's time for Washington to stop trying to win endless wars overseas when we're losing the war at home ... For the sake of my four children and yours, I choose life and I choose change."
Welcome to Handiham World! …And welcome to a new era of challenges for radio clubs. What do I mean by that? Well, if you have to ask, you might not be that tuned in to your local club’s activities. Radio clubs provide a means for you and I to get together with like-minded folks who appreciate amateur radio and who enjoy learning new things through club programs, keeping up their operating skills through club nets and activities, socializing with other radio amateurs, or being part of public service activities – to name just a few of the more obvious ones. I know that I have learned a lot about useful things that have helped me out in ham radio, thanks to the presentations at my local radio club. Pictured: Greg Widin, K0GW, ARRL Dakota Division Director, gives a club program presentation on lightning and grounding. “A club is an association of two or more people united by a common interest or goal.” Thanks, Wikipedia! Of course we seldom think of clubs in terms of only two people. Usually a radio club is larger – sometimes much larger – and there may be several distinct interest groups within the club. The club may own some equipment, such as special tools for antenna work, a repeater system, a club station, training materials and equipment, and more. The challenges: Meeting space. If you have a club of only a few members, this isn’t a big deal. Clubs of a dozen or fewer members have lots of choices, up to and including private homes. Typically, a radio club will have a membership that is too large to be accommodated anywhere but a more formal meeting space, and that means casting about for a venue. With a demographic that includes aging baby boomers, a club definitely wants to have a meeting space that is accessible to those who might use wheelchairs or who are unable to climb stairs. You also want electricity, good lighting, and quiet space. Internet is a bonus, but if it is not available, it isn’t exactly a deal-killer. The challenge is finding the space at an affordable price! Back in the day, meeting spaces were plentiful and free for the asking, especially to small public service or special interest clubs like ham radio groups. Venues might include the local school, church halls, service organization halls, and municipal or county buildings. It is not so easy today. The economy is down. Every venue is looking to raise extra cash, so the days of free meeting space might just be in the rear view mirror! And permanent space with room for a club station – wow, that is REALLY hard to find these days. I know that several clubs have either lost or given up their space for club meetings and stations due to the press for more revenue or other activities related to the needs of the landlord or host organization. Apathy. This one drives club officials nuts. And it’s nothing new, of course. There have always been club members who would rather jump out a window than put together a club program or write an article for the newsletter. But it’s worse now than ever before, and it’s related to number three on my list, which I’ll tell you about shortly. Suffice it to say that there are all too many hams out there who think it is a major hassle to even join a club, much less actively participate. Overworked club members. Yes, this one has always been around because some club members take on way more than their share of club duties. But the reason it is worse than ever before goes back to the world economic downturn that started in 2007. As the economic woes gathered, companies and organizations began trimming their workforces. Everyone seemed to be affected, no matter what the industry, and those who were still working felt lucky to have jobs. Those who lost their jobs, ham radio operators among them, tightened their belts and didn’t spend anything extra on their radio hobby. Back at the workplace, those who still had jobs were doing the work of their old job plus that of a co-worker or two, since there were now not enough people on staff to get everything done. That meant longer, harder hours at work, and less time for amateur radio club activities. I have been a ham since 1967, and this is the first time I have been hearing about this phenomenon from other hams who feel too pressed to participate in club activities as they once did. Recruiting. A club will fade away if it does not attract new members to replace those who die, lose interest, or move out of the area. Yet this aspect of club life is often left on the sidelines, going unnoticed until all of a sudden it seems as if there is no longer a reason to have regular club meetings. Recruiting is challenging in a world of worldwide internet connectivity with VoIP and other activities that mimic worldwide radio communication. What can be done? Remember that whatever needs doing, you do not have to do it all yourself. Leverage the manpower you do have by using the resources available at ARRL, which has lots of advice and ideas about clubs, club organization, and recruiting. Let’s take a closer look at each challenge: A strategy to make meeting space more available is to make your club stand out above and beyond the others who might be competing for the same space. For example, if you are meeting in the county law enforcement center, you can make a better case for meeting space because your club supports emergency communications, Skywarn training and weather spotting, and public service communications. You are making sure that your club’s mission is aligned with that of the meeting space owner! No matter who hosts your meeting space, remember that it is wise to give back to your host in some way. If you are using a church hall for your meetings, perhaps the church needs volunteers for a clean up day or help at the church picnic. If you are lucky enough to get a special meeting room at a restaurant, everyone should buy a meal or at least spend a reasonable few bucks to make sure the restaurant owner turns a profit. The key? Be the best meeting space user you can be, and you will have more choices! Apathy is hard to cure. In fact, I don’t even care anymore. Ha, ha, I am just kidding about that not caring part, of course! I look at the programs and activities as the “good stuff” associated with a radio club. The other more pedestrian activities like the business meeting don’t really interest many of us. It’s the program on the DXpedition or the special event station that draws club members to the meetings. If your club has apathy oozing out of every nook and cranny, I’m willing to bet that your club doesn’t host good programs. Finding good presenters isn’t a given; the really good ones make the rounds but have limited time and resources. Most of your club’s programs and activities will ultimately come from within the club itself, and that means finding the right club member – one who is a really enthusiastic and positive go-getter – to do the going and getting. By that I mean they need to observe the membership, noting what areas of interest and expertise there are within the club. Then they have to recruit the guy who knows about antennas to give a talk. Apathy is something you chip away at by slowly building your circle of presenters. The more varied the topics, the better. Like the offerings on a menu at an excellent restaurant, there will soon be something for everyone at the club meetings. The problem of club members who are stressed out by their work schedules will not be solved at the radio club, but I think it is reasonable for those members who are retired or who have a bit more time to step up to the plate and take on some of those extra club duties. We need to appreciate that those in their working years are trying to stuff 10 pounds of potatoes into a 5 pound bag these days, and are often also raising families with all of the obligations and demands on their time that those things require. Yes, those people are sometimes willing to take on club duties, but they are subject to “burn out” if they don’t get a little help. Next time you are at your radio club meeting and something needs doing, raise your hand. Lead by example. Recruiting is vital, but how does a club go about it? I have seen several once active and vital radio clubs fade into obscurity and finally disband. Others have been successful in maintaining and growing their membership numbers. What is the secret? Well, there are several, really. You have to understand the world around you – no small feat, that. What it means is knowing that amateur radio has a lot of competition for hobbyists who want to experiment with electronics. It means understanding that on line video gaming, so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), include elements of world-wide communication, cooperation, competition, scoring points, and community-building that are found in traditional amateur radio. There is, in other words, a lot of competition out there. Knowing what you are up against makes it easier to figure out how to package amateur radio and your radio club to better draw people in. If you want to make ham radio attractive to anyone under 100, you’d better start thinking of some interesting activities, outreach to school science teachers, high-profile cooperative ventures with other groups… I think you get the idea. My own local club drew some university students in by participating in tracking high-altitude balloon flights via APRS. Another recruiting strategy is to offer Technician courses to the general public. We schedule ours right after a Skywarn course in the Spring, just before severe weather season kicks in. The classes are free, but the participants buy their own books. Graduates are invited to join our club. Education is one of the most important indicators of a club’s health. Show me a club without an education program, and I’ll show you a meeting room that will soon be available for a group of rock hounds or stamp collectors. Seriously, you have to offer classes or your club is toast. Again, check out the excellent resources on the ARRL website for tips on teaching and for resources like math help. Most importantly, say “YES!” when asked if you will be part of your club’s education and training team. Your job? Make getting on the air with amateur radio sound like it’s at least as much fun as World of Warcraft®. Go get ’em, tiger!
The Kingdom’s capital city is home to approximately 100,000 inhabitants including the Royal family. This bustling little city is the main centre of commerce, religion and government in the country. The juxtaposition of ancient tradition and modernity make Thimphu the ideal location for visitors to break away from their tour itinerary to immerse themselves in the contemporary Bhutanese lifestyle. Thimphu is the most modern city in Bhutan with an abundance of restaurants, internet cafes, nightclubs and shopping centres. However, it still retains its’ cultural identity and values amidst the signs of modernization. Thimphu is one of the few towns in Bhutan that have been equipped with ATM banking facilities and is a good place to stock up on some currency. There are several attractions in Thimphu such as the National Post Office, the Clock Tower Square, the Motithang Takin Preserve, Tango and Chari Monasteries, Buddha Dordenma, National Memorial Chorten, Centenary Farmer's Market, Semtokha Dzong to name a few. These form the most important tourist attractions in the capital city. The culture of Bhutan is fully reflected in Thimphu in respect of religion, customs, national dress code, the monastic practices of the monasteries, music, dance, literature and the media. Tshechu is an important festival where mask dances, popularly known as Chams, are performed in the courtyards of the Tashichho Dzong in Thimphu. It is a four-day festival held every year during autumn (September/October), on dates corresponding to the Bhutanese calendar. One of the most curious features of Thimphu is that it is the only capital city in the world that does not use traffic lights. Instead, a few major intersections have policemen standing in elaborately decorated booths (small pavilions), directing traffic with exaggerated hand motions.
As catering manager Kristina Viator was leaving Tempe Center for the Arts a few Saturday nights ago she noticed the crowds at Tempe Town Lake. She realized people were there playing Pokemon GO (Phoenix New Times recently reported Tempe Beach Park as one of the best places to play Pokemon GO). It occurred to her that some good could come from the popular game if she simply asked people to bring a can of food as they hunted around the lake. Viator intercepted a few of the players and they confirmed it would be easy to show up with a can of food and that was all she needed to hear. Viator contacted St. Mary’s Food Bank and discovered that they are low on canned fruit and cereal for emergency food boxes. The Tempe Center for the Arts agreed happily to be the designated drop off point. Viator’s employer Fabulous Food Fine Catering and Events then provided her with the resources for her initial drive that will be held August 6th. So here is where you come in! You can bring these much needed items to the Tempe Center for the Arts on August 6th from 4-10 pm! All donations will go to St. Mary’s Food Bank to be used in their emergency food boxes. Tempe Center for the Arts is located at: 700 W Rio Salado Pkwy, Tempe, AZ 85281 About St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance Founded in 1967, St. Mary’s is the world’s first food bank. Today, St. Mary’s Food Bank is one of the largest food banks in the United States, and proud of the impact it has had on Arizona—and the world. About Tempe Center for the Arts The Tempe Center for the Arts (TCA) is one of the finest venues in Arizona – a jewel in the crown of a city known for its support of the arts. Plenty of parking is available to serve the center, which is just an .83-mile walk from the Mill Avenue/Third Street Metro Light Rail stop. The TCA is located on the southwest end of Tempe Town Lake. About Fabulous Food Fine Catering and Events Fabulous Food Catering and Events is a custom, high-end catering company offering distinctive event planning services. Fabulous Food is owned and operated by husband and wife, Alan ‘Skip’ and Chantal Hause. The company has been producing one-of-a-kind events with exquisite artisan cuisine since 1996.
The first rule of running a user interactive website is: Don't moderate the users. It seems that Steve Huffman has violated this rule, when he edited posts made by Donald Trump supporters. He has admitted to this moderation on his Reddit profile. This mistake in management of his website is a really big deal. By moderating Reddit. He now faces liability for any post on Reddit. There are millions of posts, and it is truly impossible to moderate Reddit, but now he is liable for that. His previous partner the late Eric Swartz. Stood for free speech.I guess, Steve Huffman has a different view on free speech. What was he thinking? His site has been the 'Go To' website for people looking for the scoop, and first news all over the world. It encourages original posting of the original source. Now, it is just another shill site, with a giant liability. What if the FBI asked for information on a user, and he had edited that post? Would the user be criminally liable for that? Suppose Agent Anderson asks Reddit for information on someone that posted child pornography. What if Mr. Huffman had edited that post? Who is to say that the original poster even made the offending content that the FBI is investigating? Steve Huffman would be liable in this case. Eric Swartz, was facing a stiff prison term for his stance on free speech, and chose suicide as his option to avoid prison. With the liability that Steve Huffman has just taken on with his confession of moderation of user posts. The potential prison time is magnitudes higher than the time Eric Swartz was looking at. I hope that Mr. Huffman does not make the same decision that Mr. Swartz made.
More than 100 Doctor Who T-shirts Hide Your Arms has gained something of a reputation for creating epic t-shirt lists and obsessing over films and TV shows to find t-shirts. When it was first suggested to me that I write a list of Doctor Who t-shirts (if you have an idea for a list send it in) I thought that it might be a tough ask since I don’t watch the show. I don’t have anything against it, I just already spend too much time watching TV shows, though since practically everyone says it’s good I probable should give it a go. Still, since the fans, or at least one fan, wanted a list of Doctor Who t-shirts, I made it my mission to hunt them down. As you’ll find in the list there are quite a lot of good Dr. Who t-shirt designs out there, but nowhere near as many as with Star Wars, which is hardly surprising considering the popularity gap between the two, so I haven’t been able to create a list on the epic scale of the 200 shirts in the Star Wars list, but I think the current 119 designs is still fairly sizable. It’s also quite telling that many of the designs riff on the same themes, which suggests to me that Doctor Who designs haven’t been explored too deeply by the more creative t-shirt designers out there. You’ll also notice that a lot of shirts come from a few different retailers, which is frustrating for me since it looks like I’ve only looked in a handful of places, but the truth is that I’ve searched long & wide and not come back with many stores that sell Dr. Who t-shirts. Whether this means we will see more in the future (or that I have simply not discovered a treasure trove of excellent designs), who knows. As ever, these lists take an awfully long time to put together, so if you would like to share the list with anyone via Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc. I would be very grateful, your sharing keeps new people visiting the site, and that in turn means that I am able to keep writing them. 1. Time Travel Convention Tee – $19.95 – Glennz Tees 2. Buy “Job Center Fail!” T-Shirt by Designer Tom Clancy – $15.75 – RedBubble 3. “It also travels in time.” by D4N13L – $21.60 – MySoti (also available at RedBubble) 4. Earth Shock Cyberman T-Shirt – £14.99 – Forbidden Planet 5. “Lordy Lordy!” T-Shirt Design by Cathie Tranent – £16.38 – RedBubble 6. Doctor Who TARDIS Black shirt – $24 – Raygun Robyn 7. The exicitingly named ‘Doctor Who Tshirt’ $20 by 80sTees 8. ‘It’s what’s inside that counts’ by Dancingheron – $26.10 – MySoti 9. “My other time machine is a DeLorean” by Iain Maynard – £15.12 – RedBubble 10. “Cyberman Delete” £15.99 at Forbidden Planet 11. Retro Doctor Who Logo T-shirt – £19.99 – Mr. Cloud 12. “That Watch…” by Jarrod Kamelski – £17.01 – RedBubble 13. “Wibbly Wobbly Timey-Wimey” by Sachiano – $20.70 at MySoti (I’m sure I’d prefer this without the text, but then it would just be straight up IP theft) 14. “4th Doctor Costume” – £15.99 – Forbidden Planet 15. “5th Doctor Costume” – £15.99 – Forbidden Planet 16. “6th Doctor Costume” – £16.99 (why the extra pound?) – Forbidden Planet 17. “7th Doctor Costume” – £16.99 (again, why the extra pound?) – Forbidden Planet I thought I’d put this next series of 8-bit t-shirt designs by TheRandomFactor together since they’d look silly split up all over the list. I like the 8-bit style, but I do think that the text underneath the designs for each single Doctor is a bit unnecessary and doesn’t really fit with the style of the rest of the designs. EXCITING UPDATE! The Random Factor has now made the designs available without the text. 18. “Doctors vs. Baddies” by The RandomFactor – £15.31 – RedBubble 19. “Circle of Life (Gallifrey Edition)” by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – RedBubble 20. “I ? Doctor #1″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 21. I ? Doctor #2″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 22. I ? Doctor #3″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 23. I ? Doctor #4″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 24. I ? Doctor #5″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 25. I ? Doctor #6″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 26. I ? Doctor #7″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 27. I ? Doctor #8″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 28. I ? Doctor #9″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 29. I ? Doctor #10″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 30. I ? Doctor #11″ by TheRandomFactor – £15.31 – Redbubble 31. Retro Doctor Who logo t-shirt – £11.99 – Forbidden Planet (cheaper than the similar one above!) 32. “Rainbow Daleks” by Sparky – $22.16 – MySoti 33. “The Doctor has been here” (Stargate mashup?) TeeFury used to sell this, I don’t know if it’s been sold anywhere else now. 34. “Who’s Who” by t-shirt design superstar Ian Leino – $19 (previously available at TeeFury, and available on RedBubble too) 35. “Matt Smith Doctor Who Shirt” stunning naming work from 80sTees once again – $20 36. “Dr. Who Cyberman T-shirt” by J. William Grantham – £15.79 – RedBubble 37. “Resurrection Daleks” – £13.49 – Forbidden Planet 38. “Wheelchair Access” by The Onion Bag – £14.95 – Spreadshirt 39. “Two Hearts” by Okse – £17.64 – Redbubble 40. Space Invaders x Daleks T-shirt by MeganLara – £14.49 – RedBubble 41. “Proscrastinate” (blue) This design was previously sold at the design contest Qwertee, now at RedBubble for £15.12, and in orange, and a full colour print. 42. “Coexist” If you look carefully you can see that the ‘I’ is the tardis. This design was previously seen on TeeFury, now available at RedBubble for £15.75. 43. “The Angels have the Phone Box” t-shirt – $20 – 80sTees 44. “Gallifrey Road” t-shirt by Monstar – £13.86 – RedBubble (previously available at TeeFury without the text) 45. “Daleks” t-shirt – £14.99 – Forbidden Planet 46. “Fuk you Who” Cyberman Graffiti t-shirt – £12.50 – Filistine 47. “Bow Ties Are Cool” t-shirt – £12.50 – Balcony T-shirts 48. “Amy Pond T-shirt” by ameba2k – £15.12 – RedBubble 49. “A doodled Dalek?” by Sparky – $22.16 – MySoti 50. “Prydon Academy” t-shirt by moreguiness – £15.12 – RedBubble 51. “Deny this reality” t-shirt featuring Tom Baker (which is unusual for a t-shirt) – £14.99 – Forbidden Planet 52. “Horton Hears A Doctor” t-shirt by rtofirefly – £15.12 – RedBubble 53. “The Angels have the phone box” from $17.99 at ThinkGeek 54. “The Angels have the phone box” by glyphobet – £16.38 – RedBubble (in case you’d prefer a simpler ‘angels & phone box’ shirt) 55. “Robots in Disguise” by TeeBanter founder Simeon Well – £15.75 – RedBubble 56. Vintage Looking Tardis + Vortex/Wormhole type shirt – $20 – 80sTees 57. Tardis Costume t-shirt by J. William Grantham – £15.79 – RedBubble 58. “Keep Calm and Don’t Blink” by mechantefille – £15.79 – RedBubble 59. “Eternal Dalek” t-shirt – £14.99 – RedBubble 60. “Procrastinate!” by hewtab – $23 – MySoti 61. “Tom Baker Scarf t-shirt” Was there ever an explanation as to why he had such an unnecessarily long scarf? Surely it got in the way most of the time? £14.99 – Forbidden Planet 62. “Exterminate” by Jimiyo, formerly available at TeeFury 63. “The Boos Have the Question Box” fun little parody by Nana Leonti – £15.12 – RedBubble 64. “You never forget your first Doctor” t-shirt – $16.99 – ThinkGeek 65. “Cyber3PO and R2Dalek T-Shirt” by Kari Fry – £15.12 – RedBubble 66. “Vortex TARDIS” t-shirt by zerobriant – £15.12 – RedBubble 67. “5th Doctor Montage” t-shirt – £14.99 – Forbidden Planet 68. “Exterminate! Disintegrate!” t-shirt – $20 – 80sTees 69. “Upgrade!” Cybermen t-shirt by Stephen Sanderson – £16.38 – RedBubble 70. “Dr. Lost” Doctor Who x LOST mashup t-shirt, formerly available at TeeFury 71. “A Most Excellent Adventure” by Shirtoid – £13.23 – RedBubble 72. “That’s mine, Dalek, let go!” Mario mashup t-shirt – $14.99 – Tshirtbordello 73. “The 11th Doctor with Sonic Screwdriver” OMG he has a Sonic Screwdriver! – Sold Out currently – Forbidden Planet (on pre-order at the BBC shop) 74. “Day of the Daleks” by Stephen Sanderson – £16.38 – RedBubble 75. “The Eleventh Doctor” by ameba2k – £15.12 – RedBubble 76. “Scooby Who” by AnimatedPhil – £15.12 – RedBubble (was this available at TeeFury?) 77. “Trust Me, I’m the Doctor” t-shirt – $20 – 80sTees 78. “Dalek Invaders” t-shirt by Iain Maynard – £14.99 – RedBubble 79. “Doctor Pooh” t-shirt – £15.12 – RedBubble 80. “Dr. The Who?” t-shirt – $20 – BustedTees 81. “Is that a Sonic Screwdriver in Your Pocket?” by Lordy99 – £15.12 – RedBubble 82. “The WHOs” t-shirt by rtofirefly – £15.75 – RedBubble 83. “Yellow Dalek Doctor Who” t-shirt – $20 – 80sTees 84. “Supreme Dalek” t-shirt – Sold Out Currently – Forbidden Planet 85. “The Weeping Angel” by The-Other-Mike – £15.75 – RedBubble 86. “All hail the new Daleks!” t-shirt – $20 – 80sTees 87. “Experimental Jetset Doctors” t-shirt – £15.12 – RedBubble 88. “Welcome to my new empire” t-shirt – Currently Sold Out – Forbidden Planet 89. “Exterminate!” t-shirt – $20 – 80sTees 90. “Superman TARDIS” t-shirt by bamboota – £15.12 – RedBubble 91. “The Dr. and Amy investigate the crack” by Bleee – £15.75 – RedBubble 92. “Linear Dalek” t-shirt – $20 – RedBubble 93. “Doctor Who Linear TARDIS” t-shirt – $17.99 – ThinkGeek 94. “Doctor Who Linear Tardis” (little bit different from the one above) – £24.99 – Truffle Shuffle 95. “Exterminate!” (same as the 80sTees one we saw earlier?) – £24.99 – Truffle Shuffle 96. “Dalek Haynes Manual” t-shirt (could have been so much better than it is) – £12.99 – Play.com 97. “Invasion” t-shirt – £13.99 – Bathroom Wall 98. “Eleventh Doctor Collage” t-shirt – £16.99 – 8Ball 99. Something a little bit different, here’s David Tennant wearing a t-shirt under his jacket on the show (I don’t know the episode). You can buy the same retro spacehopper t-shirt from Force18 for £12.99. 100. “Upgrade or be deleted” t-shirt – $21.99 – Starbase Atlanta (links through to size large, other sizes available) 101. “Keep calm and then delete” t-shirt -$24 – vortextradingcompany (I don’t think they needed the ‘then’) 102. “Keep Calm and have a Jelly Baby” t-shirt – $24 – vortextradingcompany 103. “Keep Calm and then exterminate” t-shirt $24 – vortextradingcompany 104. “Keep Calm and reverse the polarity” t-shirt $24 – vortextradingcompany 105. Burned out Dalek t-shirt – $16 – sadjacktshirts 106. “Never Forget Your First Doctor” t-shirt – $20 – orenjinotaiyou 107. “Go Go Daleks” t-shirt – $17 – sadjacktshirts 108. “Cyberman delete delete delete” t-shirt – $18 – sadjacktshirts 109. “Davros and the Gang” t-shirt – $17 – sadjacktshirts 110. “Do you obey” t-shirt – $20 – orenjinotaiyou 111. “TARDIS broken” t-shirt – $20 – Starbase Atlanta (I knew I’d find a K-9 t-shirt!) 112. “David Tennant Doctor Who collage” t-shirt – $21.99 – Starbase Atlanta 113. “Doctor Who Classic Logo” t-shirt – $25 – Starbase Atlanta 114. “What Would Who Do?” t-shirt – $19.99 – Starbase Atlanta 115. “This Old TARDIS” t-shirt – $20 – Starbase Atlanta 116. “The Tenth Doctor & Martha” t-shirt – $25 – Starbase Atlanta 117. “David Tennant in a Vortex” t-shirt – $21.99 – Starbase Atlanta 118. I though we’d finish with something a little bit different, a $300 replica of the sweater vest worn by the Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy. That’s your lot for now, if I find any more Doctor Who t-shirts or you guys suggest any in the comments I will try and add them to the list. Thank you very much for reading,I hope you enjoyed the article, and if you’re new here be sure to check out some of my other posts, perhaps subscribe to the RSS feed, follow me on Twitter, or like Hide Your Arms on Facebook. And now the additions! 119. “The Angels Have the Phone Box” t-shirt by stuartwitts – $22.14 – Mysoti 120. “Cybermen want you” t-shirt by Cuppa-T – NZD$50 121. ‘Dalek Pest Extermination’ t-shirt by Tom Trager at RedBubble – £15.99 122. “Don’t Blink” angel t-shirt at snorgtees – Buy it for $14.95 this week. 123. This Mario themed shirt was on sale at Teefury on November 25th. 124. This The Who x Doctor Who t-shirt is currently on sale at OtherTees, but only for a few days. 125. Doctor Who Police Box Storage t-shirt and hoodie available at TeeRaiders for the next few days. 126. “Doctor Hu’s Chinese Takeaway” by Chuffy at RedBubble – From £16.54 127. “The Doctor vs. The Universe” in Scott Pilgrim style at TeeRaiders for a few days (so by the time you see this it will likely no longer be there). 128. Fans of Community will enjoy this Doctor Who mashup that was on sale at GraphicLab for the week beginning December 19th 2011. 129. Shirt Punch sold this wonderful Mister Men styled t-shirt on December 20th, 2011, hopefully it will appear elsewhere too. 130. Tardis Service Repair Manual at Redbubble. 131. Shirt Punch are selling this Guns N’ Roses inspired shirt today (January 12th). 132. Shirt Punch have another Doctor Who t-shirt, this one was available on January 24th 2012. 133. “Wibbly Wobbly TIMEY Wimey” by Simon Mason at RedBubble 134. “Darth Odd” by Simon Mason at Redbubble – £19.46
By Staff An Egyptian man who went online to watch a porno film for the first time got the shock of his life when he found that the woman in the film was his own wife. The man, identified as Ramadan, instantly collapsed in disbelief on the floor at an internet shop before coming round and rushing home to face his unfaithful wife. The woman first denied his allegations and started to swear at him, prompting her husband to face her with the film. Unable to deny it any more, she confessed to have betrayed him with her pre-marriage boy friend, telling him she had never loved him although they had four children during their 16-year marriage. “I found 11 films showing my wife in indecent scenes with her lover….it was the first time I watched a porno film and I did this just out of curiosity,” Ramadan told Egyptian newspapers at his house in the northeastern province of Dakhalia. “She first denied it and accused me of being insane before I faced her with the films…she then confessed to be still in love with her boyfriend, saying he is as young as her and that I am an old man.” Ramadan said he had been happy during his marriage life until he logged on to that website. Newspapers did not say whether he decided to divorce her. Dad forces son into sex with mom US: The Indianapolis Star reported Friday that 41-year-old Mark McCoy faces 27 felony counts and one misdemeanor count of charges including child molesting, child solicitation, criminal confinement and intimidation, reported AP. Court records say McCoy coerced the boy to have sex with the boy's 41-year-old mother. Records say the incidents also involved two others boys, ages 10 and 11. The woman tried but couldn't escape several times. McCoy was arrested March 30 and was being held Friday at the Marion County Jail on $50,000 bond. It wasn't clear from jail records if he had an attorney. He's due in court May 15. Police say he came under suspicion while under investigation in southern Indiana's Davies County. Mom allows rape to save young daughter MALAYSIA: A 38-year-old woman allowed an intruder to rape her repeatedly while her four children were locked in a nearby room in Malaysia. The housewife consented to the rape when the thief held a scissor near her neck and told her that he would rape one of her daughters. She told the thief to rape her and spare her girl, reports New Straits Times. The husband was away on a business trip. The incident occurred in the early hours around 5.45am when everyone was sleeping in the house. The intruder allegedly broke a window to enter the house. He woke up the housewife and asked her to hand over all valuables. He bundled up cash, two mobile phones, bracelet, a pair of earrings and handed them over. Then, the thief told the woman about his intention to rape one daughter. The children had woken up by then. The intruder rounded them up and locked them in a room and proceeded to rape their mother. Husband solicits men for wife UAE: Ajman Criminal Court found a husband guilty of soliciting men for his wife. The couple will be deported after serving six months in jail on charges of prostitution, reported 'Emarat Al Youm'. Upon receiving reliable information, Ajman Police raided their residence and arrested the duo. The wife was found in the bedroom with another man while her husband stood guard outside. The husband admitted he charged Dh100 from men to be 'entertained' by his wife. He told investigating officials that he married the woman five months ago and had told her she would be a partner in the business of prostitution. Meanwhile, the woman admitted that she willingly worked as a prostitute because she faced financial constraints and even distributed her phone number to lure customers. 'Cheating wife' murdered by lover EGYPT: A husband who was upset about the murder of his wife was in for a bigger shock when he learnt she was allegedly cheating on him and was having an affair with the person who stabbed her to death. The body of 33-year-old RKH was found with several stab wounds on her chest and abdomen within the Mansha’at Nasser police station limits in Egypt. Officials summoned her husband but he had no clue about the incident, reported 'Al Youm Al Sabea’a' newspaper. Investigations revealed his wife was allegedly in an illicit relationship with a 34-year-old cafe shop worker for the past five years. He alleged that he had been spending his entire income on her, when he discovered she was simultaneously having affairs with other men. In an act of revenge, he bought a knife and stabbed her after a verbal duel. The case has been referred to the Public Prosecution.
Martin O'Neill remains favourite to succeed Giovanni Trapattoni as Republic of Ireland manager. The former Celtic, Sunderland and Aston Villa manager, told BBC NI last week he was keen to get back into management. However the former Northern Ireland captain has yet to declare an interest in the vacancy, following Trapattoni's departure on Wednesday. Former Republic boss Mick McCarthy, Chris Hughton and Roy Keane are also being linked with the job. O'Neill, capped 64 times by Northern Ireland, is available after being shown the door by Sunderland in March. It is understood the 61-year-old was not contacted before the Republic's 1-0 defeat by Austria in Vienna on Tuesday. Chris Hughton alongside former Republic boss Brian Kerr McCarthy is another contender who would enjoy popular support, having guided the country to the 2002 World Cup finals in Japan and South Korea. The current Ipswich boss had more than six years in charge of the country and also played for the Republic in the 1990 World Cup. Hughton was assistant to former Republic of Ireland manager Brian Kerr and won 53 caps for the Republic. He established a good reputation as a manager at Newcastle, whom he guided back into the Premier League following relegation, and has since impressed at both Birmingham and current club Norwich. Former Manchester United and Republic of Ireland skipper Keane is also being linked as a possible successor to Trapattoni. He cut his teeth as a manager at Sunderland, winning promotion to the Premier League at the first attempt, and later guided Ipswich to the semi-finals of the Carling Cup. Steve Staunton, who won 102 caps for the Republic and managed the team on their failed mission to qualify for Euro 2008 before losing his job, was not surprised that Trapattoni was relieved of his duties. But he said expectations that the Republic should be qualifying for major tournaments on a regular basis were "unrealistic" given the small pool of players available for selection. He threw his weight behind those calling for O'Neill to take over. "He's got more experience than anybody out there so it wouldn't be a bad shout," he said. "Who knows what the FAI have in mind, but Martin would be up there high on the list. "I would like to see an Irishman get it or somebody who's from these islands, who knows what the Irish boys are about and knows the mentality."
JD: So I get off the train. You know, I’m walking towards the stairs and this young teenager, uh, pulls out a knife. He wants my money. So I just gave him my wallet and told him, ’Here you go.’ He starts to leave and as he’s walking away I’m like, ’Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re gonna be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.’ So, you know, he’s looking at me like, ’What’s going on here?’ You know, and he asked me, ’Why are you doing this?’ And I’m like, ’Well, I don’t know, man, if you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was go get dinner and, uh, if you really want to join me, hey, you’re more than welcome.’ So I’m like, ’Look, you can follow me if you want.’ You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help. So, you know, we go into the diner where I normally eat and we sit down in the booth and the manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi – you know so… The kid was like, ’Man but you know like everybody here. Do you own this place?’ I’m like, ’No, I just eat here a lot.’ He’s like, ’But you’re even nice to the dishwasher.’ I’m like, ’Well, haven’t you been taught you should be nice to everybody?’ So he’s like, ’Yeah, but I didn’t think people actually behaved that way.” So I just asked him in the end I’m like, ’What is it that you want out of life?’ He just had almost a sad face. Either he couldn’t answer me or he didn’t want to. The bill came and I look at him and I’m like, ’Look, uh, I guess you’re gonna have to pay for this bill ’cause you have my money and I can’t pay for this so if you give me my wallet back I’ll gladly treat you.’ He didn’t even think about it he’s like, ’Yeah, okay, here you go.’ So I got my wallet back and I gave, you know, I gave him twenty dollars for it. You know, I figure, uh, maybe it’ll help him – I don’t know. And when I gave him the twenty dollars, I asked him to give me something in return – which was his knife – and he gave it to me. You know, it’s funny ’cause when I told my mom about what happened – not mom wants to hear this but – at first she was like, ’Well, you know, you’re the kind of kid if someone asked you for the time you gave them your watch.’ I don’t know, I figure, you know, you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world.
This Thursday and Friday the Internal Revenue Service will be in federal court to explain its inexplicable “loss” of thousands of emails from multiple computers at the same time—just the emails that tie the White House to the use of the IRS to target the president’s political opponents. The IRS has to make two separate appearances in two separate cases before two separate judges in two separate courtrooms. Making things interesting, both judges have the legal authority, moral compass and courageous personality to appoint a special prosecutor if the IRS does not comply with the court’s orders. This week the IRS finds itself in the ring with two fair, honest, just, venerable and no-nonsense judges: Emmet G. Sullivan, appointed by President Bill Clinton, and Reggie Walton, appointed by President George W. Bush. With Judges Sullivan and Walton in the ring, the IRS can no longer run and can no longer hide. ROUND ONE This Thursday, July 10, in the Freedom of Information Act suit filed by Judicial Watch, the IRS will appear before United States District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan (D.D.C.). The IRS will have to explain why it failed to inform him and Judicial Watch that thousands of emails it was to produce were “missing” and why its status report was false. Judge Sullivan will expect an explanation from the IRS and its Justice Department attorneys. Expect those missing emails to reappear quickly or expect Judge Sullivan to provide assistance—perhaps even a special prosecutor—to find them. As first reported in The Observer last week, Judge Sullivan is no stranger to appointing a special prosecutor, having done so in the corrupt and subsequently dismissed prosecution of United States Senator Ted Stevens. In Stevens’ case, the final report of Special Prosecutor Henry Schuelke found pervasive, systematic and intentional concealment of exculpatory evidence by Department of Justice attorneys. In the Stevens’ case, the final report of Special Prosecutor Henry Schuelke found pervasive, systematic and intentional concealment of exculpatory evidence by Department of Justice attorneys. The IRS has already filed a “status report” in his court that failed to report the status with any accuracy whatsoever. That false filing alone puts the IRS on the ropes for this hearing, not to mention it’s a flagrant violation of federal and ethical rules. Judge Sullivan is eminently fair and measured; he is well-prepared to demand the truth and hold accountable those who seek to hide it from the American people and the federal court. As documented in my book, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice, Judge Sullivan, well aware that the Department of Justice can’t always be trusted, saw through the government’s lies and appointed a special prosecutor to uncover the truth. He is an American hero and a champion of justice, unswayed by ideological bias, political preference, or personal expediency. The courtroom will be packed. Get there early for fireworks. ROUND TWO The very next day, Friday, July 11, the IRS will have to answer to United States District Judge Reggie Walton (D.D.C.). Judge Walton, like myself, is a former federal prosecutor. Former Assistant United States Attorneys often make the best federal judges. They usually expect Department lawyers to get it right and hold them to the high standards to which those entrusted with the power of the sovereign and the trust of the people should be held. Judge Walton has been on the federal bench 13 years and has presided over high-profile trials, including the perjury and obstruction of justice prosecutions of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby (Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff) and former Major League Baseball all-star Roger Clemens. Judge Walton is set to address the failure of the IRS to produce the “missing” emails in an action filed by True the Vote—a conservative group targeted by IRS in 2010 and 2012. True the Vote filed a motion in Judge Walton’s court last week asking the court to appoint an independent forensics expert to examine the hard drives from which the thousands of emails, including exchanges with the White House, suddenly disappeared. The government seeks dismissal of the motion (of course). Judge Walton would be well within legal bounds to enter an order allowing inspection of the hard drives. In fact, he could order them brought into his courtroom on Friday if he so chooses, perhaps after a brief recess for lunch, or he could appoint an expert to go into the IRS, their servers and any other potential source of the countless backup copies in cyberspace or devices. According to technological experts, multiple copies of the IRS emails are obtainable with just a few clicks of the mouse. In addition to the Exchange, .PST or .OST stores on the local machines at all ends of each email, there are stores on the Exchange servers themselves that get backed up with multiple archived redundant full backups. These backups are tested for disaster recovery and business continuity. Moreover, when a government hard drive is decommissioned, I’ve been told that there are strict procedures that must be followed in order to recover the data or certify that it is, indeed, unrecoverable. Someone can be required to certify that under oath. Wonder who wants to risk perjury in front of either of these judges? Perhaps, Judge Walton believes that the emails are truly missing. Unfortunately for the IRS and DOJ, such an outcome is unlikely. Indeed, through a simple twist of fate, Judge Walton happens to have spent years on the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, thus making him intimately familiar with the infinite staying-power of electronic mail. This is the perfect time for what the Founders created as an independent and equal third branch of government—the Article III Federal Judiciary—to serve as the check and balance it was intended to be on the otherwise unbridled abuse of power and deceit by the IRS and the Executive Branch. The American people want the truth. And it is only when we have the truth that we can solve the real problem. Americans are fed up with the intellectually insulting excuses from the IRS, bald denials from the White House and whining attacks from government attorneys. Neither Judge Sullivan nor Judge Walton pull any punches, and both of them have the power to appoint a special prosecutor and deliver a knockout blow to the IRS. Sidney Powell worked in the Department of Justice for 10 years and was lead counsel in more than 500 federal appeals. She served nine U.S. Attorneys from both political parties and is the author of Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.
Large speed bumps installed in Jersey City are causing numerous vehicles to bottom out and grind into the road surface, prompting city officials to lower the humps. “Oh my God, what moron did this?,” said a man who identified himself only as Walter after driving his pickup truck over a speed bump on Erie Street near Eighth Street yesterday afternoon. “Too high? I’ll get whiplash.” The front end of a small four-door car with children inside bit into the pavement as it went over the speed bump. Afterward the driver said, “It’s too big. It’s stupid. It is not safe for anyone.” A neighborhood resident said the speed bump was installed on Thursday or Friday. Already the bump and the macadam in front of it have been scarred by vehicles bottoming out. “I think they are a great idea by the park, by the school, but they are clearly over-sized,” the resident said. A man who lives adjacent to the speed bump added: “It’s worse at night when people can’t see it.” He said he also fears that drivers slowing to a crawl to go over the bumps are at risk of being rear-ended by other vehicles. A Lincoln Town Car that went over the speed bump too fast yesterday afternoon became partially airborne. The bump at the location is the same color as the roadway. There is a sign just before the intersection that reads, “Speed Bump Ahead 18 M.P.H," while a sign closer to the speed bump is not clearly visible. “Yes, people have been bottoming out but that’s what speed bumps are for," a crossing guard at the intersection said. "It’s a school zone and people go flying through.” Jersey City spokeswoman Jennifer Morrill said community groups have asked for permanent speed bumps to deal with speeding motorists. "The city's number one priority is the safety of our residents, especially children," Morrill said. "That is why we have taken the proactive step of installing effective, permanent speed humps to reduce speeding on residential streets, with a focus on streets around schools." Morrill added that “In addition to marking the speed humps with thermoplastic, reflective pavement markers, the contractor will also be lowering them." Meanwhile, a similar speed bump located on Duncan Avenue just west of Bergen Avenue is also scarred by vehicles' grinding into it.
"When I discovered what was true, I could not resist acting on it and telling others. " Daily Bell: You have almost singlehandedly led a revolution in thought that has changed the world. How does that make you feel? Rockwell: Well, thank you, but that's not how ideas work. Without donors, faculty, students, collaborators, distribution media, and the division of labor, we are all just isolated scribblers. That has always been true, for the ancient world and today. We like to say that one person can make a difference, but that is only true to some extent. All forms of production, including in the world of ideas, require as much cooperation with others as possible. And while we were making great progress before 1995, the advent of digital media has made a vast difference precisely because it has dramatically expanded opportunities for communication and cooperation. Daily Bell: Can you familiarize our readers with the depth and breadth of the organizations you have founded and that offer services — especially on the 'Net. Rockwell: I founded the Mises Institute in 1982 to try to make sure that the influence of Mises and other Austrian economists would grow. Today Mises.org is the largest economics website on the planet that is not-for-profit, and it is a teaching and publishing powerhouse. I founded LewRockwell.com in 1999, mainly because I had lots of information to share with others, and I got tired of using email lists. I figured that I might as well post what I found interesting, in every area, on a public website. Today, it is the best-read libertarian site on the web. Daily Bell: Did you ever dream of this level of success? Rockwell: Neither I nor any of my mentors, like Rothbard, nor influences, like Mises, could have imagined such a thing. Of course, reaching minds is what liberty is all about. The default position of the world is despotism. In the sweep of things, liberty is the exception. What makes the exception possible is ideological work, that is, spreading the ideas through every possible means. Daily Bell: You attribute some of your success to your father. Can you tell our readers about this unique man? Rockwell: He was a surgeon and a man of great strength of character, a man of the Old World of the sort we hardly meet anymore. He wasn't a complainer, didn't whine when things didn't go his way. He was incredibly smart, and he loved liberty in the way that the men of the Enlightenment loved liberty: he didn't believe that the state could do anything better than people can do for themselves. He was a man of the Old Right who despised FDR, in whose deliberate war my older brother was killed; and he was an admirer of Robert Taft, not least because of his noninterventionist foreign policy. My father worked hard until the last moment he possibly could. So should we all. Daily Bell: Can you provide us with a brief history of how you became interested in free markets and decided to make them your life's work? Rockwell: As with most people, it began with the observation that something was profoundly wrong with the conventional wisdom, which even from grade school seemed to presume that wise masters at the top knew more than anyone else and so should be in charge of everyone and everything. That supposition seemed to lack empirical evidence, so far as I could tell. I discovered the literature of freedom hiding in the library and realized that truth was something I would forever have to dig for. It wouldn't be given to me by network news anchors, politicians, nor the leading lights in establishment academia. When I discovered what was true, I could not resist acting on it and telling others. It really isn't any more complicated than that. Daily Bell: Is the logical outcome of Austrian economics the disappearance of the state? Rockwell: Mises didn't think so — neither did Hazlitt. Sudha Shenoy argues that of all the people who entertained the possibility of society without a state in that generation, Hayek comes closest to embodying the anarchistic temperament. In any case, the man who made the real difference in the Austrian School in this regard is Rothbard. It was he who pushed the theoretical apparatus "over the edge," so to speak. Hardly any modern Austrian today is not an anarchist. This is also thanks to Rothbardians such as Walter Block, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and David Gordon, of course. At one time Rothbard was denounced for his views, for having allegedly marginalized the Austrian School. Now, of course, his anarchism is probably the largest part of the legacy he left for the world. It is very appealing to young people, unlike the statism of regime economists. Daily Bell: Is it reasonable to believe that the state will ever wither away or does reality instruct us that the best that can be done is to limit its power? Rockwell: To me, that's like asking if we can imagine a society without robberies and murders. Maybe it won't ever happen, but we must have the ideal in mind or else we'll never get closer to it. Without the ideal, progress stops. To some extent, then, whether reality will finally ever conform is not the critical question. What counts is that what we imagine can and should exist. I like to imagine a society without legally sanctioned aggression against person and property. Daily Bell: Are you worried that your organizations will come under significant attack as the free-market movement continues? Rockwell: No, I don't worry about it. On the other hand, it is completely normal for radicals to be under attack from every quarter, so this would not be a surprise. Daily Bell: Take us back in time. You founded Imprimis. Were you bitter when you left? Rockwell: Not at all! I admired George Roche, and still do. But my work at Hillsdale was done, and I moved on. Daily Bell: When did you decide to found the Mises Institute? Was it when you became allied with famous Austrian economist Murray Rothbard? Rockwell: I had been Mises's editor at Arlington House Publishers in the late 1960s. After his death in 1973, it became increasingly clear to me that no idea in this world stands a chance for success without an infrastructure of support. Misesians did not have that in the universities nor think tanks. Mises himself dealt with the lack of support by leaving Austria and moving to a wonderful institute in Geneva. I wanted to found an institute in the United States that would be a sanctuary for free thought in the Misesian tradition. First I approached his widow, Margit von Mises, who gave me her blessing and agreed to serve as our first chairman. Then I asked Murray, whom I had also known, to guide our scholarly affairs. He was thrilled as well. He was a natural ally not only because he was Mises's greatest student, but also because he was being shunned as too extreme, too radical, insufficiently willing to play the game — just as Mises had been. I take very seriously his example, and the trust he reposed in me by making me his executor. In many ways, he was the critical force behind our growth and success. His spirit still surrounds us today. Daily Bell: What would Rothbard think of what has happened? Would he be surprised? Rockwell: Well, mostly he would be thrilled. But remember that he was the greatest optimist for liberty. He was filled with hope and hated despair. Nor was this just a disposition. It was real hope rooted in the firm belief that if we did the right thing, we could make a difference. In this sense, I don't think he would be surprised that we have more student applications than we can accept, that more and more scholars seek us out, that our member programs sell out, that our audio files are being downloaded by the millions, that our books are selling faster than we can print them, and all the rest. Daily Bell: There has been a resurgence of Randism. Are you surprised? Do you approve? Rockwell: I met her and heard her give lectures and I was always impressed. Recall that when Atlas Shrugged came out, Mises and Rothbard both wrote glowing reviews. Her works of fiction are profoundly effective in promoting the capitalist message, and this is all to the good. But there are some critical errors. I don't think she fully understood the cooperative nature of the capitalist social order, for example. She had less regard for the consumer than the capitalist, and in this respect she was only half-right. But in general, if her books can disabuse people of canards against the free economy, that is great. Daily Bell: Can you give our readers a very brief overview of Antiwar.com and how it is related to your enterprises, if at all? Rockwell: I would say that AWC specializes in one aspect of Rothbardian thought. But while it is an ideological cousin of LRC and Mises.org, there is no direct relation. Rothbard's children are everywhere, of course. One reason has to do with his special way of communicating with people. He spoke to anyone at length about his or her own intellectual interests. If you loved news, he would talk news. If you loved the history of ideas, he would talk the history of ideas. If you were dedicated to the partitioning of Belgium, he would talk to you about this cause. He was a gigantic personality and intellect. No one penchant or interest or cause can sum up his life. Daily Bell: How is fundraising going? Has it diminished since the financial crisis? "The default position of the world is despotism. In the sweep of things, liberty is the exception." Rockwell: Not at all. If anything, people are even more dedicated to the idea of freedom and the propagation of the truth. Austrian ideas are getting far more attention than ever before — in the wake of a crisis that conforms so closely to the Austrian paradigm. Daily Bell: Are you seeing a steady increase in people willing to fund free-market efforts? Rockwell: Here too, we see great progress. Daily Bell: What is the future of the Ron Paul freedom movement in your view? Rockwell: This much is clear: the Paul movement has made a huge difference in bringing people to libertarian ideas. In some way, there is an element of tragedy in that it takes politics to wake people up. Ideally, people would discover the ideas of liberty through other means. Ron Paul agrees with this observation, by the way. He sees himself as an educator first. He chose politics because, for him, it was an effective route for his larger and more important goal. And what an extraordinary job he has done, in his writing and speaking and personal example for almost four decades. He has brought vast numbers of people into the light. That was always his dream. I should add that his early support was very important in the Mises Institute's success. We are honored to have him as our distinguished counselor. Daily Bell: Will your educational organizations become more involved in political efforts or not? Rockwell: I would say no to that. Unless you are Ron Paul, politics is a dangerous business that tempts people to say and do crazy things. Success is fleeting, whereas we are in this for the long term. Daily Bell: How is the free-market movement spreading overseas? Rockwell: Wonderfully. One might compare Austrolibertarianism to Marxism in the extent of its international reach. This is very exciting. Human liberty is a universal desire, so of course there can be no libertarian movement that isn't truly international. Daily Bell: Are you hopeful that growth will continue at the pace that it has over the past decade? Rockwell: The future is always uncertain, but we have the tools and the energy and the ideas. Just in the last few years, we brought back to print virtually the whole of the Austrian and libertarian libraries. Our downloads are immense, especially among young people. If you must predict the future, look to the ideas held by young people and you will come close to finding it. In this sense, I'm certain that our movement will continue to grow long past my own life. Daily Bell: Have you noticed increased resistance to your efforts coming from organized governmental entities? Rockwell: One hears rumors, but nothing is known for sure. Government these days has many enemies, and all the usual bureaucratic problems in keeping up with them all. Daily Bell: Where does the US government and its allied power structure go from here? We think they are bleeding credibility and influence. Rockwell: Yes, and compare today's antigovernment feelings with the way things were just after 9/11/01, a massive state failure that the state used to promote itself. Today we see antistate feeling growing, picking up where it left off in the 1990s. But here is the problem. The Left hates some aspects of the state and loves others. The Right is the mirror image. The job of the libertarian is to get both sides to see that the other guys are half-right. Think of the Tea Parties, for example. The crowds roar disapproval of socialism even as they cheer for socialistic military invasions. Daily Bell: Is it possible to return the United States to a more republican form of government? Can history be repealed? Rockwell: We have a history as a radically decentralized nation, and this memory has not entirely evaporated. It could be that the path to liberty in the United States is nullification or even secession. Or the decentralization may be de facto as more and more people discover means of individually seceding from specific sectors of statism: using alternative currencies, homeschooling their children, reading alternative media, circumventing the pharma-industrial complex, starting an unofficial business, smoking whatever substances they want, or refusing to return to a military assignment. Rebellion can take many forms. We have to learn to welcome them all. Daily Bell: Do you expect in your lifetime to see gold competing with the US dollar as currency? Rockwell: Technology makes this possible as never before. Gold is not going away, but the dollar's life is limited. Daily Bell: Do you expect the Fed to be audited? Rockwell: This might happen, though as Ron Paul notes, transparency is only one step towards what must be the ultimate goal: shutting down the central bank. Daily Bell: What do you think of Ellen Brown's theory that the state historically has created money, and that banks, including the Fed, ought to be nationalized and operated by "the people's" government. Some say that the oversight that Ron Paul wants Congress to have over the Fed is somehow an endorsement of the Brownian position. Rockwell: I am not very familiar with Brown, but the Fed is the government's central bank, the audit bill gives no monetary power to other parts of the government, and the banks are already in cahoots with the regime. That's why we have a Fed and officially enabled fractional reserves. Daily Bell: We are well aware that Ron Paul seeks a gold standard and in a perfect world the end of the Fed. Can you reaffirm this position for our readers? Rockwell: Yes, though he does not seek a monopoly for anything, including gold. He wants money to be rooted in market experience. It is not complicated. Daily Bell: We have noted what we think is a softening of an institutional position regarding the gold standard — and the possibility that free banking would be a considered option as well. Is this a correct observation of your organizations' stance? Rockwell: I wouldn't say that we have an official position. There are many ways to move to free-market money and noninflationary banking. I would never want to close off any viable path. One problem with Mises's plan for a gold standard is that it relies on the idea that the people in charge will do the right thing. That is a charming, Old World idea, but I don't think it holds true in our times. We need to be open to the possibility that reform will never come from the top. Daily Bell: Are you sympathetic to a private gold-and-silver standard or is a gold standard always preferable? Rockwell: I am all for competing metals. But a true specie standard is always private, and it always leaves room for competing currencies. Daily Bell: One of the hardest issues to resolve from a free-market point of view is ownership of intellectual property. Can you tell our readers where you come down on this difficult issue? In a free market, would individuals be able to claim and enforce intellectual property rights with any prospect of success? Rockwell: Rothbard condemned patents but not copyrights. Mises and Machlup saw patents as government grants of monopoly, but neither condemned them outright. Hayek was against copyrights and patents, but didn't write about them much. It is digital media that have brought the issue into focus. The key thinker here is Stephan Kinsella. He and Jeffrey Tucker have done the heavy lifting and convinced most all of us that intellectual property is an artifice that has no place in a market economy. There are incredible implications to this insight. The infinite reproducibility of ideas means that we stand a great chance of success. The fact that ideas are not scarce goods means that they need not be controlled. This is a wonderful thing. There is much work left to do in this area. The whole history of invention needs revision, and our theory of markets needs to take better account of the central place of emulation in social progress. Daily Bell: Do you think the military-industrial complex in the United States will gradually erode as the free-market movement gathers even more strength, or is the power structure hell-bent on empire? Rockwell: It has to erode. The empire is insanely overextended. At some point, we'll go the way of Britain and Rome. We can only hope that the United States takes this path in wisdom and not in desperation. Daily Bell: Where do you go from here? Do you have other organizational changes in the works? Expansions? Rockwell: There are expansions every day. We are looking at marvelous things, things that are bigger than anything we've yet done. But I don't want to spoil the surprise. Daily Bell: What is your future personally? What intellectual endeavors are you focused on? Rockwell: I want to keep working, especially on my website, and to keep pushing the boundaries of ideas and technology. I never plan on retiring, and neither should anyone else. There is too much work to do. Daily Bell: Can you give our readers any advice as to what publications and information to seek out on your web sites — where do they start? Rockwell: We always begin with our passions, whatever they are. No two people are alike. This is what search engines are for. But let me say that at some point, everyone should aspire to be a serious student of Mises and Rothbard. No education is complete without that. "The Left hates some aspects of the state and loves others. The Right is the mirror image. The job of the libertarian is to get both sides to see that the other guys are half-right." Daily Bell: If readers wish to learn more about your organizations, where is the easiest starting point? Can anyone attend Mises seminars, etc.? Rockwell: The websites are a great starting place, but of course we love to have new people come to our conferences. We are working to create more opportunities for that. Daily Bell: Where would you recommend that a young person go for higher education in the United States? Rockwell: Do you mean education or college? They aren't always the same. You can get a good education online today. For university degrees, I would suggest the least-cost investment. But remember that the opportunity costs of formal education are very high. After four to six years in college, a person can discover that he or she has no skills. That is the worst way to enter a workforce. Daily Bell: Thank you for your time and insights. Rockwell: You're welcome.
One of the key themes I've mentioned over the last year is the increase in conventional sales and the corresponding decline in distressed sales (Foreclosures and short sales). I've argued this increase in conventional sales is a sign of a healing market. Tom Lawler has sent me some rough data that suggests much of the increase in conventional sales in California has been due to investor buying (mostly large institutional investors buying single family homes to rent). As an example, reports are Blackstone has purchased 20,000 homes nationally and Colony Capital has purchased 7,000 homes. And there a number of other large players. There groups have continued to buy even as the number of foreclosures has declined. Note: some of the smaller investor groups I've mentioned on this blog have stopped buying (they started buying at the low end in late 2008). They say the numbers no longer make sense. Historically single family rentals were a mom-and-pop venture, and these large institutional buyers are a significant change in the market. These buyers are one of the reason the current active inventory is so low (other reasons include "underwater" homeowners who can't sell, potential sellers unable to find a new home to buy, and a change in seller psychology "not wanting to sell at the bottom"). This investor buying is making it very difficult for first time buyers to find a home, and this is probably keeping some potential buyers as renters - and maybe pushing up some buyers to higher price points just to buy. In the short run (the next few years), I don't think these institutional buyers will have a negative impact on the market. It seems unlikely they will be large sellers, and they will probably maintain the homes that they purchase. However this could impact the housing market in the future, especially the move-up market, since the move-up market usually needs previous first-time buyers to sell their first homes. Obviously institutional sellers will not be move-up buyers. The impacts of this investor buying are something to consider. Below is some comments and data from Tom Lawler. He makes a couple of key points: 1) owner occupied buying is actually down a little in California, and 2) it appears the investors are moving up to higher price points. The following is from economist Tom Lawler: Dataquick [released estimates for all-cash and absentee buyer shares] for the Southern California area and the Bay Area, which are shown on the [below], along with the foreclosure and short sales shares for each area, as well as the median sales price for all-cash transactions and absentee buyer transactions. There are a few interesting things to note: first, while the foreclosure share of resales was down sharply from last March to this March, and last month’s short-sales share was down from a year ago, both areas saw an increase in both the all-cash share of sales and in the “absentee” buyer share of sales. This confirms anecdotal reports that “investors,” rather than curtailing purchases because of declines in “distressed” properties for sale, have increasingly been purchasing non-foreclosure properties, and possibly even non-distressed properties. Second, the median sales price for homes sold to “all-cash” buyers and to “absentee” buyers – and, of course, there is a lot of overlap in these two – increased by a lot more than the overall median sales price in both areas, also shown on the next page. Dataquick Estimates, California Home Sales All-Cash Share Absentee Buyer Share 13-Mar 12-Mar 13-Mar 12-Mar SoCal 34.1% 32.4% 30.6% 28.2% Bay Area 31.1% 29.4% 27.3% 24.2% Median Sales Price, All-Cash Share Median Sales Price, Absentee Buyer Share 13-Mar 12-Mar 13-Mar 12-Mar SoCal $280,750 $215,000 $274,000 $212,000 Bay Area $325,000 $250,000 $324,000 $250,000 Foreclosure Share Short Sales Share 13-Mar 12-Mar 13-Mar 12-Mar SoCal 13.9% 31.5% 21.5% 24.6% Bay Area 10.7% 25.5% 19.0% 23.8% Median Prices1 SoCal Bay Area 13-Mar 12-Mar % Chg 13-Mar 12-Mar % Chg All Transactions $345,500 $280,000 23.4% $436,000 $358,000 21.8% All-Cash $280,750 $215,000 30.6% $325,000 $250,000 30.0% Absentee Buyer $274,000 $212,000 29.2% $324,000 $250,000 29.6% New and Resale Home Sals, Socal and Bay Area 13-Mar 12-Mar % Chg. Southern California Total 20,581 19,953 3.1% Owner Occupant 14,283 14,326 -0.3% Bay Area Total 7,263 7,723 -6.0% Owner Occupant 5,280 5,854 -9.8% CR Note: Median prices are distorted by the mix. For the overall market, it is better to use repeat sales indexes to estimate price changes, however Lawler is using this data to show investors are moving up to higher priced properties.This confirms anecdotal reports that “investors” in California have been “moving up” the price points at which they purchase homes.Finally, while the sharp drop in the “distressed” share of sales over the last year indicates that there was strong YOY growth in “non-distressed” sales, the increase in the absentee buyer share of sales indicates that sales last months to folks planning to occupy the home they were purchasing were down from a year ago in both areas.These data strongly suggest the investor buying – a lot of which was all-cash and a lot of which has or will become rental units (witness the sharp drop in home listings in California, suggesting that few of the investor purchases were for quick flipping) – has been a major driver of the housing and home price recovery in California.
Calcium is synonymous with milk and dairy products, which leads many people to believe they’ll become calcium deficient if they switch to a vegan lifestyle. While milk certainly contains a lot of calcium, many plant-based foods also contain calcium, and some actually rival it. As long as you’re consuming a variety of nutritious whole foods, getting enough calcium as a vegan is a breeze. To help illustrate this point, we put together a list of 25 vegan-friendly foods that naturally contain calcium. We also made a colorful companion chart for quick and easy reference. Once you have a look at the wide variety of foods that contain calcium, you’ll realize getting enough calcium as a vegan is basically as easy as eating a well-balanced meal. 25 Plant-Based Sources of Calcium Note: All values are per 1 cup. #1. Sesame Seeds – 1404 mg / 140% DV My Latest Videos It’s unrealistic for anyone to eat a whole cup of sesame seeds in one sitting, but they’re so packed with calcium, you could sprinkle just 1 tbsp over your meal and still get an extra 87.75 mg of calcium on your plate. #2. Almonds – 378 mg / 38% DV Almonds are another food densely rich in calcium. Snacking on just 1 oz of almonds adds a heaping 73.9 mg of calcium to your diet. #3. Collards – 266 mg / 27% DV Eating a cup of cooked collard greens is basically the calcium equivalent of drinking a glass of whole milk, except for one major difference: collards are bursting with vitamin K, which is crucial for controlling the binding of calcium in bones and maintaining good bone health. 1 cup of collards has 1045% DV for vitamin K; 1 cup of milk has just 1%. #4. Garlic – 246 MG / 25% DV Making fresh garlic a regular part of your meals is an easy way to add extra calcium to your diet. Add a couple tbsp of chopped garlic to your soups, stews, and stir-fries for an extra 50 mg of calcium #5. Brazil Nuts – 213 mg / 21% DV Munching on a few Brazil nuts throughout the day is a great way to get some extra calcium in your diet. #6. Turnip Greens – 197 mg / 20% DV When you get sick of collards, you can switch to turnip greens, which are also very high in calcium. #7. Soybeans, Cooked – 175 mg / 18% DV Soybeans, in many forms, are an excellent source of calcium. Soy milk and tofu are also good sources of calcium, but only if they’re fortified. #8. Great Northern Beans, Boiled – 139 mg / 14% As the name says, they’re great. I recently used them to make these white bean and nut fritters. #9. Pistachio Nuts – 135 mg / 14% The next time you’re curled up on the couch watching a movie, instead of snacking on microwaved popcorn, snack on pistachios for some extra calcium, as well as some extra protein and vitamin B-6. #10. Navy Beans, Boiled – 126 mg / 13% DV Navy beans are another legume high in calcium. They’re also an excellent source of vitamin C and magnesium. #11. Walnuts – 115 mg / 11 % Though not as rich in calcium as almonds, brazil nuts, or pistachios, walnuts still yield a relatively high amount per serving. One handful of chopped walnuts will yield about 28 mg of calcium. #12. Mustard Greens – 104 mg / 10% DV When you get sick of collards and turnip greens, mustard greens are still bringing a large dose of calcium to the table. #13. Kale – 90.5 mg / 9% DV Kale would be one mighty weak superfood if it didn’t host a respectable amount of calcium. #14. Peanuts – 87.8 mg / 9% DV If you’re looking for a calcium rich vegan meal that’s easy to make, you could have a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat bread with a glass of fortified soy milk. #15. Oats – 84.3 mg / 8% DV If you want a healthier alternative to cereal and milk that packs just as much calcium, have a bowl of oatmeal with fortified soy milk, almonds, and raisins. #16. Pinto Beans, Boiled – 78 mg / 8% DV A great way to make a calcium-packed meal is to make a bean burrito stuffed with green veggies, garlic, and fresh guacamole in a whole grain tortilla wrap. #17. Dark Rye Flour – 71 mg / 7% DV If you want to make a loaf of bread that’s loaded with calcium, dark rye flour is the way to go. Mix a few tablespoons of sesame seeds into the dough, and you’ll really boost the calcium content. #18. Figs – 68 mg / 7% DV Whether you eat them dried, fresh, or as jam, figs are a great way to squeeze a little extra calcium into your diet. #19. Dates – 57 mg / 6% Combine dates with dried figs and mixed nuts for a high calcium trail mix. #20. Grapefruit – 51 mg / 5% Instead of a drinking a glass of cow’s milk in the morning, have a glass of grapefruit juice instead. Use it to wash down a bowl of oats topped with fresh fruit and nuts, and you’ll be well on your way to meeting your daily calcium requirement. #21. Quinoa, Cooked – 31.5 mg / 3% DV Pair quinoa with steamed leafy greens for a calcium-rich lunch or dinner. #22. Pineapple – 21 mg / 2% DV Add chunks of pineapple to your smoothies, salads, and wraps for a little extra calcium and zest. #23. Brown Rice, Cooked – 19.5 mg / 2% DV Combining brown rice with legumes, like northern beans or navy beans, is an easy way to make a calcium rich meal that’s also a complete protein, and high in fiber. #24. Spelt, Cooked – 19.4 / 2% DV Spelt is an ancient species of wheat that has been cultivated since 5,000 BCE. Spelt can be boiled and eaten like rice, or used to make flour and bread. Boiled spelt with steamed greens makes a healthy meal that is full of calcium, as well as plenty of other vitamins, minerals, and nutrients. #25. Avocado – 18 mg / 2% DV Add a few big scoops of guacamole to your beans and rice for a little extra calcium and a lot of extra flavor. Additional Info & Tips: While bananas do not contain much calcium – about 5.9 mg per medium sized banana – they help the body absorb calcium. Combine bananas with any of the calcium rich foods above for added benefits. Many other plant-based foods that contain calcium but did not make this list exist. In fact, most plant-based foods contain some amount of calcium. As long as you are regularly consuming a wide variety of fruits, nuts, grains, legumes, and vegetables – especially green leafy vegetables – you are likely consuming an adequate amount of calcium. Obtaining calcium from a wide variety of nutrient-rich plant-based sources is a good way to ensure you are also consuming the other essential vitamins and minerals needed to promote good bone health. We hope you found this list of vegan calcium sources helpful. If you’d like to find other nutrition fact sheets like this one, check out more of VeganFoodLover.com. Nutrition data sourced from: http://nutritiondata.self.com/
Italian officials want to 'restore decorum' to Milvian bridge, which became focal point for tradition inspired by cult novel Thousands of "love padlocks" fixed to an ancient Roman bridge by passionate couples have been sliced off with bolt cutters and dumped in a warehouse to save the bridge from damage. Teenage lovers in Rome have for years written their initials on padlocks, locked them to Rome's Milvian bridge and sworn eternal love for each other before hurling the key into the Tiber, a habit that has caught on at bridges around the world, particularly in Paris. The trend, which was inspired by characters in the 2006 cult Italian teen novel I Want You by Federico Moccia, first prompted Roman officials to set up posts for the padlocks to be attached to after a lamppost threatened to collapse under their weight on the bridge, which was first built in 206 BC. But this week officials said enough was enough. "We decided to remove them to restore decorum to the bridge," said local borough president Gianni Giacomini. Since the trend took off, the residential neighbourhood has become a hub of late-night bars and on Monday police arrested 17 people suspected of supplying methamphetamine to revellers. City officials said that 86% of locals were keen to see the locks go. They promised to give the mass of metal that has been removed a place in a Rome museum and said they would designate a spot in a piazza beside the bridge where locks could be left in future. "The bridge will be guarded day and night to stop more locks being attached," warned local public works assessor Stefano Erbaggi. Moccia, who has said teenagers are better off buying padlocks than scrawling graffiti, was nonplussed. "The removal of the locks is inconsiderate," he told La Repubblica. "Rome is handing Paris the 'bridge of love' tradition, which was born here and should stay here."
"Deacon Blues" is a song written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen in 1976 and recorded by their group Steely Dan on their 1977 album Aja.[1] It peaked at number 19 on the Billboard charts[2] and number 17 on the U.S. Cash Box Top 100 in June 1978.[3] It also reached #40 on the Easy Listening chart.[4] In Canada it spent two weeks at #14[5] and #20 Adult Contemporary.[6] Background [ edit ] The song, in the key of G Major, was largely written at Fagen's house in Malibu and was prompted by his observation that "... if a college football team like the University of Alabama could have a grandiose name like the 'Crimson Tide' the nerds and losers should be entitled to a grandiose name as well." [1] The song's protagonist has been described by Fagen as "autobiographical in that it reflected the dreams of both Fagen and Becker about becoming jazz musicians while they were living in the suburbs". Characterized as a "loser" by Becker, the song's subject was meant to reflect "... a broken dream of a broken man living a broken life".[1] On the origin of the song's name, Fagen stated, "At the time, there had been a lineman with the Los Angeles Rams and the San Diego Chargers, Deacon Jones. We weren't serious football fans, but Deacon Jones's name was in the news a lot in the 1960s and early 70s, and we liked how it sounded. It also had two syllables, which was convenient, like 'Crimson.' The name had nothing to do with Wake Forest's Demon Deacons or any other team with a losing record. The only Deacon I was familiar with in football at the time was Deacon Jones."[7] Recording [ edit ] "Deacon Blues" was recorded at Village Recorders in West Los Angeles. Jazz guitarist Larry Carlton used Fagen's demos to transcribe the chords into a rhythm section that featured Carlton's guitar on the song's opening. Saxophonist Tom Scott wrote the horn arrangements for not only "Deacon Blues" but for all of the songs on Aja, a task that he completed in less than two weeks. After the song was recorded Becker and Fagen decided to add a saxophone solo and asked their producer, Gary Katz, to arrange for Pete Christlieb to record the solo. At the time, neither Becker nor Fagen knew Christlieb by name, only by his reputation as a musician on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Christlieb went to the studio and recorded the solo after taping the show one evening. "They told me to play what I felt. Hey, I'm a jazz musician, that's what I do ... so I recorded my first solo ... we listened back and they said it was great. I recorded a second take and that's the one they used. I was gone in a half hour. The next thing I know I'm hearing myself in every airport bathroom in the world." [1] Success and legacy [ edit ] "Deacon Blues" was released on Steely Dan's 1977 album Aja which reached No.3 on Billboard's album chart, a position it held for seven consecutive weeks.[1] The song was the duo's fifth Top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US, where it peaked at #19 in 1978. "Deacon Blues" remained in the Top 40 for eight weeks.[8] In a 1994 AOL chat interview with Becker, someone asked him about the inspiration for the song and he answered, "It was an outgrowth of a specific mood that pertained at a given time," and later added, "...I remember the night that we mixed that one thinking that it was really good and wanting to hear it over and over which is never the case."[9] "As midlife-crisis songs go, Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues" ranks among the most melodic and existential." -- The Wall Street Journal[1] "One thing we did right on "Deacon Blues" and all of our records: we never tried to accommodate the mass market. We worked for ourselves and still do." -- Donald Fagen[1] The Scottish pop/rock band Deacon Blue took their name from this song.[10] William Gibson's book Mona Lisa Overdrive features a gang called the Deacon Blues.[11] Personnel [ edit ]
By all accounts, Saturday was a very good day for the Jacksonville Armada FC. The first-year NASL side got to play their first ever league match at home and started setting records before the first kick ever took place. The official attendance was 16,164, close to double the capacity of their normal home field at the home of the Jacksonville Suns, an AA baseball team. This set a league attendance record, and this on a weekend that saw attendance at all NASL game break an attendance record with more than 44,000 fans at five matches. Adding to the impressiveness of this feat was the day’s weather forecast. Earlier in the day Weather.com had predicted thunderstorms starting around the same time as kickoff, and less than two hours before the game fans were treated to sporadic sprinkles at their tailgates and an Ominously darkening sky on the horizon. Despite the hints of weather still to come, the first half was largely dry and the Armada continued to set records on the day as they scored only 12 seconds into the match as Jemal Johnson took a shot on goal from 30 yards out and an out-of-position Matt VanOekel just couldn’t get to it in goal for FC Edmonton. Jacksonville would continue to dominate possession, ending the half with 74 percent possession, and score twice more before the half gave Edmonton a chance to regroup. The second half saw the arrival of the downpour that had been threatening all evening and while many fans retreated into more sheltered areas of the stadium, a surprising number stayed in their seats, and the Section 904, which had been the most visible supporters group all night, only got louder as the rain came down harder. As for the Armada, they dropped into a more defensive mindset with their 3-goal lead and while Edmonton finally got a goal of their own in the 52nd minute, the Jacksonville lead never seemed to be in any real danger. This is a very auspicious start for the fledgling team. Jacksonville isn’t the largest city in the league (unless you’re counting acres instead of people) and the NFL’s Jaguars notoriously struggle to fill their stadium, and yet this team managed to break an attendance record their first time out. The initial strike 12 seconds into the match could have been a fluke, but 74 percent possession and two more goals in the first half didn’t seem to be lucky breaks. The Armada could very well have been making a statement Saturday that they’ll be joining the likes of San Antonio and Minnesota at the top of the table without some of the growing pains usually expected for an expansion team. Fans of the Armada should have left Saturday’s match with reason to have high hopes for more reasons than just the quality of play on the field. The front office seems to be determined to make the Armada an attraction in Jacksonville on par with more established sporting events. From the fan festival before the gates opened, to the half-time fireworks show that was a little larger than I had expected, the team went out of their way to make this seem like a big deal. Of course, that route comes with the potential for financial disaster, but if the Armada keep playing the way they played Edmonton, the fans should keep showing up.
With every passing day, Barack Obama is ensuring his own reelection -- but at a bloodcurdling cost for Democrats on the ballot without him in 2010. President Obama is gifted with that alchemical political material, Teflon. He speaks with power and grace. He exudes even-handed comfort, assuring all sides that this president understands their argument. His smile is an embrace that disarms, displaying the confidence of a young leader certain his intellect will prevail. In policy, the Democrats may have regressed to old, industrial-age collectivism, prescribing the same federal pill for every ill. In personnel, with this charismatic president, they are enjoying a generational leap forward. Bill Clinton's old-school charm made his every performance the topic of late night talk shows. This president's self-awareness, his post-modern reflexivity, breaks down the barriers between audience and narrator. He steps down easily from the leader's pedestal to shoot hoops, enjoy a date night with his wife, and walk comfortably among everyday Americans. America loves this guy. America is this guy. President Obama, ever-present on TV, has become the host of our national group-therapy sessions. So who needs Letterman or Leno? More importantly, Obama is protected by our aspirations. He represents the America we all want to be, a better country, beyond racial divisions and tension. For this reason alone, we will likely hold him high in our esteem after our respect for his accomplishment dims. Already, however, we are seeing a large discrepancy between who he is and what he does, a gulf that will mark his presidency. Other presidents have been as popular at similar points in their service, but this president's buoyant ratings defy the cumbersome policies he carries. Barack Obama replenishes the soul but empties the wallet. Cheering for this president is expensive. When President Obama saw a credit crisis, Americans saw him spending. When Obama saw an economy in need of stimulus, Americans saw him spending. When Obama saw a housing bust, bankrupt auto companies, Wall-Street failures, Americans saw him spending, spending and spending. Now, when the Democrats and our president see the need to spend less on health care, Americans, with some bewilderment, see them spending more on health care. Obama has taken on so many unrelated challenges that America can only see their common denominator: Obama is always spending. The Obama spending spree has begun to ring political alarms. Confidence in President Obama's ability to deal with the country's most important issue, the economy, is eroding. This is not good news for budget director Peter Orszag and his team of aptly nicknamed "propeller-heads" who keep telling the president that he has to spend more money to save it. Surveys released last week by Pew, NBC News/Wall Street Journal and the New York Times/CBS News, show a net 15 point swing in the president's handling of the economy. Nearly 60 percent in the NBC poll see controlling the president's growing deficit as a higher priority than speeding up economic recovery. Now more bad news: A June 22 Resurgent Republic survey reveals that 62% of Independent voters, critical to Obama's success, believe "reforming health care is important, but it should be done without raising taxes or increasing the deficit." Americans see Washington on fire with Democratic spending and their President pouring kerosene, not water, on the flames. Obama won't be on the ballot in 2010, but his spending will be. What are voters to do when they see a Democratic House, Senate, and president spending recklessly, without check or balance, pressing the accelerator to ever-increasing speed, without anyone or anything to stop them? It is likely they will send our President a message: For god's sake, Mr. President, slow down. Have a cigarette. Democrats running for their lives in swing districts will soon find it in their interest to join a growing populist revolt against what Kevin Philips once termed the big-spending "mandarins of Establishment liberalism." Centrist Democrats who reflect their middle-of-the-road districts will find themselves the most vulnerable. They'll see they must either slow their drive to splurge or they will be replaced by cars which actually have brake pedals. Even so, 2010 could bring Democrats a bloodbath. Bill Clinton, with an approval rating below 50%, saw his party lose 52 seats and both houses of Congress two years after he was elected. Barack Obama, with approval of his handling of the economy now dipping near the same 50% mark, could see a comparable loss. Republican gains in the House could nearly double the usual 23-seat gain by the party out of favor. Moderate Democrats, fearing this precipice, won't wait for election day 2010 to climb to higher ground though first, their lemming-like instincts will induce them to spend another trillion dollars on health care. Shortly after they burn through this cash, we can expect the White House and imperiled Democrats to sharply reverse field and start bill-boarding the President's old promise to halve the deficit before his first term ends. When the liquor cabinet is empty, the party in power will pledge sobriety. It will be too late. After having tagged on at least $4.85 trillion in deficits in four years, the Democrats will have de-branded themselves as the party of economic responsibility and rebranded themselves as the party that cannot be trusted with the nation's checkbook, the party for whom electoral success was an aberration named Jimmy Carter. Democratic candidates will become cannon fodder, their expensive, utopian frustrations unleashed by their uninhibited Congressional majorities. In the aftermath, the tenuous alliance between left-leaning Obama Democrats and centrist New Democrats will rupture, leaving Hillary Clinton to emerge as leader of the fiscally responsible. Out on the campaign trail and in the media, Democrats will have the enthusiastic support of the last Democratic President to balance the budget and produce a surplus. Yahoo, Bill Clinton rides to the rescue. Can politics get more entertaining than that? This will be Hillary's revenge. And it will be George W. Bush's revenge, as well. President Obama, who has continually lectured Republicans about the economic irresponsibility he has inherited, will be humbled by his own fiscal indulgence. If only President Obama faced a little more Republican opposition to shield him from his excesses. In that sense, it turns out Tuesday, November 2, 2010 will be Barack Obama's lucky day. As President Obama watches the carnage of 2010, he will realize the repudiation of his spending, before he is on the ballot himself, is a disguised blessing. Post-November, the president will contritely acknowledge he has received the message. He'll say, "I promise you -- I get it," eliminating the need for voters to take him to the woodshed. In his January 2011 State of the Union, President Barack Obama will stand before Congress, wait for the audience to quiet -- and he will declare that the Era of Big Government is over. Again.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s new CEO under the company’s Alphabet restructuring, has made his first major wave of executive shuffles as chief executive, promoting three top lieutenants on the critical ads and Android units. Neal Mohan, vice president of display and video advertising, now assumes that role as SVP. And Hiroshi Lockheimer, currently a VP on the Android team, is now SVP for Android, Chrome OS and Chromecast. Philipp Schindler, a seasoned ads VP who was part of the threesome replacing outgoing Google chief business officer Omid Kordestani, was also christened with a new title. He’s now SVP of Global Sales and Operations. Pichai gave a handful of Googlers promotions to VP titles, too. Lockheimer has been at Google since 2006. He’s known as a congenial, skilled engineer and, more importantly, a trusted confidant for Pichai, who ran Android and Chrome before his appointment to lead all Google products in October 2014. Since that reorg, Lockheimer has taken over more business responsibilities for Android, which is dealing with shrinking profits for its handset partners as well as the expansion onto new platforms like cars and wearables. Dave Burke, another Android VP, who showed off the company’s latest Nexus phones last week, has taken on more engineering leadership duties. Mohan is another titan inside Google. He joined the search giant after it acquired his company DoubleClick and runs Google’s formidable display ads business. Over the years, he has become increasingly involved with its video and its YouTube business as well, and is a well-known, powerful player in the advertising industry. Mohan’s also an in-demand exec in Silicon Valley. Twitter tried to poach him around four years ago, only to see Mohan lured back to Google with reportedly sizable packages. In June, Re/code reported that Mohan was considering departing for the lead product at Dropbox. A week later, we reported that was not the case — Mohan did not take the offer. At the time, a source familiar with the company said the decision did not involve any additional compensation. Both Schindler and Mohan have tough jobs ahead. Google makes a bulk of its ad dollars from search, but its display and video businesses are still massive forces in the industry. Yet they are facing increasing competition from Facebook, Twitter (which has a new video ad product similar to YouTube) and other digital rivals. Mohan will continue to report to Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP of ads and commerce. Pichai sent out news of the promotions in a company-wide email.
An intriguing case of wife-swapping has left the police at their wits' end since the day it was reported. After a casual meeting of two couples in the city, the husband of one woman begins an affair with his friend's wife. When his friend soon found this out, he approached his friend's wife and the two began having an affair too. Both couples knew about both affairs, but life went on normally. The two families even went on trips abroad, making excuses to spend time with the other's spouse. However, life changed after one of the men died following a sudden heart attack. His wife is now pressuring his friend to marry her, after leaving his wife, claiming they had been having an affair for so long that it has turned into 'love'. This story came to light after one person's death and another approaching the family court asking for divorce. The man seeking the divorce claimed that as he wanted to spend the remaining part of his life with his friend's wife with whom he was in an affair, the court take cognizance of his prayer. After approaching the court, the case was transferred from the police station concerned to the women's helpline which called all three people involved in the murky affair for counselling. Then the true story was revealed.It's an interesting story of two highprofile couples from Bengaluru whose lives were riding high like a kite, until a storm ruined the party.According to Vanitha Sahayavani officials at the Police Commissioner's office, Ganesh and Kavitha are one couple and Abhishek and Manasi are the other couple involved in this case of wife-swapping. All are middleaged. While Ganesh is a businessman and Kavitha a homemaker, Abhishek is a class one contractor and Manasi a teacher.Four years ago, the couples met at a function and as time went they became very close. As Ganesh was busy with travel and other business meetings, his wife Kavitha used to take Abhishek whenever she needed to go shopping or to attend any social do. This closeness between the two slowly turned into an affair.“When things started getting serious between Abhishek and Kavitha, Ganesh was conscious of the situation all through, but surprisingly, not at all shocked. Neither did he protest against the extra-marital relationship, nor did he stay quiet. He instead doubled up with Abhishek's wife Manasi and started a relationship with her. All four new about the warped relationships, but continued them without any dispute,“ Saraswathi, senior counsellor attached to the women's helpline, said.Both the couples started travelling to many places including destinations abroad. They went to Singapore, Dubai and other places together, but after reaching there, continued their affairs.While one woman would stay back in the hotel on the pretext of having a headache, the other three went shopping. In between, one of the men used to come back to the hotel and spend time with his friend's wife. While these affairs were not subterranean at all, sometimes fights would erupt between the consenting parties. For them, it was all part of the fun and excitement of life.This behaviour went on for two years until 45-year-old Abhishek died of a heart attack in early 2014.“After Abhishek died, his wife Manasi, who was in an affair with Ganesh, became alone with her two children. So, she started asking Ganesh to keep her company and even marry her as they were in 'love'.While Ganesh dilly-dallied for a while, he later expressed a desire to marry Manasi.Kavitha, his wife, objected to this, but Ganesh was obstinate. He tried to give his wife money and property, but she did not agree to his 'business deal'.Citing cruelty, Ganesh approached the court for divorce. After that, the case came to the helpline which we are dealing with now," Saraswathi added.“After we called all the three for counselling, they poured out the whole story. I spoke to all individually and I came to know about their cross affairs. Now, Manasi says she wants him as she 'loved' him. While he also reciprocates the same feelings, what should we do about his wife? We are counselling all of them to come up with a logical and serious solution to the problem. We cannot comment about why the couples acted such as it is a personal matter. But, as the issue has come to us for resolution, we are trying hard to do something good to all. But no one wants to compromise," counsellor added.
The British Invasion Though best known for the records he made with the Rolling Stones, with whom he worked until 1975, Mr. Johns also was the recording engineer for the Who, the Kinks and Small Faces on some of the most notable songs of the 1960s. Even at the time, he sensed these were not ordinary sessions. “There was absolutely a sense of the possibility of rules being changed, of the enormity of what was going on. One had no idea whether the general public would pick up on it the same way I did. But I can remember very clearly the session for ‘My Generation.’ I can remember very clearly ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ and lots of Stones stuff. ‘My Generation’? A bass solo? A stuttering vocal? Not to mention feedback or the song itself. Extraordinary! It was certainly special to me at the time. Are you kidding? You’d have to be deaf not to get excited by that.” The Beatles Early in 1969, the Beatles invited Mr. Johns to work on their new project. He accepted eagerly, thinking he would be the engineer for George Martin, who had produced the group’s previous albums. But when he arrived, Mr. Martin, who had grown tired of the bickering, was absent, and he realized he was being thrust into a producer’s role. The experience, which eventually yielded the album “Let It Be” after the tapes were turned over to Phil Spector, was frustrating: “The idea was something like ‘The Basement Tapes,’ to show what they were really like. I’d worked with everyone and their mother by then, so I was quite used to being around people who were famous. But when I got the call, to walk in and be privy to those guys sitting around, doing what they did, and to be invited in, was pretty astonishing. I didn’t know them. I was the same as every other punter on the planet, who saw them as these extraordinary icons of marvelousness. “And although they could hardly be normal people, because of what their success had done to them, I was witnessing them being normal to each other. Which no one else had got to see, and which nobody really had a clue about. And so my concept of the record was: how fantastic to have a record of them playing live, sitting around mocking each other, just having a laugh.
A tanker carrying natural gas exploded at 7:20 p.m. (1920 UTC) in a northern suburb of Ghana's capital Accra on Saturday evening, killing at least seven people and and wounding dozens of others. A second explosion followed minutes later. A gas tanker is believed to have exploded at a state-owned GOIL liquefied natural gas station in the Legon suburb, causing a petrol station across the street to go up in flames near the city's Atomic Junction. Ghana's Information Ministry said Sunday that 68 people were hospitalized following the accident and dozens of others were treated and released. The two explosions sent a fireball into the night sky and could be heard across the city of some 7 million people. "Unfortunately there are some fatalities and we are working to have the numbers," Deputy Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah told a local radio station. "There are quite a number also injured." More than 200 police personnel were deployed to help to cordon off the area. Pictures from the scene showed charred out cars and debris scattered around the gas stations. People ran for cover after the explosion Legon is a suburb of the capital, and close to some hostels for the University of Ghana. In 2015, more than 100 people were killed in an explosion at a petrol station in Accra used as a shelter by people escaping flooding. Map of Ghana showing Accra cw/jm (AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)
Ninja is a build system similar to Make. As input you describe the commands necessary to process source files into target files. Ninja uses these commands to bring targets up to date. Unlike many other build systems, Ninja’s main design goal was speed. I wrote Ninja while working on Google Chrome. I started Ninja as an experiment to find out if Chrome’s build could be made faster. To successfully build Chrome, Ninja’s other main design goal followed: Ninja needed to be easily embedded within a larger build system. Ninja has been quietly successful, gradually replacing the other build systems used by Chrome. After Ninja was made public others contributed code to make the popular CMake build system generate Ninja files–now Ninja is also used to develop CMake-based projects like LLVM and ReactOS. Other projects, like TextMate, target Ninja directly from their custom build. I worked on Chrome from 2007 to 2012, and started Ninja in 2010. There are many factors contributing to the build performance of a project as large as Chrome (today around 40,000 files of C++ code generating an output binary around 90 MB in size). During my time I touched many of them, from distributing compilation across multiple machines to tricks in linking. Ninja primarily targets only one piece–the front of a build. This is the wait between starting the build and the time the first compile starts to run. To understand why that is important it is necessary to understand how we thought about performance in Chrome itself. A Small History of Chrome Discussion of all of Chrome’s goals is out of scope here, but one of the defining goals of the project was speed. Performance is a broad goal that spans all of computer science, and Chrome uses nearly every trick available, from caching to parallelization to just-in-time compilation. Then there was startup speed–how long it the program took to show up on the screen after clicking the icon–which seems a bit frivolous in comparison. Why care about startup speed? For a browser, a quick startup conveys a feeling of lightness, that doing something on the web is as trival an action as opening a text file. Further, the impact of latency on your happiness and on losing your train of thought is well-studied in human-computer interaction. Latency is especially a focus of web companies like Google or Amazon, who are in a good position to measure and experiment on the effect of latency–and who have done experiments that show that delays of even milliseconds have measurable effects on how frequently people use the site or make purchases. It’s a small frustration that adds up subconsciously. Chrome’s approach to starting quickly was a clever trick by one of the first engineers on Chrome. As soon as they got their skeleton application to the point where it showed a window on the screen, they created a benchmark measuring that speed along with a continuous build that tracked it. Then, in Brett Wilson’s words, “a very simple rule: this test can never get any slower.” As code was added to Chrome, maintenance of this benchmark demanded extra engineering effort–in some cases work was delayed until it was truly needed, or data used during startup was precomputed–but the primary “trick” to performance, and the one that made the greatest impression on me, was simply to do less work. I joined the Chrome team without any intention of working on build tools. My background and platform of choice was Linux, and I wanted to be the Linux guy. To limit scope the project was initially Windows-only; I took it as my role to help finish the Windows implementation so that I could then make it run on Linux. When starting work on other platforms, the first hurdle was sorting out the build system. By that point Chrome was already large (complete, in fact–Chrome for Windows was released in 2008 before any ports had started), so efforts to switch even the Visual Studio-based Windows build to a different build system wholesale were conflicting with ongoing development. It felt like replacing the foundation of a building while it was in use. Members of the Chrome team came up with an incremental solution called GYP which could be used to generate, one subcomponent at a time, the Visual Studio build files already used by Chrome in addition to the build files that would be used on other platforms. The input to GYP is simple: the desired name of the output accompanied by plain text lists of source files, the occasional custom rule like “process each IDL file to generate an additional source file”, and some conditional behaviors (e.g., only use certain files on certain platforms). GYP then takes this high-level description and generates platform-native build files. On the Mac “native build files” meant Xcode project files. On Linux, however, there was no obvious single choice. The initial attempt used the Scons build system, but I was dismayed to discover that a GYP-generated Scons build could take 30 seconds to start while Scons computed which files had changed. I figured that Chrome was roughly the size of the Linux kernel so the approach taken there ought to work. I rolled up my sleeves and wrote the code to make GYP generate plain Makefiles using tricks from the kernel’s Makefiles. Thus I unintentionally began my descent into build system madness. There are many factors that make building software take time, from slow linkers to poor parallelization, and I dug into all of them. The Makefile approach was initially quite fast but as we ported more of Chrome to Linux, increasing the number of files used in the build, it grew slower. As I worked on the port I found one part of the build process especially frustrating: I would make a change to a single file, run make , realize I’d left out a semicolon, run make again, and each time the wait would be long enough that I would forget what I was working on. I thought back to how hard we fought against latency for end users. “How can this be taking so long,” I’d wonder, “there can’t be that much work to do.” As an experiment I started Ninja, to see how simple I could make it. The Design of Ninja At a high level any build system performs three main tasks. It will (1) load and analyze build goals, (2) figure out which steps need to run in order to achieve those goals, and (3) execute those steps. To make startup in step (1) fast, Ninja needed to do a minimal amount of work while loading the build files. Build systems are typically used by humans, which means they provide a convenient, high-level syntax for expressing build goals. It also means that when it comes time to actually build the project the build system must process the instructions further: for example, at some point Visual Studio must concretely decide based on the build configuration where the output files must go, or which files must be compiled with a C++ or C compiler. Because of this, GYP’s work in generating Visual Studio files was effectively limited to translating lists of source files into the Visual Studio syntax and leaving Visual Studio to do the bulk of the work. With Ninja I saw the opportunity to do as much work as possible in GYP. In a sense, when GYP generates Ninja build files, it does all of the above computation once. GYP then saves a snapshot of that intermediate state into a format that Ninja can quickly load for each subsequent build. Ninja’s build file language is therefore simple to the point of being inconvenient for humans to write. There are no conditionals or rules based on file extensions. Instead, the format is just a list of which exact paths produce which exact outputs. These files can be loaded quickly, requiring almost no interpretation. This minimalist design counterintuitively leads to greater flexibility. Because Ninja lacks higher-level knowledge of common build concepts like an output directory or current configuration, Ninja is simple to plug into larger systems (e.g., CMake, as we later found) that have different opinions about how builds should be organized. For example, Ninja is agnostic as to whether build outputs (e.g., object files) are placed alongside the source files (considered poor hygiene by some) or in a separate build output directory (considered hard to understand by others). Long after releasing Ninja I finally thought of the right metaphor: whereas other build systems are compilers, Ninja is an assembler. What Ninja Does If Ninja pushes most of the work to the build file generator, what is there left to do? The above ideology is nice in principle but real world needs are always more complicated. Ninja grew (and lost) features over the course of its development. At every point, the important question was always “can we do less?” Here is a brief overview of how it works. A human needs to debug the files when the build rules are wrong, so .ninja build files are plain text, similar to Makefiles, and they support a few abstractions to make them more readable. The first abstraction is the “rule”, which represents a single tool’s command-line invocation. A rule is then shared between different build steps. Here is an example of the Ninja syntax for declaring a rule named “compile” that runs the gcc compiler along with two build statements that make use of it for specific files. rule compile command = gcc -Wall -c $in -o $out build out/foo.o: compile src/foo.c build out/bar.o: compile src/bar.c The second abstraction is the variable. In the example above, these are the dollar-sign-prefixed identifiers ( $in and $out ). Variables can represent both the inputs and outputs of a command and can be used to make short names for long strings. Here is an extended compile definition that makes use of a variable for compiler flags: cflags = -Wall rule compile command = gcc $cflags -c $in -o $out Variable values used in a rule can be shadowed in the scope of a single build block by indenting their new definition. Continuing the above example, the value of cflags can be adjusted for a single file: build out/file_with_extra_flags.o: compile src/baz.c cflags = -Wall -Wextra Rules behave almost like functions and variables behave like arguments. These two simple features are dangerously close to a programming language–the opposite of the “do no work” goal. But they have the important benefit of reducing repeated strings which is not only useful for humans but also for computers, reducing the quantity of text to be parsed. The build file, once parsed, describes a graph of dependencies: the final output binary depends on linking a number of objects, each of which is the result of compiling sources. Specifically it is a bipartite graph, where “nodes” (input files) point to “edges” (build commands) which point to nodes (output files). The build process then traverses this graph. Given a target output to build, Ninja first walks up the graph to identify the state of each edge’s input files: that is, whether or not the input files exist and what their modification times are. Ninja then computes a plan. The plan is the set of edges that need to be executed in order to bring the final target up to date, according to the modification times of the intermediate files. Finally, the plan is executed, walking down the graph and checking off edges as they are executed and successfully completed. Once these pieces were in place I could establish a baseline benchmark for Chrome: the time to run Ninja again after successfully completing a build. That is the time to load the build files, examine the built state, and determine there was no work to do. The time it took for this benchmark to run was just under a second. This was my new startup benchmark metric. However, as Chrome grew, Ninja had to keep getting faster to keep that metric from regressing. Optimizing Ninja The initial implementation of Ninja was careful to arrange the data structures in order to allow a fast build, but wasn’t particularly clever in terms of optimizations. Once the program worked, I reasoned, a profiler could reveal which pieces mattered. Over the years, profiling pointed at different pieces of the program. Sometimes the worst offender was a single hot function that could be micro-optimized. At other times, it suggested something more broad like being careful not to allocate or copy memory except when necessary. There were also cases where a better representation or data structure had the most impact. What follows is a walk through the Ninja implementation and some of the more interesting stories about its performance. Parsing Initially Ninja used a hand-written lexer and a recursive descent parser. The syntax was simple enough, I thought. It turns out that for a large enough project like Chrome, simply parsing the build files (named with the extension .ninja ) can take a surprising amount of time. The original function to analyze a single character soon appeared in profiles: static bool IsIdentifierCharacter(char c) { return ('a' <= c && c <= 'z') \|\| ('A' <= c && c <= 'Z') \|\| // and so on... } A simple fix–at the time saving 200 ms–was to replace the function with a 256-entry lookup table that could be indexed by the input character. Such a thing is trivial to generate using Python code like: cs = set() for c in string.ascii_letters + string.digits + r'+,-./\_$': cs.add(ord(c)) for i in range(256): print '%d,' % (i in cs), This trick kept Ninja fast for quite a while. Eventually we moved to something more principled: re2c , the lexer generator used by PHP. It can generate more complex lookup tables and trees of unintelligible code. For example: if (yych <= 'b') { if (yych == '`') goto yy24; if (yych <= 'a') goto yy21; // and so on... It remains an open question as to whether treating the input as text in the first place is a good idea. Perhaps we will eventually require Ninja’s input to be generated in some machine-friendly format that would let us avoid parsing for the most part. Canonicalization Ninja avoids using strings to identify paths. Instead, Ninja maps each path it encounters to a unique Node object and the Node object is used in the rest of the code. Reusing this object ensures that a given path is only ever checked on disk once, and the result of that check (i.e., the modification time) can be reused in other code. The pointer to the Node object serves as a unique identity for that path. To test whether two Node s refer to the same path it is sufficient to compare pointers rather than perform a more costly string comparison. For example, as Ninja walks up the graph of inputs to a build, it keeps a stack of dependendent Node s to check for dependency loops: if A depends on B depends on C depends on A, the build can’t proceed. This stack, representing files, can be implemented as a simple array of pointers, and pointer equality can be used to check for duplicates. To always use the same Node for a single file, Ninja must reliably map every possible name for a file into the same Node object. This requires a canonicalization pass on all paths mentioned in input files, which transforms a path like foo/../bar.h into just bar.h . Initially Ninja simply required all paths to be provided in canonical form but that ends up not working for a few reasons. One is that user-specified paths (e.g., the command-line ninja ./bar.h ) are reasonably expected to work correctly. Another is that variables may combine to make non-canonical paths. Finally, the dependency information emitted by gcc may be non-canonical. Thus most of what Ninja ends up doing is path processing, so canonicalizing paths is another hot point in profiles. The original implementation was written for clarity, not performance, so standard optimization techniques–like removing a double loop or avoiding memory allocation–helped considerably. The Build Log Often micro-optimizations like the above are less impactful than structural optimizations where you change the algorithm or approach. This was the case with Ninja’s build log. One part of the Linux kernel build system tracks the commands used to generate outputs. Consider a motivating example: you compile an input foo.c into an output foo.o , and then change the build file such that it should be rebuilt with different compilation flags. For the build system to know that it needs to rebuild the output, it must either note that foo.o depends on the build files themselves (which, depending on the organization of the project, might mean that a change to the build files would cause the entire project to rebuild), or record the commands used to generate each output and compare them for each build. The kernel (and consequently the Chrome Makefiles and Ninja) takes the latter approach. While building, Ninja writes out a build log that records the full commands used to generate each output. Then for each subsequent build, Ninja loads the previous build log and compares the new build’s commands to the build log’s commands to detect changes. This, like loading build files or path canonicalization, was another hot point in profiles. After making a few smaller optimizations Nico Weber, a prolific contributor to Ninja, implemented a new format for the build log. Rather than recording commands, which are frequently very long and take a lot of time to parse, Ninja instead records a hash of the command. In subsequent builds, Ninja compares the hash of the command that is about to be run to the logged hash. If the two hashes differ, the output is out of date. This approach was very successful. Using hashes reduced the size of the build log dramatically–from 200 MB to less than 2 MB on Mac OS X–and made it over 20 times faster to load. Dependency Files There is an additional store of metadata that must be recorded and used across builds. To correctly build C/C++ code a build system must accomodate dependencies between header files. Suppose foo.c contains the line #include "bar.h" and bar.h itself includes the line #include "baz.h" . All three of those files ( foo.c , bar.h , baz.h ) then affect the result of compilation. For example, changes to baz.h should still trigger a rebuild of foo.o . Some build systems use a “header scanner” to extract these dependencies at build time, but this approach can be slow and is difficult to make exactly correct in the presence of #ifdef directives. Another alternative is to require the build files to correctly report all dependencies, including headers, but this is cumbersome for developers: every time you add or remove an #include statement you need to modify or regenerate the build. A better approach relies on the fact that at compile time gcc (and Microsoft’s Visual Studio) can output which headers were used to build the output. This information, much like the command used to generate an output, can be recorded and reloaded by the build system so that the dependencies can be tracked exactly. For a first-time build, before there is any output, all files will be compiled so no header dependency is necessary. After the first compilation, modifications to any files used by an output (including modifications that add or remove additional dependencies) will cause a rebuild, keeping the dependency information up-to-date. When compiling, gcc writes header dependencies in the format of a Makefile. Ninja then includes a parser for the (simplified subset) Makefile syntax and loads all of this dependency information at the next build. Loading this data is a major bottleneck. On a recent Chrome build, the dependency information produced by gcc sums to 90 MB of Makefiles, all of which reference paths which must be canonicalized before use. Much like with the other parsing work, using re2c and avoiding copies where possible helped with performance. However, much like how work was shifted to GYP, this parsing work can be pushed to a time other than the critical path of startup. Our most recent work on Ninja (at the time of this writing, the feature is complete but not yet released) has been to make this processing happen eagerly during the build. Once Ninja has started executing build commands, all of the performance-critical work has been completed and Ninja is mostly idle as it waits for the commands it executes to complete. In this new approach for header dependencies, Ninja uses this time to process the Makefiles emitted by gcc as they are written, canonicalizing paths and processing the dependencies into a quickly deserializable binary format. On the next build Ninja only needs to load this file. The impact is dramatic, particularly on Windows. (This is discussed further later in this chapter.) The “dependency log” needs to store thousands of paths and dependencies between those paths. Loading this log and adding to it needs to be fast. Appending to this log should be safe, even in the event of an interruption such as a cancelled build. After considering many database-like approaches I finally came up with a trivial implementation: the file is a sequence of records and each record is either a path or a list of dependencies. Each path written to the file is assigned a sequential integer identifier. Dependencies are then lists of integers. To add dependencies to the file, Ninja first writes new records for each path that doesn’t yet have an identifier and then writes the dependency record using those identifiers. When loading the file on a subsequent run Ninja can then use a simple array to map identifiers to their Node pointers. Executing a Build Performance-wise the process of executing the commands judged necessary according to the dependencies discussed above is relatively uninteresting because the bulk of the work that needs to be done is performed in those commands (i.e., in the compilers, linkers, etc.), not in Ninja itself. Ninja runs build commands in parallel by default, based on the number of available CPUs on the system. Since commands running simultaneously could have their outputs interleave, Ninja buffers all output from a command until that command completes before printing its output. The resulting output appears as if the commands were run serially. This control over command output allows Ninja to carefully control its total output. During the build Ninja displays a single line of status while running; if the build completes successfully the total printed output of Ninja is a single line. This doesn’t make Ninja run any quicker but it makes Ninja feel fast, which is almost as important to the original goal as real speed is. Supporting Windows I wrote Ninja for Linux. Nico (mentioned previously) did the work to make it function on Mac OS X. As Ninja became more widely used people started asking about Windows support. At a superficial level supporting Windows wasn’t too hard. There were some straightforward changes like making the path separator a backslash or changing the Ninja syntax to allow colons in a path (like c:\foo.txt ). Once those changes were in place the larger problems surfaced. Ninja was designed with behavioral assumptions from Linux; Windows is different in small but important ways. For example, Windows has a relatively low limit on the length of a command, an issue that comes up when constructing the command passed to a final link step that may mention most files in the project. The Windows solution for this is “response” files, and only Ninja (not the generator program in front of Ninja) is equipped to manage these. A more important performance problem is that file operations on Windows are slow and Ninja works with a lot of files. Visual Studio’s compiler emits header dependencies by simply printing them while compiling, so Ninja on Windows currently includes a tool that wraps the compiler to make it produce the gcc-style Makefile dependency list required by Ninja. This large number of files, already a bottleneck on Linux, is much worse on Windows where opening a file is much more costly. The aforementioned new approach to parsing dependencies at build time fits perfectly on Windows, allowing us to drop the intermediate tool entirely: Ninja is already buffering the command’s output, so it can parse the dependencies directly from that buffer, sidestepping the intermediate on-disk Makefile used with gcc. Getting the modification time of a file– GetFileAttributesEx() on Windows and stat() on non-Windows platforms–seems to be about 100 times slower on Windows than it is on Linux. It is possible this is due to “unfair” factors like antivirus software but in practice those factors exist on end-user systems so Ninja performance suffers. The Git version control system, which similarly needs to get the state of many files, can use multiple threads on Windows to execute file checks in parallel. Ninja ought to adopt this feature. Conclusions and Alternative Designs Occasionally on the mailing list someone will suggest that Ninja ought to work instead as a memory-resident daemon or server, especially one coupled with file modification monitors (e.g., inotify on Linux). All these concerns about the time taken to load data and the time to write it back out would not be an issue if Ninja just stayed around between builds. In fact, that design was my original plan for Ninja. It was only after I saw the first build worked quickly that I realized it might be possible to make Ninja work without needing a server component. It may yet be necessary as Chrome continues to grow, but the simpler approach, where we gain speed by doing less work rather than more complex machinery, will always be the most appealing to me. It is my hope some other restructurings (like the changes we made to use a lexer generator or the new dependency format on Windows) will be enough. Simplicity is a virtue in software; the question is always how far it can go. Ninja managed to cut much of the complexity from a build system by delegating certain expensive tasks to other tools (GYP or CMake), and because of this it is useful in projects other than the one it was made for. Ninja’s simple code hopefully encouraged contributions– the majority of work for supporting OS X, Windows, CMake, and other features was done by contributors. Ninja’s simple semantics have led to experiments by others to reimplement it in other languages (Scheme and Go, to my knowledge). Do milliseconds really matter? Among the greater concerns of software it might be silly to worry about. However, having worked on projects with slower builds, I find more than productivity is gained; a quick turnaround gives a project a feeling of lightness that makes me happy to play with it. And code that is fun to hack on is the reason I write software in the first place. In that sense speed is of primary importance. Acknowledgements Special thanks are due to the many contributors to Ninja, some of whom you can find listed on Ninja’s GitHub project page.
Those familiar with the guiding principles of the G.O.P. know that Republicans strongly believe they were put on earth to cut taxes on the wealthy. But equally important is the notion that, at all times, government spending is out of control, particularly when it comes to services for people outside the 1 percent. So it should come as a shock to exactly no one that as Republicans move closer to passing a historically unpopular tax bill that will add at least $1 trillion to the deficit, they’re already talking about the grave need to slash “entitlements” like food stamps and Medicaid. “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” House speaker Paul Ryan said during a radio interview earlier this month. “We [need to] spend more time on the health-care entitlements, because that's really where the problem lies, fiscally speaking.” But wait, you say—didn’t Donald Trump repeatedly pledge on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security? In fact he did, but like a lot of things Trump has said, those promises were not meant to be taken literally or seriously. In the same interview, Ryan indicated that he’s getting close to convincing the ex-beauty pageant owner that the most important thing he can do to cement his legacy is nix grandma’s ability to get medical attention. “I think the president is understanding choice and competition works everywhere, especially in Medicare,” he said. And while Ryan, who presumably daydreams about slapping the government-funded blood pressure pills out of senior citizens’ mouths, may have had to do a little convincing on the Medicare front, the Trump administration is apparently already champing at the bit to slash other social services. Politico reports that the White House is “quietly preparing a sweeping executive order that would mandate a top-to-bottom review of the federal programs on which millions of poor Americans rely,” while “G.O.P. lawmakers are in the early stages of crafting legislation that could make it more difficult to qualify for those programs.” And the White House doesn’t seem concerned with the fact that its machinations will potentially hurt the very people who supported Trump’s bid for office. As the budget Team Trump unveiled in May demonstrated, such cuts will “inevitably reach many of the lower-income and less-educated whites that have emerged as the cornerstone of the modern Republican coalition,” Ronald Brownstein noted in The Atlantic. Already, federal health officials are reportedly “encouraging states to impose work requirements on able-bodied adults on Medicaid,” plus higher costs for enrollees and “strict disenrollment penalties for not following certain rules.” The Agriculture Department indicated last week that states will soon have greater control over the food-stamps program, which could lead to stricter work requirements or even drug testing for participants. Meanwhile Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary Ben Carson has said H.U.D. will be “significantly involved” in the administration’s welfare reform; last May, Carson said that “poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind.” Unsurprisingly, not everyone is thrilled with these developments. “It would be a recipe for massively exacerbating poverty and inequality in America in violation of all of Trump’s campaign promises,” Rebecca Vallas, managing director of the Center for American Progress’s poverty program, told Politico. And Trump and Co. are already getting a taste of what the broader reaction to these “reforms” might look like. On December 1, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin said in a phone call that his agency would end a $460 million program that works to reduce homelessness among veterans, and would instead send they money to local V.A. hospitals who could decide how to use it. (The decision was apparently made with zero input front V.A. staff.) But by December 7, the decision to essentially relegate homeless veterans to the street was scrapped after enormous and—to anyone outside the Team Trump brain trust—predictable backlash. That little hiccup aside, Trump is reportedly expected to sign the welfare order as soon as January, with future legislation to follow. “They’re thinking about welfare reform in a large, all-encompassing way, not a program way,” Jason Turner, executive director of the conservative Secretaries’ Innovation Group, told Politico, adding that Ryan is in the process of developing a “mega-idea” for reform, which doesn’t sound terrifying at all.
MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid had the gall to blame Republicans for divisive rhetoric just a day after she took cheap shots at shooting victim Rep. Steve Scalise. On her show Saturday, Reid alleged that Scalise, who has undergone multiple surgeries after being shot at the GOP baseball practice, may be a racist and a homophobe. (RELATED: Steve Scalise Can’t Defend Himself But MSNBC Is Back To Attacking Him Anyway) “Because he is in jeopardy and everybody is pulling for him, are we required in a moral sense to put that aside in the moment?” Reid asked. Rep. #Scalise was shot by a white man with a violent background, and saved by a black lesbian police officer, and yet… #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/Qm96T90c6Y — AM Joy w/Joy Reid (@amjoyshow) June 17, 2017 Reid started the 11 a.m. EDT hour of “AM Joy” Sunday by accusing Republicans of being hypocrites when they called for “toned down rhetoric” after the GOP shooting. “The GOP’s leader is a president who, just a day after the shooting, was back to attacking Democrats on Twitter,” Reid said. “It didn’t take long for the very real political divisions to reappear.” WATCH: Reid also seemed to allege during a discussion with Republican strategist Evan Siegfried that the left is justified in calling the GOP “insensitive,” “evil,” and “the Taliban” because they want to cut federal spending. Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at Media Matters, continued the attack on the right wing, arguing, “Nobody from Fox is trying to step back the tone, nobody at Fox is saying, ‘hey, let’s be responsible.'” “If these Republicans are so upset about tone, where were they when a reporter was body slammed?” Boehlert asked. Siegfried clearly became fed up with the constant trashing from Reid and her guests. “They were putting out statements saying it was wrong!” he corrected, pointing out that multiple members of the GOP condemned Gianforte’s body slam. “What planet are you on?” WATCH: Follow Amber on Twitter
10 years ago (CNN) - Dream big and give back, Michelle Obama told the first graduating class of University of California-Merced on Saturday in her first commencement speech as the first lady. "Remember that you are blessed - remember that in exchange for those blessings you must give something back," Obama told the sprawling, cheering crowd at the university. "You must reach back and pull someone up. You must bend down and let someone else stand on your shoulders so that they can see a brighter future." The trip to the state university system's newest and smallest campus was her first trip to California since her husband, President Barack Obama, took office. The fledgling school, which opened in 2005 and has a 2,700-member student body, worked hard to get the first lady's attention, writing letters to Michelle Obama, her office, her friends and family, according to the White House. They even started a "Dear Michelle" Facebook campaign that sent out some 900 Valentine's Day cards to her. The first lady accepted the invitation in March, tapping University of California-Merced as her only stop on this year's collegiate-commencement circuit. Obama has also agreed to speak at the Washington Math and Science Technical High School on June 3. "A few people may be wondering why did I choose the University of California-Merced to deliver my first commencement speech as first lady," said Obama, in full academic dress. "Let me tell you something, the answer is simple: You inspired me." "My office received thousands of letters and, of course, Valentine's cards from students - each and every one of them so filled with hope and enthusiasm," she added. She noted that many of the more than 300 graduates are from the 250,000-population central California city, and are quite familiar with grassroots efforts. They staged a similar letter-writing campaign to get the university system to open a school in their city. "Every school kid in the entire county, I understand, sent a postcard to the UC board of regents in order to convince them to select Merced," Obama said. "I just love the fact that some of the graduates sitting in this audience today participating were involved in that campaign as well and they used the same strategy to get me here - that is amazing." After her speech, Obama was given one of five chancellor's medals for exceptional achievement - the university's highest honor - awarded Saturday.
Manuel Vigil has had two sets confiscated in three weeks by the school, which says they're gang-related LOVELAND -- In an attempt to keep gang activity out of the school, Thompson Valley High School officials say they take any number of measures, including barring rosary beads when their use is deemed inappropriate. And in the three weeks since school has been in session, Thompson Valley High junior Manuel Vigil has had two sets of rosary beads he wore around his neck confiscated. Vigil, who is Catholic, has worn the rosary beads around his neck all summer. His mother, Antoinette Ramirez, said they've become especially important in helping him deal with the recent murder of an uncle in California. "Having the rosary taken away was kind of like a huge hit for him," she said. "He wears it as a form of protection for himself." But officials say that rosary beads themselves are not prohibited. "It wasn't consistent with what would normally be a rosary, and because of that we felt like it could be gang-related," principal Mark Johnson said. "There was no punishment; we just removed it." According to the Thompson School District dress code, unacceptable items include any clothing, grooming, jewelry, accessories or body adornments that "by virtue of color, arrangement, trademark, or other attribute denote membership in gangs which advocate drug use, violence, or disruptive behavior." The school enforces its policy based on information from the Loveland Police Department. "We meet with the gang unit on a regular basis, and they do tell us what to look for," Johnson said. "We want to make sure we keep on top of what is the latest gang stuff." The latest in gang trends, and what the school may choose to ban, varies from year to year. At Thompson Valley High, bandanas and clothing with gang names or symbols are never allowed. At times, certain colors are prohibited if it appears a student is wearing a color to signal gang affiliation. "It depends on what's going on in the world," Johnson said. "You have to pay attention to colors and what they're doing." In Greeley-Evans School District 6, some numbers are banned based on street number gangs, which caused a recent firestorm when a third-grader had a Denver Broncos No. 18 Peyton Manning jersey barred. Across the country, rosary beads around the neck have been barred in schools because some gangs, including the Sureños and the Latin Kings, wear them that way. If a student wears a rosary around his neck at Thompson Valley High, Johnson said it's the school's policy to ask the student why he's wearing it. It's often a case-by-case situation, said Johnson, who said Vigil's response was simply that he had the right to wear the rosary beads. "If we determine that something is gang-related, then we have the right to say they can't wear it, so some of that is subjective," he said. While the purpose of the rosary is to aid in prayer and not as a means of fashion, the Rev. Sam Morehead of St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Loveland said the church allows wearing rosary beads as a necklace. Particularly in Hispanic culture, Morehead said wearing a rosary around the neck has become an important part of Catholic identity in the past 20 or 30 years. "It's actually quite distressing for me personally to hear that something that represents one's Catholic faith is being seemingly persecuted in the school setting when it is certainly not a symbol of gang membership," he said. According to Loveland Police Sgt. David Murphy, who leads the school resource officers in the Thompson School District, Vigil's rosary had a red-flagging 13 beads in a row instead of a traditional rosary with 10 beads. The number 13 is sometimes associated with the Sureños gang, Murphy said. According to Ramirez, her son purchased the rosaries at teen retailer rue21 and had not noticed the number of beads. "For him, he feels safe when he has it on," she said. While a rosary with 13 beads in a row might be considered suspicious, Morehead said he would be hesitant to rush to any conclusions. "For all the lack of knowledge that there is and perhaps any naivete, there is still a lot of good will for people who want to have this symbol of faith," he said. Jessica Maher can be reached at 669-5050 ext. 516 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter: @JessicaMaherRH.
The scandal brewing at the military regarding sexually explicit images of female troops being non-consensually shared has grown larger than the private social media site Marines United to include a whole host of gay adult sites depicting uniformed men engaged in sex acts. Now your very own tax dollars will be used to pay for military investigators to track down said images and videos to uncover whether active-duty troops knowingly participated in activities that could “bring discredit on their service,” which could be seen as violating military law. We’re going to save the investigators some time and say OK, that’s probably what happened — but this has all the trappings of a witch hunt. This “problem,” it’s been discovered, affects all branches of the US military, as images of men in the uniforms of sailors, soldiers and airmen reportedly appear on a whole bevy of Tumblr sites. How very dreadful indeed. There is one area of the investigation that is cause for real concern — it’s possible that some of the men appearing on the adult sites may not have provided consent, and that’s no joke. Unfortunately, even if the images constitute so-called “revenge porn,” military law doesn’t do much to protect victims if they consented at the time the pictures or videos were originally filmed. USA Today adds: Determining whether the men in the photos, many involved in group sex, are active-duty troops is possible, said a congressional source on a military oversight committee who was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue. NCIS has dedicated dozens of investigators to the matter, the source said. They can comb through the photos and identify troops with the use of facial-recognition software. There’s a fantastic use of the government’s cutting-edge technology. The Pentagon has formed a joint military task force to handle the significantly expanded investigation, which includes representatives from the Navy, Marines, Army, Air Force and Coast Guard. Punishment could include court marshall if active-duty troops are identified as having knowingly participated in the videos, and there is precedent for discharging troops for such activity.
ADVERTISEMENT: PAX Preview Pain One of the downsides to my articles being published on Thursday means that I’m usually pretty late to the party for any Magic news that was shown over the weekend. For example. I was going to spend a few solid paragraphs thoroughly expressing my disgust for how Wil Wheaton butchered the Battle for Zendikar preview show at PAX, but I’m not even going to attempt to hold a candle to Travis Allen’s beautiful explanation on how much of a vomitfest that was. Seriously, if you were thinking, “Maybe I should watch the preview show. Seeing a dumpster catch on fire has no value to the world, but it’s kind of entertaining…”, then forget about it. Don’t give them your clicks or views. Just go be entertained and informed by Travis, then come back here. Wizards of the Coast, if you’re reading this. Hire literally anyone else to do the preview show next time. Pick a random guy or girl out of the crowd, and let them do the preview show with flashcards or a teleprompter. It would have been better than the middle-school presentation that I had to dredge through. The only things that kept me remotely interested in the show were spoiled cards, MaRo’s interesting design talk, and this guy that I’ve circled in the below image. Every time they panned back to the crowd, this guy was sitting in that exact pose, giving off that “yeah, I’m not gonna clap for this bad meme personified, just give me the damn spoilers” vibe. Mystery crowd member, you are my hero of the weekend. ADVERTISEMENT: Eldra..gons of Zendi…tarkir You know what? Forget it. There’s a clever joke in there somewhere, but I’m not going to sit here for twenty minutes and try to figure out what it is. I’ve got Magic cards to write about, not subheading puns. My point is that back when Dragons of Tarkir was released, every goddamn dragon in the game suddenly went up approximately a billion dollars, just because everyone wanted to play dragon everything. Scion of the Ur-Dragon EDH, 60-card dragon casual, 78-card unsleeved dargon casual, you name it. Well, every dragon went up, except for the FTV copies of Bladewing the Risen that I’ve had for forever… Anyway, the point is that with Battle for Zendikar quickly approaching, I think it’s time to look back at a few of the older Eldrazi and get in on them before any hype starts to lift them up off the ground. I want to look for safe targets that aren’t likely to plummet any time soon, and some of them will definitely be longer-term holds. While BFZ won’t be the “Eldraziest Eldrazi set that ever had Eldrazi” as DTK was with dragons, I still think there are some safe pickups and holds that have room to grow. A lot of the dragons that picked up the price pace weren’t even good in EDH, but were just being purchased by casual players who enjoy slamming big, fire-breathing threats onto the table. We’re going to look at a few parallels here in the old Eldrazi set. Spawnsire of Ulamog At only $3, I really like Spawnsire of Ulamog as a pickup. It dodged all reprints up until now, it makes a lot of mana dorks, and the last activated ability is perfect for both Timmy and Johnny to get excited about. The annihilator 1 is pretty irrelevant, but who cares? We’re casting every Eldrazi ever. Spawnsire gets a whole lot of new tools with this set, and I don’t think he needs to see competitive or EDH play to get up to $6 or $7 on casual demand alone. SCG is out of stock on NM copies at the moment, but has plenty of SP/MP. eBay is practically dried up of non-foil copies, and there are still quite a few on TCGplayer. Maybe this doesn’t pick up until casual players start cracking packs and building decks, but this is a card I’m very bullish on. You don’t see me pick out spec targets very often, but this is one of them. ADVERTISEMENT: I’ve heard some rumors and suggestions on Eye of Ugin recently, so I wanted to clear the air with my thoughts. Eye of Ugin just got reprinted into dust because of Modern Masters 2015 by being rare instead of mythic, and you only really need one, maybe two in a deck. I’ll admit that I almost had a heart attack when I considered using it with the devoid mechanic, because Forerunner of Slaughter is technically colorless… but you still need to pay colored mana to cast it. Maybe there’s still something there, though. It makes you only need one black mana to cast Dominator Drone, and if you’re in black then you can run Urborg to let Eye tap for mana… I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy. Being able to tutor for “colorless” devoid creatures isn’t irrelevant late-game, but there’s just so many copies in supply right now. I’m calling Eye a hold for now, because I don’t want to give up on the possibility that there’s a really cool interaction in the set that we haven’t seen yet. Awakening Zone has been creeping and crawling very subtly over the past couple of months. It’s easy to not notice a trend of a card slowly creeping from $2 to $3, and Awakening Zone has shrugged off two multiplayer product reprints over the years. It doubles as a repetitive token engine and ramp spell, and we could definitely see increased demand with the new Eldrazi. It’s always been a semi-staple in Commander decks that can make good use of the tokens, but additional casual demand could put it in the $4 to $5 range relatively quickly. Keep an eye on this one, but I don’t think we buy in at the $3 it is now. If you want to buy a $3 rare, go for Spawnsire. Just be ready to sell this off at $4 to $5 if it makes it there. I still think it’s a good trade target at $3, especially if you end up being able to move soon-to-be BFZ bulk rares. How the mighty have fallen. If it weren’t for the back-to-back reprints, I would’ve loved this as a pick-up. Everyone would have. Being dropped down to uncommon from rare basically kills any chance for this to be worth anything in the next ten years, so don’t even touch it, unless you’re picking bulk and basically getting them for free. Sell them for a quarter to all of the new Eldrazi players and enjoy the small demand bump, but don’t go hoarding them thinking that you have a master plan. Did you know that Pathrazer of Ulamog is close to being a $3 uncommon? Yep, it’s worth almost as much as a Gitaxian Probe or a Boros Charm, and those ones actually see competitive play. I always preferred Artisan of Kozilek in my EDH decks because of the bonus reanimation and cheaper mana cost, but I suppose there’s something to be said about a higher annihilator number and pseudo-unblockability. At $3, though, I wouldn’t expect this to see any additional gains. The rule here is identical to how you’re moving Eldrazi Temples: be happy with the new buyers, and don’t look back. End Step Now, let’s step back into something more recent. Shaman of Forgotten Ways recently shot up to $8 off the back of pure, unadulterated hype, but there’s no actual decklists to back up the price tag yet. Because of that, I made the executive decision to list my copies on TCGplayer yesterday, and they sold in less than three hours. Nick is correct in that it’s not particularly fair for me to say that I sextupled up purely from speculation, because I paid buylist prices for them anyway back when they were $2 retail. I was just happy to unload them into the incoming hype, when I still haven’t seen a tangible decklist yet for any sort of green ramp containing the new Eldrazi. Mark Rosewater confirmed that Ulamog was the only titan left on Zendikar, so we won’t be getting Emrakul or Kozilek as backup (at least in this particular set). I’m curious to see if there will be anything else worth slamming down for 10 or more mana mana; if not, then See the Unwritten and Shaman of Forgotten ways could both very well crash and burn. I don’t want to be holding them when that happens. Do you have any pocket picks that you expect to jump up from the BFZ spoilers? Let’s continue the conversation below, or on Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook. I’m not picky. ADVERTISEMENT:
How animals can be transformed into medical assistant devices and used in a more holistic health approach including medical animals in treatment. Revital Cohen designed the Life Support project to show how animals could be transformed into alternative, low-cost medical assistant devices and a part of a more holistic health care strategy to include medical animals in treatment: Cohen outlines a plan to use greyhounds that are retired from racing as a ventilation aid for humans with respiratory problems. The dog would replace a mechanical ventilator by running at an object it is trained to chase using the pressure of its vacillating chest to pump air into the patient’s lungs – a non-invasive method of providing aid. Interestingly, Cohen also prototyped a method for sheep to act as a natural dialysis machine for humans. To start, a lab will take the bone marrow tissue of the selected patient and the major histocompatibility complex, and plant the patients DNA bundle in a test tube sheep. For the rest of that animal’s life, it can serve safely as the blood-cleaner.
Episode 695: Put A Chip On It Credit cards and debit cards have tons of safety features. The extra security code on the back. Sometimes your picture. Your signature. That little hologram of a bird that nobody looks at. But, until recently, there's been a big safety feature missing from credit cards in the U.S.: The chip. It was rolled out to stop fraud in France decades ago. It worked. Every other major economy adopted it, except us. Until now. What took so long for it to get here? And now that it is here, why have so few stores adopted it? Today on the show, we bring you a brief history of what's in your pocket. It's a story of convenience vs. fraud--and it also includes a hippie inventor, the origin of the last great upgrade on your card, the magnetic stripe, and why it takes so long to "dip the chip." HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO DIP? In the podcast, we ask for your help. How long does it take for you to complete a transaction with your credit card chip? Fill out this form to let us know. The results may appear on an upcoming episode. Music: "Wildfire." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.
A couple of weeks ago, a large banner appeared in front of the Science Center. “Free Speech,” it proclaimed in large block letters. I moved a bit closer, confused, and saw that at the bottom it said, “Sponsored by the Harvard Libertarian Forum.” I was still confused—it seemed as if this group were making a statement, but I wasn’t sure why they felt the need to do so on Harvard’s campus because I couldn’t imagine anyone being reprimanded for expressing an opinion here. I’ve actually found myself surprised by both the variety of opinions present among the undergraduate population and the eagerness with which everyone seems to want to volunteer their opinions, leftists, liberals, and conservatives alike. It wasn’t until I read the Crimson article about the free speech wall the next day that I learned that it was supposed to serve as a statement against Harvard’s limitations on free speech, which a member of the Libertarian Forum summarized as disallowing students from saying “discriminatory things,” but which actually consist very specifically of a ban against hate speech. In fact, the College Handbook states explicitly that, “speech not specifically directed against individuals in a harassing way may be protected by traditional safeguards of free speech.” I find the Libertarian Forum’s dedication to complete freedom of speech, regardless of whether or not the speech is harassment, alarming and indicative of a larger, troubling trend in American society. Our nation is obsessed with the concept of freedom. The majority of U.S. citizens seem to think of theirs as the freest of all countries, and any perceived attack on this freedom is seen as a sacrilegious desecration of the Constitution, America’s holy book. However, laws, including those in the Bill of Rights, exist for a reason—to protect citizens. The provision of freedom of speech serves, accordingly, to protect people from being punished for their ideas and beliefs. However, this freedom can backfire and end up punishing people not for their ideas but for their identities when hate speech comes into play. There must be a carefully thought-out balance between freedoms and restrictions of speech in order to create a society where citizens not only feel free to express themselves, but also are free from fear and violence. The most common argument I have encountered for unrestricted free speech on college campuses is that if we prohibit people from saying certain things, they will simply never talk about them. As a result, their prejudice and oppression—the problems that we are trying to stamp out in the first place with restrictions on speech—will continue quietly, unchecked. However, the argument goes, if we allow people to express these thoughts openly, then there will be discussion about them that leads to greater understanding. This was the view expressed by the member of the Harvard Libertarian Forum quoted in the article, and one that I think is fundamentally misguided. There certainly should be dialogue around issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression. If someone has prejudices, a good way to erase these prejudices can indeed be to engage in dialogue with that person in order to understand where their attitude is coming from and educate them about the moral and logical fallacies of their prejudice. But there is also a need to protect people from having violence perpetrated against them. When someone calls a black person the “n” word out of hatred, he or she is not expressing a new idea or outlining a valuable thought. They are committing an act of violence. Speech has great power. It can—and often does—serve as a tool to marginalize and oppress people. Laws that restrict hate speech simply seek to prevent violence against marginalized, oppressed groups in order to prevent them from becoming further marginalized and oppressed. Advertisement There are freedoms to do things, and there are freedoms from things. When our freedom to speak our mind impinges on someone’s freedom from fear, or on someone’s right to feel safe in their community, then that freedom should not stand unregulated in any group that wishes to create a safe and respectful society for its members. We cannot create a respectful learning environment at our university if students from marginalized groups feel that their administration condones acts of violence against them. University regulations against hate speech are entirely necessary for maintaining respect and dignity among the student body, and Harvard’s policies to this end are well thought-out and fair—and certainly not worthy of protest. Reed E. McConnell ’15 is an editorial comper in Greenough Hall.
Here they are, finally finished, the Stiles & Derek action figures! After so much wait, it seemed only appropriate to share this on a Monday, because even when we’re on hiatus, every Monday should be a Moonday :) This is a project that’s been in the making for little over a year; I know, it seems like a long time but there was a lot to do for it, starting from the fact that I had never done something like it before in my life and it’s purely out of love, which meant it was only done in my free time and with my limited resources. The idea was born from seeing the Avengers action figures of Thor and Loki by Hot Toys, and I thought that, if other people had the chance to have action figures of their favorite heroes, then I sure could have figures of Derek and Stiles, since they’re my favorite heroes. I started looking for someone who could help me with the custom head sculptures, and that’s how I came across Jesse Bonelli, a talented artists who became a dear friend to me (and how now is working his dream job at a video game company, congrats, buddy!). The process was long and grueling, because I’m a perfectionist and exact references were hard to find given how they’ve changed through the years. With all that, it took around 7-8 moths to come to the final product you can see now. However, the painting had to be altered once I had the whole ensemble, which I did myself. The bodies are not custom made, but that didn’t make it any easier, since I had to look and match to the body types of each of them, which took a while since different companies have different sizes and there were more than a couple bodies that had to be discarded in order to get the perfect ones. The ones used are: – TrueType Slim Body T119 for Stiles – TTL TTM19 CUSTOM body for Derek The clothes were another challenge, because even though I like crafting, sewing is something I’ve only done to fix a hole in a shirt and so, but never before had I gone into patterning, much less at this scale. I first tried to buy the clothes, but soon I realized most of what I found out there was far from what I needed or wanted to satisfy my hunger for perfectionism. I also tried commissioning it from people who’ve been in the business for a while, but would’ve turned very expensive, way out of the budget I had for it, and so, I started my quest into making their clothes from scratch. That means taking screenshots, going into blogs such as teenwolf-style.tumblr.com/ and teenwolfmtvstyle.tumblr.com/ (for which I’m eternally grateful, they made it a lot easier on me), hunting down fabrics, and teeny tiny accessories that are impossible to find in my very small town. I tried, I messed up, I got frustrated, I cried, I tried again, I succeeded, I wanted more, I made more outfits. And don’t even get me started on the shoes, because those ADIDAS were a nightmare to get! After being done with the clothes I wanted some props, which led me to go looking for HQ pictures of Derek’s loft, yeah, you’re reading right, that background you see on the pictures? HUGE print, pasted on a board. Oh, and the bat! I needed Stiles to have his bat! So I found this custom bat online, and it was 20 bucks + shipping. And those were 20 bucks + shipping that I didn’t have, so there I go, making baseball bats in scale! It was fun, but a couple broke, so I had to make another one, and then it was perfect! :D Making Stiles and Derek action figures is not something I imagined myself doing, but it’s something that I’ve enjoyed enormously. It’s a project I hold dear to my heart because it’s taught me many things, about crafting, working hard, perseverance, patience, being grateful to those who have stuck with me throughout the whole process and have been super secretive about it. On this note, I have to thank Liz Ponce, who was with me all along the way, she was so patient and supportive, helped me choose and pointed me in the right direction when I was lost, cheering me up when I was down, making sure I knew that I could make it! I’m also specially grateful to Ine, for being the voice of reason when I was afraid of this or that, for her support and encouragement, and for the firm hand when I waver and are about to break under the pressure of my uncertainties. You’re both a blessing to me. Thanks to Monce for the help with fashion issues and patterning, for teaching me about clothing in scale and finishes in clothes in general, I’m forever grateful. I’m thankful to all my friends whom I shared this with, who were happy to see what I’d done and let me know how much they liked it, thank you for letting me share this and letting me share it ‘til I was ready! Specially, thanks to Siny for connecting me to all those wonderful people, and for being so nice to help me with the graphics and guiding me through what would be a good idea to do once the cat was out of the bag. But most of all, I want to thank Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O'Brien, for being giving life to such amazing characters and being an inspiration so big and to make me passionate about something, and make it into something amazing and to be proud of. Thanks to MTV and Jeff Davis for creating these characters and giving me a chance to see them and fall in love with them, and their stories. Thanks to fandom for being so creative and active, for welcoming me and giving me a place to belong to. Thanks to all of you. Last, but not least, credit where credit is due: Sinyhale for the help with graphics, making my photos look so much cooler. You can find more of her work here: http://sinyhale.tumblr.com/ Jesse Bonelli, who did a stunning job with the custom heads, for helping me with this project and being so patient with me; more from him: http://jessejamesbonelli.deviantart.com/ DISCLAIMER: No copyright infringement intended, these figures are purely for personal use, not for sale, no profit has been made. This is a fan work for a fan by a fan. All rights go to their rightful holders. Teen Wolf belongs to MTV.
Background Edit Incidents Edit 3 August Edit Private Charles H. Kuhl, of L Company, U.S. 26th Infantry Regiment, reported to an aid station of C Company, 1st Medical Battalion, on 2 August 1943. Kuhl, who had been in the U.S. Army for eight months, had been attached to the 1st Infantry Division since 2 June 1943. He was diagnosed with "exhaustion," a diagnosis he had been given three times since the start of the campaign. From the aid station, he was evacuated to a medical company and given sodium amytal. Notes in his medical chart indicated "psychoneurosis anxiety state, moderately severe (soldier has been twice before in hospital within ten days. He can't take it at the front, evidently. He is repeatedly returned.)" Kuhl was transferred from the aid station to the 15th Evacuation Hospital near Nicosia for further evaluation. Patton arrived at the hospital the same day, accompanied by a number of medical officers, as part of his tour of the U.S. II Corps troops. He spoke to some patients in the hospital, commending the physically wounded. He then approached Kuhl, who did not appear to be physically injured. Kuhl was sitting slouched on a stool midway through a tent ward filled with injured soldiers. When Patton asked Kuhl where he was hurt, Kuhl reportedly shrugged and replied that he was "nervous" rather than wounded, adding, "I guess I can't take it." Patton "immediately flared up," slapped Kuhl across the chin with his gloves, then grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to the tent entrance. He shoved him out of the tent with a kick to his backside. Yelling "Don't admit this son of a bitch," Patton demanded that Kuhl be sent back to the front, adding, "You hear me, you gutless bastard? You're going back to the front." Corpsmen picked up Kuhl and brought him to a ward tent, where it was discovered he had a temperature of 102.2 °F (39.0 °C); and was later diagnosed with malarial parasites. Speaking later of the incident, Kuhl noted "at the time it happened, [Patton] was pretty well worn out ... I think he was suffering a little battle fatigue himself." Kuhl wrote to his parents about the incident, but asked them to "just forget about it." That night, Patton recorded the incident in his diary: "[I met] the only errant coward I have ever seen in this Army. Companies should deal with such men, and if they shirk their duty, they should be tried for cowardice and shot." Patton was accompanied in this visit by Major General John P. Lucas, who saw nothing remarkable about the incident. After the war he wrote: There are always a certain number of such weaklings in any Army, and I suppose the modern doctor is correct in classifying them as ill and treating them as such. However, the man with malaria doesn't pass his condition on to his comrades as rapidly as does the man with cold feet nor does malaria have the lethal effect that the latter has. Patton was heard by a war correspondent angrily denying the reality of shell shock, claiming that the condition was "an invention of the Jews."[19][20][21][22] 10 August Edit Private Paul G. Bennett, 21, of C Battery, U.S. 17th Field Artillery Regiment, was a four-year veteran of the U.S. Army, and had served in the division since March 1943. Records show he had no medical history until 6 August 1943, when a friend was wounded in combat. According to a report, he "could not sleep and was nervous." Bennett was brought to the 93rd Evacuation Hospital. In addition to having a fever, he exhibited symptoms of dehydration, including fatigue, confusion, and listlessness. His request to return to his unit was turned down by medical officers. The shells going over him bothered him. The next day he was worried about his buddy and became more nervous. He was sent down to the rear echelon by a battery aid man and there the medical aid man gave him some medicine which made him sleep, but still he was nervous and disturbed. On the next day the medical officer ordered him to be evacuated, although the boy begged not to be evacuated because he did not want to leave his unit. — A medical officer describing Bennett's condition On 10 August, Patton entered the receiving tent of the hospital, speaking to the injured there. Patton approached Bennett, who was huddled and shivering, and asked what the trouble was. "It's my nerves," Bennett responded. "I can't stand the shelling anymore." Patton reportedly became enraged at him, slapping him across the face. He began yelling: "Your nerves, hell, you are just a goddamned coward. Shut up that goddamned crying. I won't have these brave men who have been shot at seeing this yellow bastard sitting here crying." Patton then reportedly slapped Bennett again, knocking his helmet liner off, and ordered the receiving officer, Major Charles B. Etter, not to admit him. Patton then threatened Bennett, "You're going back to the front lines and you may get shot and killed, but you're going to fight. If you don't, I'll stand you up against a wall and have a firing squad kill you on purpose. In fact, I ought to shoot you myself, you goddamned whimpering coward." Upon saying this, Patton pulled out his pistol threateningly, prompting the hospital's commander, Colonel Donald E. Currier, to physically separate the two. Patton left the tent, yelling to medical officers to send Bennett back to the front lines. As he toured the remainder of the hospital, Patton continued discussing Bennett's condition with Currier. Patton stated, "I can't help it, it makes my blood boil to think of a yellow bastard being babied," and "I won't have those cowardly bastards hanging around our hospitals. We'll probably have to shoot them some time anyway, or we'll raise a breed of morons." Aftermath Edit Effect on plans for invasion of Europe Edit
LE CLAIRE, IOWA (The Borowitz Report) – With a stop in Iowa on Tuesday, the Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton officially embarked on a nineteen-month marathon of looking concerned. Sitting with patrons at Jones Street Java House, in Le Claire, the former Secretary of State listened intently, sipped from a cup of coffee, and nodded her head at appropriate junctures, flawlessly reënacting a brief scene from her first campaign video. After about twenty minutes of virtually nonstop displays of empathy, a Clinton aide said, “we decided to shut it down.” “Hillary is staring down nineteen months of sipping coffee and nodding her head,” the aide continued. “We want to make sure she paces herself.” After her Iowa visit, Clinton is scheduled to bring her looks of concern to New Hampshire, South Carolina, and other early primary states. Get news satire from The Borowitz Report delivered to your inbox.
Image caption Save the Children says single mothers may have to work longer or get into debt Single mothers could lose thousands of pounds under planned changes to the benefits system, a charity claims. Save the Children says its research suggests 150,000 women could lose up to £68 a week when the new universal credit takes effect next year. The report also claims second earners will be affected. But the Department for Work and Pensions said 600,000 lone parents would be better off under a system that "incentivised work and made work pay". Save the Children says single mothers on low incomes would be forced to make ends meet by either working longer hours or by getting into debt. The charity's report - Ending Child Poverty - claims the changes would make it less attractive for parents to come off benefits and into work because of poor childcare support. It also suggests that couples where both work part-time in low paid jobs would be hit by the changes The charity is urging the Chancellor, George Osborne, to take action in next week's budget to head off the problems and ensure that single mothers keep more of their income before losing benefits. The truth is 600,000 lone parents will be better off under a system which will incentivise work Department for Work and Pensions Chief executive of Save the Children Justin Forsyth said: "Universal credit will help some families, but mums working hard to stay above the breadline are its big blind spot. "It's incredibly hard bringing up three kids on £370 a week - losing almost a fifth of that will push many families over the edge. "The government must make sure mums who want to work keep more of their incomes and get more support with childcare. "Otherwise we'll see fewer women in the workplace and more children growing up in poverty." 'Better-off' By the time universal credit is fully implemented, the government expects 900,000 people to be lifted out of poverty. A spokeswoman for the DWP said the charity's claims were based on hypothetical examples and it was wrong to assert that lone parents would lose out under universal credit. "The truth is 600,000 lone parents will be better off under a system which will incentivise work and make work pay", said the spokeswoman. "This is in stark contrast to the broken system this government inherited which only rewards lone parents who work 16 hours or more. "Under universal credit 80,000 more families, including lone parents, will be able to claim childcare support - no matter how few hours they work," she added. The government did however admit that payments to some new claimants would be lower under the new system. Shadow employment minister Stephen Timms said the government must work harder to get universal credit right. "The best way to get children out of poverty is to get more parents in work," he said. "But as this report shows, their current plans will lock in a parents' penalty, chip away at the incentives for thousands to work and push 150,000 working parents deeper into poverty."
The IT job market is starting to heat up and security professionals are one of the career fields in high demand. The recent rash of high profile security breaches is causing executives and company boards to demand an increased focus on cybersecurity practices and IT shops are struggling to keep up. Earning a security credential can help you land a great job in an exciting field, but it’s important to know which security certifications will really set you apart and make your resume jump to the top of the hiring manager’s pile. The Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification remains the premier certification for security practitioners. If you’re looking for a position as a mid-level security professional, particularly as a generalist, this certification is a must have. It’s often used by Human Resources departments as a screening test to weed out job candidates who lack a strong background in information security. Earning a CISSP is no easy task. You must pass a multiple-choice examination covering 10 broad domains of information security. Perhaps the most significant hurdle, however, is that you must have five years of information security work experience. The SANS Institute’s Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC) program offers a number of credentials that are well-respected by information security practitioners and hiring managers. The exams for GIAC certifications in incident handling, intrusion detection, forensics, penetration testing and other fields require candidates to demonstrate a mastery of niche topics in security. If the CISSP is the broad “bachelor’s degree” of security certifications, the GIAC credentials are the “master’s degrees.” Holding both a CISSP and GIAC certification is a one-two punch demonstrating broad knowledge of the profession and mastery of one or two specific technical disciplines. Cisco’s Cisco Certified Network Professional Security (CCNP Security) credential allows candidates to demonstrate their mastery of using Cisco’s line of networking and security products to secure a network. The CCNP Security credential sits in the middle tier of Cisco’s program, between the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) and Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) credentials. Earning the credential requires that candidates pass five exams covering the use of various Cisco products. CCNP certification will be of particular interest to individuals seeking a network security position in a Cisco shop. The EC-Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) program validates that candidates have acquired the skills of a hacker, but also the wisdom to know how to apply those powers wisely. CEH includes coverage of penetration testing, ethical hacking and security auditing topics, preparing individuals to serve as security testing professionals. If you’re looking for a career in security consulting, consider pairing up the CISSP with the CEH credential for a powerful resume. With the rise in data breaches, forensic investigators are in high demand. Earning a vendor-specific credential, such as EnCase’s EnCase Certified Examiner (EnCe) certification can help you stand out from the crowd. The process for earning this credential is rigorous. Before registering for the exam, you must either complete 64 hours of training or demonstrate that you have 12 months of computer forensics experience. After passing a written examination, you must then successfully complete a practical examination demonstrating hands-on EnCase experience. If you’re able to make it through that process and earn your EnCe, you’ll be a prime candidate for positions in computer forensics and security incident response. The world is moving to the cloud and Amazon Web Services is the 1,000-pound gorilla in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service marketplace. While AWS doesn’t offer a certification program that only tests security knowledge, the AWS Certified Solutions Architect credential covers security topics along with a broad array of other knowledge needed to design secure, scalable implementations on AWS. With a large portion of the Internet now running on AWS servers, this certification will certainly appeal to hiring managers for security positions in AWS shops. All of the technologists involved in information security programs need top caliber leadership and management. That’s where the Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) credential from the Information Security Audit and Control Association (ISACA) comes into play. The CISM program requires that candidates pass an exam covering governance, risk management, security program management and incident management topics. You’ll also need five years of experience in security combined with three years of security management experience. Earning the CISM credential can be a great way to pave the path from security technologist to security manager. Information security professionals are in high demand and are very well compensated. Because of this, when positions are posted, they attract quite a bit of interest, with many hiring managers receiving hundreds of resumes from interested candidates. Earning any one of these security certifications can be a great way to supplement your education and work experience and help your resume survive screening and rise to the top of the stack. Each of these security certifications demonstrates both a level of technical competence and a commitment to the profession that are highly desirable in today’s competitive marketplace.
#UofTGrad17: How Indigenous studies helped Julie Blair connect with her culture By Hannah James November 9, 2017 Julie Blair at fall convocation (photo by Gary Beechy, BDS Studios) After working in Toronto nightclubs for years, Julie Blair wanted a career change. So, she came to the University of Toronto. What she got out of the next five years was more than just a degree – she was able to reconnect with her Indigenous roots. “Before I came to U of T, I didn’t really know anything about my culture,” says Blair, who is Anishinaabe and Dutch. “There was a lot of stuff I hadn’t been taught.” She said learning about her Indigenous heritage “was very emotional.” On Nov. 9, Blair collected her diploma in Indigenous studies from the Faculty of Arts & Science during U of T's fall convocation. She is the first Indigenous student to receive the Brookfield Peter F. Bronfman Gold Scholarship from Woodsworth College. It's a $12,000 prize awarded to a student who has demonstrated academic excellence and volunteerism in their community. She has also received the President's Award for Outstanding Indigenous Student of the Year. Blair at OISE’s Indigenous Education Network In her 40s, Blair has led various Indigenous committees and clubs at U of T, and she's worked as the Indigenous Education Network coordinator at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education – all while maintaining a 3.9 grade point average. “That’s really stunning,” says Cheryl Shook, assistant principal and registrar at U of T's Woodsworth College, who was part of the group that selected Blair for the gold scholarship. “The award is meant to provide somebody, who has shown this much potential, who is so involved, and who has overcome obstacles, an opportunity to take that funding and do even more things with it.” Blair, who is a member of Serpent River First Nation, says she's always done well academically and attributes her success now to finding an area of study she's passionate about. After high school, she did a brief stint at U of T Scarborough, but left to work in the fashion industry for a bridal accessories company. She then worked in the service industry, in restaurants and bars, but eventually wanted to do something else. Julie Blair (right) with OISE dean Glen Jones (left) at fall convocation (photo by Gary Beechey, BDS Studios) Reminder of home At U of T, Blair says she's found a community she can relate to. She recalls her first visit to U of T's First Nations House, which she says brought back an unexpected sensation, a deep-rooted memory passed on from generations before her. “I remember one day I went in there, and someone was smudging. I hadn’t smudged before that I could recall, but as soon as I smelled the sage burning, it brought back some memory I didn’t even know I had. It smelled so familiar. It smelled like home to me.” For the Native Students' Association at U of T, she served as a clan leader. She's also been a member of the Indigenous Studies Student Union executive body, helping to organize the university's first major pow wow in 20 years. She's also been a mentor in the Aboriginal Peer Mentorship Program, and is a part of a community-based research team looking into Indigenous mental health, led by Suzanne Stewart, director of Waakebiness-Bryce Institute for Indigenous Health at U of T. Outside U of T, Blair has volunteered for the Toronto Cat Rescue, Hot Docs Festival and The Stop's YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) community garden program. Blair's studies won't end with her bachelor's degree. She's already begun classes at U of T's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work in a master's program. She'll be focusing on Indigenous Trauma and Resiliency and hopes to one day work in mental health and addictions in Toronto.
Share. So then just what is being referenced? So then just what is being referenced? Exit Theatre Mode Bethesda has released its annual Christmas card, offering tantalising insight into its game line-up for 2014. Released on the Bethblog, the image contains a number of references to upcoming Bethesda titles that we should expect to see next year. Giving the recent confirmation that Fallout 4 is real and set in Massachusetts, unsurprisingly it's the one game that everyone's desperately hoping is referenced. So, is it on there? Well, sadly it appears not. Though a number of people have pointed to the vault under the tree or the robot dog as evidence that Fallout 4 will be headed our way next year, these are actually nods to The Evil Within and Wolfenstein: The New Order, respectively. The blood-spattered vault wrapped in barbed wire is Boxman's head from The Evil Within, while the robotic pooch is a Panzerhund from the Wolfenstein franchise. Lastly, the gold-plated Ouroboros on the wall is in reference to The Elder Scrolls Online (which recently got a release date midway through next year). Despite the absence, it's still looking like next year could be a truly stellar year for Bethesda, and who knows? Maybe next year's card will proudly hint towards both Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls 6? That'd be one Christmas none of us would forget in a hurry. Exit Theatre Mode Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Junior Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter.
A translation of a Spanish article from El Libertario summarising the development of the protests in Venezuela during February 2014, and addressing the relationship of those protests to conditions in Venezuela and the Venezuelan right. On February 4th, 2014, students from the Universidad Nacional Experimental del Tachira (Experimental University of Táchira), located on an inland state of the country, protested due to the sexual assault of a fellow female classmate in lieu of the current insecurity situation of the city. The protest was repressed, and several students were detained. The next day, other universities around the country had their own protests requesting the release of these detainees, being at the same time repressed and some of them incarcerated. The wave of indignation had the context of the economic crisis, the shortage of first necessity items and the crisis of basics public services, as well as the beginning of the enforcement of an economic plan on behalf of the President Nicolas Maduro. Two opposing politicians, Leopoldo Lopez, and Maria Corina Machado, tried to capitalize on the wave of discontent rallying for new protests under the slogan “The Way Out” and try to pressure for the resignation of president Maduro. Their message also reflected the rupture and divisions on the inside of opposing politicians and the desire to replace Henrique Capriles’ leadership, who publicly rejected the protests. The Mesa de la Unidad Democratica (Democratic Unity Table) coalition, didn’t support them either. When the government suppressed the protests, it made them grow bigger and wider all over the country. On February 12th, 2014, people from 18 cities protested for the release of all of the detainees and in rejection of the government. In some cities, inland, particularly punished by scarcity and lack of proper public services, the protests were massive. In Caracas, three people were murdered during the protests. The government blames the protesters, but the biggest circulating newspaper in the country, Ultimas Noticias (Latest News), who receives the biggest advertising budget from the government, reveals through photographs, that the murderers were police officers. As a response to this, Nicolas Maduro stated on National television and radio broadcast that police enforcement had been “infiltrated by the right wing”. Repression against protesters not only uses police and military enforcement agencies, it incorporates the participation of militia groups to violently dissolve the protests. A member of PROVEA, a human rights NGO, was kidnapped, beaten and threatened to death by one of then on the west side of Caracas. President Maduro has publicly encouraged these groups, which he calls “colectivos” (collectives). The Venezuelan government actually controls all of the TV stations, and has threatened with sanctions, radio stations and newspapers that transmit information about protests. Because of this, the privileged space for the distribution of information has been the social media networks, specially twitter. The use of personal technological devices has allowed the record keeping through videos and photographs of ample aggressions of the repression forces. Human rights organizations report detainees all over the country (many of them already released), the number has surpassed 400, and they have suffered tortures, including reports of sexual assault, cruel treatment, inhumane and degrading. As this is being written 5 people have been murdered in the context of the protests. In his speeches, Nicolas Maduro, stimulates the protesters that are against him to assume even more radical and violent positions. Without any criminalistic investigation, he automatically stated that each deceased person has been murdered by the same protesters, whom he disqualifies permanently with all of the possible adjectives. However, this belligerence seems not to be shared by all the Chavista movement, because a lot of it’s bases are waiting for what happens next, without any expressions of support. Maduro has only managed to rally public employees to the street protests he has done. In spite of the situation and due to the grave economic situation he faces, Nicolas Maduro continues to make economic adjustments, being the most recent, the increase of the tax unit. The state apparatus reiterates repeatedly that it is facing a “coup”, that what happened in Venezuela on April 2002 will repeat itself. This version has managed to neutralize the international left wing, which hasn’t even expressed its concern about the abuses and deaths in the protests. The protests are done in many parts around the country and are lacking in center and direction, having being called through social media networks. In the protesters themselves, there are many diverse opinions about opposing political parties, by which it is possible to find so many expressions of support and rejection at the same time. In the case of Caracas they are starred specially by middle class sectors and college students. On the other hand, in other states, other popular sectors have joined the protests. In Caracas the majority of the petitions are political, freedom for the detainees y the resignations of the president, while in other cities social demands are incorporated, such as inflation, scarcity and lack of proper public services. Even though some protests have turned violent, and some protesters have used fire guns against police and militia groups, the majority of the protests, specially outside of Caracas, remain peaceful. The Revolutionary Independent Venezuelan Left (anarchists, sectors that follow Trotsky, Marx, Lenin and Guevara) don’t have any incidence in this situation and we are simple spectators. Some of us are simply actively denouncing state repression and helping the victims of human rights violations. Venezuela is a historically oil driven country, it possesses low levels of political culture amongst its population, explaining why the opposing protesters have the same “content” problem as the bases of support for the government. But while the international left wing continues to give its back, and support without any criticism the government’s version of “the coup”, it leave thousands of protesters to the mercy of the most conservative of opposition’s political parties, without any reference to anti-capitalists, revolutionaries and true social change that could influence them. In this sense, the detention of Leopoldo Lopez, conservative opposition leader, tries to make his own figure the center of a dynamic movement, that up until this moment, that this is been written, had surpassed the political parties of the opposition and the government of Nicolas Maduro. What will happen in the short term? I think nobody knows exactly, especially the protesters themselves. The events are developing minute after minute. For more alternative information about Venezuela, we recommend: http://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com (in Spanish) http://www.derechos.org.ve (in Spanish) http://laclase.info (in Spanish) http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario (in Spanish, English & other languages)
(Newser) – Every aspect of Sonia Sotomayor's nomination procedure to become the newest Supreme Court justice was so controlled that she was even told what to wear at the acceptance ceremony, she said in a talk at Yale yesterday. Sotomayor, who appeared on campus for her 30th Yale Law School reunion, wanted to shop for new clothes for her acceptance, but was told to bring five suits for White House officials to choose from, the New Haven Register reports. "It was a really rough process and she knew it was just something she had to get through," said a student who attended the talk, which was closed to the media. Sotomayor became teary at times when discussing the grueling procedure, but kept the audience laughing, witnesses said. (Read more Sonia Sotomayor stories.)
In a statement released by Eskom, he says he will leave office on 1 January next year. JOHANNESBURG - Eskom CEO Brian Molefe has just announced that he will resign from his position. In a statement released by Eskom, he says he will leave office on 1 January next year. Mr Molefe says he'll take take time off to reflect before deciding on his next career move. — Khulu Phasiwe (@KhuluPhasiwe) November 11, 2016 Molefe says he was not properly treated by the former Public Protector Advocate Thuli Madonsela. Molefe features extensively in the Public Protector’s State of Capture report, released last month, and his close relationship with the Guptas emerged as one of the big outcome of this investigation. The State of Capture report found that Eskom helped the Guptas put the Optimum coal mine out of business and that Molefe was in regular contact with the family. The report has been scathing of Eskom. Molefe features extensively in this report and his close relationship with the Guptas has emerged as one of the big outcomes of this investigation. In an interview with the Public Protector, Ajay Gupta confirmed that he’s very good friends with Molefe. The report found the board of Eskom was improperly appointed, certain conflicts arose and the Minister of Public Enterprises Lynne Brown took no action to prevent these conflicts. The report also showed how investigators used cellphone records to illustrate with diagrams the numerous times Molefe visited his friends, the Guptas, in Saxonwold. Between 2 August 2015 and 22 March 2016, Molefe called Ajay Gupta 44 times and Gupta called Molefe 14 times. WATCH: Brian Molefe on the Guptas ‘BLAME MADONSELA’ Last week, Eskom chairman Baldwin Ngubane warned that if the parastatal loses Molefe, former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela will have to take the blame. Ngubane said the board remained fully behind its CEO and insisted the damning details in the state capture report are purely speculative. Ngubane said the company commended the Public Protector for releasing the highly anticipated state capture report, however, he believed the investigation was rushed. Ngubane emphasised that no one should be allowed to tear down the country based on speculation. He said Eskom’s board was satisfied that it had fully complied with all its legal obligations and that all its transactions were based on reasonable commercial contracts. Click here for an infographic on Molefe’s movements in Saxonwold.
September 7, 2017 New York City educator and activist Brian Jones makes the case in defense of one element of the legacy of the 1960s social movements for liberation from oppression. AS PART of their never-ending quest to "Make America Great Again," Donald Trump and his loyal minion Attorney General Jeff Sessions are taking aim at affirmative action programs for student admissions in higher education. For the country's newly emboldened racist right wing, affirmative action at the college level is a perfect target. It is, they claim, an example of Black people and other groups "jumping the line" and taking away resources from white people. Ominously, the U.S. Department of Justice posted an advertisement seeking to hire lawyers to work on "investigations and possible litigation related to international race-based discrimination in college and university admissions." For now, the Department claims it is only looking into a single case brought by Asian students claiming that a single university--Harvard--discriminates against them. ONE OF the most infamous anti-affirmative action cases was a complaint brought to the U.S. Supreme Court by Abigail Fisher in Fisher v. University of Texas. Denied admission to the University of Texas in 2008, Fisher claimed that less qualified Black applicants were admitted, and therefore she was discriminated against because of the (white) color of her skin. Students march against Trump's racism at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (Joe Brusky \| flickr) The Supreme Court, though packed with conservatives, ruled against her not once, but twice--in 2013 and 2016--both times upholding the right of the university to consider the race of applicants. Commentators have subsequently pointed out that of the 47 students admitted to the University of Texas that year with lower grades and SAT scores than Fisher's, only five were Black or Latino, while the other 42 were white. The fact that Fisher insisted it was the people of color who bumped her, not other white students, reveals what her case was really about--pushing back against any kind of program that attempts to address racism. Beyond this obvious hypocrisy is the issue of who is "qualified" to go to college in the first place. Who "deserves" to attend? Socialists support the demand that higher education should be free and available to all. At the same time, we recognize that Black people and other oppressed groups have been and continue to be actively discriminated against in many walks of life, including access to higher education. Affirmative action programs as they are currently constituted allow colleges and universities to consider the race or ethnicity in addition to other aspects of an application, recognizing the value of diverse student populations and as an opportunity to actively combat the pattern of discrimination. Such "race-conscious" admissions plans are legally banned in eight states, including California since 1996, where minority admissions have declined ever since. But even where such measures are in place, Black students continue to be dramatically underrepresented--at less than 5 percent in the freshman classes of many of the top public universities. Currently, "merit" and "deservingness" are measured by grade point averages and standardized test scores, such as the SAT. However, there is strong evidence that neither of these measures are accurate indicators of who will be successful in college--which is why many institutions of higher education are ditching standardized testing requirements for admission. IN THE Black Revolution on Campus, historian Martha Biondi traces the origins of affirmative action as we know it today to the struggles of African American students to gain wider access to public colleges and universities. In the 1960s, activists argued for shifting the responsibility of these institutions. Black students, she writes, "increasingly framed access to higher education as a right of postwar U.S. citizenship." In the late 1960s, student organizers at City College of New York--where the students were, at the time, 90 percent white--called for a student body that represented the surrounding Harlem community and its high schools, which would require the college to admit a freshman class that was 43 percent Black. At Brooklyn College--at the time 98 percent white--activists demanded that admission to all Black and Puerto Rican high school graduates who applied. We owe affirmative action today to the explosive struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, but the policies in place today are a far cry from the broad redistributive agenda from which they emerged. Meanwhile, there is another kind of affirmative action program that is less talked about, but far more effective--legacy admissions and purchased admissions. Colleges and universities tend to look favorably on admitting children of alumni, presumably because it facilitates the solicitation of donations. Author Daniel Golden estimates legacy admissions at Yale to be 13 percent of the freshman class, 22 percent at the University of Pennsylvania and Notre Dame, and 29 percent at Georgetown. Then there are those who merely buy their way in. Charles Kushner made a $2.8 million donation to Harvard in 1998, and his son Jared--now Donald Trump's son-in-law and a top White House adviser--was admitted in 1999. It is revealing that all of the hype and anger surrounding affirmative action is reserved for the kind that admits people openly barred from attending higher education up until a few decades ago, while very little ire is directed at the "affirmative action" reserved for the likes of the Kushners. Rarely does the question emerge of whether or not such students "deserve" to be on campus. In the context of rising costs for a college degree, declining scholarships and astronomical student debt, the tension around college attendance is likely to increase. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has generally upheld the right of colleges and universities to work towards diversifying their student populations, though undermining it in certain ways. Trump and Sessions face a challenging legal landscape. But this is no time to be passive. The Black student struggle kicked open the doors of higher education, and a new generation can and must learn from that history. We don't have to choose between affirmative action and free higher education for all--we can demand that colleges and universities take immediate action to make student bodies more diverse and representative--and we can organize to achieve fully funded public college tuition for all students.
Image: Shutterstock Cryonics, the practice of freezing oneself in the hopes that you can later be brought back to life and cured of whatever condition (including old age) motivated your decision, is basically illegal in the Canadian province of British Columbia. I say "basically" because putting grandpa in a deep freeze isn't actually illegal. Instead, the province outlaws advertising cryonics services that encourage the "expectation" of being resuscitated one day. This restriction is likely due to the fact that a human has never been resuscitated after being cryogenically frozen, and all of cryogenics hinges on significant medical advances in the future. But what do I know? I'm just another plebeian dude who expects to die one day. The law, the only one of its kind in North America, might not be around much longer if a new legal challenge from the Lifespan Society of British Columbia (LSBC), a group that promotes cryogenics, and a BC man named Keegan Macintosh, succeeds. Macintosh, who is in good health according to court documents, signed an agreement with LSBC in October to have his bodily fluids replaced with a kind of antifreeze after he is legally deceased. The actual deep freezing will likely be done by a company outside of Canada such as Arizona-based cryonics leader Alcor. Read More: The Girl Who Would Live Forever Macintosh and the LSBC, according to court filings, believe that the use of the term "expectation" in the law is too vague, and is asking the Supreme Court of British Columbia to either remove the restriction entirely or clarify the law so that it will only outlaw companies that "guarantee resuscitation or exaggerate the prospects of resuscitation." "I'm sure the court could find instances where there is cryonics fraud, but we don't want a reasonable agreement between an individual and a cryonicist to be under fire in the future," said Carrie Wong, president of the LSBC, in an interview. "That's what we're trying to establish." According to a court filing, the LSBC affirms that it "cannot guarantee that [Macintosh] will be preserved indefinitely or ever be resuscitated." The agreement between Macintosh and the LSBC also states that resuscitation "depends on a number of profound developments in medical science" and we currently have no indications as to when it will be possible. "The wording 'expect' is sort of vague, but having some sort of hope is a better way of putting it" Wong said that the LSBC has a "connection" with Alcor, but would not provide further details. "We never comment on agreements with any members if they have asked for privacy so in essence I cannot confirm or deny any arrangement," Alcor spokesperson Marji Klima wrote Motherboard in an email. Macintosh did not respond to a request for comment sent in a Facebook message and could not be reached through other means. Wong described the society as a "start up," and noted that the organization doesn't presently have any of the equipment it would need to cool down Macintosh's body before being frozen. Wong would not say when she expects the equipment to be available, but noted that Alcor has produced kits that can prepare a body for freezing before being transported to their facilities in Arizona. The province of British Columbia, the defendant in the case, seeks to have the court refuse to make a ruling on the case since the LSBC doesn't currently provide or advertise any cryonics services and their argument is "academic and hypothetical," the province contends. "We don't speak too much about the resuscitation process because we don't have the present technology to do that, obviously," Wong said of the possibility of Macintosh being brought back to life one day. But does Macintosh himself "expect" to be brought back to life? "The wording 'expect' is sort of vague, but having some sort of hope is a better way of putting it." Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter. UPDATE: This article has been updated to include comment from Alcor.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: Today we spend the hour with the director of a groundbreaking new documentary called The Act of Killing. The film is set in Indonesia, where beginning in 1965 the military and paramilitary slaughtered up to a million Indonesians after overthrowing the government. That military was backed by the United States and led by General Suharto, who would rule Indonesia for decades. There’s been no truth and reconciliation commission. As the film says, Indonesia is a country where the killers are, to this day, celebrated as heroes. A key figure in the film is Anwar Congo, who killed hundreds, if not a thousand, people with his own hands and is now revered as a founding father of an active right-wing paramilitary organization. Well, director Joshua Oppenheimer spent more than eight years interviewing the Indonesian death squad leaders, and in The Act of Killing, he works with them to re-enact the real-life killings in the style of American movies the men love to watch. This includes classic Hollywood gangster movies and lavish musical numbers. The film is remarkable. Now, the issue of the Indonesian military’s brutality is no stranger to our Democracy Now! audience. In 1990 and '91, I traveled to Indonesia and occupied East Timor. I went there with reporter Allan Nairn. There, we witnessed a massacre by the U.S.-backed Indonesian military. That was the Indonesian military occupying a foreign land. This film deals with the Indonesian military's murder of its own people. Well, this week, I sat down with Joshua Oppenheimer to talk about The Act of Killing, which he directed with Christine Cynn and an Indonesian co-director who remains anonymous for fear of retribution for making the film, as does much of the Indonesian film crew. Its executive producers are Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. The Act of Killing opens today in New York City at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema and comes to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., July 26, then to theaters nationwide. This is a clip from the film’s trailer. HERMAN KOTO: [translated] Cut! Cut! Cut! You acted so well, but you can stop crying now. ADI ZULKADRY: [translated] “War crimes” are defined by the winners. I’m a winner. SURYONO: [translated] Have mercy on me! ANWAR CONGO: [translated] Honestly, I never expected it to look this brutal. I can’t do that again. UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] Kill! ANWAR CONGO: [translated] I did this to so many people. Have I sinned? AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for The Act of Killing, a new film that has been eight years in the making. Its director, Josh Oppenheimer, joins us now in studio, longtime filmmaker who has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads, their victims, to examine political violence and the public imagination. The Act of Killing’s co-director remains anonymous. Its executive producers are Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. Joshua Oppenheimer, welcome to Democracy Now! JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Thank you so much. AMY GOODMAN: This is an astounding film. It is a masterpiece. We’ll talk about whether it can be called a documentary. I wanted to ask you if you could just give us the context of what happened. People—many people who are watching— JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: —or listening right now have never even heard of Suharto, so explain to us what happened in 1965. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: So, in 1965, the left-leaning government of Sukarno—it was basically a socialist nonaligned government, Sukarno was the founder of independent Indonesia—was overthrown in a military coup that led to the dictatorship, the 32-year dictatorship of Suharto, and then an ongoing corruption that continues to today. When Sukarno was overthrown, the military swiftly went after everybody who was opposed to the new regime and accused them of being communists. Of course, some of them were communists. Indonesia had the largest communist party, that was committed to achieving political power through the democratic process. They were an unarmed, non—in a way, non-revolutionary communist party. There was—so they were accused, but also women’s—the Indonesian women’s movement, the entire trade union movement, intellectuals, teachers, and the ethnic Chinese, and also land reform advocates. So, within somewhere—within a year, somewhere between half a million and two-and-a-half million people were killed in what was really one of the very largest genocides in our history. And it was reported in the United States as good news. It was reported in The New York Times and Time magazine fairly accurately in terms of the death tolls, but with headlines like “A Gleam of Light in Asia,” “The West’s Best News for Years in Asia.” So, inevitably, these events have been forgotten in the West, because how do you remember the killing of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people as good news? It doesn’t make sense as a story, and so we forget it. AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the U.S. role at the time, something that is— JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yes. AMY GOODMAN: —very much—if people even know about what happened here, it’s a story that isn’t as well known. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yes. The U.S. was—and the West, in general, particularly the U.K., probably Australia, were very much involved with supporting and encouraging the genocide. The U.S. provided money. It provided some weapons. It provided radios so that the army could coordinate the killings across this vast archipelago that is Indonesia. They also provided death lists, lists of thousands of names that—of fairly prominent public figures, leftists, leaders of unions, intellectuals. So it wasn’t meaningful intelligence, but it was a clear signal: We want these people dead. AMY GOODMAN: And these are political officers within the U.S. embassy handing over names of people, and they were crossing off the names as they were killed. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah. One of them was a guy called Bob Martens, from the—a former State Department official who, when we met him, was living in Bethesda, Maryland. And another was the CIA deputy station chief, Joe Lazarsky, living in suburban Virginia. They were handing out—they were handing over these lists of names. Basically, I remember—actually, Bob Martens was on the record in 1990; he was interviewed by a journalist called Kathy Kadane, and he said, “I may have blood on my hands, but sometimes that’s a good thing.” And, you know, the whole—beyond that list of names, who were people the Indonesian army certainly knew about, the whole message from the United States was: We want you not to just go after a few political leaders who are opposed to the new regime, the leaders of the Communist Party, for example; we want you to go after the entire grassroots base of the Indonesian left. It’s as if one day everybody affiliated with the Democratic Party and everybody registered as a Democrat was hunted down and killed or put in concentration camps. That’s essentially what happened in Indonesia in 1965, with Western support. AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about your film. You’re giving the political backdrop. Talk about how you discovered the people in your film. And begin with the name, because that very much tells us the story, The Act of Killing, and its various meanings. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, The Act of Killing is, of course, the title of the film. It has a few—it has several meanings. Of course, it can refer to the commission of the crime of killing or commission of the deed of killing, which, it’s worth pointing out, is fundamentally a human act. We have really no other species, except for a couple of the higher primates, kill each other. Human beings kill each other, and we kill each other en masse and again and again and again through our history. So there’s a sense that the film looks at what does it mean for human beings to kill. What are the consequences of killing? Why do—why do we kill? What are the consequences on our societies for impunity around killing? How do we justify killing through the stories we tell? And then, in Medan, in the capital of North Sumatra, the largest city in Sumatra, the third-largest city in Indonesia, a city of about the size perhaps of Chicago, the army recruited in 1965 its civilian death squad members from the ranks of movie theater gangsters, preman bioskop in Indonesian. These men were gangsters. They were part of a mafia that was running all sorts of criminal rackets, protection rackets, smuggling, illegal logging, prostitution rings, and so forth, but they were using as their base of operations movie theaters. And they were selling movie theater tickets on the black market as a kind of small side source of income. And they loved the movies. And because they were hanging out in them, so they developed a whole culture around the movies, whole kind of youth gang culture around the movies. And at the time, the head of the American Motion Picture Association of Indonesia, a man named Bill Palmer, was believed by ordinary Indonesians to have been involved—been plotting a coup to overthrow the president of Indonesia, Sukarno. He was—he had a villa outside—the head of the American—the distributor of American movies in Indonesia had a villa outside of Jakarta in which they found a memorandum—which may or may not have been a forgery, we don’t know—planning—signed by the British ambassador, Gilchrist—again, could have been a forgery—but it was discovered, and it was a coup attempt against President Sukarno. So everybody had reason to think in Indonesia at the time that the head—the guy bringing American movies to Indonesia, Hollywood movies to Indonesia, was in fact a CIA officer and planning to overthrow their founding father, if you like. So there was a boycott, a wide-ranging, a wide—you know, a broad-based boycott of American movies in 1964, ’65. And the movie theater gangsters hated this. So the army recruited them because they knew they had a proven capacity for violence, because they were criminals, gangsters, and they knew that they hated the Indonesian left already and could be easily mobilized to do their dirty work in attacking the left once the killing started. So the movie theater gangsters were recruited to form these death squads. And as it happened, they loved—because of their love of movies, and because the army had placed the offices where they were killing people directly across the street from the cinema, so that it was convenient for them to leave the cinema, walk across the street and torture and kill people, they would torture and kill people in ways inspired by American movies. And the main character in the film, Anwar Congo, describes coming out of the movies, the midnight show—an Elvis Presley musical, for example—dancing his way across the street and killing happily. So, acting was always part of the act of killing for the men in the film. It was a way of distancing themselves from the horrific deeds they were doing. And, of course, then, in my film, I have them—or I allow them to re-enact what they’ve done, to dramatize what they’ve done in whatever ways they wish. It’s worth, perhaps, in a moment, going into how I came to that method. But so, “the act of killing” has this double and even triple meaning, how acting was always part of the act of killing, how in the film they act out their memories of killing. And finally, it’s worth remembering that the act of killing needn’t be—needn’t refer simply to the act of killing human beings. It can—as it does in this case—as The Act of Killing demonstrates, I hope, as the film demonstrates, it also refers to the act of killing ideas, hope, community, solidarity, and sort of our common humanity. AMY GOODMAN: Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. He spent more than eight years interviewing Indonesian death squad leaders, and in his new film, The Act of Killing, he works with them to re-enact the real-life killings in the style of American movies the men love to watch. This includes classic Hollywood gangster movies and lavish musical numbers. The Act of Killing opens today in New York City at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema and then moves on to Los Angeles and Washington and the rest of the country. We’ll continue our interview in a moment. [break] AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with my interview with the director of a groundbreaking new documentary called The Act of Killing. The film is about Indonesia, where, beginning in 1965, the U.S.-backed military and paramilitary slaughtered up to a million Indonesians after overthrowing the government. A key figure in the film, Anwar Congo, who killed hundreds, if not a thousand, people with his own hands, now revered as a founding father of an active right-wing paramilitary. Director Joshua Oppenheimer spent more than eight years interviewing Indonesian death squad leaders; in The Act of Killing, works with them to re-enact the real-life killings in the style of American movies. Let’s go back to the interview with Joshua Oppenheimer, but first a scene from The Act of Killing. ANWAR CONGO: [translated] There’s many ghosts here, because many people were killed here. They died unnatural deaths. Unnatural deaths. They arrived perfectly healthy. When they got here, they were beaten up, and died. At first, we beat them to death. But there was too much blood. There was so much blood here. So when we cleaned it up, it smelled awful. To avoid the blood, I used this system. Can I show you? Sit there. Face that way. We have to re-enact this properly. This is how to do it without too much blood. I’ve tried to forget all this, with good music, dancing, feeling happy, a little alcohol, a little marijuana, a little—what do you call it? Ecstasy? Once I’d get drunk, I’d fly and feel happy. AMY GOODMAN: Anwar Congo describing the act of killing. Joshua Oppenheimer, you’re the director. Take it from there. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: This was in fact the very first day that I met Anwar or filmed Anwar. And it was typical, in a way. As I was saying earlier, I began this process in the countryside outside of the city of Medan working with survivors. They would send me to meet perpetrators. The perpetrators would boast. When we would go back and film with the survivors, however, the military would come and stop us. The army and the police would come and stop us. They would detain us. They would take our equipment. They would take our tapes. And it was very difficult to get anything done, and it was terrifying for the survivors themselves. So we regrouped. We went to Jakarta as a group with the survivors with whom we were filming, met the broader Indonesian human rights community and asked, “Is this too soon, after the fall of the Suharto dictatorship, for us to make this film? Is it still too sensitive?” We showed what we had filmed with the perpetrators. We asked, “Is it too dangerous?” Everybody said, “No, you must continue. We need—you’re on to something terribly important, and we need a film that exposes, for Indonesians themselves—above all, for Indonesians themselves—the nature of the regime in which they’re living, things that they already know but have been too afraid to say. Essentially, we need a film that comes to Indonesia, like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, pointing to things we know are true but are too afraid to articulate, so that we can now articulate them without fear.” So, we talked about how we could do this safely, and one of the key survivors in the film said, “You know, why don’t you—why don’t you film more perpetrators? Because you’re finding out what happened, and in their boasting, the audience can see exactly why we’re so afraid, and also you can see the nature of this regime, what’s wrong with it, that these men could boast this way.” And so, I went back and started to realize, this is—it’s as though I am in Nazi Germany 40 years after the end of the Holocaust, and it’s still the Third Reich, the Nazis are still in power. So the official history says nothing about the killings. But, and yet, the aging SS officers have been allowed to boast about what they’ve done, even encouraged to do so, so that they’ve become these kind of feared proxies of the state in their communities, in their regions, and also perhaps that they can justify to themselves what they have done. And I realized at that point that this was a reality so grave, so important, that I would give it whatever it took of my life. And I realized, I suppose, at that point, I knew that I would have to film every perpetrator I could find across the region, working my way up the chain of command, to the city of Medan and beyond, to retired army generals in Jakarta, to a retired State Department and CIA officer living outside of D.C. And I worked my way across the region. Every perpetrator I met was boastful. Every perpetrator I met was open. Within minutes of speaking to me, they would tell me these awful stories. Then typically they would invite me to the places where they killed. I always said, “Yes, take me,” because I wanted to know what happened. I knew that we’re talking about the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people in one region. And these men, as they would forget—as they would grow old and die, the facts of what had happened would be lost. So I felt entrusted by the survivors and the human rights community to film every single person I could find. Somewhere—Anwar, the main character in The Act of Killing, was the 41st killer I filmed. And somewhere around 10 or 15, my questions started to shift from “What happened back in 1965?” to “What’s going on now that these men can boast like this? Why are they boasting? For whom are they boasting? How do they want to be seen by the rest of the world? And how do they see themselves?” AMY GOODMAN: Anwar Congo, it is said, has killed a thousand people. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yes, yes, that’s right. That’s what he’s— AMY GOODMAN: With the piano wire or in all the different methods he used. Describe going out with him to the countryside. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: There’s two times we go to the countryside, actually. There’s one time where he re-enacts a killing which he thinks is the source of his nightmares. Of course, it’s not. He says he’s killed one person and failed to close the person’s eyes. He’s cut off a head, and the head stares at him. And he is in—starting to talk about his pain. It’s one of these conflicting moments, in that he’s, on the one hand, opening up about his pain and his trauma and his brokenness, at the same time as he’s still lying to himself about what he’s—about the source of his nightmares. He has killed a thousand people. He’s saying his nightmares come from this one killing. That’s—that was one moment, and that is a crucial moment in the film, in that it opens up the whole exploration of his conscience, which I was resistant to throughout the film. I felt as though I had been entrusted by a community of survivors to expose a whole regime, and I was asking questions of the nature of the regime. I was not interested in leading a killer to remorse. But as it’s happened, his broke—discovering his brokenness has been the most effective exposé, if you like, of the rottenness of the whole regime, because if he was a genuine hero, if he was really this sort of founding father of this great new order, he would be enjoying his old age in peace. But instead, he is tormented, and the other killers you meet in the film are totally hollow, and also, in a way, therefore, destroyed by what they’ve done. And I think that has resonated so much with Indonesians as they see the film. They say, “My gosh, what is the nature of this country?” AMY GOODMAN: So talk about the Pancasila. Talk about what is happening today. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: So, there is a—Anwar is a founding father of this paramilitary movement called Pancasila Youth, as are all of the killers we meet in the film. And it is a three-million-strong right-wing paramilitary gangster movement that has the support of the government. There’s a scene in the film where we see the vice president of Indonesia, the then-vice president of Indonesia— AMY GOODMAN: Kalla. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: —addressing—Jusuf Kalla, addressing a rally of Pancasila Youth, wearing the—wearing their trademark orange camouflage. Obviously, camouflage we think of as something you wear so that you blend in. Bright orange camouflage you wear so that you stand out. It exists so that—it exists so that these people are feared. It exists to scare people. And he addresses—the vice president of Indonesia addresses this rally and says, “We need our gangsters. We need to be able to beat people up so that we can get things done.” And there’s a key— AMY GOODMAN: This is the vice president saying this, and gangster, he says, means? JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Free man. AMY GOODMAN: Free man. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: And, indeed, the word for “gangster” in Indonesia is preman, which comes from the Dutch “free man.” So, it’s—they’ve used this etymological, not quite coincidence, but essentially by now a coincidence, to euphemize and justify a whole—the whole existence of a gangster, a parallel system of gangsters. And one of the—the other time in the film where we take Anwar to the countryside is to re-enact a massacre of a village. Pancasila Youth has sort of, I don’t know, set as its sort of most heroic victory a—its most heroic victory was the massacre of a village called Kampung Kolam, and it’s a village outside of Medan where they basically went in, they said it was a secret communist base, but they went in, and they raped, looted and massacred. And to understand how this whole right-wing paramilitary movement sees itself, I gathered together the—about a hundred young leaders in this movement, a minister in the government, a deputy—the deputy minister of youth and sport—his dossier is to look after political gangsters, with “youth” being a euphemism for gangster. He flies in from Jakarta to act—to direct and act in this massacre. And they re-enact the destruction of a village. We build a set. We build a village. They cast their children and their wives to play the victims. And they set about destroying the village. And very real trauma comes up, especially for Anwar, during the course of that—of that scene. AMY GOODMAN: In that scene, when they say, “Cut! Cut!” because they’re also directing the scene—they’re in it, and they’re directing it, like a movie. One of the little girls keeps crying. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the response to her by one of the killers. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Well, it’s actually—the girl who’s crying is Herman, Anwar’s sidekick and sort of one of the three main characters in the film, his daughter. And she—all of the children in the film have been auditioned for their ability to cry. And they’re not actually children of victims; they’re playing children of victims. She cries. Herman does his best to comfort her. He has a very wonderful line where he says, “Movie stars normally only cry for a second, so pull yourself together. You’re embarrassing your father.” But, in a way, I think that her—the child—the children’s crying is not what’s—it’s always disturbing to see children cry in film, but that’s probably not the most disturbing thing. There’s another woman there who’s the wife of a high-ranking paramilitary leader, who is, on a—in another moment in the film, her husband is saying, “God hates the communists,” on television. She looks like she’s fainted. And an Indonesian viewer will say she’s kesurupan, or possessed. And they’re trying to kind of purge the ghost, so they’re trying to exorcise the ghosts that possess her. Whether we believe in possession and ghosts or not, what’s clear is that she is old enough to have experiences of this, even though she’s married to a high-ranking perpetrator. Some real memory or real trauma comes up through the process. And I think it speaks to—it speaks really to something at the core of the film, which is that no matter how much, as a filmmaker, as an artist, I tried to stay in control of what was happening and control the experience that was unfolding in the shooting and also in the edited film, I think we were all—all of us were overwhelmed. It was like a tsunami overtaking us. And I think, in hindsight, you cannot walk into a place where a million people have been killed, where the perpetrators are still in power and are boasting about it and keeping everybody afraid, and then, it turns out, are doing that as much to protect their own conscience, so they can live with themselves, as to keep everybody else down—you cannot do that and not—and address such a situation honestly and not be overwhelmed. AMY GOODMAN: Joshua Oppenheimer, talking about his new film, The Act of Killing. We’ll continue our interview in a moment. [break] AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the new film, opening tonight, The Act of Killing. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: The premise of the film is that Anwar and his friends are able to re-enact what they’ve done in whatever ways they wished. As I was filming perpetrator after perpetrator, they would take me to the places where they killed. They would offer to show me—want to show me how they killed. And gradually, I started asking them, “Look, you’ve”—or saying to them, very openly, “You’ve participated in one of the biggest killings in human history. Your whole society is based on it. Your lives are shaped by it. You want to show me what you’ve done. I want to understand what it means to you and to your society. So go ahead and show me what you’ve done, in whatever way you wish. I’ll film the process. I’ll film your re-enactments. And we’ll combine this material to show what these events mean to you and your society.” And at some point, starting with—and I think I actually suspected that I would combine all of these different perpetrators from across the region, but I lingered on this one main character, Anwar Congo, because his pain was close to the surface, his memories were present, the past was with us as he would re-enact, and it was haunting. So, and he was a movie theater gangster, so he started to propose—he had this love of American movies. He started to propose these more and more complicated re-enactments that were inspired by the genres of his favorite movies, Hollywood movies from the ’50s and ’60s. And he would invite in—I think to—he would watch his re-enactments, and he would always look pained. And then he would—but he wouldn’t express what was wrong. He would never say, “This is awful because it makes me look bad.” The pain that he would—that would be all over his face when he would watch his re-enactments, he would not dare articulate, because to do so would be to admit what he did was wrong. And he’s never been forced to do so. He’s never been forced to admit what he did was wrong. Normally, in documentaries about perpetrators, perpetrators deny what they’ve done, or they apologize, act apologetic about it, at least. And that’s because by the time we speak to them, they’ve been approached as perpetrators, they’ve been removed from power, they’ve been framed as people who have done something wrong, so they deny or they apologize. These men are still in power. So, Anwar watching his re-enactments would look disturbed, and instead of saying why he’s disturbed, he would take that emotion and place it into something trivial, like “My clothes are wrong. My hair—I need to dye my hair. My acting isn’t good.” So, he started to embellish the scenes and create these more and more surreal, more and more strange re-enactments, which I filmed because I understood they were allegories for a whole system of impunity—what happens to us collectively as individuals when we kill, when we have an original crime, we get away with it, we justify it, and therefore we cling to that justification, we persecute the survivors, lest they should challenge our version of the events. So, Anwar starts to embellish, and the motor, if you like, for these embellishments is his conscience. And he brings in another death squad member, another member of his death squad named Adi. And the re-enactments get more and more emotional, more and more intense. And in the next clip, in the clip we’ll see here, it’s a moment where they’ve just re-enacted the torture and killing that happened in their office, downstairs from where Anwar does the cha cha cha earlier in the—in the earlier clip we saw. They re-enact the torture and killing in this office, and afterwards, they respond to it. And the other member of Anwar’s death squad, Adi, recognizes, wait a minute, this method, these re-enactments have the power to turn the entire official history on its head. AMY GOODMAN: Tell us who’s speaking first. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: So it’s Adi. The character we’ll see speaking here is named Adi. He is the other surviving member of Anwar’s very elite death squad. AMY GOODMAN: And he has flown in to do this film that you are filming. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, he flew in midway through the process. I was trying to meet him from the very beginning, after meeting Anwar, but Anwar kept him away from me. Anwar wouldn’t introduce me to him. His full name in Indonesian is Adi. There’s thousands and thousands of Adis in Jakarta. It was impossible to find him without Anwar’s help. Anwar only introduced us to him once Anwar was confident that he was indeed the star of The Act of Killing. So, at this point, midway, somewhere in the middle of the film, Adi has finally flown in from Jakarta, reunited with his old friend and former killing colleague, and they’re on the set, having just re-enacted the torture and killing that they did together in their youth. AMY GOODMAN: This is Adi in The Act of Killing. ADI ZULKADRY: [translated] Listen, if we succeed in making this film, it will disprove all the propaganda about the communists being cruel and show that we were cruel. ANWAR CONGO: [translated] We’re the cruel ones. ADI ZULKADRY: [translated] If this film is a success. We must understand every step we take here. It’s not about fear. It’s 40 years ago, so any criminal case has expired. It’s not about fear. It’s about image. The whole society will say, “We always suspected it. They lied about the communists being cruel.” It’s not a problem for us; it’s a problem for history. The whole story will be reversed—not 180 degrees, 360 degrees—if we succeed with this scene. HERMAN KOTO: [translated] But why should we always hide our history, if it’s the truth? ADI ZULKADRY: [translated] No, the consequence is that everything Anwar and I have always said is false. It’s not the communists who were cruel. HERMAN KOTO: [translated] But that’s true. ADI ZULKADRY: [translated] I completely agree, but not everything true should be made public. I believe even God has secrets. I’m absolutely aware that we were cruel. That’s all I have to say. It’s up to you what to do about it. AMY GOODMAN: That’s Adi, a killer in Indonesia—after Suharto came to power, who knows how many people he killed?—in this film, The Act of Killing. Joshua Oppenheimer is the director. So, he’s coming to realize—I mean, this is a smart guy—that this does not look very good for them. JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, this is a really—I think there’s a number of really interesting things about this. One of them is that Adi here says—warns everybody, “This is going to make us look bad.” And, in fact, he only warns everybody this strongly once in the film, but in the process he did so many times. But everybody continued. Nobody heeds his warning. And I think there’s a couple really important reasons for that. For the younger thugs, in the younger generation of paramilitary gangster leadership, as gangsters, fear is their capital. So they’re not participating in this film to look good; they’re participating in this film to look fearsome. And they’re only able, as we see them doing in the film, to go into a market and shake down the Chinese market stall owners—Chinese were, with a broad brush, attacked in 1965, labelled communist just by virtue of having been ethnically Chinese—they, these men, are not trying to look good, the other members of—the younger members, the Pancasila Youth. So they want to continue. Adi’s warning falls on deaf ears. And I think, for Anwar, it’s particularly interesting why he doesn’t listen to his old best friend’s advice. I think it has to do with what Anwar is trying to do with this film. He is trying, actually, somehow, to deal with his own pain. He’s trying to deal with his nightmares. He finds a forum in the film to express a pain that the regime has no time for. The regime wants him to say it was heroic, it was great, so that, one, he can live with himself, all the other killers can live with themselves, and the survivors are kept suppressed and silenced. And suddenly, in the making of the film, he has a chance to deal with the ghosts that haunt him. Earlier, in the first clip we saw, he dances on the roof. We see him—we cut right where he starts dancing the cha cha cha on the roof. But if you extend that and watch him dance the cha cha cha, most viewers will feel appalled. How can a man dance where he’s killed a thousand people? But just before he dances, as we will have noticed, he says he’s drinking, taking drugs, going out dancing, to forget what he’s done. So, somehow his pain, his conscience was there from the beginning. And then I think it is his effort to run away from the meaning of what he’s done that leads him to propose ever more complicated dramatizations. So, Anwar doesn’t listen to Adi’s warning here because Anwar actually is somehow trying to deal with his pain. He’s not trying to look like a hero. He’s not trying to simply revisit or restate the official history. He’s trying to actually run away from and experience—and these are two paradoxical human needs, I think—run away from and experience his pain. AMY GOODMAN: In the film, The Act of Killing, it ends in a devastating way. Can you talk a little about what happens? JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, at the end of the film, I think that Anwar is not able to say the same kinds of things he’s saying throughout the whole film. He’s speaking the same kind of lines. He takes us back to that office, where we were at the beginning of the film, the first time I met him, where he shows how he killed and then danced the cha cha cha. He takes us back there. And it’s the first time we’ve gone back, indeed the first time I went back, in over the course of five years of shooting 1,200 hours of material. We go back to that office, and my intention was just to ask him to say what happened in that office. And he’s speaking very much the same words that he has at the beginning of the film. But his body, it’s as though his body physically is rebelling against the line that he’s been speaking. He can no longer utter these words and not—and not—and bear it. His body starts—he starts to retch. And it’s as though, I think, he’s trying to vomit up the ghosts that haunt him, only to find that he is the ghost, in the sense that he is what—his past haunts him, and he is his past, and he’ll never be free of it. And so nothing comes up. He has lost all of his swagger. And in a way, it’s an enduring metaphor for how the film has come to Indonesia, in the sense that there’s an official—they’re still—in school, they’re still teaching that the communists were—they’re still teaching in school that the victims of the genocide deserved what they got, that it was all—they’re teaching that the genocide was justified and talking about it as a kind of heroic chapter in the nation’s history, without going into the details of the killing. But Indonesians themselves are starting to recognize that this is, like Anwar’s words at the end, a kind of hollow line, because the act of killing is making such a difference there. AMY GOODMAN: You have shown this film in Indonesia? JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah. Indonesia has political film censors. They still censor films and books that deal with human rights violations. They ban them. We knew that if we just submitted the film to the censors before there was Indonesian support for the film, that it would be banned. If it’s banned, we knew—if it were banned, we knew that that would be an excuse for the paramilitary groups in Indonesia or for the army to physically attack screenings with impunity, because it becomes a crime to screen the film at all. So, to get around that, all last autumn, we held screenings at the National Human Rights Commission in Jakarta for Indonesia’s leading news producers, news publishers, news journalists, filmmakers, human rights advocates, survivors’ groups, historians, educators, writers, artists. Everybody really embraced the film—you could even say loved the film—said we have to show this film, we have to get this film out. The news editors did—and publishers, did perhaps the most interesting thing. If you imagine you’re the editor of Indonesia’s biggest news magazine, a magazine called Tempo, you’re very much part of the establishment. And you’re in your late middle age, and you see this movie where the founding fathers of that establishment, of your regime, are totally broken by the end of the film. The main character is tormented and ravaged. The side characters are hollow empty shells of human beings. And you’re faced with a pretty stark choice. They’re not enjoying—these men are not enjoying their old age as the heroes they’ve been telling themselves and the rest of the country that they are. They’re destroyed. You’re faced with a stark choice, if you’re the editor of Indonesia’s biggest news magazine: Do you want to grow old as a perpetrator, or do you want to take a stance? And the editors of Tempo magazine took a particularly brave stance. They said, “We have to break our silence about this. After The Act of Killing, we need to open up about what happened. And we need to marshal fresh evidence to do so.” So they sent 40 journalists, approximately 40 journalists, around the country to regions where they did not know that killings had even happened. And they basically wanted to see if The Act of Killing was a repeatable experiment. Are there other Anwars out there? And they—to their horror, but I do not think to their surprise, they found that everywhere they—everywhere they sent people, they came back with—they could immediately find the local perpetrator, and the local perpetrator was a criminal. The killers were criminals, put in positions of power by the army and then encouraged to boast about what they’d done ever since, so they would be these feared proxies of the government. And these men, within two weeks, last September, they gathered—the 40 journalists gathered hundreds and hundreds of pages of perpetrators boasting. They edited it down to 75 pages. They combined it with 25 pages of coverage of the film—reviews, contextualizing essays, interviews—and they came out with a special double edition of Tempo magazine on the 1st of October last year. It sold out immediately. It reprinted. It sold out again. It reprinted. This set the tone for the rest of the media to start—to break their 47-year silence about what happened, to talk about the genocide as a genocide. Killers in Indonesia will no longer boast. At the same time, the country has no illusions about Anwar being the kind of mascot of the genocide. He’s been contextualized perhaps as one of 10,000 perpetrators of his level. AMY GOODMAN: Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing, which opens today in New York City at Landmark Sunshine Cinema on Houston, then goes to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., July 26, then to theaters nationwide.
New NBA commissioner Adam Silver handed down punishment to Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling in a harsh and swift manner on Tuesday afternoon, announcing a lifetime ban from the league and a $2.5 million fine. Silver's decision comes three days after a recording of Sterling making racist remarks to girlfriend V. Stiviano surfaced on TMZ. Silver made it clear that the league will attempt to find new ownership for the Clippers. All the NBA needs is a three-quarters majority vote from the rest of the league's owners to force Sterling to sell the franchise. Sterling's comments have overtaken the NBA news cycle during an exciting first round of the playoffs, and the announcement of the punishment levied by Silver was met with applause from those inside and outside of the league. The Clippers issued the following statement at the conclusion of Silver's press conference: LA Clippers statement: "We wholeheartedly support and embrace the decision by the NBA and Commissioner Adam Silver" pic.twitter.com/sYrRndN4Ip — NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) April 29, 2014 The Clippers website accompanied the statement by changing its background to all black with the message "We are one" in white. Magic Johnson was also quick to praise Silver for the decision. Johnson found himself at the center of the controversy because Sterling took exception to a photo Stiviano posted with the Lakers legend on Instagram. Commissioner Silver showed great leadership in banning LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life. — Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) April 29, 2014 Current and former NBA players now know that in Commissioner Adam Silver we have a great leader leading our league. — Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) April 29, 2014 Now let's hope that the other 29 owners do the right thing. — Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) April 29, 2014 LeBron James tweeted his support for Silver and the league's decision, as well: Commissioner Silver thank you for protecting our beautiful and powerful league!! Great leader!! #BiggerThanBasketball #StriveForGreatness — LeBron James (@KingJames) April 29, 2014 Rev. Jesse Jackson voiced his support for the league's decision in an interview with Bloomberg: "There's nothing more that needs to be done. I'm sure he has polled the owners … No owner will stand against this recommendation and vote for Sterling. If they did not do it, you would have mutiny by the players, boycotts by the fans and more dropouts from the advertisers. "I cannot imagine any owner embracing what Sterling said about black people. He went a step further relative to Israel and blacks and Jews, how the blacks treated Israel. He took it very extreme and provocative dimensions. I think this is a big statement. We should celebrate Chris Paul and Doc Rivers, those that stood up in the heat of the battle. Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Shaq. "There was a big fight to get Jackie Robinson on the field. A big fight when we had to fight to win the eligibility by Spencer Haywood. These are our defining moments. "Yes I would help [Sterling if he called me]. [I would tell him], 'You should put the team up for sale.'" NBA franchises, players and executives continued to comment on the Sterling ruling throughout the day. Official statement from Nets on Adam Silver’s decision to ban Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life: pic.twitter.com/8j5AwSch3M — devin kharpertian (@uuords) April 29, 2014 Great Job! — Zach Randolph (@MacBo50) April 29, 2014 For life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! — JARRETT JACK (@Jarrettjack03) April 29, 2014 Commissioner Silver has made the right moves in response to this unfortunate absurd spectacle. #ZeroTolerance — Dan Gilbert (@cavsdan) April 29, 2014 Proud of the #NBA and their handling of the offensive comments made by Sterling. I'm honored to be joining this league and family. — andrew wiggins (@22wiggins) April 29, 2014 Big ups to Adam Silver. I think this is a very appropriate way to handle this situation. Now it's up to the owners to make him sell. — Mario Chalmers (@mchalmers15) April 29, 2014 Way to go, Commissioner Silver! The NBA stands for everybody! — SHAQ (@SHAQ) April 29, 2014 Great job Adam.The @NBA is in good hands. You have my full support. — Micky Arison (@MickyArison) April 29, 2014 We'll give the final word to Rick Ross: The people have spoken.
Update on January 25, 2016 at 15:26: Sam Barlow just mentioned on his Twitter that this is planned to be a spiritual sequel to Her Story with no links to the game. This is still really exciting news! A sequel to the brilliant FMV detective game Her Story is on the way. We gave it a gold award We don't have a lot of information on the sequel other than a single page of the script, posted by its creator, Sam Barlow, on Twitter: HS2 has a 1-pager. Neat. pic.twitter.com/SsVjfETEmf — Sam Barlow (@mrsambarlow) January 25, 2016 Still this is enough to get everyone who played the game excited for more as this is a truly original title and since the game was released on mobile devices there's no reason to think it won't be the case the time around too. If you haven't tried Her Story yet, you need to correct that right now and get the game on the App Store.

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