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Miracles were a lot easier in the middle ages. When someone did something unusual, the tale would grow in the telling. And so, the simple act of helping a stranger would quite quickly morph into a miracle, and with human nature for embellishment playing a major role in miracles, we soon had an act of God. Accelerate to the 20th and 21st century – as information became more readily available it become easy to check the factuality of an event. A quick Google and you can find out whether something happened. Even the disappearance of MH370 is not a mystery – there is enough readily available information to at least be sure it wasn’t taken to the heavens by aliens.
So, today we can easily verify that the Turin Shroud is not the death mask of Christ. Science TV shows us how Madonna statues cry. The mystery has gone out of pretty much everything.
And in tandem with this access to knowledge has been the growth in atheism. In many ways, it is a sad thing, because imagining that there is a warm glowing place in the sky waiting for everyone is a comforting thing. Equally, knowing that there is this really hot and bad place for wicked people aids the feeling that although wicked people get the better of nice folk in this life time, when they are dead they will be well and truly punished.
Sadly, that fantasy has gone. And it has an important consequence – my life. In the middle ages, my life belonged to God and therefore the church. Government’s seized on this and claimed the lives of their citizens for their own to do with as they pleased, including playing war.
Now, my life is my own to do with as I see fit. I have the right to life, and equally, the right to death, such as assisted suicide. This change in perception of life has led to an entirely different way to value life. If there is nothing after death, then I had better maximise the time that I exist.
I should enjoy a drink (better yet, several). Experiment with drugs and sex – generally have a super time because frankly, this is as good as it gets.
Are we better off knowing nonsense when we see it, or were we better off believing in a fantasy? In many ways, how beautiful would it be to once again know the innocence of childhood? But on the other, I don’t want to believe in a lie. I am not an atheist – I am somewhere in between. Because somewhere, deep inside me, there remains a little bit of the child that wants to believe …
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Creating your own “endurance lifestyle” is about a lot more than just being fit. It’s about being what I like to call “honest fit” — really living the ups/downs, highs/lows that can come with pursuing your passion. It’s not easier by any means, but it’s certainly a great deal more real and powerful. I discuss this concept in my forthcoming book Train to Live, Live to Train: The Insider’s Guide to Building the Ultimate Fitness Lifestyle, as I think an important part of our fitness journey is finding a connection to “something” bigger than just endorphins.
Enter Jason “Fitz” Fitzgerald of StrengthRunning.com. Jason and I connected online around my MarathonNation.us running community and I quickly saw that this was a guy who was totally fired up about the sport of running and the power of living a fit life. Here are the excerpts from an email interview I did with Jason last month. Enjoy and definitely check him out!
What was your fitness background as a child / young adult?Growing up, I played in a basketball league that met on the weekends and regularly took swim lessons until about 4th or 5th grade. I also spent every summer at the beach almost every day. Besides that, I didn’t do any formal sports until middle school when I played basketball. I was always very active in my neighborhood when I was little though – playing basketball, stickball, climbing trees, and just running around my neighborhood being a kid. I think having an active lifestyle as a child is a vital component of athletic success later in life. It helped me build coordination, aerobic capacity, and fine motor skills all while having fun. I didn’t start running until my freshman year in high school and I haven’t looked back since!
What is your primary sport of choice right now?
I devote nearly all of my time to distance running right now. I ran a few steeplechase races in college and I’ve done a few sprint triathlons in the past few years, but I stick to road and track races now. I’m also considering ramping up my road bike fitness (I love cycling) to compete in a few duathlons within the next year. I don’t really like swimming, probably because i sink like a rock.
What’s the one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you started this new lifestyle/fitness journey?
Wow, where to begin? First, success in running and any endurance sport comes from consistent application of the basics. Rome wasn’t built in a day and I can’t get ready for a marathon in a few weeks. Having patience and a long-term plan is something I’ve struggled with that I’m now finally applying in my training. Second, I wish I knew more about injury prevention when I started. It’s a complex subject but runners need to do more than run: strength exercises, dynamic drills, hill sprints, and core work must be regular parts of a distance runners program or else they will get hurt. It’s really that simple.
What led you to pick your focus on “strength” running?
I ran the 2008 NY Marathon in 2:44, then sat on the couch for six months with a debilitating ITB injury. It was hard to not be able to run for so long, but I vowed to never let it happen again. After visiting four physical therapists, a massage therapist, four personal trainers, and doing countless hours of research, I finally knew what it was going to take to make me healthy.
A combination of strength and core exercises, flexibility drills, and training adjustments has allowed me to get healthy and start racing again. I’ve been injury-free since April, 2009 and I’ve done the most training ever this year. I’m excited to see what I’ll be able to do in the next few months of racing!
What larger change do you hope to effect with this focus?
Strength Running is a concept that ties into my belief that getting faster isn’t about getting on the track for grueling interval workouts. Too many runners make that mistake and suffer injuries that sideline them for weeks. Strength Running is about doing the extras – the core work, strength exercises, and training variations that allow distance runners to train uninterrupted.
Consistent training that comes with injury prevention is what I hope to improve for as many people as possible. Too many runners are constantly battling tendinitis, runner’s knee, ITB problems, or shin splints. It doesn’t have to be that way.
What has been the hardest part of your transition to this new professional focus?
It seems like finding time is always the hardest part about keeping Strength Running going. In addition to coaching at Strength Running and writing, I also work a full-time job as a government consultant, run 70+ miles per week, and spend time with my beautiful fiancee. I also like to get my 8 hours of sleep! Time-management is a necessity.
How have you structured your day to make fitness both possible and a priority?
Running every day is absolutely one of my top priorities. It’s rare that I take an unscheduled day off, so I normally remove all barriers to getting out the door. I prefer to run before work because I’m more of a morning person. If it’s after work, I head straight for my running clothes. Checking email “just for a second” is a recipe for disaster. After running for over 12 years, it’s become quite routine to run every day so it’s not that difficult. You just have to remember that consistency is key.
How do you balance your passion for fitness with other elements of your life?
I’m really adamant about writing a very short to-do list every day. I usually put 3-4 high-value priorities on my list, like writing a blog post, running a workout, and working with one of my athletes. I know that if I get only those few tasks accomplished then I will have had a productive day.
There have been a few times in the last few months where fitness has taken a back seat to other priorities, typically travel and spending time with family and friends. Running isn’t everything and it’s important not to squeeze in a run if you’re too tired from everything else you’re doing or will compromise family time.
What are your top three tips for other folks who might be considering following in your footsteps?
Make running a priority and make it easy to do. Whatever works for your situation, then do that. Running during your lunch hour, before work, or straight from your office after business hours are all options. Once you’ve made it a habit, it will be harder to not run. Have fun. I find joy in running a lot. It’s not for everyone, but if you like heading out the door every day then you’re lucky to find one of your passions. Don’t get too obsessed with all of the details makes this so much easier. Finally, take care of your body. Making stupid decisions like not doing any strength exercises or running too much, too soon will only result in injuries. Consistent training will lead to long-term running success.
What’s the “next big thing” you are up to?
On the personal side, my long-term goal is to run the Chicago Marathon in 2011 and qualify for the 2012 Boston Marathon.. I hope to run Chicago in around 2:37, so I have a lot of work to do in the next year. I’d like to run personal bests in events from 5k to the half-marathon.
Strength Running is growing and I want to continue spreading my message of long-term running success, injury prevention, and consistent training. Look for more content that will help you realize your potential, interviews with leaders in the running and fitness world, and my own product in the coming months that will take your running to the next level.
How can others follow you / find you online to support your efforts?
Runners and other athletes can find more information on getting stronger and staying healthy at www.strengthrunning.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at @JasonFitz1.
Related Posts None
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AFTER 10 days of intense speculation, Football Federation Australia has got its man - on Wednesday afternoon unveiling Ange Postecoglou as the Socceroos new coach on a five-year deal.
After several days of negotiations with Melbourne Victory, the terms of Postecoglou's release from the A-League's biggest club were agreed on Wednesday morning, despite some lingering feelings of angst from the Victory board.
That cleared the way for the FFA to unveil the popular figure at an afternoon media conference, giving Postecoglou time to plan for next month's friendly against Costa Rica, as he attempts to revitalise an ageing side on the back of demoralising defeats to Brazil and France.
And flanked by FFA chairman Frank Lowy and chief executive David Gallop, Postecoglou made clear that it would be his mission "for the next five years and hopefully more" to "restore pride in the Socceroos jersey".
"Obviously it's a tremendous honour for me to be sitting here. I love a good challenge and this is certainly one of those," Postecoglou said.
"My hope is that we can restore pride in this country and in the Socceroos. I still think they are the flag bearers of football in this country. There's plenty of work to be done and day one will start for me on Monday. I'm enormously grateful to be extended this opportunity.
"I plan for the next five years and hopefully longer to put my heart and soul into it."
And a clearly chuffed Lowy said he had "no doubt" Postecoglou was the right man for that challenge, with a five-year deal proof that plenty of faith has been placed in the A-League success story.
"We have the faith in him. We know that he's a good guy, he's the right person for us at this time in our development," Lowy said.
"I think in the last 10 years or so we've had international coaches. It was the time for them then. Now is the time for an Australian."
Gallop thanked the board for acting "so quickly" once a decision had been made to appoint an Australian coach.
But the CEO made clear that he believed nationality was irrelevant when it came to who the best man for the Socceroos job was.
"We have today a coach starting a journey who we believe can unite our players to play at the highest level. And unite our nation behind the Socceroos," Gallop said.
"Our technical experts have said that he's the right man, and it's certainly a bonus that he's an Australian.
"We've seen that we've got a true leader and I want to extend my excitement at the appointment."
Postecoglou's first game at the helm has been scheduled for November 19 at Sydney Football Stadium, with his inaugural Socceroos squad expected to be named early next week.
But he will lead Victory into battle against his former club Brisbane Roar on Friday night at Etihad Stadium before turning his attention to the mission of leading Australia to the 2014 World Cup.
After tense and often heated negotiations between the A-League club and the game's governing body the breakthrough came late on Tuesday when Victory backtracked on its hardline stance and agreed to accept just $50,000 in "transition costs" after initially demanding $1 million.
Victory chairman Anthony Di Pietro confirmed on Wednesday morning that the club would not stand between Postecoglou and Australia's top job.
"The circumstances that Ange and the Club have been confronted with are complex and compelling no matter what perspective you take. That said, we have made it clear to Ange that we will not stand in the way of him accepting the biggest coaching role in this country," Mr Di Pietro said.
“However, we are disappointed with the process undertaken by the FFA, given the outcomes we tried to secure could never have been achieved within the timeframes offered, which ultimately forced us to accelerate our decision not to stand in Ange’s way.
“Ange Postecoglou has had a profound impact on Melbourne Victory Football Club over the past 18 months and the club is extremely appreciative of everything he has implemented during his tenure.
"Ange’s appointment as Socceroos coach is a fantastic endorsement for our club, its culture and the standards we strive to set. We thank Ange and he will certainly always be part of the Melbourne Victory family.
“This week’s game becomes our focus and we can confirm that Ange will be the head coach on Friday, so we’re looking forward to our members and fans coming out in force.”
Postecoglou, 48, flew to Sydney after Victory training Tuesday - which was the first time he broached the subject with his players - to meet Lowy and sign a deal that will take in the World Cup, the 2015 Asian Cup and beyond.
The Costa Rica friendly will launch Australia’s countdown to the World Cup, although FFA has scrapped plans to play a second November friendly despite the temptation of playing a game in Melbourne. They had initially penciled in a double header with Ireland.
HAVE you checked out the Fox Football Podcast yet?
Episode one was a raging success and the latest addition to Fox Sports' football stable is back for its second edition.
Host Adam Peacock is joined this week by Simon Hill and Brenton Speed in the studio, and on the phone by Daniel Garb from London.
There's no shortage of fodder for the gang to discuss - from the incoming Socceroos' coach, to all things A-League, EPL and El Clasico - and none of our pundits are short of an opinion.
For your mid-week fix of football talk and fun - where else will you hear Simon Hill's Dutch accent - the Fox Football podcast is your place to go.
You can check it out here at the iTunes store, subscribe, and share your rating!
And if you're an Android user, you can find the pod on the iPP Podcast Player app.
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Rowan and I got into clay this weekend after a trip to the children’s museum. The museum has a lovely outdoor area for playing with clay which my mess loving son gravitated to immediately. We sat for almost an hour deep in concentration, both of us on a mission to make something amazing. I made a robot, and Rowan made a cave for the robot to live in. We were both very proud of our creations. When we got home, Rowan wanted more, so we made this very easy recipe for air drying clay.
Inspired by this bead necklace post at Little Girl Designs, I got to playing around with the dough. I thought these little happy faces were cute, and a nice surprise for Rowan when he came home from school. You can convert them into pins making them a fun alternative to a gold star for good behavior.
• • • • • • • • • •
Clay Happy Face Pins
Brooch pins
Strong adhesive
Paint
Paintbrush
Black pen
Seal spray
Pull of small sections of the dough, and form into little pancakes the size of a nickel or quarter. Lay out the circles onto parchment paper, and let dry overnight.
When fully dry, paint colored circles and let fully dry, about an hour.
Draw a happy face, and coat with a sealer. Set out to dry.
Glue a brooch pin on the back, or they are cute keepsakes for smaller children as is.
• • •
Air Drying Clay
2 cups baking soda
1 cup cornstarch
1.5 cups cold water
Add all of the ingredients to a pan and stir over medium heat. Mixture will be liquid, but will change consistency as you stir and it heats up. Continue stirring until dough has a dough consistency.
Remove from heat and spoon out onto a plate. Set it to cool all the way through. You can stick it in the refrigerator to speed things up.
When dough is cool lay out on a work surface that has been dusted with cornstarch. Cover hands in cornstarch, and knead dough and it will turn into a pliable dough. Keep dusting with cornstarch to keep it from sticking.
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Another day, another victory, and this check for $39,500 from New Jersey should be a reminder to every anti-Second Amendment politician in New Jersey that all we do is WIN, WIN, WIN. Not only were we successful with overturning the unconstitutional ban on tasers and stun guns, our incredible legal team fought hard for constitutional purchase & carry and won!
Unfortunately, even though this award was for violating our civil rights - the taxpayers of New Jersey, not the actual offenders, are footing the bill. Maybe the state legislature should write a law that the people violating our rights, not taxpayers, should be picking up the bill? I have a feeling life for gun owners in New Jersey would change dramatically if that were the case.
We cannot forget to mention, and remind the legislature, this is not our first rodeo or victory. Per The Record newspaper: "The most expensive case in the documents reviewed by The Record involved the Second Amendment Society seeking firearms regulations, costing the administration $101,626."
What is more alarming? This could have been resolved out of court with no legal costs if the legislature would listen to us and work together to pass better legislation. But no, they brag about passing unconstitutional laws and that is exactly why the NJ2AS exists! Let this be a fair warning to all, we will not back down, and we will challenge and fight against every single unconstitutional and unjust NJ law until we prevail - as we have twice on the State level and dozens of other times on the local level.
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How to add your preferable fonts?
Using the font files in our web page
@font-face { font-family: (family-name); src: (the url for the font file); }
/* font decleration */ @font-face { font-family: "MyFont"; src: url("http://my_server.com/fonts/mycustomfont.ttf"), url("http://my_server.com/fonts/mycustomfont.woff2"); } /* font usage */ body { font-family: "MyFont", serif}
Understanding Font File Formats:
WOFF / WOFF2 Stands for (Web Open Font Format). Created for use on web only.
They are compressed, and they contain license info and metadata.
WOFF2 is the newer version and it is more compressed and faster that the older one.
WOFF2 is becoming the de-facto standard for font formats for all devices and modern browsers.
If you don't care about old browsers navigating to your site, then you can just add a reference to this file format only. SVG / SVGZ Stands for (Scalable Vector Graphics Font)
Is a SVG vector format for the font. It is small, which make it perfect for mobile. But with new mobiles support WOFF2, it is becoming less important.
EOT Stands for (Embedded Open Type)
This is very old format from Microsoft, and it is only supported by IE, and it is the only format that IE 8 and lower will recognize. OTF / TTF Stands for (OpenType Font and TrueType Font)
OpenType was an enhancement on TTF. And later WOFF was created to add a licensing to prevent illegal copying of fonts.
Supporting all browsers and font formats
@font-face { font-family: 'MyWebFont'; src: url('webfont.eot'); /* IE9 Compat Modes */ src: url('webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'), /* IE6-IE8 */ url('webfont.woff2') format('woff2'), /* Super Modern Browsers */ url('webfont.woff') format('woff'), /* Pretty Modern Browsers */ url('webfont.ttf') format('truetype'), /* Safari, Android, iOS */ url('webfont.svg#svgFontName') format('svg'); /* Legacy iOS */ }
The simplist way to use different fonts in your web site is using fonts from the "Web-Safe" fonts[ 1 ][ 2 ].But, no impressive design will depend only on these web-safe fonts, and designers add their own preferable fonts to the web site they are building.Fonts comes as files that you have to upload to the site, and then reference them in the CSS file.Usually font vendors provide fonts with different formats in order to be consumable by many different browsers.For example, this is the files come with the font "Font Awesome":After we upload the font files into the web site, we add them into the css files as @font-face rule.The @font-face rule will create the definition for the rule, and later we can use that definition.The syntax to do that is as follows:Whereis a our own name that we give to the font which we are going to use later.And: is the url for the font file that we uploaded.An example for thatThe above code uses only one two file formats (ttf and woff2), but as we can see not all of the browsers support these formats, so we will end up adding more than one file type.We will see down later how to do that, but first let us see what are different file formats for the font.There are many different types and formats of the fonts.And you need to know a little bit of them to know which one you chooseAs you can see, not all browsers support all formats, so it is the designer's responsibility to specify the Url(s) for all these files when defining the font face.So more real example of using the @font-face rule is as follows:The order is important, because the browser will pick the first compatible format it incounter.So, it is important to have woff2 format as almost the first one after the IE compatible ones.
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This article is about the memoir by Pamela Des Barres. For the unrelated television series, see I'm in the Band
I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie is a 1987 memoir by former groupie Pamela Des Barres.
Overview [ edit ]
The book tells the story of Pamela Ann Miller, a groupie who gets a kind of fame in the 1960s by having wild nights with musicians and actors. Pictures of famous musicians and actors accompany the many stories of her time in Los Angeles, California during the late 1960s and early 1970s. She recounts tales of moments shared with girlfriends The GTOs which they use as a way to outwardly express themselves. She becomes Frank Zappa's nanny as well as has relationships with Jimmy Page and with Don Johnson.
Her escapades include travels to England where she spends time with Mick Jagger and others. She also travels to Europe before coming back home. She later falls in love with Michael Des Barres, an English glam rocker. She ends the books with the story of their wedding and the birth of her son Nicholas Dean Des Barres.
Publishing history [ edit ]
The book was described by Kirkus Reviews as "a classic account of rampant narcissism among guitar egomaniacs", and enjoyed considerable success, being issued as an audio book in CD in 1995, then reissued as a paperback in 2005, with an Amazon Kindle edition the same year.
Reception [ edit ]
The New York Times described I'm with the Band as "the brightest, sexiest, funniest of... the current outpouring of groupie literature."[1]
References [ edit ]
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The Iowa Hog Lift was a 1960 rescue effort by the agriculture sector in the U.S. State of Iowa following significant damage resulting from typhoons in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. It is widely accepted that the hog lift was largely responsible for the development of the sister-state relationship between Iowa and Yamanashi[1] and marked the beginning of currently strong relations in agriculture between Japan and the United States.[2]
Hog Lift [ edit ]
[3] Iowa hogs were met by Governor Hisashi Amano as they arrived in 1960
In 1959, Yamanashi Prefecture in central Japan suffered two significant typhoons in less than a month, devastating much of the prefecture’s agriculture sector. Master Sergeant Richard Thomas, who was from Iowa, was working in public relations for the U.S. Air Force in Tokyo at the time. When Thomas heard about the heavy damage to the livestock industry in Yamanashi prefecture, he considered arranging Iowa hogs to be sent to Yamanashi as an opportunity to help revive the devastated industry. He presented his plan to Don Motz, the U.S. agricultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, who was excited about the project and began working on its logistics.[4]
The idea of a “hog lift” received enthusiastic support from multiple parties in the U.S. agriculture sector including the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA), key representatives of the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) and the Japanese agriculture attaché in Washington D.C.
As a result, Iowa farmers donated 36 lean meat hogs rounded up by the Iowa Corn Growers’ Association, and the U.S. Air Force agreed to supply a plane to fly the hogs to Japan. The animals were shipped on a cargo plane fitted with special crates and attended to by representatives from the Iowa Corn Growers’ Association.
[5] Sergeant Richard Thomas looks over hogs he helped send to Japan
The journey took a total of three days and involved multiple stops. At each stop, the hogs were bathed as to not overheat during the journey.[6]
With the loss of one animal along the way, 35 hogs arrived safely in Yamanashi, and eventually populated the prefecture with their descendants. Within three years, the 35 hogs had multiplied to more than 500 [7] thereby restarting the hog industry devastated by the typhoons. Today, most of the pork that is raised in Japan has a genetic connection to Iowa as a result of the 1960 hog lift.
Yamanashi prefecture has since repaid the kindness of the hog lift. In 1962 the people of Yamanashi sent Iowa a “Bell of Friendship” and a bell house which currently sits south of the State Capitol building in Des Moines.[8] Furthermore, when Iowa suffered from the Great Flood of 1993, Yamanashi prefecture sent $300,000 in flood aid relief.[9]
Hog Lift Legacy [ edit ]
[10] Packaging for a Japanese "bento" lunch product which commemorates the hog lift.
The legacy which followed the hog lift has been considerable. Iowa and Yamanashi prefecture established a sister-state relationship in 1960, the first of its kind between the United States and Japan. Though the establishment of the relationship, thousands of people involved in a variety of occupations have traveled between Iowa and Yamanashi. Moreover, every Governor of Iowa has traveled to Yamanashi prefecture since the time of the hog lift.[11] The event is also basis for a children's book titled "Sweet Corn and Sushi" by Iowa author Lori Erickson, a commemorative "bento" lunch product, and a courtesy visit to Yamanashi by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, former Governor of Iowa.[12]
The hog lift was also one of the major factors leading to the formation of the U.S. Grains Council.[13] Several feed grains producers in cooperation with the USDA Commodity Credit Corporation donated feed for the 1960 hog lift as the transported animals were not accustomed to feed used in Japan. This led to the 1960 establishment of the Grains Council and Japan's eventual position as the leading overseas consumer of U.S. feed grains.
Iowa and Yamanashi honored their 50th anniversary as sister states in 2010.
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MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- Grizzlies first-round draft pick Jarell Martin says he has a stress fracture in his foot that will prevent him from playing in any summer league games.
Martin and second-round pick Andrew Harrison were introduced Monday. Martin says he "overworked my body" throughout the pre-draft process.
Martin says: "We'll see when we get back how things are going, but overall I'm getting better. It is very tough, but we've got to look for later on down the road and do what's best."
The Grizzlies chose the 6-foot-10 Martin on Thursday with the 25th pick. Martin averaged 16.9 points and 9.2 rebounds for LSU this past season to rank third in the Southeastern Conference in both categories.
The Grizzlies are participating in the Orlando Pro Summer League from July 4-10.
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Ramona Shelburne talks about Kevin Durant's dinner plans following the Warriors' win over the Thunder and the Oklahoma City steakhouse that denied his request to rent it out exclusively for the team. (1:16)
OKLAHOMA CITY -- Following the Golden State Warriors' win Saturday night over the Thunder, Kevin Durant and several teammates had dinner at the Oklahoma City steakhouse that had previously turned down Durant's request to rent it out.
Thunder All-Star Russell Westbrook also dined at the popular Oklahoma City restaurant Mahogany Prime Steakhouse on Saturday night, but he was seated in a different area. He didn't interact with Durant.
Dave Osborn, the proprietor of Mahogany's downtown location, said Durant's reps called "three or four weeks ago" requesting to rent out the entire restaurant for the Warriors after the game.
Kevin Durant is eating dinner at Mahogany after all. pic.twitter.com/c6zeZECEjd — Ramona Shelburne (@ramonashelburne) February 12, 2017
According to Osborn, the haul would have been between $30,000 and $35,000.
"I thought about it, but I said no, I can't do that, because I have Thunder players that come in after games," Osborn said. "Thunder players come in, fans come in, so I just said, 'I can't do that to them. It wouldn't be fair.'"
Mahogany is one of Westbrook's favorite postgame spots in Oklahoma City.
"He comes in a lot after home games, and he's got his own room, and it's always open," Osborn said. "And I've told him that: This room is always open after every single home game."
Osborn said that shortly after saying no to Durant's reps he received a call back and that the Warriors star said it would be fine with him if Thunder players were invited to join if they wanted.
"I told them, 'I apologize, but I just can't do it. I've got to stay true to the fans and the people that come in here because I do have a lot of people that come in after games,'" Osborn said.
Osborn said Durant used to come to the restaurant routinely following games before he left the Thunder in free agency, noting one time Durant was in a private room last season during the Western Conference finals and the Warriors wanted to book the restaurant following a game.
"I went into the room and told Kevin, 'Hey Kevin, Golden State wanted to book here and I wouldn't let 'em do it,'" Osborn said, laughing. "And he was all excited about it."
Osborn said if Durant wanted a reservation he'd be more than happy to accommodate him.
Word of the situation was first revealed when ESPN's Steve Levy tweeted about it Friday night. Durant's agent, Rich Kleiman, tweeted a denial in response to Levy, simply saying, "False."
"I told Steve Levy [on Friday night] because I recognized him when he came in and I was just kind of talking to him and I told him in passing," Osborn said. "I mean, the publicity is kind of fun because I've got news agencies calling and everything like that, but I really just want to focus on my dinner shift and making sure the guests that come in tonight are going to be happy."
ESPN's Ramona Shelburne contributed to this report.
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Highcharts Export Server
Options
Your Highcharts configuration object.
{ "xAxis": { "categories": [ "Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun", "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec" ] }, "series": [ { "data": [1,3,2,4], "type": "line" }, { "data": [5,3,4,2], "type":"line" } ] }
Image file format
image/png image/jpeg image/svg+xml application/pdf
Width
The exact pixel width of the exported image. Defaults to chart.width or 600px. Maximum width is 2000px.
Scale
A scaling factor for a higher image resolution. Maximum scaling is set to 4x. Remember that the width parameter has a higher precedence over scaling.
Constructor
Either Chart or StockChart depending on what product you use.
Chart StockChart Map
Callback
The callback will be fired after the chart is created.
function(chart) { chart.renderer.label('This label is added in the callback', 100, 100) .attr({ fill : '#90ed7d', padding: 10, r: 10, zIndex: 10 }) .css({ color: 'black', width: '100px' }) .add(); }
Use styled mode?
Enabling styled mode requires manually importing a CSS theme below.
No Yes
CSS
This CSS will be embedded in a style tag appended to the document head, regardless of wether or not styled mode is enabled.
Async Rendering
If enabled, the page rendering will wait for any of the included JavaScript resources to call highexp.done(); before rendering the chart. If the function isn't called within 6 seconds, the rendering will timeout.
No Yes
JavaScript
This JavaScript will be appended to the document head prior to rendering the chart.
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Author Name: Madeline Espineira Review Body: Cuban Black Beans NEVER have tomato products in them. Not paste, not any. The tomato products are reserved for ALL OTHER bean recipes, but NEVER in black beans, fyi. Seriously, and who in their right mind would add ONE HALF CUP of garlic? That is a typo. Must be around two cloves. Where's the cumin? Where's the vinegar? Review Rating: Date Published: 2017-04-13
Author Name: Kjersten Conway Review Body: Just made these. Holy crap! They far exceeded my expectations. These are better than the beans I was eating in Cuba a month ago. Yes, you do use 1/2 cup of minced garlic. I used the jarred kind and it was not overly strong. I will be making these constantly from now on. Review Rating: Date Published: 2017-02-23
Author Name: Jolene Gatto Review Body: I'm looking forward to making this recipe! (It sounds amazing!) and just wanted to make sure it was correct in asking for a 1/2 cup of minced garlic. Thank you advance for your response! Review Rating: Date Published: 2016-07-04
Author Name: ava678 Review Body: Another recipe to add in my collection. Review Rating: Date Published: 2017-01-30
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Several DARPA programs are exploring innovative technologies and approaches that could supplement GPS to provide reliable, highly accurate real-time positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) data for military and civilian uses and deal with possible loss of GPS accuracy from solar storms or jamming, for example.
DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar said DARPA currently has five programs that focus on PNT-related technology.
Adaptable Navigation Systems (ANS) is developing new algorithms and architectures that can create better inertial measurement devices. By using cold-atom interferometry, which measures the relative acceleration and rotation of a cloud of atoms stored within a sensor, extremely accurate inertial measurement devices could operate for long periods without needing external data to determine time and position. ANS also seeks to exploit non-navigational electromagnetic signals — including commercial satellite, radio and television signals and even lightning strikes — to provide additional points of reference for PNT.
Microtechnology for Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (Micro-PNT) leverages extreme miniaturization made possible by DARPA-developed micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. These include precise chip-scale gyroscopes, clocks, and complete integrated timing and inertial measurement devices. DARPA researchers have fabricated a prototype with three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and a highly accurate master clock on a chip that fits easily on the face of a penny.
Quantum-Assisted Sensing and Readout (QuASAR) intends to make the world’s most accurate atomic clocks — which currently reside in laboratories — both robust and portable. QuASAR researchers have developed optical atomic clocks in laboratories with a timing error of less than 1 second in 5 billion years. Making clocks this accurate and portable could improve upon existing military systems such as GPS, and potentially enable entirely new radar, LIDAR, and metrology applications.
The Program in Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering (PULSE) applies the latest in pulsed laser technology to significantly improve the precision and size of atomic clocks and microwave sources, enabling more accurate time and frequency synchronization over large distances. It could enable global distribution of time precise enough to take advantage of the world’s most accurate optical atomic clocks.
The Spatial, Temporal and Orientation Information in Contested Environments (STOIC) program seeks to develop PNT systems that are independent of GPS: long-range robust reference signals, ultra-stable tactical clocks, and multifunctional systems that provide PNT information between multiples users.
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It’s April 15, Tax Day. And while dubious business expenses and home offices might help you save a few dollars, most people pay something near what the government sets as the tax rate for their income.
The same is not always true of corporations. While the United States has the highest statutory corporate tax among industrialized nations (39.1 percent), corporations have a greater number of ways to bring that tax bill down. Use the calculator below to see how your tax rate compares to the average effective federal rates paid by 10 major corporates between 2008 to 2012, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a non-profit organization that advocates for corporate tax reform. The group’s board of directors includes a number of top labor leaders.
Calculations on how much companies pay in taxes vary considerably. A recent report by Citizens for Tax Justice found that profitable Fortune 500 companies paid an average effective federal tax rate of 19.4 percent from 2008 to 2012. The Tax Foundation, a think tank that studies the effect of taxation on the private sector and advocates for decreasing tax burdens, estimates that the nationwide rate is considerably higher–between 26.7 percent and 39.3 depending on the industry. The organization’s board members include two former Republican House members and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the chief economic adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.
While different researchers and organizations typically find different numbers for the exact amount individual companies pay in taxes, Citizens for Tax Justice maintains one of the most comprehensive comparisons of individual businesses.
Multinational corporations leverage tax exemptions to lower their tax bill and return value to shareholders. Tech companies like Apple and Microsoft were criticized after a 2013 Senate investigation into a tax arrangement known as the Double Irish, which allocates profits of intellectual property to tax-haven countries like Ireland.
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A new report from the Citizens for Tax Justice highlighted 15 Fortune 500 companies, including JetBlue and General Electric, that the group said either received a rebate or were taxed less than 1 percent of their income in 2014. GE has said that its decision last week to cut loose its financial business GE Capital could lead the company’s effective tax rate to rise to 20 percent in the future, the Wall Street Journal reports.
A February Pew Research survey found that 82 percent of respondents expressed at least some concern that “corporations didn’t pay their fair share,” compared with 53 percent who expressed concern over their own tax burden.
Methodology
The effective federal tax rates are drawn from the Center for Tax Justice’s analysis of top Fortune 500 companies, taken from the research group’s corporate tax explorer.
State and local taxes are not included in these calculations.
Read next: How April 15 Became Tax Day
Listen to the most important stories of the day.
Contact us at editors@time.com.
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Today is Amazing Words Wednesday, when we navigate the labyrinth of language together and see what interesting discovery we can find in the world of words.
Recently, I witnessed a game of duck, duck, goose among children. Perhaps you’ve played this game, in which individuals sit in a circle, an “It” is chosen who taps others’ heads and says “duck, duck, duck, duck…” until one child is deemed “goose,” at which point said Goose must chase It around the circle and tag him before It can sit down in Goose’s spot.
Fun game. But why birds?
Which got me to wondering about the names of other children’s games and where we got them.
Simon Says. Who is Simon? And why do we have to do what he says? This game is centuries-old and was originally called “Cicero dicit fac hoc”–Latin for “Cicero says do this.” In ancient Rome, when revered statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero said to do something, you did it. (Well, at least until he picked a fight with Mark Antony, got assassinated, and had his head put on display.)
But that’s Cicero. Why Simon? Along came Simon De Montfort, a 13th century French-English noble, who commanded so much authority from those around him that he imprisoned King Henry III and replaced him with the era’s first democratic parliament. I suppose if your words outrank the king’s, you should be able to get schoolchildren to pat their heads and rub their tummies at the same time. Theoretically, of course. That’s awfully hard to do–especially while standing on one leg.
Red Rover. Here’s a game for which origin is uncertain. However, the name Red Rover was used for boats in 18th and 19th century America, such as the first U.S. Navy hospital ship commissioned in 1862. The Red Rover is also the title of a James Fenimore Cooper novel published in 1827, in which the sea pirate captain and his ship are called the Red Rover. Speaking of which, the word Rover is Norwegian for “pirate.” One theory is that English children were daring those nasty, pretend Viking raiders to “come over, come over.”
However, the game is often known as British Bulldogs and Octopus Tag in the U.K. and Australia, and a similar game in China is known as Forcing the City Gates.
The saddest thing about researching Red Rover was reading that the game has been banned in some playgrounds because it’s deemed too rough for children. Really? I know kids can fall and skin knees and all that, but I don’t recall any serious injuries from Red Rover. That was hardly the most dangerous thing we kids did back in the 1970s.
Ring around the Rosy. It is generally accepted that this cute hand-holding, falling-down children’s rhyme has its origins in a dark time of history–the Bubonic Plague, or Black Death, of the Middle Ages. Despite scant written evidence that the rhyme and game date back to medieval times, the rhyme itself is rather convincing.
Ring around the rosy – The plague was partly characterized by a rosy rash that formed a ring on the sick person’s skin.
A pocket full of posies – Posies were placed in the pockets of recently deceased plague victims, in an effort to combat the stench of the disease.
Ashes, ashes – Many of the dead were burned.
We all fall down – Millions died, and the fear was that people would all eventually succumb to the Black Death plague.
When asked by my kids why anyone would take such an awful experience and translate it into a game for children, I suggested that we humans often look for ways to keep up our spirits in hard times. Children also look for ways to understand what is happening around them, and perhaps this rhyme helped. Then again, maybe the rhyme cropped up much later and only refers back to this time.
I see no harm in continuing to use the rhyme. When I taught a two-year-old class at church, the kids loved playing this game. They no more knew what a rosy ring was than they knew who Genghis Khan was.
Marco Polo. Speaking of Khan…here’s another one we don’t know, but the theories are awesome. Marco Polo was a 13th century explorer who traveled from Italy to the Far East. He spent 17 of his 23 years in China and returned to report about lands, inventions, culture, and dynasties that Europe knew nothing about. In fact, his book, The Travels of Marco Polo, was also known as Il Milione (“The Million Lies”), since many regarded his tales to be imaginative fiction.
Now for some of the theories on why a swimming hide-and-seek game was named after this explorer:
Marco Polo because he had no idea where he was going, just like the one who yells “Marco” in the game. Actually, Marco did know where he was going. His father and uncle had traveled to Asia first and met with Kublai Khan (Genghis’s descendant); Marco accompanied these Polo brothers on their second trip to the land and stayed much longer. Marco once fell asleep on his horse and was separated from the caravan. When he awakened, lost and confused, he thought he heard his family yelling his name. He responded to their cries with “Polo!” to reconnect. Yes, Marco Polo did grow weary crossing the Gobi desert, but he doesn’t appear to have gotten lost. Marco eventually returned to Venice, stopping along the way in Persia to deliver the Mongol princess for marriage to a Persian prince. His trip was by sea, with several hundred passengers and sailors in the caravan. The turbulent voyage resulted in all but 18 people dying from storms and disease. Storm survivors clinging to debris in the sea called out to the ship for rescue by yelling “Marco!” to which the ship’s passengers responded, “Polo!” I could find no such story.
I read The Travels of Marco Polo, but since that was over 25 years ago, I don’t remember much. My own theory goes like this: Children like games. Children like explorers. Children like rhyming words. “Amerigo!” “Vespucci!” was too long. “Christopher!” “Columbus!” was too old hat. “Leif!” “Eriksson!” was not balanced. “Marco!” “Polo!” could be heard and understood all around the pool.
Hopscotch. Some suggest that Roman soldiers played this game to stay fit, but the most common belief is that Roman children drew these boxes and numbers for the game, and from there it became popular throughout Europe.
But why “hopscotch”? That’s hardly a Latin or Italian word. The first mention of the game appears in the Book of Games by Willughby and the Poor Robin’s Almanac–both from the 17th century. They called the game “Scotch-Hoppers.” “Scotch” here refers to the line separating the boxes (perhaps from scocchen meaning “to cut, score, gash”). And of course, one must hop from box to box. Flip that around, and you’ve got hopscotch.
Duck, Duck, Goose. This one is driving me crazy. It is played in one form or another in many cultures. Wikipedia asserts that the “Duck, Duck, Goose” game originated with Swedish immigrants in Lindstrom, Minnesota. The Swedish title is “Anka Anka, Gråttanka.” In Minnesota, however, it’s called “Duck, Duck, Gray Duck” (perhaps a better translation of the Swedish).
But none of that explains why ducks? Why a goose? Or gray duck? Why not Dog, Dog, Cat? Why not Snake, Snake, Rabbit? What do ducks and geese have to do with sitting in a circle, tapping heads, and running around?
I don’t know. Do you?
Were you aware of the origin of these game names? What other children’s playground games would you like to know about?
Sources: Stonebridge Farm; Yahoo Games – Simon Who? The story behind a playground favorite; Biography.com – Marco Polo; Ask.com; Online Etymology Dictionary – Scotch; Sports KnowHow.com – History of Hopscotch; The Play & Playground Encyclopedia – Red Rover; James Fenimore Cooper Society; Goodreads – Red Rover, Red Rover; Online Etymology Dictionary – Rover
My love of language includes knowledge of word usage, grammar, punctuation, and more. If you are looking for a copy editor for your book, please check out my services by clicking the Copy Editing tab on the menu above.
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Colorado was the first state in the nation to legalize marijuana (though Washington voted it in the same year), and now its capital city is pushing the bar once again.
Basically, cannabis consumers will no longer have to hide in their own home when they want to get high.
The people of Denver passed ballot initiative 300, which would let businesses apply for permits that would allow the consumption of marijuana within their premises.
According to the Denver Post the initiative will create a four-year pilot program whereby certain business could apply. However, applicants will need backing from a registered neighborhood group, such as a business improvement district. Those groups will be able to set up their own conditions for their support, such as limiting hours and other restrictions.
UPDATE: Nov. 21, 2016, 12:35 p.m. EST According to the The Cannabist, state licensing officials have decided to not allow businesses with liquor licenses to obtain a permit for cannabis use on the premises.
Now, before you start to image a dive bar filled with ash trays and plumes of skunky pot smoke filling the air, the initiative will only allow people to vape and consume edibles indoors, while smoking will only be allowed outdoors under certain conditions. Vaping and dabbing concentrates as well as pot edibles have become increasingly popular since legalization, so banning smoking indoors isn't a total buzzkill to stoners looking to smoke in a social setting.
Image: APAP Photo/Ed Andrieski
But don't just think of this new initiative as a cannabis club, it will also give places like yoga studios the ability to hold a cannabis class, or let a comedy club have a cannabis night.
So why do cannabis enthusiasts want this?
Although weed is legal in the state of Colorado, actually consuming it can be quite the challenge for some, especially tourists. Visitors looking to test out some of the local green are basically forced to stay in a pro-marijuana hotel or Airbnb because public consumption is illegal. Additionally, some condo associations and landlord-controlled buildings have banned the smoking the sticky icky inside their buildings. If you don't own your property, you're not allowed to even smoke outside your residence.
"This is a groundbreaking law that reflects the shift taking place in the public attitudes toward marijuana," Mason Tvert, Director of Communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, told Mashable.
"By allowing adults to use marijuana in certain private establishments, we can reduce the chances that they are going to use it in public, like on the street or in the park. This is a community-focused measure that ensures neighborhoods will have the final say over what is and is not allowed," Tvert said.
Why is the opposition against it?
Protect Denver’s Atmosphere, one of the groups opposing the initiative conceded Tuesday, but not without a message from campaign manager Rachel O’Bryan, urging officials to to tread carefully.
“Back in 2012, marijuana legalization passed with a strong majority in Denver. Four years later, Initiative 300 has passed by a much slimmer margin,” she said in a statement. “It appears that many Denver voters who originally supported marijuana legalization do not want to see marijuana consumption everywhere in Denver."
According to the group's website, they believe the initiative will expand public consumption, endanger the health of the public and sends the wrong message to children. Additionally, the group warns of the dangers of allowing people to mix marijuana and alcohol, which is pretty fair considering that marijuana-related hospital visits for Colorado tourists are up since legalization.
So when is this all going down?
"City officials will need to create some rules and I think they'll do that quickly. It's really something the city has a lot of experience with with alcohol," Tvert told Mashable. Tvert is hopeful that the city will start to roll out permits in the beginning of next year, but no there is no official date yet.
While it's unclear how smoothly this will all go down, the city of Denver and Colorado has handled marijuana issues on a trial basis and they'll continue to do that for Initiative 300.
See what works, change what doesn't.
"We believe this will allow communities and businesses to test the waters to see what works, then move forward with the best plans possible. We are hopeful this will produce a system that can serve as a model for other cities and towns in Colorado and throughout the nation," Tvert told Mashable.
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An illegal alien who was set free by a sanctuary city and never deported is charged with killing a man just weeks after his release.
Ever Valles, 19, murdered Timothy Cruz, 32, on Feb. 7 after robbing him at a train station, police say. He had been released by the Denver Sheriff's Department just six weeks before that after posting $5,000 bond on charges of theft.
Denver released Valles even though U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents asked the city to hold him. In fact, ICE had flagged Valles as an "immigration priority" given his ties to gang activity in the city and asked to be told before his release so they could arrest him themselves.
Valles is now charged with first-degree robbery and murder along with Nathan Valdez, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen.
Denver Sheriff's Department is standing by its decision to set Valles free.
"Denver has never and will never condone dangerous or violent individuals being on our streets, immigrants or not, however, detaining anyone without a criminal warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution," a statement read.
ICE officials, though, say the city failed to keep its deal. "The detainer wasn´t honored and he was released by the jail ... without prior notification. Valles is a known gang member whose gang history is documented in the Colorado gang database," the agency said.
As President Trump seeks to crack down on sanctuary cities -- where illegal aliens can often escape the reach of the federal government and avoid deportation -- Denver Mayor Michael Hancock embracing the idea.
"If being a sanctuary city means that we value taking care of one another, and welcoming refugees and immigrants, then I welcome the title. If being a sanctuary city means families and young ‘Dreamers’ live with hope and not fear, then Washington can label us whatever they want," he said.
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WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — A decision by a new Greek government to leave the eurozone would set off devastating turmoil in financial markets even worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, a leading international economist warned Saturday.
A Greek exit would likely spark runs on Greek banks and the country’s stock market and end with the imposition of severe capital controls, said Barry Eichengreen, an economic historian at the University of California at Berkeley. He spoke as part of a panel discussion on the euro EURUSD, +0.0176% crisis at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting.
The exit would also spill into other countries as investors speculate about which might be next to leave the currency union, he said.
“In the short run, it would be Lehman Brothers squared,” Eichengreen warned.
He predicted that European politicians would “swallow hard once again” and make the compromises necessary to keep Greece in the currency union.
“While holding the eurozone together will be costly and difficult and painful for the politicians, breaking it up will be even more costly and more difficult,” he said.
In general, the panel, consisting of four prominent American economists, was pessimistic about the outlook for the single-currency project.
Jeffrey Frankel, an economics professor at Harvard University, said that global investors “have piled back into” European markets over the last years as the crisis ebbed.
Now, there will likely be a repeat of the periods of market turmoil in the region and spreads between sovereign European bonds could widen sharply.
Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and a Harvard professor, said the euro “is a historic disaster.”
“It doesn’t mean it is easy to break up,” he said.
Martin Feldstein, a longtime critic of the euro project, said all the attempts to return Europe to healthy growth have failed.
“I think there may be no way to end to euro crisis,” Feldstein said.
The options being discussed to stem the crisis, including launch of full scale quantitative easing by the European Central Bank, “are in my judgment not likely to be any more successful,” Feldstein said.
The best way to ensure the euro’s survival would be for each individual eurozone member state to enact its own tax policies to spur demand, including cutting the value-added tax for the next five years to increase consumer spending, Feldstein said.
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Christopher Hodson is assistant professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is the author of The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (2012) and is currently at work, with Brett Rushforth of the College of William and Mary, on a history of France and the Atlantic World from the medieval period through the nineteenth century.
Christopher Hodson
The Annunciation of Big Bubba
Or, reflections on writing history in two worlds
In the summer of 1999, a few months before leaving my hometown of Logan, Utah, to attend graduate school in Chicago, I took a temp job laying a faux-hardwood floor in a local toy store. On hands and knees, my little crew (me, plus two riotously profane sub-contractors from California) crept from the front entrance toward the stockroom, sticking pieces of perfectly grained plastic onto the glue-covered cement slab. Behind us, electricians from Idaho followed on rolling scaffolds, installing light fixtures and doing occult things with wires high in the ceiling—from whence would soon come the Annunciation of Big Bubba.
Big Bubba was the head electrician's son, a large, bowling-pin shaped man of about twenty. Outfitted in trucker's cap and Wranglers, he looked for all the world like he was about to hold someone upside-down over a junior high washroom toilet. As Big Bubba loomed above us, one of the California guys asked me a hard question: "So, what's taking you to Chi-town?" Having long ago learned not to broadcast in public my intention to study eighteenth-century France, I ran through my catalog of lies (law school, commodities trading, professional baseball) before settling on a version of the truth. "I'm going to get a doctorate in European history," I offered. Pausing and puzzling, the floor-layer wondered aloud, "Why would anybody want to learn about European history?" And then, with the authority of a messenger from the heavens, his face bathed in light of his own creation, Big Bubba leaned over the edge of his scaffold and proclaimed: "Cuz that way, if he goes to the bathroom next to ya, he can tell if yer a-peein'!"
I n truth, I run with the Atlanticist crowd for a selfish reason: because Atlantic history allows me to be in two places at once. And by "be," I mean "be," as in "exist or live," or better yet, "belong."
As you can imagine, I've told the story of the Annunciation of Big Bubba a lot over the years. It gets laughs. But I've come to see what happened in that toy store as something that transcends bathroom humor. In fact, I've come to think of Big Bubba's words as a kind of prophecy, one that became more meaningful the farther my career has taken me away from that half-finished floor in Logan.
To be sure, the foreign in general and France in particular have retained their hold over my psyche, Big Bubba's disapproval notwithstanding. Like Mitt Romney minus the money, I spent two years in France as a Mormon missionary. Unlike Mitt, however, I've never had much reason to hide the acute, aching francophilia I picked up there. If my face allowed me to pull off the beret and pencil-moustache look, I'd probably do it. But as an American who wants to write about subjects that resonate with people back home, I confess that in addition to giving me reason to chuckle every time I go into a men's room, Big Bubba also keeps me thinking about the allure of the familiar.
Once I got to Chicago, graduate study exposed me not just to the wonders of French history, but to the then new-ish vogue for Atlantic studies. Like everybody I went to school with, I read books and articles celebrating the demise of old models of scholarship rooted in the institutions of early modern empire or (tsk, tsk) the mere pre-history of the United States. There was now a more excellent way: the study of an integrated Atlantic world that embraced the internally diverse African, Native American, and European cultures thrust into contact in the years after 1492.
Cowed by the job prospects facing French historians and guided by sharp-eyed mentors, I edged away from France while positioning myself to catch the Atlantic wave. More than I should have, I smirked at the passé and exulted at the revolution this new thinking seemed to promise. While I parroted my share of fancy talk about historiography, theory, and methods, I'm pretty sure that I latched onto Atlantic history with Big Bubba's words ringing in my ears. Here, perhaps, was a way of embracing the European without disavowing the yer-a-peein'. Pardon my French.
This personal compulsion to cling to two (or more) homelands, I think, tends to seep into scholarship, at least for some of us. We don't just want to participate in the construction of Atlantic history as yet another sub-field. We're not team players. Deep in our hearts, we know that the modern notion of an "Atlantic world," built to bring some sense of order to an unruly early modern past, will in the end go the way of straight-up historical Marxism, annaliste-style "total history," and the "new social history" of the 1960s and 1970s. It just happens. Ashes to ashes and all that.
Fig. 1. "A View of Fort Saint Louis at Acarron Bay," 1764, accession number 02057. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Click to enlarge in new window. Fig. 1. "A View of Fort Saint Louis at Acarron Bay," 1764, accession number 02057. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Click to enlarge in new window.
In truth, I run with the Atlanticist crowd for a selfish reason: because Atlantic history allows me to be in two places at once. And by "be," I mean "be," as in "exist or live," or better yet, "belong." In the course of my travels, I've retraced the steps of a refugee boy orphaned in the 1750s through the streets of modern Philadelphia, and I've looked out across Brittany's Gulf of Morbihan toward Belle-Ile-en-Mer, imagining how the people I write about made sense of their own small niches in a world grown large. In addition, I've been lucky enough to ferret out and stumble upon the traces of obscure yet extraordinary men, women, and children in archives on both sides of the Atlantic. I get emotional about these little discoveries. But I'm not ashamed to admit that 250-year-old letters have nearly brought me to tears—which, being in an archive and all, I just blamed on the dust.
It wasn't the dust. Rather, it was the breathtaking recognition of a ghostly, flickering point of connection between my own (admittedly trivial) struggles and the bona fide, life-threatening crises faced by my subjects in the eighteenth century. My colleague Craig Harline, a historian of Reformation-era Europe, describes these moments as well as anyone can: "[Y]ou sense something familiar, and your special History muscle goes into action to find it—flattening time in your head, dragging the past forward, pushing the present back, until the story from five or fifteen centuries before looks a lot like a story that happened to you just last week, and seems just as vital and personal too."
Before taking my first research trips, I was an unlikely candidate for such an experience. No doubt spurred on by an overactive subconscious, I had fashioned a dissertation topic centered on what are now the Maritime Provinces of Canada—which, I now realize, are roughly the same distance from Utah and France. Despite knowing very little about them, I hit upon the idea of writing about Acadians. These, I gathered, were French colonists who, after living uncomfortably under British rule for forty years, were driven from their homes in the mid-eighteenth century, and whose descendants had become the Cajuns of Louisiana. It sounded like a pretty good story, but given my coddled modernity, I had no inkling that I would ever see myself in its protagonists.
As I made my way to the North American archives containing the earliest traces of the Acadians' history, I did my best along the way to visit sites where that history actually took place. I struggled to get my bearings. The first French families to put down roots in Acadia, I discovered, did so in the mid-seventeenth century, establishing villages on the eastern shore of the Bay of Fundy while courting the good graces of the indigenous Mi'kmaq. But instead of hacking their homesteads from forests or prairies like the westward-probing English of Massachusetts or Virginia, Acadians walled out the sea. Using techniques honed along the rivers of western France, they built up a network of dikes and sluices to drain vast areas of fertile marshland. Long ago, my pioneer ancestors headed for the Utah hills; these folks clung to the coast.
In terms of productivity, it worked. By 1713, when the Treaty of Utrecht abruptly transformed the French colony of Acadia into the British province of Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy seemed poised to serve as a "granary" for the market-oriented towns of New England. Even as they mulled over the idea of expelling Nova Scotia's "neutral French" and replacing them with "good Protestant subjects," British officials strained to make sense of the otherworldly environment the Acadians had created. The uplands, they reasoned, were so much safer—no storm surges, no freak tides, no burrowing muskrats to pierce the sod walls and flood the fields. As I surveyed the site of the Acadian village of Grand Pré and the ruins of its elaborate system of dikes on a blustery Saturday in 2001, I felt much the same confusion. I marveled at Acadian tenacity, but worried that whatever it was that made them tick, I of all people wasn't going to get it.
Learning about their expulsion from the Maritimes and the diaspora that saw them scattered across the Atlantic world made the Acadian experience seem even less comprehensible. Beginning in 1755, Anglo-American troops began a campaign to hunt down, arrest, and deport all 15,000 Acadians living on or near the Bay of Fundy. Among the first offensives in what would become the Seven Years' War, the deportation was also among the most successful. Within three years, some 10,000 Acadians had been captured and shipped off to exile in the port cities of British North America, Great Britain, and France, while the rest mostly hid out in the wilds of New France. By the mid-1760s, Acadians had washed up in bizarre colonies in Saint-Domingue, Guiana, the Falkland Islands, and the French countryside. The toll in lives was staggering. By the hundreds, Acadians drowned in shipwrecks off the Azores, died of malaria in Guiana, and succumbed to starvation in Normandy. The physical and psychological trauma these people had endured exceeded anything I had known, and most of the darkest things I had imagined. Trying to relate to their experience, I realized, was a little like trying to relate to that of a slave, post-Middle Passage.
As I now recall it, I drove from Grand Pré back to my hotel in Moncton, New Brunswick, that Saturday in 2001 in an intellectual funk. I had never really wanted to analyze the past; I wanted to commune with it. That prospect now seemed dim. But as I neared Moncton, a town that has long served as a center of resurgent Acadian culture in the Maritimes, the sight of a bar got me thinking. Located on Champlain Street in the nearby town of Dieppe, it was called "Le Pub 1755." A British-style pub with a French name that made reference to the year of the Anglo-American assault on Acadians? I pulled over to think about that for a few minutes.
Back in Moncton, I parked at the hotel and walked to the center of town in search of a cheap dinner. Teenagers from the hinterlands were arriving to drag Main Street—or rue Main, in this case. Jacked-up trucks, mesh-backed baseball caps, and Metallica T-shirts abounded. Skirting past the knots of kids forming on the sidewalk, I caught bits and pieces of familiar conversations about music, sports, the opposite sex, and where beer might be had. The scene could not have been more familiar or more small-town American—except that in Moncton, it took place in chiac, a local dialect that combines archaic French and Internet-era English. How historically aware Moncton's teens were I couldn't tell, but it struck me that night that those Acadian kids, like the pub owner on Champlain Street, were participants in the long process of figuring out how to belong to two places at once. And that, at least, I could understand. I might even be able to commune with it.
A year later, I felt that communion even more powerfully at the Archives départementales de la Vienne in Poitiers, a middling city in France's middle. The archive itself was bright and well-organized, far less Gothic and more Napoleonic than I had hoped. Not so for "dépôt 22," the collection of documents I had come to see. The archivist delivered them to my station not in a cardboard box or folder, but in an ancient, elaborately latched chest. With a nod to me, he opened it, revealing a pile of several hundred letters to and from a local nobleman, the marquis de Pérusse, all penned during the mid-1770s. The chest's interior was a riot of paper, with brown, crusty vellum sheets sticking out from a cascade of robin's egg-blue linen stationary. It all smelled vaguely of cathedral vault.
Fig. 2. "Large and Particular Plan of Shegnekto Bay," engraving on paper by Thomas Jeffreys, 34 x 38 cm. (1755). Courtesy of the John Clarence Webster Canadiana Collection (W295), Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Fig. 2. "Large and Particular Plan of Shegnekto Bay," engraving on paper by Thomas Jeffreys, 34 x 38 cm. (1755). Courtesy of the John Clarence Webster Canadiana Collection (W295), Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.
I plowed through the letters, growing more animated as I realized what they contained: a tale of intrigue and violence linking Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Louis XVI's famous, wealthy controller-general of finances, and Jean-Jacques Leblanc, an ordinary, impoverished Acadian refugee from the western borderlands of Nova Scotia. They made an odd couple, and they came together in odd fashion. In the 1760s and 1770s, a cadre of French thinkers and statesmen became united in their disgust with the supposedly languishing state of French agriculture. Their solution was to colonize France itself. They hoped to found colonial companies like those that had once invested in North America or the Caribbean, but who would instead pour capital into the clearing and farming of uncultivated land within the kingdom. Among the first to step forward with a proposal was the marquis de Pérusse, the forward-thinking owner of a large, bramble-ridden estate near Poitiers.
The search for loyal, hardworking, and pliable agricultural laborers for this promising enterprise led royal officials to the Acadians, about 3,000 of whom had been scraping by in French seaports since the expulsions of the 1750s. In 1773 and 1774, nearly 1,500 Acadians made their way to Pérusse's lands, where masons were (on the royal dime) busily constructing six new villages exclusively for the colonists. Among them was Jean-Jacques Leblanc.
He was unhappy to be there. For years he had told his Acadian friends that leaving France altogether was their best bet. The Spanish, he knew, were trawling for families to populate the frontiers of Louisiana, and had even made generous offers for groups willing to settle their own internal colony in the Sierra Morena of Andalusia. Even the hated British seemed to have softened on the Acadians: as early as 1763, rumors had flown across the English Channel of plans to settle France's Acadians on the island of Jersey, while mysterious British agents had promised to carry them back to Nova Scotia, Irish priests in tow, to recreate their lost homeland. Louisiana appealed to Leblanc; several dozen Acadians had already landed there, and the Spanish were eager for more. But there was a catch. All of the European nations angling for new settlers offered the best terms to large, coherent groups. Mere individuals—or, as Catherine the Great of Russia called them, "fugitives and passportless people"—merited no special attention. So whatever France's Acadians did, they had to do it as a community. And so Leblanc had reluctantly followed his compatriots to Poitiers while plotting a next move.
He soon got a hand from Versailles. Turgot, who became controller-general of finances under the young Louis XVI in mid 1774, opposed the Acadian colony as well. His reasons were straightforward: it cost too much, and it was deeply unfair. Although Turgot was sympathetic to promoters of internal colonization, Pérusse's project had been funded by a previous administration less concerned with the kingdom's mounting debt. Worse, in their efforts to lure the Acadians to Poitiers, Turgot's predecessors had promised them what amounted to hereditary privileges—tax exemptions, a daily allowance from the royal coffers, cheap tobacco, and so on. Turgot despised privileges, styling them a fundamental barrier to economic vitality. As his correspondence made clear, he wanted the colony near Poitiers dismantled and its Acadians off the dole.
In the fall of 1774, the possibility of conspiring with Turgot hit Leblanc like a thunderbolt. After securing a passport and letters of introduction from some of Pérusse's local enemies, he slipped away to Versailles and talked his way into a meeting with the controller-general. Leblanc then returned to Poitiers and got to work. With some burly friends, he formed a goon squad that roamed the colony's farms. They recommended, in no uncertain terms, that Acadian colonists agree to leave their homes, abandon their privileges, and move together to the Atlantic port of Nantes. In response to foot-dragging, they issued threats, pelted homes with rocks, and hurled logs down wells, blocking off water supplies. One Sunday after mass, Leblanc's henchman Simon Aucoin collared a few colonists as they left their parish church, growling that he would "knock them senseless" if they refused to follow Leblanc's lead. For his part, Turgot delayed the Acadians' allowance and threw up every administrative roadblock he could think of. Resistance by those who wished to remain on Pérusse's estates began to crumble.
As I neared the bottom of the chest of letters, Jean-Jacques Leblanc finally prevailed. In 1776, all but a few of the colony's 1,500 Acadians fled together, taking great wagon convoys to Nantes. Nearly a decade later in 1785, almost exactly the same number of Acadians sailed from Nantes to Louisiana—minus Jean-Jacques Leblanc, who died in 1781. If you know Cajuns, some of their ancestors probably lived through these strange events.
As I cobbled the letters into a narrative, the story spoke to me. Big processes were reflected in it: old regime France's little-known attempt to colonize itself, the widening eighteenth-century market for free laborers, and the mysterious processes by which people forged collective identities and loyalties.
Fig. 3. "Portrait of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot," 1774. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France. Fig. 3. "Portrait of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot," 1774. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France.
Little things, though, stuck out even more. Jean-Jacques Leblanc, his friends, and their foes were all trying to negotiate the intricacies of belonging to two places at once. Some abandoned the old for the new. Gervais Gotrot endured Leblanc's mistreatment in the Acadian colony near Poitiers, but instead of going to Louisiana he struck out on his own, settling in the English Channel port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he raised sons and grandsons who sailed warships for Napoleon Bonaparte's empire. Many, of course, never recovered from the loss of their Maritime homes. Guillaume Gallet and his deranged adult son simply gave up, dying homeless in the French town of Saint-Malo in 1787. Others, however, groped for a way to claim the best of both worlds—the rustic liberty of the Americas and the security afforded by proximity to European power and sophistication.
Leblanc's violent push toward Louisiana was a manifestation of this double-edged desire. So too was the face of Jean-Pierre de la Roche, one of the Acadian exiles I met while rummaging through the chest containing dépôt 22. De la Roche showed up only once. His passport, which enabled him to cross provincial borders as he traveled to Pérusse's Acadian colony, was buried near the bottom of the heap. According to the clerk who described him, he was not attractive: "Acadian, twenty five years old, five feet two thumbs [pouces, a couple of inches each] in height; gray, sunken eyes, pointy nose, a scar below his lower lip." The clerk then added a line that caught my eye: "He wears a wig." Like thousands of French men, de la Roche had seized on the vogue for cheap wigs as an assertion of status and respectability—a display that would have irked his North American ancestors, but which for him, having arrived in France as a thirteen-year-old boy, seemed sensible. Even as I scanned his crumbling passport, generating a less-than-flattering mental image of young Jean-Pierre, the impulse to see this short, rodentine, bewigged refugee as kin became overwhelming. Were we not connected in our confusion?
After leaving Poitiers, documents elsewhere began to look less like flat paper and more like inter-dimensional portals. Peering in wasn't easy. I recoiled at letters from the Connecticut State Archives recounting the story of two Acadian couples who traveled from Annapolis, Maryland, to Woodbury, Connecticut, in the winter of 1756-57. I'm not sure how it happened, but during the expulsion of 1755 the two sets of parents became separated from their seven children. Sent off to Annapolis, they scoured newspapers and queried travelers for over a year before discovering that their children had landed in Woodbury. After a midwinter journey by sea and land, they arrived frostbitten, clothed in vermin-infested rags. During a reunion reluctantly organized by some of Woodbury's town leaders, the Acadian parents realized something awful. The youngest kids had essentially forgotten them. They were terrified by their parents' ghoulish appearance, while the older children were hardly enthusiastic about giving up friends and apprenticeships in Woodbury in favor of family with little to offer besides skin and bones.
From Philadelphia to Ottawa to Boston to Aix-en-Provence, visits to diverse archives (during which, after the Connecticut discovery, I missed my own kids all the more) produced a strange duality. On the one hand, the geographical parameters of my project kept expanding at what seemed like an absurd rate—before long, I was writing about Guiana, Mauritius, and, somehow, Antarctica. On the other, my subjects' unsteady, deeply personal pathways through transatlantic dislocation seemed to converge with my own.
True, reconstructing the Acadians' efforts to live in multiple worlds didn't help me resolve my own benign identity crisis. But I do like to think that my experience as a confused wanderer between France and Utah in easy times allowed me to unlock something of their globe-trotting lives in hard times. For as integrated as their eighteenth-century Atlantic world was becoming, and as linked and networked and hybridized as ours currently is, the act of crossing boundaries always leaves its mark.
For me anyway, going back to Europe and immersing myself in musty papers always makes the old French scars ache a little; trips to archives in the United States make me wonder if I really am, or can ever be, at home. Some readers will doubtless see these reflections as self-indulgent at best, meaningless at worst—as I write these lines, I can practically hear my tough-minded dissertation adviser making irritated animal noises. But sensibilities like mine have been with Atlantic history from the start. Early on, scholars made the Atlantic turn with NATO and the Soviet threat on their minds: others did so apolitically, as an extension of their expanding vision of early Native American, African, or European history; still others, as Bernard Bailyn notes, "were simply pursuing narrow, parochial interests that proved to have wider boundaries than they had expected."
Bailyn's statement may well be the best face I can put on my participation in Atlantic history. But as I prepare to fly from Salt Lake to Paris again this summer, planning to split time between the massive, bureaucratic Archives nationales and a few smaller libraries, I'm mostly thinking of a higher power. For the Annunciation of Big Bubba, I suspect, will be with me always. And not just in the men's room.
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Across some parts of the country, nuclear power plants have been closing amid political pressure and warped financial markets, even though they contribute the overwhelming majority of their region’s clean power, and are the economic strength of their local economies.
As an example, the sad and unnecessary closing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station at the end of 2014 led to an increase in fossil fuel use, specifically natural gas, that completely filled the gap (see figure). The potential closing of a few more nuclear plants in the region will increase gas use even more.
As all energy experts know, renewables will never replace any of nuclear’s clean power lost by the closing of nuclear plants. Renewables are having enough trouble replacing significant amounts of coal or keeping pace with demand, and require taxpayer subsidies to get built. So natural gas is the obvious choice for new electricity generation in all regions of the country.
This trend is unlikely to change. Electricity demand in New England is growing 1% annually. Total generating capacity for the region is 31 GW, but over 4 GW is retiring in the next few years, and another 6 GW is at risk of retirement by the early 2020s.
As a result, 13 GW of new natural gas is proposed to cover all expected increases in electricity demand for the next decade.
America is at a 27-year low in its carbon emissions almost solely because natural gas has been replacing coal. Gains in efficiency and conservation have also helped. But the loss of several nuclear power plants has effectively wiped out the recent progress of renewables on addressing carbon reductions by increasing gas emissions. New York is struggling with this conundrum as it attempts to force the shutdown of some nuclear plants even as it desperately tries to keep others open.
The argument that nuclear is too expensive, and that closing nuclear plants would save money, is absurd. Operating an existing nuclear plant is much more cost-effective than even existing coal and gas plants, and much cheaper than installing any new power plant, even natural gas.
Over the next 20 to 40 years, the Levelized Cost of Energy for an existing nuclear plant is only 3¢/kWh. For an existing gas plant the LCOE is 5¢/kWh, and for an existing coal plant it’s 4¢/kWh. The LCOE for a new gas plant is 7¢/kWh, for a new nuclear plant is 9¢/kWh, for a new coal plant is 10¢/kWh, and for new wind is 11¢/kWh. So closing any nuclear plant prematurely makes no sense economically.
And at 19.5¢/kWhr, New England still has the highest residential electricity costs in the contiguous United States. The national average is 12¢/kWh. In my own state of Washington, it’s only 8¢/kWh thanks to hydro, nuclear and a reasonable energy market structure (Forbes).
However, in the northeast, peak prices can exceed 100¢/kWh during bad weather like they did during the 2014 polar vortex (Forbes). It’s not that utility costs increased that much, it’s just that the companies are poorly prepared for extreme winters, when hiccups in the polar vortex allow huge volumes of cold Arctic air to escape their usual confines and flow into New England and north-central America (Forbes).
During these events, fossil fuel generation suffers severe outages, as they did in 2014. Coal stacks were frozen. Diesel generators simply couldn’t function in such low temperatures. Natural gas choked up - its pipelines couldn’t keep up with demand.
And prices skyrocketed in their “free” energy market.
During the last polar vortex, ISO New England, the region’s electricity transmission organization, had to bring up dirtier oil plants to try to make up the difference. Nuclear energy, unaffected by the cold, became the primary provider of electricity in New England, edging out gas 29% to 27% (Hartford Business). Oil generation made up 15% while coal accounted for 14%. Hydro, with little other renewables, provided the rest.
The loss of Vermont Yankee has further stressed the region’s ability to respond to extreme weather. Before it was closed, Vermont Yankee was the fifth-largest source of electricity generation in New England, accounting for 4% of New England's total electricity generation and more than 70% of generation in Vermont.
New England has put too many of their energy eggs in the gas basket without thinking about what that means in terms of building the required pipelines and other infrastructure. For the last few years, ISO has warned New England about becoming increasingly dependent on natural gas for both electricity and home heating, to the exclusion of all else.
ISO knows that low diversity in sources for electricity is dangerous, just like in biology. As demand for natural gas in home heating spikes in winter, there is much less fuel for power plants. And proposals for new gas pipelines have been stomped down.
Fierce opposition to building new pipelines from the shale gas-rich areas of western New York and Pennsylvania comes from concerns over fracking technologies, pipeline leaks and climate change. Even new transmission lines to carry hydropower from Quebec can’t find support in the people of New England.
So if you close nuclear plants for ideological reasons, close coal plants because of climate change, choose natural gas over all else but prevent associated pipelines and infrastructure from being built, then you’re probably going to have a reality check sometime soon.
Let’s hope it doesn’t happen during a polar vortex.
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The trouble is, the more Erdogan realizes that his blackmailing works, the more willing he will be to export his poor democratic culture into Europe. Merkel has set the wrong precedent and given the prickly sultan what he wants.
"[N]ow the Turkish journalists and artists will even suffer more." — Rebecca Harms, co-chair of the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance at the European Parliament.
Since Erdogan was elected president in August 2014 he has sued at least 1,845 Turks for insulting him. Now his judicial challenges have been exported to Europe.
The always angry Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's president, should have a moment of peace and wonder why is he probably the world's most insulted president.
Since Erdogan was elected president in August 2014 he has sued at least 1,845 people for insulting him.
Now his judicial challenges have been exported to Europe.
An obscure German law, dating back to 1871, was used to silence Iranian dissidents critical of Iran's Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1960s and 1970s. Now Erdogan has become the third foreign leader taking advantage of that law after a popular German comic satirized him in crude terms.
The law allows prosecution in Germany for insulting a foreign leader, but only with the consent of the government. German Chancellor Angela Merkel granted her consent for the prosecution of German comedian Jan Böhmermann, although she promised that the law allowing legal proceedings would be repealed in 2018.
All that would be a story of no importance in Turkey, where journalists tend to weigh their words more carefully these days, several newspapers have been seized or closed in recent months, broadcasters taken off air and prominent journalists getting prosecuted on charges of insult, for being members of terrorist organization or even for being spies. But Merkel's decision to allow Böhmermann's prosecution hardly complies with the European culture of civil liberties.
Rebecca Harms, co-chair of the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance at the European Parliament (EP), said that "[after Merkel's go-ahead for legal proceedings] now the Turkish journalists and artists will even suffer more."
Merkel's support for Erdogan's increasingly prickly psyche came after two important reports highlighted Turkey's disturbingly autocratic regime. From across the Atlantic, the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, released annually by the U.S. Department of State, provided a clear snapshot of the deteriorating human rights violations in Turkey. It said that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government's interference with freedom of expression, arbitrary application of laws and inadequate protection of civilians in the country's southeast pose great threats to civil rights and liberties. The report also observed that: "Impunity and weak administration of justice is another issue of concern, as certain laws were applied too broadly and inconsistently ... Wide leeway granted to prosecutors and judges contributed to politically motivated investigations."
Back in the Old Continent, the European Parliament issued sharp criticisms of Turkey and warned in plain language that the European Union candidate country was "backsliding" on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. EP Rapporteur Kati Piri said after the annual progress report on Turkey: "The overall pace of reforms in Turkey has not only slowed down but in some key areas, such as freedom of expression and the independence of the judiciary, there has been a regression, which is particularly worrying."
Erdogan is holding Europe's leaders hostage by threatening to scrap a recent Turkey-EU refugee deal. Under this agreement Turkey has committed itself to take back tens of thousands of refugees in return for EU cash, promises to make progress in Turkey's accession talks and visa-free travel for Turks visiting EU's Schengen zone.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) has boasted that he is proud of blackmailing EU leaders, including European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (right), into paying him protection money.
For many European countries, most notably Germany, where the migrant crisis has curbed Merkel's popularity, Erdogan's Turkey has suddenly turned into a necessary ally. The EU finds itself in a difficult situation in balancing Turkey's newfound "face value" and the core principles of democratic culture enshrined in its legal norms. Piri adds:
"And we cannot just say, we now have the migration crisis so we don't discuss all the other issues. This is the signal the European Parliament wants to send with this report. With Turkey as a candidate country, we will also have to look at the internal developments and openly discuss it with the government."
European leaders will need better diplomatic skills in their increasingly difficult balancing act between the reflections of Erdogan's autocracy in their own countries and their need for Turkey's help in containing the continent's worst ever refugee crisis. The trouble is, the more Erdogan realizes that his blackmailing works, the more willing he will be to export his poor democratic culture into Europe. Merkel has set the wrong precedent and given the prickly sultan what he wants.
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[pullquote]“The whole movie is going to rest on their shoulders, so you have to set aside time and wait for the perfect people to appear.”~ Wes Anderson[/pullquote]
This is chapter 2 of The Producer Log, a journal written by writer/director/producer Alison Kathleen Kelly as she advances on her journey producing a micro-budget film. You can find all the installments on the Make a Film page.
Handling Casting on a Micro-Budget
STEP 1: SPECS
If like us, you can’t afford a casting director, then the producer and director will probably organize the casting.
You need specs for each character: Let’s take a female, early 20s, all ethnicities. Take these specs and put them out on a breakdown —which is where you might see them on websites such as Casting Call Pro or Star Now. There are many other websites you can use though. You will get submissions from actors and agents, and then it’s decision time.
STEP 2: SHORT LIST
Firstly, we schedule in the actors we already know are great with copy.
Then, we like to give new talent or talent we don’t know an opportunity. You need to see a video reel of the person’s work. CV’s are helpful but you want to see VIDEO FOOTAGE of them in action. Then you send out the invitations…
STEP 3: AUDITION INVITATIONS
You should also send the actors the scenes you want them to rehearse and act on the day in the form of SIDES. Pick one or two scenes that are different, one could be a simple dialogue scene, the other should be something that shows a little more range, like a murder scene or an argument, something that needs a strong emotion.
STEP 4: AUDITIONS
We asked the actors/actresses to come in in blocks. Instead of giving everyone a specific time (because someone may be late and throw the whole line-up off) we told five people to come in between say 9am-10am, that way whoever comes in first auditions first, and so on. It makes it easier for you and lessens the likelihood of delays.
We had a simple set up in the room, the director and myself sat at a table, we had a camera which our PA was operating in the corner (plus a back-up camera), and lots of back up batteries, a macbook, and a chair for the people coming in. I was at a casting once, and we ran out of batteries and hard drives, this meant a lot of unnecessary juggling and wasting time so Be Prepared.
When the actor arrives, the director will usually give them a bit of info about the film and the role, and then the actor will speak their name and telephone number into the camera and act out the scene the way they prepared it. The director then gives his notes/instructions and the actor does it all again bearing those notes in mind.
We didn’t have a lot of time so usually, each person had just two takes, most of them were really good but a couple of the actors would do their version and then when the director gave them a note they would ignore what he said and do the exact same thing they did the first time – this is NOT a good idea. It means you can’t show range or take direction, which are big things a director bears in mind when picking their cast: Will this person be easy to work with? Can they take direction? Do they have range?
By the end of the day we were happy with most of the people we’d seen, we took notes after each person and had our SHORT LIST.
Note: Also, don’t give too much information away, you can tell us where you’ve trained, but we’ll have seen your CV/resume, now is the time for you to shine 🙂
WHAT I LEARNT:
– I would say to any actors about to go into an audition, leave everything behind, just bring yourself and the character. One man came in and kept his coat on, he also had his shopping bags with him. I don’t mind as long as he does a good job but the man didn’t really get into the role, it felt awkward and rushed, and so when the director gave his notes we suggested he remove his coat, push his bags away, and instantly he perked up. It almost felt like the audition was a bit of a hassle for him.
– Something that is also very important to mention is that during our casting we didn’t have a reader so guess who got the job… me. I will be totally honest with you, I’m not an actress, and I felt awkward and don’t like hearing the sound of my voice out loud. I also felt like it was distracting for the actors to have me reading with them, they needed someone good enough to play opposite them, to help them step up and really get into the scene and their character. So I would highly recommend you definitely have someone professional designated for this job.
STEP 5: CALL BACKS
[pullquote]“Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director’s point of view.”~ Steven Spielberg[/pullquote]
For the next stage you will probably need to hire a larger room. You will bring back the actors you liked best and, if there are still some roles to be filled fit in a few new people too.
In the next Phase I will discuss what happened at our CALL BACKS…
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Alison Kathleen Kelly is an award winning writer/director/producer from London. Alison studied directing at UCLA Extension and went on to produce several successful short films, she is now producing a horror feature film in France and preparing to direct her first feature, a gangster film set in London. You can contact Alison at alisonkathleenkelly@yahoo.co.uk
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There is growing pressure on the Government to hold a full historical inquiry into the deaths of almost 800 children in a mother and baby home in Tuam, Co Galway between the 1920s and the 1960s.
There were numerous calls from TDs, Senators and councillors yesterday for a full inquiry following the disclosure that many infants and children who died in the home run by the Bon Secours order were buried in an unmarked plot.
Minister for Children Charlie Flanagan said yesterday that he was giving “active consideration to the best means of addressing the harrowing details emerging regarding the burial arrangements for children who died many years ago in mother and baby homes”.
‘Deeply disturbing’
“Many of the revelations are deeply disturbing and a shocking reminder of a darker past in Ireland when our children were not cherished as they should have been,” he said.
In a statement last night, Archbishop of Tuam Michael Neary said while the archdiocese would co-operate with any inquiry, it did not have any involvement in the running of the home and had no records in its archives.
“There exists a clear moral imperative on the Bon Secours Sisters in this case to act upon their responsibilities in the interest of the common good,” Dr Neary said.
Records uncovered by local historian Catherine Corless showed a large number of children died at the home over 36 years between 1925 and 1961. Almost 800 newborns and older infants died in that period, an average of almost 30 per year.
The building and land had been in use as a workhouse and mother and baby home since the 1840s. It is believed the remains were discovered some time ago but it is not established when they date from, or if any precede the operation of the home from 1925.
Yesterday politicians from both Government and Opposition parties, including Galway East Minister of State Ciarán Cannon, called for an inquiry into the circumstances behind so many deaths in the home, as well as into the remains found in the unmarked plot.
‘Manslaughter’
One Government Senator from Galway, Fine Gael’s Hildegarde Naughton, claimed in the Seanad that what had occurred was “manslaughter”, although no others went that far.
Tuam-based Fianna Fáil TD Colm Keaveney said the Taoiseach should take a strategic role in the matter, notwithstanding his being abroad on a Government trip to the US. He said Enda Kenny should order an interdepartmental investigation.
“The issues around the horrendous disposal of bodies in unmarked locations raises questions about the role of the State and service providers,” he said.
Some politicians said they would like an inquiry widened to all such homes not covered by the Magdalene inquires.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The tax-writing committee of the U.S. House of Representatives will begin holding hearings on a Republican tax reform proposal next week, the panel’s chairman said on Tuesday, even as the timeline for overhauling the tax code slips toward late 2017.
Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Kevin Brady (R-TX) speaks about a Republican healthcare amendment during a press briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., April 6, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady told Fox News he would soon announce a hearing schedule to examine his House tax reform blueprint with its proposal to tax imports, a plan that appears to have lost ground as the White House works to unveil its own approach.
The investment consulting firm Veda Partners advised clients on Tuesday to expect an April 27 hearing on the import tax proposal known as the border adjustment tax, or BAT.
Brady’s committee could not confirm the date or topic, but he told Fox News the committee “will soon be announcing congressional hearings on our blueprint starting next week.”
He also acknowledged that the tax reform timeline could slip as House Republicans try to reach agreement to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, following their failed attempt to pass healthcare legislation in March.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said this week that tax reform may not get done before an August deadline.
“We probably ought not be focused on the month but the year that it happens, which is this year,” Brady said. “If it moves a little past August and still lands in this year, it’s going to be an incredible achievement.”
Much of the debate has focused on the House Republican BAT proposal, which would impose a 20 percent tax on imports, while exempting exports from taxation. The proposal is opposed by import-dependent industries and Republicans who worry it could lead to higher consumer prices.
Tax experts say the proposal’s future depends on whether the White House backs it. President Donald Trump, who dislikes the term “border adjustment,” said on Tuesday his tax reform plan would create “a level playing field” for U.S. industry - a phrase widely viewed as referring to some kind of border tax.
Brady identified the critical elements of legislation as significant rate reduction, full and immediate expensing for capital investments and a simplified tax code.
He cautioned against straightforward rate reductions of the kind that some in Congress have begun to consider.
“A rate cut alone would have worked in the 1980s. It doesn’t in 2017 if we’re going to be competitive,” Brady said.
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CUMBERLAND, Ga. -- Nigel Talton has been sprinting between innings at Atlanta Braves games for the past few years. But it took him putting on blue and white spandex and getting a cool nickname to become famous.
Talton is "The Freeze," who is part of a promotional race for the Braves and has gone viral over the past few weeks. Talton joined the Braves grounds crew in 2012. He was the one running from the foul pole in right field to third base after the third and sixth innings when the grounds crew freshens up the dirt. It's a job no one ever wanted because of how far it was.
But he did.
"No one ever wanted to go so the first time I did it, I had my rake and my base. I sprinted as fast I can all the way to third. And they were like, gosh he’s pretty fast," Talton told 11Alive's Wes Blankenship.
Last year, the Braves had Talton do the 20-second stolen base challenge to show off his speed. So before the 2017 season started, the Braves approached Talton about a new promotion and asked if he was interested. The rest is history.
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Here's how it goes: Talton races a fan who is released early in the outfield track, and when the fan reaches about the halfway point, Talton is released. He always catches up and beats the fan, except for the first time he did it. They were still working out the timing.
But a race last week went viral when a fan, Alex Arrowood, started celebrating too early. Arrowood fell flat on his face when he realized Talton was catching up on him and eventually won.
"They told me he’s like an Olympic track star, or something like that," Arrowood said of Talton, whose identity was still a mystery at the time. "It worried me a little bit, but I was like surely there’s no way he can catch me from that far in the distance."
Talton said he didn't feel too bad about how that race finished.
"He was showboating twice," Talton said. "I was like, 'He trying to embarrass The Freeze.'
"Can't have that."
Talton is training to make the U.S. Indoor Track and Field team and hopefully qualify for the 2020 Olympics. He lifts weights a couple times a week, runs almost every day except on weekends; that's when the track meets are.
Having an alter ego known as The Freeze has helped his career.
"I’m just having fun. I don’t have no pressure on me. Win or lose, I’m entertaining the fans. Running tack, it’s kind of stressful, but I know this will take the stress away," Talton said. "Me running in front of a big crowd, I won’t be nervous."
There are some differences. The massive head start the fans get, the running towards the right instead of to the left to go around a track. But he's got it down, and with so many challengers out there, he's staying in shape.
But the only MLB player The Freeze has his sights set on racing is Cincinnati Reds outfielder Billy Hamilton, one of the fastest runners in the game.
"I wish The Freeze can get an opportunity to run, but I wouldn’t give him a head start," Talton said.
The Reds visit SunTrust Park Aug. 18-20. Seems like a perfect time for that match-up.
The Braves have enjoyed watching The Freeze from the dugout. Mike Foltynewicz and Dansby Swanson had the biggest reactions when Talton beat Arrowood in that infamous race.
"It feels good that they notice my speed and that I'm entertaining the fans," Talton said.
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Slain Lawyer's YouTube Video Plunges Guatemala into Crisis, Protests Form on Facebook
The crisis in Guatemala sparked by an assassinated attorney's final words -- captured on YouTube -- continues to expand online and in the streets.
Above, a protest poster distributed on Twitter in posts marked with the hashtag #escandalogt (short for "Guatemalan Scandal," for those who don't read Spanish).
The poster reads: I WILL NOT BE AFRAID TO GO OUT INTO THE STREETS, DEFEND MY LIBERTY, UPHOLD THE LAW, DEMAND JUSTICE, I WILL NOT BE AFRAID TO LIVE IN MY HOMELAND AND CHANGE ITS FUTURE.... GUATEMALA, I WILL NOT ABANDON YOU.
Inset above, a photo taken on Sunday: a worker guards the body of Rodrigo Rosenberg just after he was shot by gunmen in Guatemala City.
In the posthumously-released video, Rosenberg said he feared he would be assasinated, and that if he were, those responsible would be operating at the orders of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom.
Prensa Libre reports that Facebook is now being used by Guatemalans calling for Colom's impeachment and trial. Organizers are spreading word on Twitter and various social networking sites to gather for a second day of protests, tomorrow, Wednesday May 13. Snip from article, with my rough translation from Spanish:
En el portal de Facebook se puede leer el enunciado de un usuario: "Hoy solo fue una pequeña muestra. Mañana con más fuerza y mientras más personas lleguemos mejor aún!!!! Manifestemos Todos!!! Mañana somos más!!!, se lee en otro. On Facebook one can read the declaration of a user who says, 'Today's demonstrations were only a small example, tomorrow with more strength and even more people we will achieve more still! Everyone, Protest! And, 'Tomorrow, there will be more of us,' says another user.
Here is one of many Facebook groups calling for Colom's resignation and trial.
The Wall Street Journal has a report up here. Colom was interviewed on CNN en Español today, and a transcript is here. Here's an AP item from today, here's a NYT item.
I'm hearing anecdotal reports on Twitter and elsewhere that account holders at Banrural, the Guatemalan bank at the heart of this scandal, are withdrawing all their cash from the institution and causing a growing liquidation panic that threatens to further destabilize the already teetering country.
Previously
- Guatemala: Protests for Assassinated Lawyer Streamed Live from Laptops in the Streets
- In YouTube Video Shot Before His Death, Attorney Blames President for His Assasination
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Six-year-old Justin Wilson III gets a hug from father and shop owner Justin Wilson at the TennisServ shop in Herndon, Va., on Nov. 26, 2014. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
RICHMOND — Many businesses will open early and close late for the traditional start of the holiday shopping season this weekend, but Justin Wilson’s shop won’t be one of them.
The owner of a tennis specialty store in Herndon says he cannot compete with online sellers who keep their prices low by not charging customers sales tax.
“Six percent on a $200 racket is 12 dollars they don’t have to pay me,” he said. “I put up the white flag. It’s just simply not worth it.”
Wilson and other Virginia business owners are frustrated with Congress’s failure to act on a bill that would force online retailers without a brick and mortar presence in states such as Virginia to levy sales tax at the point of purchase.
Now the federal bill, called the Marketplace Fairness Act, has languished in committee long enough to trigger another unwelcome tax — this time on Virginia motorists.
State lawmakers grappling with how to fund former governor Robert F. McDonnell’s landmark 2013 transportation bill included a fail-safe measure that would increase the state’s gas tax if Congress failed to deliver on online sales revenue by the start of 2015.
The tax amounts to about 5 cents on every gallon of wholesale gas, all or part of which retailers may decide to pass on to consumers at the pump. With a few weeks to go, the lame-duck Congress is unlikely to act, making Virginia’s gas tax hike all but guaranteed.
Maryland included a similar trigger in a major transportation funding bill passed last year, but it does not kick in until December 2015. If Congress has not passed the Marketplace Fairness Act by that point, the sales tax on gas in Maryland will go up by another 2 cents over the following two years.
U.S. Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House committee where the bill languishes, said many lawmakers, including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), “have serious concerns” about the online sales tax bill and “do not believe this legislation is the answer.”
As for state lawmakers poised to oversee a gas tax increase in a year when all members of the General Assembly will be on the November ballot, Goodlatte was unsympathetic.
In a statement, he said: “I warned state officials last year that this was a very complicated issue that has been a topic of debate for nearly 15 years and that they should not assume legislation would be enacted within their time frame. The General Assembly was shortsighted in passing a transportation package with funding dependent upon the assumption that fundamentally flawed federal legislation would be enacted.”
State Sen. Frank Wagner (R-Virginia Beach) said the gas tax provision was part of an eleventh-hour compromise he brokered to satisfy Democrats uneasy about using general fund dollars to prop up the transportation bill.
“The goal was to raise a billion dollars for transportation,” he said. “The House was firmly entrenched that [the federal bill] was going to make up a majority of that money. The Senate was skeptical, so we didn’t want to leave a major hole in the billion dollar budget.”
Although McDonnell initially pitched the transportation bill as “revenue neutral,” a slew of taxes and fees were included to fund improvements to the state’s aging roads and bridges.
The transportation bill changed the way the gas tax is assessed from a flat tax of 17.5 cents per wholesale gallon to a percentage based on the average price over a six-month period. The hike would raise the tax from 3.5 percent to 5.1 percent, or from 11.1 cents to 16.1 cents.
The increase would bring in $783 million over five years, but would not fully replace the $978 million in projected revenue from the online sales legislation, according to an analysis from the Commonwealth Institute.
On top of that, the Institute found that if the federal bill stalls, the amount of sales tax revenue dumped into the transportation fund would be capped at 2015 levels instead of rising, reducing transportation funds by an additional $220 million by 2018.
All told, a report from the institute published in April 2013 called the scheme “a failed bet” that is likely to reduce the state’s overall investment in transportation .
The hole in projected revenue over five years won’t leave any specific projects unfunded, according to the Senate Finance Committee. The money would have bolstered the transportation trust fund to pay for future but unidentified projects.
The U.S. Senate passed Marketplace Fairness in May 2013, with ‘yes’ votes from Sens. Mark R. Warner and Timothy M. Kaine. Shortly after that, Wilson of TennisServ said, he met with Goodlatte on the issue.
“It’s been 18 months and there’s no proposal. Give us language. You’ve had 18 months to do it. Please do it and pass whatever version you think would be acceptable to House Republicans and conference it,” Wilson said.
Wilson said he can “do cartwheels” helping customers identify their ideal racket or tennis shoe only to have them make the purchase online.
“’I’m going to think about it,’” he said, citing a typical interaction with customers. “That’s code word for, ‘I’m going to go home and buy it on the internet.’”
U.S. Rep. H. Morgan Griffith, who with fellow Republican Rep. Scott Rigell co-sponsored the House version of Marketplace Fairness, said the bill wouldn’t levy a new tax, but simply would require people to pay what they already owe.
“I bet you 98 percent of Americans have no idea they’re supposed to be reporting this on their income tax,” he said, adding that every year he calculates what he owes from his hobby collecting antique postcards. An online retailer would have to sell $1 million in goods before the tax would kick in, he said.
“I don’t see some of the problems that others see with it being burdensome,” he said. “One million protects the small guy. Most people want to pay what’s fair, they just don’t want to be cheated.”
John Wagner contributed to this report.
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THE GUERRILLA ANGEL REPORT — [UPDATE, see below.] With the amount of trans exploitation going on in the media, particularly by the British press, it is nearly impossible pin down whether or not Julia Collier’s was actually transgender and if she was, did that status actually figured into her death, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter — Chris Collier did murder his wife and a Turkish court convicted him in August for it and now he’s paying for his crime in a Turkish jail. Justice served.
Chris Collier came to fame as part of the British Phones4U empire before moving to Kusadasi, Turkey. As far as I can tell, Julia worked as a singing and piano teacher in Turkey before meeting up with Chris Collier.
[UPDATE: I corrected portions of this report when it was pointed out that Julia may not even have been transgender and the claim(s) she was one may have been a fabrication.]
The press is having a heyday seemingly blaming it on the husband “discovery” that she is transgender. Indeed, research a media watch group raises compelling doubt on the tabloids’ claim Julia is even transgender.
Looking at the facts, the math doesn’t add up. Not even close. Pure typical tabloidism to make a buck at the expense of giving trans people a black eye. In addition to trying to excuse his behavior, the tabloids tried to draw attention to the fact he was going to spend his jail term in a Turkish prison and ought to be serving it in the UK instead.
No pity, he’s right where he deserves to be.
I’m not going to link to any of those tabloids, but for those interested in reading more, check out a thread about this story here:https://www.facebook.com/groups/transmediawatch/permalink/10152133842475361/
In the comments section (below) I’m posting an English translation of a news story that appears to be factual.
(Tip of the hat to everyone at Trans Media Watch FB group!)
———-
You’re welcome to share this entire article!
Follow this topic on Lexie Cannes’ Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/lexiecannes
Support this site, get the transgender-themed feature film “Lexie Cannes“ DVD here: http://www.lexiecannes.com/id13.html
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Categories: Deaths, Murder, Law Enforcement, Police, Transgender, Transsexual, Trans
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Figure 1
Left: schematic of the experimental setup downstream of BigRIPS-F6. Right: momentum correlation between the He 8 beam ( P He 8 ) at F6 and the Be 8 ejectile ( P Be 8 ) at S2 for candidate events. P He 8 = P Be 8 = 0 % corresponds to the central position of the focal plane. The shaded diagonal line shows the energy threshold of four-neutron decay. The diagonal axis is T He 8 − T Be 8 + Q , where T He 8 and T Be 8 denote the kinetic energies of He 8 and Be 8 , respectively, and Q is the Q value of the He 4 ( He 8 , Be 8 ) 4 n reaction. This axis corresponds to the sum of the missing mass and the recoil energy of the tetraneutron. The recoil energy for each event ranges from 0 to 3 MeV depending on each scattering angle, which is another degree of freedom from the magnitudes of the momenta.
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With a lot of more modern computers using SSD’s (Solid State Hard Drives), one question I often get asked is if you need to defragment a SSD. That’s a good question because up until now, pretty much everyone has heard of defragmenting a PC.
So why do we defragment a hard drive in the first place? Well, I won’t go into super detail here since you can read about it online, but basically it’s because spinning hard drives taker longer to read data that is “fragmented” or stored in multiple locations on the hard disk. Since spinning hard drives read and write data sequentially, it will take longer for the hard drive to read a file if parts of the file are located on different parts of the disk as compared to being located altogether in one unit/space.
So defragmenting a normal spinning hard drive can be useful depending on the size of your drive, the number of files you have stored and the size of those files. Now the question becomes is defragmenting useful if the hard drive has no physical moving parts?
Well, the answer to that question is pretty easy once you understand the difference between an SSD and a HDD. An SSD is basically non-volatile flash memory, which you are probably used to using in your digital camera, etc. An SSD is fast because it randomly accesses memory instead of sequentially like an HDD. SSD’s are great, but there is one huge caveat that most hard drive manufacturer’s never mention about SSDs and that’s their lifespan.
LifeSpan of SSDs
Because of the way they are built, an SSD wears down every time they are write accessed. If you have read reviews of SSDs before, you have probably read about how an SSD will get slower if you benchmark it after completely filling the drive and then erasing it. With a HDD, you would never have that problem. Most people mistakenly think SSDs are safer than HDDs because they have no moving parts. This is not true. Flash memory has a very finite lifespan and the more it is used, the more quickly it will fail.
So back to the question of defragmenting. When you defrag a hard drive, especially a SSD, it will end up causing tons of small write accesses, which will reduce the lifespan of the hard drive. And since data is not being read sequentially, it doesn’t matter if the file is stored in a hundred different places, the performance will remain the same.
So, no, you should not defrag an SSD. And performing one will actually reduce the life of your drive. All of the SSD manufacturer’s know of this problem and they have come up with an optimization technique with the use of the TRIM command.
Currently, with HDDs and SSDs, if you delete some data on the hard drive, the operating system does not actually remove the content from the disk, it just deletes the pointer to the address and therefore “deletes” the data. That’s probably why you’re heard of secure delete or government security file deletion, which actually overwrites the deleted data with gibberish so no one can use advanced tools to read data later on.
This issue of data not actually being deleted is what causes the lifespan of SSDs to be reduced. If the drive knew which areas of memory didn’t contain any important data, it could simply re-use it for new data. The TRIM command is supported by the latest SSDs and will optimize the hard drive so that it reduces the number of writes/deletions and therefore extends the life of your SSD significantly.
If you’re in the market to buy an SSD, make your choice very carefully. You want a hard drive that supports the TRIM command.
There are a lot of other SSDs that support the TRIM command, but you have to check with the manufacturer. Note that Windows 7/8/10 natively supports the TRIM command for hard drives that support it, so you don’t have to do anything. Older versions of Windows do not support the TRIM command. In the case of Windows XP and Vista, the OS cannot even tell the difference between an SSD and a HDD, so it’s best to turn off the Disk Defragmenter.
You can also use third party programs that support TRIM to run on systems not running Windows 7/8/10. If you don’t believe everything I’ve said, then you can check out this post from a more reliable source that details exactly why it’s not a good idea to defrag a SSD:
http://www.oo-software.com/en/docs/whitepaper/ood_ssd.pdf
If you have a different opinion or something to add, please feel free to add a comment! Enjoy!
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Mhairi Black, the youngest MP elected to parliament in centuries, finds it ‘depressing’. If you would like to become a politician share your thoughts with us
Very little gets done in Westminster, according to the youngest MP elected to parliament in more than 350 years.
'End the London-centricity': young people on the future of politics Read more
Mhairi Black told the Sunday Post she had not got used to working in Westminster: “It has been nearly two years and I still hate the place,” she said. “It is depressing. It is the personal elements – it is a pain to come up and down every week and you are working with a number of people you find quite troubling.
“Professionally, it is more just that so little gets done. It is so old and defunct in terms of its systems and procedures – a lot of the time, it is just a waste of time.”
Black, who was 20 when she won the seat of Paisley and Renfrewshire South for the SNP from Labour’s Douglas Alexander in 2015, says she may quit after one term as MP.
Share your experiences
Whether you are hoping to go into politics, or already work in your local constituency or in Westminster we’d like to hear from you. What do you think the future of politics looks like for young people? What puts you off politics and, if you could, what changes would you make?
You can share your experiences by filling in our encrypted form below, anonymously if you wish. We will do our best to ensure your responses are kept secure and confidential. A selection of contributions will be featured in our reporting.
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Photo: Trevor and Jessica Aitken
Jessica and Trevor Aitken's trip to Mexico turned into a terrifying experience where they were kidnapped, robbed, held at gunpoint and left begging for their lives.
The two recently travelled to Mazatlán to surprise Trevor’s parents who were vacationing in a gated community condo. The community was filled with Canadian snowbirds who had driven down to Mexico for the winter.
On March 20, the couple took off with Trevor’s parents in their Jeep Grand Cherokee to El Quelite, a well-known day-trip for tourists, located about 40 kilometres outside of Mazatlán.
Trevor’s parents, Jim and Carol, had driven their 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee to Mexico from Ontario in January and were planning on staying until the end of April at their rented condo.
The four had lunch with another Canadian couple who had driven their own Jeep to El Quelite.
“We were driving and our friends were a couple of cars ahead of us, when a Rav4 cut us off,” he said. “They blocked the road, there was no where to go, there was a ditch on either side. Then four armed men with assault rifles and bullet proof vests jumped out. They started banging on the windows and pointing guns at us.”
The men threatened to shoot out the windows so Trevor and his father, who were both in the front seats, unlocked the doors and were dragged from the vehicle.
“They forced us into their vehicle, threw us in the back seat. Jess and my mom were left in our vehicle and two men stayed with them. Then the Jeep took off and we followed in the Rav4.”
Trevor estimates they drove off of the highway for about seven kilometres on a dirt road. Separated from her husband Jessica feared for her and Carol’s safety, as they were alone with the two men.
“They drove us into a field, and let Jess and my mom get out of my dad’s vehicle and they put them in the vehicle with us. Two of them took off in the Jeep, we think they wanted the Jeep,” Trevor explained.
The family sat for almost an hour and a half in the vehicle while the gunmen argued outside on the phone with someone in Spanish.
“They forced us out of the vehicle, and at this point they had already taken all of our jewelry, cash, cellphones and everything we had packed for our day trip in our vehicle,” said Trevor.
“Then one of them left in the Rav4 and went and picked up the other two guys who had taken the Jeep. We were left with one guy who was pointing the gun at us.”
When the gunmen returned they had a cellphone on speaker, where a man could be heard yelling in English demanding more money or they would all be shot.
“That’s when they forced me to the ground and put me on my knees and held the gun to the back of my head,” Trevor explained. He said he thought that was it, his life was over, and he would be killed in front of his wife and parents.
Praying aloud Jessica began begging the gunmen to release her husband.
“Carol was holding my hands and telling me to just do whatever they say and that we should stay quiet,” said Jessica.
All of the sudden one of the gunmen started to yell ‘La Familia’ over and over, which for some reason calmed the situation.
Trevor and Jim were pushed into the back of the Rav4, while Jessica and Carol sat in the front seats and were driven out of the field back to the highway.
“They just let us go on the side of the highway,” said Jessica. “It was about 5 p.m. at this time so this happened to us in broad daylight.”
Shaken and terrified the four managed to wave down a vehicle, whose driver happened to be an off-duty police officer. The officer helped the family get water and called for help, which took a long time to arrive, leaving them vulnerable on the side of the road.
Finally they were taken back to their condo, and were told to go to the police department the following day for a statement.
“My parents will never go back, they had planned to go to Mazatlán again next year, but now they are done with Mexico,” said Trevor. “I might go back, but I won’t ever take a vehicle.”
Jessica and Trevor realize that bad things can happen anywhere, and while the police were friendly they were not helpful.
“There will never be justice for what happened,” said Jessica. “There was no real help for us, and this was a very serious thing that happened to us. People need to know when your life is put in jeopardy it’s scary, and you don’t think it can happen to you but it can.”
Mazatlán is located in the state of Sinaloa, which is currently home to Sinaloa Cartel, often described as the largest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in the Western Hemisphere, according to insightcrime.org.
Currently there is no advisory for Canadians against travelling to Mexico; however the government does advise tourists to exercise a high degree of caution at this time.
Visit Castanet's front page for more news.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaking at a news conference in January. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
NASHUA, N.H. -- Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who’s made limited headway with African American voters despite drawing large crowds on the campaign trail, on Saturday pledged “a significant expansion” in outreach to minority communities.
“We’re going to significantly increase that,” the Democratic presidential hopeful told reporters after a morning campaign stop here. “The views that we hold are important to all Americans … but to be honest with you, they’re probably more relevant to black and Hispanic voters … because the poverty rate in those communities is even higher than whites.”
Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, cited his support to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and offer free college tuition as examples.
In a later interview, Sanders said he plans to add members to his campaign staff to help with the effort.
“We’re going to be bringing people into our campaign who will give us increased capability of reaching out to the African American community and the Hispanic community,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do.”
Black voters are a crucial constituency in the Democratic nominating process, particularly after the contest moves beyond Iowa and New Hampshire to South Carolina and other states with larger African American populations, where Hillary Rodham Clinton is a well-established figure.
In recent weeks, Sanders has seen his crowds swell in early nominating states and other places where he’s traveled. His audiences numbered in the thousands recently in both Minneapolis and Denver.
[Bernie Sanders packs thousands into a Denver gymnasium]
Sanders represents a state that is 95 percent white. In a piece in the New York Times last week outlining his challenge, the senator’s advisers acknowledged that he remains largely unknown among African American voters, despite a civil rights record that includes leading sit-ins in the 1960s.
Speaking here to a crowd of more than 500 packed into a community college gymnasium, Sanders made a passing reference to having more recently joined African American workers in North Carolina on the picket lines in support of raising the minimum wage.
During his hour-long stump speech, however, he made no mention of the recent massacre at a historic African American church in Charleston, S.C., that left nine parishoners dead. The episode has prompted Clinton and another Democratic, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley (D), to make gun control a prominent part of their pitch.
[A pro-O’Malley super PAC goes after Sanders on guns]
Sanders, whose state is rural and home to many hunters, has a mixed record on gun control, including a 1993 vote against the landmark Brady Bill, which mandated federal background checks on firearms purchasers.
Asked by an audience member here Saturday if he is willing to take on the National Rifle Association, Sanders defended his record, saying the gun rights group has given him a lifetime rating of “somewhere between D and F.”
Sanders noted the rural nature of his state, saying that “guns in Chicago and Los Angeles are not the same thing as guns in New Hampshire and Vermont.”
But he relayed that he has during his career voted for bills to ban assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.
“I think my record is pretty strong,” he said.
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New York artist Sophia Wallace wants you -- and everyone you know -- to be cliterate.
"It's appalling and shocking to think that scientifically, the clitoris was only discovered in 1998," Wallace told The Huffington Post from her Brooklyn studio last week. "But really, it may as well have never been discovered at all because there's still such ignorance when it comes to the female body."
The clitoris, described as the only human body part that exists solely for pleasure, is not merely a little "button" hidden between a woman's legs, but rather a large, mostly internal organ many people don't know about, Wallace explains.
According to a 2011 post by Museum of Sex blogger Ms. M, the internal clitoris (highlighted in yellow in the images above) is a complex erectile structure consisting of two corpora cavernosa (that are said to wrap around the vagina when erect), two crura (erectile bodies that branch out from the clitoral body), clitoral vestibules or bulbs, and the clitoral glans (the part that you can see).
In 1998, Australian urologist Helen O’Connell published a paper in the Journal of Urology describing the sheer scope and size of the clitoris. She wrote that the unerect clitoris, most of which is not visible, could be up to 9 centimeters long -- longer, as some have described it, than an unerect penis.
As Robert King, professor at Ireland's University College Cork, explained in a July post on Psychology Today, the true anatomy of the clitoris had actually appeared in scientific literature as long ago as the mid-1800s. However, King writes that O'Connell's research shed light on the clitoris like no one had before.
Wallace, citing anecdotal evidence, says ignorance still seems to be ever-pervasive in modern society.
"It is a curious dilemma to observe the paradox that on the one hand the female body is the primary metaphor for sexuality, its use saturates advertising, art and the mainstream erotic imaginary. Yet, the clitoris, the true female sexual organ, is virtually invisible," Wallace told Creem magazine earlier this year.
"Even in porn, the clitoris is treated as this optional, kind of freaky, 'wow he's doing her this huge favor' thing," she told HuffPost, adding that women often feel "embarrassed" to ask their partners to pleasure them. "It's insane to me that this is still happening in 2013."
Last year, during her tenure in the Art & Law Residency, Wallace started work on a multi-media project that she hoped would serve to challenge these misconceptions and to lift the veil on this enduring ignorance about the female body.
Aptly entitled "Cliteracy," the project, which is ongoing, includes Wallace's "100 Laws of Cliteracy," street art about the organ, as well as a "clit rodeo" that involves an interactive installment of a giant golden clitoris.
Scroll down to learn more about Wallace's project:
What is "Cliteracy"?
"I wanted to talk about female genitals in a way that I felt wasn't really being talked about," Wallace said. "For me, this word 'cliteracy' perfectly breaks down the idea of the project. It's this pithy, wonderful little word that encapsulates so much so quickly and so simply. It illuminates this idea of total illiteracy and incompetence when it comes to the female body."
The "100 Natural Laws of Cliteracy"
Spanning 10 feet by 13 feet, with a 6-foot neon "Cliteracy" sign suspended from the ceiling, Wallace's "100 Natural Laws" installation is, as she describes it, "monumental in scope and scale."
"I wanted to create something so big that it would make everyone, including a football player or basketball player, feel small next to it," she said. "You can't just glance at it and expect to have gotten it. You have to spend time with it and think about it."
Using scientific data, historical information, as well as references to architecture, porn, pop culture and human rights, the "100 Laws" have been a way for Wallace to lay out her "case for the clit," she says.
"I chose to use the language of Natural Law because its authority precedes the mandate of states, countries and religious bodies. Natural laws are inalienable. In much of the world women do not hold dominion over their own bodies, and even in this country, women are too often acquiescing to sex acts that do not give them pleasure," she told Creem.
One of the most fascinating of Wallace's "100 Laws" references the story of a French doctor named Pierre Foldes who, thanks to recent research into the anatomy of the clitoris, came up with a method of repairing the damage caused by female genital mutilation. By removing scar tissue from the vulva and lowering -- and revealing -- a portion of the internal clitoris, he has been able to restore pleasure to thousands of women who have been circumcised.
Until recently, Foldes is believed to have been the only doctor in the world who was carrying out this particular surgery. More doctors have since adopted his methods.
“When I returned to France to treat genital mutilation, I was amazed that they were never tried," Foldes said, according to a 2011 Museum of Sex blog post on the internal clitoris. "The medical literature tells us the truth about our contempt for women. For three centuries, there are thousands of references to penile surgery, nothing on the clitoris, except for some cancers or dermatology -- and nothing to restore its sensitivity. The very existence of an organ of pleasure is denied, medically."
Street art
To get people talking about the clitoris, Wallace has been taking to the streets of New York City, plastering walls with cliteracy-related posters and slogans.
"This is an advertising campaign for the clitoris," she said of the unauthorized street art installations. "After all, who needs an ad campaign more than the clit?"
"This work has never meant to be behind the white walls of a gallery. It's really about cliteracy becoming a meme and creating new language for bodies and sexuality," Wallace said, adding that she wants to soon take her street art project global.
"Clit Rodeo"
With the help of sculptor Kenneth Thomas, Wallace created an anatomically accurate -- and rideable -- golden clitoris that debuted at the Wassaic Project Summer Festival in New York, earlier this month. The giant organ was the star of the "Clit Rodeo," an interactive performance that involved members of the public performing and dancing with the giant clitoris for prizes.
"[It was] an invitation for audiences to experience a space free from traditional shame, taboo and silence usually cloaking conversations around sexuality, particularly female genitals," said Wallace, who intends on bringing the "Clit Rodeo" to other parts of the U.S.
"People couldn't stop looking at [the clitoris], touching it riding it, being around it," she added. "It just had this aura about it. It wasn't just women on the clit, it wasn't just the men, everyone was engaged."
Cliteracy gear
"If you see a man walking around with a 'solid gold clit' shirt, it creates this social experiment -- what does it mean to have a 'clit' on your shirt? It's just interesting to see these words out in the world and to see how they operate and how people respond," Wallace said of her line of clothing featuring cliteracy slogans.
"It's cool to see how much dialogue can be opened up. Ultimately that's what the goal is -- to open up a conversation," she added.
Wallace says that her cliteracy project has gone viral since its launch, triggering a great public response both at physical exhibitions, as well as online on social media platforms like Tumblr.
"It's been a showstopper wherever its been shown. People are hungry to be able to talk about this," she said. "I'm thrilled that it's gone viral and I hope it'll continue to be shared. I absolutely want people to talk about it -- and really, the effect is only beginning."
Cliteracy, says Wallace, is really something that everyone should care about.
Though the project may seem limited to the discussion about women's bodies and female sexuality, Wallace insists that it's really much, much bigger than that.
Not only is the project for everyone ("I love seeing men standing up for the clit," Wallace says, adding that this is a conversation that liberates people of all genders), but she says that the clitoris can be seen as a "metaphor for freedom, body sovereignty and citizenship."
"Cliteracy is about not having one's body controlled or legislated," she said. "Not having access to the pleasure that is your birthright is a deeply political act."
"To me, this has always been about a bigger conversation. It's about breaking down walls."
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Cypriot shop owner Onoufrios Michaelides, stands in his small electrical appliance store in Cyprus' coastal port city of Limassol on Tuesday holding a letter addressed to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, with a check attached donating his monthly pension to Greece, to contribute towards funds to help the country in it's bid to overcome their economic crisis.
An 88-year-old Cypriot retiree has sent his 506 euro (555 dollar) pension to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras as a contribution towards the cash-strapped country’s budget in a show of "support and gratitude."
Onoufrios Michaelides, who describes himself as a "Greek Cypriot refugee" from the north of the island, sent the money along with a letter addressed to the leftist "Comrade Alexis.”
The gift was in "appreciation of your tireless but also heroic efforts to preserve and secure the honor and dignity of the Greek people, which our powerful vulgar ‘associates’ so much defy and abuse... Damn them."
He asked that his contribution, his entire monthly pension, serve as "partial fulfullment of my ideological identity toward my internationalistic feelings".
He concluded the letter: "Keep high, Comrade Alexis, our banner of struggle for pride and dignity."
Michaelides, who has a small electrical appliances shop in the coastal city of Limassol, told AFP he was moved to act after seeing TV images of "people my age standing outside the banks trying to get" money from their accounts.
Michaelides, whose three daughters studied in Greece after he became a refugee in the 1974 Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, said he would have voted "no" in the Sunday referendum called by Tsipras to reject EU conditions for an economic bailout.
"I am a sensitive person... and I told myself this small gesture could encourage people with more money to help people," he said, adding that he had received a telephone call from Tsipras aides thanking him for his gesture.
"I saw how much we have suffered (Cypriots), probably less than the Greeks, and I told myself: yes, do it, send this small amount to help families poorer than yours." [AFP]
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The AIPAC-sponsored Israel Anti-Boycott Law, introduced in the House of Representatives as H.R.1697 and Senate as S.720, has generated a storm of grassroots pushback. The Intercept and American Civil Liberties Union protested the proposed laws, arguing that Americans supporting boycotts of Israel over its human rights violations could be hit with fines up to $1 million and jail time up to 20 years.
Senator Ben Cardin responded to the ACLU, promising to "fix" the bill so that it would not infringe on freedom of speech or target individual Americans. However, freedom of speech was only one enormous flaw in the legislation, which is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s top 2017 lobbying priority. The other key problem with the Israel Anti-Boycott Law is that it inserts Israel into places it has no right to be – at the very center of laws protecting U.S. national security, trade and that moderate expansive presidential economic powers during emergencies.
Because it is yet another case of Congress trying to write foreign policy – like the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 – the proposed law relies upon a stalking horse, in this case the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as its central authority. The 1977 IEEPA law limits presidential authority to regulate commerce after declaring a national emergency in response to any unusual and extraordinary threat to the US which has a foreign source. The IEEPA itself falls under provisions of the 1976 National Emergencies Act (NEA), which governs how such special presidential powers to declare emergencies are to be invoked and then limiting their duration, through annual renewal requirements.
A 1973 Senate report on "emergencies" still in effect at the time under NEA listed bona fide but fading threats to the United States, such as the 1933 banking crisis, the 1950 emergency of the Korean War, and a 1970 postal workers strike. Israel’s growing international ostracization, which is generating worldwide grassroots calls for boycotts, is not a US emergency. Rather, it is a direct result of Israel’s brutal settler-colonial policies and increasing global awareness of Israel’s activities.
IEEPA has been misused in the recent past. After 9/11, IEEPA was invoked to block assets of accused "terrorist" organizations. This resulted in the formation of a new, secretive, AIPAC-backed office in the US Treasury Department that immediately struck down charities such as Al-Haramain, Benevolence International, Global Relief, and Kind Hearts with little due process. Javed Iqbal was arrested through Treasury Department complaints of violating IEEPA for broadcasting Al-Manar over his cable network in New York City to offer viewers a counterpoint to typical US televised narratives during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. Charges against Iqbal could not be defended based on free speech, since he was charged with material support for a global terrorist entity (Hezbollah). Iqbal was sentenced to almost 6 years in jail.
Beyond subverting the First Amendment, which it is clearly intended to do, the Israel Anti-Boycott Law inserts Israel into Chapter 56 – Export Administration section 4607, making Israel the only specifically designated foreign country in a trade law designed to advance US – not foreign – commercial interests. IABA suddenly makes US policing of foreign countries possibly interested in BDS, blocs such as the European Union and the UN, a US national security interest and problem – which they are clearly not – by placing Israel at the center of the US Export Administration Act of 1979. IABL amendments seek to ban organizations like the UN from compiling and distributing lists of companies doing business in territories illegally occupied by Israel. What US national interest is served by banning transparency over illegal Israeli activity? No interest.
Finally, the bill’s "rule of construction" mandates "nothing in this section shall be construed to alter the established policy of the United States or to establish new United States policy concerning final status issues associated with the Arab-Israeli conflict, including border delineation, that can only be resolved through direct negotiations between the parties." Translated into English, this means that Israel and its lobby can continue to use the US as a diplomatic lever, but Palestinians cannot employ UN, the EU or other allies in the international community, as a comparable counterweight.
There are many reasons why Israel might want the US to rewrite laws designed to advance America, to protect Israel against economic backlash. Few Americans are served by such meddling. So why do members of congress such as Ben Cardin quietly foist such laws on their constituents (and fellow Americans), to the extent of threatening fines and prison time?
The Israel lobby.
Among Ben Cardin’s top 20 year 2017 donors, 86% of the individual contributors administer, ran, or belong to Israel affinity organizations, including Howard Friedman, a former president of AIPAC. Among his top non-Democratic Party PAC contributors in the top 20, two are pro-Israel stealth PACs, providing 31% of his top-20 2017 PAC revenue. Members of the Israel lobby, not Marylanders, are Cardin’s top constituent on such matters.
Although mainstream media and congressional attention is raptly fixated on Russia as America’s biggest foreign agent threat, the Israel Anti-Boycott Law is yet another harsh warning that until the Foreign Agents Registration Act is properly enforced over Israel’s agents, including those already ordered to register such as AIPAC, Americans can expect escalating attempts by the lobby to curtail their governance, economic freedom and liberty.
Grant F. Smith is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington and the author of the 2016 book, Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby moves America and America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department’s Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government.
Read more by Grant Smith
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Now that “binders full of women” has officially become the “Big Bird” of the second presidential debate — the line that the president and his surrogates are quoting on the stump, supposedly as evidence of Mitt Romney’s extremism and his back-to-the-1950s reactionary worldview — and before it’s eclipsed by something else from Monday’s looming foreign policy showdown, it’s worth pausing a moment to reflect on the strangeness of how partisan psychology works during these last, lunatic days of an election cycle.
There have been plenty of moments during this campaign cycle when Romney delivered some line or another that really did fit the caricature that Democrats have been sketching of him, with the famous “47 percent” monologue being the most deservedly devastating example. But the “binders full of women” line was nothing remotely like this. Instead, it was an amusingly maladroit phrase that was woven into a full-on pander to exactly the kind of concerns that liberals are often more likely than conservatives to argue that politicians should address — concerns about workplace diversity, female advancement, the glass ceiling, work-life balance, you name it.
Sure, the first half of Romney’s answer may have overstated how pro-active he actually was in recruiting female candidates for positions in his Massachusetts administration, but the fact that he relied on a binder put together by a women’s group was a case study in exactly the kind of behavior that feminists, in particular, tend to argue that we need more of from executives and hiring managers. Writing for New York on Wednesday, Ann Friedman bravely stepped outside of the partisan bubble to make exactly this point:
Boston journalist David Bernstein reports that while Romney did indeed find himself with a binder full of women’s names, it wasn’t something he requested. The binder was put together by MassGAP, a bipartisan group of women who joined forces in 2002 to push Romney’s incoming administration to hire more women. Did you catch that? The binder of women was assembled by women and pushed onto Romney’s desk, unsolicited. When we mock Romney’s reliance on it, we’re actually mocking a concerted strategy by an accomplished group of women to diversify their state government. Oops. The binder-full-of-names approach is a time-honored way of getting people (mostly men, sure, but also women) in positions of power to do more than pay lip service to the idea of diversity. In my own industry, I got so sick of hearing male editors say over and over that they didn’t know or couldn’t find any great women journalists, so I created an online compendium of recent work by women. A digital binder full of women journalists, if you will. I have no idea if editors have turned to it when they’re looking to assign articles, but I do know that its very existence disproves a classic excuse for lack of gender balance in magazine bylines. It answers a very stupid but persistent question: Where are the women writers? Right here, in this binder that I can show to you.
The second half of Romney’s answer, meanwhile, was essentially an endorsement of the kind of female-friendly workplaces that featured so prominently in, say, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s much-discussed call for making the work-life balance easier on working mothers. You can argue with Slaughter’s “having it all” framing (I certainly did) but the issue she’s talking about —how to help women navigate the workplace while their kids are young — is about as far from a reactionary concern as you can. And what Romney said about it is exactly the kind of thing that our leadership class, both corporate and political, should be saying:
… one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. But number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can’t be here until 7 or 8 o’clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o’clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.
In the land of the partisan mind, of course, this part of Romney’s answer has likewise been invoked a sign of his out-of-touch “Donna Reed in the kitchen, Dad in the barcalounger” view of women — because maybe wives don’t want to make the dinner, governor! Maybe they want to be the ones working late at the office! But back in nonpartisan reality, both working mothers and stay-at-home mothers are likely to cite part-time rather than full-time work as their ideal professional situation. Not necessarily because they want to cook more meals for their children, true, but almost certainly because they like the idea of “being with them when they get home from,” just as Romney put it. Overall, the idea that the Republican nominee is somehow out of touch with contemporary life because he believes that female voters (especially, I dunno, blue-collar female voters living paycheck to paycheck in Ohio …) would like more flexible work schedules is itself completely out of touch with contemporary life.
The real problem with Romney’s comments about workplace and family issues is that (as is so often the case) there wasn’t any policy meat on the bone. (The cause of work-life balance would be dramatically furthered if Republicans actually backed the kind of family-friendly tax reform that certain voices on the right have been championing these last few years — but alas, no such luck.) And if liberals were using this gap between his pander and his actual promises to hit Romney as hopelessly light on substance (and to be fair, some are), then they would be on completely solid ground. But the line the Obama campaign is mostly taking instead — that this is “Father Knows Best” unleashed, and patriarchy red in tooth and claw — is a case study in the black-is-white, up-is-down thinking that we’ve come to expect from this most wonderful time of the political year.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Google has no plans to expand its partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV to create a self-driving car, the program chief at the Alphabet Inc unit said on Thursday, affirming that the technology company was still in talks with other potential partners.
A security guard keeps watch as he walks past a logo of Google at an exhibition stage during the 4th China (Shanghai) International Technology Fair 2016 in Shanghai, China, April 21, 2016. REUTERS/Aly Song
Earlier this month, Google and Fiat Chrysler agreed to work together to build a fleet of 100 self-driving minivans in the most advanced collaboration to date between Silicon Valley and a traditional carmaker. Google said it was not sharing proprietary self-driving vehicle technology with Fiat Chrysler, and that the vehicles would not be offered for sale.
“This is just FCA and Google building 100 cars together,” Google self-driving car Chief Executive John Krafcik said in an interview on the sidelines of an energy conference in Washington.
“We’re still talking to a lot of different automakers,” he added. “We’ve been very open about what the technology is and the problem we want to solve together. Solving this problem is going to require a lot of partnership.”
Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said after the partnership was announced that what had been agreed with Google was limited, but he suggested that the alliance could evolve.
Google has no timetable for making self-driving vehicles available to the public and has logged about 1.5 million miles of test driving, Krafcik said on a panel at the conference.
“We have a responsibility to get this out there as soon as we can and really as soon as we have data that says we’re better than the current system of flawed human drivers,” Krafcik said, citing 33,000 annual traffic deaths and more than 2.3 million injuries. “As soon as we’re better we should push the button and go.”
Rival technology and auto companies are accelerating their efforts to master the complex hardware and artificial intelligence systems required to allow vehicles to pilot themselves.
On Thursday, ride hailing company Uber Technologies Inc[UBER.UL] released photographs of a Ford Fusion it had outfitted with sensors to enable autonomous driving. The car is being tested in Pittsburgh, Uber said in a blog post.
General Motors Co earlier this month closed its acquisition of self-driving car technology startup Cruise Automation.
Another San Francisco startup company, Otto, said earlier this week it was developing systems for self-driving commercial trucks.
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PCIe and especially NVMe SSDs are without a doubt the hot topic in the SSD industry at the moment. There are still only a handful of drives on the retail market, but as we saw at Computex a few weeks ago, everyone is working closely on their PCIe designs and we should see more entries to the market later this year with a big wave of PCIe SSDs arriving in the first half of 2016.
Samsung has always been an early adopter in the SSD space. The company was the first one on the market with a PCIe 2.0 x4 M.2 SSD the (XP941) back in late 2013, and before that it was the first one to adopt TLC NAND in 2012. Earlier this year Samsung's second generation client PCIe drive, the SM951, made an appearance in a Lenovo laptop, but to everyone's surprise the drive wasn't NVMe compatible like Samsung had announced earlier. After discussing with Samsung, the company said they it has an NVMe client drive in development, but it declined to provide any reasoning as to why the SM951 still used the AHCI driver stack.
To our surprise, Ganesh found an NVMe-enabled Samsung M.2 SSD inside Intel's Broadwell-U NUC a while back. This was rather confusing at first because Samsung had specifically told us that the SM951 doesn't support NVMe, but after a closer look and a series of emails with Samsung the drive turned out to be an NVMe version of the SM951, or SM951-NVMe as Samsung calls it.
Distinguishing the AHCI and NVMe version from each other isn't very simple as the difference lies in a single character in the model number. The AHCI version carries the code MZ-HPVxxx0 (where xxx is the capacity in gigabytes), whereas the NVMe version is called MZ-VPVxxx0. Since both versions of the SM951 are technically OEM-only, the close naming isn't really an issue, but if you are shopping for the SM951 I recommend that you take a close look at the part number before pulling the trigger to ensure that you get the version you are looking for.
SM951-NVMe on the left, SM951-AHCI on the right
On the hardware side the AHCI and NVMe versions of the SM951 are a match. Both utilize Samsung's S4LN058A01-8030 controller dubbed as UBX, which is a PCIe 3.0 x4 controller that apparently supports both AHCI and NVMe driver stacks. That isn't surprising, though, because nearly all client-grade NVMe controllers I know are capable of supporting both -- it's just a matter of developing two separate firmware builds. The firmware development is likely the reason why the SM951-AHCI was the first one to market because Samsung already had the basic AHCI firmware from its XP941 and SATA drives, whereas the SM951-NVMe needed more development from scratch given how different and more efficient the NVMe command set is.
Samsung SM951 NVMe Specifications Capacity 128GB 256GB 512GB Form Factor M.2 2280 Controller Samsung S4LN058A01 (PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe) NAND Samsung 16nm 64Gbit MLC Sequential Read 2,000MB/s 2,150MB/s 2,150MB/s Sequential Write 650MB/s 1,260MB/s 1,550MB/s 4KB Random Read 300K IOPS 300K IOPS 300K IOPS 4KB Random Write 83K IOPS 100K IOPS 100K IOPS Encryption N/A
Similar to the AHCI version, the SM951-NVMe only comes in capacities of up to 512GB. The reason lies in NAND because the SM951 utilizes 64Gbit dies, and with only four NAND package placements on the M.2 2280 PCB the maximum capacity with 16 dies per package works out to be 512GB (8GB x 16 x 4). It seems that Samsung doesn't have a high volume 128Gbit MLC die at this point, although we will likely see one with third generation V-NAND later this year. The first generation V-NAND die is 128Gbit, but since it only has 24 layers it's not cost efficient for a client drive, especially not for an OEM-specific one given how cost sensitive PC OEMs are.
TechInsights found out that the NAND in the SM951 (both AHCI and NVMe) is actually 16nm. While I was aware of the change in generation character of the part number, I believed that it would just be a second generation of Samsung's 19nm die because to me it didn't make any sense that Samsung would build a 16nm 64Gbit die. I'm working on an article comparing all the modern 15-16nm NAND processes, so stay tuned for more in-depth analysis of Samsung's 16nm node.
Boot Support
One of the major questions with every PCIe SSD is whether it is bootable. Back when the XP941 became available the situation was rather messy because motherboard OEMs had not prepared for PCIe SSDs yet, which require BIOS/UEFI support from their side in order to show up in the boot menu. Fortunately, most OEMs fixed this for 9-series motherboards and now most models have a BIOS update available with proper support for PCIe and NVMe SSDs.
In short, the SM951 NVMe is bootable in my ASUS Z97 Deluxe with the latest 2401 BIOS. I don't have any other 9-series motherboards at hand, but I suspect that any motherboard with advertised NVMe support and appropriate BIOS will boot from the SM951 NVMe.
For tower Mac Pro users the story isn't as pleasant, though. I put the SM951 NVMe inside my 2009 Mac Pro, but OS X wouldn't even recognize the drive. Despite the fact that the custom Apple SSD inside the MacBook is NVMe based, I suspect that the current version of OS X doesn't carry a general NVMe driver, and even if it did the Mac Pro and its chipset might simply be too old to support NVMe, which honestly isn't surprising for a +5-year-old system. In any case, Mac Pro users can still buy and boot from the AHCI version of SM951, but I wouldn't hold my breath for any NVMe support in the future.
Availability
The SM951-NVMe is an OEM part, meaning that availability is very restricted. The drive is listed by a handful of online retailers, but none of them seem to have it in stock yet. RamCity is expecting stock in mid-July, but told us that even that is uncertain because its distributors are still saying that the NVMe version is in sampling stage with no schedule for high volume availability. We got our 256GB sample directly from Samsung, hence the early access, as it seems that there is no way to buy the SM951-NVMe at this point. I will provide an update when I hear more about the availability.
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We’ve become increasingly concerned with knowing where our food comes from: These days, even a sloppy Chipotle burrito comes with the addendum that the chicken once lived a happily free-range life. In that vein, Israeli designers Omer Polak and Michal Evyater1 have created an experimental food lab that gives diners the satisfaction of knowing where everything—right down to the aroma—comes from.
Initially created for an exhibit at Jerusalem Design Week, the Blow Dough lab is a peculiar combination of performance art and catering, during which visitors use custom-made, high performance baking tools to cook crispy bread bubbles filled with herbal scents. It began as a playful take on pita bread, a food staple in the Middle East.
But bread—while common around the world—is a finicky food to make, let alone to iterate on for a design installation. So Polak collaborated with Israeli baker and chef Erez Komorovsky, to “do something new with this chef who knows everything about dough,” Polak says. “It sounds very easy, but if you want to make the dough flexible, you have to really understand it.”
Blow Dough works like this: Visitors take a small amount of pre-kneaded dough to individual baking tables, which are each rigged with an industrial blower (typically used by industrial designers for heating and bending plastic) and a small compartment for herbs and vegetables. The “baker” puts a slab of the dough over the herb container and the blower, which emits a blast of 1,000-degree heat. This does three things: bakes the dough, inflates the dough into a balloon of bread, and transfers the herb odors inside the bread, creating an aromatic air pocket. Then they bite into them. “It’s very weird,” Polak says, “because it’s crispy, but when you bite it, it’s nothing, just smells.”
For the dough, Polak and Komorovsky replaced water with beet, carrot, and spinach juices, giving each dough its unique hue. Visitors infuse each bread bulb with scents from fresh garlic, lemons, cumin, rosemary, black tea, and sumac. It's like the opposite of Soylent: a delight to the senses without the nutrition. Fumes won’t exactly satisfy any hunger cravings, but it’s this step that gives guests a novel (albeit conceptual) connection to the food production process. “There’s a lot of attention paid to how you produce food, how you get it, and what’s inside,” Polak says. “In this process you see everything, from the raw materials to the end product.”
The genesis of Blow Dough actually predates Polak’s collaboration with Komorovsky. A few years ago Polak, who studied at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, began researching cultural and religious attitudes toward food. He was particularly interested in the ways Western eaters detach themselves from the food they eat (people will happily eat tuna out of a can, but don’t want an entire fish plopped down on their plate). Turns out we’re similarly out of touch with our noses—something Polak realized on a trip to Papua New Guinea, when a jungle guide smelled a pig coming minutes before Polak could even hear it rustling around.
Now, he’s part of a growing group of designers (including the Le Laboratoire team behind this scent-transmitting phone) looking into how smell could heighten our relationship with the world around us. In this case, perhaps rekindling our sense of smell could lead to a better appreciation of what goes into our food. “This sense is super strong and we don’t really know how to use it,” he says. “We didn’t lose the skills, we’ve just lost our abilities.”
1UPDATED 12:00 p.m. Eastern 08/11/14. This story was updated to include the name of one of the project's creators.
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When asked about fellow Atlanta emcee Trinidad James’ comments about the South running New York rap, Waka Flocka Flame took James’ comments one step further as he stated that the South doesn’t just run Hip Hop, the region runs music period.
During his interview with Vlad TV, Waka mentioned Kendrick Lamar and revealed that while the Compton rapper did warrant some attention for the West Coast, in his opinion the South is still at the top musically.
“The South run music period,” said Waka. “They don’t just run one region, one state, one genre, the South run music. That’s just what it is. You know what I mean? Kendrick Lamar made the [bar] look West, but the South still winning. Like that’s what it is. It’s friendly competition. Some people just get carried away.”
Waka followed up his comments about the South’s dominance in music with a few boastful words about his past tour with Steve Aoki. The Riverdale, Georgia rapper referred to his tour with Aoki as “the number one tour” he’s been on since the start of his career and commented on the camaraderie between artists.
“This tour, it’s the best I ever been on in my life, ever,” said Waka. “Any collab I ever did. It’s the number one tour by a long shot. Like it’s making every tour I’ve ever been on go in the garbage. This and Europe, best tour in my life…Niggas ain’t competing onstage. Niggas was real friends back there, man. We going [paintballing]. We doing crazy shit. Skydiving back here, man. We living life.”
Comments Waka made in regard to James’ remarks about the South and New York rap, come one month after the “All Gold Everything” rapper let loose his thoughts on music during a performance at the Converse Rubber Tracks show in New York City.
In the middle of his performance, the rapper proclaimed that the South runs New York rap as he informed attendees, “I remember when New York ran this shit, dog…And us in the South, us bammas, we was like ‘what the fuck’ and we just did our own thing. But now we run y’all musically.”
In the months since James’ shared his critique of New York rap, the Atlanta wordsmith has received criticism from a number of New York City-based artists including N.O.R.E. and Maino. Maino remained the most vocal in his criticism of James’ comments and even demanded an apology from the rapper during a recorded phone call between the two artists last month.
RELATED: Waka Flocka Flame Says He Mocks Himself Intentionally
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Residents of Newtown took to the streets on Saturday to express their anger over controversial lockout laws and the Westconnex by holding a "moving music festival". The march saw hundreds making their way down King Street to the music of more than 30 local bands and DJs after meeting at Camperdown Memorial Rest Park around 2pm.
A member of the protest's organising collective, Chris Lego, said they were trying to "make the day as enjoyable as possible" for everyone involved. While he hoped the protest would remain "peaceful", he wanted to make sure that the festival's message was clear.
The Reclaim the Streets protest on Saturday. Credit:Natalie Sekulovska
"If the government shuts down our dance floors, we'll dance on the streets," he said. "We don't believe we should be collectively punished for the brutal stupidity of one or two people. There's been an over-policing of fun, spontaneity and creativity in Sydney. It's not good enough."
Gig promoter Nick Parker believes the lockout laws have been "excruciatingly hard" on musicians, DJs and producers who are trying to share their music in the bars and clubs that have been affected.
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Also in February, a delegation of 10 American universities, organized by the International Institute of Education, a nonprofit group based in New York, visited Myanmar to explore partnerships. In April, the institute released a report citing some of the problems in Myanmar’s education system. They included inferior physical infrastructure and technology, a lack of international ties and a political and economic system that is unable to fulfill immediate needs. “I think they feel a little overwhelmed,” said Carola Weil, who is dean of the School of Professional and Extended Studies at American University in Washington and was part of the delegation.
And so do the foreign universities looking to build partnerships.
While some commitments were made by the delegation, including financing faculty exchanges and helping Myanmar universities renovate libraries, many participants said there was so much need that they did not know where to start. “The situation is much more challenging than we expected,” said Denis F. Simon, vice provost for international strategic initiatives at Arizona State University. “We definitely want to do something here, but how big and how large will depend on the availability of funding.”
Finding financing is a main obstacle even though Myanmar’s education spending has almost tripled from $340 million in 2011 to $1 billion in the current budget. So far, seeking money from outside donors has not yielded much.
Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, is planning to open a center for teacher training and graduate education at the University of Yangon, but concrete plans have been put on hold until resources can be secured. “There is a commitment and a willingness to do this, but these things cost money,” said Pamela Cranston, vice provost for international programs at Johns Hopkins. “People are still reluctant to get into Myanmar yet in a big way.”
The U.S. Agency for International Development began taking applications last November to finance higher-education projects in Myanmar. More than 200 organizations and individuals participated in an information session on agency grants in Washington in December. The European Union will also provide financing for faculty and student exchanges.
Yet foreign engagement still requires government approval. “The government said how hungry they are to have scholars from the U.S. come and visit,” said Christopher McCord, who is the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Northern Illinois University and also in the delegation. “We said, ‘You have to find a way if you want us to be able to send scholars where universities don’t have to go all the way to the top to get permission.”’
Improvements have come, even though in fits and starts, and in varied ways. The campus of Yangon University was spruced up a few days before a visit by President Barack Obama last November. More important, scholars from the United States are now allowed to lecture at Yangon University for the first time in decades.
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Japan’s New Order and Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: Planning for Empire
Janis Mimura
Summary
This essay examines the ideology and politics of Japanese technocrats during the Pacific War. Focusing on Kishi Nobusuke and his faction of reform bureaucrats, it analyzes how these technocrats viewed the war as an unprecedented planning opportunity to realize their vision of Japan’s New Order and Asian empire.
In 1915, the theorist of technocracy Thorstein Veblen prophetically wrote about a temporary window of opportunity for Japan to combine its national spirit and recently acquired industrial technology with maximum effect in a major military offensive. Veblen predicted that the window would gradually close as modern technical advances eroded traditional notions of community and loyalty and introduced a materialistic and commercial mindset bringing about the “sabotage of capitalism.”1 A quarter of a century later, however, Japanese technocrats remained exceedingly optimistic about their country’s prospects for war and empire. They were determined to “overcome the modern,” despite the attempts of “status quo” businessmen and bureaucrats to derail the New Order movement. They believed that more than Japan’s material resources, its human resources, namely the patriotic spirit, courage, discipline, and creativity of its people, were the fount of national strength.
On August 1, 1940, Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke announced the government’s policy to build a so-called “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.” The term Greater East Asia implied that in addition to the core region of Japan, Manchukuo, and China, the sphere would include Southeast Asia, Eastern Siberia, and possibly the outer regions of Australia, India, and the Pacific Islands. The new policy to expand the boundaries of Japan’s empire beyond East Asia emerged after France and the Netherlands fell to Nazi Germany in the late spring of 1940 and forfeited their colonies in Southeast Asia. Japan subsequently advanced into French Indochina in June 1940. Three months later in September 1940, Japan concluded the Triple Axis Pact with Germany and Italy. When diplomacy failed to lift economic sanctions imposed by the United States, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941. These actions set the country on a course of brutal occupation of Asia and a destructive war against the United States and its allies that culminated in Japan’s total defeat in 1945.
Celebrating the tripartite pact in Tokyo
The question of why resource-poor Japan would take on the world’s superpower and its allies continues to baffle analysts of the wartime period. Between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese state squeezed the economy through strict rationing in the civilian sector and control of management and labor in order to channel a dwindling supply of precious resources to the military’s ambitious production expansion and material mobilization plans.2 The drain on resources from the protracted war in China, food and energy shortages, higher import costs as a result of the European war, and rapidly deteriorating trade relations suggested that Japan had little chance of victory in a war against the United States.
Japanese technocrats conceived of the Pacific War as more than a battle of resources. They viewed it as an ideological battle between the architects of a new, fascist geopolitical order and defenders of the old liberal capitalist order. From the standpoint of planning, the war represented an opportunity to complete Japan’s New Order and build the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. For technocrats, the attack on Pearl Harbor was not only a wager to force the United States to accept Japanese hegemony in Asia, but also a means of reform. The Pacific War was the first step toward constructing a technologically advanced, self-sufficient, regional economic sphere, or Grossraumwirtschaft (kōiki keizai). Reflecting the reformist view of war as an integral part of state reform, Major General and Cabinet Planning Board Chief Akinaga Tsukizō proclaimed that Japan would “build while fighting (tatakainagara kensetsu e).3
Mapping the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
The New Order
Already by the spring of 1941, the New Order movement appeared to have reached a crossroads in which it could either flourish and develop or stagnate and congeal into the “status quo” mold. Launched in 1940 by Kishi Nobusuke and his faction of reform bureaucrats, the movement sought to reorder Japanese society along fascist lines by replacing political parties with a state mass party, subordinating commercial interests to state interests, and replacing class consciousness with national consciousness. These technocrats were concerned that the movement’s collapse would not only jeopardize long-term planning, but also place Japan in a critical predicament since it was becoming increasingly cut off from outside resources.
One of the most difficult challenges in establishing the New Order was to obtain the cooperation and expertise of business. Since the 1930s, technocrats had sought to combine state planning with private initiative. Drawing upon the lessons of Manchurian industrialization, technocrats downplayed the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the New Order and recast their policies in more business-friendly terms. In a press interview in August 1942, Kishi distinguished the new control measures from those of Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro dating from 1940. He complained that there had been “too much theory” in the proposed reforms and stressed that implementation, not theory, was the overriding concern.”4
Kishi Nobusuke
Technocrats also acknowledged that the state ought to defer to business leaders on issues concerning the internal management of their firms. In Manchuria, reform bureaucrats had abandoned the special company system based on the principle of “one industry, one company” and turned to Nissan president Ayukawa Yoshisuke to reorganize and consolidate the special companies within Nissan’s own corporate structure. Now in Japan, planners sought to address the lackluster performance of the new industry-based control associations.
In a scathing report on the control associations, the cornerstone of the Economic New Order, the Cabinet Planning Board identified the source of their weakness.5 The first problem was the lack of enthusiasm and support from business. The report accused business of sabotaging the control associations by refusing to supply the best managers, denying government inspectors access to factories, and generally obstructing their smooth functioning. The second problem was their heavily bureaucratic character. The control associations had become no more than an additional administrative layer, rigidified and unresponsive to the needs of the members firms. The third problem was the lukewarm, noncommittal attitude of the bureaucracy. The various ministries needed to overcome their sectionalism and completely transfer the relevant powers to the control associations. The real challenge was to obtain the expertise of business leaders. Given the top-down, authoritarian nature of the control associations based on the so-called “Führer principle,” their fate was completely dependent upon the ability of the leader to effectively manage the member firms and command their respect and allegiance.
In a major shift in strategy, Kishi struck a compromise with business in the form of the new Munitions Corporation Law of October 1943. Similar to the arrangement made with Nissan in Manchuria, Kishi enticed certain companies to expand production in munitions-related areas and meet government targets by providing state subsidies and financial guarantees. The new law essentially allowed the government to bypass the control associations and work directly with selected munitions firms to achieve state goals. As officially designated “munitions companies,” these firms were made accountable to the state, not to shareholders. In exchange, they were granted preferential treatment, subsidies, financing, and a free hand in meeting state targets.
As the Cabinet Planning Board pointed out, however, business was only part of the problem; the other problem was the bureaucracy. In their plans for a “bureaucratic new order” (kankai shintaisei), reform bureaucrats called for a complete overhaul of the bureaucracy, especially in four areas: bureaucratic ethos, civil service employment system, organizational structure, and duties and responsibilities. Kishi called for a fundamental reorientation of the bureaucracy away from its traditional, status-bound, rule-based approach toward a more task-oriented approach that focused on increasing productivity and performance. The main problem was the power mentality of bureaucrats or bureaucratic sectionalism. He noted that it would be impossible to establish a bureaucratic new order and raise efficiency unless the turf battles among bureaucrats were eliminated. In addition, as a result of the rapid expansion of duties, the bureaucracy had become a cold and impersonal place where department and section heads knew and cared little about the welfare of their staff and ministers. As part of an effort to improve the work environment, he called for higher compensation for bureaucrats, particularly at the middle and junior level.
The most radical proposal was to open up the civil service employment system to the private sector in order to attract new talent and expertise. As Kishi explained, the Meiji bureaucratic appointment ordinance had outlived its purpose of providing a regularized and impartial system of recruitment and training and cultivating esprit de corps among civil servants. With the increase in scope and complexity of administration, particularly in the economic area, officials with technical and practical experience were urgently needed. Bureaucrats ought to be recruited not on the basis of passing the rigorous civil service exam, but on the basis of their skill, knowledge, and practical experience. By abolishing this ordinance and eliminating the examination requirement, people from the private sector could become eligible for public office.
During the Pacific War, administrative reform became a top priority. The cabinet pushed through the Wartime Special Administration Law (Senji gyōsei tokurei hō) and Wartime Special Administration Powers Ordinance (Senji gyōsei shokken tokurei) in March 1943 in order to strengthen policymaking at the executive level and cut through bureaucratic sectionalism and red tape. The former provided for the issuance of imperial ordinances to expand productive power that could overrule existing legislation prohibiting or controlling certain activities and permit intervention in areas under ministerial jurisdiction. The latter greatly increased the authority of the Prime Minister over the ministries with regard to the production of the five priority industries of iron and steel, coal, light metals, ships, and aircraft. The government also established the Cabinet Advisory Council comprised of leading technocrats and industrialists. The Council provided greater exchange and collaboration between bureaucrats and the private sector. In November 1943, the government streamlined and consolidated the Cabinet Planning Board and the ministries of agriculture, commerce, communications, and railroads into three new ministries: the Ministry of Munitions, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, and the Ministry of Transport and Communications.
In addition to mobilizing business and the bureaucracy for war, technocrats sought to boost public confidence in Japan’s war capability. Technocrats believed that Japan had a good chance of prevailing against the larger, resource-rich nations. Their optimism was based on a new conception of national strength. Military technocrats had argued that in modern total wars, the definition of national power had changed. Economic power was but one component of national power. Two other factors were equally important - human power and spiritual power, without which materials and funds had no value. Japan was blessed with abundant human power both in terms of its population growth rate and the excellence of the Yamato people, particularly with regard to “brain power” or scientific and technological power. Cabinet Planning Chief Akinaga predicted that the efficient organization and redeployment of labor to productive, war-related industries and steady population growth would overcome any shortages in labor.
Civilian technocrats claimed that the new type of war was based on a new type of thinking centered on materials and technology, not finance and diplomacy.6 As Kishi explained, the meaning of “rich country, strong army” had changed. National wealth and power were no longer measured by a country’s national income, but by the quantity and quality or precision of its materials and the ways in which they were organized and mobilized for national defense.7 The challenge was to increase production through superior organization and eliminate the contradictions and inconsistencies in the production process. Technocrats held that in the new world order, economies were undergoing a fundamental shift from a money-based economy to a materials-based economy. This shift reflected the dictates of the planned economy in which material balances and quotas, not prices and profits, served as the benchmark for economic activity. But more important, it highlighted the pivotal role of technology in the production process and in the creation of synthetic resources.
Technocrats also sought to provide a new theoretical approach toward measuring national wealth. Mōri Hideoto, a key ideologue of the reformist faction, argued that classical economic theory had become outdated in terms of both its assumptions and methodology. Until recently the nation’s resources had been assessed by national income (the total amount of goods and services produced in an economy), which was based upon the individual’s pursuit of self interest. As he explained, in classical economic theory, consumption was defined as the individual’s fulfillment of desires and needs which are freely determined and restricted only by their marginal utility or the individual’s financial means. In the new era of state planning and autarky, however, a distinction was made between state and national (private) consumption. The latter was no longer conceived in terms of the free will of the individual. Since both production and consumption within the bloc were controlled by the Japanese state and “liberated” from foreign control, “national consumption was made free by the state.”8 Consumption was created, constructed, and planned via the state and only via the state was it made “free.”
Mōri defined national wealth (kokumin shiryoku) as the “total capital mobilization of the state” or “total productive power of state capital.” State financial resources were distributed for public finance, consumption, and industry for the purpose of contributing toward the war economy and maximizing the efficiency of state planning. National wealth was not assessed in the monetary terms of national income, which also included elements that did not directly contribute to the war economy, but rather in terms of their relative value or contribution toward fulfilling state plans.
Technocrats called for a restructuring of public finance accounting in order to clarify and specify the role of various components of the economy and the different approaches taken toward them. Rather than dividing the budget into a General and Special Accounts, they proposed to create four categories within the General Accounts budget for official finance, re-production or reinvestment, reserves and stockpiling, and welfare. Whereas the state would continue the traditional cost-benefit management approach toward regular day-to-day official finance, it would adopt what they referred to as the “long term investment approach” toward the other three categories. Welfare, production, and stockpile-related programs were viewed as future public revenue sources and should be funded by public debt. The Special Accounts Budget would in turn draw upon these four budgets for funds. By rejecting the theoretical basis and methodology of foreign assessments of Japan’s national wealth, reformists sought to show how the outside world underestimated the extent of Japan’s true wealth and war preparation.
Technocrats argued that national power should be understood in terms of its dynamic force. They held that the synergistic energy derived from its material, human, and spiritual resources and the self-propelling momentum of Japan’s advanced national defense state would determine victory in war. According to the government engineer Matsumae Shigeyoshi, the power of the national defense state should not be expressed in the static terms of the size of its air force or number of troops, but rather in the dynamic terms of the state’s ability to focus the energies of every aspect of society toward the goals of the perpetual expansion of productive power, technological advance, and increased efficiency both in terms of time, materials, and labor. Matsumae explained the dynamic nature of national power by likening the national defense state to a magnet whose force continually pulls the iron particles in one direction and in turn magnetizes them.9 In another mechanical analogy, he compared the national defense state to a top:
A top spins on its axis. The faster the top spins the more it stabilizes. When it spins at a very high speed, it attains a degree of stability by which motion and inertia become indistinguishable. As the rotational power gradually weakens, it begins to totter. At the end, when its rotational speed finally reaches zero, the top falls on its side. The so-called national defense state is a state with tremendous rotational force. Needless to say the essential idea behind the defense state is the dynamic rotation, which concentrates the total power of the state, or the totality of the economy, the military, politics, and culture, at the center.10
The attempt to redefine national power in terms of such mechanical analogies and other intangible forms of spiritual and organizational power, potential national wealth, and “revisionist” accounting in the face of real material shortages, financial crisis, and human suffering reveals the moral compromises of Japan’s technocratic leaders. The utter absurdity of Matsumae’s analogy offers three insights into wartime technocratic leadership. First, it conveys the deep contempt of Japan’s wartime leaders for public opinion and discourse about politics and matters of life and death such as war. Second, the retreat into abstract formulations about spinning tops and magnets suggests a difference in degree, not essence, of the shallowness of the theoretical reasoning and rational formulations of technocrats. The top analogy offers a poignant caricature of the seemingly sophisticated, cosmopolitan theories about geopolitics, the new world order, and the national essence. More important, it reveals the alarming irresponsibility of Japan’s wartime leaders and their inability or refusal to grapple with real issues determining their nation’s fate.
The Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere
The Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere served as a complex ideological matrix that brought together various strands of Japanese technocratic and right-wing thinking. It fused managerial concepts of the multilateral business structure, leadership principle, and Grossraumwirtschaft with geopolitical ideas of an “organic state” that requires “living space” and Japanese pan-Asianist visions of an Asian liberation into a fascist vision of empire. These strands of thought mutually reinforced each other in their common vision of a hierarchical, organic, functionalist community. It was a product of the collaboration of the military, pan-Asianists, and ultra-nationalists, as well as technically-minded professionals including economic and regional planners, geographers, and engineers.
The future of the Co-Prosperity Sphere
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan came into possession of the precious materials that the Japan-Manchuria-China bloc lacked. In a broadcast to the nation on December 19, 1941, Kishi reported on the vast resources of Asia. The Philippines possessed superior iron ore, abundant flax, as well as coal, chrome and manganese ore. Malaya was the world’s largest producer of rubber, tin, iron ore, coal, manganese, tungsten, fluorite, and bauxite. The Dutch East Indies had rich supplies of oil, rubber, tin, coal, iron ore, bauxite, copper, manganese, lead, zinc, chrome, tungsten, mercury, bismuth, and antimony. As for the South Seas, Kishi described it as a treasure house of minerals that have yet to be mined. He noted that there were only a few resources in which Greater East Asia was not self-sufficient. Through science and technology, Japan would create substitutes for these resources.
In early 1942, following the string of Japanese victories over the Allied Powers, Vice Commerce Minister Shiina acknowledged that some people likened Japan’s recent acquisition of the vast resources of Southeast Asia to a “cat being given a whale.”11 While admitting that such views of Japanese policy were probably inescapable, Shiina and his colleagues sought to portray the war not as an imperialist one, in which Japan would feast upon the vast resources of Asia, but as a moral and constructive war for the benefit of Asia. Appealing to Asian liberation and brotherhood, they argued that the current war was a “holy war” (seisensō) fought by Japan as the “moral leader” of Asia. Japan would replace the “egotistical,” “power-oriented blocs” of the Western colonial leaders with a Japan-centered “moral bloc” that promoted Asian prosperity and culture.
At the same time, the current battle was depicted as a “war of construction” (kensetsu sensō) in which Japan was building a Grossraumwirtschaft reflecting the modern trend toward national land planning and great power blocs. Technocrats argued, from the standpoint of economic rationality, that the weak, backward countries of Asia could not thrive independently outside of a larger regional bloc. Only through the synergies and economies of scale of such a bloc and the technological leadership of Japan could Asia compete with the West. Moreover, by describing the war as a “hundred year war” technocrats emphasized Japan’s long-term commitment to the Asian region. In the new era of multi-year planning, they explained, the first phase of construction would focus on obtaining essential raw materials needed for military victory against the Allies, followed by the long-term development of basic, civilian industries in Asia.
The Greater East Asia Co-prosperity put forth an alternative, ideological basis and a new unifying, organizational principle to articulate the multiple military, political, economic, cultural, and ethnic ties between Japan and Asia. As a “pan idea” it was based upon the geopolitical theory that the world would be divided into pan-regions consisting of four large economic spheres centered on the “core” industrial regions of the United States, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Within the bloc, “co-prosperity” would replace the Wilsonian ideal of “Open Door” in East Asia. In place of the liberal principles of “self-determination” and “self-interest” of the individual Asian countries within the international economy, reformists advanced the principle of “coexistence” of the Asian peoples within a self-sufficient bloc. Its organizational basis would not be free trade based on a country’s comparative advantage in natural resources or profitable market strategy, but rather the organic, hierarchical, functionalist principles of “totalism” (zentaishugi) and the multilateral business organization in which each member country, according to its ability (kaku minzoku no bun ni ōjite), contributes its raw materials, labor, capital, or technological expertise for the benefit of the bloc as a whole.
Technocrats emphasized that Japan would not replace the West as the new imperialist power in Asia. Rather, Western capitalist colonial “exploitation” of Asia would give way to mutual “co-prosperity” of a liberated Asia resulting from the increased wealth and power produced by the Asian bloc. They argued that Japan, with its technical and industrial expertise, would lead Asia into the new technological era. Ultimately, though, they justified Japanese leadership of the Asian sphere to themselves not in terms of superior Japanese technology, but in terms of the Japanese geopolitical notion of “greater Japan” (dai Nihon), in which Japan is a superior organism that is entitled to grow at the expense of other Asian countries.
Technocrats saw Japan’s position shifting from a peripheral nation in the capitalist world order to a core nation within the concentrically arranged regional bloc. Planners described the co-prosperity sphere as consisting of a “Core Sphere” composed of Japan, Manchuria, North China, the lower Yangtze region and a Soviet-occupied north coastal region, a “Lesser Co-prosperity Sphere” composed of the Core Sphere and Eastern Siberia, China, Indochina, and the South Pacific, and a “Greater Co-prosperity Sphere” which included the Lesser Co-prosperity Sphere as well as Australia, India, and the Pacific Islands.12 The latter represented no more than the “outer boundary” or peripheral sphere of the Japan-Manchuria-China Bloc.
In justifying the new Asian bloc, they promoted the geopolitical concept of “living sphere” to explain the military’s dual strategy of northern and southern advance. In his formulation of the East Asian Cooperative Body in the late 1930s, reform ideologist Mōri had distinguished between Japan’s reformist “continental policy” in north China and its liberal, imperialist “maritime policy” in central and south China. Now he modified his position to argue that the two “living spaces” of the Asian continent and the Pacific Ocean were uniting into a “homogenous single space.” In 1940 he argued that the Pacific Ocean had taken on a new significance and was becoming the foundation of a new world order; he suggested that “…with regard to the historical stage of the life struggle of the Japanese ethnic people, [we] have finally discovered the possibility of organizing the waters of the Pacific Ocean, together with our land, into a living sphere.”13
In a public broadcast a month after Japan’s declaration of war against the Allied powers, Mōri proclaimed that Japan’s possession of both a continental and maritime base placed it in the optimal geopolitical position to win the war. England was a maritime power but lacked a continental base, whereas the continental powers Germany and the United States both lacked maritime bases. He predicted that Germany, although it was on its way to establishing a European continental state via the European war, would be handicapped geopolitically because of its lack of a maritime base. Japan, in contrast, with its recent acquisition of the vast resources of Asia, would be able to build an undefeatable “greater East Asian economy of co-prosperity.”14
Finally, the sphere presented opportunities for “national land planning,” whose basic goals and principles were laid out in the Cabinet Planning Board’s “Outline for the Establishment of National Land Planning” (Kokudo keikaku settei yōkō).15 National land planning was conceived as part of Konoe’s New Order movement, but went beyond other New Order plans in incorporating a broader and more comprehensive spatial dimension to planning. Technocrats viewed national planning as the most advanced form of state planning. According to one technocrat, national planning went beyond the narrowly conceived “production technology” (seisan gijutsu) of the Soviet, Manchurian, German, and Japanese five- and four-year plans. These plans merely sought to meet limited, short-term targets for increasing production in industry and agriculture by temporary measures such as extending labor time or installing new equipment within a given geographical setting. National planning represented a new type of “construction technology” (kensetsu gijutsu) in which officials take a long-term - one hundred year - approach and seek the optimal geographical location of industries within the bloc.16 Now, the state sought to determine the most efficient distribution of the various facilities of the economy, population, culture, and society in order to promote the comprehensive development, use, and preservation of the native land in accordance with the state’s goal.
National land planning was first introduced and promoted by British planners as part of the movement for regional and urban planning. It was advocated as a means to decrease overpopulation and congestion in the major metropolitan areas by promoting satellite cities and towns, incorporating green belt areas, building a nationwide transportation network system, and formulating plans for regional growth. In contrast to the liberal type of national land planning focusing on suburban development, the authoritarian regimes of Soviet Russia, Germany, Italy, and Japan looked to national land planning primarily as a way to expand national productive power. The Soviet Five Year Plans, German Four Year Plans, Manchurian Five Year Plans, and Japanese Four Year Plans represented the first steps toward authoritarian national land planning.
Japanese planners classified national land planning in the various industrialized countries according to two general criteria.17 First, the state adopted either authoritarian planning from above or democratic planning from below depending on whether it had a liberal or totalist political system. Second, depending upon the particular developmental circumstances and history of a country, the state pursued the goal of either redesigning existing areas (kokudo saihenseishugi) or developing new land (kokudo shinkōshugi). Among countries which possessed undeveloped frontier land, the United States pursued grass-roots planning from below, reflecting its liberal tradition, whereas Soviet Russia imposed centralized planning from above in accordance with its authoritarian political system. Among those countries smaller in scale which lacked open uncultivated land and focused on restructuring developed areas, England attempted bottom-up type liberal planning to address the social problems of industrialization, whereas Germany pursued top-down planning primarily for the purposes of national defense.
Ultimately, technocrats viewed the liberal system as an obstacle to true national land planning. They argued that since liberal countries did not tolerate top-down planning, they could only partly implement national land planning from below. Planning of the vast undeveloped resources in the United States stopped at the regional level because the state was not strong enough to restrain freedom and coordinate the various interests at the local and regional level. In terms of restructuring metropolitan areas in England, the challenges were multiplied. Suburban planning in England never took off because the state was unable to tackle the source of urban congestion: the laissez-faire economy, which permits uncontrolled economic and urban development devoid of an overall planning authority and vision.
Technocrats pointed out that national planning was not individual planning expanded to the national level, but rather the task of “determining the order of the land and striving toward its comprehensive functioning at the highest efficiency level.” For this reason, they argued that totalist regimes like Japan and Germany were best suited to carry out national land planning. Moreover, among totalist states, they believed that the Japanese case was unique because Japan possessed both the challenges of reorganization of their native land and frontier development of its East Asian empire. The Japanese state’s goals were to: build a national defense state system in Japan that incorporates strategic spatial planning for defense; establish an autarkic sphere in East Asia to secure resources for Japan; address Japan’s social problems of urbanization resulting from rapid industrialization; and coordinate the various plans in a comprehensive way.
The ambitious planning visions, projects, and dreams of Japanese technocrats were soon dashed as the tides of war turned against Japan. But the biggest planning opportunity for Japanese technocrats came after its defeat, when the country faced the daunting task of rebuilding its economy and society from the ground up. From the late 1940s, following America’s reversal of its occupation policy so as to make Japan the bulwark against communism in Asia, civilian technocrats emerged as the key architects of Japan’s high-growth system. Upon his release from Sugamo prison in 1948, Kishi set about building the Liberal Democratic Party and strengthening the ties between bureaucrats, business, and the public along the lines envisioned in the wartime New Order.
Kishi and his technocratic planners were also a key force behind Japan’s postwar economic reentry into Asia. As prime minister from 1957 to 1960, Kishi became the first Japanese head of state to visit the countries of Southeast Asia. He promoted his own vision of “Asian development” that appealed to wartime notions of “co-prosperity,” Asian liberation, and state-led growth. Given Japan’s controversial wartime past and the trans-war continuities in technocratic personnel, institutions, and concepts, it is not surprising that its Asian partners have continued to view Japanese development projects in the region with a certain amount of distrust. Japan’s mixed legacy of planning challenges us to critically examine the ideological basis, politics, and lessons of wartime planning and to squarely confront the contradictions between the ideals and reality of Japan’s wartime system.
Janis Mimura is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author of Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Cornell University Press, 2011). This essay is excerpted from Chapter Six of that book.
Recommended citation: Janis Mimura, 'Japan’s New Order and Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: Planning for Empire,' The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 49 No 3, December 5, 2011.
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Scientists have found that certain psychological predispositions can make people more or less prone to believe conspiracy theories. Now, new research has found another trait that could be linked to conspiracy theories.
The study, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that conspiracy theories are associated with the desire to eliminate uncertainties. The study from researchers in Poland and the United Kingdom examined the role of cognitive closure, meaning the tendency to desire an answer for any particular question.
“Why do some people believe that the AIDS virus was created by the US government, that the British security services murdered Princess Diana or that Russians were involved in the Smolensk catastrophe of 2010 that killed the Polish president?” said Marta Marchlewska of the University of Warsaw, the study’s corresponding author. “There is no doubt that conspiracy theories give simple and structured answers to difficult questions. The aim of our research was to find out which psychological traits make people especially prone to adopt conspiratorial explanations and under what circumstances does it occur.”
“We found out that people who are especially motivated to reduce uncertainty by finding clear beliefs about reality and forming quick judgments on a given topic (those high in need for cognitive closure) adopt salient conspiratorial explanations for uncertain events that lack clear official explanations.”
Marchlewska and her colleagues conducted two separate experiments on a total of 700 Polish adults.
In the first experiment, the researchers had participants read a story about the European Union’s plans to help Syrian and Eritrean refugees in Poland. In the second experiment, participants read stories about either the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 plane crash or the Germanwings Airbus A320 plane crash. The stories were presented as online news articles.
After reading the stories, the participants then read internet comments about the events. The comments either provided conspiratorial or non-conspiratorial explanations for why the events really occurred.
Both experiments found that the need for cognitive closure predicted the endorsement of conspiratorial explanations. But this association disappeared when the participants were already aware of well-known, official causes of a particular event.
“For example, participants high in need for cognitive closure were more likely to endorse a conspiracy theory behind a plane crash when this conspiracy was salient,” Marchlewska explained. “This was only the case when non-conspiratorial official explanations for the crash were lacking. When other causes for the plane crash were easily available to participants instead, those high in cognitive closure were more likely to reject conspiracy theories.”
Specifically, participants with a high need for cognitive closure were more likely to believe conspiracies about Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, which disappeared for unknown reasons. But they weren’t more likely to believe conspiracies about Germanwings Airbus A320, which crashed because the pilot deliberately flew the plane into the ground.
“Thus, it seems that when the official causes of a particular event are well-known and assure closure, those high in need for cognitive closure might not have a reason for entertaining conspiracy theories,” Marchlewska told PsyPost. “However, when situation is complex and uncertain conspiracy beliefs may serve as a map of meaning for those individuals who are determined to get any answer.”
“Future research would do well to investigate if conspiratorial beliefs fully compensate feelings of uncertainty and discourage those high in need for cognitive closure from searching for alternative explanations.”
The study, “Addicted to answers: Need for cognitive closure and the endorsement of conspiracy beliefs“, was also co-authored by Aleksandra Cichocka and Malgorzata Kossowska.
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MIAMI – (Feb. 17, 2015) – Motorsport.com today announced that acclaimed news journalist Jonathan Noble has joined the company as its Formula One editor. The appointment is effective May 14, 2015.
Noble had spent the last 16 years with the United Kingdom-based Autosport where he most recently served as its Group F1 Editor.
We have worked alongside - or against - each other since the last Millennium, so I know exactly what he brings to our writing strength going forwards Motorsport.com Editor-In-Chief Charles Bradley
"Jonathan has a unique position in the Formula One paddock as the go-to man when it comes to breaking news," said Motorsport.com Editor in Chief Charles Bradley. "His expertise is literally second to none, and his decision to join Motorsport.com is a statement of our intent to become number one in the field.”
Today’s announcement follows significant additions to Motorsport.com’s editorial department, including Bradley who joined Motorsport.com last January from Autosport.
World-class coverage
“The addition of Jonathan to our editorial team is a testament to our commitment of offering world-class coverage of F1 news and content to our readership,” said Eric Gilbert, vice-president of operations, Motorsport.com. “As the fastest growing online content provider in all of motor sports, we continue to position ourselves as the go-to resource for everything motor sports related. Jonathan is one of the most trusted resources inside the F1 paddock. His leadership and editorial talents will provide the vision and content of world-class F1 coverage our readers deserve.”
"We have worked alongside - or against - each other since the last Millennium, so I know exactly what he brings to our writing strength going forwards, which is top-notch news journalism of the very highest standard,” Bradley added. “This is a seismic move for Motorsport.com.”
In his new role, Noble will lead the direction of all F1 news content for Motorsport.com and report directly to Editor in Chief Charles Bradley.
About Motorsport.com
Established in 1994, Motorsport.com is an award winning, cutting-edge technology company featuring a world-class digital distribution, interactive multimedia and the largest motor racing photo database in the world. Based in the Miami Design District (FL), Motorsport.com is the global leader for online motorsports news content, in-depth, up-to-the-minute coverage on the full spectrum of motor racing which includes over 450,000 news articles.
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Banging furiously at the concrete tomb, this is the moment a group of grieving relatives smash their way into a teenager’s coffin.
They heard screams from the grave of Neysi Perez, 16, so desperately tried to get to her.
Eventually they managed to get into the tomb and pulled the coffin out. They saw that the glass on it had been smashed.
But then when paramedics arrived she once again pronounced dead and reburied.
A young boy can be seen desperately attempting to smash the tomb open with a hammer (Picture: YouTube/Primer Impacto)
The family can be seen desperately attempting to save the young girl (Picture: YouTube/Primer Impacto)
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She first fell unconscious at her home in La Entrada, western Honduras, and started foaming at the mouth. An exorcism was performed but she later ‘died’ in hospital.
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She was buried and husband Rudy Gonzales went to visit her grave the next day when he heard the muffled screams.
He said: ‘As I put my hand on her grave I could hear noises inside. I heard banging, then I heard her voice. She was screaming for help.
‘It had already been a day since we buried her. I couldn’t believe it. I was ecstatic, full of hope.
Cemetery worker Jesus Villanueva also said that he heard the screaming.
Doctors believe she may have initially had a severe panic attack, temporarily stopping her heart.
Her family has criticised doctors for being too quick to sign her death certificate.
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Hi all, this is the thread for {{champion:55}}! **Goals** * ** Tactical Play and Counterplay:** Katarina and her opponents should have the ability to make moment to moment plays against each other. While this has largely been true for Katarina, we now hope that opponents have more to do than pray someone saved an instant CC for her. * **Laning and Interaction:** We want Katarina to play more dynamically in lane, taking risks and jumping in and out of combat with her opponent. * **Mastery and Skill Expression:** While playing Kat, you should feel that there are dynamic and unique ways to use your skills and feel skillful when you pull off that crazy combo. **Reworked Play Pattern** * The Dagger Katarina throws in her Q now stays on the ground after bouncing. * Sinister Steel has been replaced by a spell that directly allows her to place a Dagger where she is (after a delay), so she can jump back to it later. * She can Shunpo to her Daggers. Walking over a dagger/Shunpoing to one will effectively fully refund Shunpo's cooldown and deal massive AoE damage around her (Pre-Rework Sinister Steel, but amped up WAY past 11 - like, nearly lethal amounts of damage). * She goes crazy and bounces all over the place killing everyone (but only if she sets herself up correctly). * Kill champs to reset the entire base pattern and do it again! **Some Extra Tidbits** * She can now Shunpo to anywhere around a unit, instead of always behind it. This is controlled by the player's mouse offset relative to the target.** Really looking for feedback on this, but expect it to take a while to learn!** * Use this to your advantage to position better around enemies, or daggers! The AoE damage from the dagger is based on where you are when you pick it up, not the dagger. * Your Q Dagger always drops 350u behind the primary target, and always takes the same amount of time to bounce to get to the ground after the first hit, so you aren't punished for bouncing through multiple people. Try to trick shot Q daggers from one enemy onto a more important target using this offset. Please put any questions or feedback on Katarina in this thread!
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Welcome to Nugget Bridge
Oh… Oh hi. Didn’t hear you come in. Sorry about the mess, things are still getting off the ground, you know? The Wright brothers didn’t make it to the moon in one day after all.
Welcome to Nugget Bridge! Here at Nugget Bridge we do two things: have fun and play the Pokémon games really, really well. We play competitive Pokémon which is quite different from what you’ve experienced in the games so far, and the trainers you’ll see at Nintendo and The Pokémon Company International’s official tournaments will be in the same percentage of Pokémon Trainers as Youngster Joey’s Rattatta – the top percentage. How do you join Youngster Joey and his Rattata? Well, that’s what Nugget Bridge is for.
We’re a group of passionate and skilled Pokémon players made up of top ranked Pokémon Video Game Championships players including past, present, and future National and World Champions, the Wi-Fi traders who have supplied them with their winning Pokémon, as well as experienced staff dedicated to sharing their skills with the community. They are all united in their desire to hone their competitive skills and provide a platform for newer players to learn from the best.
Nugget Bridge is a place where players help each other. Our goal is to foster a heightened level of competition among all Pokémon players. In the past our competitive community has been insular with top players being hesitant to share their secrets with potential opponents. While this has occasionally proven to be a superior individual option on the local level, it has had the unfortunate side effect of weakening our community as a whole. We believe that by discussing our own teams and those used by winning players all over the world, offering tutoring services to new users, competing frequently at a high level of play, and sharing our insights from all of this and more we will be able to raise the skill level of the entire community, thus ensuring that we will all perform better in our quests to play on Pokémon’s most meaningful stage at the Pokémon Video Game World Championship than we would on our own.
Though we are producing articles and other content such as podcasts and videos, we are by no means the end-all be-all of competitive Pokémon. Nugget Bridge is unique in that our content doesn’t simply provide information for players to copy but instead helps players actively learn to make their own winning movesets and teams. We recognize that there are too many playstyles and options to choose from for there to be a definitive “best” team or strategy. Because of this we take a more editorial approach to our content. We aren’t looking to hand down the Ten Commandments of VGC strategy but instead to help you find what works best for you. This allows our contributors free rein to write about whichever topics in the metagame interest them in their own voice. In this way we offer uncut access to the thoughts and styles of the premiere Pokémon trainers of our day, each as unique as a snowflake.
We also recognize that articles and theory are no substitute for actual battling experience. There are plenty of times a team or strategy will look amazing in theory and then fail miserably in competition. Our goal at Nugget Bridge is to increase the frequency and stakes of non-official tournament play. While we’d love to meet up and have giant tournaments every few weeks, that isn’t feasible for the majority of us given our global membership. Distance, however, is not an excuse not to practice. While laddering on simulators helps, you can’t beat the pressures of tournament play. To this end Nugget Bridge holds frequent tournaments and events to battle each other more often and on a higher level. Theory can help us all go a long way, but battling, and discussing the battles we have, is necessary for us all to improve.
We place a high value on good sportsmanship at Nugget Bridge. While we do take the game seriously and are constantly striving to become better at it, it’s just as important to remember that we started playing to have fun. Good sportsmanship is the grease that keeps the community running smoothly in both off- and on-line interactions. We all know that sometimes these games don’t go quite the way we want them to and sometimes we feel robbed because of that, but that’s what we signed up for when we decided to play Pokémon competitively. Pokémon on/off the internet shouldn’t be so serious all the time. We aren’t really the type of people who want a bunch of strict rules here, so let’s all just be reasonable — everything will work out if we respect each other.
If you haven’t been scared off, then thanks for reading this. We hope you’ll stick around as we get the site fully up and running — we’re adding new features constantly! — and participate and contribute when you can. We look forward to meeting you and hearing from you.
Enjoy your stay!
Nugget Bridge
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Croatia delays extradition bid for Predrag Japranin, alleged war criminal living in Melbourne, until Captain Dragan case is finalised
Updated
The Croatian government will not request the extradition of an alleged war criminal living in Victoria until a final decision is made in the case of his fellow Serb, 'Captain' Dragan Vasiljkovic.
The ABC revealed this week that Predrag Japranin, an Australian citizen living in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs, is wanted over his alleged involvement in the murder of three civilians in Croatia in 1991.
Mr Japranin has strenuously denied any involvement in war crimes, and told the ABC he was never a member of any military unit.
He was put on Interpol's 'red list' after a Croatian court issued a warrant and indictment over his alleged crimes, committed when rebel Serbs carved out a mini-republic on Croatian territory following the break-up of Yugoslavia.
However, he will not stand trial unless the Croatian government asks Australian authorities to arrest and extradite him.
In a statement, the Croatian ministry of justice said it would not seek Mr Japranin's extradition until the case of Vasiljkovic - aka Daniel Snedden - was finalised.
"Both Dragan Vasiljkovic and Predrag Japranin are Australian citizens," the statement said.
"Republic of Croatia did not submit a request to extradite Predrag Japranin from Australia until Australian judicial bodies decide regarding extradition of Dragan Vasiljkovic from Australia to Croatia.
"That decision will be the precedent and will indicate the final stance of Australia regarding extradition of their citizens."
Mr Vasiljkovic is wanted by the Croatian government over alleged war crimes in Serb-occupied areas of Croatia in the early 1990s.
He was arrested in Sydney in 2006, but has been in legal limbo ever since.
He has launched a number of appeals against the Australian Government's decision to extradite him, and the Federal Court is currently deliberating on aspects of his case.
Do you know more on this story? Email investigations@abc.net.au
Topics: international-law, law-crime-and-justice, unrest-conflict-and-war, human-interest, courts-and-trials, melbourne-3000, vic, australia, croatia, yugoslavia, serbia
First posted
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President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE is expected to authorize the sale of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine's military, possibly including the Javelin missile system, as the country battles pro-Russian separatists in Crimea.
ABC News, citing State Department sources, reported that Trump is expected to formally sign a plan to sell $47 million worth of anti-tank missiles, launchers and related equipment to Ukraine's military. The plan would then head to Congress for a 30-day review period.
The State Department confirmed that the U.S. had decided to provide Ukraine with defensive equipment.
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"The United States has decided to provide Ukraine enhanced defensive capabilities as part of our effort to help Ukraine build its long-term defense capacity, to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to deter further aggression," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement.
"U.S. assistance is entirely defensive in nature, and as we have always said, Ukraine is a sovereign country and has a right to defend itself. The United States remains committed to the Minsk agreements as the way forward in eastern Ukraine."
The Trump administration earlier this week signed off on a sale of lethal arms to Ukraine, a departure from the Obama administration.
The administration approved the sale of Model M107A1 sniper systems and associated equipment to the country on Wednesday at a value of $41.5 million. The move drew swift praise from Russia hawks in Congress, including Sen. Bob Corker Robert (Bob) Phillips CorkerBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Sasse’s jabs at Trump spark talk of primary challenger RNC votes to give Trump 'undivided support' ahead of 2020 MORE (R-Tenn.), who had urged the Obama administration to do more about Russian aggression into Ukraine.
“I’m pleased the administration approved the sale of defensive lethal arms to Ukraine,” Corker said of the Trump decision. “This decision was supported by Congress in legislation that became law three years ago and reflects our country’s longstanding commitment to Ukraine in the face of ongoing Russian aggression.”
In August, Defense Secretary James Mattis James Norman MattisTrump backs off total Syria withdrawal Grass-roots campaign backs Mattis for public office Overnight Defense: Dems tee up Tuesday vote against Trump's emergency declaration | GOP expects few defections | Trump doubles number of troops staying in Syria to 400 MORE dismissed criticism that providing lethal weapons to Ukraine could be seen as a provocation in the region.
“Defensive weapons are not provocative unless you're an aggressor, and clearly, Ukraine is not an aggressor, since it's their own territory where the fighting is happening,” he said.
The Kremlin, however, condemned Wednesday's move, warning that it “will once again motivate the hotheads” on the Ukrainian side of the conflict and "unleash bloodshed again."
Updated 8:22 p.m.
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Even at a time of record income inequality, the lowest federal tax burden in 60 years and plummeting effective tax rates for the top one percent of earners, it is often difficult to put a face on the yawning chasm between the super-rich and everyone else. But now we have six. New data from the Federal Reserve reveal that the heirs of Walmart founders Sam and James "Bud" Walton now possess total wealth equivalent to 49 million American families, 42 percent of the total. As it turns out, that shocking number will grow much larger if Mitt Romney wins in November. After all, would-be President Romney not only wants to deliver another massive tax cut windfall for the wealthy, but wants to eliminate the estate tax altogether, a move that on paper would divert over $30 billion from the U.S. Treasury into the vaults of the Walton family.
Back in the fall of 2007, Walmart chief financial officer Tom Schoewe told Wall Street analysts, "Tough times are actually a good time for Walmart." Now we know just how good.
As labor economist Sylvia Allegretto of the University of California and Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute documented this week, the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) showed that the crippling recession which began five years ago has been a bonanza for the Walton Six. Between 2007 and 2010, the wealth of the Walton family members jumped from $73.3 billion to $89.5 billion even as median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent. The result?
In 2007, it was reported that the Walton family wealth was as large as the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or 30.5 percent of all American families.
And in 2010, as the Walton's wealth has risen and most other Americans' wealth declined, it is now the case that the Walton family wealth is as large as the bottom 48.8 million families in the wealth distribution (constituting 41.5 percent of all American families) combined.
Apparently, that's not enough for the Waltons. Which is why they along with dozens of other billionaires are backing Mitt Romney, big time.
As you'll recall, Mitt Romney doesn't merely want to make the Bush tax cuts permanent: he wants to end the AMT and enact another 20 percent across the board tax cut that could reduce his own future tax bills by half. But one Romney proposal above all others - the elimination of the estate tax - offers a staggering ROI for the richest families in America.
In 1999, that tax was 55% on an individual's estate valued at over $675.000. Thanks to President Obama's capitulation to Congressional Republicans in December 2010, the estate tax dropped to 35 percent starting at $5 million per person. (Despite the fact that only 0.25 percent of estates even had to pay the tax, Democrat Blanche Lincoln, also once known as the "Senator from Walmart," colluded with Arizona Republican Jon Kyl to force the lower rate.) Now, Mitt Romney wants to eliminate that levy altogether, one that brings Uncle Sam billions in revenue annually.
The result will be billions back for Romney's billionaire backers. On paper, Sheldon Adelson's heirs will keep $8.75 billion (35 percent of his estimated $25 billion fortune) currently destined for the U.S. Treasury. The beneficiaries of Richard and Bill Marriott, the hotel moguls worth an estimated $3.3 billion between them, would reap an extra $1.15 billion payday. Then there's Alice and Jim Walton, who are in a class by themselves. For their combined $400,000 contribution to Romney's Super PAC, their Walmart heirs could get back 81,750 times on Alice and Jim's original investment.
As Forbes first highlighted last year, between them the six Waltons combined have over $90 billion. As Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders explained in his famous filibuster of December 2010, the elimination of the estate tax could potentially save the Walton family $32.7 billion. As it turns out, President Romney's zeroing out of the estate tax would cap a years-long effort for the Waltons. USA Today summed it up in 2005:
Led by Sam Walton's only daughter, Alice, the family spent $3.2 million on lobbying, conservative causes and candidates for last year's federal elections. That's more than double what it spent in the previous two elections combined, public documents show.
The Waltons have joined a coterie of wealthy families trying to save fortunes through permanent repeal of the estate tax, government watchdogs say. The election of President Bush and more conservatives to Congress gave momentum to the long-fought effort. The Waltons add more.
A Republican victory this fall could bring Alice Walton's crusade to fruition. And if she succeeds, the gaping multi-billion hole left in the U.S. Treasury will have to be filled by all the other taxpayers in America. Or as the Waltons call them, Walmart customers.
(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)
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It seems like demand for gasoline (or petrol, as they say in the UK) isn't quite as inelastic as the pessimists feared. One liter of gasoline costs about 117p in the UK, which is about $8.62 per US gallon if you convert it. That's over twice as much as in the US, and at that level, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that demand for gasoline in Britain is down about 20% over the past 12 months.
Alternatives to Driving, Ways to Save on Gas
The IEA reports that motorists are increasingly taking public transit to save on fuel, but of course the context isn't quite the same in most of England as it is in the US, for example. A lot of cities were designed pre-automobile in the 'older' countries while much of the US was designed specifically so that you would need a car to do anything. That's not environmentally sustainable, or even cost effective.
Many forecasters, and we tend to agree with them, don't see high oil prices as a temporary thing. Rather, it is oil prices in the past couple of decades that have been rather low (remember the oil barrel at $20 in the 1990s?). Even if what is happening right now is not peak oil yet, the demand side of the equation is changing rapidly in the developing world and prices should stay high.
This will create a huge market incentive for higher efficiency and alternatives to oil. That's where the green movement comes in. We have to offer solutions and make sure that people in power don't panic and take the wrong path (liquefied coal anyone? more corn ethanol subsidies?). Hypermiling is great, but it won't be enough...
Walkable Communities & Urban Planning
To Go Green, Live Closer to Work
Brother and Sister Create Walkable Neighborhood in Colorado
Walk Score: Cool Green Google Map Mashup
The Suburbs are So Dead
Plug In Hybrids
F3DM: The Second, Smaller, Plug-in Hybrid by China's BYD
BYD F6DM: Will the First Plug-In Hybrid be Chinese?
The Buzz Around the Chevy Volt
Electric Cars
Introducing the BYD E6 Electric Car
Mitsubishi i-MiEV Electric Car to Go Global
Subaru Tests R1e Electric Car in New York City, Previews G4e
https://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/05/first-tesla-electric-car-store-california-santa-monica.php
Public Transportation
How to Green Your Public Transportation
Public Transit Looking More Attractive in the Face of Record Gas Prices
Google Upgrades Coverage of Public Transportation
More on High Gas Prices in Britain
Petrol sales fall 20pc as drivers feel the pinc
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We’re deep into Alpha 18 polishing and tweaking. And this week brings a huuuuge list of updates — including (finally!) buildings that don’t leave landscape holes when destroyed. (How does it work? We don’t know. It’s almost like… magic.) Also: the initial steps in a first-time player’s tutorial (only for the Ascendancy at the moment). Let us know what you think of the format.
IMPORTANT UPDATE FOR MODDERS AND PLAYERS WHO USE MODS: This release contains certain updates designed to improve performance of the game overall. These updates include a bunch of mod-related improvements we have made to make your life and the game better. The minimum mod version number has been increased to 3 so outdated mods will no longer load. Please update your mods (and let us know if you have any trouble) — games using mods that have not been updated will not see those mods loaded. These changes are effective on the Steam Latest branch with the release of develop-3107 (August 25). They will not affect games using mods on the current stable Alpha (Alpha 17).
Full details are here. Please read.
Here’s the full rundown on what’s new in this release:
Performance ++!
Tons of performance fixes related to memory Remove components from items that don’t need them: unit info, material, regions, etc
Reduce memory usage in nav grids
Various fixes related to material proxies
Change catalog to string map for network performance reasons
Separate biome generation data from biome to speed up lookup
Use restore instead of load from json when adding components that already exist
Reduce # of traces on entities
Building ++!
Restore terrain when buildings are destroyed
Add SFX for building destruction
Correct fixture merging bug when buildings are merged
Removed extra ghost object when placing furniture around finished buildings
Placeable items now show up correctly in building editor
During building destruction, combine items until max stacks are reached
Make building asserts show more information
Smooth debris animations so they are framerate independent
Building cost now updates accurately based on furniture placement
Fixed bug that prevented Carpenter House from building
Enhanced hearthling lifestyles
Added Emote Animations: Complete, Concerned, Browwipe, Reservation
Adjusted Yawn Animation – Previous Yawn Update looked too much like a celebration when time sped up
Add tall clay window and tan latticed window
Merchants++
Forgot to mention this in an earlier update, but merchants now have gold caps! You can only sell them as much stuff as they have gold to trade you for it!
Add min days before return to trader scripts
Display the returning trader’s remaining time in days, not hours, when a large amount of time remains
General stuff and bugfixes
Fixed assertion when exiting the game
Remove rename functionality on things that shouldn’t/can’t be renamed
Fix bug where toasts float a hundred feet above people’s heads
Fix militia not standing ground in town alert mode
Add button properties to Craft button in crafter UI
Fixed patrol formation bug. Keeps members from following a former patrol lead when she’s off duty (e.g. going to bed)
Fixed bug that spammed mining regions when digging building foundations
Added basic tutorial when starting a game on Ascendancy
Change market stall recipes to use wood/clay resources instead of piles
Adjust pain value of wrench
Fix some issues with pets eating
Add min days before return to trader scripts
Make level up bulletins less spammy; auto remove if close button is pressed
Fix goblin boss naming issue
Display the returning trader’s remaining time in days, not hours, when a large amount of time remains
Send CPU/GPU info for analytics
Fix Ent raid starting in peaceful mode
Fix bug that tried to set player_id on invalid goblin sheep
Fixed container inception bug where hearthlings were placing other items over the ghosts of manually moved objects
Fixed bug where inventory counts of items were incorrect because duplicate ghosts were appearing at the edge of the world
Food now decays correctly, and disappears when it is completely rotten
Known issues in this release
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“The Image of Thought” is a chapter of Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition. There he argues that philosophy has been beholden to a particular simplistic model of what thinking is, and this has never been questioned (assumed to be merely part of the common sense). Deleuze attacks this markedly unphilosophical prejudice, that would see in thought something good-natured and naturally truth seeking, a mere binary play between truth and error, question and correct response. In its place he emphasizes the problematic. Thought is the development of problems; it is these problems that give sense to questions that the respondent answers in a like sense. From ‘the answer as correct = truth’, to an examination of the sense of questions, thought is placed a further step back, at the genesis of the problem that would have one ask a question in the first place.
The chapter is often recommended as an entry point to Deleuze’s own thought, and the ramifications of the arguments in the chapter resonate throughout all of his work.
Credits: Video editing and Soundtrack by John Brady.
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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his running mate on Saturday energized the Republican base, but it also elicited an unusual amount of glee from prominent Democrats, many of whom believe he’s the ideal candidate for President Barack Obama to run against.
“Paul Ryan is the one VP pick who can unite liberal and conservative America,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow wrote on Twitter, adding her comment to the category “#CouponsCouponsCoupons,” a sly reference to Ryan’s proposal to privatize Medicare and convert it to a coupon program that offers discounts on private health insurance policies.
On that very subject, Washington Post columnist and occasional Maddow fill-in host Ezra Klein added: “Mitt Romney, announcing Paul Ryan as his VP, attacks Obama for cutting Medicare by $700 billion. Just wow.”
The president’s spokespeople didn’t waste any time hitting that same point, arguing that Ryan will enact “budget-busting tax cuts” for the rich and hurt the middle class. That that effect, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told The Associated Press that Ryan “would end Medicare as we know it.”
Ryan’s selection also plays into the Democrats’ “war on women” rhetoric because of his support for policies that undermine women’s access to reproductive health programs like Planned Parenthood. “Mitt Romney’s choice of Rep. Ryan as his running mate reminds us of why elections matter when it comes to our ability to make personal and private medical decisions,” NARAL president Nancy Keenan said in a media advisory.
“The outcome of the 2012 presidential election very well could determine whether abortion remains legal and accessible for the next generation of American women,” she added. “Romney has pledged that taking away women’s rights will be a priority for him and his choice of Ryan amplifies that promise to the extreme anti-choice backers of this ticket. My organization’s priority is to make sure President Obama remains in the White House.”
“Paul Ryan: takes big $ from Koch bros, shovels big $ to the oil industry,” environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote, calling Ryan “another corrupt hack.” In a second post he referenced Ryan’s love for the writings of Ayn Rand. “Fun guy, Paul Ryan: ‘I gave out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it.'”
Seconding that, Think Progress’s “12 Things You Should Know About Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan” list mentioned Ryan’s attachment to the writings of Rand and his vote to keep over $40 billion in government subsidies for big oil companies.
“Rand described altruism as ‘evil,’ condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor, viewed the feminist movement as ‘phony,’ and called Arabs ‘almost totally primitive savages,'” Igor Volsky wrote. “Though he publicly rejected ‘her philosophy’ in 2012, Ryan had professed himself a strong devotee.”
“Paul Ryan?” liberal documentarian Michael Moore exclaimed. “I guess they plan on winning. It’s all about who is able 2 get more ppl 2 the polls. Ignorance fear & hate r great motivators.” He added: “Channeling Bush, war supporters/military dodgers Romney & Ryan insult those who served by using battleship as their prop.”
Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), published a document examining the positions of potential Romney running mates, and ultimately said that Ryan holds “anti-civil liberties positions.”
In the milling aftermath of Romney’s announcement, politics magazine The New Republic summed it all up by exclaiming: “The Ryan Veep pick is a fantastic stroke of luck for President Obama.”
——
Photo: Flickr user Gage Skidmore, creative commons licensed.
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Illegal immigration advocates often cite studies that indicate illegal aliens commit less crime than citizens in the United States. However, criminal statistics from the city of Phoenix, Arizona, after dropping sanctuary city policies in 2008 completely undermine the talking point.
Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck supports sanctuary policies, and explained why he believed it meant citizens would be more safe. "We do not want to dilute trust because trust is the most important thing in policing," he said. "We depend on our communities, particularly our immigrant communities to cooperate with us, not only to keep them safe but to keep all of you safe."
But according to Levi Bolton, the executive director to the Arizona Police Association, when Phoenix suspended its sanctuary city policies, instead of endangering the citizens, the opposite happened.
"We saw a decrease in crime," said Bolton. "It had a deterrent effect on folks because the risk of discovery went up exponentially when we actually enforced the law."
Under the new policies, law enforcement could ask suspects if they are in the U.S. legally, and they could inform immigration agencies about violations of federal laws.
Fox News reported that the murder rate in Phoenix fell by 27 percent, robberies fell by 23 percent, and assault fell by 13 percent. Even more minor crimes fell, with burglaries by 14 percent and theft by 19 percent.
While the causes of crime are multitudinous and could be attributed to numerous sources, illegal immigration critics find confirmation of their political beliefs in the statistics.
One study challenges the illegal alien narrative by showing that there is no connection between crime and the presence or absence of illegal aliens.
The six-year study from the University of Riverside, California, across 55 cities found "no statistically discernible difference in violent crime rates, rape, or property crime."
Curbing illegal alien crime was a promise Trump made often while on the campaign trail, and while he has not rescinded Obama's "Dream Act" for childhood arrivals, or built the border wall, his rhetoric alone has caused a steep decline in illegal border crossings.
The House of Representative also passed two bills meant to deter illegal alien crime, including the "Kate's Law" named after Kate Steinle, a victim of illegal alien crime in San Francisco.
The government in Los Angeles has been at the forefront of dissent against Trump's offensive on sanctuary city policies. In May, L.A. Mayor Gil Garcetti imposed his own executive order that extended sanctuary city policies over all city employees. The state government in California is also considering a bill to make the entire state a sanctuary for illegal aliens.
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But for whatever reason, last December, in a show of unity, members from all three parties represented in the legislature rose to express their support for a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) pilot project for P.E.I.
It was a pleasant surprise for supporters of Basic Income Guarantee in P.E.I. and across the country.
Motion #83, put forward by Green Party Leader Peter Bevan-Baker, called on the Legislative Assembly to “urge government to pursue a partnership with the federal government for the establishment of a universal basic income pilot project in Prince Edward Island”. It received unanimous support.
Several MLAs from each party spoke in its favour, their comments revealing their acute awareness of the extent and the impacts of poverty in P.E.I. and their desire to find a solution.
The adoption of the motion, and most especially the positive manner in which it was received, gave new hope to the community organizers who have been promoting basic income and asking for a made-in-P.E.I. pilot project for several years.
The idea of working with the federal government is of critical importance. BIG would require a substantial reorganization of existing programs, and would, in all likelihood, be administered through the federal tax system. Community activists have been consistent in stating clearly that a BIG pilot project must be a collaborative effort among all levels of government.
As several MLAs also noted, Prince Edward Island is a perfect jurisdiction to test this idea – our size, and the fact that we are an Island with a fairly mixed economy, make it an ideal place to test BIG. At the same time, we will be watching and learning as other pilot projects roll out in Ontario and Quebec.
Several MLAs pointed out, rightly, that implementing a Basic Income would not negate the need for current social programs and services designed to support individuals and families. We would still need to invest in (and in fact increase our investment in) affordable housing, accessible childcare, public transportation and disability supports.
Workers must be paid a living wage, and have access to Employment Insurance and adequate pensions. These are all things that are part of our social infrastructure and fundamental to the kind of healthy, inclusive and socially just communities we dream of.
It was especially encouraging to hear MLAs say that planning for a pilot project should not be seen as strictly a government task, rather, it should be an inclusive process, involving people from the community, people affected by poverty and their advocates. After several years of research and community engagement, the Working Group for a Livable Income is eager to continue this work with government and participate in designing a program that works for P.E.I.
In his introduction to the motion, Bevan-Baker talked about how universal basic income could “enable the greatest unleashing of human potential ever seen” and allow people to be creative and take risks, secure in the knowledge that they have a roof over their heads and enough food to meet their needs.
This is what is so compelling about BIG – it is about dignity and equality, building communities where everyone is valued and gets to participate.
Ann Wheatley represents Cooper Institute in the P.E.I. Working Group for a Livable Income.
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Google recently made some significant changes to its Play Music app for Android, adding a search history and notification channels for use with the upcoming Android O release. That was followed up with the addition of New Release Radio, a personalized mix of recent releases similar to your own collection. Thanks to a couple of tips, we've also become aware that Google is testing a couple of small improvements to search in the app, namely a play button and album art for top results.
Left: Current behavior. Right: New UI with album art and play buttons.
As you can see from the screenshots above, the new UI includes top results for your search, including album art and the ability to start playing them instantly via a play button. I've tried to induce the new behavior on Nexus and Pixel phones with various versions of the app right up to the most recent (7.10.5022-1.T.4178353) and haven't had any luck. That would suggest this is just a test sent out to a small number of random devices. Artem has seen the new UI in version 7.9, so it's certainly not exclusive to the most recent release.
While tests of this nature are carried out all the time and often go nowhere, I would be surprised if this wasn't rolled out to everyone in an upcoming release, as it looks like a useful improvement. Only time will tell though. Let us know in the comments if you've seen this new behavior, and if so what do you make of it?
The latest version of Google Play Music is available on APKMirror for those it hasn't yet rolled out to.
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Telas em branco, folhas de papel, caderninhos, conversas… São inúmeras as maneiras de contar histórias. Luan optou por uma cada vez mais comum entre atletas: as tatuagens. Entre leões e desenhos coloridos, o atacante do Grêmio carrega, marcados na pele, momentos definitivos na vida e na carreira. Braços fechados, pescoço desenhado, nuca riscada… O jogador mais valioso da Libertadores entra em campo nesta terça, a partir das 21h45, contra o Deportes Iquique, em franca evolução no ano e com o menino de São José do Rio Preto na cabeça no coração e na perna direita.
LEIA MAIS
> Maicon treina, mas segue como dúvida
> Grêmio x Iquique tem 12 mil ingressos vendidos
> Grêmio se vacina contra acomodação
Luan mostra tatuagens à mãe, Olimpíada e fé
(Foto: Eduardo Moura / GloboEsporte.com)
Recentemente, o site transfermarkt, especializado em transferências e valor de mercado de atletas, colocou o camisa 7 tricolor como o jogador mais valioso da Libertadores. Luan carrega esse peso. Embora, diga, pouco se importa. Aprendeu em cada asfalto e campo de terra nos quais desfilava seu talento a se portar contra a pressão nos campos de várzea no interior paulista. Depois de um início de ano criticado pelos poucos gols, abriu a conta ao anotar contra o Zamora, no início de março. E já balançou as redes outras três vezes.
– Sempre assistia a um jogo de Libertadores, de Brasileiro e me imaginava dentro de campo, jogando. Hoje tenho essa oportunidade. Acho que (o sonho) é trabalhar e poder conquistar títulos. É meu desejo maior desde que estou aqui. Sempre falaram para sair e ir embora. Sempre deixei claro que não queria sair daqui sem dar um título para o Grêmio. É a forma que posso retribuir, poder dar um título e jogar bem – disse Luan ao GloboEsporte.com, acomodado em um dos bancos de reservas da Arena.
A vida do atacante de 24 anos recém completos pode ser dividida em três partes. Primeiro, sua infância complicada ao lado da mãe, Márcia, e da avó, Cida, após a morte do pai, vítima de um acidente de trânsito quando ele tinha cinco anos. A adolescência veio ao lado de pessoas sem uma bússola, consequentemente apontando o caminho errado ao jovem, e a insistência no sonho. Agora, na fase de títulos no Grêmio e na seleção brasileira, vê a hora de retribuir os amigos fiéis e agradecer a mãe pela criação.
01 A FAVELA NÃO SAI DE VOCÊ
Luan começa a contar sua história por um desenho recente, feito na perna direita. A vila, com meninos sonhadores e a bola de futebol sempre presente, representa o sonho de se tornar jogador e gozar do sucesso.
Luan mostra imagem que representa vila onde morou (Foto: Eduardo Moura/GloboEsporte.com)
Ao lado do registro de uma hipotética Vila São Jorge, em São José do Rio Preto, onde se criou, um espiral na panturrilha traz a frase: "você sai da favela, mas a favela não sai de você". Um resgate das origens para evitar qualquer deslumbramento com o sucesso atual.
– Quando pequeno, jogava onde eu morava. Tem até uma frase aqui: "você sai da favela, mas a favela não sai de você". Uma frase que eu carrego para o resto da minha vida, tenho amigos lá. Quando estou de férias, procuro ficar com eles. Lá era bem assim. Conta um pouco da minha história. Lá na minha quebrada, como eu falo, jogava no asfalto, terra, campo, quadra. Onde tivesse duas traves e uma bola, a gente estava jogando – sorri o artilheiro gremista em 2016, com 12 gols.
As dificuldades da infância fizeram Luan desacreditar e desistir do sonho do futebol por um tempo. Mas voltou atrás, e nesta noite irá novamente desfilar seu talento em um estádio para 50 mil pessoas na competição mais importante do continente.
01 DONA MÁRCIA INSISTIU E GANHOU
A primeira tatuagem de Luan, feita em 2007, foi o nome da mãe, Márcia, no antebraço direito.
– Fiz escondido, mas coloquei o nome dela para já dar uma acalmada – ri.
Esse registro, simples, significa muito para o jovem. Foi ela a insistir e a se desdobrar para dar condições ao atacante tomar o caminho correto. Também foi a mãe a motivação para Luan, mesmo aos 18 anos, idade tardia no futebol, dar o último gás para se tornar, enfim, jogador.
Acabei não indo para o outro lado, mas andava junto com pessoas que eram da vida errada. Graças a Deus, tive a cabeça boa. Com 18 anos, botei na minha cabeça que iria jogar bola para dar uma vida melhor para ela (mãe), de uma forma honesta.
Luan
– Na adolescência, foi um pouco difícil. Tinha o sonho, mas não queria correr atrás pelas dificuldades. Acabei não indo para o outro lado, mas andava junto com pessoas que eram da vida errada. Graças a Deus, tive a cabeça boa. E pela minha mãe. Com 18 anos, botei na minha cabeça que iria jogar bola para dar uma vida melhor para ela, de uma forma honesta – conta.
Então, no início da vida adulta, Luan passou a jogar no campo. Deixou as quadras, onde se divertia mais com canetas, dribles curtos e gols – algo visto hoje em dia –, para ser profissional. No Tanabi, no interior paulista, deu o primeiro passo nos gramados.
Foram poucos meses indo e voltando para casa a cada fim de semana até vestir a camisa do América, na sua cidade. Iria disputar a Copa São Paulo de Futebol Júnior, vitrine tão valorizada no garimpo a jovens talentos. Era, enfim, sua grande chance. Semanas antes de começar, porém, desistiu.
– Ia de moto treinar. Para jogador não pode, né (risos). Era a vida que tinha antes, foi bem complicado. Não tinha muita esperança. Tinha na cabeça que depois não ia mais jogar bola. Até para ir jogar foi dificuldade, treinei um mês no América, saí e voltei quando faltavam semanas para começar a competição. Foi uma benção de Deus mesmo, mudou a minha vida – lembra Luan, com olhar pouco saudoso.
Atacante do Grêmio chama atenção pelas tatuagens no corpo (Foto: Eduardo Moura/GloboEsporte.com)
Essa etapa de virada brusca na vida está marcada em desenhos religiosos. Luan tem no antebraço direito "abençoado por Deus", assim como um terço entre outros rabiscos e "fé" no pescoço, com duas asas. Também no pescoço, mais uma ode à mãe, avó e demais familiares com os dizeres: "family is my life" ("família é a minha vida", em tradução livre).
01 DA VILA À LIBERTADORES, O MAIS VALIOSO
Luan chegou ao Grêmio em 2013. O clube gaúcho observou-o na Copa São Paulo e viu potencial. Aí o jogador faz um agradecimento especial para seu Ademir, técnico no futsal, que insistiu para que participasse da competição, de olho na chance em algum clube grande.
Após um período rápido na base, Luan ascendeu para o profissional depois de se destacar no time B, que disputou algumas partidas no Gauchão. Hoje, é dos principais nomes da equipe, campeão da Copa do Brasil e da Olimpíada – conquista essa registrada também no peito do atacante, como fez o "parça" Neymar.
Com Neymar, Felipe Anderson e Gabigol na Olimpíada, onde ganhou o ouro (Foto: Reprodução)
O tom dourado no peito alçou-o a um patamar semelhante ao de outros amigos da bola: Gabriel Jesus, ex-Palmeiras, – "da favela", como define –, e Gabriel, ex-Santos, ambos vendidos na última janela de transferências. Na Libertadores, Luan é o jogador com maior valor de mercado, junto a Alario, do River Plate: 12 milhões euros (R$ 39,9 milhões).
– Para mim, são só números, não vai me atrapalhar em campo ou de repente fazer com que me deslumbre. Isso é também pelo trabalho que fiz, pelas coisas boas que fiz, ter essa valorização. Claro que é importante para o jogador. E fico feliz de estar sendo reconhecido – afirma.
A Libertadores tem uma pitada leve de infância e adolescência para Luan. Os campos de várzea, onde aprendeu os seus macetes, reservavam jornadas duras contra zagueiros mais corpulentos e vigorosos. Mais ou menos o que encontra pela frente América do Sul afora – claro, com uma diferença na qualidade técnica.
– O meu jogo sempre vai ser o mesmo. Com 18 anos, joguei o varzeano no time do meu bairro. É pegado, é valendo, e jogo da Libertadores é isso, tem que ter pegada, é mais contato. Aprendi bastante ali. Não na qualidade, mas na entrega, na pegada. Também é valendo – encerra Luan.
Confira as notícias do esporte gaúcho em www.globoesporte.com/rs
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Above watch: A Moncton man has opened up a cannabis club and vape lounge to educate people about the health benefits of marijuana. Shelley Steeves reports.
MONCTON – A Moncton man has opened a cannabis club and vape lounge to educate people about the health benefits of marijuana.
Matt Melanson opened the Dr. Greenthumb Cannabis Club and Lounge to give medical marijuana users a place to go out of the public eye. He opened the lounge at the beginning if this year after getting his own medical marijuana licence.
“Say if you need your medication and you have nowhere to go, I don’t think going into your car to smoke or vaporize it or to go walking at the bus stop to go smoke something in public is very good,” he said.
“It’s not going to help the cause.”
That cause, he says, is to lift the stigma and educate people about the benefits of cannabis. Melanson uses it to treat his ADHD.
He says he doesn’t provide the pot, but he will let anyone vape at the lounge as long as they sign up for his club and provide government issued photo ID.
“We don’t ask if they have their medical license, we really don’t care if they do or don’t.”
Health Canada says it only provides medical licenses and doesn’t regulate where people can use the drug, which continues to cause a lot of confusion among users.
Alex Caissie just got his medical license.
“I know common sense, don’t walk in front of a police station and smoke up,” he said.
There are about 40-50,000 people with medical marijuana licences here in Canada. In New Brunswick, there’s just under 700.
Medical marijuana producer OrganiGram are expanding and tripling their production to keep up with the growing demand for medicinal cannabis.
CEO Denis Arsenault says vape lounges are likely to become more common. But they do raise some public safety concerns.
“I would hope whoever uses a vape lounge takes a taxi or walk home,” he said.
Which Melanson says he does encourage people to do when they leave the lounge.
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A former Seminole County Sheriff's Office deputy was arrested on fraud charges.Michael Weippert, 48, turned himself in to the Volusia County Jail and has since bonded out.Weippert has since retired from the Seminole County Sheriff's office, but he's accused of charging the Wekiva and Sweetwater Oaks Homeowners Associations for off duty patrol services when it's alleged he wasn't in the area at all.Investigators said other deputies had to answer calls for services about 30 times.About 20 times Weippert's cellphone indicated he was not in the neighborhoods he was supposed to be in.On three occasions, Weippert was allegedly not even in the county.Top video: Man couldn't believe good deed from rescuersThe state will look into the misconduct complaint as well.Related: Florida mug shots
A former Seminole County Sheriff's Office deputy was arrested on fraud charges.
Michael Weippert, 48, turned himself in to the Volusia County Jail and has since bonded out.
Weippert has since retired from the Seminole County Sheriff's office, but he's accused of charging the Wekiva and Sweetwater Oaks Homeowners Associations for off duty patrol services when it's alleged he wasn't in the area at all.
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Investigators said other deputies had to answer calls for services about 30 times.
About 20 times Weippert's cellphone indicated he was not in the neighborhoods he was supposed to be in.
On three occasions, Weippert was allegedly not even in the county.
Top video: Man couldn't believe good deed from rescuers
The state will look into the misconduct complaint as well.
Related: Florida mug shots
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Imagine this. You are in a good mood today. You just received a piece of great news that you’re excited about and you tell your friend in joy. However, she listens in disinterest as you gush away. Worse still, she says that what you’re talking about isn’t that great! Before you know it, you have switched from being happy to feeling discouraged.
Has this happened to you before? It has to me, and unfortunately, this behavior is quite typical of critical people. No matter what you say, critical people will always find a way to bring down the conversation. You can’t remember the last time they gave you a compliment or positive feedback. They tend to scrutinize and nitpick on every little issue, after which they would harp on it and offer unwanted, negative thoughts.
If that’s not enough, critical people are often ready to discourage you. It seems that they have a filter that blocks out whatever that is good and focuses on the bad. Rather than praise, they seem to only know how to criticize.
8 Helpful Ways To Deal With Critical People
Naturally, critical people aren’t the first people you want to hang out with — yet it’s common to run into them in life. Here are my 8 tips to handle critical people. 🙂
1. Don’t Take It Personally
Oftentimes, criticisms by critical people tend to reflect more about them than you. They react critically because of their own beliefs about life. You may think that this critical person is all out to get you, but it’s likely that he/she acts this way to other people too.
Here’s one simple way to check:
Do you have any common friends with this person? Or do you know other people who interact with this person? Be present the next time he/she is with them. Observe how this critical person acts with them. How does he/she behave? Does he/she give the same pattern of comments? Focuses on the negative things? Does he/she come across as critical? If it’s a yes, then you got your answer.
In the past, I used to take a critical friend’s comments to heart. I’d wonder why she would be so discouraging toward the things I said and would feel defensive whenever she gave me uninvited criticism.
But when I observed her treatment of the people we hung out with, I realized that she did the same thing with others too. Same negative comments and hangups, even though I never saw anything wrong with what they were doing/saying. There was also a trend in the kind of things she would harp on.
It was then that I realized that it wasn’t about me; her criticisms were about her own frameworks in life. This was a liberating realization. Since then, I stopped taking anything she said personally and was able to objectify the situation.
2. Objectify the Comments – Understand the Underlying Message
Some critical people may just be misunderstood. They may be trying to offer good advice that comes across negatively due to their lack of tact. Sometimes, this turns into a big misunderstanding. The critical people get labeled as assholes even though they aren’t trying to be so.
Focus on “what” is being communicated (the message) rather than “how” the communication is being done (the words, the tone used). You may be surprised, but sometimes critical people are clueless about how they come across until they get a play-by-play of how they acted!
Filter their words and drill into their message. Ask yourself: “What are they trying to say? Why are they saying this? Are they really trying to be jerks, or do they mean well?”
For example, say you want to start an online business. Your friend (an experienced online entrepreneur) says that you shouldn’t start at all, because you’re likely going to fail. Maybe he’s trying to warn you of the overwhelming obstacles, given his extensive experience online, and having seen the number of people who have failed in trying to do the same thing. Instead of being defensive, probe into his words. Ask him, “Why do you say that?” Understand and learn from his wisdom. Who knows? He may have some great insights on what you should do to succeed!
If you can get past the “how” and focus on the “what,” you gain access to a wealth of information in people’s minds. Two things happen here:
You no longer react in a knee-jerk fashion to other people’s words but instead focus on the underlying meaning. You become more perceptive as a person. You become more knowledgeable since you focus on the message, not how the message is communicated. You are able to learn from interpreting and applying what people are trying to say. This can’t happen if you are always hung up over how someone says something.
I used to work at a multinational firm where people would speak in a very direct way. Some people were very curt at times, especially when faced with tight deadlines. Some managers were frank and would not hold back on telling you your issues directly. As they say, if you can’t take the heat, you should get out of the kitchen.
Working in such a place made me more perceptive because rather than focus on the exact words said (which tends to miss the point), I learned to listen to what someone is communicating. “Listen” meaning to listen beyond the words that are articulated, and to understand the message within. This is especially crucial in today’s world as different cultures and people have different styles of communicating and expressing their messages, and it’s important that we learn to “listen” to understand what each other is saying, and to connect as humans.
3. Take it as a Source of Honest Feedback
One way to look at critical people is to take their criticism as a source of honesty. At least with them, what you see is what you get.
I’ve come across seemingly nice people before and while the friendship starts off on a high note, they later turn out to be fake and dishonest. On the other hand, I have met oddly blunt, critical people who turn out to be pretty nice folks.
Does it have to be a choice between critical and honest people, and nice and fake people? No, of course not — this is a false dichotomy. People can be nice and honest too, and we shouldn’t excuse rudeness when it happens, especially people who are rude for no reason. It’s just that when you are dealing with a critical person, one way to look at it is that at least the person is being upfront with his/her feelings. You can ask him/her for an opinion and you know he/she will likely tell you what he/she thinks, without sugarcoating or withholding facts, and that’s helpful when you want direct feedback or the harshest kind of feedback to help you improve.
4. Address Your Discomfort Within
Just as the criticism from critical people reflects something about their inner frameworks, our discomfort with their criticism reflects something about ourselves too, especially if we keep getting bothered by it.
Whenever I feel uncomfortable about others’ comments, I’ll look within to understand why. Chances are it has struck a chord with an inner belief. My next step is to discover what it is.
I recommend doing this with everything we face in life. Sources of discomfort should be seen as compasses for growth. Something I often say this: “Fear, uncertainty, and discomfort are your compasses toward growth.”
Ask yourself: “Why am I feeling uncomfortable with his/her comment? Why am I unhappy about what he/she just said? What is it that is bothering me?”
Keep asking and drill down to the root cause. The first set of answers will be directed at the external world, such as issues with the person, issues with other people. But as you keep drilling down, the answers change from being external-focused to being internal-focused.
This means that the discomfort is not really because of the person; it’s because of something in you. It could be a similar situation in the past when someone said the same thing or a negative belief you have about such comments. The final answer you get from this exercise should help you gain closure on your discomfort and take action on the situation, without expecting anyone else to change.
5. Don’t “Ask” for Opinions If You Can’t Take It
If you can’t take what the person has to say, then don’t ask for his/her opinion. This includes talking about the topic in general, which then opens the window for the person to share his/her opinions.
Some of my friends often complain about how their critical friends put them down all the time. Yet for some reason, they keep putting themselves in the same situation — i.e. at the receiving end of their criticisms — by talking about the same thing to those people. I can understand why though. Sometimes we do this to get acceptance from critical people because it’s so hard to get encouragement from them. For example, with critical parents. With a critical partner. Or with a critical friend.
But if a person often criticizes what you say, then he/she is likely going to still do that — at least until he/she decides to change his/her behavior. So if you talk to them in the hopes that they will encourage and praise you, stop. You have seen their critical behavior before, so it shouldn’t surprise you if they continue to criticize what you say. Albert Einstein once said that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, and he’s right. If you want a different outcome, then change how you act. Stop putting yourself in the same situation, and stop subjecting yourself to their criticism by simply not talking about the things that you’re sensitive about to them — for the time being anyway, until you are ok with their criticism.
6. Disengage / Ignore
Here’s an insightful story I’ve heard before, but never get tired of:
Buddha was well known for his ability to respond to evil with good. There was a man who knew about his reputation and he traveled miles and miles and miles to test Buddha. When he arrived and stood before Buddha, he verbally abused him constantly; he insulted him; he challenged him; he did everything he could to offend Buddha. Buddha was unmoved, he simply turned to the man and said, “May I ask you a question?” The man responded with, “Well, what?” Buddha said, “If someone offers you a gift and you decline to accept it, to whom then does it belong?” The man said, “Then it belongs to the person who offered it.” Buddha smiled, “That is correct. So if I decline to accept your abuse, does it not then still belong to you?” The man was speechless and walked away.
Some people may voluntarily offer criticism when you’re not asking for them. Their criticism may be out of line and done in poor taste. One way you can respond is to retaliate in anger.
However, since the person likely has some angst to be voluntarily dispensing negativity in the first place, your retaliation will likely invite more of such comments. No sooner would this become a heated, ugly debate — one which is unlikely to end well.
As they say about online negativity, “Don’t feed the trolls.” If you can’t stop them from voicing their opinions, then you have the option to ignore them. Give a simple 1-2 line response, one that acknowledges that you have heard the comment, but doesn’t engage further in the discussion. And if the person presses on, just ignore him/her. At this point, it’s obvious that he/she wants to ignite a response in you. By not doing so, you maintain control of the situation.
Just as the critical people need to take responsibility for their comments, we have to take responsibility for our reaction too. With every occurrence, there is always the event and our perception of the event. We can’t change how people act or talk around us, but we can change how we act around them. We always have a choice. If we don’t want to accept the negativity, then just don’t accept it. The negativity is not ours if we don’t take it.
7. Show Them Kindness
This may be a huge leap forward for some. You are probably wondering, Why should I be kind to them? They are causing me so much anguish as it is. They most certainly don’t deserve my kindness!
I watched the movie Peaceful Warrior a while back and there is a quote that I really like:
“The people who are the hardest to love are the ones who need it the most.”
I thought this is a very powerful quote. It’s true, isn’t it? If you think about it, why are critical people so critical? Why is it so hard for them to be positive? Why are they so scarce with their emotions? It’s because they lack it themselves. This is why they are not able to offer it to others. And if they are so critical of others, chances are they treat themselves with the same, if not a higher, level of criticism. They aren’t giving themselves the love that they desire.
Treat them with kindness. Be generous with your emotions with them. Drop them a compliment. Give them a smile. Say hi. Ask them out for a meal. Help them out in the areas you know they can benefit from. Get to know them personally.
They may react adversely at first, but that’s because they are caught off guard by your behavior. Chances are they are wary because they have rarely been treated in this manner. Just continue on with your kindness, and soon enough they will react with positivity too.
While the effects may not be immediate and it may just be a small improvement in your eyes, to them it’s a huge shift. And over time, your relationship with the person may evolve into a different one. Of course, if all they do is remain an energy suck, or take your kindness for granted, then you should cut them off and stop letting them drain your energy.
8. Avoid Them
When all else fails, avoid them. Reduce contact, limit conversations with him/her, hang out with other people if you guys are in a group, or as a last resort — cut him/her out of your life. Even if both of you work at the same place, you can’t be working with each other all the time. Use the 7 tips above in the times when you absolutely have to interact, and just steer clear of him/her in the other times.
I used to have a close friend who was particularly critical. Being around her felt suffocating. No matter what I said, she would have a way to add a negative slant. For example, if I was sharing about something I was excited about, she’d reply with some lackluster comment, about how it was not such a big deal or it was just normal. In our day-to-day conversations, she would barely have anything encouraging to say, choosing to focus on the negative things. Even when seeking solace, it was hard to get an empathetic response. Half the time I felt like I need to brace myself for a negative comment when talking to her.
Sometimes it may just be that both of you are not compatible as friends in this phase of your lives, and that you are better off apart from each other. If the relationship is causing you anguish, then do yourself and the person a favor by breaking it off, or at least reducing contact. Allow both of you to grow as individuals first, and see if you are a better fit as friends down the road.
Get the manifesto version of this article: [Manifesto] How to Deal With Critical People
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Just before Christmas last year, in Seattle in the US, Jeff Bezos sat with Diego Piacentini to discuss India, where Amazon was nearly seven months young. It was a quarterly review for Bezos, Amazon's CEO, who keeps a close vigil on his fledgling business in India. The message to Piacentini, who runs Amazon's international business, was succinct and direct: continue to invest big and build the most customer-centric company in India.
In Bangalore, meanwhile, a customer's experience on Amazon.in , the India unit of the world's largest online retailer, was something that would have sent Bezos into a furious tizzy. A young father in India's tech capital had ordered a toy for his son for Christmas but the present did not ship on time. Missing a delivery promise is near-criminal at Amazon, given Bezos's obsession with customer satisfaction. The miffed customer, in this instance, escalated his complaint to Amit Agarwal, who heads Amazon's India business and reports to Piacentini. It didn't take a detailed audit for Agarwal to find out what went wrong: the toy was an imported one, the seller on Amazon.in did not have it in its inventory, and it took time to procure it, resulting in the late shipment.
Jeff Bezos has a simple mandate for his India team: invest big
Amazon, like Flipkart, wants to scale up business in India. Period.
Amazon's goal in India is to constantly expand its catalogue
Over 19 years, Bezos has built a USD 180-bn company
Agarwal, a "shadow" or technical adviser to Bezos between 2007 and 2009, had to fix it, once and forever. He put in a new service-level agreement with sellers on procurement time, worked backward so that sellers could accurately predict the time it took for procurement and shipping, and promise customers deadlines that could be met. Sounds simple, but when you deal with hundreds of retailers and thousands of customers, it can get complex. The process has been standardised since then, says Agarwal. "When you get to the root cause, you fix it, and then that defect doesn't happen again."In 19 years, Bezos built Amazon from an online book seller to the world's largest online store, valued at over $180 billion today - as much as Ireland's gross national income. It sells everything, from diapers to sex toys and from electronics to grocery. The growth was driven by three fundamentals of the business: choice, price and delivery. A vast stock selection, low prices, and fast and reliable delivery rolled together into value and convenience for customers - over 215 million at last count.In the US, Amazon is a retailer who sells directly to customers, and also a marketplace where other retailers can list and sell their products. In India, where laws don't allow international online retailers to sell multiple brands, Amazon only has a marketplace - its tenth such venture.Even at half strength (marketplace accounts for 40 per cent of Amazon's global sales), India is Bezos's biggest new bet for simple and obvious reasons - it has the world's third largest Internet user base, and online retail promises immense scale.In a retail business of about half a trillion dollars, online retail (not including ticketing) is close to a billion dollars. Retail consultancy Technopak expects it to grow 61 times in the next 10 years. That is almost deja vu for Bezos and Amazon. When the Internet was coming into the mainstream in the early 1990s, Bezos, then a Wall Street banker, read a report which said that e-commerce would grow 2,300 per cent in a few years. "I want a part of it," he told himself. He quit his job, drove from New York to Seattle and started Amazon in 1994 (the original name of the start-up was Cadabra) from his garage.There is a small but critical difference in the Indian situation, though. The country's online retail industry already has a growing gorilla: Flipkart, the largest domestic e-commerce company, which replicated Amazon's model and is often called the Amazon of India. Started in 2007 by former Amazon employees Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (they are not related), Flipkart has cornered more than 20 per cent of the online retail market. It has raised over $550 million from a clutch of venture capital funds including Vulcan Capital, which in the past has backed another Amazon rival, Alibaba.com in China.Amazon is unfazed. Much of Bezos's and Piacentini's ambitions ride on Agarwal, 39 years old and a graduate of IIT Kanpur. Bezos has faith in the Mumbai native. "After all he was Bezos's most technology-savvy technical advisor," says Piacentini.In a setting other than his Bangalore office, Agarwal could easily be mistaken for a bouncer. In one of his four interactions with Business Today for this story, he lets on that he cross-trains and can dead-lift 200 pounds. But what lights up his face even more is talking about his experience as Bezos's technical advisor from 2007 to 2009 - the best workout of his career. Technical advisors are often referred to as Bezos's shadows, and the Amazon CEO has had just eight of them to date. Something like a chief of staff, the shadow spends most of the work day with Bezos - travelling with him, attending meetings with him and, at the end of the day, discuss the day with him and preparing for the next one.It was during one such chat in early 2008 that Agarwal brought up India. The timing was prescient. Amazon was struggling in China and had to look for an alternative country. "We didn't want to just dabble with India. We wanted to make sure we were absolutely ready with our game plan and investments," says Piacentini. It took Amazon four years to get ready. During that time, Agarwal headed Amazon's international market expansion, which included India.Amazon.in was launched in June 2013, and Agarwal's conviction is borne out so far by the website's 6.77 million unique visitors monthly, as per December data by online tracker comScore. Flipkart gets about double that traffic at 13.22 million, and Snapdeal, another e-tailing site, gets 9.35 million.Amazon has launched 15 categories in seven months, and already has the largest catalogue of books, e-books, watches, toys and games, and fashion jewellery. In the US, Amazon has more than 30 categories, and that is what Agarwal is aiming for. "You basically need to find a way to sell everything," he says, echoing the 'Everything Store' moniker for Amazon, in the news recently for a book by the same title.Amazon.in started with books, because globally, Amazon is known as the biggest bookseller. People searched for media players online, so it started selling portable media players, followed by other consumer electronics, baby products, toys and games, watches, jewellery, personal care appliances, health-care devices, home and kitchen products, and beauty products. It has more than 440,000 products, in addition to 12 million books and two million e-books. It has 2,300 sellers, as compared with 100 sellers seven months ago. Flipkart has 1,000 sellers. "The goal is to constantly expand the depth of the selection in existing categories and add new categories," says Agarwal.Agarwal knew that if Amazon had to deliver fast to customers, it needed control over logistics, and it needed warehouses. By the time it launched, it had already built a 150,000 square-foot (roughly 3.5-acre) 'fulfilment centre' on the outskirts of Mumbai, in Bhiwandi. The idea was to let sellers stock goods in the warehouse, and manage packaging and delivery for them for a fee. Such delivery, called 'Fulfilment by Amazon', and accounts for three out of every four deliveries by Amazon in India. A second 150,000 sq ft warehouse will be operational from February in Bangalore, for buyers in southern India.The bulk of Amazon's investments in India will go into logistics and payments. The US and Europe, when Amazon started, already had an efficient payment infrastructure. India has multiple systems - cash on delivery (COD), credit cards, debit cards and net banking.Mobile technology is next. "We are looking forward to facilitating mobile internet shopping, as it is an important factor for technology investments for us," says Piacentini. He says that lessons about mobile learned in India could be applied in other countries.Ambareesh Murthy, founder of online retailer Pepperfry, says: "The marketplace model scales very fast, because it is a platform where many retailers come to sell and put in a lot of variety." At the same time, he points out that the model fetches lower margins, as they are split between the seller and the platform owner. But who cares about profits? Certainly not Amazon, which took eight years to turn in its first profitable quarter and which to date has had losses in more quarters than profits. Agarwal, like the ultra-competitive Flipkart, wants to scale up business in India. Period."They are building the capability... If they have the infrastructure and product portfolio in place, customers will flow in," says Technopak Chairman Arvind Singhal. To lure customers, Amazon also started offering next-day delivery for an additional charge of Rs 99. Within a week, Flipkart copied the idea, calling it In-a-day Delivery and charging nine rupees less (See story on Flipkart, page 68). And then eBay.in launched nine-hour delivery for some products.It was the second time Flipkart adopted Amazon's idea. It launched its marketplace in April 2013, just two months before Amazon launched in India. Copying the one-day delivery service confirmed that the battle had begun. How could Flipkart let go of its turf? From Rs 5 crore in 2008/09, its revenues grew to over Rs 1,180 crore in 2012/13, according to the Registrar of Companies. Like Amazon, the Bansals built their own logistics, copied the cash-on-delivery model from China and pioneered it in India (See COD: Necessary Evil, page 62). Flipkart's business is growing at breakneck speed - the company is running at annualised revenues of over Rs 3,600 crore, and is targeting over Rs 6,000 crore by 2015. After enjoying a free run for five years, Flipkart launched its health-care and fashion jewellery categories soon after Amazon did.The battle has only begun. What Flipkart did in six years, Amazon did in seven months. It has already reached one-third of Flipkart's size in terms of the number of transactions, says Mahesh Murthy, Chairman of digital marketing company Pinstorm and co-founder of SeedFund. "They have done that with one-tenth of the money that Flipkart has spent."Flipkart sells about 100,000 products daily. When that number reaches a million, the company will have to do things differently, says Bansal. This will require a lot of money. Flipkart recently raised $360 million, but that will last only a couple of years, says Murthy. He notes that Flipkart is built with venture capital money, and may not able to keep investing as it has done. Amazon, however, is under no such pressure, he says, and it can keep pouring in money without worrying about profits.To sustain its business, Flipkart will need an initial public offer. Though Flipkart's cash burn is smaller than Amazon's when it listed its shares in 1997, its losses are not small for an Indian company: on revenues of Rs 1,180 crore, Flipkart made losses of Rs 192 crore.On the other hand, Amazon generated $2.25 billion in cash in 2012 (Rs 13,770 crore then) and invested $3.6 billion back in the business. If Amazon invested even 10 per cent of its global investment in India, that would be $360 million. Amazon executives decline to give investment details. "We are literally investing hundreds of millions of dollars," says Piacentini. That was a lesson well learned in Amazon's nine years so far in China.In 2004, Amazon entered China, then the world's second largest Internet market, by acquiring Joyo.com, the country's largest online retailer of books, music and videos. But eventually it lost the market to Alibaba.com, China's home-grown e-commerce giant.China has home-grown leaders in search, social networking and e-commerce. In India, on the other hand, US companies dominate: Facebook is the largest social networking site, and Google is the leader in search. Amazon could well lead in e-commerce.Agarwal and Piacentini did not want to make the same mistakes in India as it had in China. It decided to invest big from day one, instead of deferred investment. It also started from scratch, rather than by acquiring a company. It imported its transportation model from China, something which it had not done anywhere else, says Piacentini. It also put to use the COD lessons it learned in China.It also started educating sellers about Amazon - something it had not done in China. Unlike in other countries, seller registration is free in India for the first year as part of a promotion to attract sellers. "There is no risk or cost for them, and we are helping them get started," says Amit Deshpande, Director of Amazon Seller Services in India.The promotion is for a year, and to benefit from it, seller must sign a two-year contract. In the second year, Amazon charges Rs 499 a month as fees. Sellers get nationwide reach. They pay a minimum commission of four per cent on mobiles, laptops and computers, and up to eight per cent on jewellery and watches. A Rs 10 closing fee is also charged on each purchase. Globally, Amazon has two million sellers contributing 40 per cent to its sales.It also launched its "Mainstream-ing Sellers/SMEs" pilot project in three cities, where Amazon's staff helps small businesses become sellers, including those who have never made a transaction online. Amazon makes their catalogue and teaches them how to accept payment.If a seller fails to maintain standards, Amazon reaches out and tries to help. If logistics are a problem, the seller is offered Fulfilment by Amazon services. Sellers who can still not maintain standards are politely asked to discontinue and come back when they are ready. "Until then, you have to stop, because it's a bad customer experience," says Deshpande.To start any new venture, a press release is the first step, and Agarwal thinks that is the best way to connect with the consumer. In April 2011, he wrote a release to start Junglee.com, a website that helps buyers in India compare options from a mix of online and offline sellers, and provides analytics to registered sellers. Junglee started with 220 online sellers, and has expanded to 1,600 online and 50,000 offline stores, with a catalogue of 30 million products.It is not profitable, but Agarwal says it can be monetised with value-added services. "It is a thoughtful business decision to build something that would make a significant free cash flow in the long run," he says.Amazon is tight-lipped about the number of transactions, revenue, technology back-end, investment and budget for India, and even about how it compares itself with rivals. One exception comes after 38 questions over about an hour's chat with Piacentini, when Agarwal interrupts to say: "We... have a higher coverage than what Flipkart does". Amazon adds a new PIN code every day for service delivery. Amazon.in is reportedly negotiating with India Post, the world's largest postal service, for logistics. It reaches 21,000 PIN codes, compared to the 12,000 served by courier companies.Shreya Vora, director of Peora, a company that sells silver jewellery on Amazon.in, was surprised on December 31, when she got a Rs 3,000 order from the tiny town of Duttaphulia, West Bengal. "At the end of October, we started [selling on Amazon.in], and we are getting orders from tier-II and tier-III towns," she says. Fifteen per cent of her online sales come from Amazon, 12 per cent from Flipkart, and the rest from other online retailers.Vora also says Amazon.in has the best back-end set-up among all online retailers. Everything is automated, she says, and she does not need to contact anyone to upload new products or change prices, unlike other sites. "There is a large factor of trust, and they are bringing the best practices and service guarantees," says Parag Rao, who heads HDFC Bank's credit cards business.Kaushal Arora, Founder of Techeye Creations & Technologies, a seller of health-care devices, says: "Flipkart is very good as far as payment is concerned, but they haven't got the resources as far as marketplace is concerned." Amazon provides better analytics, he says, and adds that its control panel is much more advanced, as it gives details such as number of units sold and inventory remaining in the warehouse.Agarwal realised early on that India has address issues, so he added PIN code and landmark fields to the address form on the delivery page - something the US site does not have. "Fulfilment by Amazon" is prominently displayed when applicable, to gain the buyer's trust. Cash on delivery is an option only on Amazon-fulfilled orders, and not if the seller ships the product.Mobile is another area of focus in India. The country has 198 million Internet users, most of them users of mobile devices (of which 70 million are smartphones). "Forty per cent of e-commerce is over mobile, and that's where the industry is going to be," says Rachna Nath, Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers.So Amazon launched mobile apps for Android and iOS devices. "Amazon India is the fastest growing geography that we have seen in terms of mobile share of sessions and gross mobile sales," says Agarwal.Of course, Amazon.in still has gaps to fill. A significant one is apparel, the biggest component of the lifestyle category. Lifestyle accounts for 35 per cent of all Indian online retail, according to Technopak. Sellers such as Myntra and Jabong have a lead, and Flipkart has a growing presence. An Amazon executive says apparel will be launched in a couple of months. Some experts expect this to increase Amazon.in's traffic by about 20 per cent.There are signs that the ticket size of orders at Amazon.in has grown. According to an executive at a large private bank, the average credit card transaction at Amazon already equals Flipkart's at about Rs 2,700."You have to have the conviction that, over long periods of time, you can generate a large free cash flow for shareholders," says Agarwal. How long is long term? Ten years and more, says Piacentini. Amazon's international business head has something else in mind for the long term, too: "We want to build India operations so that, when we look back 20 years from now, it will be bigger than the US."The battle for supremacy in online retail in India, set to be the worlds second-largest Internet market by this summer, has barely begun, but it is already bitter.
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Karnataka, which hosts India’s Silicon Valley, Bengaluru, has asked taxi aggregators Ola and Uber to halt operations immediately. Contrary to what many may think, it is not a knee-jerk move of the state government. Asking them to halt operations is the outcome of the implementation of the Karnataka On-demand Transportation Technology Aggregators Rules, 2016 which was notified by the Government of Karnataka on 2 April 2016. States have been given the power by the Union Government to frame their own rules for taxi aggregators and Karnataka was one of the earliest to do the same.
What that effectively means is that the states have a choice but the consumer has none. The states can allow taxi aggregators to operate to ease commuting in its cities or they can choose to frame regulations to outlaw these app-based aggregators and make the lives of thousands of commuters difficult.
The Karnataka Aggregators Rules, 2016 was introduced with a familiar form of reasoning- ‘levelling the playing field for regular taxi operators and cab aggregators.’
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Ola and Uber have a superior quality of service than regular on-demand taxi operators. The Karnataka government, however, has now ensured that a level playing field among these two types of services is maintained by ensuring consumers have uniformly inferior quality of service.
When one reads the rules, it becomes clear why they haven’t been followed by Uber and Ola thus resulting in the state government asking them to cease operating. Here are some of them (paraphrased In bold italics)-
1. ‘The fare including other changes, if any, shall not be higher than the fare fixed by the Government from time to time.’ Price control here too. The reason Ola and Uber have become so popular is the convenience (at a price). Control these prices and these aggregators become just like the auto-rickshaws. Instead of allowing autos and regular taxis the freedom to ply at market decided fares, the government has fixed prices of these app-based aggregators. What a twisted way to level the field!
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2. ‘Be capable of being tracked continuously with GPS/GPRS facility with a provision of a panic button for the use of the passengers, capable of alerting the control room of aggregator as well as local police without any hindrance or interference by the driver.’ Again, lots of fancy things which other taxi operators need not have. What happened to ‘a level playing field’ ? Uber already has a ‘SOS’ option on it’s app. Why does the Karnataka Government want to force upon drivers and commuters extra burden and cost?
3. ‘The driver shall not be allowed to work beyond the maximum number of hours as stipulated under Motor Transport Workers Act 1961’. The maximum hours allowed under the act is eight hours in any day and forty-eight hours in any week. This is one of the truly astounding parts. Given Bengaluru’s traffic, 8 hours a day would mean a maximum of 5-6 rides (I’m being optimistic here). The ensuing reduction in supply would only increase the market fares for taxi services. In the long term, the reduction in earnings would mean lesser number of drivers entering the market. It nullifies one of the best parts of the app services : high labour flexibility.
4. ‘ Be fitted with single integrated GPS / GPRS capable vehicle tracking unit with printer, display panel and digital fare meter’ The app won’t be enough. The government wants you to see your fare on a tamper-proof metre too. Google maps won’t do.
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5. ‘ (digital metres) capable of generating a printed receipt to be given to the passengers’ . The fares appearing on your app are not sufficient. The fares need to be informed through printed receipts.
6. ‘Be fitted with an yellow coloured display board with words “Taxi” visible both from the front and the rear. The board shall be capable of being illuminated during the night hours.’ I wonder what is this for?: Increase the ease with which the police can extort taxi drivers?
7. ‘Ensure adequate mechanism for receiving passenger’s feedback and grievances. This may be ensured through feedback register kept in the taxi, easily accessible to the - passengers always and also by providing toll free phone numbers.’ Commuters rating taxis on their app won’t be enough. The government wants you to be able to write them in a register.
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The Karnataka Government might be using such orders to tame these taxi aggregators into following the rules it introduced in February. The bureaucrats probably think that like any other business in India, these fellows too will be tamed. They most probably are mistaken. When ‘progressive’ and tech savvy Austin in Texas, USA did something similar through a referendum , Uber promptly suspended it’s operations . Those who suffered were the commuters. Karnataka won’t be different. Telangana Minister KT Rama Rao has been trying to pull companies from Bengaluru into Hyderabad. He should relax. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramiah is doing that job and then some.
One can only pray for the well being of the thousands of Uber and Ola drivers who have taken huge loans to buy their livelihood (taxis).
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The median price for a single-family home in Bend rose 4.5 percent last month over February, according to a report released Wednesday, while the median price in Redmond rose 11 percent month over month.
Both cities also saw increases year-over-year in median price.
Bend’s median price rose to $347,000 in March, or $15,000 above the median price in February, according to The Beacon Report. Last month’s median was about 6 percent higher than the median price for a single-family home in Bend in March 2015, according to the report from the Beacon Appraisal Group.
The median price equals the midpoint, with half the prices above it and half below.
Bend recorded 185 home sales last month, 58 more than in February and 13 more than in March 2015.
In Redmond, the median single-family-home price was $250,000 last month, $25,000 higher than in February. March’s median price, however, was 18 percent higher than the median price in March 2015, according to the report.
Redmond recorded 81 home sales last month, 28 more than in February, and 26 more than sold in March 2015, according to The Beacon Report.
— By Joseph Ditzler
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I’m sorry for the long gap between this post and the previous one. It’s been a hectic time in college and I don’t have time to do the translation.
Now I will post translation of Sakura Gakuin’s song, Hana*Hana. It’s a great song, have some cute side, and also some pun in it.
Once again, I’m not a good translator yet. So if you find some mistakes in my translation, give the better translation from your own in comment section.
Hana*Hana (Flower*Flower)
Kimi ni todoke hanakotoba
Aozora no binsen ni sotto
Hanabira no pen sakide ne
Egaita mirai wa oshaberi BloomBloom
– Floral language is reaching you
– Gently on blue sky paper
– With pen tip of petals,
– The future draw is chattering BloomBloom
Haru saku hana hakken
Chuurippu omoiyari no hana
Kawaii ne ryuukokorine hoshi no katachi hon wa ka haato
– Spring, discovery of blooming flower
– Tulip, flower of sympathy
– Cute Glory-of-the-sun (Leucocoryne sp.), star-shaped, heart-warming
Natsu saku hana ippai
Asagao kizuna no hana
Ii kaori chokoreetokosumosu amai koi no memorii
– Summer, full of blooming flower
– Morning glory, flower of bond
– Nice fragance Chocolate-cosmos (Cosmos atrosanguineus), memory of sweet love
Furi furi doresu no ranankyurasu
Ojigi no mimoza senobi no deejii
Kita no rabendaa minami no haibisukasu
Eikou no guroriossa
– Ranunculus the furifuri(1) dress
– Mimosa the bow, Daisy the stretch
– Lavender the north, Hibiscus the south
– Gloriosa the glory
Motto shiritai hana ippai
Mitsubachi mitai ni hana no hi “mitsu” fureyou
– I want to know flower fully
– Feel the hana secret like a bee
Kimi ni todoke hanakotoba
Afureru omoi hana ni komete
Aijou no imi no bara o okurou
Uketoru daremoga Happy Smile!
– Floral language is reaching you
– Put into the overflowing feeling flower
– Send the meaning-of-love rose
– Accept everyone’s Happy Smile!
Kaze no merodii odori dasu
Aka? Shiro? Kiiro? Tokimeki iro
Sekaijuu no hana o atsumeta egao de
Ima, saikou ni tanoshin jaou!
Oozora ni janpu! taiyou ni tatchi!
Tsubomi no josou de ashita e BloomBloom
– Begin to dance with melody of wind
– Red, White, Yellow, throbbing color
– With a smile collected from flowers around the world
– Now, Let’s enjoying best!
– Jump to the sky! Touch the sky!
– Approacing run of bud to tomorrow, bloombloom!
Aki yureru hana ii ne
Kosumosu magokoro no hana
Karen’na kitsunenomago to kitsunenohimago wa oyako ka na?
– Fall, nice swaying flower
– Cosmos, flower of sincerity
– I wonder, are water willow and fox’s great-grandchild is parent-and-child? (2)
Fuyu madamada saku yo
Sazanka hitamukina hana
Sunoodoroppu kibou no hana tenshi ga yukiwo hana ni kaeta
– Winter, still blooming
– Sasanqua (Camellia sasanqua), flower of earnest
– Snowdrop (Galanthus sp.), flower of hope, the angel change the snow to flower (3)
Santa-san mo daisuki poinsechia
Seijitsuna biora goujasuna daria
Kanpekina tsubaki eien no jinchouge
Machi no kousui kinmokusei
– Santa also like it, poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima)
– Viola the faithful, Dahlia teh gorgeous
– Camellia the perfect, Daphne the eternal
– Fragrant olive (Osmanthus fragrans var. aurantiacus) the parfume town
Hokorobu sakura no hanakotoba
Utsukushii kokoro sakasetai na Everyday!
– Floral language of blooming sakura
– Is lovely heart, please bloom everyday!
Kimi ni todoke hanakotoba
Ichiban sukina hana oshiete
“Muku” na kimochi yuri no hanataba
Mune ippai, ima Sweet Sweet Days!
– Floral language is reaching you
– Tell me your favourite flower
– Bouquet of lily, the a chestful of purity feeling
– Now Sweet Sweet Days!
See no! ! De sakasou warai gao
Orenji? Pinku? Maaburukaraa
Kinou made no ame ga niji ni naru koro
Hora, aozora no binsen ni
Hanabira no pen sakide ne
Egaita mirai wa oshaberi BoomBoom
– Blooming-like-smiling face means ready
– Orange? pink? Marble color
– Time for rain from yesterday to become rainbow
– look at the blue sky paper
– With pen tip of petals,
– The future draw is chattering BloomBloom
Motto shiritai hana ippai
Mitsubachi mitai ni hana no himitsu fureyou
– I want to know flower fully
– Feel the hana secret like a bee
Kimi ni todoke hanakotoba
Afureru omoi hana ni komete
Aijou no imi no bara o okurou
Uketoru daremoga Happy Smile!!
– Floral language is reaching you
– Put into the overflowing feeling flower
– Send the meaning-of-love rose
– Accept everyone’s Happy Smile!
Kaze no merodii odori dasu
Aka? Shiro? Kiiro? Tokimeki iro
Sekaijuu no hana o atsumeta egao de
Ima, saikou ni tanoshin jaou!
Oozora ni janpu taiyou ni tatchi
Tsubomi no josou de ashita e BloomBloom!
– Begin to dance with melody of wind
– Red, White, Yellow, throbbing color
– With a smile collected from flowers around the world
– Now, Let’s enjoying best!
– Jump to the sky! Touch the sky!
– Approacing run of bud to tomorrow, bloombloom!
Note:
(1) It’s a style of dress, i cant find the proper english meaning of it. search it on google if you want to know more
(2) It’s a pun. the word “kitsunenomago” (in this case, water willow flower) also means “fox’s grandchild”
(3) Another pun, (i think). The word “sunoodoroppu” means both snowdrop (a snow dropping, literally) and a name of flower.
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The European Parliament had harsh words for the U.K. | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images European Parliament slams UK’s Brexit stance on citizens’ rights Report uses red, yellow and green symbols to show how well rights would be protected. There’s a lot of red.
The European Parliament on Tuesday sharply criticized the U.K.'s proposals on citizens' rights after Brexit. MEPs said London would not sufficiently protect families from being divided by residency restrictions, would cast EU citizens living in Britain into a sea of legal uncertainty, and would create a tangle of unnecessary red tape, according to a report by the Parliament's Brexit steering group.
The report, prepared by MEPs closely monitoring Brexit and obtained by POLITICO ahead of its official public release, offers a deeply pessimistic assessment of the negotiations between the EU and the U.K. on an issue where both sides thought they would quickly find common ground.
More than 3 million EU nationals reside in the U.K., while roughly 1.2 million Brits live in the 27 other EU countries. Both Brussels and London have insisted that protecting the rights of these people, particularly in regard to residency and employment, is among their top priorities in the Brexit talks.
Brussels and U.K. negotiators have, however, reached a stalemate, with the EU insisting on a continued role for the European Court of Justice when it comes to rights issues after Brexit, and London insisting that leaving the EU means British courts must reassert their jurisdiction.
The report, a side-by-side comparison of the EU and U.K. positions on citizens rights, comes days after the EU's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, warned London not to underestimate the role of the European Parliament, which must give final approval to any withdrawal agreement.
The analysis uses stoplight-style color coding to judge areas where citizens' rights are protected (green), areas where clarification is needed (yellow) and danger zones where rights are likely to be put at risk (red). The chart was marked red for more than one-quarter of the 69 identified rights issues.
On the question of protections for family members, the report stated: "The U.K. position is clearly an unacceptable retrograde step for EU citizens compared to the current situation. The more restrictive criteria will drastically undermine current rights of EU citizens in relation to bringing children and spouses [to Britain]. This includes the right for EU citizens' non-EU spouses to join them after the withdrawal date."
The European Council has said that "significant progress" must be made on the core withdrawal issues — citizens' rights, the financial settlement and the Irish border — before the talks can move on to the next phase and explore a potential future relationship.
The U.K. wants these discussions to take place at the same time, saying many of the withdrawal questions can only be answered by taking into account the contours of the future arrangement.
The document says negotiators must deal with the role of the European Court of Justice because progress on its oversight of citizens' rights will be “essential” in determining "if sufficient progress has been achieved in this area.”
The Parliament’s Brexit coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, told MEPs on Monday that the institution would draft a new resolution “on the different elements of the negotiations” by the end of September with a view to having it passed before the fifth round of talks, and before October, when the European Council will decide if "sufficient progress" has been made.
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Netflix’s smash documentary series Making a Murderer is returning for a second season, but at least one friend of Teresa Halbach’s – the 25-year-old photographer whose 2005 murder frames the series – tells PEOPLE she won’t be watching.
“I probably never will. I don’t have plans to watch it,” says Halbach’s college friend, who asked not to be identified.
In fact, she says, she never watched season one, which debuted in December.
Her friends who have seen the documentary told her “it would just be too hard,” she says.
“I’d like to remember Teresa the way I remember her, and I don’t know what’s in the documentary,” the friend says.
She adds she doesn’t know if Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, whose convictions in Halbach’s murder are heavily scrutinized by Making a Murderer, are guilty.
“It’s not my place to judge,” she says.
• Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.
She has heard the series has inspired a conversation, in some parts of the country, about criminal justice reform.
“It’s okay to start a good conversation,” she says. “If there was injustice, then hopefully that will be straightened out.”
The Story Behind the Story: Remembering Teresa Halbach
She says she hopes the new season includes more of Halbach’s family, who declined to participate in season one and have criticized it heavily.
“Maybe the second season, I’ll be hopeful that there’ll be more perspective from her family,” Halbach’s friend says.
And though she says the series is a continual reminder of Halbach’s death – “Her life was just taken too early” – it has been beneficial in other ways. The series helped her old friends reconnect via social media, where they shared photos and stories.
“It was just a nice chance to remember her and not the negativity,” the friend says. “It was great to see that she could still bring people together. Her happiness was still bringing people together.”
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According to Fars News, Edward Snowden provided "incontrovertible proof" that an "alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda is driving US policy."
"Snowden Documents Proving 'US-Alien-Hitler' Link Stun Russia" appeared on the website of the semi-official Iranian news agency Fars News on Sunday.
After previously reporting the British royal family as Jewish and Israel's plans to annex Iraq, Fars News broke the news that the US government has been run by a "shadow government" of Nazi space aliens since 1945.
According to the paper, the information about the secret government of Nazi aliens was provided by NSA leaker Snowden. After losing WWII, the aliens opted to become the secret force behind the US government and made President Obama their tool.
Aliens have been visiting for "thousands of years," many working with the US air force in Nevada, the agency said.
UPI
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This article is over 3 years old
Environmentalists slam appointment of ex-Schlumberger consultant as energy and environment adviser just months before global climate summit in Paris
Environmentalists have criticised a decision to appoint a former consultant to major oil and gas companies as David Cameron’s key adviser on energy and environment policy.
Stephen Heidari-Robinson, a little-known consultant from oilfield services company Schlumberger, arrives in Downing Street just months before the prime minister is expected to attend the UN’s global climate change summit which begins in Paris in December.
A Number 10 spokesman confirmed the appointment of Heidari-Robinson, who started in the job this week. It is understood he will serve as a lead energy and environment adviser to the prime minister, liaising with senior ministers and officials across Whitehall.
Where there is oil and gas there is Schlumberger Read more
He joins Cameron’s top team from Schlumberger’s London-based consulting division where he advised companies including BP, Shell and Chevron and co-authored a paper critical of the tax regime on North Sea oil and gas production.
Number 10’s spokesman said Heidari-Robinson has been appointed for his experience and expertise, however according to his LinkedIn profile he has little previous experience in environment or climate change policy.
Prior to Schlumberger, Heidari-Robinson worked at multinational consultancy firm McKinsey, advising state-owned oil companies in the Middle East. He previously worked at the Ministry of Defence for six years and is an Oxford graduate and Persian speaker.
This is not the first time Cameron has drawn criticism over appointing a climate change adviser from the energy sector. Heidari-Robinson’s predecessor, Tara Singh, was previously a lobbyist for British Gas owner and fracking investor Centrica. Singh left Downing Street in April after two years in the job.
Singh replaced Ben Moxham, a former aide to Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP. Moxham’s appointment in 2011 attracted controversy as he came straight from Riverstone, a private equity firm behind the UK-based shale gas company Cuadrilla.
Heidari-Robinson’s previous employer, Schlumberger, is a major player in the oil and gas industry providing a range of services to fossil fuel companies around the world. In the US, Schlumberger have developed many of the controversial drilling technologies used to extract oil and gas from shale formations.
Responding to the latest appointment, Greenpeace UK’s head of energy Daisy Sands said: “Hiring an oil man as an energy and environment adviser in the run-up to a major climate summit is like asking Count Dracula for advice before a conference on veganism. It shows yet again that the government remains enthralled to the oil and gas industries.”
The nine green policies killed off by the Tory government Read more
The appointment comes amid increasing concerns among environmentalists and the renewable energy industry after a spate of recent government decisions to axe or roll-back high profile green policies, including scrapping support for onshore wind farms.
Simon Bullock, Friends of the Earth’s senior climate and energy campaigner, described the UK’s current climate and energy policy as “a mess”.
“The Government has a clear choice – to prop up the last centuries’ fossil fuel industries and become a climate-laggard, or champion clean energy and lead the way.
“Choosing an experienced oil industry insider to make this choice doesn’t bode well, but from his work in the Middle East Mr Heidari-Robinson will be well aware of the ever-growing impacts of climate change on people’s lives,” Bullock said.
Over the past year, environmentalists have also raised the alarm over David Cameron’s enthusiasm for kickstarting the UK’s shale gas industry. The government’s commitment to shales gas was underscored in August when ministers said they would intervene on planning applications for fracking operations if local authorities fail to act quickly enough.
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Perhaps more than any other country involved in the Six-Party Talks – China included – Russia must take a balanced approach to the two Koreas, a panel of Russian experts told NK News.
The roots of this approach, they indicated, extend back to the Soviet Union’s normalization of relations with Seoul in the early 1990s and subsequent loss of influence over the North. Because of this, they said, neither the North nor the South took Russia’s position seriously during the tumult of the 1990s.
Considerable effort has been expended by Moscow to resume relations with the North – which like Russia has been known to defy international opinion for its own nationalistic imperatives – while maintaining relations with South Korea – with whom Moscow shares economic interests.
However, despite their good relations there is a definitive ceiling to Moscow-Pyongyang relations: no matter how dissatisfied the North may be with its dependence on Beijing, they know Russia cannot replace China as its top trading partner.
And even as Russia exercises its own independence, it sides with the international community in one important respect: It vehemently opposes North Korea’s nuclear proliferation in its back yard.
In part 16 of a new NK News expert interview series, Russian experts who talked to NK News included:
Dr. Alexander Zhebin – Director, Center for Korean Studies, Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
– Director, Center for Korean Studies, Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences Dr. Andrei Lankov – NK News contributor / Professor at Kookmin University, Seoul
– NK News contributor / Professor at Kookmin University, Seoul Dr. Georgy Toloraya – Director of department at “Russkiy Mir” Presidential foundation, Executive Director of Russian National Committee on BRICS research, and Visiting professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO)
– Director of department at “Russkiy Mir” Presidential foundation, Executive Director of Russian National Committee on BRICS research, and Visiting professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) Kristina Voda – Research associate at Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), Center for Asia-Pacific Studies. Voda also holds a position of research fellow at Center for Situation Analysis, established by former Russian PM Yevgeny Primakov.
– Research associate at Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), Center for Asia-Pacific Studies. Voda also holds a position of research fellow at Center for Situation Analysis, established by former Russian PM Yevgeny Primakov. Dr. Leonid Petrov – Researcher at Australia National University’s School of Culture, History and Language
Additional reporting: Chad O’Carroll
Q16) How would you characterize Russia-DPRK relations at this time and why are they evolving the way they are?
Russia’s policy toward North Korea has two dimensions: when Russia acts as a member of international community and when it acts as an independent player in the Asia-Pacific region. As a responsible member of the international community and permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia condemns DPRK’s provocations aimed at destabilizing the situation in neighboring areaa. For example, Russia condemned missile and nuclear tests conducted by DPRK in 2012-2013. Russia regarded DPRK’s provocations as actions that undermined the global non-proliferation regime.
As an independent player in the Asia-Pacific region, Russia wants to increase its presence and expand its integration in the region. Russian goals are concentrated primarily in the economic field. Russia wants to extend trade relations with neighboring Asian countries and attract Asian capital in order to develop the depopulated regions of Eastern Siberia and Russian Far East. Thus, instability on the Korean Peninsula is an obstacle to Russia’s efforts to integrate its economy in the region.
Instability on the Korean Peninsula is an obstacle to Russia’s efforts to integrate its economy in the region
Russia’s official position is that it is necessary to settle the Korean problem by political and diplomatic means primarily by creating conditions for the resumption of the Six-Party Talks. The weak point is that Russia doesn’t have a clear vision of what needs to be done to resume the talks. More important is to ensure that collective efforts are effective in achieving the main goal, which is the denuclearization of North Korea.
Both Russia and North Korea are the anachronisms of the 20th century power politics. Both countries failed to integrate into the contemporary global world order and continue to intimidate their regional neighbors and mislead their own populations. Both countries are under international sanctions for their aggressive intentions and nuclear ambitions. It is hardly surprising that the Russo-DPRK bilateral relations are improving and both peoples are increasingly sympathetic toward each other.
The saddest thing about this growing friendship is in its ideological and desperate nature, which comes out of necessity and isolation. This marriage of convenience comforts both parties in their grief over the absence of better and happier relationships with those who refuse even to talk to them. The relationship may look strong on the surface but it’s lacking in substance.
Both countries failed to integrate into the contemporary global world order and continue to intimidate their regional neighbors and mislead their own populations
The relations are unusually good, better than ever in the last 30 years. The period following spring 2014 has been marked by a great intensity of diplomatic exchanges, visits of high-level delegations and talks on economic issues.
Politics is what seemingly drives rapprochement. The North Korean government worries about its excessive and growing dependence on China, and looks for alternatives. The Russian government would like to move back, to be more active on the Korean Peninsula. It is also understood that better relations with Pyongyang will make Russia’s voice better heard. There might be also a measure of sympathy toward the North Korean government, which is sometimes perceived nowadays as a brave David challenging the American Goliath – given the unusually high temperature of the anti-U.S. feelings in Russia now, this is understandable, too.
However, there is a fundamental weakness in the relationship: There is little economic exchange and trade between the two countries. North Korea’s trade with Russia is almost 70 times less than its trade with China, and this ratio tells us everything. NK-Russia trade has been stagnating and, actually, slowly sliding down for two decades, and this is not incidental: Given the current structure of the Russian and North Korean economies, the two sides have little to trade. In spite of all the loud talk, the 2014 statistics confirmed that the downward trend has not yet been reversed.
There is a fundamental weakness in the relationship: There is little economic exchange and trade between the two countries.
Things are made worse by the illusions the North Korean decision-makers seemingly entertain: They hope that Russia, driven by geostrategic concerns and ambitions, will actively subsidize the trade and exchanges. Such subsidies are not forthcoming, at least not on the scale the North Korean side seemingly expects. However, there are reasons to hope that some of the projects which have been launched recently, will survive and prosper. For example, the joint development project at the Rason port is a good idea: politically useful, economically sound.
Russia-DPRK relations have been on the rise since the second half of 2013, mainly due to North Korean initiative. However they reached a saturation point right now, with not enough room for any qualitative breakthrough.
To understand the current status there is a need to look back. Russia has been consistently trying to improve bilateral relations under its policy of “standing on both legs” on the Korean Peninsula since the mid-1990’s (when Yevgeny Primakov became minister of foreign affairs in 1996). This policy culminated in the Putin-Kim Jong Il exchange of visits in 2000-2001 with many new agreements reached and political contacts becoming brisk. However, after the emergence of the enriched uranium crisis in 2002 and the start of the “Axis of Evil” concept-based policy of Bush administration, bilateral relations experienced some limitations due to the nuclear issue. In 2008 former President Medvedev’s government, which leaned toward the West, and the conservative Lee Myung-bak government coming to power – and the ROK remaining an important Russian partner in Asia – led to Russia-DPRK relations cooling down a bit.
However, momentum was restored thanks to both sides’ diplomatic efforts – culminating in the Medvedev-Kim Jong Il meeting in August 2011. The upward trend, however, was arrested due to Kim Jong Il’s death later in 2011 and subsequent uncertainty about Kim Jong Un’s power in 2012. Nevertheless, the North Korean side expressed interest in economic cooperation and Russia reciprocated, in 2012 basing its principal position of improving good neighborly relations.
Discussion on many new projects started, with North Koreans being unusually forthcoming – probably trying to balance Chinese dominance. After the temporary setback in the wake of military rhetoric by Kim Jong Un in 2013, these relations steadily progressed. With Russia’s distancing from the West and critically approaching U.S. policy, Russia-DPRK visits and cooperation became wider. After the breakup of Russia’s relations with the West due to takeover of Crimea and war in Ukraine, North Korea has shown unprecedented friendliness toward Russia, supporting it in many occasions – sometimes to Moscow’s hidden embarrassment. Political and economic contacts reached the level, unprecedented since 1980s.
Economic benefits for North Korea, the most important factor for them, are yet to materialize
However economic benefits for North Korea, the most important factor for them, are yet to materialize. There are also limits to Russia’s support of the DPRK in nuclear and missile issues (a nuclear test would cause a harsh reaction, although probably mostly rhetorical). Personal relations at the summit level also have not evolved – not the way they did between Putin and Kim Jong Il. Russia is not going to replace China as the DPRK’s major sponsor. So, unless a miracle happens – like Putin visiting the DPRK – there is little room for further closeness in relations, although they remain stable.
Russia’s policy toward the Korean Peninsula has experienced drastic changes in the end of the 20th century. Till the end of the 1980s the USSR, mainly for ideological reasons, maintained relations with only one of the two Korean states – the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) – and ignored the other one – the Republic of Korea (ROK). Then, after well-known changes in the Soviet Union’s foreign and domestic policy and the establishment of diplomatic relations with the ROK, prompt rapprochement with Seoul and the rapid cooling of relations with Pyongyang have taken place. During the short period of 1990-1992 Russia failed to utilize its unique position as the only great power maintaining diplomatic relations with both Korean states.
Russian experts and Russia’s leaders started to look for a more rational and balanced course toward the peninsula. Russia’s new course takes into account both social and economic changes in Russia and geopolitical realities in the international arena. Russia’s new foreign policy, including toward the Korean Peninsula, is characterized by the total disappearance of ideological factors and by the appreciable increase of pragmatism in defining approaches to the current global and regional problems.
It is obvious that Russia has interests both in the North and in the South of the Korean Peninsula. However, opportunities for their realization are determined by differences in the social and economic systems, foreign policy and economic potential of the two Korean states. Russia’s political and economic values now, undoubtedly, are closer to those in the ROK than in the DPRK.
Russia’s new foreign policy, including toward the Korean Peninsula, is characterized by the total disappearance of ideological factors
However, Moscow’s foreign policy priorities quite often to a greater degree coincide with Pyongyang’s line, which supports or has a lot of common with our positions on a number of the major international issues (the multi-polar world order, missile defense, NATO’s expansion). While striving to upgrade a level of political interaction and trade and economic cooperation with the ROK adequate to Russia’s interests, Moscow is not going to lose its political influence and economic positions in North Korea, whose economy was developed with Soviet assistance and till now in many aspects has oriented toward the Russian technology, resources and markets.
All these factors dictate the Russia necessity of standing in Korea, figuratively speaking, “on two legs” – to maintain good-neighborhood relations with both Korean states. Imbalance in Moscow’s Korean policy for the benefit of one of them has always reduced Russia’s ability to influence Korean developments and led to a decline in interest in Moscow as a worthy partner in both Korean states and other participants in the Korean settlement.
Main picture: Wikimedia Commons
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Arduino JSON is an elegant and efficient JSON library for embedded systems. Today I’m releasing a new major revision with a lot of cool stuff.
A bit of history
When I originally wrote this library in early 2014, I only needed a JSON parser and I thought that sprintf would be enough to create JSON strings.
Then, with version 2.0, I renamed the library from “Arduino JSON parser” to just “Arduino JSON” after adding support for JSON encoding. It was much more convenient than sprintf and was also surprisingly smaller.
Finally, with version 3.0, I polished the API to make it even easier to use.
Through all these evolutions, the library grew way beyond my initial expectations and the original API was not designed for that. A redesigned was needed.
What was wrong?
The main problem was introduced in version 2.0. When I added the encoding feature, I didn’t want to change the decoding part of the library, so I wrote new classes in a different namespace.
There were two namespaces, ArduinoJson::Generator and ArduinoJson::Parser , making a clear distinction between the two sides of the library. Classes within the two namespaces had similar names so that you feel like you were using the same classes.
But that approach led to several issues.
First, it introduced a C++ namespace which is not something that Arduino users are familiar with.
Second, it was a pain when you wanted to use both namespaces in the same file.
And finally, it was impossible to reuse objects from one namespace to the other. For instance, if you wanted to parse a JSON string, alter the object and then encode it back, it was simply impossible.
What changed?
Version 4.0 is almost a complete reboot of the library. Here is a summary of what changed.
Only one namespace
The parser and the generator parts of the library have been merged together. No more duplicate classes, no more headache when you work with both.
New memory model
The new API contains an allocator (see StaticJsonBuffer in the examples below) for the JSON tokens, preventing problems we had in the past when people were referencing local variable outside of their scope (issues #10 and #17)
Replaced jsmn
I knew that the library would be a little bigger, so I needed to save as much bytes as I could. I replaced the jsmn tokenizer with one of my own, saving all the conversion between the different structures.
Removed Printable
To reduced memory consumption, I needed to remove the vtable of objects that didn’t really need it. In particular JsonArray and JsonObject are not Printable anymore.
This means you can’t write
Serial.print(jsonObject);
but instead, you must write
jsonObject.printTo(Serial);
Smaller for most usages
If you used only the parser or only the generator of the older version, then you’ll see that version 4.0 is a little bigger. But if you used both (which is very likely), the total size is actually a little smaller.
New folder structure
Since I realized that many people were using the library outside of the Arduino world, I changed the layout to match the traditional folder structure for C/C++ libraries:
include/ src/ test/ ...
Starting with version 1.5.x, Arduino IDE allows libraries to have a more flexible folder structure. This was also backported to IDE 1.0.6 two months ago, perfect timing ;-)
CMake
I now use CMake instead of relying only on Visual Studio, so that it’s much easier for contributors working in other environments. The library compiles with no warning in Visual Studio, GCC and Clang.
New test framework
Older versions of the library used Microsoft C++ Test Framework. This was bad because you could only build tests with Visual Studio. I switched all the tests to Google Test. There are nearly 300 tests at the time writing this article.
Continuous integration
I now use Travis to build the library and run the tests each time a change is pushed to GitHub. You can see the “build passing” badge on the project page.
What stays the same?
While the API is different from the previous one, it should not be a shock. Most of it will look very familiar.
Arduino JSON version 4.0 still relies on the features that made the library so popular:
Fixed memory allocation (no malloc ) Easy and elegant API Small footprint Optional indented output
Examples
Enough with the talking! Show me some code!
Alright, alright… here is how you encode JSON:
Arduino JSON 3.0:
JsonArray<2> array; array.add<6>(48.756080); // 6 is the number of decimals to print array.add<6>(2.302038); // if not specified, 2 digits are printed JsonObject<3> root; root["sensor"] = "gps"; root["time"] = 1351824120; root["data"] = array; Serial.print(root); // {"sensor":"gps","time":1351824120,"data":[48.756080,2.302038]}
Arduino JSON 4.0:
StaticJsonBuffer<200> jsonBuffer; JsonObject& root = jsonBuffer.createObject(); root["sensor"] = "gps"; root["time"] = 1351824120; JsonArray& data = root.createNestedArray("data"); data.add(48.756080, 6); // 6 is the number of decimals to print data.add(2.302038, 6); // if not specified, 2 digits are printed root.printTo(Serial); // {"sensor":"gps","time":1351824120,"data":[48.756080,2.302038]}
And now, here is how to decode a JSON string:
Arduino JSON 3.0:
JsonParser<16> parser; char json [] = "{\"sensor\":\"gps\",\"time\":1351824120,\"data\":[48.756080,2.302038]}"; JsonObject root = parser.parse(json); if (!root.success()) { Serial.println("JsonParser.parse() failed"); return; } char* sensor = root["sensor"]; long time = root["time"]; double latitude = root["data"][0]; double longitude = root["data"][1];
Arduino JSON 4.0:
StaticJsonBuffer<200> jsonBuffer; char json[] = "{\"sensor\":\"gps\",\"time\":1351824120,\"data\":[48.756080,2.302038]}"; JsonObject& root = jsonBuffer.parseObject(json); if (!root.success()) { Serial.println("parseObject() failed"); return; } const char* sensor = root["sensor"]; long time = root["time"]; double latitude = root["data"][0]; double longitude = root["data"][1];
Conclusion
That’s it for version 4.0. I invite you to check out the documentation for more detail.
Oh… I almost forgot… here is the link to the GitHub project!
Happy coding!
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There's no solution in sight, as frustrated Bell Aliant customers in coastal Labrador contend with dial-up-like internet.
The mayor of Cartwright, a community on the southern coast of Labrador, said internet access is so slow that it's barely usable.
"Professionally, I waste more time online trying to get work done than I actually successfully get things done," said Dwight Lethbridge, businessman and mayor of Cartwright. "It honestly does affect my life."
Lethbridge notes that to deal with both federal and provincial governments from the coastal areas, you frequently need to access the internet.
"To me, this is the number one political issue, for me personally it trumps health, it trumps education, right now it trumps everything."
Even banking will be difficult for residents of Lethbridge's community, as the only banking service in the coastal Labrador community — the Eagle River Credit Union — closed earlier this year.
Bell Aliant has reduced download speeds from up to 1.5 MB to up to 256 KB, from Mary's Harbour to Nain.
Lethbridge wants both governments to intervene and explore adding telecommunications as a public service.
"As a taxpayer, I want my tax dollars going to that infrastructure and honestly, after the fact, I don't care if some high hog at Aliant are getting rich off of it … I don't care [because] lives are held up and lives are affected by not having access in this day and age."
In a written statement, Darin King, minister of business, tourism, culture and rural development, said the province does provide financial incentives in rural areas where there would not be a "business case."
"The current situation concerning internet speed on the Straits of Labrador is unfortunate," King wrote.
King said that it's his understanding that if there is a second round of funding for Connecting Canadians — a federal program that provides high-speed internet to rural areas — Bell Aliant will likely submit a proposal for areas of Labrador.
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Stieg Hedlund's list of credits are varied. He's had a hand in Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, an Oddworld sequel, the original StarCraft and beloved cult games like Comix Zone. Prominently, Hedlund was lead designer on Diablo and Diablo II, so when I had the opportunity to speak with him recently I had to ask what he thought about Diablo III.
Lately Hedlund is working with Grand Theft Auto creator Dave Jones on ChronoBlade , an action-RPG available on Facebook. Look for more interview excerpts from Hedlund and Jones in the coming days.
"It's a tough thing to follow up on, the success of Diablo and Diablo II, and not encroach on the territory of World of Warcraft."
PCG: What did you think of Diablo III?
Stieg Hedlund: It's hard to separate personal feelings about something like that from how the game was perceived. I think the audience really didn't react to it very well. A lot of the changes were things that they perceived as negative. Personally, I was just so deeply involved in the creation of the world and how everything worked in it… The direction a lot of things went was not something that I felt was where I would have gone. But I don't want to Monday-morning quarterback them. It's a tough thing to follow up on, the success of Diablo and Diablo II, and not encroach on the territory of World of Warcraft.
The auction house was a huge point of contention, to the extent that eventually [former Game Director] Jay Wilson said, “ I think we would turn it off if we could .” They saw it as a liability or something. Did you have similar feelings about the auction house?
Hedlund: I think it had detrimental effects on gameplay throughout. They did want to reserve a certain tier of loot for the auction house, and therefore it wasn't dropping in the game with the kind of frequency that people were looking for it. But at the same time, I get… I don't think it's a matter of being greedy. Game developers, we work hard, and we want to be rewarded for what we do. The fact that Diablo II was still on shelves and still being played, in Korea particularly, 10 years after the fact of its release was something that I think Blizzard was kind of like… “Hey, we got the price of the box and not much else out of that.” That doesn't respect the amount of gameplay that people were clearly getting from it. So I can definitely see that point of view, where they say, “Hey, we should be rewarded for what we're giving the audience,” and then think about ways to do that. That's the world that we live in, too, particularly in free-to-play games. You have to think about how you… We're still a business. We need to make money. But we need to do it in a way that feels natural and doesn't feel bolted on and forced on the player, but that actually makes sense to them. The value proposition has to be there.
Stieg Hedlund, former lead designer on Diablo and Diablo II.
And Blizzard was solving an issue that existed in Diablo II. People were going to sell items. So why not bring it in-house?
Hedlund: It definitely makes sense on that level. They're providing something to players and trying to get value for the company as well. It's just that the actual way that it was done is what didn't quite come together.
Is there something you would have done differently in creating Diablo III if you were involved in that project?
Hedlund: I think one of the things that I looked at was really… The low-level stuff. The dungeons didn't feel random enough to me. They felt a little bit been-there-done-that very quickly. I think the way that people played in multiplayer games, they were pretty much just running for the exits and trying to figure out the quickest way to get there, rather than engaging with the minute-to-minute exploration of the world.
What's something that Diablo taught you about game design?
Hedlund: The big difference between Diablo and Diablo II was character customization. That's something that I've embraced for ChronoBlade . It totally fits with our vision for how the two halves—the minute to minute and the RPG—fit together. There's very strong skill trees that allow you to customize the play of each of the characters to how you want to engage with it. We have passive skills, what we call traits, and active skills, what we call abilities. You can decide, “Hey, I just want to play a powered-up version of a fighting game. I don't want to use abilities. I want to use traits. I'll just do as much damage as I can with the core gameplay.” Or you can say, “Hey, I want to do all these abilities and cool things.” Or a hybrid of those two. There are different themes, as well, within each of those things. Obviously there's the overlay of equipment that helps you continue to customize those character builds.
Check PC Gamer for more excerpts from our interview with Grand Theft Auto creator Dave Jones and Diablo/Diablo II lead designer Stieg Hedlund in the coming days.
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Yup, we can see it.
The District Attorney for Cortland County, Mark Suben, today admitted that he lied to reporters in the run up to this year's election and, yes, he was in fact a porn star in the 1970s. Suben, a Democrat who defeated Republican defense attorney Keith Dayton 9,815-7,507 earlier this month, admitted to his exciting past in a press conference in which he refused to take any questions.
Suben had previously been asked about his acting history but denied he'd made any skin flicks. However, when the above video, and a CNY story about it, showed up on YouTube he had little choice but to come forward. The hairy DA let it all out this afternoon at 3 p.m. with his wife in the room. Here's what he had to say, after discussing helping criminal youths become productive members of society:
"I used bad judgment myself in my youth. Recently, materials have been circulating (indicating) that I was an actor in the adult film industry years ago in New York. "Those allegations are true. I was an actor in adult films in the early 1970s. I also acted in other venues, off-Broadway, soap operas. "A few weeks ago, when asked, I denied this to members of the press. I regret that and I apologize. I was shocked to be confronted by this so many years later. "I was embarrassed for my family and friends who have stood by me. I also denied my actions to my family, my friends and my staff. After that brief period of my life, I found my calling in the law, particularly in prosecution, and have dedicated my life and my career to doing what I've been elected to do - protecting my home community. "I will continue to do that. I cannot defend my bad judgment, both my involvement years ago and my denial of it recently."
At the moment it does not appear that Suben—who appeared in films like Deep Throat Part 2 (as Russian Agent/American Agent), Lecher (as Ray), The Love Witch (as The Defendant), It Happened In Hollywood (as Boris Ballsoff) and Doctor's Teenage Dilemma (as Dr. Cordova/Jose - uncredited)—has any plans to resign over this affair.
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After the most successful years in his club’s history, one of the most influential men in Irish MMA, Andy Ryan, caught up with PETER CARROLL to discuss why he thinks Neil Seery should already be in the UFC, when he will defend his flyweight title, Paul Redmond, Battle Zone Contender Fight Night, match making for Cage Warriors and Team Ryano’s new gym in Finglas.
Last year brought with it some massive milestones for Team Ryano, with the crowning moment being Irish veteran Neil Seery’s capture of the CWFC world flyweight championship. To add to that, Paul Redmond broke through as a lightweight championship contender and the Baldoyle club’s Brazilian jiu jitsu team shined on the international stage.
Already a month and change into the New Year, the ever-present anchor of the Irish MMA scene, Andy Ryan, forecasts even more success for Team Ryano with title defences, amateur cards, new gyms and breaking new ground all set in his crosshairs.
“Last year was a big one for everyone involved with the club,” Ryan acknowledged. “It’s a new year now and it should be huge again. We’ve got Neil Seery defending his world title, we’re going to get Paul Redmond back on a winning streak and Patrick Boylan and John Donnelly are looking at making returns to the sport.
“The BJJ team have a busy year ahead of them too and that starts at the BJJ League in Cork this weekend. We had a great showing at the European jiu jitsu championships too and we’ve got a few of the older guys that will be getting ready for the World Championships later on in the year.
One of the most fielded questions in relation to Ryan’s team at the moment is when world champion Neil Seery will return to the cage. Set to make his first defence of his flyweight title in December at Cage Warriors 62, minutes from weighing in the Dubliner was informed his opponent Ulysses Gomez had collapsed trying to make weight for the contest.
Although there has been no comment on a new date for his champion’s inaugural defence, Ryan revealed that an opponent and a date have been set for early summer.
“We know who the opponent is, I can’t say anything about it until Cage Warriors announce it, but Neil should be defending his title early in the summer. He runs a warehouse and December, January and February are his busiest months so he just can’t commit to a fight at this time. On top of that, he has three kids and he looks after his mother and mother in law, he’s a great guy but he’s just too busy.”
Conor McGregor became the latest name to publicly support Seery’s bid for a spot on the UFC’s Dublin card when the promotion returns in September, but as far as Ryan is concerned, the flyweight’s name should already be on the roster.
“In my opinion it’s not a case of him getting a few more wins – he should be in there already,” claimed the judo and jiu jitsu black belt. “I’m blue in the face saying it, but most of his losses came when he was fighting in crazy weight divisions for his size with absolutely no ground experience.
“He’s been in there with great guys like UFC fighter “Billy” Harris and he even went into that fight with an injured knee. He was on medication and it was like he was asleep in the cage. Usually I have to calm Neil down before a fight but for that one, we couldn’t get him going at all and he still fought him to a close decision.
“He’s a flyweight world champion that’s finishing his opponents. I don’t know why he hasn’t been signed and if he isn’t on that Dublin card it will be an awful shame. The UFC do know who he is, but his age and his record have always gone against him.
“Had Ulysses Gomez fought him in Newcastle, he would’ve won and he’d be there now. I’d never seen him in such good condition and he was at his most calm and confident in the build-up to it. It was a sure thing.
“That affected him, but even watching him in training the other night you know that he’ll be even better the next time out. He was in there with bigger guys like Myles and John and he’s taking them down –he’s a little terrier.”
Ryan urged Irish fans to get behind Seery in his attempts to get a fight under the world’s most celebrated MMA banner: “I think all of the Irish people should get behind Neil and let the UFC know that they want him on that card.”
Paul “Redser” Redmond extended his Cage Warriors winning streak to five in 2013, cementing himself in the conversation for a title shot at 155. Famously a slow starter, Redmond banked one of his best first round performances on New Year’s Eve at Cage Warriors 63 before he was caught in an anaconda choke by talented Pole, Mateusz Teodorczuk. Refusing to tap, the Dubliner was rendered unconscious which signalled the end of the bout in round two.
Not one to dwell on the past, Ryan highlighted his belief that the young Ryano lightweight is destined for a shot at the division’s title and could even be in the thoughts of UFC match maker Joe Silva with another couple of wins.
“Another couple of wins and Paul will be ready to fight for the title shot, not only that, but I think with two more wins he might get a shot at the UFC. He’s different, he has awkward submissions and he always hangs in there – he wouldn’t tap that last time so he went out cold.
“He got caught with a dopey submission there, that particular choke is one of his own specialities as well. He knows himself, he just paused at the wrong time. If he gets a nice win in March he’ll be well on course for the UFC’s September show in Dublin as well.
“They’re saying Neil’s age and record are a problem, then Paul should be an ideal candidate for the UFC,” said Ryan.
An MMA Swiss army knife – coach, competitor, promoter and matchmaker – Ryan will focus on competitors looking to establish themselves in the ever competitive amateur ranks with his promotion “Battle Zone Contender Night”, set for February 22nd in the Trinity Sports and Leisure Centre in Donaghmeade.
“These Battle Zone Contender cards are really going to focus on the amateurs, especially the older teenagers to give them a good entry into the sport. We’re getting away from the hotels and stuff for the Contender nights, this will be an event tailor made for emerging amateurs.
“For the sport to grow in Ireland we need children, teenagers and girls to get involved and I hope that these events will provide the young fighters with an unintimidating atmosphere to compete in with the right rules, the right clubs and after receiving the right training.
“It’s going to be a great night of fights, there’s a lot on the line in the bouts at the top of the card, it should be great. We’re hoping to that this will be the first of many of these types of events,” he said.
Ryan went on to highlight the impact that Cage Warriors have had on the landscape of the sport in Ireland since Graham Boylan took the reins of the promotion in 2010. Now with Ryan in place as the amateur matchmaker for Europe’s biggest promotion, a clear path can be traced from the fledgling regional shows to the bright lights of the Octagon.
“It’s fantastic that young people can see the clear path to the UFC, they can go from a small amateur show to a big stage like Cage Warriors,” insisted Ryan. “Without Graham Boylan taking control of that promotion, an Irishman, I doubt the likes of Neil, Conor, Cathal and Chris would’ve got their shots.
“For years it was just guys from the UK and other European countries getting shots, we were always overlooked, but Graham knew the Irish lads were able to compete on that level. Look at how far this sport has come in a year over here, it’s crazy. The impact that Cage Warriors has had on Irish MMA has to be acknowledged.”
Ayo Daly became the first to make a public plea to Ryan to get onto a Cage Warriors card after defending his Ryoshin Fighting Championship title in early November, and the amateur matchmaker replied by putting the Lucan man on the promotion’s New Year’s Eve card.
However, Ryan explained that all fights aren’t as easily matched and highlighted some reoccurring issues that go along with his new post and the amateur status in general.
“What Ayo did was great and anyone that thinks they’re ready for a shot on the Cage Warriors prelims should give me a shout, that’s no problem. The reason I took the job with them was to guarantee that young Irish talent would be given a chance to compete on a big stage, but like with anyone and their job, I have some pet hates when it comes to match making.
“We’re having trouble with guys pulling out two weeks before fights, sometimes I get even less notice. I completely understand that people get injured, but sometimes it’s just obvious that they’re pulling their fighters out because they think they’re going to be beaten or they just haven’t committed properly to the training.
“I think there’s a misunderstanding when it comes to the amateur status. Fighters are meant to be experiencing every aspect of the sport. I don’t have any problem with putting my lads in against tough opponent, fighters that will make them dig deep to get the win. The amateurs need to experience that feeling of being up against someone that might be better than them.
“That’s another issue. A lot of these clubs want their fighters to go pro with clean amateur records, so they only take fights against people that they believe they can easily beat. That makes no sense from a coaching perspective, they’re learning nothing about their fighters and a clean amateur record means nothing once you go pro.”
Perhaps one of the most prominent signs of their success in 2013, Team Ryano have opened up a second gym in Finglas, with two of their most well known products taking the helm.
“World flyweight champion Neil Seery and absolute European BJJ brown belt champion Karl Roche will be the head coaches of the gym. It’s in a good location in Finglas, we’re sharing a space with the guys from Performance Martial Arts and both of the lads are living minutes away.
“I’ll be popping in now and again, but the coaches in charge are already at an elite level. Paul Redmond and Hughie O’Rourke will be in and out as well and I’d urge anyone in the area with even a slight interest in the sport to get down and give it a go – you’ll never know how far you’ll take it.
“There’s going to be beginner MMA classes, fitness classes, BJJ, kickboxing and boxing, there will be something for everyone and I’m sure the lads will make it a huge success,” he finished.
By Peter Carroll – @PetesyCarroll
Photo: Dolly Clew/Cage Warriors
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Getty Images Business man relaxing at office
It’s no accident that the super hero stance – broad, firm and confident – takes up quite a bit of physical space. And no coincidence that Super Man’s posture shares a lot with a CEO’s habit of sitting with hands clasped behind the head and feet up on the desk. Posture, after all, breeds power.
And that understanding could be useful for furniture and office space designers, say researchers who documented the relationship between the space that people take up and the sense of strength they feel. They even exposed how potentially corrupting such expansive “power poses” — and the ensuing sense of confidence and self-importance they can trigger — can be, leading to dishonest behavior.
“Power is like nuclear energy, it can be used for good or bad,” says co-author Andy Yap, who led the investigation while at Columbia Business School and now is a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “If you’re focused on a goal and you’ll do whatever it takes – you might cheat.”
(MORE: How Powerful People Think )
His study, “The Ergonomics of Dishonesty: The Effect of Incidental Posture on Stealing, Cheating and Traffic Violations,” involved four experiments to determine how incidental postures could influence the decisions people make — including whether they behaved badly.
Yap, along with Dana Carney, an assistant professor at University of California Berkley’s Haas School of Business, engineered situations in which participants were placed in different postures, and offered a chance to cheat. In one experiment, they asked the volunteers to play a video game that simulated driving while sitting in either small or large chairs and rewarded those who were able to beat the game under a certain time. Players were also told to stop and count to 10 following any crash, and those in larger chairs were more likely to drive recklessly.
In another scenario, the volunteers were told they could earn $4 for stretching in either expansive or confined poses but were surprised with an $8 reward instead. Seventy eight percent of those who adopted the more expansive, power poses accepted the extra money while only 38% who chose the cramped poses kept it.
The study builds on previous research that reveals how posture may influence behavior, including one, also co-authored by Carney, that measured changes in the hormones testosterone and cortisol, which is associated with stress. That study found those who habitually adopted high-power, expansive poses experienced elevations in testosterone, the hormone most often linked to power and confidence, as well as decreases in cortisol (which may have contributed to lower levels of anxiety).
(MORE: Working Too Hard? Physically Demanding Jobs Tied to Higher Risk of Heart Disease)
Posture might even help for those all-important job interviews. A recent study found, for example, that practicing expansive, striking poses before high-stakes settings like interviewing for a job or giving a presentation can improve a person’s performance — while huddling over a desk or hunching over a smartphone may inhibit innovative and confident thinking and increase anxious reactions.
“Your physical posture may have an impact upon how stressed you feel before employment interviews or speaking in front of a group,” says Marla R. Gottschalk, an industrial organization psychologist who specialized in working with businesses on workplace strategies. “So striking a ‘power pose’ shortly before the interview, one where we make ourselves larger, not smaller and closed, is indicated.”
As Carney’s study showed, the relationship works both ways — something that designers, who build furniture and spaces with the intention of not only influencing but optimizing certain behaviors, know very well. So it may make sense to install large, wide-armed chairs in casinos where people might feel bolder and inclined to gamble more, for example, while a manager or CEO might want instead to opt for a smaller boardroom where team members are less likely to take irresponsible risks. On a trading floor, observing the space in which traders work could also reveal how risky their actions might be.
But just because more space may translate to riskier behavior, it doesn’t have to dictate decisions. Awareness of these principles could alter choices regardless of the size of a work space. “If you already work in an expansive environment like an architect at a drafting table, be mindful that our social environment can hijack that,” she says. “We don’t really think about our environment unconsciously pushing and pulling our body into positions that can really have an impact on our behavior.”
So even within the confines of our physical environments, Carney says it’s possible to control our body positions, and, by extension, our attitudes and behaviors. “We can also allow body postures in our environment shape the behavior we want them to,” she says. People often do not consider how the space they take up in a chair can tap into specific emotions and attitudes. Maybe making like a superhero isn’t always so fantastical after all.
MORE: How To Use the “Pygmalion” Effect
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Product Target Market Cost Extensions Security Platform App/Storage Type Other
AuthAnvil Enterprise
MSP Enterprise ? ? Salesman Biometric Unknown
Browser Plugins Windows Chrome Internet Explorer Mac Chrome
MFA/2FA Yes YubiKey Hardware keyfob SoftToken
Encryption RSA/AES Verify key size used in your licensed product
Windows
Mac
Android
iOS
Blackberry Proprietary App
Proprietary Cloud? Autotask
ConnectWise
Continuum
Kaseya
LabTech
N-able
more
BitWarden Individuals
Families
Small Teams
Enterprise Personal Free Trial Sure(Individual)/Yes (Family) Individual Free as in beer Premium $10/yr Family $12/yr Android Free iOS Free Business Free Trial Yes Teams $5/mo up to 5 users, $2/mo ea addl user Enterprise $3/user/mo Biometric TouchID FaceID Android Fingerprint
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MFA/2FA Yes email 2FA Authy Google Authenticator FreeOTP Other TOTP authenticator apps Premium Yubi Key FIDO U2F DUO All in addition to methods at Free level. Premium features are per User ($10/yr)
Encryption AES-256 Zero-Knowledge
Windows
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Own-hosting Available Configurable Password Generator
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Probably most similar to LastPass
Cloud- and Own- hosted options
Self-hosted Enterprise Orgs get Premium features for all users
Open Source
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Browser Support None Known
MFA/2FA Not Really
Encryption AES-SBC unknown key size Zero Knowledge
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android Open-Source App
Open-Source Cloud (hosted on SpiderOak Local Option available, may not be non-trivial to implement
Donation Driven
Open Source
KeePass Individuals
Teams Individual Free Trial Sure All Versions Free Teams All Versions Free Biometric Dependant on Client
Browser Support Windows Chrome Firefox IE
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MFA/2FA Yes With Plugin
Encryption AES-CBC-256 Additional algorithms via plugins
Windows
Mac * X Note Apparently this is non-trivial to implement on Macs, aka it doesn't just work.
Linux
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Blackberry
Windows Phone
Chromebook
PalmOS
J2ME Open-Source App
Choose your own cloud or local storage Configurable Password Generator
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Extensive AutoTyper options
Can generate TOTP auth codes
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KeePassX Individuals Individual Free Trial Sure All Versions Free Product3 Price Product4 Price Product5 Price Biometric None Found
Browser Support None Found
Plugins/Ext. None Found
MFA/2FA Yes YubiKey YubiKey NEO MFAtype3
Encryption AES-256 or Twofish-256
Windows
Mac
*nix
Android Open-Source App
Own Storage Strong Security
Keeper Individuals
Enterprise Individual Free Trial 30 days per Device/Desktop $9.99/yr/device Unlimited $29.99/yr Android See Above iOS See Above Enterprise ? Salesman Biometric TouchID Android Fingerprint sort of Apple Watch Android Wear
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Plugins/Ext. Password Generator Form Fill
MFA/2FA Yes SMS Google Auth RSA SecurID Keeper DNA on compatible Wearable Devices YubiKey coming soon
Encryption AES-256
Windows
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Windows Phone Proprietary App
Proprietary Cloud Password Generator
Form Fill using FastFill™
Zero Knowledge
HIPAA Compliant, no BAA needed
Soc II Type 2 certified
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Enterprise solution for businesses: IT admin console with enforcement/auditing of employee password security, user provisioning, delegated administration and Active Directory integration, dedicated private cloud option
Okey Individuals Individual Free Trial ? Alpha ? ? Biometric Apple Watch TouchID
MFA/2FA Unknown
Encryption 'Military Grade'
Mac
iOS
Apple Watch Proprietary App
Proprietary Cloud? Alpha by sign-up only
Very little info
pass Individuals
Teams
*nix users Individual Free Trial Sure All Versions Free as in beer Teams All Versions * X Note Can support teams via git integration and including the appropriate team member keys for each directory. Pass simply uses the .gpg-id file the fewest directories up to determine the destinations for the encrypted items. So, it's probably not the finest team tool, but it's certainly better than having no granularity at all with a tool like KeePass(X). Free as in beer Biometric Unknown
Browser Plugins Windows Firefox Mac Firefox
MFA/2FA Yes GPG-compatible smart cards YubiKey Neo YubiKey Neo-n NFC * X Note Use of MFA with a smart card on a mobile phone is possible using NFC, which works with the YubiKey Neo (but not the Neo-n).
Encryption GPG
Windows
Mac
*nix
Android
iOS Open-Source App
Choose your git repository: your own GitLab other git repositories OneDrive Box WiFi only Local Only
Strong cross-platform CLI support
PassPack Individuals
Groups/Teams
SMB Individual Free Trial Sure 1 user, 100 Passwds Free Groups/Teams 3u, 1,000 Passwds $1.50/mo 15 u, 1,500 Passwds $4/mo SMB 80 u, 2,000 Passwds $12/mo 1K u, 10K Passwds $40/mo Biometric None Found
Browser Support Windows Chrome Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Mac Safari Chrome Firefox Opera
Plugins/Ext. Configurable Password Generator
MFA/2FA Yes. YubiKey e-mailed one-time password
Encryption AES-256 Zero Knowledge
Windows
Mac
Android
iOS Proprietary App
Choose your share on: iCloud DropBox Google Drive OneDrive Box WiFi only Local Only
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Form Fill
Compelling pricing for sharing with groups
Password Safe Individuals Individual Free Trial Sure All Free Biometric None Found
Browser Support None Found
Plugins/Ext. None Found
Unknown
Encryption GPG
Windows
Android
iOS Open-Source App
Own Storage Designed By Bruce Schneier
SafeInCloud Individuals Individual Free Trial Sure Desktop Free Android Basic/Pro Free/$4.99 iOS Basic/Pro Free/$4.99 Biometric TouchID Android Fingerprint
Browser Support Windows Chrome Firefox Opera Yandex Mac Safari Chrome Firefox Opera
Plugins/Ext. Configurable Password Generator Form Fill
MFA/2FA Yes/No MFAtype1 MFAtype2 MFAtype3
Encryption AES-256
Windows
Mac
Android
iOS Proprietary App
Choose your share on: DropBox Google Drive OneDrive Yandex Disk
Configurable Password Generator
Form Fill
Portable Windows App
Free full-featured Desktop version
StickyPassword Individuals Individual Free Trial 30 days All Devices $19.99 $10/yr Lifetime All Devices $99.99 Biometric TouchID Android Fingerprint
Browser Support Windows Chrome Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Chromium Seamonkey Yandex Comodo Dragon Pale Moon Mac Safari Chrome
Plugins/Ext. Configurable Password Generator Form Fill
MFA/2FA None Found
Encryption AES-256
Windows
Mac
Android
iOS Proprietary App
Choose your share on: Proprietary DropBox
Configurable Password Generator
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USB portable version available
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Premium license supports saving manatees (seriously)
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Browser Support Windows Chrome Firefox Mac Chrome Firefox
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MFA/2FA Yes Google Auth
Encryption AES-256
GUI Browser
Android
iOS Proprietary App
Choose your share on: iCloud DropBox Google Drive IneDrive Box WiFi only Local Only
Form Fill
Unique User Access
Defince user Groups and Roles with specific rights
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Yith Library Individuals Individual Free Trial Sure All Versions Free as in beer Biometric None Found
Browser Support Web Client Only
MFA/2FA None Found
Encryption Unknown
Any GUI Browser
node.js Open-Source App
Unknown Cloud
Own Storage option H.P. Lovecraft Fans
Low-cost of entry
Murky default storage arrangement and limits
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Bathurst mayor Graeme Hanger has declared the creation of a second circuit at Mount Panorama a certainty following a $10 million funding grant from the Federal Government.
Calare MP Andrew Gee and Regional Development Minister and Nationals Deputy Leader Fiona Nash visited Bathurst today to confirm the Building Better Regions grant.
Plans to build a new 4.5km circuit and business park, dubbed Velocity Park, alongside the legendary 6.2km course have been in train for some time.
A preliminary layout has already been created, with a tender process currently underway for the final design and construction contract.
Alongside $15 million from the NSW Government and $10 million from the Bathurst Regional Council, a total of $35 million of the $52 million total target has been raised.
While there remains a shortfall, Cr Hanger is now in no doubt that the project will go ahead.
“What it shows is that the Federal Government and the State Government really believes in Bathurst Regional Council,” he said.
“We’re serious about this happening. It really will happen. The $10 million today goes with money from the state government and local government.
“We’re still a way off from the first sod being turned but there is a pipeline and there’s light at the end of that tunnel and it will happen.”
A preliminary layout for the second circuit
Cr Hanger admits, however, that the tender and state planning authority processes mean “we’re a couple of years away” from construction commencing.
Supercars CEO James Warburton expressed his support for the project earlier this year, declaring interest in holding a SuperSprint round on the new layout once it’s completed.
The existing 6.2km circuit that hosts the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 will remain untouched by the works, situated to the west of McPhillamy Park.
“The Bathurst Regional Council is a fantastic partner of ours and the plans for the second circuit are absolutely world class,” Warburton told Supercars.com.
“We would absolutely consider running a SuperSprint round at Bathurst once it’s completed.
“The way the second circuit is being planned, a sprint event on that layout would have a completely different DNA to the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 in October.
“It’s something that would be a great addition to the calendar for us.”
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A cache of documents released today by The Guardian shed new light on how Governor Scott Walker, his top advisors and allies evaded Wisconsin's campaign finance system to win his recall election, and to maintain Republican control of the Wisconsin State Senate during the tumultuous recall period of 2011 and 2012.
The strategies pursued and measures taken were unprecedented in the State of Wisconsin and sparked a criminal investigation by a bipartisan group of prosecutors, the future of which is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The expose revealed that Walker fundraiser Kate Doner conducted detailed opposition research on donors whose contributions might prove embarrassing. On November 14, 2011, Walker campaign manager Keith Gilkes sends a 13-page opposition research memo prepared by Kate Doner to Walker saying he wants Walker to be aware of the donor research so he would be aware of what he "might need to defend in in terms of contributions when these are disclosed." Some of these checks ended up in the account of Wisconsin Club for Growth instead. (Ex. 31.2, 1-100 doc.)
This type of "vetting" and control of where checks were being deposited raised red flags for prosecutors and supports their theory that Wisconsin Club for Growth was effectively a "subcommittee" of the Friends of Scott Walker campaign in violation of the campaign finance statutes. In addition, quid pro quo corruption--money for favors--is a potential violation of Wisconsin criminal misconduct statutes.
One of the controversial figures flagged by Doner and Gilkes was Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons. He had never previously given publicly to Walker before, but he donated $750,000 in corporate and personal checks to Wisconsin Club for Growth in 2011-2012. It is not known how many contacts Simmons had with Walker staff or associates.
Forbes describes Simmons as a "legendary empire builder and corporate raider." Among other businesses, Simmons owned CONTRAN and its subsidiary NL Industries (formerly known as the National Lead Company), which had been a leading maker of lead pigment paint. In 2010, NL Industries was a defendant in multiple lawsuits in along with other former manufacturers of lead pigment.
Among the lawsuits were those brought by attorney Peter Earle on behalf of 173 Wisconsin children who had suffered catastrophic exposure to lead paint--at levels many times higher than the children of Flint, Michigan--whose exposure to lead sparked a national outcry earlier this year. The children's lawyer had been suing white lead pigment manufacturers in state and federal court since 2006 developing a factual record, medical records, expert witnesses, and other resources to demonstrate the terrible injury suffered by small children exposed to the toxic substance. The Wisconsin cases were pending in state and federal court.
After Harold Simmons' generous donations to Wisconsin Club for Growth, late one night in June 2013, Wisconsin's Joint Finance Committee chairs Alberta Darling and John Nygren sponsored a last-minute change to the 2013-2015 Biennial Budget that change tort law in a manner intended nullify these suits. (The "Motion 999" can be seen here).
At the time, a memo prepared by the Wisconsin Legislative Council warned legislators that any such action would be unconstitutional. The Wisconsin Association for Justice wrote a letter to the governor asking him to veto the measure, but the controversial and unconstitutional measure was rolled into the budget and was not vetoed by Walker, as other last minute measures were. Walker was slated to do a call with Simmons after the money was given, "Thank you for making this work!" exclaims the Republican Governor's Association staffer to Walker's scheduler as they set up the call.
With a $750,000 secret contribution, in one fell swoop hundreds of Wisconsin children were robbed of their substantive due process rights and denied their day in court.
Outraged that his clients had been victimized again, their attorney, Milwaukee's Peter Earle, filed an open records request with numerous legislators. Records released by Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald included a memo by lobbyist Eric Petersen of Capitol Consultants, who represented NL Industries. The memo shows that the one paragraph law change was identical to the language submitted by the lobbyist. The language submitted by the lobbyists had a handwritten notation at the top "NL Language." (See the memo here.) The change to the budget bill can be seen here.
Attorney Earle would go on to document that the lead pigment manufacturers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbyists working against his clients in the Wisconsin legislature. The $750,000 secret donations revealed by The Guardian is a hefty sum weighed against the rights of low-income children.
The retroactive application of a law to the children's cases was later found to be unconstitutional by both state and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. But litigation over the matter is still pending and lawyers for the firms are trying to get at the state case in front of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
When asked about the new revelations attorney Earl called the donation "appalling."
"It is appalling that Scott Walker, Scott Fitzgerald, and the people who run Wisconsin Club for Growth would do this. These people all coordinated together to crush the rights of these small children. All we wanted was our day in court," he told the Center for Media and Democracy.
Harold Simmons died on Dec 30, 2013, but the allegations in the Guardian expose are roiling the state of Wisconsin today as new discoveries are made.
You can access the Guardian documents here.
Lisa Graves and Arn Pearson contributed to this report. Stay tuned to @PRwatch and this site for more news shortly.
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There is a secret the Heat are eager to reveal.
There has been evidence of it in their four preseason games, but coach Erik Spoelstra believes Shawne Williams will emerge as a crucial piece off the bench. When asked Thursday about potential 3-point shooters he can trust, he called him “one of the great surprises of the offseason” and talked excitedly about Williams’ performance in practices.
“Keep your eye on him,” he said. “He’s an excellent shooter and in much better shape than he’s been in before. He just needs to be comfortable with where and when and how he’ll get to those shots. He’s one of the better shooters we have in our gym.
“He brings toughness, but he obviously spaces the floor. I can’t wait for Heat fans to see it, because in practice he’s one of our very best shooters behind the 3-point line. He can really stroke it.”
Williams, a 6-foot-10 forward, is 3 of 9 on 3-pointers during the preseason and is shooting 36.7 percent overall.
He has been in the league since 2006 and played for six teams. His biggest opportunities for playing time came in 2007-08 with Indiana and 2010-11 with New York. He took 212 3-pointers for the Knicks that season and made 40.1 percent.
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CHARLESTON—West Virginia became the 44th state to recognize the Armenian Genocide with Governor Earl Ray Tomblin’s proclamation declaring April 2016 as “Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month” in the Mountain State, reported the Armenian National Committee of America Eastern Region (ANCA-ER).
Citing the murder over 1.5 million Armenians and one million Greeks and Assyrians from 1915-1923, and the ongoing genocide against Christians, Yezidis and other minorities in the Middle East, Governor Tomblin’s proclamation notes that “recognizing and consistently remembering the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, and all cases of past and ongoing genocide, we help protect historic memory, ensure that similar atrocities do not occur again, and remain vigilant against hatred, persecution and tyranny.”
Local ANCA advocates Hamparsum Kasparyan, Nancy J. Tolliver and Amy N Tolliver played an integral role in working with state officials in support of the proclamation. “In 1915, my grandfather, Hamparsum, a prosperous wheat broker in Ankara, Turkey, was pulled from his home in the middle of the night, and beheaded. The same happened to many of the more educated and prosperous Armenians in Turkey at the time,” explained Kasparyan. “My grandfather was a kind and very generous man. During a drought he opened his silos and fed 40 towns of people. I am hoping that this West Virginia proclamation recognizing the Armenian Genocide, will in some way assure that others do not go through the same horrible events.”
ANCA Eastern Region Chairman Stephen Mesrobian welcomed the proclamation, noting, “We applaud the Mountain State for officially memorializing the Armenian Genocide, thereby becoming the 44th state in the Union to do so. This sends a strong signal to the international community and the Obama Administration that we cannot – and must not – kowtow to Turkey’s genocide denial campaign.”
Send a thank you note to Governor Tomblin.
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Flag carrier Garuda Indonesia has been named the best airline across the Asia and Australasia regions for the second year in a row by the Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX).
Garuda Indonesia was named APEX's 'Passenger Choice Award' winner again as chosen by passengers in the region on Monday in a ceremony held in Anaheim, California, beating out other regional carriers such as Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific Airways, Korean Air and EVA Air.
The award is based on a comprehensive survey assessing an airline's quality of service, products and innovation, along with customer satisfaction.
Garuda Indonesia services director Faik Fahmi said the award was yet another important milestone for the airline because it showed that the world acknowledged the airline's efforts at development.
'This award would not be possible without the commitment and the hard work of all Garuda Indonesia staff in order to provide the best service possible to our customers,' Faik said in a statement made available to The Jakarta Post on Friday.
In the same week, the airline also received the Gold Award from the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), for their immigration on board (IOB) service and their service quality, which has adopted the concept of the 'Garuda Indonesia Experience'.
Faik Fahmi also accepted the award on behalf of the company at the awards event in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
This year has proven to be a notable year for Garuda, with the flag carrier already receiving numerous awards and titles from international associations, including 'The World's Best Cabin Crew 2014' by UK-based airline alliance network Skytrax, at the Farnborough Air Show in the UK in July. (++++)
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(Updated at 11:15 p.m.) Starting today, Arlingtonians can order a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream from Amazon.com and get it while it’s still frozen.
Amazon announced this morning that it has launched its Prime Now service for parts of Northern Virginia, including Alexandria, Springfield and all of Arlington. (Users can check to see if the service is available by typing in their ZIP code.)
Prime Now allows Amazon Prime members (link goes to a 30-day free Prime trial offer) to order tens of thousands of everyday items, from groceries to household essentials to electronics to pet supplies, and get it delivered in 1-2 hours. One hour delivery costs $7.99, while two hour delivery is free.
“This is the latest benefit of being a Prime member,” Amazon spokeswoman Amanda Ip told ARLnow.com. She said the company plans to extend Prime Now service to the District of Columbia in October.
The service is available via a dedicated Prime Now website and smartphone app for Android and iPhone.
More from a press release:
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Virtual currency Bitcoin has hit new highs in value after Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, struck a deal to let startup CoinLab handle its U.S. operations.
Japan’s Mt. Gox is the largest exchange in the world for Bitcoin, but it had been having trouble making headway in the United States. So it will move operations to a U.S. company that might be able to attract more Americans. Seattle-based CoinLab has a partnership with Silicon Valley Bank and is backed by $500,000 in VC funds, which will help lend credibility to the service.
“There are two major difficulties Bitcoin exchange customers have traditionally faced: banking troubles for the underlying exchange, and security of their coins,” CoinLab CEO Peter Vessenes said in a post announcing the move. “Since we believe in Bitcoin, we’d like to solve these problems.”
As of early Wednesday evening, Bitcoin was trading above $32, a new record for the currency. Just a few days ago it hit new highs by trading above $31.
Other recent events might have helped the currency boom as well. News-sharing site Reddit started accepting Bitcoin as payment, the Internet Archive began accepting Bitcoin donations, and Bitcoin startup Coinbase announced it is now selling more than $1 million Bitcoins per month.
Check out Bitcoin price movement this week on Mt. Gox in the chart below.
Bitcoin illustration by Tom Cheredar/VentureBeat
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The second half of President Obama’s interview with Bill O’Reilly was even rougher for the president than the first, after he stumbled through a feeble and rambling explanation of why the reporter and Fox News are “unfair” and sarcastically asked, “What are you guys gonna do when I’m gone?”
O’Reilly aired an additional ten minutes of his Sunday interview with the president on Monday evening, touching on topics such as the Keystone XL Pipeline, poverty and the president’s support of the troops. Despite a new State Department report that found the pipeline would have little environmental impact, Obama’s answer seemed to indicate an intense reluctance to approve the project:
O’REILLY: Keystone Pipeline, a new study comes in, environmental impact negligible, 42,000 jobs. You’re going to OK it, I assume? OBAMA: Well, first of all, it’s not 42,000. That’s — that — that’s not correct. It’s a couple thousand to build the pipeline. But — O’REILLY: Forty-two, all told. OBAMA: Well, that — the bottom line is what we’re going to do is – the process now goes: agencies comment on what the State Department did, public’s allowed to comment, Kerry’s going to, give me a recommendation. O’REILLY: All right, so I assume we’re going to do that after five years. OBAMA: We’ll take a look at it. O’REILLY: OK. I’ll take that as a yes.
When O’Reilly asked the president point blank what his beef was with Fox News, Obama began with his typical self-righteous assertiveness. But things quickly went downhill:
O’REILLY: Fox News. I can’t speak for Fox, but I’m, you know, the table-setter here at 8 o’clock. Do you think I’m unfair to you? Do you think I’ve been giving — OBAMA: Absolutely, of course you are Bill! But, I like you anyway. Um — O’REILLY: Ok, but give me how I’m unfair. OBAMA: It’s, it’s — but, look . . . O’REILLY: Give me how I’m unfair, c’mon! You can’t make that accusation without telling me! OBAMA: [Laughs] Bill, we just went through an interview in which you asked about — uh, healthcare not working, IRS, were we wholly corrupt, Benghazi — O’REILLY: Right. OBAMA: So the list of issues that you talk about — O’REILLY: But these are unanswered questions! OBAMA: But, but, but — they’re defined by you guys in a certain way. But, that — look, this is ok. If you wanna be — if you wanna be President of the United States, then you know you’re gonna be subject to criticism, and — O’REILLY: But if it’s unfair — I wanna know if it’s unfair. OBAMA: [Laughs] O’REILLY: Criticism is criticism! It’s my job to give you a hard time. OBAMA: Here — here’s what I would say. I think regardless of whether it’s fair or not, it has made Fox News very successful. O’REILLY: But if I’m unfair, I want — OBAMA: Here’s — here’s the thing you guys — here’s what you guys are gonna have to figure out, is what are you gonna do when I’m gone? I’m tellin’ ya. O’REILLY: Our ratings were high when you weren’t here! OBAMA: Oh, man, you know — [Laughs] O’REILLY: OOOOH! [Laughs] OBAMA: I’ve been a big money-maker for you guys. [Laughs] O’REILLY: Ask President Clinton, or President Bush. I gave President Bush a real hard time.
O’Reilly also asked the president if he was the most liberal president in U.S. history. “Probably not,” he answered. “You know, the truth of the matter is, when you look at some of my policies, in a lot of ways, Richard Nixon was more liberal than I was.”
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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Protestele unei puternice organizaţii ecologiste au dus la schimbarea proiectului de construcţie a lotului 2 al autostrăzii Lugoj – Deva. Mai precis, a fost solicitată şi aprobată realizarea unor ecoducte care să permită circulaţia animalelor în habitatul natural, afectat de construcţia autostrăzii. În principal, s-a vorbit de migraţia urşilor pentru aceste suprastructuri.
Vorbim despre mai multe viaducte, supratraversări, inclusiv două tuneluri. Acestea ar urma să ajute la circulaţia animalelor, iar tunelurile ar urma să elimine total schimbarea habitatului natural de către şosea.
Unul dintre utilizatorii forumului peundemerg.ro, unul dintre principalele din România specializat pe problemele infrastructurii a realizat un film extrem de interesant care prezintă o simulare a modului în care va arăta lotul de autostradă şi modul în care ar urma să fie puse în valoare aceste ecoducte.
Lucrările la acest lot de autostradă au fost demarate de curând, finalizarea acestora fiind programată pentru anul 2016. Este vorba de 28,7 kilometri de autostradă, valoarea lucrărilor fiind estimată la 128 de milioane de euro. Este destul de posibil ca noile ecoducte să prelungească durata lucrărilor, iar pentru cele două tuneluri să fie organizată o licitaţie separată.
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The Toronto Raptors have closed to within one game of the Cleveland Cavaliers for first place in the Eastern Conference and are showing no signs of slowing down.
Winners of four straight and eight of their last nine, the Raptors have been one of the NBA’s hottest teams since the all-star break (13-4) and need only two more wins to set a franchise record with 50.
The team’s ability to keep their foot on the gas down the stretch has impressed Raptors assistant coach Rex Kalamian, although he’s not overly surprised by the results.
“It’s amazing, our defensive intensity is getting better as the season has gone along, and that’s the way a good team should react,” Kalamian told Joey Vendetta on Sportsnet 590 The Fan Monday morning. “We’re a different team and we’re getting better, we’re progressing.”
Listen: Toronto Raptors assistant coach Rex Kalamian on Sportsnet 590 The Fan
The Raptors set a franchise record with 49 wins last season but stumbled down the stretch before being swept in four games by the Washington Wizards in the first round of the playoffs. But with some added depth and all-star guards Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan in the midst of career years, the Raptors have been a much more consistent team this time around.
“The NBA is all about consistency … Player consistency, team consistency and organization consistency, and we have that right now,” said Kalamian.
While Lowry and DeRozan have been the key drivers of Toronto’s success, the team’s effort on the defensive end has been the most important factor. The Raptors are fifth in the NBA in points against (98.3) this season after ranking 18th last season and have won 32 straight games when holding opponents under 100 points.
“A lot of good things are happening for us, but nothing happens and the wins do not come unless you don’t play defence and that’s what Dwane Casey has been preaching the whole year,” said Kalamian. “This year’s team is so much different from last year’s team in terms of makeup. We have added so many new pieces. We have a different mind set, I think it’s a strong mindset and we have a very talented roster.”
The Raptors have continued to pile up wins recently despite injuries to Jonas Valanciunas, Patrick Patterson and DeMarre Carroll while giving several players days off to rest. Kalamian doesn’t have a timetable for Carroll’s return, but he expects Valanciunas back in the lineup at some point this week. Toronto returns to action Wednesday against the Boston Celtics.
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Today is sad, sad day, for today is my final day at the helm of the good ship PopDin, before brutal tyrant Christopher Ratcliff comes back from his honeymoon and once more enforces rum, sodomy and the lash. We don’t know why. I mean, it’s a diesel ship, we don’t even *need* to row...Anyway, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about my favourite band ever: Iron Maiden.Sure sure, they aren’t cool, but they are the best band. The only people who don’t like them are just saying that to get attention. Anyway, plenty has been written about Metal’s greatest ambassadors in the past, so I thought I’d take time to uncover a few lesser-known facts about the group. Let's rock!
Despite being a professional pilot in his spare time, Iron Maiden’s diminutive frontman Bruce Dickinson actually suffers from a crippling fear of heights. “I just don’t like looking down, that’s why I never grew taller” said the pint-sized air raid siren.
Maiden’s legendary manager Rod Smallwood is actually the proud owner of a small wood. After buying several hundred acres of the New Forest in 2001, Rod had every single pony driven out or shot. “I’ve never trusted their long faces” Said the grumpy impresario.
The South American leg of Maiden’s mammoth 1980’s ‘Somewhere In Time’ took a turn for the worse when the band stopped at a roadside stall to buy some Strawberries. Unfortunately they ended up blowing the next month’s tour budget when an accounting error left the band not realising that Ecuador’s exchange rate is the wrong way round, meaning each punnet cost nearly £30,000!
Maiden sticksman Nicko McBrain once won the world Pumpkin carving championship in Aurora, Illinois. “I used to practice on tour, the Rock N’ Roll lifestyle was never my thing” Explained the flat-conked percussionist.
Ex-Maiden singer Paul DiAnno was a bit of a dick.
When vestigial, deformed third Maiden guitarist Janick Gers is out in native Hammersmith, he likes nothing better than to start a bit of a ruck. “Every time I’m near the Apollo it all kicks off” claimed the horse-haired 6th member.
Iron Maiden’s resident 4-string tickler Steve Harris came up with the band’s name when he fell in love with a robotic woman called Maria. “She was so beautiful, I just had to help the workers of Metropolis rise up against their wealthy overlords” said the West Ham low frequency genius.
Maiden guitarist Dave Murray maintains his famous figure thanks to an exclusive sponsorship deal with Ginster’s pies and Panda Pops cola. “I sell the spare pies at market each Sunday to pay for guitars and spandex” bellowed the moon-faced axeman.
Maiden mascot Eddie the Head, was originally made from Steve Harris’ Gran’s actual head. “Lets face it, she wasn’t using it - she’d been dead for 8 months” chortled the wicked bass player from his Transylvanian home.
Iron Maiden traditionally get the names for their albums from the tickets inside fortune cookies.
Leather-lunged former singer Blaze Bailey originally trained as a bus driver, and was discovered by the band when they took the N9 to Piccadilly Circus for a night out at Stringfellows. “He was bellowing out of tune to ‘Kids In America’” explained Steve Harris; “I knew we had to recruit him. Although that may be down to the large amount of PCP I’d consumed”.
Iron Maiden’s latest release Your Co-workers Take Pleasure in Your Great Sense of Creativity'. is due out at some point probably.
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At this time last year, Gary Sanchez’s prospect stock was down. He had just wrapped up a good but not great season with Double-A Trenton — Sanchez hit .270/.338/.406 (108 wRC+) with 13 homers in 110 games for the Thunder in 2014 — which left people still waiting for that huge breakout season. A 2009 Jesus Montero season, basically.
I argued prospect fatigue was setting in. Although he was still only 21 at the time, it felt like Sanchez had been around forever. We’ve been hearing about him since 2009 and looking at his stats since 2010. Prospects are like toys. We love them, then toss them aside when the next flashy one arrives. Sanchez fell behind others like Aaron Judge and Greg Bird.
This year though, Sanchez finally had a dominant year at the plate, hitting .287/.340/.516 (140 wRC+) with 18 home runs in 93 games split between Double-A Trenton and Triple-A Scranton. He made his MLB debut in September and went 0-for-2 in two garbage time at-bats, and actually made the wildcard game roster as the third catcher and extra righty bat.
Sanchez, now 22, is currently annihilating the Arizona Fall League. He has gone 17-for-40 (.429) with five home runs and 36 total bases (and 15 RBI, if that’s your thing) in nine games for the Surprise Saguaros. Bird was named AzFL MVP last year after going 31-for-99 (.313) with six homers and 55 total bases in 26 games. Sanchez was recently named AzFL Player of the Week, because duh.
The numbers are nice, but, more importantly, Sanchez grew as a person and matured this year. He’s had some attitude issues over the years, most notably getting suspended a few years ago because he refused to catch a bullpen session. “Everything has improved all around. I don’t care where you come from. When you are 21 or 22, everyone grows,” said departed assistant GM Billy Eppler to George King (subs. req’d) in September.
Sanchez did a little growing up, his defense continues to make incremental progress — a scout recently told Therron Brockish Sanchez has “soft hands and showed good blocking skills,” and rated his future defense a 50 on the 20-80 scouting scale, meaning MLB average — and he had a big year at the plate. Plus he made his MLB debut. The 2015 season was a smashing success for Sanchez.
So now what? Where do the Yankees and Sanchez go from here? Sanchez is saying all the right things — “As a kid, you always dream to have that call, and I thank God that it happened this year. But I feel that it is not over yet. I want to continue to improve to where one day, I can play in the big leagues every single day,” he said to Antonio Cannavaro earlier this week — and the Yankees haven’t said anything, which isn’t surprising. The way I see it, the Yankees have three options with Sanchez this offseason.
Option 1: Trade Him!
Over the last few years the Yankees have prioritized catcher defense. The only bad defensive catcher they’ve had since 2007 or so was Jorge Posada. Sanchez has definitely improved behind the plate, but even if he lives up to that scout’s projection and becomes a 50 defender, is that good enough for the Yankees? Maybe! But they seem to look for elite glovemen, not average defenders. Sanchez’s trade value might not get any higher than it is right now, with him destroying the AzFL.
Option 2: Keep Him You Idiot!
Sanchez has played only 35 games at Triple-A, so hanging on to him and sending him back to the RailRiders to start next season is perfectly reasonable. In fact, I’d say it’s the most likely outcome. Sanchez still has work to do behind the plate and at this point of his career, he’s better off playing everyday in the minors than sitting on the big league bench as a backup. John Ryan Murphy was big league ready defensively last year. Using him as the backup made sense. Sanchez? Nah, he needs more reps and lots of them. Triple-A is always an option.
Option 3: Trade Someone Else
This seems unlikely, but it is possible, I guess. The Yankees could move Murphy to fill another position — plenty of teams needing catching help and the dirt cheap Murphy would be quite attractive — and go with Sanchez as Brian McCann’s backup. Or they could try to move McCann and accelerate the youth movement with a Murphy/Sanchez catching tandem. That would be something else. Of course, McCann’s contract and no-trade clause would be quite the obstacle.
A few months ago I would have expected Sanchez to be traded this offseason because his defense isn’t up to the team’s apparent standards. Right now I think they’re likely to hold onto him, see what steps forward he takes next season, then make a decision. The bat is too promising to move right now. Next season will be Sanchez’s last minor league option year — he could qualify for a fourth option I suppose, that stuff always confuses me — which means it’s big leagues or bust come 2017.
That’s not necessarily a problem. If Sanchez continues to hit well — 22-year-old catchers who hit 18 home runs in the upper minors are exceedingly rare, you know — the Yankees can make room for him, even if they have to shoehorn him into the lineup at DH or even first base. Mark Teixeira and Carlos Beltran will be gone after 2016, after all. The roster logjam will clear up a bit.
A year ago at this time Sanchez appeared to be fading as a prospect, a guy who was more hype than tools and production. That wasn’t completely undeserved. Either way, it’s no longer the case now. Sanchez made big strikes this year, especially with his maturity, and he put himself in position to help the Yankees as soon as next year. Surely he noticed the team turned to Bird and Luis Severino when they needed help this summer. That’s some nice motivation.
I would never rule out a trade. Can’t do it. At this point though, I think the Yankees will keep Sanchez and he’ll head into next season as the third catcher on the depth chart. It’s not often a team goes through an entire season with their top two catchers staying healthy — the Yankees got lucky and did that this past season — so Sanchez figures to start in Triple-A and come up whenever help is needed.
Development rarely goes smoothly and according to plan. Sanchez hit some bumps in the road, overcame them, and put himself in position to be discussed as a serious part of the Yankees’ future. Where does he fit exactly? That remains to be seen.
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How did I turn out to be a vegetarian? It all started about five years ago. I don’t even remember the exact date when the change took place, but I do remember all the important events that made me take this decision. It was a sudden change. One day I woke up and said: “From this moment on I’ll stop eating meat.”. And so I did.
“I’ll never give up meat… ever!”
Let’s start with the beginning. A while ago, before I made the transition to a vegetarian diet, my cousin told me she had decided to give up meat and become a vegetarian. I, an avid meat eater [I was eating meat every day, at almost every meal!], told her she’s crazy! I started telling her she will harm her body and all kinds of stupid things like that, and the grand finale was “I’ll never give up meat, ever! I could never be a vegetarian!”. I’m still a bit embarrassed when I remember that I even asked her idiotic questions like the already famous “Where will you get your proteins from?”…
My Vegetarian Story: The Spiritual Change
My transition to a vegetarian diet was also influenced by a spiritual change. About five years ago, I went through a not-so-happy part of my life. I felt lost. I felt like I had no stability, no certainty for a better future. I was depressed. Nobody knew that of course. I’m actually pretty good at hiding my emotions. I was feeling like the path I took was not the right one for me. It was like I was offered a life I did not want, a life others have organized for me, without my consent. I felt like an outsider.
In those critical times, I started watching lots of documentaries. It was like I had found a refuge in them. The more I was learning, the better I felt. I think I watched almost all existing nutrition documentaries available then. I also watched some documentaries about religion, spirituality and personal development. The documentaries I’ve seen had a huge impact on my way of thinking. It was like a thick veil was taken off my eyes and I could finally see clearly! I started developing as a person and slowly, I began to make my own path in life.
It’s time to stop worrying about what you’re going to eat! I created the meal planner app to help you! Get your personalized meal plan with delicious, healthy, and budget-friendly recipes! GET YOUR MEAL PLAN!
The nutrition documentaries I saw, made me realize how badly was I eating. I wasn’t into fast food or other junk foods, but still, I was eating a lot of meat. The documentary that made me say “From now on I’ll stop eating meat.” was Earthlings. Up until today, I didn’t finish watching the whole movie. 10 minutes were more than enough for me. The next day I decided I’ll become a vegetarian, and so I did. I just couldn’t live with myself knowing that my diet was not only causing me harm, but also all those poor animals.
Therefore, for me, the diet change also had ethical grounds. Right after I became a vegetarian, I also started blogging.
[source]
My Vegetarian Story: List of Must-Watch Documentaries
Nutrition documentaries:
Other interesting documentaries:
The Secret
Zeitgeist – The Movie
Zeitgeist – Addendum
Zeitgeist III: Moving Forward
My Vegetarian Story: List of recommended nutrition books:
My Vegetarian Story: The perfect diet?
I can’t say my diet is perfect. If I want to eat chocolate, I’ll eat chocolate! Moderation is key! But, overall I eat better. I know some people would say that the vegetarian diet is not entirely healthy and that a vegan or even a raw vegan diet is better. Well, we’re not the same! We are all different and have different needs. I think we should all test these diets on ourselves and decide which one is the best for us. My advice is to read a lot and watch many documentaries, then decide what is best for you.
Also, if you’re new to my blog you should know that almost all my new recipes are vegan. I am not. I hate labels. I have a vegetarian diet, which means I eat mostly plant-based, but I do eat eggs, dairy, and honey from time to time (once a week or even 2-3 times a month). I do prefer a mostly vegan diet but for me, this is the diet I choose and works best.
On my blog, you’ll find many popular meat-based recipes made vegan. I love “veganizing” meat-based recipes and making them cruelty-free and healthy. So if you’re one of those vegan extremists who blame other vegans or vegetarians for naming soy milk – “milk”, vegan cheese – “cheese” and for eating vegan foods that mimic meat-based recipes…well…CLOSE THE PAGE NOW and never come back.
No matter what your reason was for adopting a vegetarian/vegan diet or even for eating less meat, be it ethical or health-based, congratulations! Every small step towards a healthier, cruelty-free and environmental-friendly diet counts. Hope the recipes on my blog will inspire you to cook more and more plant-based meals. 🙂
Here are some useful articles I wrote a while ago:
Macrobiotic Diet 101 | Everything you need to know about macrobiotics!
Vegans and Vitamin B12
Healthy Sugar Alternatives
How to Choose Healthy Whole Grain Bread
Do you really know what you eat?.
My Vegetarian Story: Wake up people!
Let’s leave the ethical part aside and talk about real health facts.
Meat isn’t what it used to be. It’s one thing to have your own pig in the backyard and feed him with high quality, non-GMO forages, and it’s another thing to buy processed meat from the supermarkets. ALL meat you find in supermarkets is filled with antibiotics, GMOs, hormones and other bad stuff that cause cancer and auto-immune diseases. I’m not even going to talk about highly processed meat products like sausages, ham etc. You have to be suicidal to eat that!
Eggs. I try to buy eggs only from safe sources, mostly from the farmers market. Learn more about eggs here: All about eggs in our diet. Are they good or bad?
Dairy products. After the age of 2-3 years old, we can no longer properly digest dairy products. There is a great number of lactose intolerant people in the world. Doesn’t that bring up some questions? I eat dairy products, but not that often. I advise you to read this article Why milk and dairy products are bad for your health, to find out more about this. Also, you should read The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted. It’s a great book!
[divider]
We live in a world where we are constantly getting sick by the food we choose to eat. We’re in such a bad situation that it’s even difficult to find healthy fruits and vegetables because even they are filled with pesticides and growth hormones and are irradiated for the sake of beauty and increased production. Let’s change the world we live in by changing ourselves. The change comes from us! Any small change you make, matters and has a greater impact on the world that you might think! Start by giving up all processed foods and eat real, whole foods instead. You’ll see how good you’ll start to feel.
And a final piece of advice, never stop learning! You don’t have to listen to me, or others, find your own answers to your questions! Learn, evolve, become a better person!
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Image copyright Thinkstock
This week, a nine-year-old girl firing an Uzi submachine gun accidentally shot to death her weapons instructor. Not all Americans grow up shooting guns - but those who do often start young.
When he was five years old, Dan Baum started shooting guns.
The author of Gun Guys: A Road Trip has crisscrossed the country learning about America's gun culture. He believes shooting can teach children valuable lessons about respect and discipline.
"It can be a great thing for kids," he says. "What you're saying to a kid is, 'This is an extremely dangerous device I am putting in your hands, and I am trusting you to use it properly.'"
Thirty-one percent of US households had at least one child and one gun kept in the home as of 2012, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. For many parents, being a responsible gun owner also means teaching children to shoot - and respect firearms - from an early age.
Children's involvement in American gun culture is so ingrained that in some areas, schools close on the first day of deer-hunting season.
One company sells weapons specifically for children. Crickett Firearm's "My First Rifle" has less firepower than many adult versions and is designed to fit smaller hands.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Video released by the Mojave County Sheriff's Department shows Charles Vacca teaching the nine-year-old shortly before the accident happened
Baum taught his daughter to shoot when she was 10.
"Children are smart," he says. "First of all, they'll find anything you try to hide. And second of all, they can learn instructions. They can learn safety."
David Prince and his wife started the Eagle Gun Range in Lewisville, Texas two years ago. They welcome children as young as age eight and have hosted children's birthday parties at the facility.
"We wanted to provide a safe, family-friendly environment to learn gun safety because kids are going to come into contact with guns," Prince says.
"They see them all the time in video games. They need to know that the guns out there are inherently dangerous."
Prince showed his children how to handle and empty a gun at ages five and six "so it took the mystery out of it," he says.
Image copyright Thinkstock
Children and guns by the numbers:
18 : The number of people age 24 and younger killed by firearms in the US each day
: The number of people age 24 and younger killed by firearms in the US each day 55 : The percentage of US homes with children and firearms in which one or more weapons are kept in an unlocked place
: The percentage of US homes with children and firearms in which one or more weapons are kept in an unlocked place 1.6 : The number, in millions, of children 18 and under who are estimated to be living in homes with loaded and unlocked firearms
The number, in millions, of children 18 and under who are estimated to be living in homes with loaded and unlocked firearms 72: The percentage of parents who say they have spoken with their children about the hazards of guns
Source: Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, ABC News
Legally, he says, there are no limits placed on how old a child must be in order to fire a weapon. That determination is instead left to parents.
Price says children can handle submachine guns like the one used in this week's fatal shooting, but only with proper safety precautions - such as tethering the weapon to minimise recoil.
For his part, Baum says no child should be given access to Uzis. While he hopes the tragedy sparks a wider discussion about guns in the US, he's concerned it will also be used as political fodder for the anti-gun lobby.
"The pity is people are going look at this video and, on the basis of what this [instructor] did, draw conclusions about children and firearms that will serve their preconceived agenda," he says.
Image copyright AFP
Uzis
Submachine gun designed in 1950s for Israel's army
Capable of automatic or semi-automatic fire
Standard rate of fire is 600 rounds per minute
Meanwhile, Silvio Calabi, author of The Gun Book for Boys, says the gun debate in the US has become so polarised that people on both sides go to extremes.
"Some people are so hell-bent on proving it's ok that they will push the envelope," he says.
"If you go online, you can find photos of five-year-old kids shooting machine guns. I have to believe that in a normal sort of situation, nobody, no matter how hard-core a shooter or shooting enthusiast, would hand a machine gun to a five-year old."
Still, he says, those who are shocked at the idea of children shooting guns often don't understand the reality.
"They envision homes where loaded guns are lying around on coffee tables like candy dishes, and that it's just a matter of time before there's some horrible accident and some family member gets wasted," Calabi says.
"The great majority of people who shoot treat guns with a great deal of reverence, and keep them under lock and key," he adds. "They regard them as recreational equipment but understand the realities that go with it."
His children, who learned to shoot around age 12, no longer use firearms now that they are grown. But, he says, they made that decision only after understanding first-hand what it's like to fire a gun - and to be part of an American tradition.
Additional reporting by Kate Dailey
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AMAZING! I joked about an idea like this with people… bags that could protect my camera when needed, disappear to nearly nothing when i’m using the camera? Inflatableness to the rescue?!?! Kata ABS-HD inflatable protective casing comes folded up in a pouch. I love that they say “When on board with your camcorder it takes approximately 1 minute to inflate, wrap up your camcorder and stow it in the over head bin.” So you can basically sneak on seeming like you have very little, then poof you fill the bin? Slightly shady. But then again, perhaps you can use it as a flotation device in case or emergency? I also wonder how it handles the air pressure? Sadly they also say “This is inflatable protection not a camcorder bag, so while on the go use the camcorders strap or handle to carry and upon arriving at your destination it should be deflated and packed away in your working bag.” I’d love a purse/messenger bag fitting version for my dslr for those emergencies if i had to pack it in my check in, or let someone else handle my bags… see more images on the next page!
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2014 has seen the advent of memory recording, smart contact lenses, cameras that can record the speed of light, and printable batteries.
But what does 2015 have in store? IBTimes UK takes a look at what we can expect to see in the upcoming year.
Driverless buses and lorries to hit the roads
UK roads are going to be transformed in 2015 with Transport Minister Claire Perry tipping it to be the year of the driverless car, bus and lorry.
According to Perry, driverless buses will be able to provide "better and more frequent services" and transform rural public transport.
"I understand that one of the country's major bus companies is already interested in driverless buses," Perry said in October.
"Driverless technology is the future. We can't avoid it and I don't want us to. I can also understand that some drivers will be - at the very least - unsure of them."
First advert on the moon
A Japanese soft drinks manufacturer is planning to place the first extra-terrestrial advert by sending one its cans to the moon.
The marketing mission by Otsuka will be undertaken through Elon Musk's SpaceX company in October 2015 on a four-and-a-half day journey that will cover 236,121 miles.
If successful, SpaceX and Otsuka will be able to claim the $20 million prize offered by Google's Lunar X competition to be the first private team to "land a robot on the surface of the moon, travel 500 metres over the lunar surface, and send images and data back to the Earth."
World's first commercial hoverboard
The 1989 cult film Back to the Future II featured a time-travelling Marty McFly riding around on a hovering skateboard. The year was 2015.
The scene has proved to be amazingly prophetic, as the first ever hoverboard is expected to be commercially available next year.
The Hendo hoverboard, developed by California-based company Ax Pax, tested a prototype earlier this year and has now reached its Kickstarter crowd-funding targets to make it a reality.
White space Wi-Fi
Free "Super WiFi" that utilizes the white space spectrum found between television stations to deliver internet connectivity is expected to be rolled out across vast swathes of the unconnected world in 2015.
Last month Microsoft announced that it would roll out the technology in India as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India project.
White space Wi-Fi has a range 100 times greater than current WiFi methods and is also able to travel through solid objects like walls with little interference.
Augmented reality smartglasses
Google's acquisition of an augmented reality startup earlier this year led to strong speculation that the tech giant is planning a big upgrade for its Google Glass smartglasses.
Magic Leap is expected to deliver augmented reality to Glass wearers, offering both informative and gaming experiences.
"Our team dug deep into the physics of the visual world, and dug deep into the physics and processes of our visual and sensory perception," Magic Leap states.
"It is biometric, meaning it respects how we function naturally as humans (we are humans after all, not machines)."
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Pakistan bans Facebook in outrage over online competition to draw Prophet Mohammed
A Pakistani court has ordered the government to block the popular social networking website Facebook over an online competition inviting users to submit images of the Prophet Mohammed.
The page has caused an outcry in Pakistan and throughout the Muslim world. Images of the Prophet are considered blasphemous.
A series of cartoons of the prophet published in a Danish newspaper in 2005 sparked violent protests and death threats against the cartoonists.
Outrage: Pakistani religious students shout slogans during a protest in Karachi against the Facebook page asking using to submit images of the Prophet Mohammed today
Revolt: Supporters of Islamic political party Jamat-e-Islami join the Karachi protest today. A Pakistani court has temporarily banned the entire Facebook website
The Facebook page 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!' encourages users to submit images of the prophet on May 20.
It was set up to protest threats made by a radical Muslim group against the creators of 'South Park' for depicting Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode earlier this year.
'We are not trying to slander the average Muslim,'' the Facebook creators wrote on the information section of the page, which was still accessible this morning.
'We simply want to show the extremists that threaten to harm people because of their Mohammad depictions that we're not afraid of them. That they can't take away our right to freedom of speech by trying to scare us into silence.'
More students join in today's protest. As of early this afternoon, Facebook was still available in Pakistan
In an attempt to respond to domestic criticism, the Pakistani government ordered Internet service providers in the country to block the page Tuesday.
But a group of Islamic lawyers went one further - and asked the Lahore High Court on Wednesday to order the government to fully block Facebook itself.
This was because the site had allowed the page to be posted in the first place, said the deputy attorney general of Punjab province, Naveed Inayat Malik.
The court complied with the request by the Islamic Lawyers Forum and ordered the government to temporarily block the site until May 31, Malik said.
Lawyers outside the courtroom hailed the ruling, chanting 'down with Facebook'.
As of early this afternoon, the controversial Facebook page had been blocked, but the site itself was still functioning.
Ali, the Pakistani telecommunications official, said he was awaiting final instructions from the government before ordering Internet service providers to fully block Facebook.
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DETROIT, MI - APRIL 17: Henrik Zetterberg #40 of the Detroit Red Wings celebrates his second period goal with Gustav Nyquist #14, Dylan Larkin #71 and Brendan Smith #2 next to Michael Blunden #46 of the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game Three of the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals during the 2016 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs at Joe Louis Arena on April 17, 2016 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
By Dan Jenkins
There has been no love lost between the Detroit Red Wings and the Tampa Bay Lightning in their first round playoff series. Now, that tension has boiled over into both fans bases and sports talk radio in both cities.
Tampa radio host Steve Duemig of WDAE had some harsh words for Detroit fans after the Wings’ 2-0 shutout of the Lightning on Sunday. Duemig didn’t sugarcoat anything, calling Detroit fans “classless chicken spit.”
“So Detroit shows one of their players — or best players — is a chicken and their fans are classless, classless chicken spit. Of course we already knew that from last year,” Duemig said. “But way to go, chicken spits of Detroit, and thank you for putting the chicken dance in our repertoire for the rest of the day, cause that’s what you’re going to hear.”
Duemig took exception to a fight between Detroit’s Justin Abdelkader and Tampa’s Brian Boyle in which Abdelkader refused to take his gloves off, and a fan dumping beer on Boyle during the skirmish.
“We have a new name for Justin Abdelkader — octopussy,” Duemig said. “We saw the ultimate in pussydum when Justin Abdelkader refused to take off his gloves to fight Brian Boyle because he said, ‘oh, I had tape on my hands.’ Well lets see the tape.”
Duemig also called the Red Wings cheaters.
“You ask any Lightning player what the toughest series was [last year], it was the Detroit series because you have to work so hard to survive because they cheat,” Duemig said. “So not only are they chicken spits, but they cheat too and the refs let it go last year as well and they’re letting it go this year, at least in Game 3.”
Detroit’s own Valenti and Foster program got in on the action on Twitter.
Tampa Bay radio host @BigDogwdae called Red Wings Justin Abdelkader an "Octopussy" on air today. What a joke… — Mike Sullivan (@MikeSullivan) April 18, 2016
Tampa radio host @BigDogwdae called Abdelkader an "octopussy" yet he's the one who's literally blocking anybody who tweets at him about it. — Mike Sullivan (@MikeSullivan) April 18, 2016
Just remember… 11 Stanley Cups here in Detroit. #GoWings. https://t.co/5qTW1fexgd — Mike Sullivan (@MikeSullivan) April 18, 2016
@620wdae @MikeSullivan @MikeValenti971 If you had somebody qualified on the air that can talk hockey we would come on. — Terry Foster (@TerryFoster971) April 18, 2016
@calebabston I have my own show to run. — Steve (@BigDogwdae) April 18, 2016
@SCline1174 also on FM douche bag — Steve (@BigDogwdae) April 18, 2016
@FrankHassell yeah with his stick — Steve (@BigDogwdae) April 18, 2016
@KeepNTouch313 tell them to call me. I hear your all asking them to up there LOL — Steve (@BigDogwdae) April 18, 2016
Even WDAE got in on the fight.
BTW..Happy To Produce Your Show's Content For Today! Take The Rest Of The Day Off Too @MikeSullivan @TerryFoster971 pic.twitter.com/qlgObZzgTo — **620 WDAE** (@620wdae) April 18, 2016
Keep living in the past https://t.co/GwAmGPCAXt — **620 WDAE** (@620wdae) April 18, 2016
Love You Back! That Valenti guy though…. :) https://t.co/wDV1cWPGRX — **620 WDAE** (@620wdae) April 18, 2016
Sounds like this is turning into a full-time rivalry.
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Federal, state and local officials are typically ready to find the money required to fix problems when it comes to highway infrastructure. As a former governor, I know this is good politics. Infrastructure creates jobs, and people appreciate tangible improvements to highways and bridges. Here, taxpayers can see government at work. Yet when it comes to critical infrastructure projects such as electrical transmission equipment or pipelines, equally important, job creating initiatives often end up on the back burner — or face outright opposition.
With his recent quadrennial energy review, President Barack Obama outlined his desire for a modern American energy infrastructure system. Congress, state and local governments have also stepped up with policies and laws directed at energy infrastructure build-out. But unlike a new highway or rebuilt bridge, the political rewards are murkier for complex energy infrastructure projects that produce far reaching economic benefits but are less obvious to the naked eye.
Nevertheless, we can no longer afford to ignore our nation's energy infrastructure needs. While we derive clear benefits from producing needed fuel here at home, those benefits will not be fully realized until we build out the network needed to deliver the products throughout the country.
Unfortunately, the highest profile energy infrastructure project of late involved the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline, turning pipelines into a political litmus test rather than what they are: catalysts for economic growth and the safest and most efficient means of delivering critical fuels. According to one study, infrastructure improvements in the oil and natural gas arena could generate as much as $1.15 trillion in new private capital investment, support 1.15 million new jobs, and add $120 billion on average per year to our nation's GDP over the next 10 years. Yet pipelines continue to be painted in ideological rather than economic terms.
In Maryland, thousands of miles from Keystone, activist groups have utilized the debate to further an agenda that rejects any development, even when residents (like those in Garrett County) stand to benefit. In the recently concluded legislative session, these same activists forced through restrictions and delays that will hurt the state and our economy in the long run.
Natural gas represents a huge opportunity for an energy independent America. Natural gas heats homes and businesses, powers manufacturing facilities and fuels power plants cleanly and efficiently. Combined with pipeline expansions in projects like Cove Point's LNG export facility right here in Maryland, we can create new markets for our gas that will benefit our region both at home and in the international community.
In nearby shale country, up to 18 billion cubic feet per day is slated to be produced by 2020, amounting to 64 percent of U.S. gas production — a huge boon to those who support the use of clean burning fuels and energy independence. Yet, regardless of how much gas we develop, if we don't improve our infrastructure constraints, much of that abundant energy will be trapped.
Just across the Mason-Dixon line in Pennsylvania, projects such as the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline promise dramatic economic impact by providing consumers in Maryland and along the East Coast with access to reliable, cost effective natural gas supply. In fact, access to natural gas supply has begun to power an American manufacturing revolution (new manufacturing plants are springing up all across America) while lowering the energy costs of regular folks who use this energy to cook meals and power their homes. The Sunrise project alone would provide enough natural gas to meet the daily needs of more than 7 million American homes — thereby reducing costs and power bills for Maryland consumers.
We have a golden opportunity to create an energy future based on U.S. leadership. Maryland has a chance to play a leading role if it can overcome the baseless fears of the opposition. This future will enhance our independence, provide an economic boost to consumers and businesses alike, and assist our allies across the world. But we need to act now to make the investments that will help us reach this new era. Let's say "enough" to the politics of labels and name calling and embrace the incredible opportunities in our midst. Let's put our money down on American infrastructure.
Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. served as Maryland governor from 2003-2007. He is currently a partner at the firm of King & Spalding. His email is ehrlichcolumn@gmail.com.
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We heard about the Bulgarian company called “Rci Tuning” after there was a video, which shows a BMW E39 model converted into F10 model, released to the internet. The company offers you a solution how you can make your BMW E39 look like F10 model. However, it’s just a visual transformation, which is a body kit only. No technical side of the car is touched.
You can get the kit for around $3000-6000 (the price depends on the options – without headlights and paint or with them, etc.). To convert your E39 into F10, you would need to deliver your car to the Bulgarian company and wait a few weeks until the job is done. And if you don’t own a BMW E39 already, you can buy a whole car with the kit installed for less than $14,000.
Would you buy such a car? I bet a lot of people wouldn’t (including me) but some would, that’s for sure. And this is why a lot of people wouldn’t buy it: Yes, the car looks good, but it’s still just a replica of the real F10 model. Even if it looks like an F10, it will never be like the real F10 is.
Today, we have here a 1996 BMW 5 Series 520i E39 converted into F10 model (the pictures). This car is from Norway and has Norwegian license plates on it (the plates are masked). We’re not sure if this car is somehow related to the Bulgarian company or not, because the license plates are from Norway, and the kit is for sale in Norway too — Maybe Norwegians have started their own transformations — They’re asking 49,999 Norwegian Krones, which is around $6.2K, for the kit only.
As you can see from the pictures, the car looks great. The exterior is basically the same as the F10 model’s is. However, the interior doesn’t look like the real F10‘s interior. The interior in this car is modified, but it still looks old and not modern at all (everything at the front – the steering wheel, etc.), not like the one you can find in the F10 model, that’s for sure. The seats and door panels look great, though.
Car News & Articles
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It's not often that apps that aren't made by a giant company or preloaded reach a threshold as monumental as 50 million downloads, but TeslaCoil Software's Nova Launcher, everyone's favorite custom launcher, has gone ahead and done just that. That's seriously impressive.
In case you somehow don't know what Nova Launcher is, it's a free custom launcher with loads of ways to tune it to your own tastes. You can use icon packs, choose the app drawer's style, customize the Google search bar, and so much more. You can even activate the Google Feed by swiping right. The opportunities are endless, especially with Nova Launcher Prime, which we just gave away 50 codes for.
Congratulations to Kevin and the rest of the TeslaCoil team. If you haven't tried Nova yet (which I doubt), you can download it below.
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