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Sloppy Rangers can't keep late lead vs. Fish
ARLINGTON -- The Rangers have enough wounded on the disabled list, they don't need any more self-inflicted wounds during the course of the game.
The Rangers have handicaps without adding to them. On Tuesday night, they were trying to hold a one-run lead with nine outs to go, and five of the nine players they had on the field had less than 100 games of Major League experience.View Full Game Coverage
ARLINGTON -- The Rangers have enough wounded on the disabled list, they don't need any more self-inflicted wounds during the course of the game.
The Rangers have handicaps without adding to them. On Tuesday night, they were trying to hold a one-run lead with nine outs to go, and five of the nine players they had on the field had less than 100 games of Major League experience.View Full Game Coverage
But the Rangers added to their travails with a litany of mental and physical mistakes, all adding up to a fourth straight loss as the Marlins rallied for an 8-5 victory. The loss, besides dropping the Rangers to three games under .500 for the season, was also their 16th in their last 22 games at home.
Manager Ron Washington admitted afterward there were certain aspects of his team's performance that disappointed him in this one.
"Yeah, in the end, we didn't play defense the way we are capable of playing," Washington said. "That hurt us. We fought back to get into that game and then shot ourselves in the foot. I get a little upset but I don't get frustrated. We've still got work to do."
The Rangers let their 5-4 lead disappear when the Marlins scored two in the seventh and two in the eighth. Three of the four runs were unearned on three errors. Two of the three errors were committed by rookies: left fielder Michael Choice and second baseman Rougned Odor. Pitcher Tanner Scheppers committed the third error.
"We all want to win," pitcher Colby Lewis said. "That's the bottom line. We're all trying to win. ... We're all trying to do what we need to do."
The physical errors were not the only issue. Lewis walked four in five innings, and two ended up scoring. Brad Snyder, playing first base for the first time in the Majors and only the third time as a professional, cut off a relay throw to the plate in the fourth inning that had the potential to be an out.
In the sixth, center fielder Leonys Martin was too slow getting to what should have been a one-out single by Christian Yelich. Hustling all the way, Yelich turned it into a double.
Ed Lucas followed with a grounder that Odor fielded next to second. He had a chance to tag Yelich for the second out, but tried to do it too quickly in an attempt to get a double play. Odor missed the tag and the Rangers didn't get any outs. Yelich scored on a two-out single by Casey McGehee.
"We've got to keep working, that's all we can do," Washington said. "They are certainly trying to play and trying to do their best. Some things just didn't go right. We've got to keep battling until we get it right."
Even with all that, the Rangers were able to take the lead after being down 4-1 going into the bottom of the sixth. The Rangers rallied with four runs after loading the bases against starter Tom Koehler. Shin-Soo Choo was hit with a pitch, Adrian Beltre singled and Alex Rios drew a walk. Another walk to Snyder forced in a run and a sacrifice fly by Robinson Chirinos made it 4-3.
Rios went to third on the play. Daniel Robertson then struck out, but with Odor at the plate, Rios scored on a wild pitch with Snyder advancing to second. Odor then beat out a slow ground ball to short and Snyder raced home from second with the go-ahead run.
But the Rangers couldn't keep the lead for long. Jason Frasor struck out the first hitter in the top of the seventh before Justin Bour smacked a hard grounder past Odor for a single.
Jeff Mathis followed with a potential double-play grounder up the middle. Odor had to go to his right to make a backhand play and appeared to be in position. But the ball went under his glove for an error, leaving runners at first and second. Adeiny Hechavarria then flied out to deep center, moving runners to second and third.
With Yelich at the plate, Washington went with Neal Cotts for a lefty vs. lefty matchup. Cotts got ahead 1-2 but hung a breaking ball, and Yelich lined it to left -- just off the tip of Beltre's glove for a two-run single.
"I had never faced him before," Yelich said. "I didn't really know what his pitches looked like, what he was going to go to for an out-pitch, things like that. So it was kind of a battle and one that I'm glad I won."
The Marlins added two more runs in the top of the eighth on three singles and two throwing errors by Choice and Scheppers.
Lewis, who threw 106 pitches in five innings, took a shot off the right biceps with two out in fifth when he was hit by Bour's line drive. Bour got an infield hit out of it and Lewis was left with a bruised right arm. But Lewis stayed in the game and struck out Mathis to end the inning. His night was over, but only because of his pitch count.
"To use a racing term, I rubbed the wall and got back at it," Lewis said. "Nothing is going to slow me down."
T.R. Sullivan is a reporter for MLB.com. Read his blog, Postcards from Elysian Fields, and follow him on Twitter @Sullivan_Ranger.


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Most people think of space as nothingness, the blank void between planets, stars, and galaxies. Kip Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, has spent his life demonstrating otherwise. Space, from his perspective, is the oft-rumpled fabric of the universe. It bends, stretches, and squeezes as objects move through it and can even fold in on itself when faced with the extreme entities known as black holes. He calls this view the "warped side of the universe."
Strictly speaking, Thorne does not focus on space at all. He thinks instead of space-time, the blending of three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time described by Einstein's general relativity. Gravity distorts both aspects of space-time, and any dynamic event—the gentle spinning of a planet or the violent colliding of two black holes—sends out ripples of gravitational waves. Measuring the direction and force of these waves could teach us much about their origin, possibly even allowing us to study the explosive beginning of the universe itself. To that end, Thorne has spearheaded the construction of LIGO [Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory], a $365 million gravitational-wave detector located at two sites: Louisiana and Washington State. LIGO's instruments are designed to detect passing gravitational waves by measuring minuscule expansions and contractions of space-time—warps as little as one-thousandth the diameter of a proton.
Despite the seriousness of his ideas, Thorne is also famous for placing playful bets with his longtime friend Stephen Hawking on questions about the nature of their favorite subject, black holes. Thorne spoke with DISCOVER about his lifetime pursuit of science, which sometimes borders on sci-fi, and offers a preview of an upcoming collaboration with director Steven Spielberg that will bring aspects of his warped world to the big screen.
What does a black hole actually look like?
A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time. It may have been created by an imploding star [where the gravity becomes so concentrated that nothing, not even light, can escape]. But the star's matter is destroyed at the hole's center, where space-time is infinitely warped. There's nothing left anywhere but warped space-time. A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado. It has time slowing as you approach the hole's edge, the so-called horizon, and then inside the horizon, time flows toward and into the singularity [the central spot of infinite density and zero volume], dragging everything that's inside the horizon forward in time to its destruction. Looking at a black hole from the outside, it will bend light rays that pass near it, and in this way it will distort images of the sky. You will see a dark spot where nothing can come through because the light rays are going down the hole. And around it you will see a bright ring of highly distorted images of the star field or whatever is behind it.
How sure are you about this model of a black hole? Could the picture be wrong?
It is a firm prediction from Einstein's general relativity laws. Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes—maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity. It's extremely unlikely that they are anything else, but that's the exciting thing—we've been wrong before. We've had enormous surprises before.
Einstein thought of black holes as theoretical curiosities. Since no one has directly observed one, how do we know that black holes truly exist?
We see very strong evidence right at the center of our own galaxy. Astronomers have seen massive stars fall toward some central object and whip around it, like a comet around the sun, and fly back out. They have weighed that central object by measuring how strongly it whips stars around it. It turns out to have the same gravitational pull as approximately 3 million suns, and it is very dark—astronomers see only weak radio waves there. It almost certainly is a black hole. And when quasars [extremely bright, compact objects at the centers of some galaxies] were discovered in the early 1960s, it was obvious that the source of power had to be gravitational because even nuclear power, which powers the stars, is too inefficient. The idea that quasars are powered by the accretion of matter onto black holes was proposed within months after the discovery of quasars. This was a huge change of people's views of the universe, and it came very quickly. There followed a period of rapid research, and by the mid-1970s we came to understand that black holes are dynamic objects with a rich set of properties. They spin, and they can vibrate.
What are the latest discoveries about black holes?
The most exciting things to me are the first supercomputer simulations of two black holes that spiral together and then collide, triggering wild vibrations of their warped space and time. There's a fascinating recent simulation by a group led by Manuela Campanelli and Carlos Lousto, who are now at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in which the two holes are spinning with their axes pointed in opposite directions in the plane of their orbit. As they come together, the whirling space around each hole grabs hold of the other hole and throws it upward, just before they collide. The merged hole flies upward from where the collision occurred, vibrating wildly, and fires a burst of gravitational waves in the opposite direction in order to conserve total momentum. It's similar to how a smoke ring propels itself forward through air.
How soon might we see hard evidence of gravitational waves from violent events like colliding black holes?
LIGO is a several-stage project. We upgrade the detectors to better and better sensitivity. We are now operating our first detectors, completing the first long search. It's possible, but not probable, that we already have gravitational waves in the can, that we will see them as we complete the data analysis. In Advanced LIGO, which will begin its searches early in the coming decade, we expect to see a rich plethora of different types of waves, with signals coming in every day or week.
Can you describe briefly how you are going to be able to detect gravitational waves?
When gravitational waves reach the earth, the waves stretch and squeeze space. This is a tiny stretch and squeeze. Far too small to detect with ordinary human senses. We are attempting to detect the gravitational waves by hanging two huge mirrors from wires, each pair of mirrors about two and a half miles apart, and as the waves pass, the mirrors ride on that stretching and squeezing space so they are pushed apart and pulled together, back and forth. We monitor the oscillating separation between the mirrors using a laser beam. Even though these are 25-pound mirrors, their motions are so exquisitely small that they are perturbed quantum-mechanically by our monitoring. And so we have had to devise ways to get a gravity wave signal into these mirrors and through them, without it being contaminated by the quantum jiggling motion of the mirrors. Normally, you only see quantum-mechanical jiggling when you look at objects the size of atoms and molecules, but we are moving into a domain where we see the centers of mass of these big mirrors jiggle quantum-mechanically. We will soon be measuring the motions of the mirrors with a precision that is about the same as the width of the mirrors' quantum-mechanical wave function, which means that we will see the mirrors behave quantum-mechanically. We will see these human-sized objects behave like atoms behave and molecules behave, which has never, ever been done before.
How is this possible?
My superb experimentalist colleagues are able to do it because they are making such exquisitely accurate measurements. The motions that they are now able to see are at a level of about 1/100,000,000 the size of an atom. The surfaces of the mirrors have bumps and valleys that are the size of a few atoms. And we're measuring them to an accuracy of almost a billionth of the size of the bumps and valleys. And so you might say: How is it possible to measure that level? The answer is the laser beam is big—something like four inches across—and it averages over huge, huge numbers of these bumps and valleys, and it averages over time. We're looking for the motion of the centers of the mirrors as they move back and forth about 100 times a second. But the atoms inside the surface of the mirror are oscillating thermally at somewhere around one trillion oscillation per second. So, we average over an enormous number of thermal oscillations and an enormous numbers of atoms—the laser beam does that automatically. And it thereby can actually be sensitive only to the exquisitely tiny average motion of the whole mirror, the so-called center of mass motion.
Besides black holes, what other kinds of objects that are made from warped space-time and create gravity waves?
Well, a neutron star is an example. It's made partially from nuclear matter and partially from warped space and time. We hope to watch a black hole tear a neutron star apart. We will see the dynamical behavior of the warped space and time around these two objects as one destroys the other. Another example is something called a cosmic string. These are hypothetical cracks in the fabric of space that are thought to have been created at the very beginning of the universe, by the inflationary expansion of fundamental strings—the objects that string theorists tell us everything is made from. Cosmic strings are like cracks in the fabric of space. The geometry around a string is not like that of a flat sheet paper. Instead, space is warped in a conical sort of a way; the circumference around the string is less than pi times diameter. The core of the string is made of fields that have enormous energy that do this warping, and the core has enormous tension, like the tension of a violin string. If you pluck a violin string, waves go traveling along it. Similarly if a cosmic string gets plucked, oscillations travel along it at very high speed—at the speed of light—and they produce gravitational waves as they travel.
Cosmic strings are an idea that comes from string theory, the most studied area of theoretical physics. This area is still a long way from being a coherent unification of quantum and classical physics. Do you think string theory is exciting enough to merit the amount of attention it's gotten?
Absolutely. I think there's no question. It shows many signs of being on the right track toward a correct quantum theory of gravity. It has given rise to a number of very important ideas that have a good shot at being correct, such as higher dimensions, such as the possibility of forming mini-black holes at the LHC [Large Hadron Collider, a new particle accelerator that may be up and running next year], and thereby probing higher dimensions. String theory is now beginning to make concrete, observational predictions which will be tested. Claims that it is just theorists playing mental masturbation are, I think, nonsense.
What about those mini-black holes that may be produced by the LHC. How do they relate to the black holes that you study?
The black holes that we study as astrophysicists are huge, and they have enormous gravitational pulls. The mini-black holes that might be formed at the Large Hadron Collider are radically different from those huge astrophysical holes. It's unfortunate that they have the same name because it's like saying that a human being and an amoeba are the same entity, and giving them the same name because they are living things made out of matter. The black holes that one might see at the LHC are in some sense very distant cousins of huge astrophysical holes, with radically different properties. We will see mini-black holes only if our universe has higher dimensions, and then only if they form and evaporate through what's called Hawking radiation [a kind of radiation that is hypothesized to escape right along the horizon of a black hole]. A large fraction of the evaporation products go off into the higher dimensions, and so here we are exploring a very different aspect of the warped side of the universe, the influence of higher dimensions. If evidence is seen in the LHC for these mini-black holes, it'll be convincing evidence of the existence of higher dimensions.
What are some of the big surprises from your lifetime of studying theoretical astrophysics?
Oh, I think the biggest surprise to me was the discovery of dark energy; that most of the mass in the universe is in the form of this dark energy that extends throughout the universe, and has an enormous tension like an exceedingly stiff rubber band. That I found incredible. I and most of my colleagues didn't believe it until we saw several completely independent pieces of observational data saying that that's the case.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, you collaborated quite a bit with Russian physicists. What was it like to work with them during the cold war?
I managed to do this in large part because a Russian astrophysicist named Yakov Zel'dovich took me under his wing. He and Andrei Sakharov had been the principal designers of the hydrogen bomb in Russia. John Wheeler, one of the designers of the American hydrogen bomb, was my Ph.D. thesis adviser, so I was personally close to the designers of both the Russian and U.S. hydrogen bombs. I moved freely back and forth between Russia and the United States as an intellectual gadfly, carrying astrophysics and relativity ideas back and forth and helping the two sets of scientists communicate with each other.
Were you watched and questioned by government agents?
I was pretty sure that the CIA or FBI was bugging my telephone occasionally here in the United States, but they never came to me directly. After I would leave the U.S.S.R., my Russian colleagues were typically debriefed by the KGB about what had happened during my visit. The monitoring was much more intense on the Soviet side. The KGB often tried to use Russian scientists as spies, and this was a painful issue that some of my Russian colleagues had to struggle with. The CIA never, ever tried to use me as a spy.
Science fiction fans love you because in the 1980s you suggested that time travel might be possible by passing through a thing called a wormhole. How would that work?
A wormhole is a hypothetical warp of space that can serve as a shortcut between two different regions of the universe. It's sort of like if a worm drilled a hole through an apple from one side to the other. If you were an ant and you lived on the surface of the apple, there could be two routes to get from one side of the apple to the other. One is around the outside, on the surface, which we can think of as being like our universe's gently warped space; the other is down the wormhole. In the case of our universe, the wormhole might be quite short and still reach from, say, our solar system to the center of our galaxy. General relativity says wormholes could exist. When we combine general relativity with quantum theory, we find moderately strong evidence that wormholes cannot exist after all—but we just don't know for sure yet.
How did wormholes lead to your interest in time travel?
In Carl Sagan's original version of his novel Contact, he had his heroine traveling through a black hole to a distant part of the universe, and he asked me for advice. I immediately told him, "You can't do that. Black holes can't be used in that way," and I suggested he use a wormhole instead. That got me interested in the issue of whether or not there really could be wormholes that you could travel through, and quite quickly I came to realize that if they did exist, it would not be hard for a very advanced civilization to use a traversable wormhole to make a time machine. That forced me to face the issue of self-inconsistent histories: Could you go back and kill your father before you were conceived? And that question led me to realize that these kinds of thought experiments can be a very powerful way to probe the laws of physics. I had friends who worried about whether I'd gone off the deep end when they first heard about this, but most became enthusiastic after they learned the details.
Could it really be possible to travel backward in time?
It's quite unlikely that one can go backward in time—although it is certainly not ruled out—and it may be that nature has mechanisms to prevent backward time travel. When I was studying this, I came away convinced that the laws of physics can be readily adapted to backward time travel without any serious loss of ability to predict and without self-inconsistencies. I think more interesting was the discovery I made with a postdoc, Sung-Won Kim from Korea, that there is a universal mechanism that always occurs: If any highly advanced civilization attempts to make a time machine for backward time travel, quantum effects will cause the time machine to begin to self-destruct explosively at the moment you activate it. We don't know whether the explosion is strong enough to always destroy the time machine. We will have to have in our hands the full quantum theory of gravity [a combination of general relativity and quantum mechanics, yet to be understood] to find out the answer.
This kind of research certainly hasn't hurt your career. Carl Sagan, on the other hand, did have to deal with a backlash because he was writing fiction and thinking about extraterrestrial civilizations. You were friends with him. Did this backlash really damage his career?
He had some backlash to deal with, but I don't think it hurt his career among his immediate colleagues. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and then his election got quashed in the final meeting, when it should have gone through. It was quashed by people who were not close to his field. I think that was typically true, that his immediate colleagues—those who had worked with him, those who knew his research from having read his papers—they had high respect for his scientific work. It was people who had little personal knowledge of his research, who were the cause of whatever problems he had.
There is a rumor that you are working on a sci-fi project with Steven Spielberg. True?
I'm working on a science fiction film with Steven that's based on a treatment I coauthored with the producer Lynda Obst. I will be an executive producer on the film, basically focused on bringing good science into it. I expect that nothing in the film will violate fundamental physical law, and all the wild speculations in the film will spring from science. The working title is Interstellar, but it's unlikely that will be the final title. It is a story in which the warped side of the universe plays a major role.
Can you describe some of the bets you've had with Stephen Hawking—and who won?
Our first bet was about Cygnus X-1, the first strong candidate for a black hole that anyone had found. Is it really a black hole? Hawking characterized that bet as his insurance policy because he had so much invested in it turning out to be a black hole, so he bet against his hopes. He figured if it turned out not to be a black hole, he at least would get something out of the disappointment. The bet was very nonpolitically correct: He gave me a subscription to Penthouse magazine when I won. We also had another bet: John Preskill and I on one side—Preskill's a physicist at Caltech—and Hawking on the other. The bet was over whether the laws of nature permit an implosion to produce a naked singularity—a singularity that is not inside a black hole. We bet that it could, and Hawking bet it couldn't. He had to concede when a naked singularity was actually created in a finely tuned implosion, simulated on a computer. Now we have a new bet over whether a naked singularity could occur naturally in the universe.
What did you win on that second bet?
The loser had to give the winner an item of clothing to hide the winner's nakedness. Hawking conceded in a public lecture at Caltech, and he had his assistant present to us T-shirts that had a picture of a woman hiding her nakedness with a towel. On the towel was written "Nature Abhors Naked Singularities."
You also placed a wager on one of the strangest ideas about black holes: Not only do they swallow matter and light, they even obliterate any clues or information about the event. What was the argument in this case?
If you have something that implodes to make a black hole, which then completely evaporates due to Hawking radiation, does all the information that went into the black hole come back out? The fundamental principles of quantum theory say yes, and Preskill took their side. General relativity seems to say no, and that's the side that Stephen and I took. About three years ago, Stephen found a new way to analyze the evaporation process, a way that convinced him that Preskill was right and that the information could be recovered, in principle. Hawking conceded in a big ceremony at an international meeting in Dublin where I was the chair. But I haven't conceded yet.
And that was for encyclopedias?
That's right. The loser was to provide the winner with an encyclopedia of information. So Stephen gave John, who has a fabulous collection of these baseball cards, an encyclopedia of American baseball.
It sounds like Hawking hasn't done very well in his bets.
He hasn't won any of these bets yet. I think that characterizes the fact that he's ready to go out on a limb and challenge people, as a way of trying to foster the forward movement of science.
Are you still in contact professionally with Hawking?
He and I have never written a paper together. His current focus is the birth of the universe. Mine is probing its warped side. I will be going to Cambridge soon and spend a day with him, and we'll be talking about physics and about life. He's just finished writing a book for children called George's Secret Key to the Universe. I'm eager to read it. It should contain gems of wisdom, not just for children but for adults and probably also for physicists like me.
Discover Magazine

subset: commoncrawl


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The first thing I learned about shooting a TV series on location in Washington is that you can't. While news crews freely roam Senate hallways and committee rooms, films and TV shows are barred from working anywhere on the Capitol grounds. That meant that Alpha House, the new Amazon series centering on four senators that I'm helping to produce, was going to have to create its own Senate.
But where? Strict congressional rules and a shortage of soundstages and tax breaks in Washington mean that political shows are generally filmed in Los Angeles ( Scandal, The West Wing), Baltimore ( Veep, House of Cards) or New York. We chose New York for no other reason than that the show's creator, Garry Trudeau of "Doonesbury" fame, and I live there, and our other executive producer, Elliot Webb, likes to visit.
Story Continued Below
Amazon didn't intend to lead off its first venture into online TV with a political show; that was mainly the result of Alpha House winning a bake-off with viewers, a whole new way of giving the audience a voice in what shows should be on the air. But the debut comes at a time when shows about Washington are all the rage, with Homeland, The Americans and Newsroom qualifying, as well as more obviously political shows like Veep and House of Cards. It's as if the same controversial subjects that once kept shows off network TV—where conventional wisdom held that politics was a no-go zone, at least until Aaron Sorkin's successful liberal fantasy hit with the late 1990s debut of The West Wing—are now the selling point for niche audiences. Yet most exist in TV-fantasyland. Our show is a comedy and it is being shot in New York, but it has the unusual distinction of being the only one of the half-dozen political shows on the air that is set in the Washington of the present, with Barack Obama as president, Republicans embattled by their internal Tea Party uprising and the 2014 midterms fast approaching.
The show came about almost by happenstance. Garry hadn't done a TV show in nine years. Elliot is a legendary Hollywood agent who only recently became a producer. And the sum total of my show-business experience consisted of co-writing a single episode of a failed CBS drama in 1991. We pushed forward anyway with our little three-man production company, Sid Kibbitz Productions, which is named for the "Doonesbury" character based on Elliot.
Garry wrote the pilot for Alpha House in 2008, but the project was sidelined that year by the writers' strike. In January 2012, he and I were on one of the quadrennial road trips we've taken for 20 years to the New Hampshire primary. He described his idea for a show about four Republican senators living in a man-cave on Capitol Hill, inspired by the house shared for many years by Democratic lawmakers Bill Delahunt, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer and George Miller (who owns the house). All but Delahunt, who left Congress in 2011 to pursue a career as a lobbyist and purveyor of medical marijuana, still live there. Garry had created a show about Democrats, Tanner '88, in the 1980s, but now he thought the predicament of Republicans was funnier and more compelling. So he switched the characters to the GOP.
In the spring of 2012, after Jonathan Klein, former president of CNN, told me that Amazon was planning to generate original content, I sent Garry's pilot to Roy Price and Joe Lewis of Amazon Studios. They bought it, and suddenly we were rolling, though before House of Cards launched on Netflix this past February to much acclaim, it was a little hard to explain the concept of online TV. At first, even Garry was worried that our show would look like a YouTube (or hostage) video if it ran online. Would Amazon give us the millions of dollars we needed to make the show for real?
When we secured the actor John Goodman as one of our leads, things got serious. A project that began with the three of us eventually grew to a payroll of more than 125. We were middle-aged guys with other careers doing this to have a good time, not to break into show business. So we applied a "no a-holes" policy to all hiring. That meant rejecting anyone with a reputation for being difficult. My wife told me that by the end of the process there would likely be at least one Alpha House a-hole, and it would possibly be me. But against all show business odds, we ended up with a cast and crew both talented and nice, and they apparently liked us OK, too.
Amazon's pilot process is different from anything seen in 60 years of network television. For one thing, it's a lot more democratic: Amazon commissioned eight comedy pilots in late 2012 that were all posted on Amazon.com this past May. Instead of using focus groups to help them decide which shows to pick up, Amazon executives crowd-sourced the pilots with customers, who were asked to weigh in on which they liked. Even if this wasn't the only factor in deciding whether to pick up the show, it gave viewers a voice. In the end, Alpha House and another show, coincidentally called Betas (about a San Francisco tech start-up), were green-lit for 11 episodes.
Our distribution model is a little different from Netflix, the other pioneer in TV series made for the Web, which released all its House of Cards episodes at the same time. The first three Alpha House episodes are already available for free on Amazon, with episodes 4 through 11 requiring a subscription to Amazon Prime. Amazon is now releasing a new episode each Friday. By mid-January, viewers can binge on all 11. And within a few weeks after that we'll know for sure if we have another season.


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This Mick Deane fellow reminds me of Rodney Dangerfield
anonjedi2 wrote:This video was already posted, please review previous posts before posting duplicates.
Personally, I believe this leak is too convenient and it might actually be a psyop within a psyop.
Apache wrote:In the Arab world, it's something of a phenomenon. It has a name: 'Taharrush gamea'. Sometimes the girls are teased and have their veils torn off by gangs of young men; sometimes it escalates into rape. Five years ago, this form of attack was the subject of an award-winning Egyptian film, 678. Instances of young men surrounding and attacking girls were reported throughout the Arab Spring protests in Cairo in 2011 and 2012. Lara Logan, a CNN CBS journalist covering the fall of Hosni Mubarak, was raped in Tahrir Square. Taharrush gamea is a modern evil, and it's being imported into Europe. Our authorities ought to be aware of it.
Here we have a direct link to a CNN CBS journalist, Lara Logan and an "award winning" film. According to the Spectator their statement "who has ever heard of such a thing?" is immediately followed up with examples from the West-instigated destruction of Egypt from years ago. This "Taharrush gamea" has now, apparently, been "imported" into Europe according to the media.
The media is having a field day with the multicultural topic, post New Year's Eve, and no-one here, on this thread, has even bothered to bring it up in context with media fakery and have a good, long, hard look at it with a critical eye.
"On 15 February 2011, CBS News released a statement that Logan had been beaten and sexually assaulted on 11 February, while covering the celebrations in Tahrir Square following Hosni Mubarak's resignation. CBS 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with her about it on 1 May 2011; she said she was speaking out because of the prevalence of sexual assault in Egypt, and to break the silence about the sexual violence women reporters are reluctant to report in case it prevents them from doing their jobs.
She said the incident involved 200–300 men and lasted around 25 minutes."
Apache wrote:Thanks Simon. I am going to take a look at the transcript of the interview.
I was told later that they were saying "Let's take her pants off." And it's like suddenly, before I even know what's happening, I feel hands grabbing my breasts, grabbing my crotch, grabbing me from behind. I mean - and it's not one person and then it stops - it's like one person and another person and another person.
During the revolution, dozens of reporters were assaulted, often by agents of the regime.
Logan and her CBS crew were arrested and detained for one night by the Egyptian Army on 3 February 2011, while covering the Egyptian Revolution. She said the crew was blindfolded and handcuffed at gunpoint, and their driver beaten. They were advised to leave the country, but were later released.[17][18]
When we drove from the airport into Cairo that night, moments after Mubarak had stepped down, it was unbelievable.
Western broadcasters, including ITN and the BBC, today joined the Arabic networks in warning about the running battles taking place in and around Cairo's Tahrir Square.
Reuters said one of its television crews was beaten up early today close to Tahrir Square while filming a piece about shops and banks being forced to shut during the clashes.
Press freedom groups warn that reporting on the Egyptian uprising is becoming increasingly perilous as the number of journalists injured and arrested continues to rise.
Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the Committee to Protect Journalists' Middle East and North Africa programme co-ordinator. "This is like a return to the first phase, before the censorship, but far more violent and universal. They are now targeting anybody with a camera, notepad, anybody interviewing people – anyone will get violently attacked, anyone they could get their hands on. If you're a journalist in Egypt at this late stage in the game, they don't care if you're from Mars – they're going to come after you."
they illustrate the two poles of journalism: those who view their role as exposing the relevant secrets of the powerful (Hastings) and those who view their role as protecting those secrets and serving the interests of those officials (Logan).
Logan has done good and courageous reporting over the years, but she clearly sees herself as part of the government and military, rather than an adversarial watchdog over it
On the night of the 11th, a mob turned on Lara and her "60 Minutes" team and singled her out in a violent sexual assault.
I didn't even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and things, because I couldn't even feel that. Because I think of the sexual assault, was all I could feel, was their hands raping me over and over and over again.
I felt like I had been given a second chance that I didn't deserve because I did that to them...I came so close to leaving them, to abandoning them.
hoi.polloi » February 9th, 2011, 7:30 pm wrote:
3. Who the heck knows what is going on unless we are there!? Al Jazeera is obviously as controlled and financially dependent on its rich benefactors as any TV station in the U.S.A. -- perhaps those benefactors are at every level of control. They populate the political parties of the U.S.A., the people and the news companies.
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copyright, Platon.
This was Clinton's last official portrait as president, created with 1 light for Esquire. After a session of typically presidential posing was complete, Platon asked Clinton to "show him the love." The result caused a stir in the political mediasphere. Bob Woodward said on Larry King Live that, "the tie is an arrow pointing to his penis, his legs are splayed to present his crotch to us, his hands are big to grope you, and he's smiling in a way to say I got away with it."
Camera: Hasselblad 553ELX with 30mm fisheye lens and Kodak Portra film. Shot at 1/60, f8, ISO 100.
Lighting: The key, and only, light is a small softbox at f8 directly over camera. Although it seems that another light is aimed at the background, I'm guessing this effect was created in post.
Comments: To break the ice, Platon tried teaching the president some cockney rhyming slang. Bill just laughed and said, "you said cockney."


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Posted: Mar 04, 2011
COOKEVILLE, Tenn. – The Tennessee Tech softball team enjoyed some home cooking as it opened its 2011 home schedule with wins over in-state rival Middle Tennessee and NC State at the Tech Combat Classic.
The Golden Eagles started the day with a 6-0 victory over MTSU, riding the shoulders of junior pitcher Holly Thomas as she pitched seven shutout innings, en route to her fifth victory of the season. Thomas allowed just three hits on the day, while striking out seven, for her third shutout of the season.
The Tech offense broke the game open in the in the second inning, as the Golden Eagles scored four runs, including three off of RBI singles, to put Tech up 4-0.
Sophomore Melody Christian, who recorded three hits and three RBI, drove in a Tech run in the fourth and sixth innings to put Tech up 6-0. Sophomore Brittany Spalding crossed the plate three times.
Tech finished day one of the Tech Combat Classic with a 3-1 win over NC State.
Junior Whitney Cummings earned her second victory of the season, as she pitched seven innings, while giving up one run and striking out five.
The Golden Eagles opened up the scoring in the third inning scoring a pair of runs off of three hits and one Wolfpack error. Tech added an insurance run off the bat of sophomore Chanelle Spalding to increase its lead to 3-0.
NC State managed to score on run in the top of the seventh, but Cummings held firm as she completed her first game of the season for a 3-1 Golden Eagle victory.
Tech (7-7) hosts Belmont and Louisville in day two of the Tech Combat Classic Saturday. Game times are set for 12:30 and 3 p.m.


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The Planning Division of the Community Development Department advises the City Manager, City Council and its commissions, residents, the business community and the general public on current land use and development issues. It provides logistical support for assessing future demands for services related to land use in Beverly Hills and the surrounding region, including the West Side, greater Los Angeles and Southern California.
The Planning Division provides administrative assistance to the Planning Commission, which also serves as the Board of Zoning Appeals and Planning Agency, and the Architectural Commission, two separate decision-making (discretionary) boards mandated by the City Council to oversee current and future private land use in the City.
It also maintains the General Plan and Zoning Code and maps that provide the policy and regulatory bases for land use and development as mandated by State and local laws. It also administers Community Development Block Grants and other limited Federally assisted programs for which residents are eligible. The department oversees all applications for discretionary permits needed to meet those requirements, including:


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Thanks for all the fish
Folks, thank you for the tremendous outpouring of supportive comments. I want to take some time and answer as many questions and dispel many of the rumors that were posted here, rather than address them individually in the long column of comments for 666.
First: Discontinuing this comic because I can't make money.
The amount of effort that I expend to put up the comic three times per week was far outpacing the monetary return. Contrary to what you might think, they best way for webcomic artists to make money from their comics at the present time is to print books and sell the collections. That's where the big I-can-quit-my-day-job money is. Without that resource available to me the best I can do is dice sales and the occasional T-shirt. Quite frankly it is not enough. Make no mistake: I have many, MANY more models in my work room than I would have had without sponsors that paid me in store credit, so I cannot say that I did not ever benefit from the comic.
B: Games Workshop shut me down.
Not quite true. Don't blame GW for this, I was the one who decided to use their IP. They are well within their rights to allow or not allow any use of their property. I was hoping that since Turn Signals has always been an advocate of Games Workshop and their products that a mutually-beneficial arrangement could be made. That did not happen. If someone at GW wanted to make it happen tomorrow I would be all ears, but for now I'm moving on. They let me live for almost 6 years when they could have really shut me down any time they wanted to and for that I must thank them.
3: Kren and Frep are dead.
As anyone who has read Turn Signals knows, no one is really dead, no matter how badly they are obliterated, atomized, shredded, or vaporized. I have plans for them, and Cavendish, and everyone else, assuming I can get Games& off the ground.
Delta: I am getting Games& off the ground.
True. It was supposed to pick up where Turn Signals left off, but that has not happened yet. I am not a computer genius like Webmaster Larry and I still need to sit down with him and work out all of the web page, WordPress, and ComicPress bugs that I am currently staring at. I'm hoping I have entertained you enough that you will point your eyeballs at my next comic but I know that statistically I cannot bring ALL of you over to a new and different webcomic, but I hope that some of you will join me and Keenan, Eric, Klak-Nor, and Reg over
at the game store. Keep checking here for updates that will direct you there shortly.
V: Turn Signals is going away:
Nope, it will be here as long as I keep paying Dreamhost, which I intend to do for the foreseeable future. So the archives will exist for as long as you wish to paw through them. I'm trying to figure out a way that ComicPress will randomize comics and show a new one every day, but I'm not sure it's capable of that function yet.
Well, I've got some drawing and some computating to do… SEE YA!


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Urban Decay's newest lipstick is the Revolution Lipstick – a 'Baddass, pigment rich, creamy, long-lasting, hydrating' formula. If you want pigmented and fun, let's face it, Urban Decay is a pretty good bet. I have two colours here to show you today:
The packaging of the Revolution Lipstick to me looks expensive and has a more grown up feel than previous Urban Decay lipsticks (you know the fun ones with the dagger?!). It reminds me of Hourglass, a brand with exquisite packaging but is also double the price or Urban Decay. So far, so good.
The lipsticks look like this – (sorry Bang is a little smushed). Naked 2 is the perfect beige nuder and Bang is a loud bright orange. The formula is as described; ridiculously creamy and pigmented but also not heavy, sticky or uncomfortable to wear. It feels heavier than YSL Rouge Volupte to me, but has the same kind of pigment.
Something unique about these lipsticks is that UD also released matching lip liners to go with the colours – I think this is a great idea as sometimes it can be hard to match to a lip colour (I tend to use a nude one) especially if you want a really neat line. The lip liner can also be used as a base, so that the colour lasts even longer.
I like the idea of finding the dream lipstick then getting a liner to match.
Ozone – now this is an interesting product. As it's clear it can be used as a lipliner to prevent bleeding and feathering, or all over as a lip primer. This is useful with a product like this as it's so creamy it can bleed, especially if you are going to eat etc.
In terms of longevity, I thought these left a slight stain but lasted a good few hours. The initial shine and glossy finish wears off after a few hours.
Bang – a bright orange:
I found this lipstick very hydrating and plumped my lips up a little too.
Naked 2 – this is the kind of shade I would've died for a while ago. I still love it – think the ultimate beige nude to go with smokey eyes – although as I get older, I prefer brighter colours as they perk up my face a little:
Face shots!
Bang is so bright, if I were wearing it out and not swatching for the blog I would keep it natural.
The nude:
Here are all the colours:
There are 22 shades! This lipstick formula is really nice; I am tempted by Obsessed which looks like a bright blue pink and Native which is a wearable every day pink.
These cost £15 each (not bad!) and you can get them from HQ Hair or Urban Decay counters.
Do you fancy any of these?
*PR Sample


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"Baywatch" babe Donna D'Errico, who weeks ago after being singled out for a revealing scan by TSA agents, is suffering from a "serious medical issue."
"Prayer request -- this time for me -- a serious medical issue has arisen," the bombshell former Playboy pinup wrote on her Facebook page. "Thank you for any and all prayers."
TMZ reported that D'Errico has been infected with MRSA -- methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus -- a highly resistant bug that doesn't respond well to normal antibiotics. The site said she may have contracted the bug from a hospitalized relative.
D'Errico is expected to be hospitalized for several more days. MRSA infections, sometimes called "super bugs," can be life-threatening. Many public health experts are alarmed by the spread of tough strains of MRSA. Because it's hard to treat, MRSA is sometimes called a "super bug."
D'Errico, who played Donna Marco on "Baywatch" and who divorced Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx in 2007, was just in the news. D'Errico, her boyfriend and her 17-yea-old son were going through security at LAX airport when she was chosen for the intensive scanner that shows fliers' naked forms.
"It is my personal belief that they pulled me aside because they thought I was attractive," she said.
D'Errico was on her way to visit a sick relative in Pittsburgh, but it is not known if that person is suspected of passing along the bug.
Selected Reading: Popeater, TMZ, New York Daily News.


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How will you know a good house when you see it? What if you buy a house and can't sell the one you own? How can you make sure you are making a good investment? What if you think you paid too much and home prices drop?After years of hefty home-price appreciations, it's natural to wonder how long the good times will last. Real estate markets are cyclical: prices go up and they go down. However, over the long term in this country, prices have tended to move higher. At the end of the 1970s, after a big run up in home prices, real estate agents had a hard time believing that prices could go any higher. The market did cool in the early 1980s. But today home prices are much higher than they were in the early 80s.HOUSE HUNTING TIP: To protect yourself when you buy a home, adopt a long-range horizon. Don't buy unless you plan to hold the property for at least 5-10 years. This way you can ride out any downturns in the market and sell when the market improves. Try to avoid getting into a situation where you are forced to sell in a down market. If you have any questions about how long you'll be staying in the area, postpone your buying plans until there's more certainty in your life.For the buy and hold strategy to work you need to make sure that the home you buy will suit your long-term needs. This usually means: don't buy a home that's too small. Many first-time buyers make the mistake of buying a tiny starter home because it's charming and it's in the right neighborhood. But, two bedrooms, one bath and a postage-stamp lot doesn't leave much room for growth.A better strategy to consider might be to buy on the outskirts of a prime neighborhood where you can buy a 3-bedroom, 2-bath home for the approximately the same price. You might not have the most prestigious address today, but you could experience good appreciation, which will finance your trade-up move. And, you'll be comfortable in the mean time.Some floor plans are better than others. Ideally, there should be good flow between the rooms. A home with a central hall that leads to many rooms usually is easier to live in, and often times more saleable when the time comes to sell. Considering central hall layouts rather than layouts that ramble; where you have to pass through rooms to reach other rooms. A home with indoor-outdoor living space makes a big difference. A deck or patio off the kitchen, family room or separate dining room provides additional usable space and makes the home feel larger.Some buyers put off their home buying plans for fear that the real estate market will fall. This seemingly sane strategy can be risky if prices don't drop. You could be kicking yourself next year when you haven't bought and home prices are further out of reach. THE CLOSING: Remember, there is usually no need to rush to buy in a market that's loaded with inventory, particularly if new housing developments are in the works near the home you are planning to buy. An over-supply of housing relative to buyer demand (supply and demand theory) puts a downward pressure on home prices.For more information on Home Buying or Selling Tips, Please contact me, I will be pleased to help you.


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Texas President Bill Powers has issued a statement of "full support" for football coach Mack Brown after the Longhorns finished 8-4 in the regular season and didn't qualify for a BCS bowl for the third consecutive year.
Writing on his university blog Thursday, Powers said Brown will remain the Longhorns coach and dismissed what Powers called media speculation that Brown's job was in jeopardy.
Powers said Brown also has the full support of athletic director DeLoss Dodds. Powers lauded Brown's 15-year tenure, which includes two Big 12 championships and the 2005 national title.
Texas has dipped sharply since the playing in the 2009 season national championship game. The Longhorns are 21-16 the last three seasons.
The Longhorns play Oregon State on Dec. 29 in the Alamo Bowl.


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DescriptionCommercail and Residential Building Available For sale in Deira Dubai
Property Type: Commercial and Residential Building G+m+3 (Freehold Property) Rented
Location: Deira
Deal Type: sale
Plot size: 25,700 sq,ft
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Total Units: 251
number of shop: 73 Units
studio: 178 Units
Selling price: AED 100,000,000
- Lift: 4 OVER VIEW OF DEIRA
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Attention, all Gleeks: your resident Frankenteen (and one of our Fun, Fearless Males) has just made a positive personal decision. Good for him.
As Season Four of Glee continues filming, Cory Monteith—who, now 30, has previously been outspoken about his teenage struggles with drinking and drugs—announced via his rep last night that he would be checking himself into rehab for substance abuse. As a result, Finn won't be appearing in the final two episodes of the season. Fox has offered their support for Monteith, as has his one-year girlfriend and Glee co-star Lea Michele.
Says Lea in a statement to People: "I love and support Cory and will stand by him through this. I am grateful and proud he made this decision."
Monteith previously went to rehab at age 19. Are these two the Sarah Jessica Parker and Robert Downey Jr. of the Twitter age? Hopefully not. Much has been written, especially in the last few post-James Frey years, about personal struggles with substance abuse, but you rarely hear anything public from the spouses or partners of celebrity drug or alcohol addicts.
There's a special kind of hell that the significant others of drug or alcohol abusers go through before their partners end up in rehab. It's bad enough just watching the person you love self-destruct before your eyes, but if the substance-abusing partner is reluctant to seek help, putting pressure on them to do so can put even more of a strain on the relationship. After all, only the substance abuser him/herself can make the decision to change. (One good example: Remember what the tragic Amy Winehouse said when they tried to make her go to rehab? "No, no, no.")
And yet, the alternative to encouraging (what the addict sees as "nagging") your S.O. to change their lifestyle is to silently enable them. It's a tough spot to be in, for sure. It's great that Monteith has chosen to go to rehab, and we wish him all the best. This is when it starts getting better for Monteith, not to mention his relationship with Michele.
Follow Anna on Twitter: @annabreslaw
Photo via Getty Images


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Posted: Nov 12, 2013
SANTA CRUZ, CA -- Calling all Basketball fans! Tickets for Slug Basketball games are now available though Santa Cruz Basketball website. Ticket prices range from $5-$20 and you can even sit court side.
Most games are played at the Kasier Permanente Arena located downtown Santa Cruz.
If you are interested in group sales or about tickets in general, please contact Santa Cruz Warriors at 831-713-4399.


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Craft beers, good food draws at Naperville pub
Downtown Naperville has definitely changed over the last 20 years. From an area with few nightspots, it's evolved into a lively late-night bar scene with a wide range of dining options.
Jumping into this throng is Jackson Ave. Pub, located at 7 W. Jackson just off Washington Street. While not the biggest in square footage, the bar offers a large dose of imaginative pub food and a plethora of top-notch craft beers.
Motif: Open since June, Jackson Ave. Pub is a place for friends and families to meet for a great burger or singles to gather for late-night drinks. The spot features a simple contemporary bar design with seating near the bar and at high tables.
Service: We found service quick and friendly. The young staff seems to have a good knowledge of menu items and drinks.
Liquid consumption: Jackson Ave. boasts an excellent selection of craft beers including local and hard-to-find choices. Fifteen beers are available on tap, including Solemn Oath's Kidnapper by Vikings, Founder's Red Rye, Goose Island Matilda, Smuttynose Old Brown Dog and Firestone Walker Double Jack. Bottled brews give beer lovers even more choices -- from Miller, Bud and Coors to Two Brother's Ebel's Weiss, Wells Banana Bread Beer, New Belgium Fat Tire and Young's Double Chocolate Stout. Prices ($5.50 to $7.50) are a little at the high end for pints here, but the quality makes it worthwhile. And if you want to shave a bit off the tab, come on Tuesdays for $4 craft beer pints.
There is also a nice selection of wines, whiskeys and mixed drinks.
Food: The menu offers an imaginative selection of appetizers and burgers.
It would be easy to sate your hunger by just ordering pub staples like chicken wings, jalapeño bites and quesadillas, However, Jackson Ave. adds a few not-to-miss appetizer selections like sumptuous pork pot stickers, blue cheese smothered fries, and mac and cheese (with or without bacon). We decided on two opposite palate-pleasers -- the sweet and salty bacon-wrapped dates and the spicy Snake Bites, and both hit the spot. The dates were baked perfectly while the Snake Bites -- fried wontons stuffed with a mixture of cheese, black beans and habanero peppers -- offered just the right amount of heat.
The stars of the menu are the 17 different burger combinations -- with the added twist of each coming with your choice of either Angus beef or grass-fed beef patties. You can also go for a chicken breast instead. Each burger comes with a heap of fresh-cut house fries and your choice of a house bun or pretzel bun. All the selections looked like winners -- except one: the PB&J. A burger topped with peanut butter and grape jelly is something I'll maybe leave for my 6-year-old goddaughter to try.
After a long perusal, we pared our choices down to three burgers -- the Smokey, topped with pepper jack cheese, arugula, tomato and chipotle aioli; the Prime, topped with horseradish cream and sweet caramelized onions; and the Caesar, which included romaine lettuce, parmesan cheese, garlic aioli and a fried egg.
Each burger patty was thick yet perfectly cooked, and even the leaner grass-fed patty was juicy. Not one of us had the need to use the mustard or ketchup on the table; the flavor combinations provided did not need any extra support.
Sounds: Medium-level music is played at most times, though the bar can get extremely noisy with the late-night younger drinking crowd.
Crowd: Like most of the downtown Naperville restaurant and bar crowd, patronage changes from older adults and families at meal times to 20- and 30-somethings later.
Parking: You can find parking along Jackson Street and municipal parking garages within two blocks.
Overall: Jackson Ave. is a worthy addition to the downtown Naperville scene, offering high-quality pub food and beer selections.


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Say we have a PID $R$, integers $1 \leq a \leq b$, and $R$-homomorphisms $R^a \stackrel f\to R^b \stackrel g\to R^a$ with $g \circ f$ of full rank.
For $h = f, g, g \circ f$, let $c(h)$ be the characteristic ideal of $\mathrm{coker}(h)_\mathrm{tors}$, i.e. the index of the image of $h$ in its saturation. (In particular $c(g \circ f) = \det(g \circ f)R$, though this interpretation isn't available for $c(f),c(g)$ when $a < b$.)
Keeping $c(f),c(g)$ fixed, can I arrange $c(g \circ f)$ to be divisible by whatever primes of $R$ I want, beyond to those forced to appear by $c(f),c(g)$? If so, I would like a obvious way of constructing examples.


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All summer long, Paris was intermittently spectacular and spectacularly intermittent. Even the brightest spectacles came and then, abruptly, went. Every hour on the hour after nightfall, the Eiffel Tower is forced to light up, for exactly ten minutes, in a crazy-quilt pattern of scintillating lights. The lights were put in for the first night of the millennium and taken down the following year, but they were such a hit that they have been permanently reattached to the tower's girders and are turned on according to a schedule. Charming when it first appeared, the show now has something dutiful and undignified about it, like a society lady in her eighties wearing spandex and shimmying her hips; it's nice to know she can do it on New Year's Eve, but you don't really want to see her doing it every night. Another strange, temporary summer spectacle is the Paris Plage, the absurd and touching brainchild of Bertrand Delanoë, who is the green and gay mayor of Paris. The Plage, an artificial beach that extends along the Right Bank of the Seine, from the Tuileries gardens to just past the Île Saint-Louis, complete with beach shacks, cafés, and strolling musicians, has been particularly welcome in the unequalled heat, which began in July and has lasted through the summer. (A hot day in Paris often ends with a sad cool breeze. These days haven't.) The French genius for order, however, insured that the thousands of tons of sable that were shipped in by barge to make the Plage possible are neatly packed in linked wooden boxes—making the beach, in the end, the world's oddest, longest, narrowest sandbox. What is startling is the gravity with which people stretch out in the sandbox and apply sunscreen and lounge in chairs and read books while the tourists walk by. In the early morning, the "bathers" go home.
Continuing the theme, most of the summer's news was dominated not by Iraqis or Americans but by strikes—by part-time workers in show business, the intermittents du spectacle, as they call themselves. (It sounds just as odd in French as in English.) The history and the grievances of the intermittents du spectacle are hard to summarize, or, for that matter, to believe. Basically, for thirty years or so part-time actors and night-club bouncers and musicians in France have had a ridiculously generous unemployment-insurance deal, which, owing to the "precariousness" of their situation, lets them work for about three months to collect a year's worth of unemployment insurance. The unemployment fund is a general one, and all workers contribute to it. The people who were paying the intermittents, producers and theatre owners, were perfectly happy to have the plumbers and electricians of France essentially subsidizing the out-of-work actors and actresses. It was understood to be a kind of cultural subvention, a way of keeping the theatre technicians, in particular, from having to leave the business in the long stretches between productions. (It was also a way for the C.G.T., the old French Communist-dominated union, to keep a stranglehold on film and theatre, for practical and, at times, ideological reasons.)
Eventually, though, the other unions rebelled against the arrangement and, this spring, made a more or less surreptitious deal with the bosses to alter it, on the rationale that an excellent remedy for the precariousness of the position of part-time actors already exists: it is called "waiting on tables." Now the part-time actors would have to work three months out of every ten, for only eight months of benefits. At this, the intermittents went out on strike—a difficult thing to do when you are not working in the first place, but they managed it, holding marches that shut down the center of Paris, throwing bits and pieces of old film into the streets, and displaying sloganeering of a high quality. (One sign claimed to be quoting Marcel Duchamp: "The taste of a time is not the art of the time," meaning that the waves of budget cutting or keeping should not be allowed to interfere with the sanctity of independent culture.) Then they set to work shutting down the summer music and theatre festivals, one by one—Aix, Avignon, and most of the music at the Paris Plage. (The Rolling Stones, however, were able to go on, for reasons that were not well explained but may have had something to do with E.U. regulations, or with a sensible French fear of Rolling Stone roadies.)
There was a widespread understanding, too, that the inherent theatricality and self-dramatization of French strikes were at last being placed in the hands of those who had been practicing for years for the opportunity to be theatrically self-dramatizing—for the moment when the manner of French striking became the subject of French striking. Even Jean Baudrillard, who turned the paradoxes over and over in his mind in Libération—the society of spectacle had at last produced a striking proletariat of spectacles—didn't know whether to clap or to shake his head. For many people in France, it produced, surprisingly, a sense of dour hopelessness greater than that caused by any of the other strikes that have happened in France in the last eight years. It is one thing to have your country stopped regularly by truck drivers and railroad engineers; at least this has the savor of blue-collar rectitude. When the country and its joys can be shut down by part-time trombonists, however, something is wrong, or at least ridiculous.
The question of the intermittents was so pressing—omnipresent in the newspapers and on television—that there was little room left for the Americans. With the egocentrism that is our national character (and which we call "innocence" and others "arrogance"), Americans in Paris were full of apprehension about their welcome, only to discover that they were regarded as less worrisome than your son Gilles, the failed actor. Paris Jazz, the commercial classic-jazz station, played its twenty-four hours of Prez and Billie; the Lacanian psychoanalysts in the pages of Le Monde praised Ang Lee for giving us the Oedipal life of the Hulk; the event of the summer was the rerelease of "Wanda," a film by the forgotten American feminist filmmaker Barbara Loden. The special summer feature in Le Figaro was a happy, undisturbed account of a trip taken on the old Route 66 by a French journalist. ("The gastronomy," he concluded gravely, "is, frankly speaking, peculiar.") Nothing remotely like the overtly poisonous anti-French propaganda of the Murdoch media could be found anywhere in Paris. Whatever bad feeling there might be took the form of mordant jokes (butcher to American customer: "Say hello to George for me") and a certain defensive pride. Even the Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, every day announced how much France likes America, insisting that only Iraq divides us.
A kind of generalized anti-Americanism, not simply opposition to the war in Iraq, does exist, but it has become "a routine of resentment, a passionless Pavlovianism," rather than a critique of United States policy, as the historian Philippe Roger concluded in "L'Ennemi Américain" ("The American Enemy"), a recently published six-hundred-page tome devoted to the subject. Anti-Americanism, though of course it has life as a muttered feeling, has almost no life as an idea or an argument. Even in its strongest and most overt form, it tends to be Olympian and condescending rather than vituperative.
The most effective and most talked about of the new anti-American texts, Emmanuel Todd's "Après l'Empire" ("After the Empire"), argues, through a series of analogies to the Roman and Athenian Empires, that America has, slowly in the Clinton years and more vigorously since 9/11, drifted away from a "soft" universalist imperialism of culture and toward a " hard" military imperialism. This military imperialism, however, is too weak to put on more than "micro-theatrical military displays"—intermittent spectacles—against limp opposition. Resorting to such "Triumphal Arch" imperialism, Todd points out, is always a sign that the empire is finished. (One of his cleverer points is that the trappings of a service economy—lawyers, bards, and attendants—replicate the condition of a Roman imperial household more than that of an industrial community.) Todd's book is actually rather compassionate. It's all over, and has been for years. We're just too dumb to know it.
Far more lucid and arresting, and just as likely to sell books and get attention, are the views of the anti-anti-Americans—that small but loud bunch of philosophers and journalists who share the American conviction that September 11th was an epoch-marking event, and that how open societies react to it will help determine how open they get to remain. Though members of this group can be counted on the fingers of one hand (with room left over for a thumb and a pinkie), they are in a way the most potent of contemporary French thinkers.
There are at least two kinds of anti-anti-Americanism, though the first, represented by Jean-François Revel, the old lion of French liberalism, is simply displaced nationalism. Revel's new book, "L'Obsession Anti-Américaine" ("The Anti-American Obsession")—which was a No. 1 best-seller in France for a month last fall—is a defense of the American nation so enthusiastic that it would embarrass George Washington's mom. More interesting—for an American reader and observer, at least—are those thinkers who, because they have to defend American behavior without being in any way American nationalists, are forced to define a new kind of international liberalism.
"Anti-Americanism in France is always a magnet for the worst," Bernard-Henri Lévy said one evening in July. He was sitting in the study of his apartment on the leafy Boulevard Saint-Germain, and even for a casual meeting he wore, as he has done in public for thirty years, an elegant uniform of black suit and open white shirt, the collar lapping over his lapels. B.H.L., as everyone calls him, who remains one of the central media figures in France, has had a great critical success with a book entitled "Qui A Tué Daniel Pearl?" ("Who Killed Daniel Pearl?"), which is, in a way, the most vivid and intensely realized of all the "pro-American" texts. It is an inquiry into the kidnapping and murder in Pakistan last year of the Wall Street Journal reporter, and will be published next month in English by Melville House Books. Unapologetically personal, the book recounts B.H.L.'s own investigation in Pakistan and India, and also in America, with sidelights on his previous campaigns in Bosnia and Bangladesh. One reason for its success in France is that it is written almost in the tone of what the French call a polar, a noirish police thriller, full of one-sentence paragraphs and portentous cliff-hangers ("He was the man who knew too much. But what did he know?"). It also attempts, on a deeper level, to paint a character portrait of the man who did kill Danny Pearl, or, at least, arranged his kidnapping: Omar Sheikh, the Islamist who was convicted in Pakistan last year. Like Mohammed Atta, he turns out to be not a barefoot wild-eyed Mahdi but a child of the West, London-raised and educated—the New Naipaulian Man, lost between two cultures, enraged at the West and mesmerized by a fantasy of Islam, only now armed with a total ideology and an A-bomb.
On a third level, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" is a demonstration piece, a deliberate embrace by a French intellectual of an American journalist, and a book that insists that the death of an American journalist (and one who worked for the Wall Street Journal, at that) was as important for France as for America. B.H.L.'s purely political, or forensic, conclusion is that it is naïve to speak of Al Qaeda as an independent terrorist organization. At most a band of Yemenis and Saudis, the Al Qaeda of American imagination and fears—the octopus of terrorism capable of bringing tall buildings down in a single morning—is largely controlled by the Pakistani secret service, he says, and he concludes that Pearl was kidnapped and murdered with its knowledge. Pearl was killed, B.H.L. believes, because he had come to understand too much about all of this, and particularly about "the great taboo": that the Pakistani atomic bomb was built and is controlled by radical Islamists who intend to use it someday. (He writes that Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, the cleric whom Pearl had set out to interview when he was kidnapped, far from being a minor figure, is one of Osama bin Laden's mentors and tutors and has a network in place in the United States. John Allen Muhammad, the Washington sniper, Lévy claims, in a detail that, if not unknown, is unpublicized in the United States, had transferred from the Nation of Islam to Gilani's sect shortly before he began his killing spree.)
The essential conclusion of this central Parisian thinker and writer is, therefore, not that the American government ought to be more conciliatory toward the Islamic fundamentalists but that our analysis of the situation and its risks is not nearly radical enough. "I am strongly anti-anti-American, but I opposed the war in Iraq, because of what I'd seen in Pakistan," Lévy said. "Iraq was a false target, a mistaken target. Saddam, yes, is a terrible butcher, and we can only be glad that he is gone. But he is a twentieth-century butcher—an old-fashioned secular tyrant, who made an easy but irrelevant target. His boasting about having weapons of mass destruction and then being unable to really build them or keep them is typical—he's just a gangster, who lived by fear and for money. Saddam has almost nothing to do with the real threat. We were attacking an Iraq that was already largely disarmed. Meanwhile, in some Pakistani bazaar someone, as we speak, is trading a Russian miniaturized nuclear weapon."
The relentless first-person address of Lévy's new book has been mocked—"Tin-Tin in Pakistan"—but its egocentrism feels earned, and even admirable. There are three kinds of writers addicted to the first person: the kind whose "I" remains a pillar of self-reliance, supporting the text (Camus and Bruce Chatwin are both masters of this sort); the kind whose "I"s magically become "you"s (Montaigne, Thurber); and then a third, rarer kind (Mailer, Malraux), whose insistent "I"s somehow become an extended and inclusive "we," and who, through sheer lack of embarrassment about their own self-dramatization, end up enacting the dream life of their generation. B.H.L. is, or has become, in his last three books, a writer of that kind, and of that stature.
"The real issue, which the Americans don't see, is that the Arab Islamist threat is partly manageable," he went on. "One can see solutions, if not easy ones, to the Israeli-Palestinian question, to the Saudi problem. The Asian Islamist threat, though, is of an entirely different dimension. There are far more people, they are far more desperate, and they have a tradition of national action. And they have a bomb. Even North Korea is less dangerous than Pakistan—a Stalinist country with a defunct ideology and a bomb is infinitely less dangerous than a country with a bomb and a new ideology in the full vigor of its first birth. That is the real nexus of the terrorism, and fussing in the desert doesn't even begin to address it.
"The French opposition to the war was opportunist in part, rational in part, but mostly rooted in a desire not to know. What dominates France is not the presence of some anti-Americanism but an enormous absence—the absence of any belief aside from a handful of corporatist reflexes. This whole business with the intermittents is typical: it's corporatism pursued to the point of professional suicide. All that we have to replace it with is the idea of Europe; so far, we have overcome romantic nationalism, but we have nothing left to replace it with."
Even the most resolutely anti-anti-Americans in Paris don't know what to do about George W. Bush—no one since Joseph McCarthy has been such a gift to anti-Americanism in Europe, and particularly in France. Even the unprecedented heat that has swept Europe is provocative, people feeling that a warming so global might have something to do with global warming. The centrist journal Le Débat, in an editorial defending the American intervention in Iraq and criticizing the French government for opposing it, felt compelled to call the current Administration "perhaps the worst in American history." What the French, from left to right, see as Bush's shallow belligerence, his incuriosity, his contempt for culture or even the idea of difference—no one in France can forget his ridiculing an American reporter, on his one visit to Paris, for daring to speak to the French President in French—make him a heavy burden even for the most wholeheartedly pro-American thinker.
"No completely defensible cause has ever been so poorly defended as this one," André Glucksmann said in his apartment, up in the Tenth Arrondissement, the day after Bastille Day. He was speaking of the case made for the war in Iraq. "The great mistake was to settle for the absurd argument about weapons of mass destruction. Had the appeal for war been made on straightforward humanitarian grounds—the case against Saddam, this guy is a killer, we can do something about him and we must—I know it would have worked in France. Look, Bernard Kouchner"—the co-founder of the humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)—"is the most popular political figure in France, beyond question, and the moment the war was broached he came out in support of it, on purely humanitarian grounds. He lost perhaps one per cent in the polls. The French think, Well, arms, everyone has arms, and the French élite knew the kind of thug and gangster that Saddam was—they had contempt for him—and they communicated that. But people really did learn something from Bosnia, and had the case been made resolutely that we had another Milosevic it would have worked."
Glucksmann grimaced as he spoke, and then the grimace turned into a smile—of resignation, understanding, attempted forgiveness. It was the day after the French state routinely makes itself look foolish by parading new guns and old uniforms up and down the Champs-Élysées, and then makes itself look beautiful by setting off violet and gold fireworks outside the Eiffel Tower for an hour that same night. In the middle of the relentless heat wave, Glucksmann struggled to keep his cool and his good humor. On the page, he is relentlessly sardonic, and even sarcastic, but in person he bends toward bemusement. His long gray hair and strong, rather Russian-seeming face give him a bearing and intensity that one associates more with Eastern European intellectuals than with his suave and ironic countrymen. At sixty-five, he remains an original. Beginning in 1968 as an anarcho-Maoist, and as an ally of Sartre in the founding of Libération, he has made an exceptional journey, to end in a place that belongs to no one but him. Though he is staunchly pro-war (and comes as close to being pro-Bush as any Frenchman can, announcing that "underneath the carapace of the Baptist bigot there is someone who is a nearly Shakespearean figure, a man who has met tragedy and recognized it as such"), he is not really of the right. He is simply pessimistic.
Glucksmann believes that the only worthwhile "political" project is the constant, unrelenting, and most probably futile amelioration of obvious suffering. "It's very odd that the idea of the doctor, and of medicine, predates by thousands of years the actual ability of doctors to help anyone in more than small ways. Why should it be?" he said once in a conversation. "Well, it's because we recognize the presence of evil as being stronger than the promise of a cure. The simple Hippocratic oath, 'First, do no harm,' is a far, far more radical sentence in the history of thought than it seems. It recognizes the existence of evil—illness—that is in many ways beyond our control. It is the opposite of magical thinking, witch-doctor think, which promises to make well, to cure. 'Do no harm' is the truly radical sentence; 'Cultivate your garden' the unforgivable one."
Above all, literature is for him the natural model of thought: he sees history through the lens of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky and Aristophanes. In the nearly two years since September 11th, Glucksmann has written two books, neither of which has yet been translated into English. The first, "Dostoyevsky in Manhattan," is a strange, brilliant, nightmarish rumination, which sees in the attacks not some strategic rebound or medieval throwback but the evidence of a basic and essentially irrational will to destruction that has found a new home in the Islamic world. To explain the attacks with reference to a "cause"—poverty, or the Palestine question, or Islamic eclipse—is to miss their essential nature as surely as would reducing the Holocaust to flaws in the Treaty of Versailles. The second book, "West vs. West," which he has just finished, is an acerbic, unhappy account of the Franco-American quarrels, rich in a kind of head-shaking disbelief at the unreality of both sides, but especially the French bien-pensant one. Both books point to the same moral. Mass killing has become, in our time, the means of expiating doubt and uncertainty, and the central reality of September 11th was that "a capacity for massive destruction, until then available only to a few, was suddenly in every hand, in countless pockets, and in millions of deranged minds." Dostoyevskian killers were descending on Chekhovian cities.
"What's happening is simple," Glucksmann said. "There are no longer battles, or Auschwitzes. But anyplace can become an Auschwitz. 'I kill, therefore I am' is the motto of the new generation of murderers. It's really very easy: the Hutus attacked with machetes and a few machine guns, and committed a genocide of a million people. The Russian Army blunders its way into Grozny, and no one cares or objects. Rwanda and Chechnya are the intimations of Manhattan—they are rooted in a will to kill no matter whom. The crime is to be,and the act is to kill: to be a Manhattanite on that morning was your crime, as to be a Jew was the crime in Germany.
"In France, the problem, more than a will against America, is a will to hide—to hope not to be seen at all. But it is insane for the French to see all this as somehow apart from them. It began against us. Nine years ago, the G.I.A."—the Algerian Islamists—"who are a group of the same kind, hijacked a plane and were going to fly it into the Eiffel Tower! The only difference? They didn't know how to fly a plane! They were trying to use the pilots to do their work. Seven years later, they knew how. So to imagine that we are somehow immune is not only crazy on principle—it is the direct opposite of what we know to be the facts!"
He shook his head. "There is a kind of nihilism at large in the world now, which ranges from the murderous nihilism of the terrorists to the comic, domestic nihilism of the intermittents, who have only the power to block, to destroy, and they use it."
What is finally moving about the anti-anti-Americans in France is that they are defending a cosmopolitan tradition—the tradition of the Marshall Plan and the melting pot, where, as B.H.L. rhapsodizes, Daniel Pearl could be Jew and journalist and American and internationalist all at once—that they continue to identify, stubbornly and, these days, perhaps quixotically, with the United States. What is striking, and a little scary, in Paris this year is the absence of anti-Americanism—of a lucid, coherent, tightly argued alternative to American unilateralism that is neither emptily rhetorical nor mere daydreaming. (In fact, it is easier to find this kind of argument in Britain than in France.) The real threat to France is not anti-Americanism, which might at least have the dignity of an argument, an idea, and could at least provoke a grownup response, but what the writer Philippe Sollers has called the creeping "moldiness" of French life—the will to defiantly turn the country back into an enclosed provincial culture. "For the first time, French people care about their houses," a leading French journalist complains in shock. "That was always a little England thing—and now you find intelligent Parisians talking all the time about home improvements." This narrowing of expectations and horizons is evident already in the French enthusiasm for cartoon versions of French life, as in "Amélie," of a kind the French would once have thought fit only for tourists. It has a name, "the Venetian alternative"—meaning a readiness to turn one's back on history and retreat into a perfect simulacrum of the past, not to reject modernity but to pretend it isn't happening.
This urge could be felt in an almost unconscious force deforming even the two major exhibitions of the summer, the Centre Pompidou's Jacques-Henri Lartigue retrospective and the National Library's show of the complete Cartier-Bresson, in which the two great photographers were suddenly made cozy and diminutive. The Museum of Modern Art's outsize 1963 black-and-white prints of Lartigue's photographs of speed and action were put on view in an anteroom only to be debunked inside, with all the albums and stereoscopes from which the great work was adapted put on view in "period" glass cases. See, the show said, he's a little Frenchman, one of us, small and stylish and delectable and amateur. The refusal to live in the world as it exists is a kind of nihilism, too. It is possible to look into Lartigue's work and see a modern visionary of dynamism and forward motion; possible, too, to make him a static and comfy mediocre artist of domesticity. It depends, perhaps, on just how spectacular you want things to be, and for just how long. ♦


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