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You can either make money or make excuses
OPEC's dominant role in the global oil market is in serious jeopardy.
For nearly half a century, the oil cartel kept a tight check on prices, keeping them fr
World oil prices have probably reached its lowest level and soon will again show growth. This was stated by the Secretary-General of the Organization of countr
After the death of Saudi King Abdullah, the world oil price is slightly raised, but his successor Salman Ibn Abdul Aziz al Saud said that he would continue his
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Saturday, May 10, 2008
This is becoming an unnerving tendency of the Celtics. Then again, perhaps the 108-84 loss in game 3 is just an aberration, made to seem worse by the 3 road losses in the Atlanta series. After all, the C's were 35-10 on the road during the regular season, so it isn't as if this is a team that got here by only winning at home.
Unlike the losses in Atlanta, the Celtics didn't lose simply on defense. Offensively, they were off. KG had 17, but Ray Allen only had 10. Allen was 4 of 12 from the field and 0 for 5 from behind the arc. Sam Cassell only contributed 1 point off the bench. Rajon Rondo had a dismal night, shooting 3 of 10, with no assists.
Meanwhile, the hawks, I mean Cavs, were shooting lights out on offense. As a team, they were 53.6& from the field, and 10 of 19 from beyond the arc. Cleveland also out-rebounded (37 to 33), out-stole (6 to 5), and out-blocked (7 to 3) the Celtics. LeBron didn't shoot that well, but had 21 points.
The most disgusting moment of the night was when the announcers commented on how LeBron's "athleticism" allowed him to drive to the hole and draw fouls, whereas other players would simply get knocked down and turn the ball over with no whistle. Right, that's how LeBron draws so many fouls. It's some rare form of athleticism. And nothing more.
Game 4 is Monday night, and I have a feeling the Celtics will win in a close contest. And finally, all the haters will be silenced.
Photo Credits:
Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images
Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
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subset: commoncrawl


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Why did the Amish come here? Is the eccentric 'Father of Amish Country' still alive? Hundreds of displays! Special tours by reservation. Lower floor of Walnut Creek Community Center, across from post office. The German culture Museum is more than a collection of antiques - it's a keeper of local history!
From attractions to food stores, The Holmes County Chamber has many members!


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(NOTE – To enlarge, click on image, then click on the box in the lower right side of the screen that reads, "View full size." Once the image is enlarged, your cursor will show a small magnifying glass which can be used to magnify a specific part of the document even larger.)
Hours open to researchers:
Monday – 8:00 a.m. – noon
Tuesday – 1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Wednesday – 8:00 a.m. – noon
Thursday – 1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Friday – 8:00 a.m. – noon
*Closed on Saturday, Sunday and county-observed holidays. Please check the "Plan Your Visit" page and click on "Archives Office Holidays" for a complete listing of dates our office will be closed.
The archives will be closed:
April 10 – Good Friday
May 25 – Memorial Day
July 3 – Independence Day
August 6 – Election Day


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[G] Pheromone Catch: 20+
If your Illumise used Pheromone Signals during your last turn, this attack does 100 more damage.
weakness: [R]×2
retreat: 1
Illus. Saya Tsuruta
Celestial Storm — 17/168 — Uncommon
It lives around clean ponds. At night, its rear lights up. It converses with others by flashing its light.
How many proxies would you like to print?


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List Kentucky autism services and supports providers
Submit a Provider
Thank you for choosing to submit your organization's information to the KATC's Service Directory. Please note that your submission will be reviewed and verified before it is placed into the directory. Be sure to provide enough information for us to contact you.
Please be aware that there is no implied endorsement of the listed programs in the Kentucky Autism Supports and Services Directory by the KATC. The purpose of the Kentucky Autism Services and Supports Directory is to help parents and professionals share information. It is recommended that parents speak to a representative of the program before enrolling their children, to ensure that the interests, skills, talents and needs of each child can be met in the program.


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Every human relationship has its ups and downs. It is a fact of life that some people are meant to be with each other and others are not. If your relationship is going through some issues, you may want to consider receiving some relationship advice through the form of a love psychic reading.
A psychic reading through a love psychic can be incredibly helpful towards solving trivial issues and discovering if you and your loved one have a true spiritual connection. Choose from one of Zenory's online psychics and relationship experts to heal your relationship issues today.
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Psychics can help with relationship issues in a number of ways. If you are having relationship issues, you may feel doubtful or concerned about whether the relationship is worth holding on to. This is something that can't be answered holistically by anyone directly attached to your relationship, as people will always have agendas and opinions that get in the way.
A Psychic has the ability to look at your relationship both objectively and spiritually. This means psychics can offer a spiritual assessment of your relationship that goes far beyond any counselling session. Psychics can help you to connect with your own spirituality to discover who you are as a person, so that you can gain insights about your expectations and motivations within a relationship.
Psychics won't tell you anything you don't already feel within yourself, especially when it comes to relationships. They can however give you the confidence and reassurance that your emotions come from a valid place. They may also give you the guidance you need to realise and identify emotions that you have bottled up or repressed, that can provide answers for your relationship problems.
If you are struggling with identifying whether or not a relationship is worth holding on to, a psychic can sometimes have insights about whether your relationship is that of a twin flame – meaning you are meant to be together forever, or a soulmate – meaning this person is in your life to help you to learn and grow, and not meant to be there always.
The important thing to remember when you have a love psychic reading, is that psychics cannot determine your future for you – only you can do that. They will give you insights from the universe, but they will never be anything out of left field. You should never be upset or feel unsafe by anything a psychic tells you, as a genuine psychic will tell you things that you know in your heart already to be true.
Receiving relationship advice from a trusted psychic at Zenory can be a huge leap in how you move forward in a relationship. Our psychics are qualified and trusted to help you with anything you may be going through. Choose a psychic that best suits your needs and receive your love psychic reading online, via phone or chat today.


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No figure in the Republican Party, save President Trump himself, has been more polarizing than Mitch McConnell. For a time, the party was split between the populist MAGA populist branch of Donald Trump, and the conservative establishment wing, represented by Mitch McConnell. Let's remember that Steve Bannon and the "MAGA" wing of the party actually went to war against McConnell in the Roy Moore debacle in Alabama that cost the GOP a Senate seat. In the wake of Trump's unexpected win, the idea became to push out the establishment conservatives that the populists viewed as being at fault for many of their grievances, and were even willing to nominate deeply flawed candidates such as Roy Moore to see it done. Then, two things happened that shifted the course of GOP politics:
First, Moore, a deeply flawed candidate on numerous levels, lost resoundingly and gave up what should have been a safe Senate seat, validating McConnell's view that in order to win, you have to nominate people that CAN win a general election.
Secondly, Don Blankenship burst onto the national scene in the West Virginia Senate race. Blankenship arrived in full insurgent mode, taking on McConnell with the full range of anti-establishment rhetoric, and dubbing McConnell "Cocaine Mitch." The Cocaine Mitch title originated as a result of an accusation that a company McConnell had ties to was trafficking cocaine, and this was Blankenship's strategy: to somehow tie McConnell via unproven allegations to something nefarious. Blankenship was trounced, but Cocaine Mitch stuck, and almost singlehandedly rehabilitated McConnell's establishment image. Let's take a look at how it happened.
First, we know nicknames work. We see it elementary school bullying, all the way up to the workplace, and yes, in Donald Trump's climb to the presidency. From Crooked Hillary to Pocahontas, nicknames have the power to shape the perception of an individual, tying them to a particular theme or idea, so that every time it's uttered, it conjures up a specific negative element of the person. When President Trump says "Crooked Hillary," images of email servers, or Clinton Foundation corruption, or Benghazi hearings might pop into your head. It's an amorphous title that conjures in the listener some negative element about the person, that the listener can interpret in their fashion. Donald Trump does this expertly, his nicknames sticking to people and helping to define who they are as they deal in his realm. His evisceration of the Republican field in the primaries was a work of art and helped in no small way by his branding of opponents.
Don Blankenship is no Donald Trump.
Cocaine Mitch is far too ludicrous to be a serious negative nickname association. As soon as it was uttered, memes flooded the internet of Mitch McConnell sitting on top of mounds of cocaine, his face superimposed over images of Scarface and other iconic movie drug lords. Within days, every innocuous line McConnell uttered took on a different connotation. Now, instead of being the figurehead for the reviled GOP establishment, McConnell, the majority leader of the Senate, was seen as some sort of kingpin, presiding over the Senate as drug baron might preside over his minions. McConnell fully embraced the nickname, even having himself photoshopped into various situations with cocaine raining down over him as he dunked on Blankenship for getting crushed in the race. Everything McConnell was involved in suddenly took on a new light. Parliamentary tricks in the Senate, which are normal day to day operations, suddenly took on new meaning as Mitch ruthlessly shuttled through Donald Trump's judicial nominees and even the historic tax cuts. All of a sudden, Mitch McConnell went from MAGA pariah to overlord of the Senate, shepherding through Donald Trump's will with ruthless efficiency. Delivering crushing monologues on the Senate floor became routine occurrences, and seemed to get just a little bit edgier.
There is a concept in psychological circles called Nominative Determinism. Essentially, it is a theory that names somehow dictate the type of person one might become, the jobs they might do, or the attitude they take on in life. For example, many studies have been done showing that people with surnames like "Counsel" are more likely to be lawyers, and people named "Farmer," are more like to be a farmer. It's also an ego projection, designed to manifest into reality what someone wants to be true, which is why fighters always have ridiculous sounding nicknames, like The Devastator, or the Notorious. This brings me to the question: Did Mitch McConnell become edgier due to the Cocaine Mitch nickname? It's an interesting question of perception how the most reviled establishment Republican in the country and the poster boy for everything wrong with the GOP, suddenly became popular with the MAGA crowd. Or, it could just be that people like McConnell and Lindsey Graham learned the lessons of Donald Trump and how to fight, as we've been clamoring for them to do for some time. Graham, in particular, has been a juggernaut of late, decimating all comers with a newfound brazen attitude.
All one has to do is a Twitter search of "Cocaine Mitch" over the past week, and you'll find populist Republicans who hated McConnell cheering him on as he rallied votes to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In a way, Don Blankenship actually helped to unify the GOP by turning McConnell into some sort of badass leader through his failed nickname strategy. McConnell is now a Republican icon, who some consider to be one of the most consequential Senate Majority Leaders of all time. He now faces virtually zero opposition within the party and has become a critical ally of President Trump. Even those that aren't fond of him, no longer outright oppose him, as his work on the judiciary will live long after he's gone. How much of present-day Mitch McConnell is the kindly old man, and how much is the ruthless "Cocaine Mitch?"
We may never know, just hope that one day you can get as effective of a nickname as Cocaine Mitch.
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The Plan to Defeat Trumpism
What would you do to stop Hitler from coming to power and imposing an authoritarian regime on your country?
This is the central question one must understand to bring into full focus the events that are taking place in America right now. For the left wing progressives in America, they are attempting to answer that question every day, and at every level of society. Everything we see, from the restaurant harassment, rampant lawsuits, assaults, uncorroborated allegations, all of it is in service to one thing: stopping what the left views as encroaching fascism, and ensuring no one like "proto-Hitler" Donald Trump ever rises again in America. The left, unsurprisingly, acts as the collectivist Communists that they are, organizing multiple levels of resistance to ensure they are never sold into breeding slavery by the Christian right, just as the Handmaid's Tale predicted, which they view as more of a documentary than a work of fiction. As absurd as that view is, the hard left believes with every fiber of their being that the stakes are just that high, and they act accordingly.
Brett Kavanaugh is finding out the hard way what it means to face full-scale opposition from the left. The death threats, harassment, and assault allegations all began on the day he was nominated for the Supreme Court. At that moment, the entire left wing machine sprung into action using the full weight of everything they've learned opposing Donald Trump for two years. Buoyed by the 11th-hour accusations that Brett Kavanaugh is a serial gang rapist and staggering drunk, a view perpetuated by nearly all of the media, Hollywood, and leftist politicians, harassment and intimidation have become the new norm. Kavanaugh will likely need round the clock security for the rest of his life, due to the existential threat that they believe he poses. Where Gorsuch was opposed, they viewed him as a one for one replacement for Antonin Scalia; thus they didn't bring to bear the full weight of opposition. Kavanaugh, on the other hand, represents the loss of the Supreme Court for a generation; thus he is viewed as an existential threat at a far higher level than Gorsuch.
The purpose of all of this resistance is not just stopping Trump and Kavanaugh; there is a bigger plan being executed: to ensure no Trumpian (or even brashly conservative) candidate ever arises again. Besides the dozens of lawsuits targeting Trump himself, everyone who is even tangentially associated with him has frivolous lawsuits and investigations targeting them, all in an effort to not only destroy them but to set an example of what happens when you interfere with the left wing machine. That is what all of the public harassment and lawfare is all about: showing future conservatives what their life will be like if they dare to be conservative in public. For some, it even goes further, as it did when radical Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson shot up a baseball field full of Republicans. So effectively has the left and their media allies ginned up their base on the Hitler comparisons, that it is dangerous to actually be a conservative in public. Let that one sink in for just moment: It has actually become dangerous to be a Republican in public. I personally know people that will not out themselves at work or even to some friends, fearing retribution.
For once, even moderate conservatives finally realize the scale of the fight that we (the Trump base) are in and have been screaming about from the beginning. Brett Kavanaugh had a reputation as sterling as any conservative in the world, and the left has managed to taint him for life, even if he is confirmed. There are already talks on the left about impeaching him or expanding the Supreme Court to offset both him and Gorsuch since they view those as stolen seats given the 2018 election. The only thing "good" that may come from all of this character assassination of Kavanaugh is that some moderate Republicans might realize the scale of the fight they have been unwittingly dragged into, and act as if they are in an existential war. The left was perfectly fine allowing controlled opposition; but Trump has them scared because, with every day that passes, he teaches Republicans how to play hardball. Lindsey Graham, a man I reviled for a very long time, over the last year, has stepped into the crucible of combat, as evidenced by his torching of Senate Democrats. Jeff Flake, on the other hand, continues to get played, acting like a pathetic baby whenever he's confronted.
Kavanaugh himself recognized the effort to keep "good people out of public service," as part of his testimony, but what he meant was "keep Republicans out of public service." After all, watching the disgusting smears, mounting legal fees, frivolous investigations, and constant harassment, who wouldn't think twice about entering public life as a Republican? Make no mistake; they want you to see the harassment Ted Cruz, Sarah Sanders, and other Republicans are getting, to make people think twice. Not everyone is a multi-billionaire like Donald Trump, that can easily handle the myriad of lawsuits and afford security 24/7. He is an outlier that is immune on numerous levels to their shenanigans, so they have shifted targets a bit to anyone associated with his administration. You may have noticed that we virtually never hear about Russia anymore; the narrative has shifted due to the fact that very little sticks to Trump himself. He might be made of Teflon, but many are not, and can't afford to have their lives ruined. That is why these tactics must fail, at all costs. Any hint that they work, will only encourage the hard left to continue from the same playbook in perpetuity.
I hope we haven't already passed that point.
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The Left No Longer Needs You
The premise of the Terminator films is that Skynet, an artificial intelligence, became self-aware and destroyed large segments of humanity once it realized it was capable of doing so. Following in the footsteps of their fictional counterparts, so too has the Left become self-aware about the degree of power they possess in our society. There was once a time in American society where it would be considered the height of folly to "take a side" in the political arena for a brand, celebrity, or company.
Those days are over.
The greatest gift Donald Trump has given us is that in the wake of his completely unexpected victory, the left went entirely overboard, exposing themselves in all facets of our lives. What used to be subtle propaganda became outright advocacy from the media, companies, universities, and celebrities. After losing an election they should have won, the left went berserk in a fashion that would make slasher icon Jason Voorhees jealous. All of a sudden the subtle biases became roaring tempests; light protesting became full on street warfare from the likes of ANTIFA. Monolithic companies went from a left-wing tilt to full-on destruction of free speech and de-platforming. What then, was the penalty for all of these people, companies, and brands taking a side on defeating Trump, demonizing the opposition, and advancing socialism?
It cost them all nothing.
We have reached a tipping point in American society where the left realized that they have sufficient power, funding, and structural capability to no longer need conservatives. Even more than that, they KNOW it, which is the important part, having discovered this as a result of watching their own not go down in a ball of fire for their advocacy. There was a time when companies and to some degree celebrities feared entering the political arena because they didn't want to invalidate vast swaths of the country. If you were running a business, you didn't want to risk losing conservatives as customers, or as Michael Jordan is thought to have said, "Republicans buy sneakers too." Those days are now over, as evidenced by virtually every company from Nike to AirBNB, from Google to Uber going ridiculously far left and not only not being penalized; but rewarded for it. Make absolutely no mistake: Every one of these companies has done a cost-benefit analysis and determined that it was worth the move to jump into progressive advocacy.
How did this happen?
First, the left is far more organized than the right is when it comes to boycotts. It is incredibly rare, despite the occasional Nike burning or Keurig smashing, for the right to sustain a boycott for any length of time. Moreover, the right doesn't LIKE to boycott. Sean Hannity discouraged people from boycotting Keurig, and most conservatives see it as a "free market" issue, which they are largely in favor of, even if it works against them consistently. Contrast that with the left, which not only boycotts but revels in it; treating it as the battleground for their very own Battle of Thermopylae. Leftists disseminate massive spreadsheets with every single conservative host, and a list of every advertiser, which they pressure daily. Any company that does not sufficiently supplicate to the left finds themselves brigaded by the thousands with calls, tweets, and protests. Every so often, the leftists gain a scalp in the process, which only serves to fuel their near-psychotic pursuit. For the side that is supposedly anti-war, they are waging it daily in an incredibly effective manner, supported by both Big Tech and the media.
Secondly, there is an entire infrastructure built to support leftist policies and advocacy. In addition to being essentially a social club in which excommunication results in lost jobs, the left has found a way to institutionalize advocacy. They give one another awards nearly every day, promote and fund even competing interests, and possess nearly unlimited funding, which results in a sort of circular feeding effect. In hypocrisy that would make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez jealous, they criticize rich Republicans, while acting utterly oblivious to their own Tom Steyer and George Soros type characters. Another of the more interesting advocacy techniques is how left-leaning journalists promote other journalists from COMPETING companies. When Maggie Haberman writes a New York Times article slamming Trump, every media personality from every channel supports the article. Try to imagine Microsoft promoting the new Apple MacBook, and you have the equivalent because opposing Trump has become more important than beating competitors, which has to be a first in the annals of American business.
Third and finally, you have the complete and utter domination of culture via entertainment. Not only are they able to sustain multiple concurrent shows with identical frameworks across numerous channels, but they can get entire propaganda pieces greenlit for mainstream television. Nowhere is this more blatantly obvious in the 15 or so nearly identical late night/comedian shows all over every network, that share almost identical structures and joke formats. Everyone from Seth Meyers to Jimmy Kimmel, to Samantha Bee and the 20 other clones all retain enough audience to justify their existence, except for Michelle Wolff, who was sufficiently terrible to get canned from a network desperate to compete in this new anti-Trump, pro-socialism space. They manage to get shows approved whose entire point is advancing left-wing propaganda and viewpoints while shutting out any vestige of conservative thought from mainstream culture. In addition, another key point is that even if a show is produced with a left wing bias and produces poor ratings, to them, it is completely worth taking the hit to advance their propaganda and fight Trump.
In other words, having said all of this, conservatives should be worried, because the left now wields sufficient power to exclude conservatives completely, and not care about the repercussions in the least. In the same way that Trump showed us just how abhorrent the left has become, so too did he show them that they can live without us. As long as the right is willing to sit back and not organize effective boycotts, instead relying on the free market, the left will continue to dominate the culture and business for the foreseeable future.
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You may have noticed during the recent funeral for John McCain the outpouring of support from all quarters. Virtually everyone came together lamenting the loss of an American icon. With few exceptions, for once, nearly the entire country was united in saying goodbye to John McCain. Even the ultra hard left, the group that celebrated the death of Antonin Scalia with a fervor usually reserved for the return of pumpkin spice lattes, seemed actually to be sentimental over the loss of McCain. The weekend of his funeral, many hard left activists shared videos and pictures of the McCain moments that they said illustrated "decency, civility, and values," such as his interactions with voters soothing their fears over what kind of president Barack Obama would be, and how great of a guy he was during the 2008 Presidential Campaign. Interestingly, it was during the 2008 campaign that the left relentlessly savaged McCain as being a neocon warmonger, war criminal, and too old to run. He was held responsible for all of Bush's failings and given no quarter in a vicious campaign. It was in these reflections that I realized why the far left is so tolerant toward establishment conservatives:
The left loves conservatives that gracefully lose to them, and these conservatives love the platforms that the left allows them to have.
Flashback to the 2008 and 2012 campaigns for a moment, and reflect on the sheer number of attack vectors both McCain and Romney had on Barack Obama. Let's look back for a moment and see how many attacks they could have used, and didn't, or only minimally:
1. Jeremiah Wright (the g-ddamn America guy)
2. Bill Ayers (Terrorist)
3. Frank Davis (Communist)
4. George Soros (Open Borders)
5. Multiple Socialist Associations
6. Louis Farrakhan
7. Birtherism
I do realize a few of those did come up, but only tangentially from outside PACs or someone like Sean Hannity. McCain himself made none of them a serious issue for any length of time, and instead tried to make the election about experience and policy. Now, try to imagine for a moment what would have happened had Donald Trump run that 2008 campaign. There is zero chance he would have let any of that slide, and in fact, would have made them all significant issues. To this day, many believe McCain could have beaten Obama had he been willing to use the full playbook, but instead he elected to take the "high road" and lose. As progressives lovingly reflect on McCain, realize that it's only because he was precisely the type of conservative they love:
One they can defeat in a national election.
The left adores conservatives that "stand on principle" and don't use the full suite of tools to win. There's actually a name for this, one I wrote about in my book:
The Scrub.
The Scrub is a concept I first heard about from Street Fighter World Champion David Sirlin in his book Play to Win, that he mostly applied to competitive gaming. In summary, the Scrub is a player that has invented a fictional set of arbitrary rules that the game doesn't recognize. In other words, someone takes a game with a defined set of rules, and imposes their mental constructs over top of the existing game, creating a ruleset in their mind that doesn't actually exist, thus hindering their ability to win. They impose these artificial rules on themselves, then wonder why they lose to opponents that have no such limitations. The left has had no compunction whatsoever to colluding with the media and foreign governments, playing identity politics, weaponizing courts and higher education, and now they want to tell us how terrible Trump's tactics are, and how conservatives need to go back to playing McCain/Romney style politics. In other words, the left plays to win, and up until Trump, Republicans never reciprocated.
Establishment Conservatives are Scrubs of the political variety, and the left knows it and loves them for it. They love a "conservative" that will go on television and decry President Trump for being too mean in a tweet, or doing something that they deem "unpresidential." Understand that when a left-winger tells you that they want to bring back civility and decency, what they really mean is that they don't want to deal with Republicans that play hardball that is willing to use every tool to win. Donald Trump scares them because they know he plays to win, that he will use any and all methods to defeat them, unlike conservatives of previous years. The cold truth of the matter is that Trump knows how to win, as evidenced not only by the general election but by the manner in which he destroyed 16 of the establishment's finest in the primary.
Also, the left knows that there is a benefit to having controlled opposition; you want the other side to feel heard, even if they can't actually beat you or stop anything you want to do. Make no mistake; the left doesn't mind having a few self-identified "conservatives" around, as long as it's the Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, or Jonah Goldberg variety. They want nothing more than to have an opposition that will sit around in think tanks quoting William F. Buckley or Friedrich Hayek all day rather than waging war on them with every tool imaginable. This is why virtually every "conservative" on CNN or MSNBC is of this variety; they want to project a sense of unity between the parties on opposition to Trump, even though the conservatives they use in no way represent the vast majority of Republicans any longer. There is a reason that left-wingers are desperate to deplatform Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity, yet have no problem with George Will, Bill Kristol, or Jonah Goldberg. They know what I know: that the latter group's brand of "principled" conservatism cannot possibly beat them in a national election. Regardless of what one thinks of Alex Jones, watching progressives and conservatives pop champagne corks over his deplatforming should tell you that they viewed his threat level as extremely high.
If you are a conservative, and your platform isn't being threatened, then that says a lot about what progressives think of you. If they aren't trying to shut you down, then that only means one thing: they don't consider you a threat. Either you are too small to bother with such as myself, or they know you aren't tilting the scales back to the right. If you are the type of conservative that loves to stand on principle then lament how you lost and didn't actually conserve anything, congratulations, you too can be in the good graces of the left. Enjoy your time there, I'm sure you'll get along fine as their glorified pet.
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Upgrade Prime Review
To be frank, I'm not sure I've ever been more surprised by the quality of a film than I was with Upgrade.
Looking back, I remember seeing the commercial and being thoroughly unimpressed. I remember thinking that it looked like generic revenge movie #498 where the protagonist gains superpowers and takes vengeance on those that wronged him while having a Blade Runner knockoff setting. The advertising, coupled with a paltry (by Hollywood standards) 5 million dollar budget, had me convinced this movie was just another straight to video waste of time, in the vein of the 6th movie in the Leprechaun franchise.
Oh, how wrong I was.
Upgrade falls into some odd blend of 2001, Black Mirror, and Death Wish, and even into what some would categorize as horror, and does it all remarkably effectively. The central idea of the plot is that a man becomes a quadriplegic, and is given a massive technological "Upgrade" by a corporate technology maven, and sets about finding the people that paralyzed him and killed his wife. There will be no spoilers here, but suffice it to say there is more here than meets the eye, and things get out of hand very quickly. I am surprised how much I enjoyed the plot, given that the writer, Leigh Whannell, has written two horror franchises that I've never been a fan of: Saw and Insidious, which also serves to explain some of the horror elements within Upgrade. One of the most impressive feats this movie manages to pull off is looking so plausibly futuristic on a budget of next to nothing. The film looks incredible and has a cast that is up to the task of delivering a riveting performance, which brings me to one of my favorite parts: The performance of Logan Marshall-Green.
Upon viewing the film, I knew I recognized him from somewhere, and a quick IMDB reference revealed he was the incredibly badass gunslinger in the TV show Damnation, and also utterly unrecognizable in 2005's The Invitation (also worth a watch). He pulls off an incredible performance as the out of place, off the grid, gearhead who works on classic cars, but it's his performance once he receives the upgrade that is most impressive. At specific points in the film, the Artificial Intelligence controls his body, while he controls his head and dialogue. It's amazing watching his body engaged in these incredible fight scenes, while his head and voice are acting entirely differently. Great work from the man some refer to as "knockoff Tom Hardy," given how similar the two men look.
I will go ahead and issue a bold statement: Upgrade is the best sci-fi movie I've seen since 2009's dual masterpieces, Moon and District 9 (sorry Interstellar, Arrival, and Gravity fans). I might even go so far as to place it in the top 10 science fiction movies of the 2000's, alongside classics like Minority Report, Wall-E, AI, and the films mentioned above. Upgrade delivers on a theme Black Mirror has been accomplishing expertly: Showing us an entirely plausible, negative vision of the near future that comes about due to technological advancement on things like self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, drones, cybernetics, and virtual reality. These things, in most cases, are right around the corner, that many of us will see in our lifetime, yet we don't always ponder the ramifications of them being subverted or hacked, and the results can be profoundly disturbing, as evidenced by this film. Upgrade is a prime example of a great concept, executed on flawlessly, and is an exemplar of what can be done on a budget that makes a shoestring look vast. The right script, idea, writer, cast, and effects all blend into a cohesive whole that I have no doubt I will watch again and is sure to become a modern science fiction classic.
What then are the negatives? To be perfectly honest, I have to stretch into the more hypothetical territory to find any negative. Theoretically, it could have looked better and more expansive with a bigger budget, but that says nothing about telling a better story. I can't think of one scene or actor I'd swap out, nor would I care to dilute it by adding to its razor-sharp 1-hour 40-minute runtime. There seems to quite the gulf between critics and the average viewer; critics obsess over its B-movie budget and roots, as though it isn't sufficiently pretentious enough, while still admitting it looks tremendous and Logan Marshall delivers a wonderful acting job. They also give it no credit whatsoever for its cultural commentary on the future and our relationship with technology, which is odd given how critics salivate over every low budget indie coming-of-age story. The critical reception reminds me of how the Death Wish remake was panned before anyone saw it, and was branded an "alt-right" fantasy despite Bruce Willis saving the lives of multiple minorities. These days, if your film doesn't feature biting social justice commentary and a hyperdiverse cast, it might as well be Nazi propaganda to the critical pool that's infested with leftists.
In the end, if one has even the slightest preference for either horror or sci-fi, then Upgrade is required viewing.
Do yourself a favor, and "Upgrade" your science fiction.
Score: 9/10 - Classic
Liberal bullshit meter: 0/10
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Here is a fun experiment you should do sometime: rewatch some of your favorite shows from years ago and apply to them today's standards and sensibilities. What you will find is that you will be shocked at how far over today's social justice line many of those shows were, especially those in the period that I define as the Golden Age of Television. We've seen incredible TV shows in many different generations, going back to I Love Lucy and Bewitched through the Simpsons and Seinfeld, and up to the more recent era of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. So what then would be the Golden Age, and how do you define it?
First, one should define the Golden Age of TV as a time when creativity peaked, and writers were free to see their visions come alive on screen, without any shackles; where the quality was overwhelmingly high across multiple shows, genres, and channels. I am aware there are those who ascribe that term to the 1950's and a second in the late 90's. I define the beginning of the Golden Age as January 10, 1999, with the pilot of the Sopranos. The Sopranos ushered in a new era of TV, with a nearly unheard of levels of critical acclaim, and brought about the ability for studios to take the gloves off writers to tell more engaging stories. For the first time, television could meet and in many cases exceed the storytelling of movies. The HBO triple threat of Sopranos, The Wire, and OZ, all firing in succession, showed what was possible with modern dramas. In a rush to capitalize on this newfound freedom and chasing HBO to the awards and ratings line, virtually every studio went all in on hardcore dramas. In addition to the quality being churned out yearly by HBO, two of my favorite series of all time premiered within a year of one another: The Shield in 2002 and Battlestar Galactica in 2003.
From approximately 1999 to 2015, television was scintillating virtually every week. My DVR was packed during that time with unbelievably high-quality tv in both the drama and comedy realms. From FX hitting home run after home run in the Shield, Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck, Sons of Anarchy, and more to HBO continuing their legacy of greatness, and the emergence of Netflix and Amazon, this span of time included the highest density of greatness ever seen on television. All good things come to an end, and as time went on, I started to notice my DVR wasn't quite as full as it used to be. Everything from drama to stand up comedy seemed to be reduced dramatically in the quality and quantity I had become accustomed to having. Don't get me wrong; there are still great shows out there, but not to the level that we had in the Golden Age. Recently, I rewatched my favorite series, Battlestar Galactica, and I think I've figured out where the Golden Age went.
Social Justice killed it.
In rewatching BSG and thinking back to that era, I had forgotten how far shows were willing to go to tell a story, and networks were quite willing to run storylines you couldn't possibly get away with in the modern era. Even innocuous shows like the Office likely would never get made in today's climate of oppressive social justice without severe alterations. The Shield, which I believe to be the best police show ever created, would have ZERO chance of being green-lit in 2018. The reason for all of this?
Writer's handcuffs and the boycott outrage machine.
In writing my own novel, I've done a tremendous amount of research on the do's and don'ts of writing fiction. Read any number of recent articles entitled "10 Mistakes Writers Make," and you will be presented with a litany of things you should not write about or characters you shouldn't have. A great example of this is YouTuber/Writer Jenna Moreci, who has a massive hit channel on YouTube with many videos telling you what the "rules" are for writing, with a distinctly left-wing bent. After watching about 10 of these types of videos, I came to the conclusion that modern writers are shackled to an incredibly lengthy list of handcuffs, to stay on the pleasant side the social justice warrior crowd. For example, it used to be that representation was one of the most significant problems, as people wanted to see more diverse casting decisions. Once that came to fruition, then it became about dictating how those people were written. Keep in mind, no one has a problem with the representation of minorities, but that is no longer enough, now they have to be portrayed exactly a certain way to conform to these rigid guidelines.
Let me give an example, featuring the show I consider to be "Patient Zero" in the new era of social justice TV: Quantico. Back in 2016, the writers for this show came out and stated explicitly that they would never have a Muslim terrorist on the show, becoming one of the first times that writers publicly took certain types of characterizations off the table. Fast forward to 2018, ABC and the show's writers were forced to issue a public apology for a storyline involving Indian Nationalists framing Pakistanis for a terrorist act. Think of it: one of the most politically correct shows on television, featuring an Indian lead, still got crushed for veering off the social justice highway even for a moment. It turns out that doing so much restricting of your characters and storytelling doesn't make for particularly compelling TV, as Quantico was canceled after three seasons.
There's another elephant in the room: the complete lack of black or minority villains. Shabazz Malikali wrote an excellent article on this over two years ago that remains true: Hollywood is petrified of making black villains. Go ahead and google the phrase "black villain on tv" and you get a grand total of nothing. Outside of the all black properties like Luke Cage or Empire, there are zero black villains on any mainstream TV show. The problem used to be representation, as in there aren't enough black people on TV, now the problem is that all black characters have to be portrayed as comically overpowered in every situation, giving them no actual arcs, depth, or flaws. Also, one can go right down the line of every ethnicity, gender, or orientation and find the same. Essentially, 99% of the time your villain has to be miscellaneous rich white guy number 424, relegating minorities to playing superhuman caricatures of real people.
To sum up: the rules that were created with good intentions have spiraled out of control, stifling creative expression across all forms of media. Books, TV, and to a lesser extent, movies have all become artistically subverted to a fascistic left-wing orthodoxy that demands rigid adherence to the rules; thus creating a stale environment where every show has to follow a long list of guidelines in order to ever get produced. Since every show is working from the same social justice guidelines, it stands to reason they would share many of the same characteristics, inducing boredom with everyone competing to see how woke they can be. Maybe it's possible that the Trump era killed TV, as he scared liberals so drastically that they figured maybe they needed to crack down further on the culture; making sure to pound home their message in a more blatant manner. Whatever the reason, it is highly likely we will be seeing average TV for the foreseeable future.
Steven Mager
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Twitter, in theory, should be a mind-numbingly simple service.
1. I follow person X.
2. I see and can respond to tweets from person X.
3. Other people do the same with me.
This is how Twitter started, and how it got popular, as the original genius of Twitter was the simplicity of the service. Twitter did something never before seen, taking the instant messenger and making it global in reach. Now, the service has become far more complex, what was once a hands-off operation has now become embroiled in the political arena and free speech arguments. The same happened with Google, what started out as a simple search and email service has evolved into something much more sinister, as Silicon Valley companies have declared themselves the arbiters of our speech, and continue to find new and inventive ways to censor thought crimes they don't like. I wrote about this some months ago regarding several algorithms I discovered that were flagging myself and others as "Russian Bots," thus applying what some refer to as a "Shadow Ban" to my account.
Let's talk about the shadow ban controversy for a moment, as there is something of a disconnect regarding the term. Republicans for some time have been using the term as a catch-all regarding online censorship, and it never really had a strict definition. The gist of it was that everyone does not see your tweets and that the system and algorithms were doing "something" to stop people from seeing your tweets, and it suspiciously was only happening to Republicans. Twitter denied this and issued the following statement:
"People are asking us if we shadowban. We do not. But let's start with, "what is shadow banning?" The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone's content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster. We do not shadowban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology."
If you read the above statement, it looks like a relatively innocuous corporate reply, but let me point out a few things. First, they apply a strict definition to the term shadowban, then deny that they DELIBERATELY engage in that exact definition of the term. As every conservative on Twitter knows, the description they have decided to use is not at all what we generally perceive as happening. What Twitter is engaging in is plausible deniability, in that they are not directly censoring you for being a Republican, they have just constructed the algorithm in such a way as to downrank conservative sources and hashtags as being bots or troll accounts. Secondly, at the bottom of that statement in parenthesis, they admit to doing exactly what they are accused of, namely not showing you the tweets from people you follow. In short, they are playing a word parsing game to absolve themselves of being accused of censorship. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, even went as far as to go on Sean Hannity's radio show to deny that they censor conservatives, yet again playing the plausible deniability game.
However, it doesn't stop there. Not even close.
In March, Twitter introduced a concept called "conversational health." In other words, behavior they deem abusive or trollish means you are not contributing to a healthy conversation and thus will have your tweets hidden from view. Note that apparently death threats and abuse from left wing accounts do not fall under the "unhealthy conversation" moniker, as I've never even heard of someone on the left being "shadow banned" for such behavior. Yet, if Chelsea Handler, Amy Siskind, Jimmy Kimmel, or any other progressive tweets something, and I respond with a humorous reply or correction, that is me contributing to poor conversational health.
Let me show you how this works.
1. Person A comments on Person B's Tweet.
2. Group C initiates a campaign to block and report Person A.
3. Person A is now flagged as a "low conversation health" user.
4. Twitter's algorithm removes Person A from visibility for an indeterminate amount of time.
You see, none of this process requires Twitter to censor based on political viewpoint. When Twitter says "We don't deliberately censor conservatives," they technically aren't lying. There isn't someone physically sitting at a desk and saying "AH HA, you used #MAGA, here's a ban!" The other trick that they use is to rank sources such as Breitbart or Infowars extremely low, to filter tweets involving them to lower visibility, much like Google does in search rankings. The only way to "beat" this system is to have so many followers that they can't effectively shadowban you without backlash.
Why then is all this happening? Here is my theory: organized pressure campaigns.
Three years ago, no one had even heard of a shadow ban. It was extremely rare to hear of someone getting banned from Google, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, even for heinous hate speech. Yet now, all of a sudden, in the past two years, it's a daily occurrence perpetrated by our Silicon Valley overlords. It's almost as if there was an event that happened in the last two years that was the trigger mechanism for all of this online censorship.
Oh, wait, let me guess.
The election of Donald Trump was facilitated to a large extent by his domination of social media, and now the left wants to stop it from happening again, at any cost. If you watch left-wing Twitter as I do, you can watch in real time as they wage organized reporting and blocking campaigns, which works in conjunction with Twitter algorithms to suppress conservative thought, equating to a "shadow ban." There is a reason that we didn't see significant censorship two or three years ago because the left wasn't taking social media seriously as a perpetuator of conservative or Republican ideas. Having realized that monumental error, they now seek to rectify it by organizing pressure campaigns against all of these companies, utilizing their massive organizing apparatus and partnerships with groups like the ADL and ACLU. It is no accident that social media censorship has ramped up dramatically in the Age of Trump, and shows no sign of slowing down. Social media cost them an election once, and they learned from it, realizing how imperative it is to stop speech that opposes theirs at the source.
Then, on top of all of it, this past week a project came to fruition they've been working on for some time: the complete destruction of the third party app ecosystem. Now, it's no longer enough for them to completely control the conversation, they have to control how you see the conversation, introducing over the past few years a scaling set of barriers to ensure third-party apps can't operate effectively. Twitter essentially requires that you use their app, which few like, to ensure that the third party apps cannot stop their draconian rule set and algorithms. Let me put it this way: the main Twitter app is so terrible, that I elected to use Tweetbot instead, even with a reduced functionality set. Twitter is, quite literally, putting entire companies out of business to ensure they control the conversation.
The left lost once due to social media, and they are doing everything possible to ensure it doesn't happen again.
Steven Mager
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Endorse the Space Force!
On January 28th, 1986, I watched live on television as the space shuttle Challenger exploded. I can only compare the shocking feeling to one other time in my life, and that was 9/11, as I watched the twin towers fall. The Challenger disaster took not only the lives of seven astronauts but effectively the life of our entire space program as well. After that tragedy, Americans no longer had nearly the hunger to conquer space as we once did. Indeed, we have gone back, and run missions relatively regularly, but the national appetite for conquering the final frontier effectively went up in smoke with the Challenger and her crew that day. All these years later, the appetite has returned; we've landed a rover on Mars, and we are now pursuing the outer limits with gusto once again.
And now, there's even a Space Force on the table.
The "Space Force" idea is not unique or new to Donald Trump, but it might be one of his best branding ideas, and frankly is one of the most important projects he's championed.
Let me explain.
On the surface, the Space Force seems like a ludicrous idea that a Star Wars/Trek fan fiction writer might come up with, and is widely ridiculed by a great many people, especially those on the left. The very name conjures up X-Wings, Death Stars, and colossal lasers in outer space. We will address that, but let's look at a bit of history for some context, and lets establish one thing first: We already do have a "space force," the Air Force Space Command, which is a division of the Air Force, in much the same way that the Air Force used to be a division of the army before it was separated and given its own branch in 1947. At the time, it was becoming increasingly evident that air power was the future of warfare; thus it was necessary to make the Air Force its own entity. Also, there has been legislation for a "space corps" floating around for some time, and of course, some of you will remember the "Star Wars" programs of the Reagan Era.
Why then is it so critical to designate an entirely new branch of the military? Why not just continue to allow the Air Force to handle space assets?
First, our assets in space at this point are nearly priceless. Even Neil DeGrasse Tyson, noted progressive scientist who opposes nearly everything Trump does, did not dismiss the idea of a Space Force due to the vast amount of satellites we control that provide hundreds of billions to our economy in the form of GPS and other types of data. Protecting such a vast network that is critical to our economy is far from an absurd idea; ask yourself what sort of irreparable damage would be caused if our satellite networks were breached either remotely or physically. In other words, our assets alone make a reasonably strong case for the creation of a Space Force as technological warfare extends beyond air, sea, and ground.
Secondly, the budgeting and funding for space-related activities gets a monumental upgrade. In my more liberal days, it drove me insane that we didn't fund NASA and space exploration as I felt we should, and even the left will tell you that space exploration and funding should be a significant cornerstone of our spending. Think of this: From 1958 to 2018 the entire budget of NASA was about 601.3 Billion, not per year, in total. We just funded the military over 639.1 billion in a single year, so wrapping the Space Force into the military budget would have incredible implications for funding potential of space missions and innovation. NASA does fantastic work, but they have significant limitations in what they can handle, as their scope is more civilian in nature and they function as an independent agency. If the Space Force were a co-equal branch, it would allow us to shift budgets to match the need, as we have done over the years ramping up Air Force spending.
Third, and most importantly I believe, is the innovation factor. When we push the frontiers of space, it requires our boldest thinking, forcing ideas outside of regularly established norms. Go ahead and have a look at the laundry list of modern inventions and innovations that came about as a direct result of the space program. All of the aforementioned innovations came about on a budget that has generally been less than 1% of the federal budget. Now imagine we have a co-equal branch of the military, entirely devoted to space, with 10x the budget, and the shackles of limitations removed. The Space Force could quite literally accelerate innovation at a level we haven't seen in decades, possibly ever. In addition, that says nothing about the potential economic boom that these massive innovations could bring to the country.
Now we come to the brilliant part: the branding. I believe President Trump and Vice President Pence know all of the advantages mentioned above, but how then do you sell the idea? What you don't do is say, "Yes, I would like to increase the budget of the Air Force Space Command by XX%." No, that doesn't excite anyone, nor does it move the needle on public opinion. To do that, you need something powerful and bold, that generates strong feelings on both sides and gets people talking.
You need the Space Force.
Every single time the President brings it up, it trends on Twitter and generates headlines. So strong is the persuasion engineering that people cannot help talking about it, and it guarantees a response. Think about the name Space Force. The very name sounds bold, with force being an incredibly powerful word on its own, coupled with our love of space, which conjures up the unknown, and fantastical horizons yet explored. This is Trump doing what Trump does, taking an idea and branding it into people's minds in much the same way he did with Crooked Hillary, Pocahontas, and Low Energy Jeb. Considering everything I wrote about in this article and distilling it into two words that fire the imagination. The administration even managed to release six logos for people to vote on, which got people talking even more. As an aside, I like the blue shield with the rocket.
My only regret is that I'm too old to sign up. Let's do this, and get back to where we belong, on the razor's edge of exploring the outer reaches of space.
I endorse the Space Force, and so should you.
Steven Mager
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The Quest for Real News
America has a long, rich history of biased journalism and Fake News.
Oh, you thought today's war of opinion journalism between Fox, CNN, and MSNBC was a new phenomenon? Not even close. In our earliest days, the media was used as a cudgel to batter political opponents and sway opinion. Alexander Hamilton started an entire paper just to espouse federalism and to attack Jefferson. Jefferson paid journalists to attack his political opponents. Then you have the man who I consider to be the all-time king of Fake News: Benjamin Franklin. From his early days as a printer to his later years as a diplomat, Franklin outright fabricated stories to move things in the direction in which he needed them to go. He once falsified an entire issue of a newspaper, complete with fake advertisements to push the British to the negotiating position he wanted. In other words, Franklin altered the course of history on more than one occasion by weaponizing the media. Just so everyone understands: there is not a single source of "unbiased" news in this country, and there likely never has been. There are only degrees of bias; it is more a question of how biased it is in a particular direction, rather than if it is biased at all.
We are beset on all sides by agenda driven, opinion journalism fed to us by the 24/7 news cycle and networks. Before I get started, let me preface this by placing into context something that never gets talked about: the Age Gap. Take a look at any media poll in the country, and you will notice a few things. First, Republicans are overwhelmingly more distrusting of the media. Secondly, once you look at the age difference between the parties, you see that once you hit 40+, the percentage of Republicans skyrockets. Thus, if you are over 40, you are far more likely to be a Republican who is distrustful of the media.
I realized something the other day; I am 41 years old, and in my lifetime I believe I have seen the closest this country ever got to "real news." The definition I use when I say "real news" is an objective reporting of the facts, without any lens of interpretation or opinion. Remember that before 1980, you only saw the news in 30 minute to one-hour blocks, once a day. This meant that there was virtually no time to cover all the news of the day, so the anchors and networks were generally devoid of editorializing. CNN came about in 1980 but did not become widespread until 1991, during the Gulf War. So, if you are over 40 years old, you grew up before 24/7 opinion journalism, and likely consumed news in 30-minute blocks once a day, or by skimming a local newspaper. Remember that although 24-hour news started in 1980, hardly anyone had cable until the mid 90's. Now, a 40+ year old turns on the television, and they realize they are being told what to think to a degree that is far different than they grew up with, and moreover, they know this because they existed in a time when that didn't happen, at least not to the extent it does now, which accounts for the disparity in media trust.
The other element that differs between the old days and now is the degree of comfort we possess as a society that has influenced how much we care about the news. In the early days of the country, life was much more of a fight for survival, and lifespans were far shorter. The average citizen just didn't have the time between farming, hunting, raising numerous children, or starting a business to worry about how biased their media outlets were. Now, we can just plop down in our nice recliner and turn on the news as background noise while we sit in a lovely air-conditioned house. We can issue a contented sigh as we have our own opinions fed back to us by any one of the outlets that conforms to our existing viewpoint.
The uncomfortable reality is that there is no profit in being "unbiased." Now, we have such an extreme degree of choice in our media, that we want our own opinion fed back to us as forcefully as possible, and articulated in a superior fashion. We want to hear back to us what we already believe, in a more eloquent manner than we can produce, to validate our beliefs. When someone credible or famous appears on a network espousing the same view that Joe Blow has, Joe feels great about himself, thus wanting to watch more, creating a dopamine feedback loop that dispassionate truth can't match. The sad actuality of the matter is that if there were a truly down-the-middle network, no one would watch. We want to see punditry locked in mortal combat, as a spectator sport, rooting for our pundit of choice to "own" the other side. We all act as if we want principled, reasoned debate, and objective reporting of the facts, but we are all liars. There is a reason shows like that don't exist, and it's because we as a people repudiated them in the ratings. If the market existed for such a show, you better believe the networks would happily provide it for us.
Who then is the least biased?
It depends on your version of reality, and the lenses through which you see the world. We all have existing beliefs and a worldview that colors everything we see, thus shaping what we consider to be the ultimate truth. What is concrete truth for me is likely not so for my next door neighbor. I've not seen one news show, on any channel, that presents objective fact without any lens of bias. The hard truth is that we don't WANT unbiased news, that is just what we tell ourselves.
"There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result, there are various truths, and as a result, there is no truth." - Nietzsche
Steven Mager
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*Minor Spoilers*
I honestly can't get enough of Tom Cruise. Despite his penchant for looney behavior off screen, I believe him to be one of the most underrated actors of all time. There are very few actors that have been doing it as long and at the quality level that he has been operating at for decades. I am 41, that means he has been cranking out quality films since I was five years old, which puts him at 56 years old, and yet he still looks and maintains the physicality of a much younger man. As far as I know, he is the only actor that I grew up with doing A-level action movies, that is still doing them, and executing at a high level. I can go through his filmography and easily pick more than a dozen excellent films, whether it's stellar sci-fi like Edge of Tomorrow, or a hilarious cameo like Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, or an action/spy thriller such as the topic of today's article, MI: Fallout.
The other element that gives Cruise Hall of Fame status on its own is his insistence on doing his own stunts. It would be one thing if he were doing simple fight choreography or small jumps, but he goes to level 10 on nearly every film, especially the Mission Impossible series. From the outright insanity of the cliff-hanging and knife to the eye scenes from MI: 2, he never fails to go to another level, even now at 56 years old. Fallout is no different; every action scene is meticulously filmed and edited, also has extra weight because you KNOW it's Cruise doing it himself, thus allowing the camera work to be more visceral. For a filmmaker, the ability to get a legitimate perfect shot using the actor, instead of constant cutting, makes a huge difference, and it shows. This movie, just as it's predecessors did, has incredible action sequences that nearly defy belief, especially in an age of CG, where so much feels synthetic, these scenes hit like a Mike Tyson uppercut. Think of this: Tom Cruise has become the first actor, ever, to perform the hyper-dangerous HALO jump from a plane. When I say this film delivers the goods on the action scenes, make no mistake, they don't get much better.
Despite my praise for the incredible action, my favorite part of the film is the motivation of the bad guys, The Apostles. The plot hinges on one of my favorite tropes that I was first introduced to in the legendary Watchmen graphic novel, that is, that the villain believes that the only way to achieve true peace in the world, is through a catastrophe so enormous that it unites all of humanity. The theory is that if mankind were subjected to a large enough tragedy, it would force us to put aside petty squabbles and come together for the greater good. In the Watchmen novel, the tool was a false alien invasion (and changed in the subsequent movie), and in Fallout, it is a poisoning of the water supply at the intersection of China, India, and Pakistan, which would devastate the massive populations of three of the largest countries in the world. In much the same way Ozymandias in Watchmen and Thanos in Infinity War operate, the villains here have real, legitimate beliefs that they believe are in the interest of humanity. I also have to give a lot of credit to Superman himself, Henry Cavill. I've enjoyed his work ever since The Tudors, one of my favorite shows of all time, and he delivers here as well, bringing a brutal physicality to his role, without being "generic muscle dude." Also, there's a slick little plot move with a "fake dossier" that echoes the Steele Dossier made on President Trump. Intended or not, it made me laugh at the parallels to the real world.
If I have to level any criticism at this movie, it is that it can be a victim of its own history, relying on many of the tropes within the Mission Impossible franchise. In other words, it feels a little too much like a Mission Impossible movie, which is phenomenal in certain aspects, and negative in others. On the positive side, the action, plot, stunts, villains, and twists are all executed nearly flawlessly, and I would go as far as to say the best in the series. On the negative side, the twists feel a little too obvious, since every single MI flick pulls them at the halfway mark, and the "mask" scenes, which the franchise has relied on since the first entry, are not as slick and impressive as they once were. Having said all of that, I do believe this is the best entry in the series right along with the incredible Ghost Protocol. My theory has always been this: You can have a formula to your project, but it better be a DAMN good formula. Whether it be music, movies, TV, or games, I don't mind a developer or director sticking to a tried and true method as long as it is executed on at the highest level. I never get tired of a perfect ribeye steak, and I likely won't tire of Mission Impossible movies as long as they are executed at this extremely high level.
In closing, if you are even remotely a fan of action films, as I am, then Mission Impossible: Fallout is a must watch. I consider myself a connoisseur of great action films, be it Die Hard, Dredd, The Raid, or Mission Impossible, and this entry deserves its place on the list of the top tier action films. In addition, it cements Tom Cruise as an absolute action legend, if he wasn't already. The guy has almost killed himself a few times over, give him his due, and see this movie.
9.5/10 - Masterpiece
Steven Mager
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Spam emails during June were at an all-time low according to Symantec's monthly threat report. People are being sent fewer spam emails than at any time over the past 12 years. Fewer than 50 percent of emails scanned during June were junk.
Ben Nahorney wrote in the report that, "attackers are simply moving to other areas of the threat landscape," to make money from people going online.
Legal action against the criminal networks that channel spam to people had helped to cut the junk mail. It is said the fall in spam had been offset by a rise in malware being made.
Spam levels have continued to decline further since the report was issued. The decline was said to be caused by action against botnets, which are networks of hijacked computers that have been the passage through which spam has been sent in the past.


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The use of GPS probes in traffic management is growing rapidly as the required data collection infrastructure is increasingly in place, with significant number of mobile sensors moving around covering expansive areas of the road network. Many travelers carry with them at least one device with a built-in GPS receiver. Furthermore, vehicles are becoming more and more location aware. Vehicles in commercial fleets are now routinely equipped with GPS.
Travel time is important information for various actors of a transport system, ranging from city planning, to day to day traffic management, to individual travelers. They all make decisions based on average travel time or variability of travel time among other factors.
AVI (Automatic Vehicle Identification) systems have been commonly used for collecting point-to-point travel time data. Floating car data (FCD) -timestamped locations of moving vehicles- have shown potential for travel time estimation. Some advantages of FCD compared to stationary AVI systems are that they have no single point of failure and they have better network coverage. Furthermore, the availability of opportunistic sensors, such as GPS, makes the data collection infrastructure relatively convenient to deploy.
Currently, systems that collect FCD are designed to transmit data in a limited form and relatively infrequently due to the cost of data transmission. Thus, reported locations are far apart in time and space, for example with 2 minutes gaps. For sparse FCD to be useful for transport applications, it is required that the corresponding probes be matched to the underlying digital road network. Matching such data to the network is challenging.
This thesis makes the following contributions: (i) a map-matching and path inference algorithm, (ii) a method for route travel time estimation, (iii) a fixed point approach for joint path inference and travel time estimation, and (iv) a method for fusion of FCD with data from automatic number plate recognition. In all methods, scalability and overall computational efficiency are considered among design requirements.
Throughout the thesis, the methods are used to process FCD from 1500 taxis in Stockholm City. Prior to this work, the data had been ignored because of its low frequency and minimal information. The proposed methods proved that the data can be processed and transformed into useful traffic information. Finally, the thesis implements the main components of an experimental ITS laboratory, called iMobility Lab. It is designed to explore GPS and other emerging data sources for traffic monitoring and control. Processes are developed to be computationally efficient, scalable, and to support real time applications with large data sets through a proposed distributed implementation.
The application of GPS probes in traffic management is growing rapidly as the required data collection infrastructure is increasingly in place in urban areas with significant number of mobile sensors moving around covering expansive areas of the road network. The paper presents the development of a laboratory designed to explore GPS and other emerging traffic and traffic-related data for traffic monitoring and control. It also presents results to illustrate the scope of traffic information that can be provided by GPS-based data, using the city of Stockholm as a case study. The preliminary analysis shows that network coverage, especially during peak weekday hours, is adequate. Further investigation is needed to validate the data, and increase its value through fusion with complementary data from other sources.
The use of probe vehicles in traffic management is growing rapidly. The reason is that the required data collection infrastructure is increasingly in place in urban areas with a significant number of mobile sensors constantly moving and covering expansive areas of the road network. In many cases, the data is sparse in time and location and includes only geo-location and timestamp. Extracting paths taken by the vehicles from such sparse data is an important step towards travel time estimation and is referred to as the map-matching and path inference problem. This paper introduces a path inference method for low-frequency floating car data, assesses its performance, and compares it to recent methods using a set of ground truth data.
The paper develops a non-parametric method for route travel time distribution estimation using low-frequency floating car data (FCD). While most previous work has focused on link travel time estimation, the method uses FCD observations for estimating the travel time distribution on a route. Potential biases associated with the use of sparse FCD are identified. The method involves a number of steps to reduce the impact of these biases. For evaluation purposes, a case study is used to estimate route travel times from taxi FCD in Stockholm, Sweden. Estimates are compared to observed travel times for routes equipped with Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras with promising results. As vehicles collecting FCD (in this case, taxis) may not be a representative sample of the overall vehicle fleet and driver population, the ANPR data along several routes are also used to assess and correct for this bias. The method is computationally efficient, scalable, and supports real time applications with large data sets through a proposed distributed implementation.
An important application of sparse floating car data (FCD) is the estimation of network link travel times, which requires pre-processing by map-matching and path inference filters. Path inference, in general, requires some a priori assumption about link travel times to infer paths that are reasonable and temporally consistent with observations. Path inference and travel time estimation is thus a joint problem. This paper proposes a fixed point approach to the travel time estimation problem with consistent path inference.The methodology is applied in a case study to estimate travel times from taxi FCD in Stockholm, Sweden. In this case study, existing methods for path inference and travel time estimation, without any particular assumptions about path choice models or travel time distributions, are used. The results show that standard fixed point iterations converge quickly to a solution where input and output travel times are consistent. The solution is robust under different initial travel times and data sizes. Using historical initial travel times reduces bias. The results highlight the value of the fixed point estimation process, in particular for accurate path finding and route optimization.
The paper proposes a non-parametric route travel time estimation method based on fusion of floating car data (FCD) and automated number plate recognition (ANPR) data. Today's traffic management utilizes heterogeneous data collection systems which can be stationary or mobile. Each data collection system has its own advantages and disadvantages. Stationary sensors usually have less measurement noise than mobile sensors but their network coverage is limited. On the other hand, mobile sensors, commonly installed in fleet vehicles, cover relatively wider areas of the network but they suffer from low penetration rate and low sampling frequency. Traffic state estimations can benefit from fusion of data collected by various sources as they complement each other. The proposed estimation method is implemented using FCD from taxis and the ANPR data from Stockholm, Sweden. The results suggest that the fusion increases the robustness of the estimation, meaning that the fused estimates are always better than the worst of the two (FCD or ANPR), and it sometimes outperforms the two single sources.


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Fixation in histopathology is a complex series of chemical events which brings about changes in the various chemical constituents of cell like hardening but doesn't alter or change the cell structural details and morphology.Instead,fixation is means of preservation of the histopathological specimen.
Unless a tissue is fixed soon after the removal from the body,it will undergo degenerative changes due to processes like autolysis and putrefaction which alters the morphology of the cell.
Principle of Fixation
The fixative brings about a crosslinking of protein which denature or coagulate proteins so that the semifluid state is converted into semisolid state so that it maintains everything in vivo in relation to each other.Therefore a semisolid state facilitates easy manipulation of tissues.
Aims and effects of fixation
If a fresh tissue is kept as such at room temperature,it will become liquefied with foul odour mainly due to action of bacteria that is putrefaction and autolysis so the first and foremost aim of fixation is
- Firstly to preserve the tissue in as if like manner as possible
- To prevent postmortem changes like putrefaction and autolysis
- Autolysis is the lysis or dissolution of cells by enzymatic action probably as a result of rupture of lysosomes.
- Putrefaction is the breakdown of tissue by bacteria action often with formation of gas
- Preservation of chemical compounds and microanatomic constituents so that further histochemistry is possible
- Hardening which is the effect of fixatives that allows easy manipulation of soft tissues like intestines,brain etc
- Solidification which converts the normal semifluid consistency of cells (gell) of the tissue to an irreversible semi solid consistency(solid) for easy manipulation
- For optical differentiation.It alters to varying degrees the refractive indices of the various compounds of cells and tissues so that unstained components are more easily visualized than when unfixed
- To intensify the effects of staining.Example like formaldehyde fixative intensifies the staining characteristics of tissues especially with haematoxylin stain
Properties of Ideal fixatives
- It should be able to Coagulation and precipitation of proteins
- It should be able to easily penetrate the tissue faster.Penetration of the fixatives in the tissues which is done by immersing the tissue in fluid containing the fixative.Note that the faster a fixative can penetrate the tissue,the better and fixative penetrating power depends upon their molecular weight.Formalin fixes faster than osmic acid
- It should be soluble in a suitable solvent preferably in water so that adequate concentrations can be prepared
- The concentration of a fixative should be isotonic or hypotonic
- It should be neutral.Most fixatives are acidic which may help in fixation but can affect the staining of the tissue.
Amount of Fixative required
The fixative to be used,should be at least 15-20 times the bulk of the tissue to be fix.
Large specimen can be section to slices with a thickness of 1.5 cm so that fixative can easily penetrate the tissue.
The volume of museum specimens during fixation is usually greater than 50 times that of the specimen
Preparation of Specimen for the process of fixation
- In order to achieve good fixation,it is important that the fixative penetrates the tissue well hence the tissue section should be less than 4 mm thick so that fixation fluid should be able to penetrate from the peripheries to the center of the tissue.
- For fixation of large organs,perfusion method is used.Perfusion method is the injection through the blood vessels into the organ.Hollow viscera fixation is injected into the cavity like urinary bladder,eyeball etc
- The time necessary for fixation is important.Routinely,10% aqueous formalin at room temperature takes 12 hours to fix the tissue.At higher temperature that is 60 to 65 ° C,the time for fixation is reduced to 2 hours
- Ratio of volume of the fixative to specimen should be 1 : 20.
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Manufacturing Update #2
THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST We're back with another update from Jord 25th June 2019 The AJAX universal milling machine is now up and running and we have taken our very first cuts. This cutting method will replace our old technique of abrasive wheel notching, with a faster, more accurate and cleaner cut. The […]Read Post


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News Centre
Flood Clean-up Guide
May 1st, 2019
How to Protect Your Health When You Clean Up After a FloodThis fact sheet is intended to help you protect your health and your property assets after your home or business has been flooded. Clean-up is time-consuming and...+ More Flood Clean-up Guide
Be Prepared for Spring when you have Allergies and Asthma
April 30th, 2019
The warm weather is coming, and with it: Allergy season!If you have allergies, your body is sensitive to things that most people don't react to. You may be sensitive to pollen, dust, pet dander, food, or something else...+ More Be Prepared for Spring when you have Allergies and Asthma
Patient support available in both official languages
April 17th, 2018
We are happy to announce we can provide lung transplant patient support in both official languages, thanks to volunteer Chantal Babineau-Clark, RRT. She is volunteering on Tuesday and Thursday to assist with anyone...+ More Patient support available in both official languages
Country Hearts: We Have A Winner!
April 13th, 2018
Congratulations to Alice Gilmore, winner of our recent Country Hearts campaign contest. Alice won a getaway package from The Fredericton Inn! Thank you to Fredericton Inn for sponsoring this great prize, and to all...+ More Country Hearts: We Have A Winner!
Page Last Updated: 06/04/2016


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Adoption is love and heartbreak simultaneously occurring in the same exact moment. Adoption is both a loss and a gain, but most importantly, adoption is, "For all future time; for always."
One foster mom's touching reflection on all of the kids she has cared for and loved.
A mother reflects on the love, challenges and sense of purpose that treatment foster care has given her.
On November 16, 2018, 15-year-old Ashana — along with 18 other kids — was adopted as part of Milwaukee's Adoption Day Celebration.


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You know how people are supposed to see their doctor every year or so, just for a general checkup to ensure all is well? Dogs need similar care, at least once a year if not more often. Wellness exams for dogs are thorough and give you a better idea of your pet's overall health. The exams give you and the veterinarian a chance to catch problems when they are still small and more manageable. Whether you go to a clinic or a veterinary hospital, your pet should have a thorough exam each year. Pine Meadow Veterinary Hospital in Yorktown can help.
What Do These Exams Cover?
A wellness exam for a dog should include not only a physical exam of every body part, but also tests for blood, urine, and more. If the animal needs any vaccines, this is the time to get them; the animal may need dental care like a tooth cleaning done as well. By the way, do not wait until the pet's next wellness exam to discuss minor problems the pet seems to be having; the sooner you have those minor problems diagnosed, the easier they will be to fix.
Some tests done during a wellness exam are dependent on other results. For example, if your dog seems to be having metabolic problems, the vet may decide to do a thyroid test for the pet. Older pets and those with existing health issues may need more frequent wellness exams given the changeable state of their health.
It's not a good idea to assume that because your pet seems healthy and happy, it must actually be healthy and happy. Many pet health problems don't show visible symptoms that a non-veterinarian could identify until the conditions are advanced. Remember, the purpose of a wellness exam is to seek out those strange little issues and take care of them as quickly as possible.
Give Your Dog a Shot at a Long, Healthy Life
You can contact Pine Meadow Veterinary Hospital for an appointment for a wellness exam for your dog if the animal hasn't had one in over a year. You can reach us at 757-599-3326 if you're in the Yorktown, Newport News, or Hampton areas. Your dog deserves the best care, and we know you want many happy years with your pet. A wellness exam is the first step toward keeping your dog in great shape.


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You may have never heard of her before, but Marcela Davison Aviles is behind some of your favorite Latino content on Disney. As Disney/Pixar's lead cultural consultant, she's helped guide the company in the creation of Handy Manny, Elena of Avalor, and now, everyone's favorite holiday movie: Coco!
A first generation daughter to Mexican parents, Davison Aviles worked hard and graduated from Harvard University before moving on to study law at Stanford (no big deal). Born in the border town of Nogales, she has since seen her hard work pay off with a 25-year career spanning everything from executive director to executive producer. She brought her first-hand intimate knowledge of Mexico straight to the big screen as the lead consultant on Coco, and the authenticity and care given to the storytelling cannot be ignored. Davison Aviles told HipLatina that she is thrilled that audiences of all kinds have been able to, "Rejoice in the stories emergence into the popular culture to finally present our community the way we know it is in terms of who we are as members of society."
Coco is Disney's first big "Latino" hit, but one of the most incredible parts of Coco's success has been how it has resonated so deeply with the Mexican, Mexican-American and Latino communities across the world, while also managing to appeal to an international and non-Latino U.S. audience. Coco is second only to Moana in largest openings for Disney/Pixar and is on track to break records for box office sales in China. Davison Aviles helped craft a story specific enough to speak to every Mexican and Mexican American who went to see it, but broad enough to tug on the heart strings of anyone who loves their family. "You're always going to have to be very thoughtful when you're storytelling about a culture or a topic that some of the audience may have no identification with," she says. "In this instance, we needed to be multiple facing: We needed to create an homenaje to Mexico that was honest, and true, and beautiful and then we had to translate that knowledge to our compadres who are not in our community in a way that they would get it."
So, what took so long to get here? "It's ironic because what we're here trying to do is be storytellers about our culture, for our culture, by our culture, but at the same time to do that you have to realize that you can't just do that in a vacuum, you're going to need help. Getting your own footing and your sense of place takes time."
Hollywood has been historically unkind to Latino narratives, and Davison Aviles points out that not only are Latinos facing the traditional roadblocks of stereotypical depictions, and unfamiliarity with our culture and language, but it's especially tough for women of color to break through. But things are different now:
"I've been pitching the entertainment industry since 1999, and back then the demographics weren't that different than they are now. But the barriers to entry have just exploded due to the Internet and social media. Folks are owning their agency online in a very positive and powerful way."
Another key to Davison Aviles' success has been the legacy of women supporting women. Nancy Kanter (EVP content and creative strategy at Disney Channels Worldwide) and Darla Anderson (legendary Pixar producer) both played pivotal roles. "It's a really good story of women helping women and definitely lead to me being selected as lead consultant on the film."
Coco has been a huge hit for Disney/Pixar, does it signify a general cultural shift as far as Latino content across film, TV and even the broader media is concerned? Davison Aviles sees the film as a watershed moment. "I can see the healing through the Facebook posts, tweets, and emotional testimonials from the Latino community and that's been amazing to see."
She feels things may be different with this film and perhaps moving forward with Latino representation in the media because of the universal appeal of the story behind Coco: "We knew that once audiences saw and felt the story, that 'Aja' moment would happen that we're all really in this together and the world really is our family and music really is our language."
At the end of the day, Davison Aviles is happy to have helped create a story that has blazed a new trail for those who come after her. "I'm hoping that the doors we want to have opened as storytellers will open more widely now," she says thoughtfully, "And when we go into those rooms to pitch we'll get folks that see the success of Coco and understand it now and feel the relevance of these stories."


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Best Dog Training in Charleston, SC by Sally Said So!
Sally Said So dog training is proud to offer our services to Charleston and the surrounding areas.
Our in-home dog training programs are fully customized based on the needs of the dog and the owner. We offer a variety of professional, in-home programs for adult dogs dealing with severe behavioral issues, puppies, dogs in need of basic obedience, expecting parent programs, and much more. We have the most experienced dog trainers in charleston sc.
Sally Said Professional Dog Training is Fear Free Certificated.
Dog Trainer on Retainer: Obedience Training Charleston
We have been helping dogs and owners for over 15 years, and we know that NO dog is beyond hope. Our dog obedience training charleston sc programs are reward based, and commitment-based. This means we are going to be by your side until ALL of the issues are totally resolved, no matter how long it takes. We are proud to work with all breeds of dogs including Dobermans, Rottweilers, German Shepherds, Boxers, Bulldogs, Pit Bulls, etc. using our stellar dog boot camp routine.
Below are some of the common behavioral issues we address:
- All forms of aggression (dog and human): aggressive dog training charleston sc
- Separation anxiety
- Leash walking
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- Recall
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- Excessive behaviors (barking, jumping, chewing)
What sets us apart from other obedience trainers?
Here at Sally Said So we help build the relationship between dogs and their owners. Our goal is that you will never need another dog trainer after working with us. We make sure that not only the dog is getting trained, but the owner is too! Sally Said So understands the important role that owners play, and we make it a top priority to give our dog owners the knowledge and skills they need to have a well trained, happy dog.
If you have a dog who is struggling with behavioral issues in the Charleston area, give Sally Said So a call today! We can't wait to help bring behavioral balance to the Charleston areas. If you have any questions, we can be reached at (843) 790-7297 .
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