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When my son died five years ago today, I was told "It was just a miscarriage." No! Benjamin is my son.
Bryan Kemper
Director, Stand True Pro-Life Youth Outreach
I share this story every year because it is important for people to understand the humanity of every child and the importance of protecting and respecting all human life, born and pre-born.
On the morning of February 23, 2011 I awoke to the scream of my wife coming from the bathroom down the hall. I jumped out of bed and ran to her, finding her standing next to the toilet bleeding. In tears she pointed to the toilet where the body of my son (approximately 12 weeks into his development) was floating.
I stood in shock for a moment as we did not even know we were pregnant; the test we took weeks earlier came up negative. Then I noticed my wife was not steady and she was bleeding badly. I wrapped a towel around her to stop the bleeding and scooped my son's body out of the toilet. I then loaded my wife into the van, as I knew driving her to the hospital would be faster than waiting for an ambulance. When we arrived in the emergency room the attending doctor immediately called for a specialist, as he could not stop the bleeding; there was blood literally on the walls and floor. As the specialist came into the room he looked up and said, "Oh my God; is that her blood pressure?" My heart stopped. I have to say that was the scariest moment of my entire life as I thought for a moment I might lose my wife. The doctor was able to stop the bleeding and my wife was stabilized. The doctor pointed to the container holding our son and said her would "take care of that." I told him, "No, we are going to have a funeral." The hospital actually treated us extremely well. They were very sensitive to our loss; I was surprised. I called the pastor of the church we were attending at the time to tell him what happened and ask about a funeral service for our son. He did not know what to do as he had never had a funeral for a child who was miscarried. I ended up doing all of the legwork and making the arrangements myself That Sunday as the pastor was announcing the funeral, I was shocked when he stopped mid-announcement to make a disclaimer. He mentioned that many women in the church had gone through a miscarriage but had not chosen to have a funeral and that it was "no big deal." "This is just something the Kempers chose to do." I was appalled; I could not believe that this was being said as I sat there days after the death of my child, hearing how it was "no big deal." That Tuesday at the funeral, other than the Pastor, his wife, intern and one another couple, no one else from our church showed up to the funeral. I remember standing near the graveside wondering why no one was there; none of the elders and most of the deacons did not come. Later when I called the pastor and asked him why no one else showed up, he said that people did not really knew my son. I replied, "But they know my family." I then asked him if this had been his son or any other grown kid in our church, would they have been there? He replied, "Yes, but this was not any other funeral; it was just a miscarriage." "Just a miscarriage." I really could not believe my ears; did he really just say that about my son? Mind you, this is a very pro-life church. This is a church which supported the work I do and even financially gave to this pro-life work. How could a pastor who was so pro-life say something like this? The answer is simple. Even those who call themselves Christian or pro-life sometimes cannot 100% understand the full humanity, the full personhood of the child inside the womb. If we did, abortion would be over. We still see some kind of difference between the children in the womb and the children running around the streets today. We still are more emotionally distraught over the shootings in a school then the dismemberments in abortion clinics. We have not actually seen abortion for what it truly is. I will concede two differences between the children in the womb and the children running around today. First difference is their age, what stage of life development they are in. Zygote, Embryo, Fetus, Infant, Toddler, Teen, Adult"¦. These are all stages of the life of a human person. The second difference is why I am writing this story, the reason I have given more than 20 years of my life to fighting for the abolishment of abortion. It is their voice. The children in the womb have no voice; they are in need of someone to do as Proverbs 24:11 commands us to do:
Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.
When those who call themselves followers of Christ, Christians, begin to recognize that abortion is actually an act of homicide, the abolition of abortion will take place. When we show the same rage and intolerance that we have for things like child molestation, rape, school shootings or any other crime against humanity, we will end this holocaust that is now over 42 years running in America. My wife and I sat down with our other children and looked at our son's body and asked them to name him. We chose Benjamin Davis Kemper. Benjamin Davis Kemper is as much my child as any of our living children. Benjamin Davis is buried in a cemetery in Troy, OH where he was given the dignity he deserved with a funeral and burial. Today, February 23
I will visit that gravesite and mourn the loss of our son. I will look to heaven and know that he is with Christ, waiting for our family reunion one day. While I stand at his gravesite I know I will also be reminded of the 55 million gravesites that don't exist for all those whose lives have been stolen by surgical abortion. I will shed a tear for my nation, a nation which has turned her back on the most innocent and venerable of her citizens. I will also renew my commitment to shining the light of Christ and truth on the evil of our age, the abortion holocaust. Will you join me in this commitment? Will you Stand True? Bryan Kemper
I know the pain that comes with losing my son, I cannot imagine the pain someone must feel after an abortion. I am blessed to work with some amazing people who are leading the way in helping to heal the pain from shockwaves of abortion. Please visit
for more information about healing.
Stand True relies on the support of people like you to continue fighting to save lives. Please donate $25, $50, $100, $500 or any amount and help Stand True continue to educate, activate and equip this generation. If you can donate please do so at
or on the donate button at the top of this page.


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Chapter 3: Page 17
God Child News: We're releasing God Child Chapter 3, one page per week . If you want to skip ahead and read it all now there are two ways you can support us and get it all now!
#1 God Child is available on Comixology by our publisher, Caliber Comics! You can subscribe to the series there and get everything so far at this link: https://www.comixology.com/The-God-Child/comics-series/44638
#2 I'm going to firing up the Patreon page again at http://patreon.com/comics if you'd like to become a patron at $1 or $5 a month. All funds raised from our Patreon we are going to use to funnel back into our expenses of doing comic shows on the east coast and save for bigger trips hopefully. We appreciate your support, check it out!
Back to the drawing board for me! – DJC

subset: commoncrawl


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Booties And Breasts Storm Times Square For National Underwear Day
Once again, underwear retailer Freshpair stormed New York City's Times Sqaure with its annual booty and breast fest all in the name of reminding people they really should get rid of those skid-marked undies and ill-fitting bras and drop some coin for a...uh...fresh pair. Check out all the images and video over at YesButNoButYes.
by Steve Hall Aug- 9-06 Click to Comment
Topic: Good, Guerilla
Topic: Good, Guerilla


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SACRAMENTO (AP) — With as many as half of California voters expected to cast their ballots by mail and several statewide contests narrowing to dead heats, Election Day has the potential to morph into election week.
The number of California voters casting mail-in ballots this year is expected to surpass 2008, when about 42 percent of the 13.7 million ballots cast in the presidential election were sent by mail. By comparison, 25 percent voted by mail in 2000.
The state distributed 8.9 million mail-in ballots this election cycle, about 20 percent more than were requested in 2008.
The rise in mail-in voting means that some of the highest-profile contests, from a statewide tax initiative to nationally watched congressional races, might not be decided by the time voters go to bed on Election Day if enough of those voters wait until the last minute to turn in their ballots.
"We've given people more avenues to vote, but to ensure there's no fraud and error, we have to take more time to verify the ballots," said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. "We've traded speed for convenience."
Absentee ballots take longer to count because elections workers must compare the signature on the mailed envelope with the one on that voter's registration card.
Many voters wait until the end to submit their ballots, which delays the process further, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen said.
"The biggest change is the number of ballots that are being dropped off on Election Day," she said. "Those ballots don't even start to be processed until 8 p.m."
California voters are most likely to drop off their ballots at polling stations during presidential contest years. In 2008, 3.2 million ballots— a quarter of the total vote count— didn't make the election night tally.
Many California races are likely to be nail-biters already, thanks to the success of a new independent process for drawing the state's legislative and congressional districts.
Several statewide ballot initiatives also are expected to be close, including Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to raise the statewide sales tax and increase income taxes on the wealthy to help close the state's budget deficit.
In the Central Valley, incumbent Democrat Rep. Jerry McNerney and Republican challenger Ricky Gill are prepared to wait days to know their fates. The redrawn 9th Congressional District is among the most competitive in the state.
"We're prepared for any contingency here, and that certainly could be one of them," said Gill, a 25 year-old law school graduate.
Lauren Smith, spokeswoman for the McNerney campaign, said a prolonged wait would disappoint supporters.
"It's an energy and excitement thing," she said. "It's a like Christmas Eve, and all of a sudden you're told Christmas is two days later."
The rise of mail-in voting likely contributed to the wait earlier this year for a verdict on Proposition 29, which would have raised the state's tobacco tax for the first time since 1998. The initiative on the June primary ballot lost by less than 1 percentage point during an election in which 65 percent of voters cast mail-in ballots.
The secretary of state's office will release the latest registration numbers Friday but said California appears to be on pace for a record number of registered voters. The state does not project turnout.
California saw the highest voter turnout for a presidential contest in 1964, when 88.4 percent of registered voters cast a ballot. The lowest was in 1996, when just 65.5 percent of voters weighed in.
County election officials are approving overtime and hiring extra workers to process the hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots already starting to flood their offices.
Contra Costa County Registrar of Voters Steve Weir said he plans to triple his staff in the coming days.
"We'll have 80, 90 people working in every cranny of our warehouse," he said. "We're calling in people's children."
Still, registrars say Californians need to come to terms with the end of the era of knowing winners by bedtime.
"My job is to produce results that people are confident in, not to provide instant gratification for anyone," Shasta County Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen said.


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The graphic below illustrates the five planets as they are visible, with the naked eye, from Huntsville, Alabama. It shows their positions in the sky around 6:30 AM during the week of January 18 and continuing for the next few days. Mercury will be close to the Sun, over in the East, and Jupiter will be over in the West, with Venus, Saturn, and Mars between the two. Pluto is near Mercury, but is invisible to the eye, requiring a telescope for viewing.
The last time an alignment such as this occurred was about 10 years ago. This pre-sunrise configuration will be similar for other northern latitudes.
In the graphic, the yellow line is the ecliptic, which is the plane of the Earth's orbit. The orbits of the major planets lie close to this plane, which is why they appear close to the ecliptic in the night sky.


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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
PvP vs. Punching Yourself in the Junk
7 comments:
Rolling pin! Love it. I don't have the hand-eye coordination to keep up with PvP. Especially when they circle you. Keep up the good work.
- November 18, 2009 at 11:59 AM
- Fricassee said...
You should give your warrior a shot with Prot PvP. It's pretty fun due to the mobility and stuns, and if you have a pocket healer it makes for a pretty devastating spec.
- November 18, 2009 at 12:42 PM
- Unknown said...
I had a good laugh at this. I too hadnt PvP'ed in sometime on my warlock and just recently began again while we are taking a raiding break. At first I felt as you learning to PvP all over again. I have found Destro PvP build with the Succy a lot of fun. Using glyphed Shadow Flame, shadow fury, succy seduce and good use of your portal and those melee encounters become easier. Oh and the damage you can throw out is nice...have fun!
- November 18, 2009 at 1:01 PM
- WTF said...
"I do it for the challenge.....and I am not a fan of punching myself in the junk......not that there is anything wrong with that."
fail...there is something very wrong with that lol.
- November 18, 2009 at 11:48 PM
- Fish said...
I would say slim advantage to punching myself in the junk, I'm a hockey player, I'm almost used to it and its not unexpected.
The only BG's I will even bother with is as a healer. Then when I inevitably get killed, I expect it and just come back to heal more. I DESPISE people just running around in circles around me. Worst part of the game ever.
- November 19, 2009 at 7:35 AM
- Leiandra said...
Yeah, I can't pvp with my mage. They die way too quickly. At least I have a fighting chance with earth sheild and mail armor with my resto shaman.
- November 19, 2009 at 2:57 PM
I lol'd IRL at the rogue with the rolling pin. You should seriously PvP with your warrior though. Once you get a few PvP pieces you become a wrecking machine. There's nothing like smacking a lock in the face with your axe. Or reflecting an 8K fireball back at a mage. Get yourself a tree healer and you will be near unstoppable.
- November 20, 2009 at 12:40 AM


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South African Journal of Science
On-line version ISSN 1996-7489
Print version ISSN 0038-2353
S. Afr. j. sci. vol.105 n.3-4 Pretoria Mar./Apr. 2009
Funding crisis jeopardises Ph.D.s
Craig McKune
Science journalist based in Cape Town
Three years ago, the National Research Foundation and the Department of Science and Technology jointly launched a programme to increase the number of Ph.D. graduates in the countrycurrently approximately 1 200 annuallyfivefold by 2018. But government's ability to pull this off is now in question as the department this year reduced its subsidy to the foundation, which is the agency responsible for funding graduate students in South Africa. Furthermore, the role of the foundation itself is being questioned by many researchers, who believe it is failing to disburse funds judiciously.
In terms of Ph.D. production, South Africa's performance is well below other emerging economies (http://www.dst. gov.za/publications-policies/strategies- reports/The%20Ten-Year%20Plan%20 for%20Science%20and%20Technology. pdf). The country currently graduates an annual 27 Ph.D.s per million of population, compared with Brazil's 42 and South Korea's 172, not to mention 240 in Australia or 259 in the U.K. The planned fivefold boost should be important for the country to compete economically with other developing countries.
The department aims specifically to boost numbers of science, engineering and technology graduatesnumbering 561 in 2005to 3 000. Asked if he thought these increases were realistic, Robin Drennan, executive director for grant management and systems administration at the foundation, replied: 'It's not a pipedream, but it is a stretch target.'
The department's explanation for the cut is that the global economic crisis forced them to slash budgets throughout. While their subsidies to public institutions engaged with scientific and technological activities dropped between 2008 and 2009, not all their beneficiaries have suffered cuts of similar magnitude: the subsidy for the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, for example, was boosted from R534 749 million to R561 487 million, while the NRF's subsidy of R680 396 is a decrease from last year's R680 832 (see box on p. 84).
After more than six weeks, an explanation has still not been forthcoming from the department as to why the foundation's subsidy in particular had been singled out for cuts in the context of their funding the Ph.D. programme. At the time of going to press, spokesperson Nhlanhla Nyide said that a detailed response was still waiting to be approved, but he claims that the department is still prioritising its Ph.D. project, and has not lost faith in the foundation to deliver on it. Nyide acknowledges that tensions do 'naturally' exist between the two bodies over implementation and targets, but said that the department was 'absolutely satisfied' that the foundation was 'doing its job'.
Just under half of the Ph.D. students supported by the foundation are funded from their 'discretionary budget', which is allocated by the department and which increased by only two per cent this year. While the number of Ph.D. students supported by the foundation's discretionary budget rose from 1 100 in 2004 to a peak of 1 197 in 2006, it then declined to 1 037 last year. The cause of this is almost certainly the implementation of the Incentive programme last year, which is at odds with the aim of increasing the production of doctoral graduates, as studentships and running expenses are not embedded in it as they were in the Focus Area Programmes (FAPs). The Incentive programme provides 'glue funding' to rated researchers, which they are supposed to receive for the duration of their rating cycle: A-rated researchers should receive R100 000 annually; B-rated researchers R80 000; and C-rated researchers R40 000.
The foundation has come under fire from dissatisfied researchers for its strategic decision to replace the FAPs with the new funding framework. Drennan says that the FAPs are being phased out over four yearsby which time all existing grants would have run their courseand as money becomes available it will be channelled to the new framework, which so far comprises four programmes: the Incentive Programme, the Blue Skies Programme, Collaboration with National Facilities and Competitive Support for Unrated Researchers (see box below).
Both the FAPs and the new framework are funded from the foundation's 'discretionary budget'which is currently R279 million and provided by the department. Also channelled from the department to the foundation this year is R171 million in 'ring-fenced' grants for specific initiatives including the research chairs, the centres of excellence, and more specialised foci such as the Coelacanth Conservation and Genome Resource Programme and the National Bioinformatics Institute. Administration costs (including salaries) and funds for running the national facilities make up the balance of its subsidy from the department. In addition, the foundation should receive an estimated R870 million this year in contract funding from various other government departments for specific projects, including the Scarce Skills Programme and the Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme.
The Blue Skies Programme, in particular, has been controversial: its aim is to focus on 'novel research'. Only R7 million is available for the programme this year, but Drennan says this will grow over the next four years as the FAPs are phased out. The new framework, he says, is intended to last at least until 2015.
In the review process for the Blue Skies Programme, proposals addressing important, 'basic' scientific questions, with clear experimental designs and sound hypotheses were immediately rejected, if they were based on past research. This means that most researchers have to rely on relatively small amounts of incentive fundingassuming they receive itwhen their FAP funding comes to an end. A Competitive Support for Rated Researchers programme will cover such research, but this will be the last to be phased in: 'within about the next four years', according to Drennan.
Consequently, 'very good, well-established scientists with excellent projects cannot continue with their work,' according to Stellenbosch University medical researcher Paul van Helden. This is because in targeting 'novel' research, the programme excludes any proposals that are a continuation of any existing research whatsoever.
'Researchers are looking at this and seeing they've got no way to support their projects and take them to the next logical step,' said van Helden. 'There is a nasty gap in the funding, and it impacts on researchers' momentum. They've had it at the moment. There's nowhere for them to go.'
And researchers say the foundation's communication about their new strategy has been unclear. In the call for proposals to the Blue Skies programme last year, it was stated that it would focus on 'fundamental, curiosity-driven and basic' research, but nowhere did it state that the proposals should not be based on existing research. 'A lot of us had the impression that the Blue Skies programme would fill in for the FAPs,' says University of Pretoria zoologist Sue Nicolson, who is a typical victim of the new framework: her Focus Area grant has terminated, and her Blue Skies proposal was rejected, leaving her relying solely on glue funding.
Compounding the view that the foundation is botching its implementation of the new framework, the agency reneged on an assurance that proposals would be sent out for written peer review. In its call for applications, the agency stated that proposals would be assessed in a two-tiered process: postal peer review and an assessment panel. For at least one panel review, members received the applications only 24 hours before the meeting took place, giving them too little time to prepare (see SAJS 105, 10; 2009).
Drennan disputes this, and claims that on average panel members were sent their documents, via courier, 11 days before their meetings. 'Should any panel member have actually received their documents closer to the meeting I can only apologise,' he says. He says the 300-odd applications received for the Blue Skies programme were divided among 14 panels, and were sent out for written review, but that the process was abandoned because the response was so poor. He was unable to provide details on how timeously proposals had been sent out.
To make matters worse, the Incentive programme has been implemented in a piecemeal fashion. Last year all rated researchers not receiving any other funds from the foundation were guaranteed glue funding for five years, but this year glue funding was awarded only to A-, P- and some B-rated researchers. Drennan explains that this is part of the phase-in process: they began to move down the hierarchy of rated researchers until they ran out of funds. But glue funding has been awarded irrespective of what a researcher's costs really are (research on molecular biology is more expensive to conduct than that on literary theory, for example), or whether researchers received funds from alternative sources. 'More discretion is needed to avoid overfunding,' says A-rated historian Bill Nasson of the University of Cape Town.
'We debated it and decided [the phasing in of glue funds] would be the most effective way of funding them all,' said Drennan. He acknowledges that the phase-in process has not been perfect, and emphasises they were not planning to turn their back on productive researchers not conducting 'novel' research. 'We're caught in a situation where we're trying to accommodate everyone from a discretionary budget that is not keeping pace with inflation. [The process] is not ideal or smooth, but it's the best we can do under the circumstances.'
In a further threat to the foundation's ability to boost Ph.D. output, the Department of Labour did not renew its scarce skills funding this year, even though the foundation had allocated scarce skills bursaries to over 800 students. To honour these commitments, Drennan says they have been forced to dip into their already strained discretionary budget.
Nicolson echoes the feelings of many researchers when she says: 'There is a paradox here: at the same time that they want us to train more Ph.D.'s, the funding gets cut.'


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When your vehicles equalizer settings simply aren't good enough and you find yourself wanting more control over the music you listen to, an external equalizer will give you all the control you could ever ask for. The Cadence CEQ-773 is the perfect addition to any vehicle with an aftermarket stereo system. This rock solid EQ gives you the ability to boost up or cut back on areas of your music that could use some adjustment.
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The Specs of A Champion
The Cadence CEQ has a very simple operation design. It accepts 1 set of RCA inputs, than splits them off into 3 separate outputs for connecting to multiple amplifiers. Conveniently, there is a 3.55mm auxiliary jack on the front face of this unit, which allows you to plug in your portable accessories such as iPods, satellite radios or other devices. One of the great features is the ability to output a 7 volt signal through each set of RCA outputs. The high-strength signal will allow you to slightly turn your gains down on your amplifiers so they can work more efficiently with greater head-room for power.
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You had a great time at the party, so it's time to say "thanks" to family and friends with a Thank You for the Bridal Shower Gift card. Choose from 100+ one of a kind designs, customize, and we'll mail your cards next business day. Now you just have to get through the wedding!
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The making of a queen: Road to royalty begins early in paper wasps
Social status in paper wasps is established earlier in life than scientists thought, says a study published this month in the journal PLoS ONE.
While many social insects have distinct social classes that differ in appearance and are fixed from birth, paper wasp society is more fluid — all castes look alike, and any female can climb the social ladder and become a queen. Now, molecular analysis reveals that paper wasp social hierarchy is less flexible than it appears. Queens diverge from their lower-status sisters long before they reach adulthood, scientists say.
Slender reddish-brown wasps with black wings, Polistes metricus paper wasps are a common sight throughout the Midwestern and Southeastern U.S. Hidden in papery umbrella-shaped nests in the eaves and rafters of your house, a complex society is hard at work.
Female wasps develop into one of two castes that take on different roles within the nest. While young queens don't work and eventually leave the nest to reproduce and rule colonies of their own, workers forego reproduction and spend their lives defending the nest and raising their siblings.
"All offspring look alike but some work and some don't," said lead author James Hunt, currently a visiting scholar at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC. "The workers are the ones that fly out and sting you if they feel their colony is threatened."
Hunt and his colleagues wanted to find out if hidden molecular mechanisms set some paper wasps on the path to becoming workers, and others to becoming queens. "Many scientists think that paper wasp social status isn't decided until they are adults, but some think there is more to it than that," said Hunt, also a biologist at North Carolina State University.
With co-authors Amy Toth and Tom Newman at the University of Illinois and Gro Amdam and Florian Wolschin at Arizona State University, the researchers measured gene activity and protein levels in young paper wasp larvae before they took on different roles.
Although all wasp larvae look and act alike, the researchers discovered several differences during development that predispose them to one caste or the other.
The larvae that become queens have high levels of a group of proteins that enable them to survive the winter and reproduce next year, whereas the ones that become workers are much shorter-lived and have low levels of these proteins, said Hunt. "There's less upward mobility in the ones that become the workers. They may look just like the future queens, but they are strongly biased toward the worker role."
Future queens also showed higher activity of several genes involved in caste determination in other, more recently evolved insects that have more visible distinctions between castes. "Paper wasps and honey bees are separated by 100 million years of evolution, but we see some of the same gene and protein patterns in paper wasps that lead to different types of adults in bees," he explained.
The results help shed light on how insect social behavior comes to be, Hunt explained. "It is sometimes argued that adult wasps actually choose to become workers in order to help their mother reproduce and raise their sisters — hence the term 'altruistic,'" he said. "What we found is that really the choice is limited by how they develop as larvae."
The team's findings were published online in the May 17 issue of PLoS ONE.
More information: Hunt, J., F. Wolschin, et al. (2010). "Differential gene expression and protein abundance evince ontogenetic bias toward castes in a primitively social wasp." PLoS ONE. dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010674.
Provided by National Evolutionary Synthesis Center


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MIAMI – Heat coach Erik Spoelstra summed up the efforts of LeBron James and Dwyane Wade in three words: "Video game numbers," he said.
Both put up monster stat lines.
And the Miami Heat needed them.
James scored 40 points and added a career-high 16 assists, Wade had 39 points, and the Heat pushed their winning streak to 12 games by outlasting the Sacramento Kings 141-129 in double overtime on Tuesday night.
"Some great stat lines tonight," James said. "But I'm happy I was able to do what I did and help our team win."
Great stat lines might be calling it an understatement. Consider:
— A season high in scoring for James, who capped off the best shooting month of his career.
— A season high in scoring for Wade, who tied a career best with 19 field goals.
— A 36-point night for the Kings' Marcus Thornton, the most by any non-starter in the NBA this season.
— The 141 points tied a Heat franchise record, set in 1991.
— Add James' assists to the mix, and he put up the NBA's first night of at least 40 points and 16 assists since April 1994. The man who did it then? None other than Phoenix guard Kevin Johnson, now, ironically enough, the mayor of Sacramento. And for February, James finished 139 for 217 from the floor, that 64.1 percent clip the best of his career for any month.
"It was a great atmosphere," said Thornton, who made 11 of 18 shots, including 8 of 12 from 3-point range. "To be able to take that team to two overtimes just shows the testament of us growing. A team like that — championship team — they play great together. Obviously I hate losing but it was a great effort by us."
Ray Allen added 21, Chris Bosh finished with 15 and Chris Andersen had 10 for the Heat, who remained six games clear of second-place Indiana in the Eastern Conference standings.
Miami's 12-game winning streak is the longest in the NBA and matches the second-longest in franchise history.
Tyreke Evans scored 26 points for Sacramento. DeMarcus Cousins finished with 24 points and 15 rebounds, John Salmons added 15 and Isaiah Thomas 14 for the Kings, who lost their sixth straight.
"They've got a couple of guys that can turn the notch up pretty quickly," Kings coach Keith Smart said. "LeBron and Dwyane played an incredible game. It took a Superman-type game from both of those guys."
Smart said before the game that sometimes "great teams get a little bored with the regular season and they need something to get them going."
The Heat didn't seem to be bored by the second overtime.
After a late non-call that James wanted, he simply seemed mad.
James scored inside to open the second extra session, yelling "and one" at referees as his way of insisting he was fouled as well. But after one sensational sequence, the game was pretty much sealed.
Thornton had a chance to give the Kings the lead after a Heat turnover, but his shot at the rim was blocked by Wade, who came down and set up James for a 3-pointer — a five-point swing, in essence, and the Heat had a 131-127 lead. James scored again, then added two free throws and found Bosh for a dunk and 10-point lead with 1:29 remaining.
"It's tough but this is a loss I consider a good loss," Cousins said. "Our effort tonight was incredible. We come out and play like that every night, we can beat a lot of teams."
Sacramento fell to 1-17 against Miami since March 2004.
James was perfect in the second overtime: 3-for-3 from the field, 4-for-4 from the line. He had more points (11-5), rebounds (3-0), and assists (3-1) in the final five minutes than the Kings had combined.
"No matter what their record is, they made plays just like us. They gave everything they had and more," James said.
The Heat missed key free throws late in both regulation and the first overtime — Wade missing a pair with 21 seconds left in the fourth, and James missed one of two with 29.3 seconds left in the opening extra session.
Those two free throws were the only ones Wade was awarded all night.
"I knew we came out a little flat and they came out so free," Wade said. "So I told myself to be a little aggressive and kept us afloat a little bit. And in the overtime, LeBron got going a little bit. We kept going to him and he delivered."
In the first OT, the Kings had a chance for the late lead and potentially the win, but Thomas had a layup blocked by Bosh, and Allen grabbed the rebound for the Heat with 5.7 seconds left.
Miami put the ball in Wade's hands, and he found James near the basket. James' shot missed, and he complained he was fouled by Salmons on the attempt. Referees disagreed with that, but after a lengthy review to determine possession, they awarded Miami the ball with 0.4 seconds remaining. It was much ado for nothing, as Bosh's shot sailed long and the teams went to double overtime.
The game was tied at 92 midway through the fourth before Wade — with six points and an assist — led a 13-4 run that looked like it would give Miami breathing room. Miami was up 105-96, and still led 112-104 when James scored with 1:40 remaining.
Sacramento roared back, scoring the final eight points of regulation. Thornton hit a pair of 3-pointers, the second coming with 23 seconds left to get the Kings within 112-110. And after Wade missed a pair of free throws, Cousins grabbed an offensive rebound and laid it back with 8.5 seconds remaining to knot the game at 112-all.
Out of a timeout, the Heat went to Wade, whose step-back 20-footer bounced off the rim as time expired, sending it to overtime.
They were just getting started. And when it was over, the Heat streak survived.
"We're coming together," James said. "We're doing it the right way. We're executing offensively. We're sharing the ball. And we're not getting rattled. We've been in some crazy games. We just stay the course and figure out a way to get the victory."
NOTES: Miami finished February with a 12-1 record, with the one loss to start the month. ... The Heat have allowed 68 third-quarter points in their last two games, both at home. They gave up 67 third-quarter points in their previous three games, all on the road. ... One day after celebrating his 24th birthday, Kings G Jimmer Fredette did not play. ... The Heat played without F Shane Battier, sidelined by right hamstring tightness. He's day-to-day.


text: An exploit for a recently patched vulnerability that allows potential attackers to obtain administrative access on network appliances from hardware vendor F5 Networks was added to the Metasploit penetration testing framework on Tuesday.In a security advisory published on June 6, F5 Networks advised customers that attackers could exploit a SSH configuration error to obtain root access on many of its products.The vulnerable platforms are VIPRION B2100, B4100, B4200; Enterprise Manager 3000, 4000; BIG-IP 520, 540, 1000, 2000, 2400, 5000, 5100, 1600, 3600, 3900, 6900, 8900, 8950, 11000, 11050; and BIG-IP Virtual Edition.The vulnerability is the result of a SSH private key present in many F5 appliances being publicly available. This key allows unauthorized users to bypass authentication and login as root on those devices, Florent Daigniere, the security researcher who discovered the issue, said in a separate advisory.Users of the affected products should install the software updates and hotfixes made available by F5 as soon as possible, especially since exploit code for this vulnerability is now publicly available.F5 also released a SSH reconfiguration tool that can be used by customers that cannot immediately deploy the security patches, to prevent the compromised SSH key from working. Instructions on how to use this tool, as well as apply other mitigation techniques, are described in F5's advisory.The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2012-1493 and was rated as highly critical by security firm Secunia because it can result in a full system compromise and can be attacked remotely.


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CLASS STORIES from John Reed on Vimeo.
This site was produced by Robert Polito, John Reed, Luis Jaramillo, Laura Cronk, Lori Lynn Turner, Justin Sherwood, Carrington Alvarez, Bean Haskell, and the students of the Spring 2013 Riggio Documentary course, Writing & Democracy.
American Vanguard, a publishing imprint of the New School Writing Program, revives the name of an annual anthology of writing by New School students from the late 1940s and 1950s.


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WASHINGTON - President Obama's reelection campaign opened a new front against Mitt Romney on his home turf Wednesday, calling Romney's tenure as Massachusetts governor a time of grand gestures and empty economic promises that should be a warning sign for the nation.
To drive home the point, Obama's campaign is sending chief strategist David Axelrod to the Massachusetts State House Thursday morning to stage a press conference just steps from the office Romney once occupied.
"Mitt Romney applied the economic philosophy he learned in the private sector to disastrous results as governor of Massachusetts,'' Axelrod wrote in a five-page memo released Wednesday. "Massachusetts couldn't afford Romney Economics, and neither can the American economy.''
The strategy marks a shift for Obama, who has spent several weeks aggressively criticizing Romney's experience running the Boston-based private equity firm Bain Capital. It echoes the campaigns of previous presidential candidates who lambasted foes on their home court, most notably Vice President George H.W. Bush's use of a chartered boat to link the fetid Boston Harbor to his rival, Governor Michael Dukakis.
Andrea Saul, a Romney campaign spokeswoman, responded Wednesday by calling the effort desperate and an attempt to divert attention from the national economy.
"If President Obama had even half the job creation record of Mitt Romney, then he would be running on it,'' she said.
An outline of Obama's new campaign breaks down Romney's tenure as governor point by point, highlighting promises he made while running for office, complete with links to videos of Romney in 2002 gubernatorial debates.
It points to rises in a host of fees, while pointing out that Romney pledged not to raise taxes. The central thrust, however, seeks to undercut Romney's argument that he is a job creator who would bring the country out of a dour economy.
Romney made a bold promise during his 2002 campaign, saying, "My program for creating jobs is second to none in the entire history of this state.''
But his four-year term provided a far more muddy picture that complicates his ability to sell himself as a job creator and turnaround artist, according to some independent analysts.
By the time Romney left the State House, Massachusetts had generated 24,400 net new jobs, according to an analysis by Moody's Economy.com, an independent research group. The state had only an 0.8 percent increase in employment, giving it the fourth-weakest rate of job growth among all states over that time.
"If you want to say you're about job creation, your record - at least in our state - would suggest that's just not true,'' said Andrew Sum, a professor at Northeastern University who has studied Romney's economic record. "That time period was a very weak time period for the state.
"I'm not blaming everything on him, but he didn't turn anything around,'' he added.
Sum did a study that showed that 14 percent of the state's manufacturing jobs were lost during Romney's four years, along with declines in payroll and labor force. In all indicators, Massachusetts was below the national average and was among the lowest-performing states in the country.
Sum also said Romney's frequent argument that unemployment dropped during his tenure is a false indicator. The unemployment rate was dropping nationwide, and much of the improvement in Massachusetts was due not to additional jobs but because people stopped looking for work or moved out of the state, he said.
Some in the business community also complained that Romney never fulfilled a promise to be the state's chief cheerleader, instead using the Bay State as a punch line as he began laying the groundwork for his 2008 presidential campaign.
"He campaigned in 2002 that he was going to be the ambassador for Massachusetts, that as a CEO at the highest levels of the private sector he could open doors and bring business to Massachusetts,'' said Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. "It's virtually universally recognized that he did very little of that. . . . He was out badmouthing Massachusetts instead of being the ambassador, by the end of his term.''
Romney repeatedly was forced to defend his record in Massachusetts during this election season's primaries. Texas Governor Rick Perry frequently criticized him over his jobs record in the Bay State, while former House speaker Newt Gingrich pilloried Romney's record at Bain Capital. Both have since endorsed Romney.
In a second response to Obama's attack, Romney's camp said in a statement Wednesday: "We're happy to compare the 4.7 percent unemployment rate Mitt Romney was able to accomplish any day against President Obama's failure to meet his own goal of 6 percent right now.''
Like Obama would in 2009, Romney in 2003 inherited a sluggish economy. Between February 2001 and December 2003, the state lost 205,100 jobs, or about 6 percent of its workforce. The climate later improved, and some of Romney's policies were credited with helping the business climate.
He persuaded the Democratic-dominated Legislature to approve a law to fast-track the permitting process, helping businesses expand.
"The truth is, if you look at the record, it's a heck of a lot more than I expected I'd get done in four years,'' Romney told the Globe in 2007.
As part of their effort to put Romney's record under a microscope, Obama advisers say, several former Massachusetts officials are prepared to criticize the former governor. The advisers have declined to say who, aside from Axelrod, will attend Thursday's State House event, but attendees could include former mayors and lawmakers who worked with Romney.
Governor Deval Patrick, who is expected to play a prominent role in the Obama campaign in the coming months, was not planning to attend the event but was slated to appear on MSNBC's "Morning Joe'' and several other national television programs.
In some ways, Obama campaign operatives must walk a tightrope in dealing with Romney's record in Massachusetts. For more than a year, they have heaped praise on him for passing a revolutionary health care plan.
Romney had the skills to craft, negotiate, and work with Democrats on his signature accomplishment, their argument went, as they sought to remind Republican primary voters that Romney created the precursor for Obama's national health care law. But now they are attempting to shift that ample praise for health care into pointed criticism for nearly everything else.
The activity over the next few weeks is likely to intensify as both sides attempt to define Romney before a wider electorate that may not have been paying attention to the Republican nominating contests.
"Not a lot of people focus time on the characteristics of a new candidate like myself, and people will get to know me better,'' Romney said in an interview that aired Wednesday on Fox News. "My guess is they're going to get to know more about me than they'd like to by the time we're finished.''
Matt Viser can be reached at email@example.com.


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If you appreciate good TV, this is a fantastic time to be alive. If you appreciate good writing about TV, ditto. There seems to be consensus on that first statement, but not so much on the second — at least if writers of thinkpieces are to be believed.
In these pieces, recaps — or, as I prefer to call them, overnight reviews — represent the totality of TV criticism in some minds, even though they represent a small percentage of the often-fascinating work that's out there right now, and even though the overnight review can itself be as provocative and artful as any other kind of criticism. Recent articles in The LA Review of Books, Bookforum, and The Wall Street Journal have nice things to say about aspects of TV crit, but they also sound notes of disappointment and alarm, and in places they feel like a revisit of last spring's handwringing "Recaps: Bad for journalism, bad for art?" debate, which I wrote about here.
At this point, I find the whole discussion exhausting and frustrating, because it's too often approached from a misguided and in some ways ignorant angle— one that presumes, or accidentally suggests, that overnight reviews somehow represent TV criticism itself, and that TV critics as a species aren't trying hard enough to attain the lofty heights once scaled by the great literary, theater, and film critics.
John Jurgenson's Wall Street Journal article — which quotes one of my bosses, Vulture deputy editor Gilbert Cruz — is a reported feature about recapping; but by largely omitting any other kind of criticism, it affirms the idea that TV crit equals recaps, and that critics are slaves shoveling copy into an insatiable content maw and wearing themselves out in the process. One part of the article profiles Austin's Jacob Clifton, a freelancer who recaps five shows a week, usually without the aid of advance screeners, and relies on "MiO caffeine mix, 5-Hour Energy drink, Prolab caffeine tablets, stovetop espresso" to get through the work week. Reading the piece, one gets the sense that TV critics spend their lives on a virtual hamster wheel, racing around and around to earn a few measly pellets. In fact, the gun-to-the-head kind of writing is but one part of what most critics do.
At Bookforum, Ken Tucker reviews two books about the post-Sopranos wave of TV, Brett Martin's Difficult Men and my old Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall's The Revolution Was Televised. Tucker, Entertainment Weekly's longtime TV reviewer, has few good things to say about TV criticism, past or present. He calls it "anemic," says that it "has never yielded a significant body of work — or at least an acknowledged one enshrined with any permanence in book form," and complains that it hasn't produced a figure as important as Pauline Kael or Andrew Sarris. A lot of the time Tucker is echoing his subject, Martin, who seems defensively resentful of TV critics throughout Difficult Men. Martin writes off most contemporary critics as "fan-cum-critics," and says the recap, or overnight review, is a "strange practice" done only by "the most die-hard, or smitten." This sounds uncomfortably like a swipe at Sepinwall, a pioneering online TV critic whose own book on this subject beat Martin's into the marketplace by half a year, though it could apply to pretty much anyone who writes about TV anywhere, and has to do a certain number of overnight reviews to have skin in the game.
Like Martin, Tucker's distaste for much current TV criticism is tied to the rise of overnight TV reviews. Tucker disparages this kind of writing as "ultimately a mug's game — there is no way to maintain that kind of writing without becoming either burned out or a hack." I'd counter that it requires endurance, speed, and obsessive focus to recap even one show in an intelligent, timely manner, especially without access to advance screeners, and that it's petty to write off the mass of recappers as fools in the express lane to Hacktown, rather than people who are doing work that Tucker would rather not do.
Over at the LA Review of Books, Philip Maciak also writes a double-review of Sepinwall and Martin's volumes, but he takes a more measured view than Tucker. He wishes both books made TV criticism more of a presence in their stories, and says its absence "haunts both books." This is partly because the shows Sepinwall and Martin fixate on (The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and the like) are so overwhelmingly male-driven, and modern TV criticism is so much more receptive to female writers, and feminist critique in mainstream publications, than many other popular art forms; there's too much testosterone on one side of the looking glass, and that's the side the books favor.
But for the most part, Maciak's view aligns with mine: Let's all step the eff back, stop furrowing our brows over what TV criticism should be or shouldn't be, and appreciate how astonishingly vibrant it is.
I've been a film critic for over twenty years, and a film and TV critic simultaneously for fifteen. I have never seen anything as innovative and thrilling as what a lot of my TV critic colleagues have been doing since the mid-aughts. The flowering of modes and styles and the willingness to experiment is always engaging and sometimes amazing.
Before I cherry-pick a few examples of what I mean, here's a qualifier: If TV is, as I've argued, an adolescent medium — not in terms of artistry, but timeline development, meaning it's only been given carte blanche to be daring for maybe fifteen years — TV criticism is an even younger phase of its development. There has always been good stuff; even back in the dark ages of the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, you could find writing that aspired to do more than tell you what's on and whether it's good. A few examples: Clive James of the Daily Telegraph, George W.S. Trow's landmark New Yorker piece "Within the Context of No Context," John J. O'Connor in the New York Times, Ron Powers of GQ, Tom Shales of the Washington Post (and now RogerEbert.com), Ken Tucker at Entertainment Weekly, Tom Carson at the Village Voice, and one of my New York Magazine predecessors, the great John Leonard, whose prose collapsed high and low art. As a teenager in Dallas, I read every published word by the Dallas Morning News' Ed Bark and the Dallas Times Herald's David Zurawik and Steven V. Reddicliffe (later one of Entertainment Weekly's founding editors). I had no idea how spoiled I was having access to three writers of that caliber — sharp, often hilarious critics who managed to take the whole of pop culture, politics, and morality into account even when dashing off 500 words on a Super Bowl halftime show or an offensive cola ad. Other markets had their own equivalents, if they were lucky — and a good many were lucky.
But as great as they were, or are, these critics were all generalists, and they tended to work in one of two major modes: consumer guide/reviewer, or freewheeling cultural critic. (The exception on that list is Trow, whose particular genius defies categorization; astonishingly, most of his lucid and insightful "No Context" manifesto was dictated into a tape recorder and then transcribed!) What's happening now, online for the most part, is an incremental expansion of TV criticism's possibilities. There are great examples of traditionalists or generalists, plus new (mostly young) critics who don't feel obligated to follow anyone's template for proper criticism, and who use hypertext links, video, GIFs, and social-media conversation to expand TV criticism's frontiers. Not every experiment works, and there's definitely a lot of wheel-spinning or clock-punching going on, but that was the case when newspapers and magazines were the only game in town, too; the pace has just accelerated, the number of platforms have multiplied, and all bets are off.
"If the past 15 years of television production tell us anything, it's that 'proper artistic questions' change and crumble over time," Maciak writes. "[Andre] Bazin and Kael and Sarris did not change film criticism by importing the conventions of literary criticism wholesale from Henry James and Trilling. […] Critics shouldn't be hamstrung by the intentions of a show's creator, nor should they be beholden to literary or cinematic constructions of value. Television criticism has not developed as a discourse simply by aping Kael and Sarris, nor has it thrived by listening faithfully to the hectoring pronouncements of those 'difficult men' Martin and Sepinwall profile. Kael and Sarris changed film criticism by creating a form specific to and worthy of the medium, and, just as the time to equate television series with junk food is over, it is now time to consider how the culture of online television commentary has expanded, rather than degraded, our critical culture."
Yes! Lord knows I've used the hamster-wheel comparison myself when talking about TV criticism, and there are times when I've agreed with The Wire creator David Simon's gripe that recap culture prizes the parts over the whole, and sometimes obscures the true purpose and value of good shows. But for the most part, I think this period of TV criticism is incredibly exciting, because it's so new and young and open to experimentation.
There are infinite variations of TV criticism — maybe we should say "coverage" instead, to differentiate imaginative writing that isn't really criticism and isn't trying to be. The kind that I practice is, as a friend pointed out, a strange merger of visual analysis, literary close-reading and bloggy psychodrama. My old beat partner Sepinwall, the fastest gun in this online Wild West, is much more interested in the practical aspects of storytelling and characterization than I am. He weaves in behind-the-scenes knowledge about how particular shows are made, and how the personalities of the writers and producer and directors might have influenced them. He's as much a reporter as he is a critic — the kind of writer whom twentieth-century editors might describe as "a newspaperman," one who happens to write online.
My predecessor in this job, The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, might be TV criticism's closest equivalent to a Pauline Kael — impassioned, funny, and conversational — but because she's more interested in the politics of representation than Kael ever was, that comparison will only take you so far. The Huffington Post's Maureen Ryan is great at a lot of things, but I most enjoy reading her on characterization and acting; there's an empathetic quality to her writing on fictional characters that makes me think that, in another life, she'd have been a great teacher, or therapist. Nearly all of Alyssa Rosenberg's writing at ThinkProgress has a strong, clear spine — the difference between TV's representation of life, and life, specifically the fine points of race, sex, and power — and because she writes regularly about film, politics, literature, comics, and other topics, one gets the sense that she's ultimately writing about life, and television is just one means to that end.
You could say the same about almost any other critic worth reading, come to think of it. When you read The Hollywood Reporter's Tim Goodman, Time's James Poniewozik, Grantland's Andy Greenwald, NPR's Linda Holmes, USA Today's Robert Bianco, Eric Deggans of the Tampa Bay Times (soon to be NPR's first TV critic), and the AV Club's Donna Bowman and Todd VanDerWerff, you always get the sense that the writers aren't just doing consumer guide work. They grind axes, float theories, tilt at windmills. And they all do it in their own distinctively personal way.
But these are all variations of what we traditionally think of as Serious Criticism, whether or not the writers crack jokes. Look beyond this mode and you get a sense of TV criticism's variety. The landscape is as dazzling and sometimes confounding as any young ecosystem's. The dedicated TV-watcher surveys it as Darwin might. How did that strange creature come into existence? What's the point of the plumage? Why five legs instead of four?
It's customary to decry much TV writing, recaps especially, as plot summary plus snark; I've done it myself. But as television criticism has evolved, this catch-all insult has started to seem as lazy and out-of-touch as cinephiles writing off the whole of television as an idiot box.
Even those sites that adopt a lighter touch — such as previously.tv, the new site from Television Without Pity's original founders — invest snark with imagination and a sense of play. Tara Ariano's "Schraders vs. Whites" chart and Newsroom recaps, the "watch/skip index," and "Ask the Experts" are all riffs, but not just riffs; the site's a welcome reminder that most people watch TV because it's fun. (Though they do get serious on occasion: see Sarah D. Bunting's appreciation of Tony Soprano as a prototypical Jersey dad.) Pajiba's Joanna Robinson does the most visually inventive recaps I've seen, using GIFs and screenshots as rimshots. At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Scott Eric Kaufman's detailed breakdowns of composition and editing liven up the recap with a dash of film theory.
Look beyond the writers who churn out thousands of words a week, and you'll find many insightful, sometimes powerful one-offs, such as Aura Bogado's piece accusing Orange Is the New Black of being unthinkingly racist even as it strives to enlighten. Bogado's target isn't just the show, but the complacent white liberal point-of-view that dominates criticism in every field, not just TV.
Tom and Lorenzo's style-oriented approach and Molly Lambert's Grantland pieces — on Mad Men, especially — are a breed apart. They're not recapping, exactly, and I don't know if they're reviewing or criticizing, either, but they're definitely feeling and responding, and noticing, and at their best, they make art from art. Tom and Lorenzo's coverage adopts an outside-in approach, looking at the clothes, architecture, colors, and textures, and then finding their way into the drama, but they do more straightforward criticism as well, and it's often dazzling.
Lambert's pieces seem to have been written from the not too distant future, by a novelist who's more interested in re-creating the general look and feel of an episode than sifting through granular detail. She treats the characters as prisms we peer through to see ourselves more clearly. "Is Don capable of doing something that doesn't benefit him directly in some way, even if it's just to stoke his sense of self?" she asks. "Is anyone? Or do we all secretly expect that our favors will be returned, our contracts honored, and our affections requited? How, then, to accept a reality where the world is always unpredictably shifting between loving attachment and utter indifference with regard to what we want from it? Get a cat."
The only thing these writers have in common is that they're not interested in satisfying preconceived notions of what criticism should be. They aren't losing sleep over answering the questions that some other critic believes are the "right" ones, or nudging TV coverage into line with the supposed grand traditions of older art forms. They're just writing. Sometimes the show is the whole point. Sometimes it's just a springboard for something else. If you don't like what any particular writer is doing, read somebody else. If you read enough TV criticism, you'll eventually find a byline worth returning to, believe me. The freer they are, and the more open-minded we are, the more impressive the landscape will become. This world is young.


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The porch thermometer still read 20 below — a small grace offered by the cloud cover that moved in overnight, because it could have dropped a lot lower. I asked the proprietor what he thought that meant for the temperatures on the trail. "Definitely 30 below," he said. "Probably 35 below in spots. There are some cold holes on the river."
For my hands, I used a pair of pogies on my trekking poles that Beat sewed out of a synthetic sleeping bag. In non-windy conditions, the pogies were all I needed. They enabled me to go bare-handed for nearly the entire trip, 35 below and all, which is why I was able to take so many photos and stuff my icy face with so many tasty carbohydrates and sips of water from my deeply buried Camelback vest. Photo-taking and food are my best coping mechanisms — the key to feeling healthy and happy the entire time. On my feet go Drymax socks (pure, blister-preventing gold), fleece socks and vapor barrier socks, with Gortex trail running shoes and knee-length winter gaters. Even with my prior frostbite damage, I never had issues with cold feet. On the morning of 35 below, I did add a primaloft puffy sweater to my ensemble. This proved to be unnecessary and ultimately a mistake of overdressing, but I didn't realize it at the time. I mean, really, it was 35 below.
"We should probably keep moving," I said. "Anne kept going."
Beat agreed that we should probably shouldn't fall too far behind Anne, but asked me if I wanted to go in and get warm. I did, but still hesitated. How could I explain this? It was Yentna Station where in 2009 I struggled in front of a weak wood stove, trying to remove the boot that had frozen to my foot. It's where I endured the agony of thawing frostbitten toes and coped with the crushing disappointment of dropping out of my second ITI 350 and ending my great Alaska adventure before it even really began. The proprietors at Yentna Station were nothing but nice to me, but it's still difficult to return to the place where I spent one of the worst nights of my life.
Beat saw my face and understood. "You don't have happy memories here, do you?"
"And, well," Anne said. "They knew we were coming up the river and they already started heating a cabin for us this morning. I don't know about you guys, but I don't have to practice being miserable."
It was settled before it was settled. This was, after all, our vacation, and setting back out to camp on the river when there was a perfectly good cabin at our disposal would only confirm our craziness. I couldn't wait to get my hands on some hot chocolate.


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Duane Hanson
Our editors will review what you've submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
- Born:
- January 17, 1925 Alexandria Minnesota
- Died:
- January 6, 1996 (aged 70) Boca Raton Florida
- Movement / Style:
- Photo-realism
Duane Hanson, in full Duane Elwood Hanson, (born January 17, 1925, Alexandria, Minnesota, U.S.—died January 6, 1996, Boca Raton, Florida), American figurative sculptor whose lifelike figures made of cast fibreglass and polyester resin and dressed in everyday clothes often fooled the public into believing that they were viewing real people. Because of its faithfulness to reality, Hanson's work is often categorized with that of the Photo-realist painters of the same era, who based their paintings on photographic images. Unlike the two-dimensional paintings, however, Hanson's three-dimensional objects, life-size and realistic down to the hair on their arms, are uncanny in that they are simultaneously familiar in their lifelike appearance and yet strange as static works of art.
Hanson received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1946. He continued his studies at the University of Minnesota and in 1951 completed an M.F.A. in sculpture at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Hanson taught for several years in Germany, where he met the German artist George Grygo, whose work in polyester resin and fibreglass had a great influence on his sculptures. Hanson returned to the United States and settled in Atlanta, where he taught art at Oglethorpe University and began his own experiments with polyester resin and fibreglass. From 1965 to 1969 Hanson lived in Miami. During that period, in 1967, he produced his first life-size work. After living in New York City for a short time, Hanson moved back to Florida in 1973 and spent the rest of his life there.
Like George Segal, an American sculptor whom Hanson greatly admired, he cast his figures from life. Hanson chose his model carefully and then posed him or her in a manner that would best capture his basic theme. (His earliest work showed figures in midmotion, but he preferred the effect he obtained with static poses.) Hanson then painted the cast figures, adding such precise details as mosquito bites or varicose veins. Finally, he clothed and accessorized his sculptures, using props as necessary. Often he created veritable tableaux or mini-installations with figures situated in real contexts with real things.
Hanson's subjects of the late 1960s were political, including war, gang victims, and the homeless. Though he later tempered his political message, he continued to address the largely thankless roles of the working class—housewives, repairmen, office cleaners, dishwashers, museum guards, and janitors, whose bowed heads and vacant gazes reveal boredom and exhaustion.


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"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'" — President Ronald Reagan
Those wise and yet haunting words spoken by one of our nation's greatest presidents couldn't ring more true — especially today, as winter sets in on an estimated 130,000 of our fellow Americans who are still struggling without power. Many live without heat, hot water or inhabitable homes and question the government's efforts to alleviate their condition.
Amid the election frenzy, several mainstream media outlets instantly praised the Obama administration's response to the Hurricane Sandy devastation in the Northeast. But let's look beneath the congratulatory headlines to see the real and horrifying picture of what's happening.
Right now, homeless Americans are literally freezing, wrapped in blankets and trash bags as they struggle to survive in FEMA tent cities such as New Jersey's "Camp Freedom," which reportedly "resembles a prison camp."
"Sitting there last night, you could see your breath," displaced resident Brian Sotelo told the Asbury Park Press. "At (Pine Belt), the Red Cross made an announcement that they were sending us to permanent structures up here that had just been redone, that had washing machines and hot showers and steady electric, and they sent us to tent city. We got (expletive)."
Sotelo said Blackhawk helicopters patrol the skies "all day and night," and a black car with tinted windows surveys the camp while the government moves heavy equipment past the tents at night. According to the story, reporters aren't even allowed in the fenced complex, where lines of displaced residents form outside portable toilets. Security guards are posted at every door, and residents can't even use the toilet or shower without first presenting ID.
"They treat us like we're prisoners," Ashley Sabol told Reuters. "It's bad to say, but we honestly feel like we're in a concentration camp."
Snow and icy slush seep into living areas through the bottoms of the government tents.
Meanwhile, officials are said to be banning residents from taking pictures and even cutting off Wi-Fi and power access.
"After everyone started complaining, and they found out we were contacting the press, they brought people in," Sotelo said. "Every time we plugged in an iPhone or something, the cops would come and unplug them."
He added: "Everybody is angry over here. It's like being in prison."
In New York, residents of Gerritsen Beach have banded together to survive.
"With all due respect to the federal issue, we're used to taking care of ourselves," Doreen Garson, the acting volunteer fire chief, told The Washington Post as area residents received hot meals outside a trailer. "I don't know what FEMA is really doing for anyone."
Some citizens say FEMA has distributed checks to fix their homes, but bureaucratic hurdles mean relief amounts are determined inconsistently and may be insufficient to cover damage. In some cases, the rebuilding funds are distributed even when reconstruction doesn't make sense because the destroyed homes are located in high-risk areas.
FEMA's bureaucratic tape is such a mess that states have had to hire consulting firms just to navigate the paperwork, with consultants earning as much as $180 an hour — all of which is billed to American taxpayers.
Meanwhile, FEMA — which previously provided trailers to victims of Hurricane Katrina that made residents sick from toxic levels of formaldehyde — will now bring more temporary homes to New York and New Jersey. The government assures us that this time the homes have been approved by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, FEMA failed to have bottled water and other supplies ready for storm victims — a week after the storm hit — and was forced to seek help from private vendors to meet residents' needs.
While generous citizens fill trucks with donations and goods for hurricane survivors, FEMA is reportedly demanding they stop — because the federal agency has "strict rules on what can and can't be accepted."
To make matters worse, FEMA now expects Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to appear before Congress and request a taxpayer bailout for FEMA flood-insurance operations while it burns through $200 to $300 million a day.
Where did we go wrong? The moment we began looking to government to fill the role of caretaker, provider and savior.
What happened to the days when communities and churches were the places Americans turned to for help? We need to get back to basics, where Americans care for our brothers and sisters and help them in times such as these.
In one brilliant example of communities banding together, Staten Island residents organized their own citizen-led team of volunteers and started a donation drive, bringing massive trucks of aid into their community from Virginia. They've worked with local churches, VFW posts and businesses to bring in needed supplies and help with cleanup efforts.
In yet another stunning example of private efforts, veterans of both the Israeli army and U.S. military descended on New York to help with rescue operations and relief assistance when the government was said to be absent.
Churches and businesses are reaching out to people who've been displaced, packing U-Haul trucks and 18-wheelers with food, diapers, blankets, toiletries and other needed goods.
"We decided that it wasn't enough for us to simply declare the gospel; we've got to demonstrate it," pastor Jerry Young said from New Hope Baptist Church in Mississippi. "What we're trying to do now is demonstrate the gospel."
Just as these grassroots volunteers have been sacrificing so much to help displaced citizens and clean up storm-ravaged areas in the Northeast, I urge America's citizen volunteers, churches and businesses to follow their examples.
Let's stop making the mistake of expecting government to be our savior in times like these.
We are told eight times in the Bible to love our neighbor. This Thanksgiving week, America has an extraordinary opportunity to do just that. Let's band together and show our fellow citizens that we care and we won't leave them to the "mercy" of the government in their time of need.
Follow Chuck Norris through his official social media sites, on Twitter @chucknorris and Facebook's "Official Chuck Norris Page." He blogs at: http://chucknorrisnews.blogspot.com.


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KISSIMMEE, Fla. — Dexter Fowler had two RBIs in his Houston debut and Chris Carter added a run-scoring double that helped the Astros beat the Atlanta Braves 7-5 Friday night.
Fowler was acquired from Colorado this offseason to play center field and bat leadoff. He put Houston up 2-1 in its spring training opener with a two-run single in the second inning that chased Braves starter Brandon Beachy. He was thrown out trying to stretch the hit into a double.
Fowler, who had spent his entire career with the Rockies, was excited to get things going with his new teammates.
"It was awesome," he said. "It's just good to be back on the field. You always feel like the offseason's long. Getting back and getting with a new team, and we did a lot of things right today."
Marc Krauss put the Astros ahead 3-2 with a ground-rule double in the fifth. Carter followed with a run-scoring double to left field.
Dan Uggla drove in two runs, and Freddie Freeman had two hits and an RBI for the Braves.
Delino DeShields and Marwin Gonzalez both drove in a run in the sixth for Houston.
Astros: Lucas Harrell allowed a hit and a run with four walks in two innings. He said he was a bit amped up in the first inning, but settled down and felt better in the second. He joked that walking so many Braves gave him a chance to practice working out of jams.
Braves: Beachy gave up five hits and two runs in 1 2-3 innings. The right-hander made just five starts last season after having reconstructive elbow surgery in 2012. He said he felt good on Friday night, but is eager to see how he feels on Saturday morning.
"I'm just going to keep going out there and keep doing what the training staff asks me to do," he said. "I feel pretty confident in the way I've been feeling and the way I'm going to feel. I've got April and October in mind and not today."
Astros: Manager Bo Porter isn't sure when right-hander Mark Appel, the first overall pick in the 2013 draft, will appear in a game this spring as he recovers from last month's emergency appendectomy. Appel reported to camp on time, but the Astros are bringing him along slowly.
"We actually haven't even talked about him getting into the game," Porter said. "The progress has been really good (with) him getting his bullpens done. We think that he's coming along quite well."
Braves: Catcher Gerald Laird remained out after leaving Thursday's game with a lower back strain. Manager Fredi Gonzalez said he was day to day.
Houston reliever Matt Albers took a sharp grounder hit by Freeman in the fourth inning the off the end of his glove and tumbled to the ground. He was a bit shaken up after the single, and remained sitting on his backside near the mound while his defense ended the inning by throwing Cunningham out at home.
"Luckily for us, he was fine and everything's OK," Porter said.


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Judge Blocks Florida Law Curbing Doctors' Questions About Guns
The pediatricians are on a roll. A federal judge in Florida has issued an injunction blocking a state law that would make doctors think twice before asking patients about guns.
Why would your doctor or your child's doctor want to know if you have guns at home? Well, having one in the house is a health risk. And the doctors want to be able to talk over those risks, and how to mitigate them.
Through their Florida chapters, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College of Physicians asked a federal judge to block a Florida law enacted this year that would have effectively barred doctors from talking with patients, or their guardians, about guns and gun safety.
The doctor groups, along with a half-dozen doctors, argued the law violated their First Amendment right to free speech.
But as Marion Hammer, the National Rifle Association's lobbyist in Tallahassee, told NPR in June, "We take our children to pediatricians for medical care — not moral judgment, not privacy intrusions." The NRA helped write the law.
The doctors won in court. U.S. District Court Judge Marcia Cooke of the Southern District of Florida, Miami Division, granted a preliminary injunction. In her analysis, she wrote:
At issue in this litigation is a law directed at maintaining patients' privacy rights regarding firearm ownership within the context of the doctor-patient relationship. In effect, however, the law curtails practitioners' ability to inquire about whether patients own firearms and burdens their ability to deliver a firearm safety message to patients, under certain circumstances.
She decided the right of doctors to free speech wouldn't interfere with gunowners' rights to bear arms. And, to the contrary, that the Florida law could chill free speech.
The court's decision "ensures that important conversations about firearm safety can continue to take place between doctors and patients," Dr. O. Marion Burton, president of the pediatricians' group said in a statement. "Parents often do not realize how easily a child can access a gun that is not locked, and we too often hear about the tragic consequences."
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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The new city center designed by Dutch architects MVRDV for Gwanggyo, a city coming up 35 kms from Seoul in South Korea seems to be something taken out of the sci fi movies. Expected to be completed by 2011, the city is sufficient enough to hold 77000 inhabitants and has a design envisioned with two centers which is a mix of housing, culture, office, retail, and leisure and education spaces. Various atriums are created in the towers catering to various categories, with box hedges being planted on the roofs and terraces which in turn improves ventilation and reduces usage of energy and water.
[Press Release]
MVRDV wins Gwanggyo City Centre Competition, near Seoul, South Korea
The Daewoo Consortium and the municipality of Gwanggyo announced the MVRDV concept design for a dense city centre winner of the developer's competition for the future new town of Gwanggyo, located 35km south of the Korean capital Seoul. The plan consists of a series of overgrown hill shaped buildings with great programmatic diversity, aiming for high urban density and encouragement of further developments around this so-called 'Power Centre', one of the envisioned two centre's of the future new town.
Since the beginning of the millennium local nodes with a high density concentration of mixed program are used in Korean town planning. These nodes consist of a mix of public, retail, culture, housing, offices and leisure generating life in new metropolitan areas and encouraging further developments around them: the Power Centre strategy. The Gwanggyo Power Centre will consist of 200,000m2 housing, 48,000m2 offices, 200,000m2 mix of culture, retail, leisure and education and 200,000m2 parking.
This diverse program has different needs for phasing, positioning and size. To facilitate this all elements are designed as rings. By pushing these rings outwards, every part of the program receives a terrace for outdoor life. Plantations around the terraces with a floor to floor circulation system store water and irrigate the plants. The roofs of these hills and the terraces are planted with box hedges creating a strong, recognizable, cohesive park. This vertical park will improve the climate and ventilation, reduce energy and water usage. As a result a series of overgrown green 'hills' appear in the landscape.
The site is surrounded by a beautiful lake and forested hills, the design aims to create a landscape on top of the new program that enlarges the green qualities and that links the surrounding parks by turning the site into a park.
The shifting of the floors causes as a counter effect hollow cores that form large atriums. They serve as lobbies for the housing and offices, plazas for the shopping center and halls for the museum and leisure functions. In each tower a number of voids connect to the atrium providing for light and ventilation and creating semi-public spaces. On the lower floors the atriums are connected through a series of public spaces on various levels linking the towers and serving the outdoor facilities of the culture, retail and leisure program. The Power Centre creates a dense urban program with a green regard.
The concept plan is currently at the Gyeonggi provincial authority's Urban Innovation Corporation for further development and feasibility study, the entire new town will be a self sufficient city of 77,000 inhabitants. The estimated budget and timeframe are still in the process of being established, completion is envisioned for 2011. A consortium lead by Daewoo develops the project with local firm DA Group, which commissioned MVRDV to design the scheme. British firm Arup is involved as engineer.
Designer : MVRDV via IGreenSpot via WordArchitectureNews


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Auberon Herbert on the "magic of private property" (1897)
Found in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays (1978 ed.)
The English radical individualist and Member of Parliament Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) appeals to ordinary workers to acquire property peacefully and to thereby enjoy one of the "master keys" to enjoying peace and prosperity:
If you surround property with state restrictions, interfere with free trade and any part of the open market, interfere with free contract, make compulsory arrangements for tenant and landowner, allow the present burdens of rate and tax to discourage ownership and penalize improvements, you will weaken the motives for acquiring property, and blunt the edge of the most powerful material instrument that exists for your own advancement. Only remember—as we have said—that great as is your material interest in safeguarding the rights of individual property, yet higher and greater are and ever will be the moral reasons that forbid our sanctioning any attack upon it, or our suffering state burdens and restrictions and impediments to grow round it. True liberty—as we said—cannot exist apart from the full rights of property; for property is—so to speak—only the crystallized form of free faculties.
This impassioned plea to the working class to give up the effort to achieve their goals through state intervention and regulation (via the Labour Party) came towards the end of Herbert's life (1897). By this time the radical liberals were in serious decline in England as they were overtaken by the rise of organised socialism and the mergence of the "new liberals" who accepted many of the ideas of the socialists. Herbert's strategy here was to argue that the working class too could become property owners (which of course is what happened in the late 20th century with the rise of home ownership and invested pensions) and thus enjoy the "magic of property" which he fervently believed was a "master key" which would open the doors of prosperity and material comfort to a class which had been previously excluded.