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Google tackles piracy by removing millions of URLs
A new Google report shows that piracy and copyright infringement are growing exponentially, with 1.2 million URL removal requests per month, and Microsoft seems to be a particular complainant.
Google is removing URLs from its search function, but before anyone cries foul, it's letting people know about it.
The tech giant released a new edition of its Transparency Report today, which shows who is requesting URLs be taken down, the copyright owners, and all the targeted domains since July 2011. Everything that's being deleted is allegedly copyrighted or pirated material -- mostly from software and entertainment companies.
Google has been releasing the Transparency Report for the last two years, but before today the only available information was government requests to remove content and disruptions in the search engine's traffic patterns. There wasn't a focus on piracy and copyright issues.
The new stats released today are telling. Of the millions of requests, Microsoft is the No. 1 complainer of copyright infringement, asking that a total of 2,544,209 URLs be removed. Coming in behind Microsoft are NBCUniversal, RIAA, BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), and Elegant Angel pornographic film studio. Google said it granted 97 percent of all requests between July and December 2011.
"As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly," Google's senior copyright counsel Fred von Lohmann said in a blog post today. "These days it's not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results."
Google noted that requests for products other than Google Search, such as YouTube or Blogger, are not included in the stats. It also said that it plans to update the numbers everyday, include a removal notice in the search results, and share all copies of copyright removal requests with Chilling Effects -- a nonprofit organization that collects these types of notices. If a URL has been removed, Google said the user responsible can submit a counter-notice if they believe the removal request was incorrect.
"We're starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason," von Lohmann wrote. "As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of different proposals to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion."
"Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don't want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws," von Lohmann wrote. "At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why."
Services and Software Guides
Streaming Services
Web Hosting & Websites
Other Services & Software


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Glossary - X
Click on letter to jump to the list of terms starting with that letter. Click on a term to jump to the full definition. The excerpts on this page show the first line of each definition.
- XC — Executive Committee (of the MIT Corporation)
- XPL — X Prize Lab at MIT
- xQIT — Extreme Quantum Information Theory, which will be studied in the W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory

subset: commoncrawl


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|Little Known Asian Animals With a Promising Economic Future
source ref: b18ase.htm
Asia has several domesticated animals about which little is known. Among them are the banteng ("Bali cattle") of Indonesia, the yak of Central Asia's high country, and the mithan of the border region of India, Burma, and Bangladesh.( *The promise of another Asian animal, the water buffalo, is described in companion report no 32. ) Some Asian farmers use domesticated bovine hybrids: the madura (banteng-cattle hybrid) in Indonesia and the yakow (yak-cattle hybrid) in Central Asia. In addition, domesticated forms of at least two Asian pig species (the Indonesian wild boar and the Sulawesi warty pig) are important husbandry animals in parts of Indonesia.
Among Asia's undomesticated animals are five interesting and potentially valuable species of wild bovines: the kouprey in Thailand, Laos, and Kampuchea; the gaur in India and much of Southeast Asia; two species of anoas in Indonesia; and the tamaraw in the Philippines. There are also three species of undomesticated Asian pigs: the bearded pig, the Javan warty pig and pigmy hog. Perhaps the strangest Asian animal of all is the babirusa, a piglike species of eastern Indonesia that may be a rudimentary ruminant.
Many of these animals are either threatened or endangered species, and some will soon be extinct unless scientists, governments, and resource managers take forceful action to preserve them. Scientific management and a better understanding of the animals themselves is required.
An important need is to investigate their potential as livestock resources. All seem to be disease resistant and well adapted to difficult natural conditions. Some will interbreed with conventional livestock and might thereby pass on important characters to hybrid progeny. A few of the wild species are ancestors of domestic livestock and could be important genetic reservoirs for maintaining or improving the quality of their domestic descendants. Others may make useful new domesticates.
Appreciation of their potential in the long-term for the world's agricultural development could create a momentum for the protection, preservation, and greater use of these little-known animals.
Imported Livestock
In the past, many thought that the best way to raise animal productivity in tropical developing countries was to introduce high-performing breeds from temperate industrialized areas. The fact that the exotic animals were much more productive than local stock made this seem very appealing. But many such importations ended in failure when the animals either quickly died or their growth or reproduction rates declined so drastically that the herds dwindled away or became uneconomic. These introductions had been made without adequate consideration of the local environment that was expected to support the imported animal.
More recently, some animal scientists have decried the idea of wholesale importing of temperate-zone livestock into tropical countries without also evaluating the indigenous livestock. In many cases the local animals' apparent poor performance results not from their lack of genetic potential, but from inadequate feeding, breeding, selection, management, and health care.
Indigenous Animals
Until an objective evaluation of particular indigenous breeds is undertaken, governments should regard local animals as vitally important for the long-term development of their domestic livestock industries.
To achieve an agriculture that is compatible with nature, we should try to raise an animal as much as possible within its own natural environment. Indigenous species are necessarily well adapted to their surroundings and have survival qualities that imported livestock often lack. They generally select food, either graze or browse, better than foreign species and can therefore exploit the habitat more efficiently and live within it more harmoniously.
But most of the livestock species the world depends on today are best adapted to temperate conditions. This is because Stone Age peoples in what today are Europe, the Middle East, and eastern China domesticated the prototypes of agricultural animals that were available in those places. The world's best-known breeds of cattle, wool sheep, and horses, for example, usually perform well in temperate regions and poorly in the tropics.
The species described in this report offer promise as new and important alternative livestock resources for tropical regions.
Embryo Transplants
It seems likely that modern technology will substantially improve our ability to use new species and breeds of livestock. One of the most encouraging of the new biotechnology techniques is embryo transplantation. In this process multiple eggs (produced by hormonally stimulating female animals) are fertilized and transplanted to other female animals. The hormonal cycles of the donor and receiving animals are synchronized so that a pregnancy results.
This technique is widely used to transfer embryos between cattle, but researchers are now exploring transfers between different species and even between different genera. In 1981, for example, animal scientists at the New York Zoological Garden transplanted a fertilized gaur ovum into a Holstein cow, which carried the gaur calf to term. Now veterinarians at the University of Florida are attempting to transplant water buffalo embryos into both zebu and Holstein-Friesian cattle, and vice versa. If such pioneering work can become everyday practice, it will open possibilities of using common livestock to raise rare animals.
Moreover, because embryos are thought to be free of many diseases, their shipment between nations may soon be permitted without elaborate quarantine precautions. Methods for freezing embryos have been worked out so that the tiny bundles of cells can be air freighted inexpensively in small, insulated containers. This may make animals such as those discussed in this report available to Africans, Latin Americans, North Americans, and Europeans. It may vastly simplify the worldwide exchange of animal genetic material and become the animal counterpart of exchanging seeds.
An additional benefit of embryo transplants is that the surrogate mother's placental blood supply provides the fetus with natural immunity to some local diseases, thus perhaps reducing one of the most serious causes of failure when exotic animals are introduced to new environments. And at Utah State University it has been noted that raising wildsheep embryos in domestic ewes produces lambs that are more docile than if they were raised by their biological mothers. Embryo transplants may be a small step toward domesticating new animals.
With these possibilities on the horizon, it becomes even more important that all countries preserve their indigenous animals. The rest of this report suggests and discusses Asian species for protection and study.


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Press Release
Port Arthur Man Sentenced In Kidnapping And Carjacking Scheme
For Immediate Release
U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Texas
Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
BEAUMONT, Texas – A 33-year-old Port Arthur, Texas man has been sentenced to federal prison in a carjacking case as a result of Operation Time Machine in the Eastern District of Texas, announced U.S. Attorney John M. Bales today.
Luan Van Nguyen, aka, Kevin Nguyen, was found guilty by a jury on Aug. 2, 2012, of carjacking, conspiracy to commit carjacking, and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a violent crime. Nguyen was sentenced to 330 months in federal prison today by U.S. District Judge Thad Heartfield.
According to information presented in court, from July 16, 2010 to Aug. 6, 2010, Nguyen conspired with two fellow Port Arthur men, Patrick Allen Chaney and Rigoberto Gaytan Valenzia, to kidnap a 24-year-old Port Arthur man and hold him for ransom. Chaney and Valenzia had both previously performed construction work for Nguyen, who was a construction contractor. Nguyen approached Chaney and Valenzia and asked them to help kidnap the victim and promised to share a portion of the ransom proceeds, which was to be paid by the victim's family. Prior to the kidnapping, Chaney, Valenzia, and Nguyen traveled together on one or more occasions to conduct surveillance on the victim and the victim's family. Nguyen was a friend of the victim's family and knew that the victim had a job doing computer repair work. Nguyen's plan was to lure the victim to an vacant house in Port Arthur by having Chaney make a fictitious service call for computer repair. On Aug. 5, 2010, at approximately 6:30 p.m., Chaney, using the alias "Gary Underwood," called the victim on his cell phone and asked the victim to fix a computer.
On Aug. 6, 2010, from approximately 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., Chaney, using the same alias, "Gary Underwood," made multiple phone calls to the victim's cell phone and the victim's employer, specifically requesting that the victim be sent to do the computer repair. Chaney instructed the victim to meet him at 3748 Proctor Street in Port Arthur, in order to pick up the computer. At approximately 3:00 p.m., Chaney met the victim at 3748 Proctor Street and was able to lure him into the house. Upon entering the house, Valenzia confronted the victim with a short-barreled shotgun and told the victim to lay face down on the floor and not to move or else he would shoot the victim. Chaney proceeded to blind-fold the victim and bound the victim's hands with duct tape. Valenzia and Chaney then put the victim into Valenzia's van, bound his feet with duct tape, and then removed the victim's car keys and cell phone. Chaney took the victim's car which was parked in the driveway. Nguyen drove up to the residence and instructed Chaney to follow Nguyen in the victim's vehicle while Valenzia transported the victim. Chaney and Nguyen then abandoned the victim's vehicle behind a business on 8th Street and 9th Avenue in order to conceal the location of the kidnaping from law enforcement.
Valenzia took a large knife and placed it against the victim's neck and leg, and told the victim that he would cut him if he moved. Valenzia left the residence in his van with the victim still bound in the back and planned to take the victim back to his apartment. While in route, the victim was able to maneuver to the front of the vehicle and lodge himself against Valenzia and the inside wall of the van. Valenzia choked the victim with his hands in order to try and regain control over him. After a brief struggle, Valenzia stopped the vehicle and opened the driver's side door in order to free himself. Once the door was opened, the victim fell out of the vehicle, managed to free one of his legs, and was able to run to a nearby business for help. A passing motorist observed the victim escaping from the vehicle and called Port Arthur Police. Valenzia left the scene and then called Nguyen on his cell phone and informed him that the victim had escaped. Valenzia attempted to flee in the van, but was later apprehended by Port Arthur Police officers. Port Arthur Police recovered the shotgun used in the kidnapping and carjacking. Chaney voluntarily surrendered to Port Arthur Police on Aug. 13, 2010. A federal grand jury returned an indictment on Sep. 8, 2010, charging Valenzia, Nguyen, and Chaney with federal violations.
The evidence at trial showed that Nguyen fled Port Arthur on Aug. 16, 2010 after he learned federal investigators were investigating him for his role in the kidnaping and carjacking. He was at large for over a year, and was eventually arrested in Houston, Texas on Dec. 14, 2011.
Phone records showed that Nguyen repeatedly called Chaney and Valenzia on the day of the kidnaping and carjacking, and instructed them on how to carry out the crime.
This case was prosecuted as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods' Operation Time Machine program in partnership with the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office. Operation Time Machine is aimed at reducing gun and gang violence, deterring illegal possession of guns, ammunition and body armor, and improving the safety of residents in Port Arthur, Texas. Participants in the initiative include community members and organizations as well as federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
Chaney pleaded guilty to carjacking and was sentenced on Aug. 9, 2011, to 97 months in federal prison. Valenzia pleaded guilty to carjacking and was sentenced on Apr. 20, 2011 to 116 months in federal prison. Chaney and Valenzia were also convicted of state charges for aggravated kidnapping and were both sentenced to 5 years in the Texas Department of Corrections. During sentencing, Judge Heartfield referred to Nguyen as the "puppeteer" and his co-defendants as the "puppets" in this scheme.
This case was investigated by the Port Arthur Police Department and the ATF and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Baylor Wortham and Assistant U.S. Attorney John Ross.
Updated March 12, 2015


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We've heard a lot about the 200-plus new features in iOS 6, but how will this upgrade affect performance? To find out, I grabbed a stack of iOS devices from the Macworld Lab and did some before-and-after testing to see whether iOS 6 performance was faster, slower, or the same as under iOS 5.1.1.
iOS 6 benchmarks: Geekbench
iOS 6 benchmarks: Page Load
I ran a series of six tests on an iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and a third-generation iPad. I found subtle performance differences between the two versions of iOS. GeekBench scores with iOS 6 were within one percent of the iOS 5.1.1 scores. Page load times were less than half a second faster using the new version of iOS.
iOS 6 benchmarks: SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
There were, however, three tests that showed larger differences. The iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and third-generation iPad were all 20 percent faster at the SunSpider 0.9.1 JavaScript benchmark when running iOS 6. The iPhone 4 was 17 percent faster on this test in iOS 6.
iOS 6 benchmarks: GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen
iOS 6 benchmarks: GLBenchmark Pro Offscreen
The GLBenchmark test also showed real performance differences, but the results weren't as cut and dried as the JavaScript results. The iPhone 4 displayed the same number of frames per second in the Egypt Offscreen Test, regardless of the version of the iOS. The Pro test, also run offscreen, showed iPhone 4 performance that's practically identical. The iPhone 4S was less that 1 percent faster on the Egypt test, but 2.5 percent faster on the Pro trials when running iOS 6. The iPad 2 was 4 percent faster in the Egypt test running iOS 5.1.1, but the Pro test results were nearly identical.
The third-generation iPad showed the biggest performance difference—unfortunately, it wasn't in the ideal direction. iOS 5.1.1 outperformed iOS 6 by just under 3 percent in the Pro offscreen test, the Egypt offscreen test was nearly 11 percent faster under the old OS.
iOS 6 benchmarks: WebVizBench
WebVizBench, an HTML 5 benchmark, showed identical performance for the iPhone 4 and iPad 2, but significant gains in performance for iOS 6 on the iPhone 4S and third-generation iPad: 20 percent and 7 percent, respectively.
While these results may sway your decision to upgrade your iOS, at least we now know that there is no significant performance downside to doing so.
Check back soon for battery life results for these devices, as well as test results for the new iPhone 5.


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Cancer Centers of Colorado
340 Exempla Circle, 1st Floor
Lafayette, CO 80026-3384
Care and Support
Your care team
Our cancer care teams know that great care is the result of seamless communication between you, your family and your existing healthcare providers. When you have this kind of collaboration, you can expect a more efficient, effective and tailored approach to meeting your individual needs.
Brain cancer nurse navigators
One of your key team members is your nurse navigator, who serves as a patient educator and care guide focused on improving your cancer treatment experience. Your nurse navigator will assist you at every stage, help you understand your diagnosis and treatment options and coordinate care between your physician, surgeon and other support teams.
Learn more about your cancer care team.
Life beyond brain cancer
With improvements in technology and the coordination of care, more patients are surviving brain cancer than ever before. Our survivorship program gives you access to specialists who partner with you for your post-treatment. This program focuses on nutritional goals, healthy living, emotional well-being and physical, speech and occupational therapy rehabilitation when you need it.
We'll also help you set up regular medical checkups with your primary doctor to prevent, detect and manage any complications related to your cancer or cancer treatment. Because you may be at higher risk for second cancers, screening and surveillance are essential to your long-term health.
Survivorship care
Talk with your doctor about developing a survivorship care plan. This document will summarize the cancer treatment you received and outline the medical guidance you'll need as you transition to living beyond cancer.


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Give your party guests a So Fresh - Lemon themed Hershey's® Kisses® party favor to enjoy during the event or take home and enjoy later. This set of So Fresh - Lemon Hershey's® Kisses® stickers are a fun way to add a little flair to all areas of your party. Simply peel and stick each label to the bottom of a chocolate Kisses® candy, LifeSavers® candy or any other similar-sized round candy. Use your decorated candies scattered down the length of your buffet table, at your candy buffet or in party favor bags for your guests to take home. Each set of 108 stickers comes with 4 coordinating designs that everyone will adore. Hershey's® Kisses® stickers are the party supply you have been looking for to add a little extra touch to your celebration.
So Fresh - Lemon - Citrus Lemonade Party Hershey's® Kisses® Sticker Labels
- Set of 108 sticker labels in 4 coordinating designs
- Note: Kisses® are a trademark of the Hershey® Company and LifeSavers® candies are a trademark of the WM. Wrigley Jr. Company. Big Dot of Happiness, LLC is not associated with any Hershey® or LifeSavers® candies mentioned.
- Easy assembly - peel and stick to the bottom of Hershey's® Kisses®!
- Each label measures .75" in diameter and will fit Hershey's® Kisses®, LifeSavers® candy or any other similar-sized round candy
- Hershey's® Kisses® and LifeSavers® candy are NOT included but are available at your local grocery store.


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Ray-Ban was founded in 1937 with a lightweight pair of aviator sunglasses. Made of mineral glass to filter out infrared and ultraviolet rays, they became standard issue for US Army Air Corps pilots. In '52, they introduced the classic black Wayfarer. Both styles remain unflinchingly stylish and have gone on to be the best-selling sunglasses in the world. If you want the quality, style and history without the ubiquity, Ray-Ban just introduced a new, vintage-inspired style called the Meteor. With a midcentury-influenced design along with throwback colors and durable crystal lenses, they make ideal everyday shades whether you're dressed up or down. So even if you can't jet to a mid-winter vacation, at least you can block the sun in style.
From $145 (with free shipping) by Ray-Ban
© Copyright 2023 Valet Media LLC - All Rights Reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions


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Home - Memory of Mankind
A time capsule for the long now. Laser-etched ceramic tablets in an Austrian salt mine carry memories of our civilisation in three categories: news editorials, scientific works, and personal stories.
You can contribute a personal story, your favorite poem, or newspaper articles which describe our problems, visions or our daily life.
Tokens that mark the location of the site are also being distributed across the planet.


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Librarian Nancy Pearl's Picks For The Omnivorous Reader
I'm often asked how I choose the books that I'm going to talk about on Morning Edition's "Under the Radar" segments. Simple: I just pick some of the titles that I've most enjoyed since the last time I was on, without concern for whether they're fiction or nonfiction, genre or not, or aimed or classified as being for children or teens.
Because I am an omnivorous reader, at first glance my choices always seem to me to be completely higgledy-piggledy, with no book bearing any similarity to any other. Certainly some of these books have elements in common. Among Others and The Double Game could both be described as "booky." America Aflame and Color of Lightning are both about the Civil War. But beyond that, I can't see much that these titles have in common with one another besides my deep enjoyment of them.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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The Lamp in Hakone
Lemons into Lemonade
Down below I have a story of how things looked rotten then turned right as rain. Do you have a photo-story like that – where things looked horrible then turned out okay?
Daily Photo – The Lamp in Hakone
The entire time I was in Hakone, it would not stop raining. This is not a great thing, when you finally make it to a place you are very excited about and there is a torrential downpour. So what to do? Well I didn't want to walk away empty-carded (new word I just made up – feel free to use it!), so I lugged out the umbrella and took a stroll to see what I could find. And now, I'm happy I did.


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Architects: Bora Architects
Photographs:Jon Jensen
Manufacturers: Andersen Windows & Doors, Ann Sacks, Bear Creek Lumber, Bruce and Dana, Central Coast Landscaping, Chown Hardware, Edgetech, Mari Design, Mark Newman, Oregon Tile and Marble, Royal Oak Metal Craft, Spark Modern Fires, Viridian, Viridian Wood
Text description provided by the architects. This coastal residence is an exploration in erasing boundaries between indoors and out. Sited on the bay side of a peninsula on the Oregon Coast, the 2,865 square-foot home opens to the natural landscape with 180-degree views. The design employs a duality of openness and expansive views with spaces that are private and quiet. The residence is organized in three parts, joined in U-shape formation around a central courtyard fronting the view.
The upper floor in the largest of the two buildings is extensively glass-walled. Windows crescendo from 8 to 15-feet tall at the most outward facing point. A large covered deck extends the indoor footprint by nearly an additional 1/3, joining the massing of the residence, framing an outdoor invisible wall. The lower level is more private, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a flex room--a space that converts open living area into a guest bedroom by pulling two eight-foot sliding hemlock accordion pocket panels to form walls.
Native Shore Pines with a dwarfed growth habit shelter the lower level with privacy. On the upper level, the experience is one of suspension as one's feet are just slightly above the treeline. The second building combines a 295 square-foot office and bathroom with a garage below. A hybrid copper rooftop, formed by cross-pollinating the typology of a shed and dormer roof, forms an origami-joined ceiling in the office area.
A 45-foot long covered walkway sided in horizontal slats forms the base of the U-shape. The landscaped courtyard fuses building with walkway, creating focus on where interior and exterior spaces merge. At night, the residence appears as a lantern, and the central courtyard is its hearth.


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Posted by : Rev. Ouabache | Monday, January 31, 2011 | Published in discordianism, jake, larf, troll, unintentional irony, video
That's right. On this day, the promoters of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters created an all out terror panic in Boston simply by putting up some promotional Lite Brites that the police mistook for IEDs.
Wikipedia article.
What followed during the aftermath was the best press conference ever!
Tone It Down!
Posted by : Rev. Ouabache | Thursday, January 27, 2011 | Published in activism, discordianism, language, memes, meta, skepticism
And all of those conversations were shit. I'm not going to include any links in this post because I feel your time is too important to waste on such trivialities. All of them can be summed up as followed:
A: "You should be nicer to people. People like it when you are nice to them."
B: "Whateva! I do what I want!!!"
As a Discordian I am all for internal strife because it helps to get rid of the riff-raff and pantywaists who weren't going to put in any effort anyways. But at some point you have to stop having committee meetings and backstabbing contests and get shit done. If you notice, while everyone was talking amongst themselves about how best to get their message across no one was actually working to get the message across. An outsider who came along wanting pertinent information was met with a bunch of monkeys throwing shit at each other.
The thing is no single tone works to get the message across. No two people communicate the same and no two people receive messages the same. What works in one situation might not work in another. We need as many voices as possible translating the message into their own personal language. We need people saying that Christians can believe in evolution as well as people saying that the Bible is all bullshit. Yes, being nice attracts people to your side but being a dick is more entertaining.
So please, for the sake of everyone can we stop fucking yelling at each other and go back to yelling at the world?
Uncomfortable Trutthasaurus
Posted by : Rev. Ouabache | Sunday, January 23, 2011 | Published in fate, larf, troll, unintentional irony
The Scariest Horror Movie You Will Ever See
Posted by : Rev. Ouabache | Thursday, January 20, 2011 | Published in Christianity, creationism, politics, religion, video
The scary part is that every single thing in this movie is 100% true. As far as I know nothing was scripted. This is not a work of satire and there is not a hint of irony involved. The camp in this movie no longer exists but there are tens of thousands of people scattered throughout America that look, think, and act like this. I know, because I've met them before. This is what fundamentalist Christians actually believe. Hopefully you'll still be able to sleep at night after this.
Also: LOL, Ted Haggard!
I Believe...
Posted by : Rev. Ouabache | Tuesday, January 18, 2011 | Published in atheism, discordianism, fate, law of fives, religion, skepticism
For some reason both atheists and Discordians have been stereotyped as people who don't believe in anything. Atheists because people often confuse it with nihilism (thank Nietzsche for that). And Discordians because people often confuse it with absurdism (and Robert Anton Wilson was a big proponent of Model Agnosticism). I, however, am not afraid to admit that there are things that I believe in. And yes, some of the things that I believe in based on nothing more than optimistic faith that the world isn't a complete pile of shit. Some of the things that I currently believe in:
I believe that humans are simultaneously the best and worst thing to happen to this planet. Us humans have made this tiny blue and green orb in the middle of a rather boring galaxy into a compelling story with a heavy underdog overcoming substantial odds to rise to the top of the heap. On the other hand there is a non-zero chance that we will destroy all life on this planet someday.
I also believe that as humans we are all that we have. There is no Superman, Spiderman or the Second Coming of Jesus to rescue us from ourselves. If we are to solve our problems we must rely on one another, quit our bitching and fix the goddamn problems. Then again, usually we are the problem in the first place. We can't get out of our own way because everyone wants what they want.
I believe that justice, purpose, beauty, good and evil do not exist outside of the human mind. But that doesn't mean that they aren't real.
Life will never be fair but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try with all of our might to tip the scales into the right direction. Never be afraid to overcompensate those who have been wronged.
We have to create our own purpose in life outside of breathing, eating, and reproducing. Do what you must to make the world a better place for those that come after you. Learn, laugh, love, cry. Connect with other people. Enjoy the people that you love. Torment the people that you hate.
There are no sins other than harming another. That's not always an easy thing to determine though. What hurts one may help another. There's never an easy answer. Choose as best you can and beg for forgiveness and empathy when it doesn't turn out like you hoped.
I believe that logic, empiricism, and rationality will also win out over metaphysical guesswork. As Tim Minchin said, "Throughout history every mystery EVER solved has turned out to be Not Magic." Wishful thinking and talking to the ceiling will make you feel better but at some point you are going to have to get off of your knees and do the hard work. Likewise, if you really care about knowing the truth then you must have enough courage for your ideas to be tested to the breaking point.
I believe that Chaos is the most powerful force in the universe. The ability to create Order from Disorder and Disorder from Order is the closest to magic we will ever have. Unexpected creation/destruction has an amazing effect of producing both horror and mirth at the same time. It can evoke joy and sadness, trust and disgust, fear and anger, surprise and anticipation all at the same time. And it will never be the same emotions between different people. Chaos needs us to tell the story. And no two stories are the same.
And most of all, I believe that I'll have another beer.
Etc. Discordia
Posted by : Rev. Ouabache | Monday, January 17, 2011 | Published in discordianism, irreligion
In 1958 or 1959 (we're not sure which), Eris, the Goddess of Confusion, sent an Emperor Penguin to a bowling alley in California. It appeared before Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst and inspired them to create the Discordian Society: a tribe of philosophers, theologians, magicians, scientists, artists, clowns, and similar maniacs.
The Et Cetera Discordia proudly celebrates 50th the anniversary of this prophetic vision. It is a collage of the funny, weird, and often profound writings and art created by numerous modern (and post-modern) Discordians. This book is an invitation to join them in exploring, celebrating, and remixing this strange and exciting century
A bit of background: Triple Zero and Cramulus had this idea back in 2008. The original idea was to create a quick one-shot internet forum which gathered content for quick publication of a new Discordian text celebrating Discordia's 50th anniversary. So we threw THE PARTY AT LIMBO PEAK, an intentionally shortlived Internet forum, where people could post anonymously and then later unmask themselves at the end of the party. The project got out of control and we took a million years to finish it. And the finished product is a beautiful 128 page paperback, the latest addition to Grand and Glory Old Discordjia!
The Etc. Discordia can be purchased in paperback or downloaded for free in PDF form here.
et cetera discordia
I'm Sorry You Were Offended
Posted by : Rev. Ouabache | Friday, January 14, 2011 | Published in irreligion, language, larf, satire, troll, video
On the Origins of Everything
Posted by : Rev. Ouabache | Thursday, January 6, 2011 | Published in beginning, creationism, evolution, irreligion, religion, science, skepticism
At some point some of those reptiles developed fur to help keep themselves warm. Some of these mammals roamed the forests and learn how to climb through the trees. But then the trees were not good enough for them so they came back down to the ground and formed tribes to keep each other safe. These upright apes roamed the lands hunting down other animals until that wasn't good enough either. They settled down, built huts to live in, and started planting their own food rather than searching constantly for it. At some point they learned how to read, write, do math, harness electricity, and kill each other very effectively. It's all been down hill from there.
As for the purpose of all this, it doesn't exist outside of your mind. However we constantly want purpose to be there so we start making stuff up until the world makes sense again. Some stuff actually does make sense. Others don't because we just don't have enough information. A lot of times the made up stuff is more interesting and exciting than the real truth. But that some people's made up stuff is very different from other people's made up stuff. That is the main reason why we learned to kill each other so effectively...


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Facebook has rolled out a new API (application programming interface) that has crippled most of the connections Microsoft built into its mobile and desktop apps to link with Facebook calendars, contacts and photos.
The change to the Graph API -- triggered by Facebook's desire to give users more control over what they shared with third-party apps -- was first broached in April 2014. Facebook gave outside developers a year to switch to Graph 2.0.
Microsoft passed on making the changes in its apps and services.
"Facebook has made an update to their Graph API that will impact Microsoft apps and services," Microsoft said in a document recently published on its support site. "Due to these changes, Facebook Connect features will no longer be supported."
"Facebook Connect" is the term for synchronizing content from Facebook with other applications and services.
In Microsoft's case, Facebook Connect brought Facebook contacts and calendars into Office 365, Outlook.com, Windows, and the Windows 8 and 8.1 People and Calendar apps. It also allowed other Microsoft apps, including Movie Maker, OneDrive, Photos and Photo Gallery to sync and share Facebook content.
The synchronization between Facebook and Microsoft's apps and services stopped working on June 9.
Microsoft declined to answer questions about whether the breakage was permanent, and why it decided not to upgrade its apps to the new Graph 2.0 API, implying that the sharing was dead.
Facebook also declined to comment.
It's unclear which side, Microsoft or Facebook, is responsible for the broken connections. Although Facebook gave developers a year to make changes to their apps -- to use the new API -- the Menlo Park, Calif. company's new rules made it impossible for the kind of information sharing Microsoft had previously enabled.
That's because Graph 2.0 allows Facebook users to share only their own information with third-party apps; they can no longer share friends' data, such as contact information -- the key to bringing Facebook friends into Microsoft apps like People on Windows 8.1 -- those friends' photographs, or birthdays and other events. The latter two were the extent of the calendar sharing between Facebook and Microsoft's software.


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Do you think the damage from the pending bankruptcy of the city of Detroit will be limited to Detroit? Think again.
Detroit is partly the victim of economic trends far beyond its control, the downsizing and outsourcing of the auto industry and the collapse of the sub-prime bubble, to name just two. And yes, the city has suffered from corrupt and inept local government. But leaving Detroit to a bankruptcy process that favors investment bankers over local pensioners will neither provide a fair outcome nor contain the damage.
In the past two weeks, other Michigan cities and counties, including Saginaw and Battle Creek, have had to postpone bond issues, as the damage from the Detroit bankruptcy spills over. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, who hoped to whack both public employees and the heavily Democratic city of Detroit by promoting bankruptcy, could end up shooting himself and his state in the foot.
Those who hope to use the pain of cities to undermine public employee pensions are playing with fire. One of the striking government failures of the era since the collapse of 2008 is that the federal government has done so little to help municipalities whose revenues were doubly hit by the subprime collapse and the recession itself. In the absence of aid, we can expect a prolonged era of dwindling services and scapegoated public workers and retirees.
It is a travesty that the federal government and the Michigan state government are not sending Detroit a lifeline. Other cities and states stand to lose both public services and pension benefits as this trend spreads. Chicago, which just suffered three levels of bond-downgrading, looks to be next.
Some background: In 1975, New York City very nearly went bankrupt. It faced a financial crisis and was unable to roll over maturing bonds. When Mayor Abe Beame appealed to Washington for help, President Ford initially refused, prompting the famous headline in the New York Daily News, "Ford to City: Drop Dead."
But that was a different era and in the end, Ford did approve $2.3 billion in federal loans. The New York State government, through a hastily legislated Municipal Assistance Corporation, agreed to refinance the city's debt, subjecting it to a rigorous supervision process. The Big Apple avoided bankruptcy, its economy recovered -- and New York is now home to the wildly profitable financial industry that is destroying Detroit in order to protect bankers.
In contrast to President Ford and New York's then Democratic governor Hugh Carey, Michigan's Republican governor Rick Snyder was happy to collude with Wall Street by embracing a bankruptcy proceeding rigged in favor of investment banks. And President Obama, who successfully sponsored a recapitalizing of the auto industry, is staying far away from Detroit this time.
These policies are short-sighted as well as cruel. If you think about it, many of Detroit's citizens are getting screwed both as debtors and as creditors. With the city having lost tax revenues in the housing collapse and property values at rock bottom, most homeowners with mortgages -- debtors -- can't qualify for refinancing. But many of the same people are also creditors, they city owes them pensions.
In principle, a bankruptcy proceeding is a system for fairly allocating claims when a debtor can't service all of its debts. The Michigan state constitution guarantees that Detroit pensioners will be paid what they are owed. Even Michigan's Republican attorney general, Bill Schuette, agrees that the constitutional protection is binding.
But the most recent changes (2005) in the federal bankruptcy law, lobbied for by Wall Street, put bankers in line ahead of pensioners. As attorney, author and debt expert Ellen Brown explains, this special-interest provision gives credit default swaps held by banks priority over other forms of debt. So banks that speculated in Detroit's debt stand to get paid ahead of ordinary bondholders and pensioners.
As Brown writes:
Derivative claims are considered "secured" because the players must post collateral to play. They get not just priority but "super-priority" in bankruptcy, meaning they go first before all others, a deal pushed through by Wall Street in the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005. Meanwhile, the municipal workers, whose pensions are theoretically protected under the Michigan Constitution, are classified as "unsecured" claimants who will get the scraps after the secured creditors put in their claims. The banking casino, it seems, trumps even the state constitution. The banks win and the workers lose once again.
The average pension owed to Detroit municipal workers, incidentally, is just $1,900 a month, and only 4 percent of Detroit's general revenues go to pensions. According to AFSCME President Lee Saunders, Detroit's non-uniformed public workers have already had pensions cut by 40 percent.
As we saw in the Wisconsin assault on collective bargaining for public employees and most recently in the San Francisco area BART strike, all public workers are losing public sympathy because wages, pension and health benefits have declined even faster in the private sector, leaving regular people to conclude that government employees have it too good. In fact, a study by pension expert Alicia Munnell finds that average state and local employee pensions are well below level needed to maintain living standards in retirement. Wall Street must be chortling, as ordinary workers blame civil servants rather than bankers.
But the assault on public workers and pensioners will continue to spread until citizens generally start appreciating that the culprit is not "over paid" public employees but a banker-dominated system that undermines decent living standards for public and private workers alike.
Robert Kuttner's new book is Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior Fellow at Demos.


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Posts Tagged As: Transgender Law and Policy Institute
May 30th, 2008
The American Psychiatric Association has convened several panels to discuss revisions to the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual (DSM), which is currently in its fourth edition (DSM-IV). It's a standard practice for the APA to revise the manual every decade or so in order to incorporate knowledge generated by more current research.
The APA has begun the work of compiling the data for DSM-V, and that process has sparked several strange rumors around the Internet that really didn't ring true with me. According to a few of these rumors, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is poised to either reinstate homosexuality in the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual (DSM), or that the APA was going to decide to approve of sexual reorientation therapy. There is nothing however to suggest that anything like that will be happening.
But most of these rumors surround the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (GID), which is of particular interest to the transgender community. These rumors are centered around two researchers who have been appointed to some of the working groups: Kenneth Zucker, who chairs the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders work group, and Ray Blanchard, who chairs the Paraphilias subworkgroup under Zucker.
To understand transgender people's concern about these two appointments, some background is in order. Kenneth Zucker and Ray Blanchard are associated with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada. This center resulted from the merger of four mental health centers, one of which was the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. The Clarke Institute was the referral agency for transgender clients who wanted to surgically transition.
Many transgender clients found their treatment in the hands of the Clarke Institute degrading and offensive, feelings which were greatly magnified by the Institute's main mission of treating sex offenders. Transgender clients often describe inappropriate and degrading tests and experiences at the institute. In fact, feelings run so deeply about the Clarke Institute that some transgender advocates have dubbed it "Jurassic Clarke.", while others append the adjective "notorious" in front of the Institute's name so routinely that one might be tempted to think that its official name was "The Notorious Clarke Institute."
Because of the Clarke Institute's history, virtually anything emanating from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health is suspect among the transgender community, and those suspicions often radiate to the rest of the LGBT community.
Associations with the Clarke Institute however isn't the only source of transgender advocates' concerns. Also controversial are some of Blanchard's theories on MtF transgender etiology that he calls "autogynephilia,"which many people find deeply offensive and off the mark. (Blanchard, on the other hand, is a leading researcher into what he believes to be the biological causes of male homosexuality.) Also controversial is Zucker's approach to treating transgender clients, which involves counseling the client to take on behaviors and attitudes which are considered to be more socially appropriate to that person's biological sex. This is an approach which raises alarm bells among gays and lesbians who recognize the parallels to sexual reorientation therapies, which may be the source of the rumors concerning homosexuality and sexual reorientation therapy that I mentioned earlier.
Today, we have a statement from four Transgender advocacy groups, which will hopefully provide some clarification on Zucker's and Blanchard's role in the DSM-V revision.
Statement from:
National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE)
Transgender Law and Policy Institute (TLPI)
Transgender Law Center (TLC)
Transgender Youth Family Allies (TYFA)
On May 1, 2008, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced the composition of work groups to review scientific advances and research-based information to develop the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). The composition and scope of the work group on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders and two subgroups are of great interest to transgender people and therefore to our organizations.
Though no consensus exists among transgender people about whether and how a GID diagnosis should be in the DSM-V, there is certainly agreement that decisions made by the APA about transgender and gender non-conforming people will deeply affect the lives of millions of transgender adults, adolescents and children.
We have met with and strongly encouraged the APA to closely adhere to its stated commitment to scientific process regarding diagnosis of transgender people. We are confident that a fair, unbiased review of current knowledge can result in a DSM-V that can move society toward a more rational and humane understanding of transgender people.
We encourage our transgender brothers and sisters to approach this issue with thoughtful consideration of all available information. To that end, we encourage transgender people and allies to remember that:
The naming of this working group on May 1 was not the commencement of advocacy around rethinking or revision of the GID diagnosis. Thoughtful advocates, within and without the APA, have been working on this issue for several years and they will continue to do so for several more, through at least 2012 when the DSM-V is finalized. We look forward to strengthening our relationships and positive communication channels with the many APA-affiliated professionals who are knowledgeable and understanding of transgender issues.
It is inconceivable that in the 21st century any credible scientist or medical professional would recommend any discredited treatment that would attempt to change a person's core gender identity or sexual orientation. Such treatments have no empirical basis and are harmful. Importantly though, the DSM consists of diagnoses and not treatments. As such, the DSM-V will not offer any treatment recommendations for transgender people of any age.
The APA has created several mechanisms for thoughtful input into the DSM revision process from mental health professionals as well as laypeople affected by the DSM. We encourage transgender people and allies, especially mental health professionals, to utilize these systems to appropriately impact the process. In particular the APA has created a website through which written comments can be submitted. Additionally, as the DSM-V development process advances, working groups are charged with seeking the counsel and input of various advisers who will be selected from various clinicians, academics and other stakeholders. We will advocate for the inclusion of fair-minded advisors who are committed to providing only scientific, fair, reasonable and humane input. We are hopeful that these systems will help provide sufficient information to assure a fair and scientific process for the creation of the DSM-V.
Public acceptance of transgender people and anti-discrimination protections have been advancing swiftly. This is in large part due to scientific and medical advances, but also to the assertive, vigilant and intelligent activism of thousands of transgender people and our allies. While transgender people's history with the psychiatric and medical professions has been, at times, fraught with misunderstanding and tainted by bigotry, we are optimistic that current and developing scientific research and clinical data will further the understanding of transgender issues among health care professionals and the public.
National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE)
Transgender Law and Policy Institute (TLPI)
Transgender Law Center (TLC)
Transgender Youth Family Allies (TYFA)
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In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for "cross-gender disturbance" in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.
When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 500 posts to tell the story of one nation's embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that "[Paul] Cameron's 'science' echoes Nazi Germany." What the SPLC didn"t know was Cameron doesn't just "echo" Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution's architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a "plausible idea" in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.
On February 10, I attended an all-day "Love Won Out" ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.
Prologue: Why I Went To "Love Won Out"
Part 1: What's Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With "No Exceptions"
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word "Change" Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For "Change"
At last, the truth can now be told.
Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!
And don't miss our companion report, How To Write An Anti-Gay Tract In Fifteen Easy Steps.
Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.
Anti-gay activists often cite the "Dutch Study" to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.
Tony Perkins' Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family "Research" Council.
The FBI's annual Hate Crime Statistics aren't as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.


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DAVIS, JOHN FREEMAN, dance and music teacher; b. 31 March 1835 in Oakville, Upper Canada, one of the six children of Charles Davis and Eliza Freeman; m. first 3 March 1860 Ruth A. Cunnyworth in Toronto, and they had four sons and one daughter; m. secondly 4 Oct. 1876 Sarah Keys in Toronto, and they had one son and one daughter; d. there 3 May 1916.
Charles Davis was one of the first shoemakers in the Oakville area, and by 1850 was prosperous enough to purchase the Halton House inn. John Freeman Davis, his eldest son, attended the Gore District Grammar School in Hamilton, and also studied the violin, piano, and organ. He is reported to have owned a Stradivarius violin. In 1855 he moved to Toronto to pursue a career in music. He taught music, but at first to earn his living he took on jobs as various as oyster-dealer, fruit-dealer, and tobacconist. From 1873 to 1875 he ran the Musical Hall, which published and sold sheet music. He also composed his first dances for publication in 1873, and by 1896 he had over 20 polkas, lancers, rockaways, waltzes, two-steps, and other dances to his credit. Among the most successful works were "Great Pacific lancers" and "Eureka quadrille," both from 1873, and "The new premier gallop . . . ," published in 1874 to honour Alexander Mackenzie*. One of the best known was "The call to arms polka" (1885), dedicated to the "Volunteers who so promptly responded when called upon to suppress the rebellion in the North West."
Davis began giving dance lessons around 1860 to a few pupils who had admired his skills at parties. He claimed he was self-trained, but he probably studied in Toronto with James Douglas Andrews and Augustin Noverre. Advertisements for his lessons started appearing regularly in 1872 when he began teaching children and adults in the Toronto Grammar School building, and in 1880 his "academy" acquired a permanent address. His reputation had soared with the publication in 1878 of The modern dance tutor; or, society dancing (Toronto), which he dedicated to his "six thousand and odd pupils" of "the past eighteen years." Like most American and British dancing manuals of the period, it provides information on correct deportment and the basic dance steps before turning to detailed instructions on popular dances. In addition to social dancing, Davis taught music and calisthenics, and he also arranged fancy dances for special occasions, such as the Toronto "kirmess" of 1891. Although his students included the children of Lieutenant Governor Donald Alexander Macdonald* (Sandfield), he believed that people from all social classes should learn to dance, and in 1907 he introduced a special instructional method, the "sivadonian" system, to teach nine dances in only three lessons. He followed it by other quick and simple systems. In 1914 he claimed that he had instructed over 30,000 pupils.
Davis was active in several organizations that began in the 1880s with the purpose of improving the standards in teaching dance. He became vice-president of the American National Dancing Association in 1888 and in 1894 of the National Association of Teachers of Dancing of the United States and Canada. He was the first president of the Western Association Normal School Masters of Dancing, founded in 1894. He choreographed numerous dances for presentation at dance conventions, and in 1900 won the grand prize for dancing at the universal exposition in Paris. Fie continued to teach until some months before his death. Several of his children had followed him in his profession. His youngest daughter, Elsie M., began teaching in his school in 1899, as did in 1909 his youngest son, Albert R., who continued it into the 1930s. Davis's eldest son, Charles F., had opened his own dance academy in Toronto in 1889.
AO, RG 22-305, no.31851; RG 80-5-0-62, no.13403; RG 80-27-2, 66: 85. NA, RG 31, C1, 1901, Toronto, Ward 3, div.23: 12 (mfm. at AO). York Univ. (North York, Ont.), Dept. of Dance, Kathryn Noxon, "Professor John Freeman Davis: nineteenth-century Canadian dancing master and composer, a man of his time" (undergraduate paper, 1984). Globe, 4 June 1934. News (Toronto), 4 May 1916. G. M. Adam, Toronto, old and new: a memorial volume . . . (Toronto, 1891; repr. 1972). Complete list of Canadian copyright musical compositions, (entered from 1868 to January 19th, 1889,) compiled from the original register at Ottawa ([Toronto?, 1889?]). Encyclopedia of music in Canada (Kallmann et al.). H. C. Mathews, Oakville and the Sixteen: the history of an Ontario port (Toronto, 1954; repr. 1971).
© 1998–2023 University of Toronto/Université Laval
Cite This Article
Mary Jane Warner, "DAVIS, JOHN FREEMAN," in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed October 2, 2023, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/davis_john_freeman_14E.html.
The citation above shows the format for footnotes and endnotes according to the Chicago manual of style (16th edition). Information to be used in other citation formats:
|Author of Article:
|Mary Jane Warner
|Title of Article:
|Publication Name:
|Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14
|University of Toronto/Université Laval
|Year of publication:
|Year of revision:
|Access Date:
|October 2, 2023


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Siguirillas Pequenas by Rafael Marin (1862-)
Rafael Marin was a talented guitarist and flamenco music composer. Born in Pedroso de la Sierra, Province of Sevilla, Spain, July 7, 1862. While very young he became an enthusiastic aficionado of the guitar and the flamenco music. Rafael Marin published a Flamenco Method book. "Methodo Para Guitarra- Aires Andaluces". A bible for many flamenco artists like Ramon Montoya.
Taken from Methodo Para Guitarra- Aires Andaluces (Flamenco). 40 Measures. 4 Pages. Time Signature 2/4 and 4/4. Key of D minor


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Live: The Last Iowa Republican Debate
Tonight is that most important of nights for Iowa Republicans: Their final chance to see our beloved field of Republican presidential candidates say the same things they say in every debate. But will they say these things differently? Who will fuck up most comically? Go soak that tampon in grain alcohol, put on a fresh pair of pants, and let's find out — together.
9:00 — Turn on Fox News, Bret Baier needs you!
9:02 — Newt Gingrich, everyone wants an electable candidate to beat the president, and you are Newt Gingrich. Why are you ruining everything? Gingrich responds: Umm... Ronald Reagan?
9:04 — The buzzer sound is, once again, the Gchat sound. Wait, sorry, brb, someone's Gchatting me... oh no that's just them trying to get Newt Gingrich to shut up.
9:06 — Ron Paul, would you support the eventual Republican nominee who is likely to be someone you hate? Paul says that any of these candidates would have no trouble beating Obama! (He's wrong.) Also, he likes monetary policy. Direct answer, that.
9:07 — Rick Santorum, you've been in all 99 Iowa counties. No one's spent as much time on the ground as you. So isn't it funny that no one wants to vote for you? Santorum: I'm a leader. "When you wanted something done" in Congress, he says, "you'd come to Rick Santorum."
9:10 — Mitt Romney explains how sorry he is to not have bought up and destroyed JetBlue when he had his chance in business.
9:11 — Michele Bachmann: "I spent 50 years as a real person."
9:12 — Rick Perry says he loves debating now! He wants to debate Obama, 10 million times. Oh crap, now he's invoking Tim Tebow. He is literally reading a biography of Tim Tebow. "I hope I am the Tim Tebow of the Iowa caucuses." TWITTER 'SPLOSION. Boy howdy, what a dumbass.
9:15 — Jon Huntsman is so useless. He keeps talking about various deficits. Real Deficit. Trust Deficit. He will fix all of the deficits. But mostly the "Trust" "Deficit." He's just Thomas Friedman at this point, without all the butt-picking.
9:18 — Newt Gingrich is off with his "Saul Alinsky radical" label for the President. He then explains that he can bring together the entire political spectrum to get things done. A notably patriotic non-sequitur.
9:24 — Back from commercials. Chris Wallace has some questions about "DC culture." Newt Gingrich, What's the best gastropub in Adams Morgan?
9:26 — Mitt Romney again that President Obama "has not lived" in "the real world." How many leveraged buyouts have you completed in your "world," Neptune? How many sad old fucks' pensions have you redirected to your bank account? Thank you.
9:28 — Newt Gingrich is asked about the hilarious millions of dollars he took from Freddie Mac, and whether he feels it's hypocritical to then criticize Barney Frank or Chris Dodd. I was just in private business, Gingrich says. Indeed, he's just your neighborhood non-registered lobbyist ex-Speaker who takes corporate cash and then gets his many friends in power to pass laws.
9:30 — Ron Paul is going on about Austrian economics, as a means of attacking Newt Gingrich. C'mon. Just call him a fat old crook and then take a victory lap around the auditorium.
9:32 — Michele Bachmann just ruined Newt Gingrich. Gingrich: "What she just said is factually not true." He's a reformer! Talk to former Rep. Rick Lazio, he says. Maybe we will! Which Bronx homeless shelter is ol' Laz living in these days?
9:34 — Newt Gingrich: "I have never once changed my position" because of "a payment." He is just BEGGING someone to throw $20 in his face to see if he'll say, Yeah meet me in the alley in 120 minutes, make sure you're not followed.
9:37 — Now they're talking about The Paul Ryan Death Plan 2.0, which is now bipartisan because one Democrat supports it. It would basically be the Ryan plan with an option of staying on traditional Medicare. What would you choose? We'd probably choose the one that doesn't double our out-of-pocket health care costs.
9:39 — Ron Paul gives his defense of earmarks — all money should be earmarked! That keeps it out of the dirty executive branch's hands. Legislators need to get their money back, he says. He has a point — earmarks are for existing streams of funding. But his typically strident, principled tone doesn't work so well here. He knows that that money he brings home gets him reelected, and that's why he does it.
9:41 — Rick Perry, always speaking to the nation at large: "Don't believe everything you read in the Austin American-Statesman."
9:44 — Here's that funny part of the night where they asked former Ambassador Jon Huntsman to explain China in 30 seconds. Well, he says, you've got China and the Internet and dissidents and values and North Korea and... OOPS, SORRY, GCHAT SOUND. Moving on: What do you think about profits, Rick Santorum?
9:46 — Some Twitter guy has a question for Mitt Romney: What new industries will be the big deals over the next 10 years? Romney: The private market will determine that, not me. Sorry. Got a problem with that? Take your complaints to the Privates. (But maybe manufacturing and energy, maybe those things could grow.)
9:48 — Newt Gingrich: You know that thing you keep saying about impeaching tons of judges you don't like or even eliminating their districts? Isn't that a horribly hostile destruction of the balance of power? Gingrich: Yes it does disrupt the balance of power, but some of those courts are really stupid.
9:50 — Gingrich says that lawyers suddenly have too much power and think they can run everything. What a totally new development that's not thousands of years old!
9:51 — Michele Bachmann is stunned, stunned that in this dystopian hellscape of Modern America, "the final arbiter of the law is the court system." Yeah, when did these courts get so uppity, thinking they could rule on statutory law? A proper judge only gives people their stolen vibrators back from their exes' apartments, like Judge Judy.
9:55 — Megyn Kelly wants them to go down the line, naming their favorite Supreme Court justice. Aww, cute. Mitt Romney names four. Gingrich agrees. Ron Paul is giving a lecture about liberty. "All of them are good and all of them are bad," he says. Michele Bachmann names the same four. Jon Huntsman is happy that we have the rule of law in this country. He likes Roberts and Alito. So, yes, everyone dodged the cute question.
10:02 — Time for Hour #2: The Poop Hour. So, what do you all think about this Iran getting its nuclear weapon on? Ron Paul, you love Iran. Why?
10:03 — Ron Paul: Iran isn't even trying to get a bomb. The situation's the same as it was in "two oh three." This is just like Iraq! Some Israeli civil servant who just retired said so. Let's not jump the gun and just settle for another Cold War.
10:05 — Ron Paul is giving a strong defense of why Iran obviously wants a nuclear weapons. Who wouldn't? Bret Baier keeps pushing him to give the Right Answer (kill all Persians), and he won't do it. The other candidates are pissing their pants with excitement!
10:07 — Rick Santorum: "Iran is not any other country." Well it ain't New Zealand, that's for sure. Then he says that it's essentially run by its own version Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda, be scared!!
10:09 — Mitt Romney agrees that President Obama is inviting war with Iran. Mitt Romney would avoid this war by... directly starting a war with Iran? No, with STRENGTH. Mitt Romney would use beefed-up American military strength to not have a war with Iran.
10:11 — Michele Bachmann thinks Ron Paul is the craziest foreign policy fucker this side of Gibraltar. She gets loud cheers! MICHELE BACHMANN RE-SURGE? Check back three or four surges down the road, by which time Mitt Romney will have dropped out to start a slop factory with Tim Pawlenty or some such. Bachmann goes there: "WORLDWIDE CALIPHATE." Chug a pint of Clorox.
10:14 — Bachmann and Paul are getting heated over American empire, for time no. 800. Sadly, this probably doesn't help Ron Paul. Although could it really surprise anyone at this point?
10:16 — Newt Gingrich says that if dirty Arabs were lobbing missiles into America, as they are in Israel, like a couple of times, disproportionately considering what Israel does, wouldn't we want to destroy all of them? Hmm. I thought we were doing a pretty good job of that from our perch across the Atlantic. Anyway, the point is that Newt Gingrich would nuke the Gaza Strip, and knowing him he'd somehow link it to a tax deduction for space station rivets.
10:20 — So now we're going to talk about energy! That was a quick foreign policy segment. It's "funny" how these foreign segments never ask a single question about the actual biggest international problem of the time, the European debt crisis. But hey, who cares? Now Newt Gingrich is ranting about a pipeline and San Francisco and the Strait of Hormuz.
10:23 — The Republicans are explaining their plans to eliminate America's addition to foreign oil: Drill under some birds in Alaska, schlep down those tar sands from Canada. Umm... natural gas, yes, get that natural gas, in Pennsylvania and such. America's long-term foreign energy dependence problem, solved.
10:27 — Rick Perry is asked about whether he's hypocritical to criticize the federal government for subsidizing green technology, while giving tax breaks to oil companies in Texas. Perry: "Today is the 220th anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Rights."
10:32 — Back from commercial. The home stretch. Rick Perry, you've asked for AG Eric Holder to resign over the Fast and Furious scandal. Are you and fellow Republicans overexaggerating and politicizing this? Surely they'll all say yes.
10:33 — The way Rick Perry says "Texas ranger recon teams" is awesome. [Unamused cowboy face]: Texasrangerreconteams.
10:35 — Mitt Romney is furiously explaining how he'll give every illegal immigrant who's here a MasterCard or Visa card, to get a job. What would be the credit limit? Two jobs? He stole this from Newt Gingrich.
10:38 — Interesting that organized, well-funded Iowa frontrunner Ron Paul hasn't talked in oh a half-hour or so. Instead, what do you think about illegal immigration, Jon Huntsman, who is in last place nationally and isn't even running in Iowa?
10:40 — Mitt Romney, you're a total flip-flop on everything. Can you give us your canned response? I HAVE NEVER CHANGED MY OPINIONS, CHRIS WALLACE. Except for gay rights! He was gay when he governed Massachusetts, but he regrets this now.
10:43 — Mitt Romney says he'd fight for anti-discrimination laws for gays. He let a gay into his Massachusetts cabinet, even. He would do more for gays than Ted Kennedy ever did! Good for Mittens. Also, he probably just lost Iowa, again.
10:46 — Rick Santorum can't believe that Mitt Romney wouldn't eliminate his gay state Supreme Court in Massachusetts. This is right in Newt Gingrich's wheelhouse. Fourteen more minutes...
10:47 — Michele Bachmann continues to light into Newt Gingrich, just brutally. It sounds like she's indirectly accusing him of being, you know, A CONSTANT MURDERER OF INFANTS. He takes infants and fucking kills them all, for fun. Die die die, infants! Die again! Gingrich's look right now is incredible. He merely says that "sometimes" she doesn't get her facts right. I bet Newt Gingrich does kill infants for fun; it just has no relation to the abortion debate.
10:50 — HECKLER! HECKLER! No on interrupts Bret Baier. Uh oh, there go the rent-a-cops to crush that guy's skull.
10:52 — Why are you all so mean to each other? Have you forgotten what God told Ronald Reagan atop Mount Sinai, "Thou shalt not be mean to other politicians within your political party"?
10:55 — Let's thank our Lord, Tim Tebow, for it is over. Thank you all for reading and commenting. Whoa, there are a million comments! It's nice to see that *some* people take our country's future seriously.


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Did Congress vote last week to indefinitely detain Americans and hold them without charge in military prisons? Absolutely! But don't worry; the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act didn't kill all of your freedoms.
In fact, should President Obama sign the legislation into law, Americans in the armed forces will be allowed a few new rights worth celebrating. Just, please — however you chose to consecrate the Act, keep it to yourself.While text in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 did indeed give the US military the power to — as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) put it — turn America into a "battlefield," for the men and women serving the United States, they will be able to, under the legislation, engage in both sodomy and bestiality, legally, while protecting America.Don't let lawmakers let you think the terrorists have won. American soldiers can have sex with animals now.Finally.The 97-to-3 vote in the Senate last week is causing a few new controversial legislations, but somehow under the radar of many was text that repealed article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And what does that say? Let's take a gander:(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.(b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct. Now repealed, the military cannot find those that commit those acts guilty of any crime. Now all sorts of sex (anal sex, gay sex, oral sex, rooster sex, et cetera) are fine and dandy. Apparently Uncle Sam is a lot more understanding of your sexual preferences than you thought.While the arguably more dangerous wording in the Act gives Congress the power to engage military rule over every American citizen without reason, the reinstating of sex acts has understandable already garnered its fair share of opponents as well. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told CNSNews.com that the move is "all about using the military to advance this administration's radical social agenda."At the same time, however, Perkins acknowledged that removing the bestiality provision by repealing the act to make sodomy a-okay in the military could have just been "collateral damage."Frankly, the whole thing seems like a hairy situation. "Well, whether it was inadvertent or not, they have also taken out the provision against bestiality," Perkins adds. "So now, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), there's nothing there to prosecute bestiality."WorldNetDaily reporter Lester Kinsolving asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Monday this week if Obama was in support of the legislation. The journalist quizzed Carney on whether or not Obama was particularly a proponent of sodomy and bestiality, which the secretary shrugged off and asked reporters for their next question.In typical PETA fashion, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have since gone after the White House for not taking the matter seriously."Our office has been flooded with calls from Americans who are upset that this ban has been repealed — and for good reason," they say in an official statement. "As we outlined in the attached letter sent yesterday to the secretary of defense, animal abuse does not affect animals only — it is also a matter of public safety, as people who abuse animals very often go on to abuse human beings."When the Act went before the Republican-dominated House of Representatives earlier this year, the amendment asking for the appeal of the sex law was absent. Only under a revision from the Democrat-controlled Senate did the legalese get snuck in. And who said left-wingers don't know how to party?


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Universal Will Make A New 3D Animated Feature Version Of 'How The Grinch Stole Christmas'
Briefly: Ron Howard and Jim Carrey's live-action version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, from 2000, isn't the most beloved movie out there — why watch that one when the original Chuck Jones animated version is so much more charming? — but it does have fans, and it made money.
But The Lorax made more money, and so now Universal, Chris Meledandri, and Illumination Entertainment are going to make a new 3D animated version of the Dr. Seuss classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas, to follow up on Illumination's other Seuss adaptations. Deadline says that Meledandri is producing with Pete Candeland set to direct. There's no writer on board yet. Expect to see the film for Christmas 2014 at the earliest.


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Salad of Parsley, Capers, Black Olives and Tomatoes on Bruschetta
Well, its that time of year again, where we need to make new year's resolutions and as always, mine is to lose a few pounds. I always do this to myself. I spend the first half of the year being super good, so I can lose all the wight I put on over the holidays, just to over indulge in the last couple of months of the year and then vow to do it all again. Maybe this year, my resolution should be to stay good over the holidays. But for now, that is 10-12 months away and I need to drop the pounds from this past holiday season.
Therefore, we start the year with a salad. No the best time to do this, as its cold and produce is not exactly fresh, however I did manage to find some great tomatoes (surprise) at the wholesale market. Yes, I know they are imported from California, or some such place and have a big carbon footprint, but I couldn't help it...I was just dying for some great tasting veggies.
This recipe comes from Delicious magazine, Volume 4, Issue 10 and was wonderful. I didn't think it would fill me up, but it definitely did and for a bit of protein, I served with a couple slices of deli cut turkey. Not really suited to the frigid cold outside, but it went down a treat in our lovely heated little home and provided just the veggie boost I have been craving :)
Happy New Year!!
Salad of Parsley, Capers, Black Olives and Tomatoes on Bruschetta
(Serves 4)
1 bunch flat leaf parsley
3 ripe tomatoes
1 tbs capers, rinsed and roughly chopped
20 small black olives, pitted
2 tbs olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
4 slices of ciabatta bread
1 garlic clove, cut in half
soft goat's cheese, to serve
1. Remove the leaves of the parsley and discard the stems. Roughly chop and place in a bowl. Cut up the tomatoes in uneven wedges and add to the bowl. Throw in the capers and olives and dress with olive oil and lemon juice. Generously season with salt and pepper.
2. Preheat the grill (broiler) to high. Broil bread slices for 1 minutes on each side or until lightly browned. Rub gently with cut side of the garlic and drizzle with a little extra olive oil.
3. Top each slice of toast with salad and dollops of goat's cheese. Serve immediately.


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Secret no more, US moves openly to block the rise of China.
|Hillary's Humanitarian Mission – Anthony Freda
Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently published in Foreign Policy magazine, "America's Pacific Century," a Hitlerian declaration of imperial intent for American "leadership" in Asia for the next 100 years. The piece, which could just as easily been penned by Neo-Con policy makers begins with, "the future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action."
Of course, America's presence throughout the Middle East and the control it exercises over the region's oil resources, as well as over the region as a logistical hub, is essential in tempering the rise of Asia and ultimately hemming in the rise of China and Central Asia. The "Arab Spring" which Secretary Clinton and the US State Department had been a part of preparing, equipping, training, and even arming for at least 2 years prior, is the coup de grâce meant to completely overturn the multi-polar nature of the Middle East and ultimately the world.
Upon reading Clinton's declaration of intent for American leadership into the next century, readers may recall the similarly named, ranting "Project for a New American Century" signed off on by some of America's most notorious Neo-Conservatives, which almost verbatim made the same case now made by Clinton. In fact, America's evolving confrontation with China, marked acutely by Obama's announcement of a permanent US military presence in Australia just this week, is torn directly from the pages of decades-old blueprints drawn up by corporate-financier funded think-tanks that truly rule America and its destiny.
As reported in June, 2011's "Collapsing China," as far back as 1997 there was talk about developing an effective containment strategy coupled with the baited hook of luring China into its place amongst the "international order." Just as in these 1997 talking-points where author and notorious Neo-Con policy maker Robert Kagan described the necessity of using America's Asian "allies" as part of this containment strategy, Clinton goes through a list of regional relationships the US is trying to cultivate to maintain "American leadership" in Asia.
For example, the recently reinstalled Wall Street proxy regime in Thailand led by Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, has received reassurances by Clinton herself just this week stating that, "it is in the national security and political interest of the United States to have this government succeed." As reported in-depth in "CONFIRMED: Thailand's "Pro-Democracy" Movement Working for US," Thaksin Shinawatra and his political regime have had long-standing, well-documented ties to Wall Street and London. The US backing of puppet-regimes like Thaksin, installing them into power, and keeping them there is central to projecting power throughout Asia and keeping China subordinate, or as Kagan put it in his 1997 report, these proxy regimes will have China "play Gulliver to Southeast Asia's Lilliputians, with the United States supplying the rope and stakes."
It is essential to look past the empty rhetoric of "democracy," "human rights," and "progress" used to justify foreign-funding and meddling to install servile autocrats like Thailand's Thaksin or Malaysia's stooge dictator-in-waiting Anwar Ibrahim and see the greater geopolitical game at play and the disastrous conclusion it is leading us all toward. It is also essential to expose the disingenuous organizations, institutions, and media personalities helping promote this global corporate-fascist agenda.
Above all, it is important not to allow ourselves and our countrymen to be manipulated and their lives wasted in the inevitable conflicts that are sure to arise as Wall Street and London struggle to maintain, or even expand their global financial, economic, and military hegemony.
Tony Cartalucci's articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at
Land Destroyer Report.
linkwithin_text='Related Articles:'


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ARC'TERYX Altra 48
Brand: Arc'Teryx Gear Reviews
Model: Altra 48
New model for this year (Do not check this option if this model was listed as new in last year's Gear Guide)Trekking, backpacking for up to 3 nights
Fast and light volume bags that can pack efficiently for multi-day trips.
All Altra packs have a Load Transfer DiscTM that pivots to increase agility and stability on rough terrain. Larger volumes combine the C2 suspension with GridlockTM shoulder straps that adjust for custom fit. Smaller volumes keep weight to a minimum while still using the efficient C2 system.
210D nylon 6,6 ripstop is a high density single ripstop fabric coated with silicone to shed moisture and increase waterproofness. Used in the body for its light weight, the textiles construction is a balanced weave that is durable and tear-resistant. Reinforced in the high wear areas with extremely durable 500D ATY nylon 6,6 silicone treated PU fabric that resists dirt, snow and water pick-up.
100D nylon 6,6 mini ripstop has a high thread count in a mini ripstop weave that has incredible tear resistance. Coated with silicone to shed moisture and for waterproofness.
6005-T6 extruded aluminum M-bar stays are rigid and lightweight to provide structural support.
BACk PAneL
HD 80 foam is high density polyethylene foam that provides support and structure to the bag, plus comfort against the back.
SHOuLDeR StRAPS
500D ATY nylon 6,6 silicone treated PU is an air textured yarn used in shoulder straps for its durability and aesthetic properties. Silicone treatment helps prevent dirt, snow and water pick-up. Hypercell foam has the benefit of being open cell polyurethane foam that provides stability and comfort. SpacermeshTM lining provides airflow. Polyester yarn is hydrophobic by nature, to repel water.


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Ever Wednesday there are new comics in comics shops and available for (legitimate) download. But there aren't new Alan Moore comics, every Wednesday, so this one is special!
Read on for some recommendations:
Comics You Should Consider Buying (from comics shops)
Criminal: Last of the Innocent #2 The second issue of Ed Brubaker's latest crime comic. I don't care much for his super-hero comics. His Captain America leaves me cold. But his crime comics... these are the best books he writes. He runs each as a standalone mini-series. This new one, whose title is a play on a book that helped fuel a national scare about the content of comics in the 1950s, is drawn by his partner in crime comics, Sean Phillips. The artist adds the visual motif of using older comic book art styles to luridly illustrate the past—thepast of a man who has decided he must murder his wife.
Detective Comics #880 Some folks are loving writer Scott Snyder's current run, which is about to wrap up as the writer switches to the first issue of the relaunching Batman comic in September. Snyder's good, sure, but I'm listing this here mainly so I can show you the amazing cover by artist Jock.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol 3: Century: 1969 Uh, yes, buy this! It's Alan Moore. It's just about the only comic he's writing these days. And it's the 1969 version of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Official summary, as if you needed it: "The long-awaited second chapter of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen III: Century takes place almost sixty years later in the psychedelic daze of Swinging London during 1969, a place where Tadukic Acid Diethylamide 26 is the drug of choice, and where different underworlds are starting to overlap dangerously to an accompaniment of sit-ins and sitars. Alerted to a threat concerning the same magic order that she and her colleagues were investigating during 1910, a thoroughly modern Mina Murray and her dwindling league of comrades attempt to navigate the perilous rapids of London's hippie and criminal subculture, as well as the twilight world of its occultists. Mina and her companions must prevent the making of a Moonchild that might well turn out to be the Anti-Christ."
Secret Avengers #15 I'm very high on the writing of Nick Spencer. If you haven't read him yet, his short run on Secret Avengers is a good place to start. Each issue has been self-contained including the new one. I don't even know what it's about! But Spencer has earned that kind of confidence in me. His Iron Man 2.0 has been shaky, but everything else, from Jimmy Olsen to T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents to his one issue of Supergirl has been smart, imaginative and just generally terrific.
X-Men Schism #2 Jason Aaron is another writer who seldom disappoints. The first issue of this mini-series began sowing the seeds for the rupture between Cyclops and Wolverine that will split the X-Men into two teams. It began, last issue, with a mutant intrusion into the U.N., while Cyclops was requesting a worldwide ban on Sentinels. Aaron's working with stock X-Men conventions but, with sharp dialogue and strong character moments, he's managing to tell a story that feels fresh.
Comics With Video Game Connections (new this week in comics shops)
DuckTales #3 Official summary: "The hit Disney Afternoon TV show continues to make a splash as an all-new, original ongoing comic book series! Written by the creator of the Epic Mickey video game, Warren Spector! Scrooge McDuck, Launchpad, and the gang continue their search for the McDuck Museum artifacts that have been mysteriously deported to their original locations! Who is behind the dastardly deportation? Does Donald Duck have the answer?"
Gears of War #18 Official summary: "Best-selling author Karen Traviss continues to explore the years prior to 'Emergence Day.' As Marcus Fenix fights what turns out to be the last battle of the Pendulum Wars, his father, Adam, perfects the devastating weapon known as The Hammer of Dawn. Peace is coming to Sera, but neither father nor son is optimistic about its longterm prospects."
Halo: Fall of Reach: Covenant #2 Official summary: "After being nearly destroyed in an attack by a Covenant craft, the UNSC frigate Commonwealth is in bad shape. Before the Covenant ship can return for a second attack, the Spartans set out to overtake it. And, with the new Mjolnir armor-the single most cutting-edge piece of technology developed since the Spartans themselves-they're a force to be reckoned with. But the Covenant is still an unknown quantity, and it may take more than the Spartans' new armor to stop them."
And Over On The iPad/iPhone/Droid/WebBrowser…
The ComiXology Comics app and website offer a fresh batch of new and old digital comics this week (though beware that Marvel doesn't offer comics on all of the services' platforms). Highlights this week include digital versions of several issues of a bunch of old and older Marvel and DC series that I never read. So you tell me if Bill Mantlo's Cloak & Dagger, Kevin Smith's Daredevil, and Daniel Way's Ghost Rider were any good. Any cheers for Mark Waid's Impulse? There are six issues of that as well as a few issues of mid-70's-era Batman, Green Lantern, Justice League of America and Wonder Woman. (One of the old Flash comics apparently involves seeing if the Flash is fast enough to save Abraham Lincoln from assassination!)
Best Comics I Read Last Week
Moon Knight #3 I never expected to like a Moon Knight comic or even care about one, but I've been enjoying Brian Michael Bendis' new series about the super-hero so far. The gist is that a man named Marc Spector is both the super-hero Moon Knight and crazy. He hallucinates that's he's hanging out with the Avengers. He dresses up as a super-villain in order to threaten his friends and thereby test their loyalty. He's a lunatic, which I guess is the play on the "moon" part of the name. The series is set in Los Angeles, with Spector as a producer responsible for a TV show being made about his adventures and with a west coast Kingpin on the rise. Or is that just another hallucination?
Tell me what you're reading this week and which great comics I'm missing.
You can contact Stephen Totilo, the author of this post, at firstname.lastname@example.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.


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In the Matrix film series, Keanu Reeves plugs his brain directly into a virtual world that sentient machines have designed to enslave mankind.
The Matrix plot may be dystopian fantasy, but University of Washington researchers have taken a first step in showing how humans can interact with virtual realities via direct brain stimulation.
In a paper published online Nov. 16 in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, they describe the first demonstration of humans playing a simple, two-dimensional computer game using only input from direct brain stimulation — without relying on any usual sensory cues from sight, hearing or touch.
The subjects had to navigate 21 different mazes, with two choices to move forward or down based on whether they sensed a visual stimulation artifact called a phosphene, which are perceived as blobs or bars of light. To signal which direction to move, the researchers generated a phosphene through transcranial magnetic stimulation, a well-known technique that uses a magnetic coil placed near the skull to directly and noninvasively stimulate a specific area of the brain.
"The way virtual reality is done these days is through displays, headsets and goggles, but ultimately your brain is what creates your reality," said senior author Rajesh Rao, UW professor of Computer Science & Engineering and director of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.
"The fundamental question we wanted to answer was: Can the brain make use of artificial information that it's never seen before that is delivered directly to the brain to navigate a virtual world or do useful tasks without other sensory input? And the answer is yes."
The five test subjects made the right moves in the mazes 92 percent of the time when they received the input via direct brain stimulation, compared to 15 percent of the time when they lacked that guidance.
The simple game demonstrates one way that novel information from artificial sensors or computer-generated virtual worlds can be successfully encoded and delivered noninvasively to the human brain to solve useful tasks. It employs a technology commonly used in neuroscience to study how the brain works — transcranial magnetic stimulation — to instead convey actionable information to the brain.
The test subjects also got better at the navigation task over time, suggesting that they were able to learn to better detect the artificial stimuli.
"We're essentially trying to give humans a sixth sense," said lead author Darby Losey, a 2016 UW graduate in computer science and neurobiology who now works as a staff researcher for the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS). "So much effort in this field of neural engineering has focused on decoding information from the brain. We're interested in how you can encode information into the brain."
The initial experiment used binary information — whether a phosphene was present or not — to let the game players know whether there was an obstacle in front of them in the maze. In the real world, even that type of simple input could help blind or visually impaired individuals navigate.
Theoretically, any of a variety of sensors on a person's body — from cameras to infrared, ultrasound, or laser rangefinders — could convey information about what is surrounding or approaching the person in the real world to a direct brain stimulator that gives that person useful input to guide their actions.
"The technology is not there yet — the tool we use to stimulate the brain is a bulky piece of equipment that you wouldn't carry around with you," said co-author Andrea Stocco, a UW assistant professor of psychology and I-LABS research scientist. "But eventually we might be able to replace the hardware with something that's amenable to real world applications."
Together with other partners from outside UW, members of the research team have co-founded Neubay, a startup company aimed at commercializing their ideas and introducing neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that could make virtual-reality, gaming and other applications better and more engaging.
The team is currently investigating how altering the intensity and location of direct brain stimulation can create more complex visual and other sensory perceptions which are currently difficult to replicate in augmented or virtual reality.
"We look at this as a very small step toward the grander vision of providing rich sensory input to the brain directly and noninvasively," said Rao. "Over the long term, this could have profound implications for assisting people with sensory deficits while also paving the way for more realistic virtual reality experiences."
The research was funded by the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Washington Research Foundation.
Co-authors include I-LABS research coordinator Justin Abernethy.
For more information, contact Losey at [email protected], Stocco at [email protected] or Rao at [email protected].
Video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru7HRkFNM7w
Media Contact
Jennifer Langston
[email protected]
Story Source: Materials provided by Scienmag