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April 14, 2011
Google Translate, Now With Voice Input
Google Translate is the first Google service that uses this feature. If you use Google Chrome 11 Beta, Google Chrome 12 Dev/Canary or a recent Chromium build and visit Google Translate, you can click the voice input icon. Right now, this feature only works for English, so you need to select "English" from the list of input languages.
Unfortunately, the results aren't great. I tried to translate "beautiful sunshine" into French, but the speech-to-text engine didn't work properly and Google had to translate "wake up beautiful sunshine girl".
{ Thanks, Kalin. }
33 comments:
Its finally here!!!ReplyDelete
I had seen a preview of this earlier at IFA Sept, 2010.
Now conversation mode isn't far away either :D
It should have an option to confirm if the user wants to transmit his/her voice or not, before transmitting it. Like in Adobe flash....ReplyDelete
- AnonymousApril 14, 2011 at 10:05 AM
The word "f*ck" is understood as #### :o)ReplyDelete
- AnonymousApril 14, 2011 at 10:15 AM
Is this option being rolled out? I'm in the latest beta release but don't see the option.ReplyDelete
I've just installed Chrome 11.0.696.43 beta and it works.ReplyDelete
I wonder if this feature could learn to transcribe a particular users (prolfile) voice to text? Seems like accurate transcriptions are difficult since we all pronounce words a little differently...ReplyDelete
- AnonymousApril 14, 2011 at 11:02 AM
Thanks for confirming, Alex!ReplyDelete
Now I see it! I had to change the language (I had detect language and English). When I switched to Spanish, it gave me a Spanish language keyboard and when I switch to English, it displayed a mike.
- AnonymousApril 14, 2011 at 11:03 AM
Er, mic :-DReplyDelete
Lovely, the next feature they should have in Blog Editor and in Comments area. Works awesome despite my obvious Asian accent :-)ReplyDelete
- AnonymousApril 14, 2011 at 6:47 PM
wonder if it will be able to import wav files in the future?ReplyDelete
- AnonymousApril 14, 2011 at 7:48 PM
If you speak slowly and pronounce well and leave a tiny silence in between each word, the results are much, much better.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousApril 14, 2011 at 10:18 PM
So, can any html5 website spy on me using the microphone?ReplyDelete
Amazing collection of good thought here.I am agree with this nice direction on good topic.Keep it continue with us.ReplyDelete
A new concept Google just reveal :)ReplyDelete
Good! Finally they did it. Very useful functionality for all.ReplyDelete
This would be great if you need to know what something means in another language but don't feel like typing.ReplyDelete
It would be wonderful if you could join each user's particular voice profile to their Google account. Results would be both more accurate and much more economic!ReplyDelete
pretty cool for a start, I must admit..... it's funny though at this point with accents.. for e.g had to actually speak "beautiful sunshine" in a highly Indian accent to get the translation done correctly... English -> German.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousNovember 25, 2011 at 2:00 PM
uhhhh it would be wonderful if the google translate that keeps coming up still looked like this so i could listen to what i want to translate....THANKS A LOT GOOGLE!ReplyDelete
Hey guys please tell me how i can get the speak now button. If anyone can tell me step by step, i will be thankful to u.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousFebruary 7, 2012 at 3:00 AM
Not working very well.ReplyDelete
I can't get it understand word: run.
Please continue its development.
- AnonymousApril 5, 2012 at 4:37 PM
It didn't workReplyDelete
Is it to sell "Zoom Dwonloader"?ReplyDelete
my google translate haven't voice tool. how to apear / show it?ReplyDelete
- AnonymousJune 22, 2012 at 3:07 AM
Right now, this feature only works for English, so you need to select "English" from the list of input languages.ReplyDelete
English -> Other language
Any idea when will more languages be supported for voice input? And what they will be?ReplyDelete
- AnonymousJuly 31, 2012 at 3:47 AM
How can I put some pauses or delays into the audio output of the text to speech on Google Translate? Are there any special codes and other similar services?ReplyDelete
- AnonymousAugust 9, 2012 at 11:24 AM
i want to start but dont know howReplyDelete
- AnonymousAugust 14, 2012 at 9:35 AM
It neva workedReplyDelete
I find it terribly offensive that you change the voice of the Google translator you put the accentsReplyDelete
in my chrome this option is not available. please tell me how i get this. my chrome up to dateReplyDelete


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Well, in this country, and perhaps in yours, lots of young folk are wearing bracelets - both girls and boys. I was looking at some that my students wear and found that some were magnetic!
Many seem to have beads that are spherical and they go around the wrist quite comfortably. There are lots of different sizes and some have large beads and some quite small beads.
I suppose that most wrists are kind of oval - squashed circles - in shape and with the string or wire through the beads they fit very well.
It was playing with the magnetic beads off the person's wrist that gave me some ideas. There were $18$ beads altogether and they were all the same colour but I've chosen to show them in a variety of colours!
I found I could put them into different shapes:-
mind you, you'd have to have a triangular wrist for them to stay like that!
Now suppose we play around with this idea and make a rule that there has to be some shaped hole in the middle for a wrist. But we'll allow that to be all kinds of shapes :- vaguely triangular, rectangular, hexagonal etc.
You could try this out with marbles, circular counters, tiddly-winks, coins or with a drawing program on your computer.
I think we'll make a rule that the circles/spheres have to be the same size and you don't have to imagine that they're magnetic!
So here are some that I found with $18$ beads:-
I liked that one as it is the longest rectangle you could make - remembering to keep a wrist-hole. I then went on to:-
and then, almost a square :-
I like the next one - although it was a little hard to do on the computer!
Have a go at making these with your circles!
I then moved on to $24$ circles - it seemed to be a "good" number to choose - I wonder why?
I managed to get this regular shape:-
But then I thought that since I had $24$, perhaps I could make two that were exactly the same. So there's a new rule: You can make more than one bracelet as long as they're both the same.
Have a go at using $24$ circles and make a large triangle and a fat square.
Well, now it's time to explore, to see what other bracelets you can make. Remember that there's to be a "wrist-hole". The shapes should be kind of "regular" but not strictly so, because then we could not use rectangles.
Other things to investigate:-
So whatever shape you make, how many will you need to make the next size up? How does each shape grow? Look at the first shape I made using $24$:-
What will the next size up of this look like?

subset: commoncrawl


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There was a palpable air of excitement around Melbourne Museum< Australia, as people queued and tv crews jostled at the starting gate of the revamped Phar Lap display.
The exhibit was officially opened by Victoria's Minister for Racing, Hon. Rob Hulls, with speeches by Museum Victoria's Director, Dr. Patrick Greene, and Michael Houlihan, Te Papa's Chief Executive. Michael's speech, filled with racing analogies, had the crowd laughing but thinking about New Zealand's significant contribution (in terms of bloodlines) to Australian racing history. Melbourne Museum's manager Brett Dunlop did a fine job of keeping proceedings trotting along until the final reveal.
Sorry I don't have better pictures – the lights were all geared for the cameras! The hide of Phar Lap is in a case directly behind the skeleton (so they are nose to tail). BUT I do have better photos of the morning tea spread – all Phar Lap-oriented, of course!
Now the heart is in Canberra at the National Museum of Australia and is far too fragile to travel but Melbourne Museum made sure that it was remembered.
Phar Lap's skeleton will be on display at Melbourne Museum until the end of January 2011 and will be back on display at Te Papa in his home "stable" in March.Phar Lap


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News | August 22, 2011
Bump in the road
By Alan Buis
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Like mercury in a thermometer, ocean waters expand as they warm. This, along with melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, drives sea levels higher over the long term. For the past 18 years, the U.S./French Jason-1, Jason-2 and Topex/Poseidon spacecraft have been monitoring the gradual rise of the world's ocean in response to global warming.
While the rise of the global ocean has been remarkably steady for most of this time, every once in a while, sea level rise hits a speed bump. This past year, it's been more like a pothole: between last summer and this one, global sea level actually fell by about a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter.
So what's up with the down seas, and what does it mean? Climate scientist Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., says you can blame it on the cycle of El Niño and La Niña in the Pacific.
Willis said that while 2010 began with a sizable El Niño, by year's end, it was replaced by one of the strongest La Niñas in recent memory. This sudden shift in the Pacific changed rainfall patterns all across the globe, bringing massive floods to places like Australia and the Amazon basin, and drought to the southern United States.
Data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center's twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) spacecraft provide a clear picture of how this extra rain piled onto the continents in the early parts of 2011. "By detecting where water is on the continents, Grace shows us how water moves around the planet," says Steve Nerem, a sea level scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
So where does all that extra water in Brazil and Australia come from? You guessed it — the ocean. Each year, huge amounts of water are evaporated from the ocean. While most of it falls right back into the ocean as rain, some of it falls over land. "This year, the continents got an extra dose of rain, so much so that global sea levels actually fell over most of the last year," says Carmen Boening, a JPL oceanographer and climate scientist. Boening and colleagues presented these results recently at the annual Grace Science Team Meeting in Austin, Texas.
But for those who might argue that these data show us entering a long-term period of decline in global sea level, Willis cautions that sea level drops such as this one cannot last, and over the long-run, the trend remains solidly up. Water flows downhill, and the extra rain will eventually find its way back to the sea. When it does, global sea level will rise again.
"We're heating up the planet, and in the end that means more sea level rise," says Willis. "But El Niño and La Niña always take us on a rainfall rollercoaster, and in years like this they give us sea-level whiplash.


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Feb 8, 2013
Gildan raises full-year revenue forecast
Feb 8, 2013
Canadian clothing maker Gildan Activewear Inc raised its full-year earnings forecast after posting a profit for its first quarter, driven by sales in its printwear business.
The company now expects full-year revenue to slightly exceed its previous forecast of about $2.1 billion, while backing its earnings outlook of between $2.60 and $2.70 per share
Gildan is a top supplier to screenprinting companies, which print designs on its T-shirts and other basic clothing items. The company also makes private-label and branded socks sold by mass-market retailers.
But the company has been shifting away from the private-label business, and has been spending to market its own brands such as Gildan and Gold Toe.
Gildan reported a net income of $35.3 million, or 29 cents per share, for the quarter ended Dec. 30, compared with a loss of $46.1 million, or 38 cents per share, a year earlier.
The company, which holds the U.S. sock licenses for Under Armour Inc and New Balance, said net sales rose 39 percent to $420.8 million.
Analysts on average had expected earnings of 30 cents per share on revenue of $398 million.
Montreal-based Gildan's printwear segment sales rose 65.6 percent, while sales in branded apparel rose 13 percent.
Shares of Gildan, which has a market value of about C$4.46 billion, closed at C$36.55 on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Wednesday. The stock has gained about 70 percent of its value in the last one year.
© Thomson Reuters 2023 All rights reserved.


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Welcome to Mira Vista Country Club. We are a family-oriented, full-service, member-owned, equity country club providing a world-class golf experience with facilities, service levels & amenities that exceed the expectations of our Members & guests. Members live inside & outside the neighborhood, as we have the only 24 hour gated golf course community in the Fort Worth area. Located in the heart of North Texas, the par 71 course takes advantage of the natural beauty provided by the 700-acre development, as it meanders through the scenic vistas.
Take a tour of our 18-hole, par 71 course, designed by Tom Weiskopf and Jay Moorish.
Discover Tennis, Swimming and Fitness activities MVCC offers for all ages.
Weddings and events at Mira Vista are truly times you'll always remember. Let our helpful staff assist you on your big day.


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Capt. Greg Bacher said in a release that officers expect to issue at least 10 citations for traveling too fast for conditions.
"It's sometimes impossible to keep the highways completely ice and slush free, so drivers should expect the unexpected," Bacher said.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission also announced it has begun a full review of the Feb. 14 accidents, which occurred about seven miles east of the Willow Grove interchange in Bucks County.
The turnpike said its review would take several weeks to complete. A legislative hearing on the matter and other weather-related vehicle crashes also is being planned.
Investigators are assembling a timeline and collecting information about communications, response times and other factors from emergency responders, turnpike employees, victims and witnesses.
"We absolutely want to understand if there was something we could have done that may have prevented or somehow mitigated the crashes," said turnpike chief executive Mark Compton. "Plus, we need to consider if there's something different we could be doing ... in the future."
Officials said Friday most of the injuries were minor.


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Snyder reviews Paul Preston's new book on the Spanish Civil War.
There was plenty of savagery to go around during the War, and the little I know I do from having spent time in Spain and getting to know a few people whose grandparents fought during that time. The Valle de Los Caidos is seldom talked about, and for good reason (Franco used prison laborers from the other side in order to construct a monument to his fallen fellows).
Perhaps the more conservative, traditional, religious parts of the nationalist coalition weren't prepared for some of the folks that made up Franco's forces:
'First, many of the soldiers fighting under the banner of Spanish nationalism against the Republic were Muslims, mercenaries from Spanish Morocco. Second, Christian soldiers were little interested in the application of ethics to their deeds.
Well, this is war and Franco did amass his army from the Spanish colonies in Morocco. Yet as for the Republicans:
'The most violent political force in the Republican zone were the anarchists, who fought against Franco but also opposed the Republic. Beyond the reach of the government, and bountifully armed, they were all but impossible to control. They ran the most murderous of the checas, including one squad that decorated their murder van with skulls and their uniforms with death's heads'
The fight had been brewing for quite some time to get Spain on the path to "modernity" and "progress." Clearly, not everyone agreed how to get there or where they were going…as other European ideological conflicts and interests consumed the country:
'And so the Republic itself, when it was re-established in 1931, was bound to provoke determined and articulate resistance. Its new constitution propagated a secular state, which angered the priesthood and the conservatives. The first government purged the officer corps, demoting many officers who had been promoted for their deeds in Morocco. But more infuriating still, it concerned itself with the fate of the peasantry, rather than leaving them under the authority of local notables.'
Our author wants to note that Preston's book is careful to point out that the Nationalists were worse, however, which raised a bit of suspicion on my part:
'Preston is concerned to show that violence from the Right was on a greater scale than violence from the Left during the Spanish Civil War. Contemporary accounts of atrocities came from Madrid, the Republican capital, where reporters and ambassadors could observe and criticize the actions of the Republic but not those of the rebels—with certain exceptions, such as that airdropped corpse. Preston reminds us that prevailing opinion in the British establishment (Churchill was a good example) held at the time that right-wing killings were relatively insignificant. But with the help of massive documentation recently published by Spanish historians, Preston shows that roughly 150,000 Spaniards were murdered on territories controlled by the rebel nationalists, compared with about 50,000 in the Republican zones'
Well, everyone has their interests while examining the conflict, but point taken. Snyder goes on:
'From Poland's Galicia in the east to Spain's Galicia in the west, conditions of radical inequality conspired with weak state institutions to turn the energy of capitalism against democracy by generating support for the far Left and the far Right, especially during the Great Depression'
Is "capitalism" really the bogeyman here, a handmaiden to both the anarchic revolutionaries and the fascist mercenaries with "democracy" lost in the shuffle? Implicit in the review are certain assumptions about democracy, which seem pretty liberal by American standards.
In fact, this review is found in "the New Republic", so, duly noted.
Related On This Site: Snyder is perhaps not a fan of libertarianism Timothy Snyder Responds To Steven Pinker's New Book At Foreign Policy: 'War No More: Why The World Has Become More Peaceful'


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14 results for SAN DIEGO, California Pawn Shops
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|Named for the grasslands in its South. The Steppes was the site of the now-defunct Portal of War, which was used long ago by the Rallosian Army to open a portal to the Plane of Earth.
Today, this land is the territory of the Stonemight goblins (in the Southwest), Darkfell gnolls (in the North) and some of the strongest hill giants in all of Antonica (in the Northwest). While treants, wolves, centaurs, leopards, and bears wander an evergreen grove in the West, a horde of wasp spiders makes their home in the Southeast.
Suffering from occasional snowstorms, the Steppes provide the first taste of the relentlessly cold climate of northwestern Antonica.


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Inventions in the 1920s
By lilvicky
Period: to
Invention in the 1920'sThis time line is mostly about who had invention that was some what popular and important in the 1920s. Some of these invention did impacked this life. We tell use these inventions today in the US and all over the world. In this timeline we have some very improtant people and they was very intelligent and some was very while educated.
Hair DryerThe Hair Dryer was invented in Gremany. By this women who had insert a hose in the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner.
Q-TipsLeo Gerstenzang had took his wife invention and put it on the market. The real name used to be called Baby Gays.
Traffic LightThe traffic light was invented by police officer William Potts. He used red, amber and green lights and $37 worth of wire to make his traffic light
Automobile with Combustion EngineIt was invented by Henry Ford.The automoblie with the combustion was the most popular invention in the 1920s. This invention had started new jobs.
Band-AidThe Band-Aid was invented by a man called Earle Dickson. The reason why he invented the band-aid because his wife Josephine Dickson be cutting herself every day.
Lie DetectorJohn A. Larson was the inventer of the lie detector test. He was a medical student when he invented the test in Califorina.
BulldozerThe Bulldozer was invented by Engineer Benjamin Holt. He bulit a crawling tracter which he called the caterpillar. LaPlant-Choate Manufacturing Company had produced the first bulldozer in 1923.
Liquid-Fueled RocketThe Liquid-Fueled Rocket was invented by Robert Goddard. The North American Space Association tell use it today.
Kool-AidKool-Aid was invented by Edwin Perkins of Omaha, Nebraska. The original name was called Fruit Smack.
Bread SlicerThe bread slicer was invented by Otto Frederick Rowedder he lived in Iowa he worked on it every since 1912. He completed the machine that could successfully cut and wrap a loaf of bread.


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This article is courtesy of the Horse Industry Association of Alberta
Biosecurity refers to practices designed to prevent, reduce or eliminate the introduction and incidental spread of disease among livestock and poultry. Biosecurity practices minimize the risk of disease spread by identifying risks and developing intervention measures to minimize disease-causing agents from entering or leaving a farm or horse stable.
Here are some equine biosecurity resources:
Animal Biosecurity (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) website
Animal Health Act and Regulations website
Biosecurity in Alberta website
Biosecurity: Should I be Concerned article by Dr. Darrell Dalton presented at 2009 Horse Breeders and Owners Conference
Equine Biosecurity Principles and Best Practices book
Equine Guelph Biosecurity Risk Calculator website
Horse Events: Biosecurity guidelines for organizers and competitors document


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POTC:AWE is a lukewarm maelstrom of secret agendas, double-crossings, tricky alliances, back-stabbings, familial complications, romantic entanglements, political conspiracies, warring factions, hidden gods, cheeky monkeys and excessive eyeliner some of which is linked to events from the previous installments, some of which is freshly pulled out of the collective ass of director Gore Verbinski and writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and none of which is the least bit captivating or, by and large, comprehensible.
The story, such as it is, begins with the rescue of Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from the Locker of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), doomed captain of the Flying Dutchman, master of the crusty Fish Pirates, owner of the most repellently vigorous facial hair in modern movies. The Locker, a.k.a. death, is a kind of sixteenth-century, white-on-white Matrix in which Sparrow, intuiting himself as the most entertaining figure in existence, hallucinates the antics of several dozen Sparrow doppelgangers, while stranded beside the Black Pearl ship in an abstract expanse of desert.
Boring Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), plucky Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and blustery Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) effect his rescue through a keen understanding of the peculiar metaphysic ruling the Pirates universe: randomly generated nonsense. Thus, by plunging their vessel over a watery precipice, they are damply landed on a tropical beach upon which legions of industrious crabs, neatly hatched from smooth white stones, are hustling the Black Pearl ship overland to meet the rescue party. Via another application of the Whatever Principle, our heroes will exit the Locker and embark in the direction of additional inexplicabilities.
Ah, but I have forgotten Captain Sao Feng! Luxuriating in the hysterical chinoiserie of his exotic Singapore lair, this outrageous Oriental (played by Chow Yun-Fat) has been wedged into the Pirates panoply in order to exude colorful slant-eyed menace, enable the destiny of a white woman, then die. Impaled by one of the many large wood splinters incessantly flung about the narrative, Sao Feng bestows a totem of Super Piratehood to Miss Swann. Off she goes to join a reunion of the Super Pirates and fend off the snooty imperialists of the Dutch East India Company.
But seriously, who cares. POTC:AWE isn't a movie so much as a delivery system for two kinds of special effect: those created by computers, and those generated by Johnny Depp. The former peaked with the attack of the Kraken in Dead Man's Chest. I do rather miss that hefty, peevish sea monster. The transmogrification of voodoo priestess Aunt Jemima oops, I mean Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris) first into a 50-Foot Woman, then into 50,000 digital crabs, and finally into a vast, oceanic drainage is not, alas, as cool as it sounds.
When Depp freaked his funk in The Curse of the Black Pearl it seemed a sneak attack the deployment of frisky, flamboyant, softly subversive shenanigans across the cold, impersonal grain of corporate entertainment. Dead Man's Chest put him in the spotlight and he withered; blooms of such mincing, mascara'd rarity depend on nooks and shadows to flourish. At World's End is even more aggressive in flaunting and defanging his spectacle, resorting more than once to the multiplication conceit. Give 'em what they want has never been taken so literally, and to such diminishing returns.
As for everyone else: The punishing runtime could easily and harmlessly have been abbreviated by removing witless Will Turner, whose sub-Shakespearean psychodrama with his cursed, crustaceous father (Stellan Skarsgard) is representative of the film's mind-numbing, indulgent exposition. Of all movies, this is the last you'd expect to talk and talk and talk and talk, but on it goes, everybody yapping about what they just did, what they're about to do, what they should be doing, what it will mean if they do X instead of Y. Dude, just fucking do it.


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Awesome ride today doing hill repeats out on Mount Cheaha. I managed to climb it 4.25 times (yes I turned around about a quarter of the way up to restart the climb from state highway 49 when I was not happy with how the climb was going … just a number of random things interrupting the climb that made me say "enough" let's go try this again since it was a first ascent for me from Lake Henry on Hwy 49). Yes, with the climb from Lake Henry, I think that means I have climbed Cheaha from every conceivable direction except for the mountain bike trail. This has been an unusual year in that I have had the opportunity to ride out at Cheaha at least 3 times this year including one ride from Birmingham.
About the Strava climbing competition, this ride today gives me even greater respect for the guys out in California who do most of their climbing on longer climbs like this one. It took me almost 5 and a half hours and a lot more effort to climb the same amount that I could do in under 4 hours on the smaller climbs and rollers around Birmingham. You just never get a chance to rest on these long climbs! Give me a 500′ rolling monster with pitches of 20+% any day over a 7% climb that just goes on and on forever. Still, it's always fun to change things up a bit with long climbs like today on Cheaha and last weekend on Clingman's Dome and the Blue Ridge Parkway. My personal preference for now is the smaller, steeper stuff because the descents are faster and more frequent.
View of a cloud covered Mount Cheaha from Cheaha Lake about 1200 vertical feet below the summit.
Nearing the top on the first time up the Cheaha climb — the longest version of the climb from below Camp Mac with an elevation difference of about 1800′ and total climbing exceeding 2500′.
The lookout tower on top of Mount Cheaha – the highest point in the state of Alabama – trying to peak out through the clouds.
Switchbacks climbing out of the Lake Chinnabee canyon.
The view looking southwest down the ridge line, plus a view of the road climbing up from the western side.
My bike after the ride … not looking so good after my accident on Wednesday (check out the right handlebar tape and the seat).
Finally, here is a link to the interactive data on Strava as well as a gallery of all the pictures I took on the ride. Hover over each picture for a caption. http://app.strava.com/rides/2402474


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Another simple lunch or dinner when you are too tired to cook or simply you're not in the mood but you don't want to eat junk food.
In these situations I always have a mix of veggies in my freezer: potatoes, carrots, peas, green beans, corn. You can prepare these mix of veggies when you have some free time and then can just put them in the freezer and cook them when you're too lazy for anything else 🙂
Just need to steam the veggies, add some sliced olives, boiled egg if you like, mayonnaise, salt & pepper and your lunch or dinner is ready. It is really a great solution for when you don't want to cook but you don't want junk food. Eat your daily, delicious and colorful veggies!
Photo credit: Popsicle Society – Potato and veggies salad


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The People:
Rowena Bradley
Rowena Bradley (1922-2003) was the third generation of known basket weavers in her family. Both her grandmother, Mary Dobson and her mother, Nancy Bradley were accomplished at making baskets. Bradley is often cited as one of only a handful of Cherokee basket weavers who carried on the complex double weave technique in the 1930s and 1940s. Her baskets won numerous awards at the annual Cherokee Indian Fairs and an exhibition of her work was held at Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual in Cherokee, North Carolina, in 1974.
Read more about Rowena Bradley on the Cherokee Traditions website.


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We're staying in on New Year's Eve, which is my preferred way to ring in a brand new year. I'll be drinking a Cranberry Orange Sparkler with Sweet 'N Low to celebrate.
I found the recipe in Dash, an insert that came in our local newspaper, and adapted it. I thought it sounded like the perfect winter cocktail.
Cranberry Orange Sparkler with Sweet 'N Low
Servings: Makes 8 drinks
2 cups red wine (pinot noir)
1 cup cranberry juice
1 cup orange juice
1/2 cup raspberry vodka
one packet of Sweet 'N Low
I mixed it all up in the cocktail shaker I received and refrigerated it for one hour before serving.
I received the cocktail shaker and Sweet 'N Low as a part of the DailyBuzz Food Tastemaker program. Thoughts and opinions are my own.


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I am trying to digitize OpenLayers data (such as Google satellite imagery) with no success. Whenever I try to move or zoom the canvas the vector layer I digitized loses the position relative to the imagery.
I have read about this problem elsewhere but was not able to find a solution.
Does anyone have a solution as to how I can digitize satellite imagery for free in QGIS?


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This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017 | Tor.com
If you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting out of the top of Los Angeles buildings, it's not a far-off place. It's fortunes earned off the backs of slaves, and deciding who gets to count as human. It's impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. It's having empathy for the right things if you know what's good for you. It's death for those who seek freedom.
A thought-provoking first watch of Blade Runner …with an equally provocative interpretation in the comments:
The tragedy is not that they're just like people and they're being hunted down; that's way too simplistic a reading. The tragedy is that they have been deliberately built to not be just like people, and they want to be and don't know how.
That's what really struck me about Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go: the tragedy is that these people can't take action. "Run! Leave! Go!" you want to scream at them, but you might as well tell someone "Fly! Why don't you just fly?"


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Chairman Bill's note: Author Peter Joffre Nye's latest work is his biography of Albert Champion, The Fast Times of Albert Champion: From Record-Setting Racer to Dashing Tycoon, An Untold Story of Speed, Success, and Betrayal (Prometheus Books) is available in hardcover and Kindle eBook.
Champion (1878-1927) was an incredible man, as a bicycle racer he was winner of Paris-Roubaix and set more than a hundred world records. He went on to found both the Champion Spark Plug Company and General Motors Division AC Delco Systems.
Just click on the Amazon link to the right to get your copy of this terrific book.
Also on this site is Mr. Nye's story of former bicycle makers Glenn Curtiss and the Wright Brothers and their battle for supremecy of the skies
Oh, and there's Nye's story of Doris Kopsky, America's first national women's champion. Dig in!
From the era of snub-nosed cars and dirt roads, of cyclists wearing goggles over their eyes to keep out the ubiquitous dust from the roads, and racers wrapping a spare tire over their shoulders and across their backs in a figure-eight, a lone U.S. rider enjoyed success as a professional on the roads of Europe. Joseph Magnani of Illinois raced professionally from 1935 to 1948 on French and Italian teams. He was so ahead of his time that few in his homeland knew of him. In the 1947 world championship professional road race in Reims, northeast of Paris and famed for its champagne vineyards, Magnani finished seventh. He raced 171 miles through torrid heat that forced most of the starters, including legendary Fausto Coppi, to abandon. When results reached the United States where his performance should have been celebrated, however, Magnani's name only piqued confusion.
"If anyone knows who he is or where he came from to represent America, we would like to hear about it," wrote Otto Eisele, secretary of the Amateur Bicycle League of America (predecessor to the U.S. Cycling Federation and USA Cycling, Inc.), in American Bicyclist, then the only national cycling publication.
Ironically, some of Magnani's triumphs had been reported previously in the magazine during the 1930s. His victory in the 1935 Marseille-Nice road race classic had astonished everyone when it catapulted him to world-class stature. He won other races and performed well in one-day classics such as Milan-San Remo. In the post-World War II years, however, the earlier reporting was forgotten and confidence in American cycling sagged so badly that a U.S. rider holding his own against the Europeans apparently seemed to stretch credibility.
In mid-1948, Magnani returned to America with his French wife and their son to visit Chicago relatives and was recruited by the Schwinn Bicycle Company in Chicago to ride the American indoor winter six-day circuit. After a crash that October during the Buffalo six-day forced his retirement from cycling, he promptly went to work for Schwinn and settled in Chicago. From late 1948 until illness overcame him in the early 1970s, Magnani assembled all of the Schwinn Paramount track and road racing bicycles. In his free time, he coached Chicago riders, including son Rudy, a medalist in the Illinois district championships.
In the years just after the war Magnani rode for the Olmo pro team in Italy
Eisele's question about who Joseph Magnani was and how he came to represent America at the 1947 worlds remained unanswered even after Magnani died in 1975 at age 63, a year before Eisele himself died at 74. Only Magnani's immediate family, some Schwinn colleagues, and a few friends knew about his participation in major European national tours and one-day classics. Word-of-mouth rippled through the Chicago-area cycling community about a local rider who had competed successfully on the roads of Europe. Word-of-mouth gave way to stubborn rumors that turned into the mystique of a Schwinn employee as the first U.S. rider in the Tour de France--cycling's equivalent to Elvis sightings.
Later, in 1976, Mike Neel of Berkeley, California, rode on the Italian professional team Magniflex and finished 10th at the worlds pro road race in Ostuni, Italy. His performance at the time represented a major advancement for American cycling. Magnani's previous seventh place had been forgotten by a new generation that reported Neel had achieved the highest-ever placing at the world's by an American.
How could the one American, Joseph Magnani, whose professional career spanned 14 years, even enduring imprisonment during World War II as an American captured in German-occupied France, in the pro peloton with legends such as Coppi and Coppi's rival Gino Bartali go completely overlooked in his homeland?
"My father lost a whole box containing newspaper and magazine clippings, team jerseys, racer-leader jerseys, and photos of his career," explained his son Rudy, born in France while his father raced there and now living in Chicago. "Everything my parents and my father's sister had saved from his years of riding was in a box that got lost on its way from Nice, France, to Chicago. That box just disappeared. And my father had a quiet, self-effacing personality. He didn't draw a lot of attention to himself."
In international cycling, Magnani--routinely referred to in French accounts as l'Americain--earned a reputation as one of his generation's strongest riders. His reputation has proved durable. Several photos of Magnani in his prime years recently turned up neatly framed and mounted on walls of a Washington, D.C., restaurant. One photo shows spectators cheering Magnani as he crosses the finish line triumphantly in the 1934 Grand Prix Urago in Nice. Another catches him peeling off after his turn leading the breakaway during a stage of the 1938 Paris-Nice, on his way to finishing ninth overall. In another photo, he stands with the bicycle manufacturer Giuseppe Olmo and Olmo team riders and support crew at the start of the 1946 Giro d'Italia.
"Joe Magnani and Jean Veneziano, who went on to become assistant director sportif of the Ford Team with Jacques Anquetil, raced professionally together on the Urago team," said Pierre Mattia, an Italian native and co-owner of Coppi's Vigorelli restaurant in Washington where the photos are displayed. "Jeannot, Jean's nickname, saved everything from his racing days. That includes a lot of information on Joe Magnani."
When Mattia prepared to open the second of two Washington restaurants named after Fausto Coppi, the Italian cycling icon called Il Championissimo (champion of champions) for his breadth of achievements that included setting the world hour record on the Vigorelli Velodrome in Milan, Mattia journeyed in the summer of 1996 to Bordighehra, on the Italian Riviera bordering France, to visit Veneziano. "Jeannot gave me this treasure trove of photos," Mattia gestured with a wave of the hand that swept the walls of Coppi's Vigorelli restaurant adorned with many dramatic black-and-white photos of European racers. "He gave me the photos because he loves the sport. This is a way to contribute to cycling being better known in the United States."
Now finally Eisele's question can be answered about who Joseph Magnani was and how he came to represent the United States years long ago at the 1947 world championships.
Joseph Magnani (pronounced Mahn-yan-ee) was born in 1912 to an Italian-immigrant family in LaSalle, Ill., a coal-mining town in the middle of Illinois. He grew up in Mount Clare, between the state capital in Springfield and St. Louis, according to his youngest brother, Father Rudolph Magnani, a Catholic priest in Bethesda, Maryland.
In 1928, sixteen-year-old Joseph Magnani, the second in a family of eight, and his elder sister, Angelina, were sent to live with relatives in southeastern France. "His father had fallen on hard times in the mines," explained his widow, Mimi, of Chicago. "Joe and his sister were sent to France to make the family smaller."
They lived on a farm in Cap d'Ail, a small tourist town near Nice on the French Riviera within sight of the purple Alps bordering Italy. "Joe and his sister lived across the street from my family," said Mimi. "He delivered coal and wood to residents in the area."
He also joined the local amateur team, Club Cyclo-Tourists, sponsored by Urago Cycles, a family-owned bicycle manufacturer in Nice. Francois Urago was one of France's top racers and gave Urago Cycles a publicity boost when he won the 1930 national motorpace championship. By 1934 Magnani, 22, started adding to the company's publicity. He won the Grand Prix Urago against a field of 85 starters. Finishing fifteenth was his Italian friend Fermo Camellini, destined to win Paris-Nice and stages of the Tour de France.
Magnani wins the Gran Prix Urago in 1934
Magnani stood 5 feet 11 inches. The French press described him as thin and strong. Photos show him looking trim, with his dark hair parted in the middle and combed back in the day's fashion.
Two dozen French bicycle manufacturers such as Urago, Peugeot, Terrot, and Automoto each supported a trade team to help promote their products. Several hundred aspiring riders competed for berths on the teams. "Getting a contract to race for one of the pro teams was tough," said his wife.
Since Magnani had experienced hardships brought on by his family's poverty in Illinois and had discovered road races in France to match his talents and temperament, he took cycling seriously. In the off season, he chopped wood to strengthen his upper body. He told an interviewer that he prepared for the new racing season by training 2,500 miles. This preparation and his will to succeed propelled him to consistent top place victories that enhanced his popularity as a rider on the French Riviera. The area featured high-quality racing, and the hilly region developed many national-level climbers, including Magnani, considered tall for a climber.
In 1935 Urago Cycles offered Magnani a coveted pro contract. As an American expatriate, he was required to obtain a license from the American governing body, the National Cycling Association, based in New Jersey. Magnani wrote to the NCA and received back his license, issued by America's long-standing national sprint champion Frank Kramer. America had several sprinters who went to compete in Europe, but Magnani became the only American racing on Europe's roads.
One of the 1935 season's classics was the Marseille-Nice road race. Dating back to 1897, previous champions had included Gustave Ganay, a favorite of Ernest Hemingway, and world champion Alfredo Binda. During the 1935 Marseille-Nice event, Magnani executed a bold break to win in the final kilometers after seven hours of racing. His victory earned him a place in the pro peloton--as well as glory with his name and nationality, USA, still listed in VeloPlus, the European cycling record book (Marseille-Nice was discontinued after 1959).
"There wasn't much money in the 1930s," observed his wife. "The Depression was on. What kept him racing was that he was making a pretty good living."
Paris-Nice 1938
Making a good living meant racing even in horrendous weather, such as his 1938 victory in the 149-mile Marseilles-Toulon road race during a torrential rain storm--only four of the 80 starters finished. He also competed in the one-day classic, Milan-San Remo for the second time and finished a respectable 29th. That summer Magnani won the two-day Circuit of Lourdes, a strenuous event that crossed some of the highest peaks of the Pyrenees Mountains. Although he specialized in road races, he set a new hour record for the Nice Velodrome when he pedaled 42 kilometers (26.25 miles).
Bill & Carol McGann's book The Story of the Giro d'Italia, Vol 1: 1909 - 1970 is available as an audiobook here. For the print and kindle eBook versions, just click on the Amazon link on the right.
Peter Joffre Nye continues:
Magnani's performances generated attention in the French press. France's sports daily L'Auto (renamed l'Equipe) published a feature about the American riding Europe's road races, and the feature was cited in American Bicyclist. French journalist Jose Meiffret exclaimed to readers, "Attention! Follow this man! Urago has on its hands a rider of great quality."
At the top of bicycle racing then, as now, loomed the three-week Tour de France. Unlike today's format with trade teams composed of international riders, the Tour in Magnani's era involved national teams. That format excluded Magnani, the lone U.S. road rider (several other U.S. riders competed in Europe, but chiefly on the tracks). Magnani's performances, however, earned him consideration to ride the Tour de France on an international composite team, recalled Al Stiller of Boulder, Colo., who worked at Schwinn with Magnani. "But a Canadian who came up with more money bumped him off the team," Stiller said.
For the 1939 season, Magnani left Urago to join another French pro squad, Terrot. In the spring, he won the first stage of the 11-stage Tour of Southeast France that covered 1,250 miles. That put him in the race leader's blue jersey. He also scored a third place in the third stage. But after the first week he lost the lead and finished seventh overall. At age 27, he had only begun to reach the top of his game. Then Germany invaded Poland. War erupted, and the world championships scheduled that year in Italy were canceled.
Magnani moved to the Italian team, Martini, where he joined his friend Camellini for the 1940 season. In the spring, German tanks and troops blitzed across northern France and captured Paris. German troops seized the Union Cycliste Internationale headquarters in Paris and moved the sport's governing body to Berlin. Although the war escalated and the German army occupied the northern half of France, bicycle racing continued in southern France to offer at least an outward appearance of routine life. Magnani won the opening stage of the 1940 Grand Prix de la Cote d'Azur. He and Camellini posed with Magnani's fiance, Mimi, for a celebratory photo.
From the left: Joseph Magnani (matini jersey) poses with Fermo Camellini (Uraho) and his fiance Mimi.
Joseph and Mimi, a petite dark-haired woman, married at the end of the racing season in October 1941. Magnani had enjoyed a good season on France Sport team. He had won a stage of the Circuit du Mont Ventoux, and finished 10th in the Grand Prix des Nations time trial.
War hostilities intensified globally. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor; the U.S. Congress promptly declared war. Magnani had signed to race the 1942 season on France-Sport, a big professional team with greater resources at his disposal than ever before. His team mates included Rene Vietto and Dante Gianello, two of the period's biggest names. Despite wartime hardships, Magnani traveled with his teammates to races in the southern half of France. As an American in France during German occupation, however, Magnani became a marked man. After U.S. and English troops landed in North Africa in November 1942 to fight the German troops, German troops in northern France moved into southern France.
"In February 1943, the Germans arrested Joe because he was an American," Mimi said. "They put him in a concentration camp in the north of France."
"Joe was practically starved in the concentration camp," said Father Rudolph Magnani. "Our family sent him care packages with food, but we had no way of knowing how much got through to him. His weight dropped from 170 pounds to 98 pounds."
After U.S. and British troops launched the Normandy invasion on France's northwest coast in June 1944 and weeks later liberated Paris, Magnani and others were set free. Magnani joined his wife after more than two years of incarceration. When their son was born in July 1945, they named him after Joseph's youngest brother, Rudolph.
In the post-war years, the UCI relocated to permanent headquarters in Geneva, events that had been suspended for several years started again, and Magnani joined others who resumed their cycling careers. By 1946, Giuseppe Olmo--a gold medalist at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, former world hour record holder, and Giro d'Italia stage winner--had retired from racing to found a company to manufacture bicycles in his name. Olmo hired Magnani and Camellini to ride for him.
Italy's three-week national tour, the Giro d'Italia, had been suspended for six years, making the 1946 Giro the battleground for all of the Italian teams. Olmo picked Magnani to ride on the Olmo squadron in the Giro, thus adding that prestigious stage race to a long list of firsts that he scored for U.S. racers on Europe's roads. Much of the Italian public was divided in support of Fausto Coppi or his rival, Gino Bartali, a devout Catholic nicknamed "the Pious," while other pros such as Camellini and Fiorenzo Magni fought for attention.
The 1946 Olmo team for the Giro. Magnani is the third Olmo rider from the right.
According to Veneziano, Magnani rode support for Camellini, who wore the race leader's pink jersey during the second week. Then Magnani fell heavily in a crash. "He banged up his knee and couldn't race because of infection, so he came back home to recover," said his wife. Camellini couldn't defend the leader's jersey as Coppi and Bartali dueled, with Bartali ultimately triumphing.
During the 1947 season, Magnani scored ten top-ten results, including a second place in the final stage of the Tour of Normandy. At the Tour of Switzerland, he finished ninth in the time trial stage that Coppi won, and seventeenth overall in the event that Bartali won.
Late in the summer during a heat wave, Magnani, 35, entered the world championship road race in Reims, over a hilly course designed for Grand Prix car racing. Among the field of 31 starters were Coppi, Albert Sercu (father of 1964 Olympic gold medalist and six-day racing legend Patrick Sercu), Italy's classics winner Fiorenzo Magni, and Holland's star Theo Middelkamp.
"The amateur race was held in the morning when the weather wasn't bad, but by the time the pros started after noon, it was really hot," recollected Al Stiller, who represented the United States at the world championship track events on the Parc des Princes outdoor track in Paris. "The temperature hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with humidity to match. The heat knocked Coppi out."
Only seven riders finished, the fewest ever in a worlds road race. Middelkamp won, in seven and a half hours of racing, with Sercu in second. Magnani held on to finish seventh--the best U.S. performance at the worlds for 33 years.
For the 1948 season, Magnani rode for L'A.S. Monaco team, a small team sponsored by the Mediterranean principality, and started talking about retiring. "In July 1948, we came to the United States on a vacation trip," said Mimi. "Joe hadn't been back to visit his family since he had left so many years before."
"When he came back," said Father Rudolph Magnani, "I was an adult, 18, seeing him for the first time. I was really thrilled. I wore my best shirt."
After the Magnani family reunion, Joseph Magnani presented a letter of recommendation from Urago Cycles to the Schwinn Company, Mimi said. Of the half-dozen bicycle manufacturers in the United States, only Schwinn supported professional and amateur racing. Professional racing in America was limited to winter indoor six-day races, in which teams of two riders each alternated riding so that one cyclist competed while his partner ate or took a nap during the event of six days and nights straight. Schwinn hired Magnani to ride the winter indoor circuit.
The 1948 winter circuit started with the 12th international six-day, October 5 to 11, in Buffalo's Memorial Auditorium. Fifteen two-rider teams entered the event around the new portable Masonite track, 10 laps to the mile. Riders included Hugo Koblet, the Swiss rider who would win the 1951 Tour de France, paired with compatriot Walter Diggelman. Magnani teamed with Bill Johan, one of Chicago's hot young riders in his first six-day.
"Joe was really out of his element," said Bill Jacoby, a Chicago native who paired with Alf Letourner of France to finish fifth. "That track was a far cry from the roads of Europe which Joe rode so well."
Crashes day and night reduced the field to just six teams. Among the casualties were Magnani, Johan, and Koblet.
The vacation to Chicago turned into a permanent move as Schwinn hired Magnani to work full-time. With about 1,000 registered amateur racers nationwide, American bicycle manufacturers concentrated on the juvenile market. Schwinn also relied on the juvenile market, but deployed some of the profits to promote bicycle racing. Schwinn was the only U.S. bicycle manufacturer to make a racing frame, hand-made with Reynolds steel, called Paramount.
"Joe worked for me in the Paramount room, a large warehouse space with a high ceiling off the assembly line,' said Stiller, an engineer who had competed in the 1948 London Olympics. "Joe and two or three other guys assembled Paramount track bikes and tandems. In the early 1950s, we started building Paramount road bikes, and Joe assembled all of them."
"Joe Magnani was a remarkable technician," observed Richard Schwinn, a fourth-generation bicycle manufacturer and former company vice-president who saw Magnani in action on the job.
With all of his training and racing experience, Magnani shared his expertise with local riders. Fritz Masanek, now living in Aurora, Illinois, said Magnani prevailed upon his Urago Cycles connections to arrange for a shipment of complimentary Urago road bicycles, equipped with eight-speed derailleurs--rarities in America, still holding to the tradition of one-speed fixed gears from the salad days of track racing. Magnani also helped Masanek prepare for long European-style road races in eastern Canada that contrasted to the U.S. racing diet of criteriums, most often limited to 50 miles.
"We rode together on the weekends, and he gave me many pointers," Masanek said. "He had a lot of endurance. A couple of times in training with several of the best Chicago-area riders, Joe would shift into a big gear and just drop everybody."
Magnani's coaching helped Masanek win the 1949 Winnipeg-Kenora race of 150 miles. "I wore my Urago jersey and pedaled my Urago bike," Masanek said.
In one-hour team races that enjoyed popularity at the Brown Deer Park track in Milwaukee and Washington Park track in Kenosha, Masanek and Stiller competed together while Magnani coached from the sidelines. 'Joe helped us as much as he could with tactics we might use, how we looked," Masanek said. "He gave us water."
For Masanek, training and racing focused on the 1951 Pan American trials in St. Louis to determine team selection for the First Pan American Games, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Masanek finished second in the road trails, although the sport's governing body could afford to send only one road rider to Buenos Aires. He subsequently spent a year and a half competing in European-styled events in Mexico where he won 18 races. "I rode for AutoMoto, a French bicycle company that had a subsidiary plant in Mexico City," Masanek said. "Three French riders were on the team, and they all knew Joe Magnani pretty well from his racing in France."
When Rudy Magnani came of age in the early 1960s, his father coached him. "He always came out training with me," Rudy said. "We did a lot of traveling--Tuesdays we were on the track in Kenosha, Thursdays in Northbrook, and Sundays at Brown Deer Track. We didn't get home till after 11 P.M. And Dad always got up at 5:30 the next morning to get to work."
Results show that Rudy Magnani won a silver medal in the 1965 Illinois district sprint championship, and a bronze in the 10-mile. "That was my last year of racing. That fall I quit cycling to enroll in the Art Institute and the University of Chicago. I probably disappointed him when I decided to go on to art. But if he was disappointed, he didn't express it. Winning wasn't everything with my Dad. His philosophy was to enjoy the sport."
The younger Magnani went into advertising, and his company worked on the Schwinn Company account. Richard Schwinn, a company vice-president, dined frequently in the Magnani household. "Mama Magnani is a wonderful cook," Schwinn said, cheerfully patting his comfortable belly. "She cooks wonderfully rich French food in the provencal style." He laughed indulgently. "That woman doesn't know the word hungry."
In the early 1970s, despite his athletic talent, Joseph Magnani was overtaken by a debilitating neural affliction. "My dad had always been active, quite vigorous in fact, and not being able to get around because of illness depressed him," his son said. Magnani died November 30, 1975.
"U.S. cycling started coming back around in the 1980s," remarked Rudy Magnani. In 1980 at the worlds pro road race in Salanches, France, Jonathan Boyer of California finished fifth, improving upon Magnani's place at the worlds. "My dad never saw any of the professional movement. He would have had a lot to talk about with today's pro riders here in America."
Joseph Magnani, an American pioneer in road racing, left a legacy. Today his son's company, Magnani & Associates in Chicago, consults on advertising for Richard Schwinn, now vice-president of Waterford Precision Cycles. Magnani & Associates also does marketing and advertising for Mongoose Bicycles. That legacy is well represented today. Thousands of Schwinn Paramounts he put together are still ridden--many prized by collectors. Joseph Magnani continues riding, forever in his prime on the roads of France and Italy, as captured in photographs prominently displayed at Coppi's Vigorelli restaurant.
Highlights of Joseph Magnani"s professional career. Compiled by the editors of Coups de Pedals 67, published in the July-August 1998 issue.
1948: AS Monaco & Tebag
Photo credit: All the photos on this page are from Pierre Mattia of Coppi's Vigorelli Restaurant, Jean Veneziano Collection


text: Career criminal Willie Sutton was often quoted saying that he robbed banks "because that's where the money is." The legend sounds good, but Sutton actually said in his biography, "Go where the money is...and go there often."No doubt many cybercriminals are taking note, and as Android devices gain market share, they are attracting more interest from cybercriminals. According to comScore, Android phones comprise more than 40 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, and users are 2.5 times more likely to encounter malware than just six months ago.Android phones, which are now available on all of the big four networks (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon) as well as on smaller, prepaid carriers, also cost from $50 to $300, meaning that users on a variety of budgets are using the Google OS. Android's popularity with consumers also makes it a bigger target for criminals.This year has seen many old tricks of the trade heading to new platforms, such as porn scams targeting smartphones. The old-school tactic was used in the dial-up days to get infected computers to call premium numbers, and now scammers are targeting smartphones. Android users are also likely to encounter traditional web-based threats as phishing scams and browser exploits.A greater threat could be malverstising, a threat that continues even with legitimate websites, where ads served through legitimate apps can lead to fake Android market where users might download malware. Android remains a serious threat because it is an open platform.On the other end of the spectrum Apple's closed platform is also seeing a rise in threats. Famous Apple hacker Charlie Miller recently showed how microcontrollers, the tiny chips that regulate everything from the battery in a laptop to a car, can be taken over. Miller, who is also a security researcher, found that Apple laptop microcontroller chips are shipped with default passwords, and once discovered can be used as a hiding spot for malware. The danger says Miller is that this goes way beyond traditional hacks, as the battery could be disabled or even blown up.While Miller also contends that the Max OS X security is better than ever, the truth is that PC users aren't the only ones facing these threats of cyber attacks.Peter Suciu writes about technology trends for small business, but has an appreciation for the Victorian Age when the telegraph was the information superhighway. After living in New York City for 18 years, he now resides in more rural Michigan.


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The Chow Chow (sometimes simply Chow:7–8) is a dog breed originally from northern China, where it is referred to as Songshi Quan (Pinyin: sōngshī quǎn 鬆獅犬), which means "puffy-lion dog". The breed has also been called the Tang Quan, "Dog of the Tang Empire." It is believed that the Chow Chow is one of the native dogs used as the model for the Foo dog, the traditional stone guardians found in front of Buddhist temples and palaces. It is one of the few ancient dog breeds still in existence in the world today.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Chow Chow", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.


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Since leaving the White House, George W. Bush has adopted a remarkably low profile, foregoing the political scene to spend his days at home in Dallas. During his downtime, Bush has picked up painting as a hobby. In particular, New York magazine reported, Bush likes to paint dogs.
Unfortunately, the first public unveiling of the 43rd President's handiwork was prompted Friday by sad news: the death of Barney, Bush's Scottish terrier. Barney was 12. Bush released this statement in remembrance:
Laura and I are sad to announce that our Scottish Terrier, Barney, has passed away. The little fellow had been suffering from lymphoma and after twelve and a half years of life, his body could not fight off the illness.
Barney and I enjoyed the outdoors. He loved to accompany me when I fished for bass at the ranch. He was a fierce armadillo hunter. At Camp David, his favorite activity was chasing golf balls on the chipping green.
Barney guarded the South Lawn entrance of the White House as if he were a Secret Service agent. He wandered the halls of the West Wing looking for treats from his many friends. He starred in Barney Cam and gave the American people Christmas tours of the White House. Barney greeted Queens, Heads of State, and Prime Ministers. He was always polite and never jumped in their laps.
Barney was by my side during our eight years in the White House. He never discussed politics and was always a faithful friend. Laura and I will miss our pal.
Barney did bite a reporter back in 2008, though Bush White House alums might tell you that attests to his judgment. As for the President, he inscribed his oil painting with a one-of-a-kind signature: "43."


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The brain is made up predominantly of two cell types: neurons and glial cells. Neurons are regarded as responsible for thought and sensation. Glial cells surround, support and communicate with neurons, helping neurons process and transmit information using electrical and chemical signals. One type of glial cell — the oligodendrocyte — produces a sheath called myelin that provides support and insulation to neurons. Myelin, which has been compared to insulation around electrical wires that helps to prevent short circuits, is essential for normal neural conduction and brain function; well-recognized conditions involving defective myelin development or myelin loss include multiple sclerosis and leukodystrophies.
Aug. 28, 2013 ? Stem cell technology has long offered the hope of regenerating tissue to repair broken or damaged neural tissue. Findings from a team of UC Davis investigators have brought this dream a step closer by developing a method to generate functioning brain cells that produce myelin — a fatty, insulating sheath essential to normal neural conduction.
"We actually developed 'super cells' with an even greater capacity to spike than natural cells," Deng said. "This appears to give them an edge for maturing into oligodendrocytes and producing better myelin."
Deng believes that replacing glial cells with the enhanced spiking OPCs to treat neural injuries and diseases has the potential to be a better strategy than replacing neurons, which tend to be more problematic to work with. Providing the proper structure and environment for neurons to live may be the best approach to regenerate healthy neural tissue. He also notes that many diverse conditions that have not traditionally been considered to be myelin-related diseases — including schizophrenia, epilepsy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — actually are now recognized to involve defective myelin.
It is well known that adult human neural tissue has a poor capacity to regenerate naturally. Although early cells such as OPCs are present, they do not regenerate tissue very effectively when disease or injury strikes.
They next compared electrophysiological properties of the derived OPCs to naturally occurring OPCs. They found that unlike natural OPCs, the ESC-derived OPCs lacked sodium ion channels in their cell membranes, making them unable to generate spikes when electrically stimulated. Using a technique called viral transduction, they then introduced DNA that codes for sodium channels into the ESC-derived OPCs. These OPCs then expressed ion channels in their cells and developed the ability to generate spikes.
In cell culture, they found that only spiking OPCs received electrical input from neurons, and they showed superior capability to mature into oligodendrocytes.
According to Deng, this is the first time that scientists have successfully generated OPCs with so-called spiking properties. This achievement allowed them to compare the capabilities of spiking cells to non-spiking cells.
This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01NS061983 and R01ES015988, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Shriners Hospitals for Children and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
In this study, the UC Davis team first developed a novel protocol to efficiently induce embryonic stem cells (ESCs) to differentiate into oligodendroglial progenitor cells (OPCs), early cells that normally develop into oligodendrocytes. Although this has been successfully done by other researchers, the UC Davis method results in a purer population of OPCs, according to Deng, with fewer other cell types arising from their technique.
Other study authors affiliated with the UC Davis Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and/or the Institute for Pediatric Regenerative Medicine, Shriners Hospitals for Children are Peng Jiang, Chen Chen, Vimal Selvaraj, Wei Lu, Daniel Feldman and David Pleasure. The team also included Xiao-Bo Liu of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience, and Ronald Li, who was at UC Davis at the time of the research, and now at the University of Hong Kong, China, and Ying Liu, now with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
"Our findings represent an important conceptual advance in stem cell research," said Wenbin Deng, principal investigator of the study and associate professor at the UC Davis Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine. "We have bioengineered the first generation of myelin-producing cells with superior regenerative capacity."
They also transplanted spiking and non-spiking OPCs into the spinal cord and brains of mice that are genetically unable to produce myelin. Both types of OPCs had the capability to mature into oligo-dendrocytes and produce myelin, but those from spiking OPCs produced longer and thicker myelin sheaths around axons.


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19 Feb 2018
Bringing first-time non-executive directors on board
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When it comes to getting the right quality of board member in your boardroom, do small to mid-size housing providers lack ambition in who they expect to attract?
There is a very real opportunity to take advantage of those who are still in their executive career, but with the right approach, can add value to a skills-based board.
One of our clients, Wandle, a London- based social housing provider with over 7,000 homes, made five appointments of 'rookie NEDs' in the past year. Tracey Lees, their CEO, shares what's been learned from that experience.
Here are the five major lessons.
Get succession planning right
Firstly, with multiple appointments to make, Wandle put a succession plan in place.
The programme of appointments would mean two NEDs were appointed in Autumn 2016, and two further individuals would join the board in Autumn 2017.
In the meantime, they would be co-opted onto committees.
Why? Committees are a fantastic training ground. This created succession which was 'oven -ready' and already carefully aligned to Wandle's corporate plan – Road to 2020.
Think long-term
Whilst putting people at a committee level allows people to get to grips with the sector, it also enables them to start to put themselves in a slightly different frame of mind.
It's also important that those still in the day job can develop a whole new skillset.
Tracey is clear that you have to give people time to grow into this space, but also provide the right tools to enable them to understand the quirks and nuances of the sector. You cannot expect new appointees will be the perfect NED immediately, but the effort will reap significant rewards.
Finally, Tracey believes that committees are a great test bed. If no promises are made and it is decided that someone will struggle to be a fully-fledged board member, you can still retain the talent you saw in them within your governance framework.
Create a robust learning process
No one can be expected to be an expert overnight. Likewise, a 'rookie NED' won't know how to be a good NED from day one. It's dangerous to assume otherwise.
It can cause disruption in the boardroom and disharmony between the executive and non-executive.
The following has helped Wandle ensure their first-time non-executive directors land well:
- Have a robust induction programme. Get new NED's out and about to learn about the business and the customer base fully. If you don't do this, how can they truly add value to the boardroom?
- Encourage your new NED to focus beyond their functional specialism from the very beginning. This is where a lot of the 'killer questions' come from and it drives the right behaviours in the long term.
- Never underestimate the value of a buddy system. The more experienced NEDs can help to build confidence in the boardroom, and help the rookies to think about how they can best contribute.
- Set expectations early. A good NED is someone who contributes outside of meetings, not someone who just turns up for the main event. Avoid being disappointed/frustrated by the lack of contribution a new NED makes outside of the boardroom, by setting the tone.
Build in some flexibility
The saying goes 'if you want something doing, give it to a busy person'. Those in a day job are more than capable of finding time to add value to your housing association if they are the right people.
For this to work, there has to be flexibility on the part of the housing association. For example, arranging meeting times and how you engage with your NEDs outside of the boardroom. Tracey's view is that the return on this kind of investment has been worth it.
Free your thinking on diversity
The benefits of diversity in the boardroom are well documented. The reality is that trying to build a skills-based board, whilst also finding experienced NEDs, can make diversity hard.
This is where growing your own talent really does pay dividends. Wandle's commitment to diversity paid off. Beyond the skills diversity of the five appointments made, two were female and two are BME candidates. The average age of the board has decreased by six years, and each candidate brings very different life experiences.
Finally, lateral thinking leads to a richer pool of candidates. Don't be too prescriptive about what the ideal CV looks like. Wandle is now benefitting from an energy and enthusiasm in the boardroom that is unprecedented.
To discuss how Odgers Berndtson can help you find and develop your NED leadership talent, please get in touch.
You can find out more about Wandle, and their most recent appointees, here.


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Some of His Best Friends Are Jewish: The Saga of a Holocaust Revisionist
From his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, in what might be called the intellectual center of Jewish America, Michael Santomauro sends out a daily e-mail digest of what are, for his neighborhood, some unusual views on Judaism. Among them: questions on the Holocaust's veracity, excoriation of every aspect of Israel's behavior and questions on the morality of Judaism itself.
Santomauro, 50, says he is not an antisemite. But this week, his messages, which he claims reach about 144,000 subscribers, caught some unwanted attention. The Jewish Defense Organization, a militant group known for its sharp-tongued rhetoric, called for his eviction from the apartment in which he lives and assembles his "Reporter's Notebook" Web site. The organization has posted leaflets outside his building and called for a rally there next weekend.
The group is also attempting to organize a boycott of Santomauro's business, a Web-based service called Roommate Finders, which Santomauro says has a clientele that is about 45% Jewish. The JDO has not ruled out other tactics.
"We're going to run this neo-Nazi pig out of his office one way or the other," said Mordechai Levy, head of the JDO, who was jailed in 1989 for attempting to shoot Irv Rubin, the head of the Jewish Defense League, from which Levy's group broke away in the late 1970s.
Holocaust revisionist circles are full of colorful characters, but few could be as unconventional as Santomauro. A Catholic, he grew up in a mostly Jewish section of the Bronx, N.Y., before moving to the heavily Jewish Upper West Side. He calls himself a pacifist and says he is aggressively anti-Nazi, noting most of his fuel comes from the left, not the right. He has promoted books with titles such as "When Victims Rule: A Critique of Jewish Preeminence in America," yet he says many of his friends are Jewish. He insists his Reporter's Notebook e-mails and postings do no more than offer an "objective" view of how Jewish interests operate in the world.
"Jews are the most powerful and dominant group in the political spectrum and have a tremendous effect on how we conduct our foreign policy," Santomauro said.
Santomauro has not yet felt the effects of the JDO's "Operation Nazi Kicker." But the controversy has already sparked at least one physical confrontation, said a doorman in Santomauro's building.
According to the doorman, on October 13, one person handing out anti-Santomauro materials verbally assaulted a man walking his dog who refused to take a leaflet. The passerby responded with a punch, and a scuffle ensued, the doorman said.
The management company for the building did not return calls for comment.
Santomauro landed in the mainstream media in January 2003 when The New York Times reported that he had been sending his Reporter's Notebook e-mails to his Roommate Finder clients, prompting some salty protests. Santomauro is not hesitant to blur the lines between his business and his obsession with Jewish issues. In discussing his theories on Jewish social psychology, he claimed that of his business clients who express a racial preference in their roommate search, 95% are Jews. "It's a much more cliquish community," he said.
The JDO says it targeted Santomauro's apartment as "Nazi headquarters" because of meetings he hosted with Holocaust deniers. Santomauro said he never has had a meeting in his apartment, but in June he hosted a lecture with David Irving, who was called a "pro-Nazi polemicist" in a British court ruling, at a church across the street However, Santomauro, said there is a gulf between his own beliefs and Irving's. Irving, he said, is a "fascist. I'm not."
Kenneth Stern, an expert on antisemitism at the American Jewish Committee, said he had been unaware of Santomauro before this week. But after looking at Santomauro's Web site, Stern said: "This is not intellectual inquiry, this is the peddling of bigotry."
Santomauro launched his Reporter's Notebook about four years ago. E-mails go out several times a day, offering press clippings from mainstream newspapers, frequently salted with Santomauro's editorial notes. He also sends out essays that are hostile to Israel and that question the Holocaust. In one recent week, titles included "The Amazing, Rapidly Shrinking 'Holocaust,'" "Miami, Florida: Zionist Occupied Territory?" and "Jewish Discrimination Against Christians."
Growing up on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, in what he called "one of the last blue-collar Jewish neighborhoods," Santomauro said he helped turn lights on and off on Saturdays at the synagogue across the street and that most of his childhood friends, with whom he is still in touch, were Jews. "It's a natural inclination that you're interested in how your friends are different from you, when I went to their bar mitzvahs and all that," he said.
In his e-mails Santomauro repeatedly declares himself innocent of antisemitism. "An antisemite condemns people for being Jews," Santomauro said. He wants not to hurt Jews, he said, but merely to change their religious beliefs and political behavior. His interest in the topic comes primarily from an interest in the Middle East conflict, he said.
As for the Holocaust, Santomauro believes that only about 2 million Jews were killed. "There are things that have been twisted and exaggerated," he said, "but taking that aside, there was still an atrocity of monumental proportions, and a concerted effort aimed at the fact that people were Jews."
His work goes far beyond the Holocaust, however. His e-mails frequently attack tenets of the Jewish religion and Jewish individuals. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, he sent out an article arguing that Jews were involved in the Civil Rights Movement because it "dilutes Euro-American power," which he said "stands in opposition to Jewish interests."
During the recent High Holy Days, he sent out an email arguing that the Kol Nidre prayer is meant to free Jews from honoring any promises made to non-Jews.
"There are a lot of things in Judaism that are very hateful," Santomauro said. "It could be a group strategy to promote a reaction of antisemitism, so that it keeps the Jewish community cohesive and intact."
Santomauro is clearly excited to debate his ideas. His Web site offers a monetary reward to anyone who can disprove the essays that he sends out. He also circulates criticisms of himself that he receives. One, from a man he identified as a Jewish childhood friend, said: "I know you mean no harm and I know you're not a bad person, but you process information poorly."
Levy at the JDO has turned down Santomauro's appeals for a dialogue about their disagreement. In an e-mail that appears to come from a JDO address, Santomauro was told: "The JDO is not interested in collecting an award, and we are not interested in debating you with any of your bull**|*. We are interested in only one thing… f***|**|* your mother."
Santomauro is sticking to his position: "A dialogue should be done on an intellectual level. They make it very clear they're not interested in having a debate. They want to destroy me."


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Daniel Ellsberg: ŌĆ£Secrets ... Can Be Kept Reliably ... For Decades ŌĆ" Even Though They Are Known to THOUSANDS of InsidersŌĆØ
Judges, prosecutors and journalists all know that collusion happens every day. As I noted last year:
Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme was a conspiracy. The heads of Enron were found guilty of conspiracy, as was the head of Adelphia. Numerous lower-level government officials have been found guilty of conspiracy. See this, this, this, this and this.
Time Magazine's financial columnist Justin Fox writes:
Some financial market conspiracies are real ...
Most good investigative reporters are conspiracy theorists, by the way.
Indeed, conspiracies are so common that judges are trained to look at conspiracy allegations as just another legal claim to be disproven or proven by the evidence.
As I pointed out in 2009:
Federal and all 50 state's codes include specific statutes addressing conspiracy, and providing the punishment for people who commit conspiracies.
Conspiracy is a very well-recognized crime in American law, taught to every first-year law school student as part of their basic curriculum. Telling a judge that someone has a "conspiracy theory" would be like telling him that someone is claiming that he trespassed on their property, or committed assault, or stole his car. It is a fundamental legal concept.
Obviously, many conspiracy allegations are false (if you see a judge at a dinner party, ask him to tell you some of the crazy conspiracy allegations which were made in his court). Obviously, people will either win or lose in court depending on whether or not they can prove their claim with the available evidence. But not all allegations of trespass, assault, or theft are true, either.
Proving a claim of conspiracy is no different from proving any other legal claim, and the mere label "conspiracy" is taken no less seriously by judges.
Indeed, even Obama's information tzar - who advocates using the power of the state to shut down talk of conspiracies - admits:
Some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out to be true ... The Watergate hotel room used by Democratic National Committee was, in fact, bugged by Republican officials, operating at the behest of the White House. In the 1950s, the CIA did, in fact, administer LSD and related drugs under Project MKULTRA, in an effort to investigate the possibility of 'mind control.'" [This post isn't going down the rabbit hole of mind control.]
Can't Hide It
Those accusing Goldman Sachs, Dick Cheney or some other powerful people of conspiring to enrich their interests are often met with the argument that "someone would have spilled the beans" if there had really been a conspiracy.
But famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg explains:
It is a commonplace that "you can't keep secrets in Washington" or "in a democracy, no matter how sensitive the secret, you're likely to read it the next day in the New York Times." These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn't in a fully totalitarian society. But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.
History proves Ellsberg right. For example:
- One hundred and thirty thousand (130,000) people from the U.S., UK and Canada worked on the Manhattan Project. But it was kept secret for years
- A BBC documentary shows that:
There was "a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen . . . . The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush's Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression"
Moreover, "the tycoons told General Butler the American people would accept the new government because they controlled all the newspapers." Have you ever heard of this conspiracy before? It was certainly a very large one. And if the conspirators controlled the newspapers then, how much worse is it today with media consolidation?
- 7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980's during the "Latin American Crisis", and the government's response was to cover up their insolvency. That's a cover up lasting several decades
- The government's spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this.) But the public didn't learn about it until many years later. Indeed, the the New York Times delayed the story so that it would not affect the outcome of the 2004 presidential election
- The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted "crap" in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill - who sat on the National Security Council - also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11. And top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took office. Dick Cheney apparently even made Iraqi's oil fields a national security priority before 9/11. And it has now been shown that a handful of people were responsible for willfully ignoring the evidence that Iraq lacked weapons of mass destruction. These facts have only been publicly disclosed recently
These examples show that it is possible to keep conspiracies secret for a long time, without anyone "spilling the beans".
To anyone who knows how covert military operations work, it is obvious that segmentation on a "need-to-know basis", along with deference to command hierarchy, means that a couple of top dogs can call the shots and most people helping won't even know the big picture.
Moreover, those who think that co-conspirators will brag about their deeds are forget that people in the military or intelligence or who have huge sums of money on the line can be very disciplined. They are not likely to go to the bar and spill the beans like a down-on-their-luck, second-rate alcoholic robber might do.
Finally, people who carry out covert operations may do so for ideological reasons -- believing that the "ends justify the means". Never underestimate the conviction of an idealogue.
"All Wars Are Based on Propaganda"
Tom Brokaw notes:
All wars are based on propaganda.
There are numerous examples, such as dressing corpses in fake uniforms and planting false intelligence on them to mislead enemies.
In addition, governments from around the world have admitted to false flag terror. In all of these cases, more than a handful of people were involved in planning, funding and carrying out the attacks. And yet no one spilled the beans or – if someone did – they were not believed.
For example:
- The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950's to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister
- Israel admits that an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind "evidence" implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this)
- The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people's support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: "You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security" (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred)
- As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960's, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Official State Department documents show that - only nine months before - the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. (While the Joint Chiefs of Staff pushed as a serious proposal for Operation Northwoods to be carried out, cooler heads fortunately prevailed; President Kennedy or his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara apparently vetoed the plan)
- The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him "to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident", thus framing the ANC for the bombing
- An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author)
- Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton says that a Clinton cabinet member proposed letting Saddam kill an American pilot as a pretext for war in Iraq (and see this)
- According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.
- The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings
- As reported by BBC, the New York Times, and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the "war on terror".
- Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having "our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda's ranks, causing operatives to doubt others' identities and to question the validity of communications."
- United Press International reported in June 2005:
U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.
- Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers
- At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence
- There are many other instances of false flag attacks used throughout history proven by the historical evidence. See this, this and this.
In summary, the claim that conspiracies couldn't have happened or else we would have known when someone bragged about their deeds completely false.
Conspiracies are generally not discovered unless the facts are aggressively investigated and prosecuted.
- Orangutan.'s blog
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- 6 votes
Let's not forget P2OG
From Wikipedia:
The Defense Science Board (DSB) conducted a 2002 "DSB Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism."[1] Excerpts from that study, dated August 16, 2002, recommend the creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception.[2] For example, the Pentagon and CIA would work together to increase human intelligence (HUMINT), forward/operational presence and to deploy new clandestine technical capabilities.[3] Concerning the tactics P2OG would use,
Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destructionŌĆöthat is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces.
Such tactics would hold "states/sub-state actors accountable" and "signal to harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk", the briefing paper declares.[2]
* * *
This is about as clear a program for false flags as you'll ever see spelled out in government documents.
Another great and useful essay from George Washington!
The truth shall set us free, but we have to work to get it out there.
Love is the only way forward, and love is a verb, so get busy brothers and sisters.
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Excellent! and should be
required reading for every citizen. It is far better than the simple answer I give to those who start talking about "conspiracy theorists": If you want to see conspiracy theory in action, I tell them, go to any prosecutor's office in the land -- especially federal jurisdiction -- and count the number of pending cases that have the word "conspiracy" in their description.
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uh. . . 9/11
I can't help being annoyed and frustrated at Ellesberg's tap dancing around 9/11. Isn't he aware of it, either the event, or the controversy??
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- 7 votes
Ellsberg supports a new investigation
Hey NYCGuy,
For your edification, hope this helps ease your frustration:
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Excellent History Lesson
You have presented an excellent history of government lies, conspiracies and coverups. This should be required reading for every US citizen! Great work.