Paper plates might be ok in a barbecue scenario, or for serving birthday cake, but a greasy pizza will make short work of what little structural integrity they had to begin with. When a slice of pepperoni pie is on the menu, there’s no better way to serve it up than on a set of these pizza graphic plates.
Without synapses, your neurons wouldn’t be able to communicate and your brain would be little more than a ball of meat. Exactly what synapses look like has been a mystery until now, and it turns out that even though their job is simple, they’re complicated as hell.
This week we watched Apple buy Beats for $3 billion, explored the inspiration behind the newly-announced LG G3, learned about Samsung’s new partnership with Oculus VR, investigated the benefits of solar energy and much more. Read on for Engadget’s…
Toyota is rolling out new versions of its assist robotics, updating its “bionic leg” and balance-gamification system for rehabilitation and testing them out in Japanese hospitals. The Walk Training Assist … Continue reading
KHARTOUM, May 31 (Reuters) – A Sudanese woman sentenced to death for converting to Christianity is expected to be released soon, a government official said on Saturday, after Khartoum came under diplomatic pressure to halt her execution.
“The related authorities in the country are working to release Mariam (Yahya Ibrahim), who was sentenced to death for apostasy, through legal measures,” Foreign Ministry Under-Secretary Abdelah Al-Azrak told Reuters.
“I expect her to be released soon,” he added.
A Sudanese court this month imposed the death sentence on the pregnant 27-year-old woman, who is married to a Christian American, and ordered her to return to Islam.
The sentence caused a diplomatic incident, with Britain urging Sudan to uphold what it called its international obligations on freedom of religion.
Ibrahim’s lawyer, Mohaned Mostafa, said neither he nor the woman’s husband had been notified about any release.
“But we do hope she will get released soon,” Mostafa told Reuters.
Ibrahim was also sentenced to 100 lashes for what it deemed her adultery for marrying a Christian. Last week she gave birth in prison to a daughter, her second child by her American husband Daniel Wani.
(Reporting by Khalid Abdel Aziz in Khartoum; Writing by Yasmine Saleh in Cairo; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
What would you think if the owner of a Ford dealership always purchased General Motors cars for his family to drive? Or, what would be your reaction if the owner of a McDonald’s franchise always took her family to eat at a Wendy’s? Although there is no written law that people have to be loyal to the products they are selling, we naturally expect them to be.
It seems to me that we as taxpayers have a right to expect this same type of loyalty from people who are employed to conduct the business of the federal government. But according to statistical reports published by USA Today, as of last September 3.9% percent of all federal employees owed back taxes, and the percentage is on the rise.
The delinquency rate of people on the payroll of the House of Representatives was among the highest at 4.9 percent. The Senate delinquency rate was 3.24%. Can you imagine–some of the very people and their staffs who make the laws for citizens to follow lack the sense of loyalty and responsibility to abide by those laws themselves!
Let’s dig further. In the past week we have learned more about what has been going on in the Veterans Affairs Department. At first it appeared that the VA had just been incompetent in caring for our veterans. But now we are learning that in all likelihood many appointment records were falsified to make it appear that veterans are being cared for so efficiently that employees of the VA are eligible to receive financial bonuses for superior job performances, which is clearly not the case. And, on top of that, the Veterans Affairs Department’s tax delinquency rate of 4.4% is one of the highest of all government departments.
Looking at the Treasury Department, it has the best tax compliance rate among departments in the federal government at 1.2%. But the IRS, part of the Treasury Department, according to the report, paid more than $1 million in salaries and bonuses to employees who have not been paying their federal income taxes. I am incensed that people whose responsibilities include seeing to it that we citizens pay our taxes lack the sense of loyalty and responsibility to pay their own taxes.
The private sector and the federal government are similar in as much as they pay bonuses for failure. In the private sector, after failing to perform their responsibilities adequately, CEOs and coaches often receive big bonuses as part of their severance packages. But in these instances, the private sector does at least dismiss those who fail to do what is expected of them. The federal government, on the other hand, not only keeps employees who violate the law by failing to pay their federal income taxes, but in some instances also pays them bonuses.
Where is the sense of loyalty and responsibility to the citizens who are paying the salaries of these government employees? Franchise owners who are disloyal to their brands are breaking “unwritten” expectations of loyalty and responsibility. It is quite another thing for employees of the federal government to break “written” laws that were enacted by the United States Congress and signed by the President.
We hear so much these day about banks and companies that have become so large they are unable to manage themselves–that there are so many layers of bureaucracy that illegal and unethical behavior can go undetected for years. Has our federal government become this same way?
I think is was Attorney General Richard Kleindienst during the Nixon Administration who suggested that the United States government had become too large to manage the affairs of our country solely from DC and put forth a proposal to divide the government into two equal divisions, one managing our country east of the Mississippi River and the other managing matters west of the Mississippi. Such an idea seemed farfetched and complicated and was immediately dismissed. But has our federal government now become so large that it can’t govern effectively? Has the government lost its ability to manage its employees and hold them accountable? Has the federal government become so big that it has lost a sense of loyalty and responsibility to the very people it represents and governs?
I’m not a member of a far-right political group that wants to radically change the makeup of the federal government. But I hold loyalty and responsibility in high regard. People tend to adhere to the qualities of life they learned as children. I was reared during World War II, and the patriotism of that era produced in people a deep sense of loyalty and responsibility.
According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, “loyalty” is defined as being “faithful to a cause, ideal, custom, institution, or product.” “Responsibility” is defined as being “able to answer for one’s conduct and obligations.”
I see indications that loyalty and responsibility are values that are going out of style. In my opinion, loyalty and responsibility are historic and important ingredients of our way of life that should never be put on the back burner, either in the private sector or the federal government. It may be that the federal government is too large and too important to fail. But we as taxpayers have every right to expect the employees of our government to be loyal and responsible, and if we discover they are not, we need to take appropriate action at the ballot box.
(Tax delinquency statistics are from the May 23-26 weekend edition of USA Today, page one.)
Memorial Day offers an annual remembrance of courage and sacrifice as well as the all-too-frequent foolish and counterproductive effusion of American blood. Most of the conflicts in which so many Americans died were fool’s errands, wars which the U.S. should never have fought.
Few were as tragic or unnecessary as the American Civil War, which 150 years ago was grinding through its bloody final full year. Today most Western governments would not use force to stop peaceful secession — it is impossible, for instance, to imagine the British military occupying Scotland to prevent the latter’s departure from the United Kingdom. But in 1861 mystic nationalism combined with practical politics to impel President Abraham Lincoln to call out northern troops to coerce southern residents to remain in the Union. Abolition only became a war measure as the conflict proceeded.
The first year resulted in mere skirmishes compared to the battles to come. The next two years saw combat of increasing intensity, with the conflict’s result seemingly in the balance. In the east Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia invaded Pennsylvania before being turned back at Gettysburg in July 1863. Two months later in the west the Confederates won at Chickamauga in Georgia before tossing away the advantages gained from that victory.
While the conflict out west remained one of maneuver in 1864, in the east Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac battered their way past successive confederate defensive positions at huge cost. For instance, the battle of the Wilderness, from May 5 to 7, caused almost 30,000 casualties. Although Grant had both flanks smashed in and suffered much more heavily than Lee, he moved forward. That resulted in the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, which ran through May 21st. Fighting was even more savage at times, with a similar 30,000 toll. The Bloody Angle entered American lore for the horrific close-in combat.
The armies moved again, ever closer to the Confederate capital of Richmond. On May 23 Lee entrenched, creating an inverted V defensive line anchored to the North Anna River. As a result, he could easily reinforce his own forces while Grant had to split his army, leaving both wings vulnerable to a concentrated strike by the Army of Northern Virginia. But what then ensued may have been the most important battle not fought during the Civil War.
Lee was sick with an intestinal illness, unable to command. From his bed he murmured: “We must strike them a blow,” but he could not order it done. And no subordinate general could substitute for him. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson had died the previous year. James Longstreet had been wounded while directing an attack in the Wilderness. Richard Ewell, A.P. Hill, Richard Anderson, and Jubal Early all were sickly or otherwise ill-prepared for command.
A big victory for Lee would not likely have changed the war’s ultimate outcome — the North’s advantages were too great at that stage — but, argued Dana Shoaf of Civil War Times, had Lee “succeeded in crushing half of the army of the Potomac, it would have changed the tenor of the war in the east.” Grant likely would have had to retreat, giving the Confederacy some time to recover; another command shake-up might have occurred, given tension between Grant, who oversaw all Union armies, and George Meade, who led the Army of the Potomac under Grant. Any change would have further delayed northern operations.
But no attack came and on May 26 Grant moved again, leading to one of his worst defeats, at Cold Harbor. On June 3 Grant suffered around 7000 casualties in just a few minutes when assaulting Lee’s nearly impregnable position. The night before the attack pessimistic northern soldiers pinned pieces of paper with their names to their jackets, an informal “dog-tag” to identify their corpses after the attack. It was the one battle about which Grant expressed regret in his memoirs.
The campaign then moved on toward Richmond and became a siege of Petersburg, to the capital’s south. That lasted until March 1865, with Lee’s surrender in early April. The war soon ended.
The country was again unified, but at the cost of 620,000 or more dead, tens of thousands maimed, vast wealth squandered, and much of the southern states devastated. The federal government had been vastly strengthened, creating the opportunity for even more abusive future expansions of national power. The one indisputable benefit was the end of slavery, which ironically, was a consequence rather than objective of the conflict. Had Lincoln made that a war aim to start, he would have divided the north and might have lost the war.
The satisfaction of having ended the horrid practice was tempered by the fact that only one other country uprooted slavery through violence: Haiti, in which a slave revolt ousted French overlords and gained independence. Every other slave society peacefully abolished the practice — among them Great Britain, which did so three decades before, and Brazil, which did so two decades later. War likely was not necessary to eliminate this great evil from America.
If not abolition, then for what was the war fought? Southern partisans argue for the constitutionality of secession, but there is no definitive answer. The more important question is: what justifies killing those seeking to leave a political community? What kind of a republic with a limited government kills dissatisfied citizens to prevent them from leaving? Today most people in the West express horror at the thought of forcibly suppressing peaceful secession.
Indeed, many Americans who supported the Union opposed coercion. For instance, famed editor Horace Greeley declared in the New York Tribune: “We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets.” Col. Robert E. Lee, offered command of the North’s armies, voiced similar sentiments when his home state of Virginia chose to secede:
I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union… Still, a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me.
Moreover, while slavery impelled the seven inner-southern states to leave the union, the outer four, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, acted only after President Lincoln called on them to provide troops to invade their neighbors. Most southern unionists then switched sides — they wanted no conflict, but if forced to fight it would be to protect their southern neighbors from their northern neighbors.
Unfortunately, many people in both sections gaily went off to war believing there would be little bloodshed. Young men raced to join lest the fight be over before they could win glory and impress the folks back home. Three years of bloody combat irrevocably shattered such illusions. After the carnage of the Wilderness campaign, Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts observed: “If that scene could have been presented to me before the war, anxious as I was for the preservation of the Union, I should have said: ‘The cost is too great; erring sisters, go in peace’.” Had he and others like him done so, more than 600,000 brave soldiers on both sides would have lived.
Unfortunately, the Civil War was not America’s only unnecessary war. In 1898 the U.S. charged into the Spanish-American War and then spent three years killing Filipinos seeking the very independence that early Americans had won in combat. World War I was a foolish imperial slugfest with nothing at stake warranting U.S. intervention. World War II grew out of the one-sided peace imposed through American arms after WWI. Vietnam confused vital and peripheral interests. More recent conflicts, such as Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya have been almost frivolous, wasting thousands of American lives for infinitesimal geopolitical gains.
Memorial Day always is an appropriate moment for serious reflection. But it is not enough to affirm the obvious bravery of U.S. military personnel. It also is necessary to expose the recurring misbehavior of U.S. government officials. Sometimes war is a sad necessity, but most often not. This Memorial Day offers an appropriate moment to not just reflect, but act. And insist that statesmen treat military intervention as a last resort, reducing the casualty toll to be commemorated on future holidays.
By Jose Martinez, Complex Sports
On Friday, Peru and England squared off in a tune-up match and the star of the night was a paper airplane. We’re not kidding.
As you can see in the above video, one fan decided to toss a pretty large paper airplane onto the pitch in the middle of the game. But what no one, including the individual throwing the object, could’ve ever foreseen was having it actually make contact with a player on the opposing team. That unfortunate honor goes to Hansell Riojas who was decked in the side of the head, much to the delight of the fans at Wembley.
Take a look.
[via YouTube]
Kendrick Lamar keeps it real, and his newly purchased California home is proof.
The Grammy-nominated rapper reportedly purchased a 4-bedroom home in Eastvale for a modest $523,500. Given that the average home in the Eastvale goes for $345,000, Lamar clearly hasn’t let his newfound fame and fortune get to his head. An hour away from Los Angeles, the surprisingly-normal house is certainly not what one might envision GQ’s Rapper of the Year to live in.
In today’s rap game, Lamar seemingly stands alone in his modest purchases. Back in February, Rick Ross dropped $5.8 million on Evander Holyfield’s 109-room mansion in Georgia. Fellow California resident and rapper Tyga owns a $6.5 million 7-bedroom home in Calabasas fully equipped with a movie theater, spa, pool and waterfall. In 2012, Drake moved into a flashy $9 million mansion in the Hollywood Hills complete with a tennis court, volleyball court, wine cellar and horseback riding arena.
A Compton native, Lamar has emphasized the dangers of materialism both in interviews and on tracks like “Vanity Slaves Pt. 2.” It’s refreshing to see a down-to-earth celeb who’d rather keep up with the Joneses than the Kardashians.
Just a few days remain till California’s primary election. Will California Republicans, whose share of the state’s electorate dropped more than seven percent over the past decade, veer even further to the right with their standard-bearer for governor? Or will they at least pick a modernizer who might help point the way to a future for the party and won’t be an ongoing embarrassment?
That the question is still in doubt reflects the devolution of both the Republican Party in California and the state’s media establishment, which seems no longer able to muster up a serious polling effort.
Here’s a few sentences I wrote several weeks ago: “Fortunately for Kashkari’s faded hopes, Donnelly doesn’t have any money to speak of. So it’s not impossible to catch him. But probably not with the amounts Kashkari has aggregated so far.”
Since then, Kashkari has quadrupled the $500K in personal funds he’d put into his campaign. And late last Wednesday what looked like the cavalry finally began arriving for the former assistant U.S. Treasury secretary. An independent expenditure committee filed with the California Secretary of State, reporting an initial $415,000 generated for Californians for Kashkari for Governor. $350,000 of it is from Charlie Munger Jr., son of Warren Buffett’s old billionaire business partner and frequent funder of Republican modernizers as well as a big source of the money laundered into 2012’s unsuccessful efforts to defeat Jerry Brown’s Prop 30 revenue initiative and promote a measure to hamstring public employee union campaign funding efforts.
And we have some public polls, too, though I don’t really like them and they’re all out of date.
Survey USA, a robo-poll I often malign which in this instance works for several California TV stations, provides this snapshot of California’s open primary for governor: Jerry Brown 57 percent, Tim Donnelly 18 percent, Neel Kashkari 11 percent.
The more accepted Public Policy Institute of California poll has these numbers: Brown 48 percent, Donnelly 15 percent, Kashkari 10 percent.
(What accounts for Brown being nearly 10 points lower in the PPIC poll? Well, that one has Brown with only 79 percent of the Democratic vote whereas Survey USA has him with 90 percent of Democrats.)
The poll also finds overwhelming support for Brown’s November initiative for a rainy day fund, with backing at a stupendous 74 percent among likely voters.
The problem with the PPIC poll is that it is taken as always, much like the Field Poll, over a whopping eight-day period, which means that in a dynamic race it is already out of date as soon as it is completed, much less when they get around to publishing it.
In this case, the poll was conducted from May 8th through May 15th, and just published late last night. That means it has data in it that is already two weeks old!
Survey USA, in contrast, is taken over a more customary three-day period, in this case concluding on May 19th. There hasn’t been another Survey USA poll published since then.
There is also a new poll put out by the Hoover Institution, the longtime conservative policy center at Stanford. But that one, which just came out, suffers from the same problems as the PPIC poll, and in any event has old data.
What about the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that in the 1990s seemed on track to joining the New York Times as one of the few great newspapers around? Well, its in-house polling operation, which strangely mirrored its then editor’s predilections in downplaying the prospects of the 2003 gubernatorial recall election, not to mention the prospects of one Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger, since disappeared.
More recently, the LA Times has had a polling operation in alliance with the University of Southern California. But the director of the polling operation, USC Unruh Institute of Politics director Dan Schnur — former communications director for then Governor Pete Wilson and Senator John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign and more recently chairman of the Fair Political Practices Commission at the end of the Schwarzenegger Administration — is himself running for secretary of state as an independent in this election. (I’m voting for him, but it looks like he is falling short for lack of campaign funds.)
Schnur’s likely return to his USC role is good news for public polling in California, if yet another sign of problems for independent candidates. But the lack of a poll in his absence is further reminder of the LA Times’s devolution.
So it appears that Kashkari is at last began moving and the race for the right to lose to Brown has tightened.
Is the cavalry arriving for Kashkari in a timely manner? And will it arrive with enough resources to be make the difference? Since the initial statement, only another $30,000 has been reported.
Unless something big is happening now, that’s less than a half-million dollars to take down Donnelly. With a mailer from former Governor Pete Wilson decrying his extremism and personal business and financial foibles.
If this doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s because it’s not.
What about the candidates themselves?
Well, Donnelly still isn’t raising enough money to win a hotly contested legislative seat. And Kashkari has raised, according to reports to the California Secretary of State’s office, less than $90,000 in the past 10 days.
It’s absolutely preposterous that the Republicans are in this situation. Donnelly should have been political roadkill early this month.
It’s not like the man is a heavyweight on the right. He’s no Congressman Tom McClintock, that’s for sure.
McClintock would get his clock cleaned by Brown, too, but he doesn’t make psychotic claims that Kashkari (as a Bush Administration official, no less!!) promoted Islamic sharia law or try to take his .45 caliber pistol on an airliner.
While McClintock is far right himself, he’s not a fringe character. Donnelly is. And yet the California Republican Party convention seemed ready to endorse him, if given the chance. I’ve written before about the party’s fateful fall 2007 convention outside Palm Springs in which it rejected the well-delivered centrist entreaties of then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who just months before had won a second landslide election as governor, in favor of the right-wing red meat of Texas Governor Rick Perry. We’ll see if I have yet another occasion to examine the party’s odd behavior.
Brown, meanwhile, is in cruise control. He’s not polling the primary or campaigning to any real extent, sitting on a $21 million campaign war chest which he may never need to spend from. Though of course he will, at some point, to drive home both his own smashing re-election and lift the fortunes of the Democratic ticket as well as his state budget rainy day fund initiative, heavily amended from the one originally produced by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
He’s in the midst of state budget negotiations now, from which the budget will emerge much as he presented it in the annual “May revise.” Any hassle points for Brown in this process? Well, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Office says Brown is understating state revenues, the better to dampen new spending demands from his fellow Democrats. And not everyone is on board with his plan to use major funding from the greenhouse gas cap and trade market created as part of the landmark climate change program enacted in 2006 by Schwarzenegger to fund the controversial high-speed rail project.
Then there’s the revelation that the U.S. Department of Energy, in another triumph for the Obama Administration, appears to have seriously overestimated how much oil and natural gas is available in California using current fracking technology. So a potential bonanza is at least somewhat delayed, not that Brown will ever allow the fracking moratorium that some critics on the left demand.
So into each life a little rain must fall (actually, with the state’s greenhouse era drought settling in, Brown probably wants more than a little rain), but life in Mr. Brown’s world is good. The mom-and-pop shop Jerry and Anne show — the latter referring of course to the estimable and witty special counsel to the governor and first lady of California, Anne Gust Brown — continues to roll on to great effect.
We’ll see how much better things might get, at least for them, on Tuesday.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
