Nov 17
Hey, this is pretty neat. You can now connect Uber with Spotify so you can pick the music on your next ride. I’m playing all death metal all the time, sorry next driver.
Nov 17
Nov 17
There’s a scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise, on the run, hides in a department store. Unfortunately, the billboards that line the walls read his eye print and begin screaming his name at every turn. We may have seen that sequence as a…
Nov 17
Reports surfaced last week that Uber riders would soon be able to blast tunes from Spotify during the commute, and now the partnership is official. After hailing a car via the handy app, you can decide what music you’re in the mood for, and when the…
Nov 17
What will be the first major Nokia device look like following Microsoft’s acquisition of its smartphone arm? We’ll find out tomorrow, according to a cryptic tweet featuring a mysterious black box from the company. That’s when Nokia’s head of product…
Nov 17
Darren Wilson Tells Man 'I'll Lock Your Ass Up' Months Before Brown Killing (VIDEO)
Posted in: Today's ChiliA newly released video purports to show Missouri officer Darren Wilson threatening to arrest a man for filming him ten months before fatally shooting unarmed Ferguson teen Michael Brown.
In a police report first obtained by The Free Thought Project, Wilson responded to the home of 30-year-old Ferguson resident Mike Arman on Oct. 28 2013.
According to the report, Wilson was responding to complaints of “derelict vehicles being on the property.”
Video taken by Arman was uploaded last Friday. Arman told The Free Thought Project he wanted to wait to upload the video until he had left Ferguson and would not face retaliation.
The 15-second video shows Arman asking Wilson for his name. Wilson responds: “You wanna take a picture and I’m gonna lock your ass up.”
“Do I not have the right to record?” Arman can be heard asking as Wilson approaches him.
“No, you don’t,” Wilson responds.
In his own report, Wilson admits that he did not allow Arman to record him, despite the fact that recording police officers is perfectly legal.
More from Wilson’s report:
“[Arman] removed his cell phone and stated that he would record the situation. I advised [Arman] that a voice recording would be acceptable, however, that we needed to move forward on the derelict vehicle situation. [Arman] refused to answer any questions or cooperate as he lifted the phone to begin a video recording of myself. [Arman] then stated that I must state my name to him. I advised [Arman] that I would not comply with his demand and to remove the camera from my face….”
When Arman once again asked for Wilson’s name, Wilson said Arman was “capable of reading my department issued name plate attached to my uniform.”
Immediately after Wilson told Arman to stop recording, he placed the man under arrest for Failure to Comply, according to the report. That charge was later dropped.
Arman told The Guardian that he was being cordial, but “wanted to safeguard myself by recording what happened.”
A Grand Jury in St. Louis will decide in the coming days whether or not 28-year-old Wilson will be charged in the Aug. 9 shooting death of 18-year-old Brown, a killing which has ignited a firestorm of protests across the country and incidences of police brutality.
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Ferguson police incident report: Darren Wilson arrests Mike Arman by Jon Swaine
Nov 17
I put my opinions on the internet for a living, so other women often ask me how I handle the inevitable hate and harassment that comes my way. I always feel a bit unhelpful when I tell them the answer: I just ignore it. Honestly, the “shut up, bitch” tweets don’t even get to me anymore. I almost take pleasure in blocking them without comment. When expletive-laden emails land in my inbox, I take them as proof that my ideas have moved beyond my core audience of sarcastic gender-studies students and earnest nonprofit employees and made it out into the wider world, a place where few people read and even fewer agree with me. I archive them to my “hatemail” folder and go about my day.
The problem is, my personal strategy of ignoring the haters doesn’t square with my principled understanding that it’s not fair to expect women to do this.
Nov 17
Homer In Syria
Posted in: Today's ChiliThe war has been going on for longer than anyone wants to remember. The fighting has swayed to and fro; there have been catastrophes on all sides; cities have been trashed; allies have broken away; some have refused to fight; and many precious men have been lost, almost always horribly, with no dignity or beauty in the deaths. The Iliad describes Syria 2014.
Nor, within the body of Homer’s epic, is there any sense of an ending. Of course the audience knows, and Homer knows, that the war will end one day, and that the Greeks will exact from the city and its inhabitants the most brutal and horrifying of prices, but that is far off, and no hint of a Trojan Horse appears in the Iliad. That resolution-by-trickery appears only in the Odyssey, in retrospect, in tales told long after the war is over, with the combatants dispersed and little but grief remaining to remember the war by.
For now, though, the war, it seems, is going on forever. Its acts of violence are generating acts of violence, continuously, symmetrically. War is a trap in which human beings are condemned to toil, like slaves on a treadmill, summoning all those images of endless, repetitive pain to which the Greek mythic imagination is consistently drawn: Sisyphus and the boulder that will always slip out of his grasp and back to the bottom of the hill; Tantalus and the fruit that always lifts just beyond him as he reaches for it; Prometheus whose liver will be eaten for ever by the eagle than feeds on it by day, only for the liver to grow back at night; the Danaides spending eternity trying to fill a bath with water they must carry to it in sieves.
The Iliad does have an ending, a kind of resolution, or at least a wished-for resolution. The poem ends before Troy falls, but Homer orchestrates something subtler and richer than the hideousness of any military triumph. After Achilles kills Hector the Trojan prince, the whole of Troy goes into horrified despair and mourning. The women wail, the men cover themselves with dung scraped up from the streets. This moment of hopelessness is the pit of the poem. Achilles is threatening to eat Hector’s body raw. It looks as if everything the city enshrines means nothing in the teeth of the Greeks’ triumph. Priam, the king of Troy, resolves to go to their camp across the plain to find Achilles and beg him for the body of his son.
The old king slowly prepares and gathers carts full of the best that the city can offer, including beautiful cloths: robes, mantles, blankets, cloaks and tunics, as if wanting to drown Achilles in the woven. But that is the point. Priam is going to take the qualities of the city out into the plain. That has been the place where in book after book, death after death, the wrong thing has been done. Priam’s journey is a kind of healing laid across that theatre of horror. He travels slowly, at night, with his mule carts: no heroic northern chariots here. He comes at last into the shelter of Achilles’s camp, and without announcement the old king kneels down next to Achilles, clasps his knees and ‘kisses his hands, the terrible man-slaughtering hands, the hands that had shed so much blood, the blood of his sons’. That old man’s kiss is the moment of arrival. Achilles thinks of his own father in Greece, and comes to understand something beyond the world of violence and revenge he has so far inhabited. Both men give way to grief.
Priam wept freely
For man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
Before Achilles’s feet as Achilles wept himself
Now for his father, now for Patroclus
And their sobbing rose and fell in the house.
Food is cooked for them, mutton souvlaki:
They reached down for the good things that lay at hand
And when they had put aside desire for food and drink
Priam gazed at Achilles marveling now how tall he was,
And how beautiful
And Achilles looked at the nobility of the old king
And listened to his words.
They gaze at each other in silence, and that exchange of admiring looks is the Iliad‘s triumph. Priam has brought the virtues of civility into Achilles’s heart. The body of Hector will now be returned to his father and will be buried with dignity outside the city. In that way, Troy has won the war. Achilles has absorbed the beauty of Priam’s wisdom, of his superhuman ability to admire the man who has killed his sons, and from the mutuality and courage of that wisdom, its blending of city and plain, a vision of the future might flower.
We know, as Homer’s audience knew, that this is not the true ending. It is nothing but a moment. Achilles will soon be dead, Troy will soon be broken, the Trojan men will soon be slaughtered, Priam among them, horribly murdered by Achilles’s own son, their women abused and enslaved. Only here, in poetry, in passing, a better world is momentarily seen.
Homeric wisdom does not age. The Iliad‘s understanding of the continuous nature of war, and the fragile place that the desire for peace has within it, is as meaningful now as it has ever been, in this era of wars that don’t end, that don’t have the result they were intended to have, that leave little but damage in their wake.
Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has recently described how, ‘between airplane flights’ in August 2012, she had a cup of coffee with Kofi Annan, who had just stepped down as the international community’s special envoy on Syria. ‘Speaking with deep sadness,’ Mathews has written, ‘this consummate international negotiator said he’d never worked harder on a problem with less to show for it.’ Translated into the medium of the 21st century, those are Priam’s words.
Adam Nicolson is the author of Why Homer Matters.
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Also on The Huffington Post:
Nov 17
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Pope Francis is coming to the United States.
Francis confirmed Monday that he will travel to Philadelphia next September for the World Meeting of Families, a conference held every three years in a different city to celebrate the importance of family. Francis’ announcement, at an interreligious Vatican conference on traditional family values, ended months of lobbying and speculation.
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, the conference’s organizer, met with Francis at the Vatican and personally invited him to the city in March.
Vatican officials toured the city in May and President Barack Obama, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Congress have extended invitations.
Just last week, more than 10,000 Philadelphia Catholic school children sent handwritten notes encouraging Francis to make the visit.
The pope is also expected to visit New York and Washington, but Vatican officials Monday would not confirm those legs of the trip.
The pope “wanted to guarantee his presence to the organizers of the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia 2015, but for the rest I have nothing to say, no concrete information to give,” the Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi told reporters.
The Vatican’s envoy to the United Nations last week strongly hinted that Francis would visit New York to address world leaders at the General Assembly, saying the coming 70th anniversary of the world body would be “the ideal time.”
Archbishop Bernardito Auza, the permanent observer of the Holy See, told The Associated Press that “if he comes to Philadelphia, he will come to New York.”
Chaput, at the Vatican for Francis’ announcement Monday, said he “applauded the loudest” of the people cheering the news, “because we’re very, very grateful for this opportunity.”
“We’re doing a lot of planning for the World Meeting of Families, great enthusiasm, but I think that 90 percent of that is based on the fact that the Holy Father is going to join us,” Chaput told The Associated Press. “So for him to say publicly that he’s going to join us will give us a renewed commitment and energy to have the best ever World Meeting of Families that has been celebrated in the church.”
Francis, making just the second papal visit to Philadelphia and his first visit to the U.S. as pope, is expected to participate in the conference’s closing events and celebrate a Mass on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
The boulevard, linking Philadelphia’s city hall to the art museum steps made famous by the movie “Rocky,” is home to the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul and has been the backdrop for summer concerts and parades attracting hundreds of thousands of people.
Officials have said the World Meeting of Families on Sept. 25-27 could attract more than 1 million people. Hotels within a 10-mile radius of center city Philadelphia have already sold out.
Details of Francis’ itinerary will not be finalized until next spring or summer, conference organizers said.
Pope John Paul II, canonized by Francis in April, celebrated Mass on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in front of an estimated 1 million people in 1979.
Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, was the last pontiff to visit the U.S. He celebrated Mass in New York and Washington, met with President George W. Bush and spoke to the United Nations during a five-day trip in April 2008.
Francis’ visit will come just weeks before the 50th anniversary of the first papal visit to the U.S. Pope Paul VI addressed the United Nations General Assembly, attended the New York World’s Fair and celebrated Mass at Yankee Stadium in October 1965.
Nov 17
Daily Meditation: Rain Dance
Posted in: Today's ChiliWe all need help maintaining our personal spiritual practice. We hope that these Daily Meditations, prayers and mindful awareness exercises can be part of bringing spirituality alive in your life.
Today’s meditation features a rain dance performed at the Thunderbird American Indian Festival in New York. Whether it’s already raining where you are, or if you live somewhere that desperately needs more rain, consider the sacred role water plays in our Earth and spiritual traditions.
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