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The Avid Commentator
A big picture analysis that's straight to the point
In brief: The Australian Property Market really is Different, but for all the Wrong Reasons
On October 11, 2018 October 11, 2018 By avidcommentatorLeave a comment
Australia's two largest property markets, Sydney and Melbourne have recorded the largest falls in property prices since the financial crisis.
Sceptics of a large fall in Australian housing prices have long decreed that "Australia is different", that our nation through some combination of culture, lending standards and other factors, is somehow immune to the large housing price falls endured by other nations throughout the world.
For that reason, perhaps now is the time to examine a few ways that Australia is different to these nations that suffered housing crashes during the financial crisis.
Australia's level of household debt to GDP is one the highest in the world, with the current level being more than 58% larger than that of the United States at that nation's absolute peak.
Generally banks throughout the world prefer diversified loan portfolio's spread across a number of different loan classes. However, in Australia our banks have concentrated heavily on residential property, with our banks holding more than doublethe proportion of residential mortgage loans as banks in the United States.
Australia has some of the most expensive property in the world in terms of price to income ratio's, with both Sydney and Melbourne ranking in the top 10 most expensive housing markets in the world going by the price to income metric.
As you can determine from the graphs above, the sceptics are a hundred per cent correct that "Australia is different" although not for the reasons they espouse.
With the combination of one of the highest levels of household debt in the world, a banking system built on a previously unheard proportion of mortgage lending and some of the highest property prices on the planet Australia could scarcely be more different to other comparison nations.
One way or another, the Australian property market is going to become a pertinent lesson for policy makers and economists of the future. Either it will be recorded as the largest property bubble to ever safely deflate or it will become a reminder that asset price bubbles always find a way to eventually burst.
Once unthinkable, an alliance between Moscow and Beijing is becoming increasingly possible.
On September 16, 2018 By avidcommentatorLeave a comment
As the United States ramps up its rhetoric on trade toward China and continues sanctions on Russia, the two former cold warriors are coming together for the largest Russian military exercise since 1981, Vostok- 2018. The exercise is set to include over 300,000 Russian troops, 36,000 vehicles and over 1,000 aircraft.
This cooperation is just the latest sign that the two former adversaries are willing to bury the hatchet in the face of the threats to both of the nation's strategic interests. In recent years Moscow once again began selling its latest and greatest military equipment to China after over a decade of pause caused by issues around intellectual property.
These sales have drastically improved the capabilities of the Chinese armed forces in many key areas where they were previously lagging behind the West. The Russian S-400 Triumph air defence system for example, gives the Chinese the ability to effectively deny enemy aircraft access to airspace within a 400km radius.
If Russian claims about its effectiveness prove to be accurate, it also has the ability to "see through" the stealth abilities of U.S aircraft like the B-2 Spirit bomber, F-22 Raptor and the F-35 strike fighter.
This is a potentially nightmare scenario for Pentagon defence planners, a prospective fight with the Chinese armed forces over the South China Sea for example just became that much harder.
The delivery of these, potentially game changing weapons are just one part of the warming relationship between Beijing and Moscow. The Chinese participation in the Vostok-2018 exercises is a huge change compared when they were last held in 2010. Back in 2010 the exercise was conducted with China being considered the potential foe according to geopolitics analysts.
At Vostok-2018 things could scarcely be more different, the Chinese armed forces will now line up side by side with the Russians, a profound change in the relationship between Beijing and Moscow in a relatively short period of time.
What has happened to bring about this change?
Both Russia and China are facing American led attempts to curtail their potential or existing spheres of influence.
For the Russians it was the coup against the Russian friendly government in Kiev of Viktor Yanukovych, which was backed partially by the United States. For decades the United States had been breaking a promise made in 1990 for NATO not to expand into Eastern Europe.
With the removal of the effective buffer state between the bulk of NATO forces and Russia's borders the Kremlin burst into action. The Russians quickly seized the Crimean peninsula and quickly began arming separatists in the Eastern part of Ukraine.
For China it's the expansion of their sphere of influence that is causing the problems. China believes it owns almost the entirety of the South China Sea with its "9-dash line" claim.
This has unsurprisingly raised serious flags with not only the countries who believe their territory is being encroached on, but also those who rely on the South China Sea for martime trade.
As China continues its meteoric rise there is a strong belief among certain officials in Beijing that war with the United States is "inevitable". This belief coupled with the United States "Pivot to Asia" has only further inflamed tensions between Washington and Beijing.
So where are relations heading between Moscow and Beijing now?
An alliance between Beijing and Moscow may still be a long while off, but the recent rounds of cooperation between the two former adversaries on everything from military exercises to trade agreements leads credence to its potential.
Different geopolitical analysts paint either Moscow or Beijing as the reticent partner in any potential alliance. Russia is allegedly seen by the Chinese a potential liability given its involvement in existing conflicts in Ukraine and its position as the far inferior economic party in any alliance.
China is apparently viewed by Russian military officials as a potential unreliable partner. China's military may be extremely powerful on paper but it is a nation that has not been tested in a real war in decades.
The once unthinkable alliance between Beijing and Moscow may not end up happening, but the very possiblity is none the less the stuff of nightmares for Western military planners.
Energised, Unified and Out of touch: A critique of the modern Democratic Party
On September 7, 2018 September 7, 2018 By avidcommentatorLeave a comment
This is the accompanying article to go with last weeks Critique of the modern Republican Party.
The Democrats are a party that is still profoundly out of touch with much of Middle America, tens of millions of Americans in the so-called "flyover states" are largely either forgotten or ignored by a Democratic Party drunk on its own anti-Trump hype.
The forgotten Americans still remember how Barack Obama had 8 years in the White House and more or less completely failed to deliver any of the "Change we can believe in" to people like them.
While the forgotten America struggles with things like unemployment and access to basic necessities, there are Democrats like Kamala Harris are touting her 'Rent Relief Act' which would use taxpayer dollars to subsidize the rent of Americans who earn up to $100,000 per year.
When there are millions of Americans who are struggling to put food on the table or find a good job, the idea of helping those on nearly six-figure incomes should be a complete nonstarter.
Instead, the party including many prominent potential candidates for President in 2020, are pressing ahead with this display of exactly how out of touch the Democratic party is with anything resembling those in middle America.
The idea that a working single mother with two jobs in St Louis, Missouri should be subsidizing the lifestyle of someone in management in upstate New York on nearly $100,000 a year not only sounds wrong, but its also a great betrayal of the ideology of the 'New Deal' Democrats who genuinely stood up for the little guy.
In the lead up to the Mid Term elections, the Democratic Party has increasingly coalesced largely around the Democratic Socialist agenda of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren.
Aside from a few notable exceptions, the Democrats are displaying an enviable amount of political cohesion that is sorely lacking on the other side of the aisle.
The embracing of the Democratic Socialist agenda has reinvigorated a party that was reeling from its shock election defeat at the hands of Donald Trump and the Republican Party less than two short years ago.
Democrats at all levels are getting behind the message hoping to bring about the much talked about "Blue wave" to tip the balance of power on Capitol Hill in their favour.
Many of those in the Democrat old guard is slowly being either converted to the new ways or is falling by the wayside.
The most recent expression of this was the loss of 10 term congressman Michael Capuano to challenger Ayanna Pressley, a Boston city councillor, who is also campaigning on a strong Democratic Socialist message.
As a whole, the pollsters currently predict that it is indeed likely that the Democrats will retake the House if the election campaign continues on its current course. Polls suggest that the Senate will remain under Republican control, but potentially with a reduced majority.
On the face of it, for a party that had the DNC leadership and its political message decimated as a result of the 2016 election, the Democratic Party seems on course for what one might consider a miraculous recovery.
The Democratic Party has made an impressive comeback from their crushing defeat less than two short years ago, assisted handsomely by a heavily anti-Trump media and an injection of new ideas in the form of Democratic Socialism.
With a White House seemingly in almost constant chaos, the Democrats are displaying an enviable amount of political cohesion, lending serious credence to their message of being an alternative government in waiting.
However, despite all of these positive developments for the Democratic Party, they appear to remain painfully unaware of the struggles of many of the forgotten Americans.
Their continued embrace of policies like the 'Rent Relief Act' is only going to further alienate voters who may have chosen to give the Democratic party another chance.
By continuing to concentrate on the issues of those in Democrat strongholds on the coasts, they risk yet another backlash in the long term. The forgotten Americans, who arguably helped to propel the Republicans to their big win in the 2016 election cycle, may once again choose to make their voices heard at the ballot box.
A house divided against itself, cannot stand: A critique of the modern Republican Party
On September 2, 2018 September 2, 2018 By avidcommentator1 Comment
Foreword: There will be the accompanying critique of the modern Democratic Party coming next week.
In the race for the Texas Senate seat up for grabs this November, former Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz, has apparently called on his old campaign trail nemesis Donald Trump to help him campaign in the Lone Star state.
With a strong Democratic challenger in the form of Beto O'Rourke, some recent polls have put the prospective Senator as little as 1 point behind Ted Cruz.
Some analysts in the mainstream media put Cruz's poor showing in the polls down to the "Blue wave", that according to some pollsters is going to cost the Republicans the house and seats in the Senate.
That may well be a contributing factor, but there is arguably a far greater one that will more seriously affect the outcome on Election Day.
The coverage of contemporary politics by much of the news media has degenerated to the point where the Republicans are portrayed in an almost sitcom fashion, as "Donald Trump and friends".
This lack of "clean air" in which other Republicans can share and promote their message is forcing Republicans from across the country to increasingly lean on the President for political firepower in the run up to November.
This has only intensified the identity crisis the Republican Party has been suffering from ever since Donald Trump won the party's nomination for President.
Other than Trump's huge political presence there is no real cohesive message coming out of the Republican Party as a whole, it is a scattered jumble of idea's from all over their side of the political spectrum. As a result Trump remains front and centre going into November, as he likely will going into the future.
However, in order to remain competitive the Republican Party must show that it has an identity of its own, something that extends outside of President Trump's immense political shadow.
Trump may have great appeal to the Republican base, the polls well and truly reflect that. But Republicans need to appeal to independents and even right leaning Democrats should the candidate have that type of character.
Meanwhile the Democrats have rebuilt their policy platform in the wake of their shock 2016 election defeat. The Democratic Socialist ideology is front and centre, with its standard bearers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren spearheading the charge toward November.
The Democrats are showing a level of unity that should be coming naturally to a Republican Party that controls Congress, the Senate and the White House.
Instead the Republicans are currently a party that struggles with its own internal divisions, with battles over the correct level of conservatism the party should embrace constantly raging in the background.
These internal divisions have already inadvertently or otherwise effectively torpedoed the Speakerships of two of their own in recent years, John Boehner and Paul Ryan.
If the Republicans are to have their own vision for the future that extends beyond that of President Trump's, they must unify their party behind a cohesive message they can all agree on, no matter how begrudgingly.
Arguably the greatest Republican President Abraham Lincoln once said "A house divided against itself, cannot stand". He was talking about the unity of the United States, but it applies just as well to the Republican Party.
Trump's Presidency may be like a bull in a China shop, but it has delivered real results for Republicans
On August 27, 2018 August 27, 2018 By avidcommentatorLeave a comment
At first glance Obama and Trump don't appear to have anything in common other than they both made it to the highest office in the land. But when one looks closer at their individual political circumstances in their respective first terms and the electoral landscape after their first election victories, striking similarities begin to emerge.
Obama was elected in a landslide victory, which also handed the Democrats overwhelming control of both Congress and the Senate.
Trump was elected in a narrower victory than Obama in terms of the Electoral College, but he was nonetheless was elected with a large majority in Congress and a sufficiently large majority in the Senate.
Both Presidents effectively had the ability to pass whatever legislation that they could get their Congressional and Senate Colleagues to agree with. These large majorities in both halls of Capitol Hill coupled with a President of the same party are relatively rare. They are great opportunities to pass bills that are kryptonite to the party on the other side of the aisle, that would never pass under normal circumstances.
The Obama administration largely failed to capitalize on the large Democrat majorities in both the House and the Senate while they had the opportunity.
If the Obama administration had of made "Obama care", a single payer universal health care system for example, their priority in the first two years they could have gotten a system much closer to the one they wanted. Instead Democrat concessions made necessary by a much less friendly Capitol Hill later in Obama's presidency, led to Obamacare being "ineffective" and "compromised" according to some policy analysts.
Trump on the other hand has in relative terms run riot with his policy agenda despite having a smaller majority than Obama did during his first two years.
The Trump administration has passed large tax cuts, for both personal income tax and corporate taxes with relative ease given the policy deadlock that usually defines Capitol Hill.
In addition to that Trump has cut 16 regulations for every new one fulfilling the ideals of Libertarian Republicans the country over.
Both Trump and Obama started out in very similar positions, but one administration has been willing to severely rock the boat in order to pass the bill's they wanted. The other was trying to mend fences and build bridges the other side was never interested in, in the first place.
In essence Trump is the Anti-Obama, a bull in a China shop figure who doesn't use a scalpel when a hammer will do. But his hammer job on U.S politics has given the Republican Party and Trump supporters things that have been on their wish list for decades.
Obama on the other hand delivered many Democrats disappointment that he didn't do more when he had the chance, leaving many die hard Democrats hopeful that next time will be different.
The censorship of Alex Jones is just the beginning
The removal of Alex Jones content from all the various mediums is still sending shockwaves throughout the free world. It turns out there are indeed limits to free speech on the internet even when you are obeying all the relevant laws.
The intricacies of the right to free speech in the United States tends to be somewhat understood by some Americans. The first amendment protects the right to free speech from the government; however it doesn't protect it from corporations or private institutions.
So while Alex Jones effective ban from most of the mainstream internet platforms is perfectly legal, it very clearly goes against the spirit of the first amendment and the very concept of free speech that many Americans hold extremely close to their heart.
According to a Pew research poll done in September 2017 a large majority of Americans under 50 now gets their news from the internet, rather than the TV and that number is growing by the day. Going into the future, people are going to increasingly get their news and current events information from the internet that is why it is so important to protect it from censorship.
Shielding Alex Jones's Info Wars from censorship in actual fact, has almost nothing to do with Alex Jones at all; it is about protecting content creators from censorship. Because ultimately who decides what is acceptable or not?
Political extremists would love nothing more than to silence their harshest critics, removing them from the World Wide Web entirely and effectively kneecapping their movements in one fell swoop.
There are those who are celebrating the removal of Alex Jones's content from most of the mainstream platforms, but they don't realize the censorship Rubicon has been crossed. The leadership in charge of companies like Facebook and YouTube that define the modern internet, now have the power to decide who's content survives an ideological purge and who's doesn't.
No one knows what the next Facebook will be and who will control it, but one thing is certain that person will have an almost unimaginable amount of power.
In recent years political discourse has become increasingly polarised, even individuals with relatively centrist viewpoints like Toronto University Professor Jordan Peterson for example are routinely attacked.
Peterson's speaking engagements are often protested and condemned by political extremists that believe that his pro free speech platform is somehow akin to a rerun of National Socialism in 1930's Germany.
He is routinely accused of being part of the alt right and is frequently labelled a Nazi simply for disagreeing with those on the militant left. The disagreement is on issues that most people consider to be on the political fringe, such as compelling individuals to use new gender pronouns.
The militant left trying to classify Peterson as a Nazi is an attempt to not only censor his message but remove him from the debate entirely. They have no real counter to his arguments so instead of attempting to debate his message they simply try to knock him out of the discussion entirely.
On the face of it Jordan Peterson and Alex Jones have nothing in common; Peterson is a well centered academic preaching a message of responsibility and self-improvement. Jones on the other hand is off the deep end at times, ranting recently about the Psychic Vampire conspiracy and the Inter-Dimensional war on Joe Rogan's podcast.
What they do have in common is that there are those on the extreme political fringe, who would love to remove both of them from the political and social debate for their apparent sins against their personal sensibilities.
By silencing Alex Jones we take a step towards a terrible outcome, censorship of the only completely free medium we have ever had in the history of humanity. This censorship will start slowly like most steps to shut down debate and censure free speech.
Today its people like Alex Jones, but who will it be tomorrow?
A quick EU trade deal for Britain is unlikely
As the formal Brexit date of the 29th March 2019 grows ever closer, speculation over what arrangements and trade deals can be worked out before then has reached fever pitch.
The markets and the participants of the talks all "remain confident" a deal can be reached. Even when the possibility of talks failing to achieve a trade deal is brought up, it is often dismissed as unlikely.
The British government and the European Union may indeed negotiate a continuation of current trade deals, of which Britain could potentially remain a part, for a time at least.
A whole new trade deal is another matter entirely.
Trade deals are notoriously difficult to negotiate even when only attempting to look after the competing interests of two nations.
Putting together a framework where both sides sufficiently benefit is a gruelling process. In the case of the EU, it's not just two sides that need to walk away satisfied, it's the nation making the deal and the EU's 28 member nations.
According to the European Court of Justice (Europe's highest court), EU trade agreements that deal with regulatory or investment issues must be ratified at multiple levels. In these types of instances, for example the Canada – EU free trade agreement. The approval of the EU council, EU Parliament, the national assemblies of all 28 member nations and certain sub-national bodies is required before the deal can be fully enacted.
The Canada – EU trade agreement took 7 years to negotiate and was 22 years in the making. It has been nearly two years since the deal was signed, but it has only been ratified by 9 of the required 28 EU member nations. So the full agreement is not yet entirely enforceable and parts of it are only provisionally applied.
Despite over two decades in the making, the Italian Parliament is currently attempting to block its ratification, a move that could potentially sink the entire deal.
So what does that mean for Britain?
The cost of bowing out of the EU without a trade deal is currently estimated at £27bn a year to UK companies and an additional £31bn to their EU counterparts.
The British ambassador to the EU privately told the government that a trade agreement with the EU may take 10 years to negotiate and then still potentially fail to be ratified.
The complexities of EU internal politics and the plethora of political speed bumps will likely ensure any potential Britain-EU trade deal will take a considerable amount of time.
That doesn't even begin to take into account the likely issues Theresa May's embattled government may face in negotiating any trade deal.
Given the current governments extremely slim majority, having the political mandate to push through a deal that may prove unpopular with elements of British indistry, could potentially be a terminal battle for the Prime Minster's leadership.
There may indeed be some EU member states that are extremely keen on a good, quick deal for Britain, for example Germany. However considering the extremely complicated process EU trade deals can potentially entail, a quick sweetheart deal for Britain seems very unlikely.
If for any reason your interested in the ins and outs of the 30 step EU trade agreement process, there is a guide to the process here.
Will polling get it wrong again this midterms in a rerun of 2016?
On August 16, 2018 By avidcommentatorLeave a comment
With the midterms fast approaching there is a question on every political analysts and pundits mind, will the polls be accurate this time? In electioneering, polls are still the only real way to measure voter intentions going into any democratic contest, yet in the recent past beginning with the Brexit referendum they have failed to accurately predict elections and referendums on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the 2016 election the vast majority of polls suggested Hilary Clinton would be the next President of the United States by a handy margin, yet not only did that not come to pass, Trump won the election by 77 Electoral College votes.
For example, Michigan was considered practically in the bag for Hilary Clinton during the 2016 election cycle. Polling numbers less than a month out from Election Day had Donald Trump's campaign lagging up to a huge 11.4 points behind in the race. On Election Day however Trump emerged victorious by 10,704 votes.
Michigan Democrats were absolutely shocked that the Clinton campaign and the DNC listened to the polls predicting an easy victory, over their own on the ground experiences which painted a very different picture. These battle-hardened political operatives very much knew that Michigan was a live race in the battle for the Presidency, yet the Clinton campaign chose to stand behind their "model" based around pre-selected data.
In 2016 the Democrats put their faith in the polling, in the data and left themselves putting all their eggs in one basket. On November 8th 2016 the bottom fell out of that basket and left them not only with egg on their faces, but picking up the pieces in a world in which Donald Trump would now be President and the Republicans would control both the house and the Senate.
Fast forward to today, some of the same polls that predicted the Clinton campaign handily winning the Presidency are now projecting a strong possibility that the Democrats will retake control of the house. The Real Clear Politics Generic Congressional Vote polling currently gives the Democrats a mammoth 5.7 point lead over the Republicans. Democrats are rejoicing at the possibility of Congress going blue and finally having a means to check Donald Trump's agenda politically.
Yet in this renewed faith in polling there is danger that the mistakes of the recent past may once again be repeated, with potentially dire consequences for the Democratic Party all over again.
Since the 2016 Presidential election, political discourse has become even more polarized, seemingly by the day. As the two sides drift further and further apart, regular every day voters feel less and less comfortable sharing their political opinions with those that don't share their particular values.
People are increasingly keeping their own counsel when it comes to political matters, with some even going as far to outright lie or deceive others about their voting intentions in order to maintain their relationships and communities.
Trump supporters and Republicans are often vilified by prominent individuals or media commentators and this has led to them increasingly dropping out of political discourse but increasingly motivated to get out and vote come November.
This Republican Congress has proven incapable of fulfilling the Founders' design that "Ambition must … counteract ambition." All who believe in this country's values must vote for Democrats this fall. Policy differences don't matter right now. History has its eyes on us.
— James Comey (@Comey) July 18, 2018
The rapper Eminem for example said in an interview when asked about Trump "He's got people brainwashed".
In all these pieces of commentary there is often the common thread that you are not a good person, or a good American if you want to vote Republican. With all this negativity surrounding anyone voting for the GOP of course some people are going to be reluctant to share their opinion if they want their state to go or remain red.
As some Republicans and Trump supporters increasingly go underground, this potentially makes the pollsters job that much harder. If people that are interviewed can't or won't be truthful about their genuine political allegiance then the polls will become increasingly skewed towards pointing to victories for the Democratic Party.
If Democrats hope to win back the House and make a dent in the Republican majority in the Senate they must be careful not to repeat the mistakes of the recent past and this time listen to those with genuine sources on the ground, rather than relying solely on big data to give a complete picture.


text:
module Data.Vector.Generic.Mutable ( module Exports ) where

import "vector" Data.Vector.Generic.Mutable as Exports

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: Prevent users from typing on html5 date textbox I have an asp:textbox which I set to textmode="date" and I managed to prevent users on selecting future dates by blocking them with:
txtDateofAcci.Attributes["max"] = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd");

and removed the spin arrows with:
input[type=date]::-webkit-inner-spin-button {
    -webkit-appearance: none;
     display: none;
     }
     </style>

I made this to prevent users from entering future dates, however, I can still enter future dates by typing it, Now, I want to prevent users or block them from typing, instead, input date by selecting through the picker. How can I do this?

A: Add the following to the textbox control:
onkeypress="return false;"

Hope it helps...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Why is history important? Hear how the history of racism shaped two historic churches in Georgetown, Washington DC. Join me with Dr. Rev. Totty and Dr. Rev. Cogman as we discuss the impact of a contentious past on their ministry.


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I Kissed a Girl est une chanson interprétée par Katy Perry et écrite par elle-même, Dr. Luke, Max Martin et Cathy Dennis. Elle figure sur l'album One of the Boys (sorti en 2008). La chanson a été nommée aux Grammy Awards ainsi qu'aux NRJ Music Awards.

Thème
Le thème de cette chanson est la bisexualité. I Kissed A Girl se traduit par J'ai embrassé une fille, la chanteuse fait allusion à cette expérience. Les paroles décrivent une sorte de transgression, mais la narratrice déclare ne pas être homosexuelle, en faisant référence à son « boyfriend » (« petit copain »).

La chanson est devenue, comme l'a noté le New York Times, un exemple particulièrement représentatif de la bisexualité féminine dans la culture populaire contemporaine, à l'instar du film Tout va bien ! The Kids Are All Right.

À l'origine, la chanson ne devait pas paraître dans l'album et sortir seulement en tant que single pour éviter de déclencher une polémique ; Katy a finalement convaincu ses producteurs de sortir cette chanson en tant que premier single.

Clip
Le clip commence avec différentes filles ; Katy apparait alors sur un lit rose tenant un chat, qui n'est autre que Kitty Purry, son propre chat, lors du premier couplet. À partir du refrain, nous pouvons voir Katy accompagnée de jeunes femmes figurantes (parmi elles, la chanteuse Ke$ha avant sa célébrité) ; elle apparaît dans une fontaine lors du deuxième couplet tenant un éventail. À la fin de la chanson, elle se réveille aux côtés d'un homme et nous découvrons que ce n'était qu'un rêve.

Liste des titres

 Téléchargements
 I Kissed a Girl - 3:00
 European CD Single
 I Kissed a Girl - 3:00
 I Kissed a Girl (Jason Nevins Funkrokr Extended Mix) - 6:51
 I Kissed a Girl (Dr. Luke & Benny Blanco Remix) - 3:28

 Australie CD Single
 I Kissed a Girl - 3:00
 I Kissed a Girl (Instrumental) - 3:00
 UK CD Single
 I Kissed a Girl - 3:00
 I Kissed a Girl (Jason Nevins Funkrokr Extended Mix) - 6:51

Classements et certifications

Classement

Classement de fin d'année

Classement de fin de décennie

Certifications

Reprises
La chanson a été reprise par :
 William Fitzsimmons ;
 Ben l'Oncle Soul ;
 Phish, à titre humoristique lors d'un concert ;
 Glee, épisode 7 de la saison 3 ;
 The Big Bang Theory, épisode 21 de la saison 4 ;
 Cœur de pirate ;
 Le groupe allemand Terminal Choice sur l'édition limitée de leur album Übermacht en 2010 ;
 -M- en version française pour la bande originale du film Toute première fois ;
 Angèle en 2018, titre remixé ensuite par le DJ français Crisologo

Notes et références

Liens externes

Bisexualité dans la musique
Chanson interprétée par Katy Perry
Chanson reprise dans Glee
Single musical sorti en 2008
Single publié par Capitol Records
Single numéro un en Allemagne
Single numéro un en Suisse
Single numéro un dans le Canadian Hot 100 de Billboard
Single numéro un dans l'Ultratop 50 Singles flamand
Single numéro un en Australie
Single numéro un au Danemark
Single numéro un en Autriche
Single numéro un en France
Single numéro un dans le Top Singles Téléchargés du SNEP
Single numéro un en Italie
Single numéro un en Suède
Single numéro un en Nouvelle-Zélande
Single numéro un dans le Billboard Hot 100
Single numéro un dans l'European Hot 100 Singles
Single numéro un en Irlande
Single numéro un au Royaume-Uni
Chanson écrite par Katy Perry
Chanson écrite par Dr. Luke
Chanson écrite par Max Martin
Single numéro un dans le Nederlandse Top 40

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


We will be running tennis classes at Mosman Park Tennis Club in the upcoming April school holidays.
Note: As there is no class on ANZAC Day, the fees for Week 2 have been reduced to $155 and $90 for the Full and Half Clinics respectively.
Enrol online here or contact the Pro Shop with any queries.


Cambridge International Qualifications (CIQ) is a professional awarding organisation incorporated in the UK. CIQ aims to develop and accredit qualifications which meet the ongoing needs of learners and the corporate sector ensuring individuals have access to opportunities for personal and professional development.
CIQ has gained a reputation for the high-quality support services provided to the education sector. We work with Schools, Colleges, Universities, and corporate bodies as well as Government agencies to provide relevant, effective, and flexible programmes. Our qualification and assessment framework is up-to-date, result oriented and meet the defined values as per international standards. CIQ qualifications are approved for progression to higher qualifications offered by International Universities around the globe.
The CIQ qualification and assessment framework have been developed in consultation with leaders from various corporate bodies, government agencies, and Universities around the world. CIQ programmes are frequently assessed to enhance quality and ensure they are relevant for the rapidly changing global market as well as career opportunities for ambitious individuals. The CIQ Qualification and assessment framework is available throughout the world and may be accessed via our "Approved Centre Network".
Every learner has access to the most modern and advanced Learning Management System, e-library, Lecture Videos, Multimedia Presentations etc. and CIQ continues to invest in the latest technology to enhance the learning experience.


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One of the best things about Hong Kong being a world city is that it's cheap and easy to get to the rest of Asia. My favorite trip was a long-weekend hop over to Tokyo to visit my friend who is studying abroad at Waseda University.
Hopping off a red-eye flight, I hit the ground running, exploring all the cultural events in Ueno Park, the various modern art museums (Mori has the best views, but 21_21 was my favorite), watching a local band play at Mash Records near my hostel, and getting to see the Imperial Palace on my run through Chiyoda Park.
What stuck with me most was food. Japan is known for its sushi, and getting to see Tsukiji Fish market gave me an up-close view of the craft of sushi, one of my favorite foods. The desserts are incredible, from expertly shaved ice to a fish shaped pastry with red bean paste, the my sweet tooth was, for once, satisfied. But my favorite experience was this little coffee shop in Ginza, which served an egg-coffee (coffee with egg yolk on top), expertly made and incredibly rich. It was so good that I want to make my own back in Seattle!
Being able to experience Tokyo was one of the highlights of my study abroad, and I'm so glad I got to experience it while I was in Asia.


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Comics!
Todd McFarlane Is the Anti-Hero of American Comics
Ahead of the filming of his new 'Spawn' film, the legendary comic book mogul shares his life-long struggle to pursue his artistic and creative dreams.
by Wilbert L. Cooper; photos by Robert Hickerson
Nov 19 2018, 1:44pm
Photos by Robert Hickerson
When I told Todd McFarlane that he was one of my heroes, he started to look a little uncomfortable. Up to that point in our conversation, the 57-year-old comic book mogul had been his characteristically loquacious self—he was shit-talking and pontificating so much that I had been having trouble squeezing in questions or even guiding the conversation. But when I brought up the notion that there are many people out there who might look up to the famed artist for the way he has pushed his work and his business forward, he halted for a moment and shifted in his seat.
"I make the decisions that are fit for me. And I don't necessarily want anyone to repeat that," he said after a pregnant pause. "The path I've gone down is a battle. I go to war everyday. Everyone is not built for that."
Whether you love him or hate him (and there are certainly a lot of people who do hate him), the personal battles McFarlane has waged have helped transform the comics and toy industries. In the late-80s, he challenged the pearl-clutching regulations of the Comics Code and reimagined Spider-Man for a new generation. A few years later, he gave us Spawn, the "quintessential 90s superhero" from hell and co-founded Image Comics, the "revolutionary" independent publisher that has rivaled DC and Marvel with blockbuster books like The Walking Dead. Following that, McFarlane's independent toy company brought subversive icons like Freddy Krueger and Pinhead to the action figure aisle of America's big-box stores, right next to franchises like Legos and Hotwheels.
These days, McFarlane has his sights set on Hollywood. He went there before, in the late 90s, to make a big-budget, PG-13 Spawn film that made money at the box office but failed to live up to his cryptic comic vision. This time around, McFarlane is doing what he does best—taking full creative control. He wrote the script, and plans to sit in the director's chair when filming begins in June. Jamie Foxx will be playing the titular undead hero and McFarlane promises the film will earn a "hard R" rating, staying true to the horror his fans are used to. To do that, he's enlisted The Walking Dead's special effects specialist, Greg Nicotero, to work on the movie. But while nerds like myself have hope that this new Spawn movie might break the malaise of overwrought cinematic universes, McFarlane made it clear to me that he never focuses on changing the game, even if that is often the outcome of his effort.
"Everyday is just a fight for my own personal sanity," the artist told me with a laugh. "When I find something that just doesn't work for me, I leave that situation and start a new situation. I don't complain about it. I just do."
McFarlane attributes his "just do it" attitude to his upbringing. His dad, Bob, was "a hard working, blue collar guy" in the printing industry. Like his son, Bob would constantly start "new situations" for better career prospects. Because of that, the McFarlane family moved more than 30 times during the Canadian-born artist's youth, living everywhere from Alberta, Canada to California.
McFarlane's dad's example also went beyond his no-nonsense work ethic. "He taught me a lot of things without knowing it—especially to be as fair minded as you can be."
Clearly, Bob's lack of tolerance for prejudice wasn't lost on his son; McFarlane, who is white, has dedicated most of his life to enshrining Spawn, a black superhero, into the American consciousness. While Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Black Panther character rules the box office today, when McFarlane brought Spawn to comic book stores in the 90s, T'Challah was not a top-tier hero, even within his own Marvel Universe. But from the very beginning, McFarlane chose to focus solely on Spawn, building a world and a mythology around him with action figures, an HBO animated series, a live action film, and video games. The work he put in led to Spawn being the best-selling black superhero in comic book history, despite the comic hitting the shelves decades after characters like Luke Cage and Storm made their debuts.
But for McFarlane, the open-mindedness that led him to make the focal point of his life's work a black man is actually deeper than his art—it's something he told me he strives for when people aren't looking. "The problem is often not the blatant racism, it's the 'I'm just kidding' stuff, too… You've got to work at it 24 fucking hours a day. You don't get an hour or ten minutes off."
McFarlane's dad didn't just give him an ethical foundation that impacted the choices he made in his career: he also introduced him to the game of baseball. "He just came home one day and told me he'd signed us up," McFarlane recalled in the 2001 documentary made about his life, The Devil You Know.
The game left a profound impact on McFarlane's tenacity and the way he views the world. (And it probably influenced his historic decision to drop millions on the record-setting asterisk balls of Barry Bonds and Mark Mcgwire, which are worth much less now that both athletes admitted to using performance enhancing drugs.) In our conversation, he could boil everything down to stark baseball analogies, from the fierce competition in the media business, to the dysfunctional way Brett Kavanaugh made it to the Supreme Court despite serious allegations of sexual assault.
"Assume the other team will never do you any favors and you'll never be disappointed. Assume it's the Yankees and the Red Sox," he said, as if he were coaching politicians in Congress. "It's just about winning now and it is a fool's game to think that someone on the opposite team is going to do you any favors."
Baseball was such a significant part of his youth, it didn't leave much time for comics. Though McFarlane always doodled, he didn't really get into superhero books until he was around the age of 16, when he discovered a few issues on a spinner rack at a mom-and-pop grocery store. After being struck by the medium, he spent all the time that he wasn't practicing or playing ball trying to draw superheroes. He read How to Draw the Marvel Way and he studied the pencils of Gene Colan and tried to mimic the melodrama of Jack Kirby. McFarlane's devotion to both his crafts culminated in meeting the legendary late writer and publisher Stan Lee serendipitously at a Holiday Inn in Florida when he was 16. McFarlane was staying at the hotel because he was attending a baseball camp, which was happening at the same time as a comic convention. "He let me ask questions for seven hours in between signings," McFarlane recently told The Hollywood Reporter.
After a career-ending injury in college killed his dreams of playing in the major leagues, he took all of the obsessive, competitive, take-no-prisoners energy honed on the field, paired it with the knowledge he gleaned from studying guys like Lee, and used it all to claw his way into comics.
In the mid 80s, from a trailer park in Canada, he sent out more than 750 submissions and got back more than 300 rejection letters from top editors at DC and Marvel. Eventually, he won the war of attrition. By 1985, he'd broken into books like DC's Infinity Inc. and Epic Comics' Coyote, where he developed a style that compensated for some of his anatomical shortcomings with flashy flourishes like dynamic layouts. When he took on more consistent work with Marvel in the late 80s through books like The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man, he focused on audacious poses and extreme action, exploding heroes out of their panels to make them pop off the page. He faced those heroes off against huge, super-sized villains—like Venom, a hulking symbiote he co-created with David Michelinie. Spider-Man's brain-eating antagonist has become so popular in his own right, he just had his own Hollywood film starring Tom Hardy.
"When I'm doing comic books, I want the hero's journey to be as difficult as it possible," McFarlane explained to me, when discussing how storytelling influenced the way he drew an antagonist like Venom. "It has to come at a cost."
Despite the polarizing nature of his art, by 1990, McFarlane's style made him a veritable rockstar, like nothing comics had seen before. Hour-long lines would form around the block to see him at comic conventions and book signings. He was so hot, Marvel did the unthinkable and gave him his own Spider-Man book to write and draw, even though he'd never written a comic before.
McFarlane's cover for the debut issue of his adjectiveless Spider-Man is a perfect encapsulation of his iconic style. Spider-Man is depicted more like a insect than human, with arthropod eyes and the squatted pose of an arachnid. He's immersed in McFarlane's winding, web tendrils, surrounded by hundreds of creepy little crawling spiders. The eerie-looking cover art, which was recently auctioned off for more than $350,000, set the perfect precedent for McFarlane's dark take on Marvel's friendly neighborhood hero. Spider-Man number one sold more than 2.5 million copies, with comics speculators buying up multiple issues as an investment. It is still one of the top five best-selling single issues in comics history.
Of course, not everyone was enamored with the "spaghetti" webbing and bug eyes he gave Spider-Man or the way he transformed Mary Jane into a voluptuous vixen from a hair metal music video. But his exaggerated style resonated with young boys, fueling sales for Marvel.
"It's like a Broadway play. For it to really hit someone, it's got to be over-the-top," McFarlane explained to me while reflecting on the art of comics and his own style. "[I didn't] create in a vacuum. The comic book world used to be completely dominated by men, from editorial all the way down to the pencilers. These days, you get more eclectic viewpoints and more styles as opposed to only the testosterone-driven stuff, where you take the already perfect body of man or woman and add steroids to it. We're a little ridiculous in the way that we create costumes. Batman's got on armor, while Wonder Woman's flashing a lot flesh... I've been guilty of this, too, along the way."
But despite his seismic success, there were problems. Like a number of the industry's top mainstream artists at that time, McFarlane was frustrated over his lack of creative control and the paltry compensation he was receiving from his blockbuster work, which was being milked for merchandise. Things came to a head for McFarlane when Marvel editor Tom Defalco refused to print a panel he drew for Spider-Man 16 featuring a sword piercing the eye of super mutant Juggernaut, because he believed the graphic violence violated the Comic's Code. McFarlane had already been entertaining the idea of helping start a union for comics artists working in the industry. After the sword incident, in November of 1991, he abandoned the Spider-Man book that had been created specifically for him. By 1992, he'd left Marvel completely, along with seven other top artists, including X-Men's Jim Lee and Deadpool co-creator Rob Liefeld. Their departure made national headlines and caused Marvel's stock to take a nosedive. Together, the newly free men announced that they were venturing out on their own to create a private, artist-led comic book publishing company called Image.
"We started a company that gave us the [freedom] we wanted," McFarlane explained to me. "Image comics can't control any creative person because the company doesn't actually own anything. Its role is just to create an environment for artists to do good, bad, or indifferent work. It's up to you."
When I asked McFarlane why he, a massively successful and powerful force in comics in the 90s, felt he couldn't just forge this kind of freedom at Marvel, or even DC, he answered with an axiom that he would end up repeating again and again during our talk. "There is one thing I try to teach my kids," he said, "Never bet against greed. It will break your heart every time." When I pushed him on this, he clarified that it wasn't the people of Marvel who were greedy, it was simply in the nature of the corporate comics system to be driven by financial gain over a love of the art.
"The people who run those companies have what is called fiduciary responsibility to maximize their shareholders value. They have to get bigger every 90 days and to do that, they do unnatural things that will be good for stocks today with no foresight of what the what the impact will be on individuals," McFarlane said, explaining his view of the system he left behind when he co-founded Image. "If I was only driven to make more money today than yesterday, I'd make different decisions, too. But my job isn't to max. My job is to be free. Every year I sit down with the executives of my toy company and I tell them to get me to zero. If we spend $10 million, we have to bring in $10 million. I own the company and I pay my salary. As long as I can feed my family and have a couple of dollars so that I never have to go back to that system, I'm good."
I was born in 1988, so I missed McFarlane's heyday at Marvel. But like many other millenials, I was right on time for Image and the iconoclastic comics it produced. I was already primed to love comics thanks to my dad, who took superhero origin stories as seriously as one might consider Homer or Shakespeare, archiving hundreds of historic, yellowed issues from the Silver Age wrapped in plastic and stacked in boxes that filled the storage under our stairwell. And for every Wolverine or Hulk toy he gifted me, he bought an extra one to keep in the box and add to his own personal collection.
But as great as that stuff was, it wasn't mine. They were cultural artifacts of another generation. Todd McFarlane's Spawn, on the other hand, was totally different. He was the ultimate anti-hero.
"Spawn is not Batman," McFarlane said to me with a heavy laugh, describing the space between the demonic vigilante character he created and the guys in tights that my dad used to adore. "Say the Joker gets out of jail and kills a couple of kids. What does Batman do? Beat him up and put him back in a prison system that can't hold him. It's happened 40 or 50 times. Batman could have saved like 80 lives if one of those times he just put a bullet in Joker's fucking head."
I can vividly remember the first time I saw Spawn. I was in the kid's aisle of Marc's, a discount drug store in Strongsville, Ohio. It was around 1994 or 1995 and I was about six or seven years old. At that point, I had no idea about the racial identity or hellish comic book mythology of McFarlane's landmark anti-hero. I just recognized right away that the toy with the green eyes and massive red cape was a lot taller and tougher looking than all of the Wolverines and Spider-Man figures I had at home. Everything on him, from his scorched and sore-filled face to the intricate little skulls and chains on his costume were depicted in excruciating detail. It was like all of the toys I'd seen before had been out of focus and that spooky thing was in 4K.
From that moment on, every trip to Marc's ended with another demonic-looking figure under the McFarlane brand in the shopping cart. And I worked tirelessly on my reading skills so that I could decipher the nightmarish comic books that came packaged with the action figures in that first series. Little by little, I pieced together the epic, confounding, overstuffed story: It involved a tortured man named Al Simmons, caught in the middle of a cold war between heaven and hell, smack dab in a gritty New York City filled with demented mobsters and criminals, a creepy ice cream-selling pedophile, and a demon that takes the form of a rundown version of Pennywise. Our Faustian quasi-hero deals with it all by strangling, dismembering, and decapitating soldiers of both God and Satan's armies.
But as crazy and cryptic as Spawn was, the most surprising thing McFarlane did with the character was make him a black man.
Spawn was unlike all of the mainstream black superheroes my dad had introduced me to. He doesn't talk any cornball jive like Luke Cage. And while the royal Black Panther has a sparkling perfection only rivaled by goody two-shoes like Superman and Captain America, Spawn is definitely no knight in shining armor.
"Just to survive, Spawn has to make decisions right or wrong... but a lot of them are wrong," McFarlane told me as he reflected on his character. "I made Spawn completely flawed. He acts on his emotions. And those emotions get him in trouble.
"Spawn is essentially me if I was a superhero," he explained.
By modeling his black hero on himself as opposed to an ideal of racial excellence like Black Panther or blaxploitation stereotypes like Luke Cage, McFarlane tapped into a humanity with Spawn that is rarely granted to black characters when they are being written by white men, who often other their personalities into obtuse caricatures.
Like his work with Spider-Man, McFarlane's propulsive art drew millions of fans to the book, many of whom missed the fact that before Spawn sold his soul to the devil, he was a black dude named Al Simons. From the cover of the very first issue, the power of Spawn is blatantly apparent. The hero is literally leaping off the page, one hand brandishing the necroplasm power bestowed to him by Satan and the other hand clawing at the reader. His sharp, almost sinister eyes glow green, while the chains and skeleton clasps on his demonic suit flex with his movement. As he comes at you, he's almost totally engulfed in his own swirling, blood-red cape, which consumes most of the cover. The parts of his body that are visible are boasting muscles in places that defy anatomy. He's a movie monster and caped crusader all wrapped up in one. When this stirring, almost scary cover hit comic book shops in May of 1992, it defied all expectations, selling 1.7 million copies, making it the best selling independent comic ever.
But that day at Marc's, it was the Spawn toy that first introduced me to the character. Just like he started his own company to publish comics, McFarlane launched his own business to make toys. McFarlane Toys was started in 1994 after he realized big corporations like Hasbro and Mattel would never be gory or detail-oriented enough to make toys that truly represented Spawn's universe. Since then, he's battled it out with multinational toy companies for shelf space in big box stores. While McFarlane Toys hasn't chipped away at the oligopoly of the toy industry the way Image did with comics, it has moved more than 100 million blood-drenched, weapon-wielding figures since it hit the scene. And it has expanded its production beyond just Spawn and Image comics characters. McFarlane toys now makes highly collectible figures for horror films like Hellraiser, pop culture icons like Kiss, sports stars like Lebron James, and video games like Fortnite.
"The question isn't why haven't I slayed the giant," he said to me reflecting on the more than two decades he's spent fighting for a space for mature toys in the marketplace dominated by powerful players. "The better question is why can't the giant slay me. They have one thousand times more money and people and still can't kill what I'm doing. Why is it? Easy. I move fast and they don't and I make the toys that they won't."
Despite the insane success of the early days of Image comics, there were a lot of issues. As the company faced intense pressure from Marvel and DC, the founders also fought among themselves. And although the comics were wildly popular, they suffered constant publishing delays, which hurt the business. On his own, McFarlane faced his fair share of lawsuits and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars due to poor choices he made early on. Neil Gaiman, one of comics greatest writers, initiated an epic copyright suit with McFarlane over characters Gaiman introduced to the Spawn universe when he wrote the book's ninth issue, and NHL player Tony Twist sued McFarlane for naming a mob boss character after him without his consent. Not to mention, many of the initial Image books received criticism for wallowing in the the male gaze with its hyper violence and scantily clad heroines.
Against all odds, the company has managed to survive—even weathering the comics bust of the late 90s. Today, it's become a beacon for diversity and creativity. Image releases awesome feminist books like Bitch Planet, queer-friendly series like Wicked + Divine, along with books that have nothing to do with superpowers at all, like Warren Ellis's sci-fi thriller Injection.
And while Spawn is rapidly approaching its 300th issue (the first Image comic to do so), it's also experiencing a bit of a resurgence thanks to the character's new story arc.
"If you go down the list, God and Satan all want the exact same thing. It's just that one guy has a better PR firm," McFarlane told me with excitement. "So Spawn's big thing is that he has locked heaven and hell out of Earth. But whoever was here before is still here. So now he's going to go after them, one by one. It might take 1,000 issues, but he's going to rid the Earth of these influences so we can have our own destiny."
In a lot of ways, Spawn's arc sounds similar to McFarlane's. The artist who told me that his creative and professional life has been defined by battles is now intent on creating more of his own space where he's free from those influences. Like the creation of Image comics and McFarlane Toys in the past, his latest fight to make a new Spawn film is a great example of him opting to bring his vision to life by going his own way. As a fan, I can't wait to see what he comes up with and how it could impact superhero movies. But for McFarlane, it's just a natural outgrowth of his life-long war to express himself.
"Everything I've ever done has been about me advocating for myself because no one else on the planet will," he said to me in that typically defiant tone he's become famous for. "Even though Todd rhymes with God, I've only got control over one individual on this planet and that's me."
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black superheroes

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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West End Village, Anguilla AI
Average sea temperature in June
Average sunshine in June
Average UV index in June
What is the warmest month in West End Village?
Warmest months in West End Village, Anguilla, are June through October, with an average high-temperature of 31°C (87.8°F).
What is the temperature in June in West End Village?
In West End Village, Anguilla, in June, the average high-temperature is 31°C (87.8°F), and the average low-temperature is 25°C (77°F).
How much does it rain in West End Village in June?
In West End Village, during June, the rain falls for 13 days and regularly aggregates up to 62mm (2.4") of precipitation.
West End Village, Anguilla
Average high temperature in June: 31°C
Warmest months (with the highest average high temperature) are June, July, August, September and October (31°C).
Months with the lowest average high temperature are January, February, March and December (29°C).
Average low temperature in June: 25°C
Months with the highest average low temperature are June, July, August, September and October (25°C).
Coldest months (with the lowest average low temperature) are January, February, March and December (23°C).
Average rainfall in June: 62mm
The wettest month (with the highest rainfall) is September (129mm).
Driest months (with the lowest rainfall) are February and March (43mm).
Average rainfall days in June: 13 days
The month with the highest number of rainy days is November (21 days).
The month with the lowest number of rainy days is April (12 days).
Average sea temperature in June: 28°C
Best months for swimming (with the highest average sea temperature) are September and October (29°C).
Coldest months (with the lowest average sea temperature) are January, February, March and April (26°C).
Average daylight in June /
The month with the longest days is June (Average daylight: 13.2h).
Average sunshine in June: 8h
Months with most sunshine are March, April and August (Average sunshine: 9h).
Months with least sunshine are January, February, May, June, July, September, October, November and December (Average sunshine: 8).
Average UV index in June: 12
Months with the highest UV index are March, April, May, June, July, August and September (UV index 12).
Weather Atlas: West End Village, Anguilla - June weather forecast and climate information. West End Village, Anguilla - June weather averages including high and low temperatures, humidity, rainfall, snowfall, daylight, sunshine, UV index, and sea temperature. [122792]


Are ISAs still worth it?
What type of savings account are you looking for?
Whether you have a cash ISA or are thinking of getting one, you should consider if it's still a good place for your money. Here is how to work out if ISAs are still worth saving into.
Your capital is at risk. Your investments are not guaranteed; they can decrease in value as well as increase and you may not get back the full amount you put in.
You don't need to save into an ISA to earn interest tax free, thanks to the introduction of the Personal Savings Allowance.
If you are a basic rate taxpayer: Your Personal Savings Allowance is £1,000. This means you can shop around for the highest rate and avoid paying tax on interest, whether it is on an ISA or not.
If you are a higher rate taxpayer: Your Personal Savings Allowance is £500. If your savings interest is likely to go over this amount, you could save into an ISA for more tax free savings.
If you are an additional rate taxpayer: You do not qualify for a Personal Savings Allowance. This means an ISA is the only way you can save money without paying tax on the interest.
Your ISA allowance for the 2019/20 tax year is £20,000, meaning you can still save tax free even if you are an additional rate taxpayer.
Are ISAs still the best for rates?
No, ISAs do not always pay the best rates. Historically, to beat an ISA you would need to find a net interest rate on a savings account that was higher than an ISA's gross interest rate.
Net interest represents the rate you get on your savings after tax has been deducted. The gross rate is what you get paid before tax.
Now, all banks and building societies use gross interest to advertise their savings accounts. This means you can compare ISAs to other accounts on a like-for-like basis.
Help to Buy ISA: This is an ISA-linked regular savings account that offers a 25% bonus when used towards the deposit for your first home.
Lifetime ISA: Like the Help to Buy ISA, it gives you a 25% bonus towards buying your first home, however you can also use it to save up towards your retirement.
Junior ISA: This is a special ISA you can open on behalf of your child. It has its own ISA allowance (£4,368), and cannot be touched until your child turns 18 years old.
If you're married or in a civil partnership and die, your partner can add the value of your ISA into one of their own, without paying any tax.
For example, if you have £50,000 in an ISA when you die, your partner can add up to £50,000 into their ISA, in addition to their ISA allowance for that tax year.
What else could you do?
Also known as a stocks and shares ISA, lets you invest with your ISA allowance so any return you make is tax free.
Also known as a P2P ISA, lets you use your ISA allowance to invest in peer to peer lending.
Your cannot use the Personal Savings Allowance with investments or P2P lending, but you can use your ISA allowance to make them tax free.
Speak to an independent financial adviser if you are unsure if an investment is right for you.
Maximise the value of your savings by hunting down the best rates available, compare savings accounts to find the best fit for your money.
Can you still get a decent return on your savings?
What is the best way to save for your child?
What's the best place for your money?
Should you get a Lifetime ISA?


I love the SDA health message. Now before I tell you why, allow me to make one thing very clear. When talking about health and what foods we should eat or shouldn't eat I am not talking about salvation. I don't believe anyone will enter heaven because they ate or didn't eat certain foods. Salvation is by grace through faith not works; therefore, a healthy lifestyle will not add one grain of sand to what Jesus did on the cross for me. Apart from Christ a healthy person is just a sinner with longevity.
Are there people who take health too seriously to the point that they are legalistic about it? Absolutely. Growing up I experienced that a lot in my church and family. These are the people who are, in my way of putting it, "health Nazis." For them, everything is evil and all you can eat is a raw vegan diet that only a rabbit would enjoy. However, the Bible says that Jesus came to give us an abundant life. Walking around all day fretting about what you can and cannot eat is neither abundant living nor is it what Jesus has in mind when He commands us to be healthy. Jesus wants us to have an abundant life – the best life possible. Even secular, non-religious people recognize that the best life is a healthy life. TV shows like the Biggest Loser or Extreme Makeover Weight-loss Edition make millions by documenting the journeys of unhealthy, overweight people as they fight to get their lives back. In the end, those who succeed are always happier than they were when they were living however they wanted to before. In light of this, I find it troubling that so many Christians live however they want and eat however they want in the name of "freedom in Christ." Christ didn't come to set us free so that we could dig ourselves into an early grave. He came to set us free so that we could rise above the addictions and habits that ruin our lives. Of all people, Christians should be the healthiest, happiest, and most vibrant. God has given us principles for healthy living that promise us a more enjoyable, exciting, and rewarding life. Again, this has nothing to do with earning favor with God or with gaining salvation. It has to do with allowing God to restore us to the best us that He wants us to be.
I have some friends in New Jersey who are SDA. They have never embraced the health message. They are in their 60's now. Between the husband and wife they have had several strokes, are overweight, and practically live in the doctor's office and hospital. Instead of spending that time with their grandchildren or sharing Christ with their neighbors, they are sitting in a doctor's office waiting for him to give them medication and some health tips (which the Bible has without a price tag on it). What a difference that is from Stan Will my old landlord. When I met him he was 92 years old, healthy as an ox, and independent. No health problems whatsoever. He even lifted weights and would do a push up for every year of his life (92!) three times a week. He preached at my church, and man! What a sermon! He gave us Bible studies and he could still quote scripture from memory. There are people who at 50 years old can't even do half of what Stan could do. Stan's secret was no secret at all. He lived the health message. If I have to choose how to spend my twilight years, like my friends in New Jersey or like Stan Will, I would much rather spend them like Stan Will. God knows best. Be healthy! Enjoy your life to the fullest.
 There's nothing wrong with being a raw vegan. What I am contesting here are those who not only eat this way but think everyone else should also.


Though our world's current state of affairs may seem bleak, we're here to remind you of why you should believe in humanity.
From saving the planet to developing cures for cancer, these are five great reasons why you should have hope for the future.
Learn more about the stories listed in the video on GNN: the coral reef removal; breast cancer cure; Swiss businessman's donation; diabetes reversal; and the Pacific Ocean garbage cleanup.
Want to keep good news on your coffee table? Get a copy of our good news book right now, for the office, home, or gifts for friends.


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After sentencing, victim's father again asks Christensen to reveal her location
Frank's Weekend Faves, March 24, 2019
By Frank Pieper fpieper@news-gazette.com
Frank Pieper
Copy Editor/Entertainment Editor
Two Illinois institutions are celebrating golden anniversaries this year, and they'll be doing so together this Saturday when The Other Guys present their 50th anniversary reunion concert at Krannert Center in Urbana.
Set your wayback machine for 1969: Woodstock. Vietnam. Neil Armstrong on the moon. And on the UIUC campus, as a brand-new Krannert Center for the Performing Arts opens its doors, another Illini tradition is being born — a men's a cappella group calling itself The Other Guys. As the group's website tells it: "Members of the Varsity Men's Glee Club first performed as a newly minted offshoot ensemble in a spring 1969 concert at Foellinger Auditorium, treating the crowd to barbershop tunes, a bit of The Beatles and an arrangement of Johnny Mathis' 'That's All.'" In the five decades since, the octet in its iconic "Block I" sweaters has made a name for itself with catchy arrangements, nearly 20 recordings and a rather famous ode to the UI's Morrow Plots.
Saturday's show, set for 7:30 p.m. in Krannert's Foellinger Great Hall, will feature nearly 100 alumni, performing by era, from the group's half-century of music-making, all crescendoing to "a massive all-Other Guys grand finale." Ahead of that special night, I was fortunate to connect with The Other Guys' music director, Simon Tiffin, who offered me this sneak preview:
"The various Other Guys alumni will be performing in mostly 'decades' groups and will be representing their decade of Other Guys. The first group is 1969-1978 and will feature the original members of the group as part of the ensemble. Notably, Bruce Johnson, founder of the group, will be present in the group. They will be singing 'The Way We Were' and 'The When You And I Were Young, Maggie, Blues' ...
"I think people should be excited to hear our two combined numbers, 'Momma Look Sharp' from the musical '1776,' and 'Leader of the Band.' 'Momma Look Sharp' was arranged by Bruce Johnson, and 'Leader of the Band' was written by a U of I alumni, Dan Fogelberg. The two songs have become standards of the group over time, and the group performance of the two tunes will be something truly communal and beautiful!"
That's the ticket!
Want a preview of this summer's hottest night at the Champaign County Fair? Thursday. The City Center. Be there.
Rising country music star Dylan Scott is promising to "kick it up a notch" at Thursday night's concert in Champaign with guest Cash Campbell. That should only serve to raise the bar for his July 26 show at the Champaign County fairgrounds in Urbana alongside Dustin Lynch.
But months before then, the red-hot Louisiana native is "winding down" his nearly sold-out "Nothing to Do Town Tour 2019" at The City Center. Doors open at 7 p.m. Thursday for the 8:30 p.m. show. Tickets for the age-19-and-over event are $20 to $35.
With more than 600 million on-demand streams and sales topping 4 million stream equivalent songs, Scott's brand new single, "Nothing to Do Town," is obviously generating buzz for the April 26 release of his EP "Nothing to Do Town" from Curb Records. He also recently garnered his first career nomination for Best New Country Artist at the 2019 iHeartRadio Music Awards.
All this on the heels of his breakout self-titled debut album in 2016, which delivered two consecutive Top 5 hits with gold-certified "Hooked" and his first No. 1, platinum-certified "My Girl." He'll be joining Chris Young's "Raised on Country Tour 2019" in May. But you don't want to wait till summer to catch him "live." This guy's hotter than a summer barbecue right now.
Raise the curtain
Illinois Theatre's "Because I Am Your Queen (A Feminist Fantasia)" premieres tonight at Krannert's Studio Theatre
Written by playwright Mina Samuels and directed by Barbara Pitts McAdams, this unique production asks the question: What would Queen Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, Shakespeare's Hermione, Medea and other queens of stage and screen say and do if they all got together at a day spa? And what if that spa existed in a mysterious universe, run by some seriously feminist cosmetologists?
Illinois Theatre is presenting the premiere of this devised performance, created using the "Moment Work" method developed and directed by Tectonic Theater Company master teachers McAdams and Samuels. The theatrical method involves improvisational collaboration among the play's participants — including Illinois Theatre students — to create the narrative's "fast, funny, wicked take on power, sex and sisterhood."
Performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. today, Friday, Saturday, March 28-30 and April 2-6, and 3 p.m. Sunday, April 7, in Krannert Center's Studio Theatre. Tickets are $25 each; $24 for senior citizens or retired UI faculty and staff; $15 for non-UI college students; and $10 for current, full-time UI students and youth high school and younger.
What I'm watching this weekend
There's nothing like seeing a local product make good on the big screen, but such an opportunity presents itself this weekend when cinematographer and producer Ryan Suffern returns to his alma mater for a pre-release screening of his new musical documentary, "Satan & Adam."
Suffern, a UI graduate, Class of 1999, and now head of documentaries for The Kennedy/Marshall Co., will be releasing "Satan & Adam" in theaters in April. Before then, the UI Department of English is hosting a screening and reception, both free and open to the public. The reception starts at 7 p.m., and the screening's at 8 p.m. with Q&A to follow, in Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum.
The doc chronicles the unlikely pairing of legendary one-man-band Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee and harmonica master Adam Gussow, starting in Harlem in 1986 and covering their relationship over 30 years.
Have a question, suggestion or fave nomination for Frank? We'd love to hear from you. Please email it to fpieper@news-gazette.com.
Frank Pieper is a copy editor and entertainment editor at The News-Gazette, and the author of Frank's Faves and Frank's Weekend Faves. His email is fpieper@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@frp308).
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Q: cv2.circle() not showing I have the following code that's working, except the draw circle on the provided image. I tried the setMouseCallback example on here, which is working but I'm afraid I have implemented it wrong in my own code.
import numpy as np
import urllib.request as ur
import cv2

params = np.zeros([1, 2])  # init params
s_img = np.zeros((512, 512, 3), np.uint8)

def clicked_corners(camera, user, pw):
    """
    Function to write the clicked corners (ij) to a camera object.
    Image is provided by a valid url to a snapshot of camera,
    usually in the form of http://xxx.xxx.x.x/snapshot/view0.jpg
    :param camera: Camera object
    :param user: username to authorize access to URL if set
    :param pw: password to authorize access to URL if set
    """
    window_name = 'img'
    ... # define url, not important to the question
    global params, s_img

    ... # handle authentication, not important to the question

    ... #open url
    img = cv2.imdecode(arr, -1)  # decode array to an image
    s_img = cv2.resize(img, (0, 0), fx=0.5, fy=0.5)
    cv2.startWindowThread()

    cv2.imshow(window_name, s_img)
    print('Click corners to determine the field')
    cv2.setMouseCallback(window_name, on_mouse, params) # <-- setting callback for mouseclicks
    k = cv2.waitKey(0) & 0xFF  # adding a keylistener

    if k == 27:
        ... # destroy window

    clicked_points = params

    return clicked_points

def on_mouse(event, x, y, flag, param):
    global params
    if event == cv2.EVENT_LBUTTONDOWN:
        ... do some operation
        cv2.circle(s_img, (x, y), 100, (255, 0, 0), -1) # **draw circle this part is not working properly**

    ... return something

I have edited the code to highlight the important parts to the questions, and where I assume it's not going as it should be.

A: Fixed. Essentially what I did was adding a call to imshow() to show the updated version of the image with circle drawn. This corrected version works without any glitches, the window_name makes sure that existing window is used to display the updated image:
import numpy as np
import cv2

params = np.zeros([1, 2])  # init params
s_img = np.zeros((512, 512, 3), np.uint8)
window_name = 'img'

def main():
    global s_img
    img = np.ones([512, 512, 3]) * 255
    s_img = cv2.resize(img, (0, 0), fx=0.5, fy=0.5)

    cv2.startWindowThread()
    cv2.imshow(window_name, s_img)

    print ('Click corners to determine the field')
    cv2.setMouseCallback(window_name, on_mouse, None)

    while True:
        k = cv2.waitKey(0) & 0xFF

        if k == 27:
            break # destroy window

def on_mouse(event, x, y, flag, param):
    global s_img
    if event == cv2.EVENT_LBUTTONDOWN:
        print ('here')
        cv2.circle(s_img, (x, y), 100, (255, 0, 0), -1)
        cv2.imshow(window_name, s_img)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()


text:
Q: Google Analytics API download of multiple dimensions - numbers decrease with more dimensions I am in a quandary on this GA issue. I have a number of custom dimensions, including a user identifier, browser timestamp and section name.  I'm downloading the results from GA using the v4 API with Python.
When I download the user ID (along with ga:eventCategory, ga:eventAction and ga:eventLabel), I get around 12K rows for a single day, which I believe is correct.  When I add the timestamp, the numbers increase, as expected, to about 15K rows.
But when I add the final custom dimension, section name, the numbers decrease.  Supposedly that dimension is always passed and defined.
This is counterintuitive to me.  Why would the number of rows decrease when another dimension is added to the batch query?

A: The problem here is that final custom dimension was not always defined.  So when I added the other dimension to the batch query, the rows were lost where the dimension was not defined.
This should be spelled out in big letters in the Google Analytics documentation: if you don't define a dimension, you will lose that row when querying for that dimension.  There should never be an empty value, instead use something like UNDEFINED.  Then you can search in your downloads for that keyword.
To find this problem, I downloaded all the results with the exception of that final dimension to a file all_but_section.csv.  Then I download all the results with the final dimension to a file all_with_section.csv.  I removed the section column from the CSV.  With bit of UNIX trickery, this gives you the rows that are missing the dimension:
cat all_but_section.csv all_with_section.csv | sort | uniq -u

If somebody is interested, I can also provide a little python script I built to extract a column.


There is still room for anyone else who might to come along to St Pats in Stamullen tomorrow night for hurling skills training.
All you need to do is just turn up and bring your child's hurl along to learn some new skills. No experience required.
In addition to the training tomorrow night Páidí Butler will be giving a training session to coaches and parents this Saturday from 10-12 in the club and all are welcome to attend this session also.
Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow night.


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HomeNewsAI makes driving a car safer, but steering it yourself still feels better
AI makes driving a car safer, but steering it yourself still feels better
When it comes to AI in mobility, many people instantly think of autonomous cars. They are still a while away, but AI can already contribute to safer and more sustainable mobility.
Written by Innovation Origins
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Sit back and read a book or check your email while your car is driving to your destination. Can you picture it? Or do you find it terrifying? Opinions are divided. In any event, fully autonomous cars are still a while away. In the meantime, the technology is being further improved and the aim is to update laws and regulations accordingly. Besides that, people sometimes find it hard to let go of the idea of having control. After all, you literally put your life in the hands of a driving computer. Yet the underlying technology of autonomous cars – including artificial intelligence – is already making a huge difference.
Safer and cheaper
Traffic accidents cost Dutch society about 15 billion euros a year and traffic jams cost about 3 billion euros a year. This figure does not include any healthcare costs or costs due to emissions. Using artificial intelligence (AI), we can make mobility considerably safer, more sustainable, and more efficient. Not only when it comes to personal transportation, but also in logistics. AI can, for example, predict when maintenance on trucks and passenger cars should be carried out, which could prevent accidents and reduce costs. AI can also be used to plan infrastructure maintenance on time, which in turn reduces traffic congestion.
What's more, smart systems can monitor electric car batteries. Cars can then be driven and charged as economically as possible. This will lead to a higher number of kilometers driven on a single battery charge as well as a longer battery life.
We asked a number of Dutch people how they would utilize AI in the area of transportation. Public transport was mentioned as an area where AI could be useful. "Public transport uses fixed routes, so computers would be able to take over tasks there," was one key argument. While others see AI primarily as an extension of the human driver. "With a (partly) self-driving car, people with a physical disability would still be able to drive independently," was often said. Everyone who was asked indicated that they hope that AI would make traffic safer.
The first self-driving vehicles are already on the roads. These often concern vehicles that do not go as fast and drive only in an enclosed area. An example is the HagaShuttle, a shuttle bus that transports people at 15 kilometers per hour. There is no driver present as is the case on buses, but for the time being, there is someone on board who can intervene if needed.
Self-driving aspects are being designed not only for public transport but also for passenger cars. Many new cars, for example, already have several driving assistants built in. These support human drivers. The most well-known assistant is cruise control, also known as motor speed controllers. Newer versions of this – adaptive cruise control – not only maintain a certain speed but also automatically keep enough distance from anyone in front. Sometimes they already do this by using information from one or more of the cars in front. This makes the traffic flow smoother and more comfortable.
This technique can also be useful in traffic congestion. There is nothing more tiring for people than driving in a traffic jam. A computer, on the other hand, does not lose concentration. That could save a lot of rear-end collisions. Additionally, there are cars that automatically brake when something or someone suddenly appears in front of the car. This driving assistant can also prevent a lot of accidents.
Better traffic flow
In order to really improve road safety with these technologies, all vehicles will have to use them. It will take another five years or so before all new cars have driving assistants, estimates Maarten Steinbuch. He is a professor at the Dutch Eindhoven University of Technology and a researcher in the field of systems and control technology for vehicles and robots. "This kind of technology enables cars and trucks to drive much closer together, which improves traffic flow and saves time on the road," he says.
At the moment, there are still legal restrictions on the use of AI. For example, you will be fined if you drive too close to the car ahead of you. Whereas if AI were to be used, cars could drive much closer to each other. Traffic flow improves as a result. Getting stuck in traffic and having to brake and accelerate a lot costs a lot of fuel and therefore causes even more emissions. Fewer traffic jams have a positive effect on the environment.
Therefore, a lot needs to change in order to really bring AI in daily practice. Among other things, the Netherlands Vehicle Authority (RDW) is busy working on this. This is going step by step. Next year, DAF will launch the first TWIN Drive on the market. These are two trucks that are electronically linked to each other. This enables them to 'platoon', i.e. to follow each other automatically and hence drive closer to each other.
There are already passenger cars, among others from Tesla and Porsche, that are technically capable of driving partly autonomously. Steinbuch also drives such a car. "It's nice to see that my car can do more with each software update," he says. The car also learns from past situations and adapts to them, within the rules that have been set up for this. "For example, the car can now stop itself when it sees that a traffic light has turned red. But in the Netherlands, there are strict rules with regard to (partial) autonomous driving. The driver is allowed to use these functions but has to keep an eye on them and keep their hands on the wheel. In order to monitor this, the driver has to move the steering wheel every thirty seconds to let the car know that they are still paying attention.
Making Mistakes
Because an algorithm can calculate very quickly what the best way to act is in any given situation, an autonomous car will soon be able to make reasonably safe choices. Still, some people do not feel comfortable with it. We asked a number of people if they would get into a self-driving car. The responses were divided. Most of them thought it should first be proven that it is safe and would not get into an autonomous car at this point. One of the reactions was: "You still hear all too often that it goes wrong."
As far as Steinbuch is concerned, this is an interesting argument. "We generally react more ona an emotional level when technology makes a mistake than when a person makes a mistake," he notes. "A laptop may get stuck, but for many people it's unacceptable if a self-driving car makes a mistake and causes an accident. And that while people are constantly making mistakes in traffic." This is why researchers are working hard to make the software and algorithms in cars as robust as possible. If a certain part of the technology no longer works, a backup must be activated immediately.
A lot of data is needed to train driving cars properly. Steinbuch believes that self-driving cars need to learn from human behavior. "The autonomous car needs to understand very clearly what is going on around it and what other road users are about to do," he adds. " Using specific software, you could deduce from camera images how a person who wants to cross the road will behave. The translation of that behavior can then be used by the car in its decision-making process." As such, the algorithm uses the behavior of people as a basis for driving and learning further.
How long it will take before the fully self-driving car is on public roads is something that Steinbuch doesn't dare estimate. But that there will ever be such a self-driving car, especially on the highway, is beyond doubt. "Autonomous driving brings people a lot of comforts and convenience, it improves traffic flow and makes traffic safer.
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In reality, journalism has very little to do with a story that needs to be told. It has more to do with mass , how many papers you will sell, or how much press your story will get from the media. For this reason, every journalist is after the big , that story which no one else has. However, no story, or even the who got you that story, will stay secret. So the next thing you need to consider is the you will give to the story. When doing this you have to stay on the right side of the laws. Too many journalists have used journalism instead of fact or not properly respected someone's and had their careers destroyed in court. papers are generally more likely to take a risk than a broadsheet but they are all involved in wars with each other so are hungry for the big story.
I started as a journalist on a very low-quality tabloid newspaper in the 1990s. I hated it, because I felt it had no principles: the checked every report from his journalist and he would change them to make them more sensational if necessary. The articles were often based on rather than hard facts. The important thing was always to get the scoop before the other newspapers, and to send a out with a camera to get the most salacious photo possible. Well, I stuck it for two years, but then I was lucky to get a job on a . I'm still there, and I'm now a regular , writing in depth about any medical stories in the news.


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