1) While we can see in our ClipperData that OPEC loadings to the U.S. in January have dropped off materially, we can see they have been strong into Asia. It is being suggested that a flood of light crude into Asia - not just from the usual suspects such as OPEC - but also from the likes of the North Sea, is set to pressure regional grades lower.
A narrowing in the Brent-Dubai/Oman spread late last year has served to incentivize Northwest European and West African crude to head to Asia; an ongoing trend of this narrowing in January is only likely to further encourage flows. While total loadings to Asia are up across the board in January, the rise in light crude is most pronounced, up nearly a million barrels per day versus last year's average.
Loadings from the North Sea to Asia are up to the highest on our records, as China's desire for bargain-hunting is being satiated by light Forties and Ekofisk grades.
2) The chart below shows Wood Mackenzie's breakevens for new oil wells across various U.S. shale plays, and also in the Gulf of Mexico. While various additional factors have to be considered, including everything from transportation costs to administrative overheads and interest charges, the key takeaway is that breakevens are below market prices.
3) Headlines alluding to strong OPEC compliance have been circling in recent days, with Reuters estimating compliance is at 82 percent, while Bloomberg is a little less aggressive at 60 percent. While we can see in our ClipperData that most producers appear to be cutting production via the medium of lower exports, to offset this we are seeing increasing export loadings in January from the triumvirate of Iran, Libya and Nigeria. Export loadings from the three in January are up nearly 500,000 bpd on the prior month.
4) Although a report from Fitch earlier in the week suggested that a default from Venezuela's state-run oil company is probable, credit default swaps for Venezuelan government debt have actually dropped from a 59 percent likelihood of default in December to 44 percent this month.
This means the implied probability of nonpayment on Venezuela's debt over the next twelve months has dropped below 50 percent for the first time since September, amid a cabinet reshuffle by President Maduro. (Mind you, there is still a 89 percent likelihood of default over a five-year period). The test will be in April, when $3 billion of debt repayment is due.


NorPix new high speed laptop solution records uncompressed or compressed avi, mov or seq video at up to 150 mbytes/second from a variety of sources.
Record at 120 fps x 1024 x 1024.
Record for up to 95 minutes uncompressed.
Up to 150 Mbytes/second to disk.
Camera link, HD-SDI, Analog NTSC PAL.


Update 2012: Interesting that we've documented a massive drilling operation (Horizontal Directional Drilling/Boring) in the middle of our southern Grand Prairie neighborhoods that apparently has no rules. This is pipeline construction (Boring) and our Texas state laws see ALL pipeline construction as a "public utility" ~ meaning it's all for the public good. So, a private company can set up heavy, industrial activity in the middle of our suburban neighborhoods without any review from our city. Yes. You read that correctly. It's for the public "good."
We've blogged about it ~ click here.
Update 2010: No presentation or hearing about the new Grand Prairie, TX Gas Drilling Ordinance for December 14, 2010. This date had been previously announced during the November 15, 2010 City Council Meeting.
We're glad. We hope the city will take Westchester-Grand Prairie Community Alliance's advice and appoint a Gas Drilling Advisory Board per our recommendations submitted on October 1, 2010.
Click here to read the WCGPCA Recommendations for Changes to the Grand Prairie, TX Gas Drilling Ordinance (9.30.2010). It was a pleasure working with our Westchester neighbors on this document.


text:
CODEC Presents: Thomas Gold & Third Party
Sat, 08 Oct 16, 22:30 - Sun, 09 Oct 16, 04:00
SWX BRISTOL, 15 Nelson St, Bristol, BRISTOL, BS1 2JY
Thomas Gold & Third Party
Unheard of YouTube views, peppering Beatports Top 10, building a rep as a remixer to the stars and delivering stamina-soaked sets from the White Island to Governors Island...Thomas Gold has fast become clubbings G-force of nature. Since storming onto the scene and riding the crest of dance musics re-taking over of the planet, the prolifically pedigreed German has emerged as a top shelf seizer of arenas, talked about the world over.
As a spinner with the most well-thumbed of passports, Golds upgrading from studio to stage stimulator, including the use of live drum lines and brass sections, has dominated the essentials of must-attend dance parties: the Ultra Music Festival, Electric Daisy Carnival, Coachella, Mysteryland and Tomorrowland.
After setting standards with releases on Armada, Toolroom, Spinnin, and Steve Angellos Size, Golds consistent hitting of dancefloor jackpots had Miami anthem Sing2Me, released on Axwells Axtone imprint, trilling its way to Beatports number one spot and becoming a cornerstone of Golds Essential Mix. Turning Adeles Set Fire to the Rain into a YouTube record breaker (like his number of Facebook followers, Gold has set counters to crazy), it stood as the jewel in a remix crown of popstars and peers.
Artist Link - http://mn2s.com/booking-agency/dj-roster/third-party/

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
import Relay from 'react-relay/classic';

class UserTwoFactorAuthenticationMutation extends Relay.Mutation {
  getMutation() {
    return Relay.QL`mutation { userTwoFactorAuthentication }`;
  }

  getFatQuery() {
    return Relay.QL`fragment on UserTwoFactorAuthenticationPayload { success, user { two_factor } }`;
  }

  getConfigs() {
    return [{
      type: 'REQUIRED_CHILDREN',
      children: [Relay.QL`
        fragment on UserTwoFactorAuthenticationPayload {
          success
          user { two_factor }
        }
      `],
    }];
  }

  getVariables() {
    return {
      id: this.props.id,
      password: this.props.password,
      otp_required: this.props.otp_required,
      qrcode: this.props.qrcode,
    };
  }
}

export default UserTwoFactorAuthenticationMutation;

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Style 02 (Dim Gray) - Menu by Apycom.com
About WMCA
History of WMCA
Connect to Us!
Perfect Sacrifice
Tribute to Elton John and Ed Sheeran
Friday, Sept 23, 2022 - 7:30pm
Please note:Everyone in attendance will be required to show proof of full vaccination. Face masks are also required everywhere in the building, including in the concert hall seats.
Children 11 and under must be accompanied by a fully vaccinated adult.
Jeff Scott has been performing the music of Sir Elton John for over 20 years. Based in Toronto, he may be one of the best Elton John Tribute Artists in the world. The show features colourful costumes, skilled piano playing and those distinctive Elton John vocals. And by channeling the star's flamboyant look, style, and mannerisms, he makes audiences feel they are in the presence of "musical royalty". Many say it's like seeing Elton John in his prime. And out of all the tribute artists lusting after the role, it was Jeff who was chosen to perform as Elton John at the North American Premiere of the "ROCKETMAN" movie, at the Toronto International Film Festival Building...A star indeed! The repertoire features so many of Elton John's hits...the songs we all know and love covering over 4 decades of music.
Daniel East is based in the North West of the UK and has been travelling the world as Ed Sheeran since 2015. Armed with a Boss RC 300 loop pedal and signature guitars, Daniel is believed to be closest to the real deal. East performs all of Sheeran's top hits, such as "Castle on the Hill", "Shape of You", "Perfect", "Photograph", "Thinking Out Loud", "I Don't Care" and more! You'll be immersed in all things Ed Sheeran, with a surprise twist that will leave you wanting more!
Please note: Everyone in attendance will be required to show proof of full vaccination. Face masks are also required everywhere in the building, including in the concert hall seats.
Prices include taxes and service charge
Tickets available at the Western Manitoba Centennial Auditorium Box Office, or call 204-728-9510
Ticketing Provided by arts-people.com
Privacy Policy| Refund Policy
Copyright © 2011 Western Manitoba Centennial Auditorium
Menu © 2011 Apycom jQuery Menus


text:
Q: bash: command works in terminal, not in script I am doing
a="$(openssl x509 -in /path/to/pemfile.pem -text -noout)";
echo ${a} |grep -a1 -b2 Signature

which works quite well if i put this line into terminal
However, if i put the very same line in a file executeme.sh, chmod +x executeme.sh, ./executeme.sh
I seems does not create the linebreaks in the variable, resulting grep to receive just one line. output is as follows on the terminal:
20- Version: 3 (0x2)
38- Serial Number: 32 (0x27)
64: Signature Algorithm: md5WithRSAEncryption
107- Issuer: C=EN, ST=a, L=b, O=c, OU=d, CN=e
244- Validity
------
[...]

The script outputs the entire certificate , as if i would only do a="$(openssl ...)"; echo ${a}

A: Do
echo "${a}" |grep -a1 -b2 Signature #mind the double quotes

Why doublequotes?
See [ this ] answer + [ this ] answer.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


This course assumes you know how to use truth functions and quantifiers as tools. Our principal task here will be to study these very tools; we shall be engaged in part of the science of logic. Contents: Preliminaries; The logic of truth functional connectives; The first order logic of extensional predicates, operators, and quantifiers.


text:
Theo Tait is deputy editor of the Week.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
The Whole Point of Friends
Dunthorne's Punchlines
Through Their Eyes
Abdulrazak Gurnah remembers Zanzibar
Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrut
Tom Wolfe's Bloody Awful Novel
Your mission is to get the gun
Raoul Moat
This is me upside down
'Kapow!'
Eagle v. Jellyfish
Fancy Patter
Holmes and the Holocaust
Memories of Camus
John Sturrock
Christopher Prendergast
David A. Bell
Burying André Malraux
Terry Castle
A Garland for Colette
Biography and memoirs, Biography, Literature and literary criticism, Fiction, Novels, Europe, Western Europe, France
Vol. 28 No. 3 · 9 February 2006
pages 11-13 | 4630 words
Gorilla with Mobile Phone
Theo Tait
Houellebecq non autorisé: enquête sur un phénomène by Denis Demonpion
Maren Sell, 377 pp, €20.00, August 2005, ISBN 2 35004 022 4
The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd
Weidenfeld, 345 pp, £12.99, November 2005, ISBN 0 297 85098 9
Towards the end of Michel Houellebecq's first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), translated into English under the dismal title Whatever (1998), the nameless protagonist falls into a severe depression. He leaves a note on his desk saying 'I AM SICK,' and checks himself into a 'rest home'. Relations with his psychologist are not easy:
She took me to task for speaking in general, overly sociological, terms. This, according to her, was not interesting: instead I ought to try and involve myself, try and 'get myself centred'.
– But I've had a bellyful of myself, I objected.
– As a psychologist I can't accept such a statement, nor encourage it in any way. In speaking of society all the time you create a barrier behind which you can hide.
It's obvious that Houellebecq's novels contain a strong vein of autobiography. The main character is always immediately recognisable. He is a Parisian civil servant or middle manager, aged between thirty and fifty, depressed, isolated, alienated, miserably obsessed by sex, given to sociological conjecture and blasé, sometimes very funny asides. In Plateforme (2001, translated as Platform, 2003) he is even called Michel. Nevertheless, it's a shock, on reading Denis Demonpion's biography, to learn quite how much of Houellebecq's life has been thrust raw – though often distorted – into his novels. It's no surprise that his first novel is, like many first novels, closely modelled on the author's life: like the young Michel Houellebecq, the narrator of Whatever works as an IT technician, contracted out to install software at various depressing provincial outposts of the Ministry of Agriculture. What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters – Philip Schnäbele, Jean-Yves Fréhaut and Catherine Lechardoy – actually exist, and have simply been plonked into the book. Understandably, they took it badly: they are represented, like many characters in Houellebecq's novels, as pointless and pathetic. ('Her ugly little face is glum, she regularly wipes her glasses. I even wonder if she hasn't been crying; I can just picture her breaking into sobs in the morning as she gets dressed, all alone.') Demonpion records the grievances of Schnäbele (in the novel, a self-aggrandising IT manager known as 'the Serpent'), who has no memory of meeting Houellebecq: 'I recognise myself in his descriptions. He describes my office, mentioning the posters that I had up at that time, which proves that he was physically there – but from a very biased point of view. That said, an author has every right to his freedom of expression. I just wish he'd changed my name.'
Houellebecq has consistently exercised a similar freedom of expression with respect to his parents. The mother in Les Particules élémentaires (1998, translated as Atomised, 2000) is an appalling proto-hippy slut, who dumps her kids on their grandparents, and on one occasion leaves her young son locked in a hot attic room in pools of his own urine and excrement. She then joins a sinister cult and spends much of her time bedding young men and boys. Although the more sensational aspects are Houellebecq's invention, this character shares a great deal of his mother's biography: she too was born to a pied-noir family in Algeria, became a student radical, trained as a doctor and then lived an alternative, itinerant lifestyle. But again Houellebecq upstages the invention, by giving the character his mother's maiden name, Janine Ceccaldi. As Demonpion reports, his mother 'flipped' when she read the book: she flew to Paris from her home in Réunion and considered sueing her estranged son.
Houellebecq's father, an admirer of Céline, was more sanguine when he found himself killed off at the beginning of Platform, in an updated and energetically offensive version of the opening of L'Etranger:
Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.
As I stood before the old man's coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. 'You had kids, you fucker . . .' I said spiritedly, 'you shoved your fat cock in my mother's cunt.' Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it's not every day you have a death in the family.
Houellebecq's father's house provides the backdrop for these first few scenes, and his North African lodger the model for Aïcha, the narrator's father's young lover, whose brother has murdered the older man. This mixture of documentary detail and lurid fantasy is a recurring pattern in Houellebecq's fiction. He was successfully prosecuted by the owner of a New Age holiday camp which was described in Atomised – very accurately, except that it was depicted (like many locations in Houllebecq's novels) as a torrid den of anonymous sex. Yves Donnars was keen that his business should avoid an unearned reputation for sexualité de groupe, so he took Houellebecq to court. The author reluctantly changed the name in later editions.
Fiction often seems like a form of revenge on the world; Houellebecq's is an extreme case. Read alongside his biography, his novels turn out to be filled with highly specific attacks on jobs, places and people that have, in one way or another, pissed him off. Most of all, though, in their characters, their tone and their underlying thinking, they represent a sustained act of vengeance against his parents and their way of life.
Houellebecq non autorisé is a decent, intelligent hack-job. Demonpion, a journalist for the weekly news magazine Le Point, is prone to cliché and has a few exasperating tics, such as always describing what people are wearing ('replied the writer, wearing a checked Vichy shirt'). On the other hand, he has done his research, and the book is full of entertaining and illuminating detail, and ends, rather unusually, with an astrological projection of its subject, written by Houellebecq's friend Françoise Hardy, the 1960s pop star. At one point, Houellebecq thought of adding his own footnotes to Demonpion's text, but negotiations between the two broke down. This collaboration would have made the biography more interesting, but might also have muddied the waters: Houellebecq is not a reliable witness. Demonpion's real coup was securing the co-operation of Houellebecq's parents, and his biography is built around a series of interviews with them.
Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas in 1956 in Réunion, where his mother was working as a doctor. His father had been a lorry driver and a ski instructor. Bruno in Atomised is born in the same year: 'The couple quickly realised that the burden of caring for a small child was incompatible with their personal freedom and, in 1958, they agreed to send Bruno to Algeria to live with his maternal grandmother.' Houellebecq's parents set off across Africa in a 2CV five months after their son's birth and left him with his grandparents in Algiers. He lived there until 1961, when, with the Algerian war of independence nearing its end, he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother, Henriette, in the Yonne, south-east of Paris. By this time, his parents had divorced. Michel only saw them during the holidays. 'I grew up with the clear knowledge that a grave injustice had been done to me,' he told one interviewer. 'What I felt for them was mostly fear, as far as my father was concerned, and a clear disgust vis-à-vis my mother.' Responding to Demonpion's biography on his website, he wrote: 'Until my death, I will remain an abandoned little child, howling from fear and cold, starved of caresses.'
All Houellebecq's books have the same theoretical underpinning: a modest extension of the argument of the Communist Manifesto, proposing that what we call sexual freedom is in fact the last stage in the free market's resolution of personal wealth into exchange value. This is laid out in the section of his first novel that explains its ironically grandiose title:
Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system, certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment in misery. In a totally liberal sexual system, certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.
His later novels explore various solutions: in Atomised, the naturist resort at Cap d'Agde is described as a 'sexual social democracy', in which French, German and Scandinavian couples swap partners and share their love with lonely single men, in an atmosphere of 'discipline and respect for the social contract'. In Platform, sex tourism is proposed as a radical free-market solution, allowing sexual paupers to achieve the same consumer satisfaction they have at Monoprix: rich but ugly Westerners and the poor but handsome of the Third World share resources.
But Houellebecq's novels also clearly and vituperatively blame his parents and their generation – the hippies and the soixante-huitards – for the sexual misery in which many of his characters live, and for all kinds of social ills besides. In Atomised, Bruno's parents are horribly compromised, carnal people. His father ('give a gorilla a mobile phone and you've got the general idea') is a cosmetic surgeon, one of the first to benefit from 'the use of sex in marketing and the resulting breakdown of the traditional couple'. Their heinousness doesn't end there: his mother's fellow cultists, not satisfied with free love, turn to ritual murder. According to Bruno, we shouldn't be surprised: 'Actionists, beatniks, hippies and serial killers were all pure libertarians who advanced the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippy movement, but its logical conclusion.'
'I've lived my life rather than his,' Houellebecq's father admits to Demonpion. 'But I knew he was in good hands.' Houellebecq always describes his time growing up with his grandmother Henriette as a short episode of idyllic happiness in a largely miserable life. If Houellebecq's parents serve as his symbols of self-indulgent evil, Henriette represents the ultimate good: it's tempting to see in this the origin of the sharp division in his books between cynicism and hatred, on the one hand, and sentimentality, on the other. Henriette is memorialised in the description of the life and death of Bruno's grandmother, once again closely based on the facts:
After the death of her husband, she had worked in a factory and brought up her four children; in midwinter she drew water from the pump in the courtyard so that they could wash. At 60, having just retired from the factory, she agreed to look after her son's only child. He had wanted for nothing – clean clothes, good Sunday lunches and love. All these things she had done for him.
When Michel came to publish his first poems, he did so under Henriette's maiden name, Houellebecq, later adopting it as his legal surname.
He was an introverted, bookish child, who did very well at school but sometimes had trouble getting on with other children. According to his father, he was afflicted by existential angst even then: 'Very early on in life, he was conscious of the futility of existence, of the difficulty of living.' His mother's less sympathetic assessment is that he was 'mentally gifted, emotionally subnormal'. He was sent to board at a lycée in Meaux, where he was probably bullied, and where the older boys led a mini-insurrection in May 1968 – no doubt adding to his growing horror of leftist radicalism. But he made friends: plenty of Demonpion's interviewees, from all periods of his life, report that although unusual and sometimes difficult, Houellebecq is also funny and charming. He then went to Paris to cram for university entrance, studying science subjects, particularly biology, and starting to live the solitary urban lifestyle often described in his fiction. In the studio flat that his father had bought him, he lived off dry bread, mustard and whisky; there was no furniture except a bed and two posters: one of Iggy Pop, the other of Jacques Chirac.
In 1975, Houellebecq enrolled at the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon to study agricultural engineering. This seems to have been a bad idea: the atmosphere was left-leaning, jolly and carousing. Some classmates remember him as an 'uptight intellectual poseur' with an 'extraterrestrial' way about him. There are also various descriptions of his abject misery after falling in love and being rejected. Nevertheless, he seems to have enjoyed himself, making a few good friends, especially among the children of the Catholic squirearchy – Demonpion suggests that he was both sympathetic to their view of the world and, as a working-class boy, impressed by their social status. He read Dostoevsky and science fiction, discovered Schopenhauer, published an arts magazine, and made a short gothic film under the pseudonym d'Evel de Smythe-Winter. And he had at least one girlfriend, who remembers him, and his immoderate love of Camembert, fondly.
In 1978, his grandmother Henriette died – by all accounts a devastating experience for him. Despite his diploma from the INA, he was unable to get a job; he spent two years at film school, but nothing came of it, and he found himself unemployed again. At 24, he married the younger sister of one of his aristocratic college friends. They had a son, and she had to work to support them both, until eventually a friend pulled some strings to get him a job in IT. He hated it, and began to suffer from clinical depression, having to be hospitalised on various occasions. The parallels with the plot and mood of Whatever are close: 'I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke. My entire work as a computer expert consists of adding to the data, the cross-referencing, the criteria of rational decision-making. It has no meaning.'
After four years, his marriage broke up. Both Atomised and his new novel feature a first wife and child, who are described with indifference and casual brutality: 'Today it's almost impossible for me to remember why I married my first wife; if I was to come across her in the street, I don't even think I'd be able to recognise her,' says the main character in The Possibility of an Island. 'On the day of my son's suicide, I made a tomato omelette . . . I had never loved that child: he was as stupid as his mother, and as nasty as his father.'
Writing seems to have saved Houellebecq. In 1991, he published his first collection of poetry, a manifesto for depressed poets called Rester vivant, méthode: 'Your existence is nothing more than a tissue of sufferings. You think you can manage to lay them out in a coherent form. Your objective, at this stage: to live long enough to do it' (the translation, from Houellebecq's website, is by Richard Davies). But, around the same time, he also found a comfortable job in a sympathetic environment, in the IT department of the French National Assembly. His poetry brought him a small group of admirers, though his first prose book, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, against Life (1991), attracted little interest. It's a strange, messianic celebration of the seminal fantasy and horror writer – more revealing of Houellebecq's own Schopenhauer-derived pessimism and intentions as a writer than of Lovecraft:
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All those prodigiously refined 'notations', 'situations', anecdotes . . . All they do, once the book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our 'real life' days.
In 1992, he met Marie-Pierre Gauthier, whom he would marry in 1998. She worked in publishing and became, effectively, his unpaid literary agent: submitting his first novel to scores of publishers, until it was eventually taken on by Editions Maurice Nadeau and became a cult success. According to those who know the couple, she is also the model for the principle of female good in his novels, embodied in Valérie in Platform and Christiane in Atomised – gentle, intelligent, sexually accommodating, an appreciative audience for the miserable male character's autobiographical ramblings and highfalutin theoretical talk; 'consolatrice' is Demonpion's apt word. Gauthier seems to have been an enthusiastic participant in the Houellebecq project. She went with him to Parisian swingers' clubs and to the naturist camp Cap d'Agde; she starred in his soft-porn movie; in the run-up to the publication of Platform, she had sex with him in front of a photographer. The rest of Houellebecq's story is a matter of public record, to which Demonpion adds little. Atomised became a bestseller at home and abroad. It won the Prix Novembre, though it missed out on the Goncourt. The publication of Platform saw him prosecuted for incitement to racial hatred, after describing Islam as 'the most idiotic religion' in a promotional interview. (His exact words were: 'La religion le plus con, c'est quand même l'Islam.') He argued that he was entitled to criticise Islam, and that he had never conflated Muslims with Arabs; he was cleared; the book sold 200,000 copies in two weeks.
Houellebecq has established himself as one of the great international brands of popular literary fiction. But there is a great deal of disagreement over whether he's a genius, a fraud or a reprobate. Responses to his novels largely fall into three categories. The first is euphoric: Houellebecq as visionary. According to this view, he sees the dehumanising effects of the market, the breakdown of religion and the family, and the unbearable tensions of Western life: the sexual misery, the inevitable conflict between Western morals and Islam. His novels are regarded as having a prophetic quality: Platform, published two years before the Bali bombing, ends with an assault by Islamists on a decadent tourist resort in Thailand. His then publisher, Flammarion, apologised for any offence caused by the novel on 10 September 2001. By this time, Houellebecq was in hiding in Ireland after receiving death threats. 'You're saved,' the writer Michel Déon told him as they watched the planes fly into the World Trade Center.
The second view is that, though his perspective is not necessarily right – and probably rather regrettable – it's an interesting and prevalent one, and illuminates the attitude of many people in modern France and Europe. As Salman Rushdie put it, 'Platform is a novel to go to if you want to understand the France beyond the liberal intelligentsia, the France that gave the left such a bloody nose in the last presidential election, and whose discontents and prejudices the extreme right was able to exploit.' On this view, Houellebecq speaks, though in a rarefied and intellectual tone, for les beaufs – the hicks, the Le Penistes. This is also true in the realm of sexual politics: he represents unreconstructed man, slavering and masturbatory, whose existence tends to get glossed over in the era of supposed sexual liberation and equality. As an unnamed Dutch academic quoted in a recent Sunday Times profile remarked, he reveals 'the vile 20 per cent of himself' that most people keep hidden.
The third attitude is outright disapproval. Houellebecq is a disgusting sexist, racist, eugenicist and pervert, who ought to repulse us. He is a professional provocateur, a marketing whizz, whose success is down to his courting of controversy, to the racist jokes and great dollops of pornography in his work.
After the publication of Atomised, he was ejected from Les Perpendiculaires, a leftish writers' collective to which he belonged. As far as they were concerned, the novel was 'a machine of war' for his ultra-right ideas: a flashy way of expressing intolerant conservative regret at the decline of traditional social structures, at women's liberation and the growth of immigration. This is tidily expressed by Bruno's rant about one of his black students:
He always wore a baseball cap and a pair of Nikes; I was convinced he had a huge dick. All the girls threw themselves at this big baboon and here I was trying to teach them about Mallarmé – what the fuck was the point? This is the way the world ends, I thought bitterly, people worshipping in front of big dicks, like hamadryas baboons.
(In the original, it's 'civilisation occidentale', not 'the world', which ends – making the point even clearer.)
The answer, of course, is that Houellebecq is a mixture of all three – and this mixture is probably the key to his success. There's little point in denying that he has some profoundly fascistic tendencies (the biography reveals that he is, or at least was, a committed racist). Like Céline, he's a right-wing misanthrope who has produced a genuinely perceptive and resonant picture of French society – obscenified and isolating. He's also a careless writer (in his view the modern world doesn't deserve anything better). His fiction is often crude and repetitive. His observations, bracing at first, seem specious and grating when repeated, in almost identical form, in novel after novel. It's frequently obvious that he is simply dressing up his personal obsessions as something more significant, or cannily repackaging popular prejudices as grand philosophical positions. On the evidence of The Possibility of an Island, his latest novel, he would be the first to admit all this.
Daniel, a celebrated and super-rich stand-up comedian, has built his career 'on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts' – pandering to the prejudices of his audience, by producing shows with titles like 'Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler)'. He knows he's overrated, and thinks it's funny that he is regarded as a 'humanist' and a representative of free speech, when in fact he despises most humans and is rather against freedom.
Wealthy and bored, he lives in a huge villa in Almeria. He separates from his wife, Marie, largely because she's getting a bit old and saggy, and doesn't like sex enough. He then meets and falls in love with Esther, a beautiful young actress from Madrid, who, 'like all very pretty young girls, was basically only good for fucking'. She gives him many days and nights of pleasure, which are described at great length. But, inevitably, she doesn't want to spend her life with Daniel, and decides to pursue a career as an actress in America. At her leaving party, he finds her in a bedroom sandwiched between two handsome, muscular young men. Daniel takes solace in the dubious generalisation that, 'for Esther, as for all the young girls of her generation, sexuality was just a pleasant pastime, driven by seduction and eroticism, which implied no particular sentimental commitment.' Even so, the episode drives Daniel to despair, thoughts of death etc.
Meanwhile, Daniel has become involved with a thinly fictionalised version of the Raelian cult, with which Houellebecq has himself flirted. The Raelians believe that human life was begun by visiting aliens named the Elohim. This message was revealed to Claude Vorilhon, a sports journalist from Clermont-Ferrand, when he was visiting the crater at Puy-de-Lassolas in 1973. A flying saucer descended, and a four-foot alien told him to build an embassy to facilitate further contact. The Raelians also believe that cloning will allow us to live eternally, and indeed claim to have cloned human babies already. They are called the Elohimites in The Possibility of an Island. Every other chapter is narrated from a post-nuclear future, by one of Daniel's genetic successors. As in Atomised, which has a similar but less intrusive science-fiction structure, these future humans are sexless immortals, looking back in pity at the desperate rutting of their predecessors. Daniel24 lives in Daniel's house in Almeria; outside his electric fence, sexually reproducing mortals have survived, as 'savages' – 'slightly more intelligent monkeys, and, for this reason, more dangerous'.
It's difficult to summarise further without sounding completely mad. Let's just say that the plot illustrates the Schopenhauerian principle that people are trapped between pain and striving, on the one hand, and boredom and emptiness, on the other. The original Daniel suffers from the first, the future Daniels from the second. Daniel25 sets off across Spain, hoping to find a fabled community of real humans, and to learn what they meant by love, sex and laughter. By and large, The Possibility of an Island seems like the result of a very uninteresting experiment: to see how much Houellebecq can get away with, how slapdash, how misogynistic, how programmatically 'controversial' he can be. It showcases many of his fascist instincts. Daniel's clones shoot humans for the hell of it, witnessing 'without regret the disappearance of the species'. They tell us that the post-apocalyptic world they inhabit is the result of the Eurabian civil war currently being gleefully predicted by Le Penistes and unhinged neo-cons.
When Houellebecq's novels work, it's because he has three interlocking talents: his sense of humour; his sharp, aphoristic way with ideas; and his ability to write perceptive, alienated and detailed accounts of everyday activities – working in offices, going on package tours. The new novel provides the odd striking aphorism and the descriptions of life in the cult are initially interesting. But, strangely enough, since Daniel is meant to be a comedian, it's all deadly unfunny. Disastrously ricocheting between scepticism and credulity, cynicism and sentimentality, The Possibility of an Island offers mostly pointless hate and filth. As Yves Donnars, the owner of the New Age holiday camp, complained: 'I got the impression that he saw himself as a redresser of wrongs, but one who loves to wallow in the muck, while saying: "Look, society is even more disgusting than I am."'
Vol. 28 No. 3 · 9 February 2006 » Theo Tait » Gorilla with Mobile Phone
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Over 50 years of combined
real estate investment acumen.
Christina Georgiou
Christina joined Invel in January 2019 as the Office Manager in Limassol. In a fast-growing company she was quickly involved in all subsequent hires in the Group, becoming Head of HR in November 2020. Since November 2021 she has been acting as the Chief of Staff, ensuring seamless communication between the Managing Partner (MP), the senior management and the rest of the Group.
Immediately after graduating, Christina lived and worked in Brussels for 3 years as a diplomatic attaché of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cyprus. She was positioned at the Permanent Representation of Cyprus to the EU, where she served as one of the closest collaborators to the Permanent Representative, participating at the COREPER II meetings, preparing the work of 4 Council configurations (economic and financial affairs, foreign affairs, general affairs, justice and home affairs). Prior to joining Invel, Christina also worked as the Office Manager of the Embassy of France in Cyprus and the PA to the Secretary General of the Embassy for 4 years.
Christina holds a Master's degree in Political and Social Sciences and International Relations from the University of Strasbourg, France. She is a fluent Greek, French and English speaker and a basic user of Italian.
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MAKOTO KAWABATA - RICHARD PINHAS - YOSHIDA TATSUYA : "Trax"
What remains to be said ?
Richard Pinhas is one of the most atypical French musicians of the last 40 years. His guitar playing sounds a bit like Sonny Sharrock's, with a kind of Sonic Youth treatment applied to it, yet his trademark effects reminiscent of the Heldon years can still be heard.
Makoto Kawabata who has been a big follower of Heldon, has also been a longtime friend and partner of Tatsuya Yoshida.
So, naturally these 3 re-united in 2016 at the Studio Condorcet in Toulouse (France) to record a series of fiery improvisations and experimentations.
Free noise, Blues and psychedelia are all intertwined.
The music is relentlessly broken down: percussive guitars turned bewitching metronome while other guitars are taken on a sometimes lyrical but always chaotic journey will keep the listener on edge.
Repeated listenings will trigger memories of German psychedelia or even the more recent Noise rock or No-wave.
Every title is named "Trax" followed by a number. Each Trax is a sonic outburs, relentlessly following each other. The musicians expose their most expressive and unbridled sides; it's a Free music but without the permanent collapse.
Sorry for high shipping fares, french post is way too expensive !


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Get to know Cape League senior writer Priscilla Merritt
Priscilla Merritt with Hyannis Harbor Hawks assistant coach, Nick "The Greek" Siemasz
Q: What will you be doing for the Cape Cod Baseball League as a senior writer?
A: I will be writing about different aspects of the Cape Cod Baseball League, the 10 franchises and their events, as well as profiles of league staff, volunteers, players and coaches. There are so many great stories within this organization and I'm looking forward to sharing them.
Q: What do you hope to bring to this position?
A: I hope my eagerness to write about the CCBL shows through in my stories.
Q: What do you believe our Cape League readers would like to see?
A: I believe the appeal of the Cape Cod Baseball League is that the game of baseball is so intimate here. There's nothing quite like the atmosphere at one of our games. You can hear the fans cheering for the players like they know them personally, and many times they do. Kids are thrilled to be able to get an autograph or a photo on the field after the game. I'd like to bring that sense of intimacy to our readers. I think they care about our organization, our volunteers, our players and coaches. The league is so much more than just a baseball game. The CCBL is an integral part of the fabric of Cape Cod. I plan to write stories that shine a light on all aspects of the league, on and off the field.
Q: How do you plan on providing that to our readers?
A: I plan on writing stories about the behind-the-scenes work, about the interaction between the league and the community, and by introducing our readers to the many people that make up the CCBL.
Q: What is your writing background?
A: I don't have a formal background in writing. I started writing press releases for the Hyannis Athletic Association and eventually became their VP of Media and Community Relations. Pretty soon I was designing promotional materials and writing stories about their events. It feels a bit like being called up to the big leagues now that I'm writing for the CCBL. I'm excited to learn about all aspects of the league and share what I can with our readers.
Priscilla and her husband visited Evansville teammates and former Harbor Hawks Eric Stamets (2011), left, and Kyle Freeland (2013) at Spring Training in Arizona in 2015. Stamets is a SS with the Cleveland Indians and Freeland is a pitcher for the Colorado Rockies.
Q: How did you originally get involved in the Cape League?
A: My husband is from Hyannis and he grew up watching the Hyannis Mets (now Harbor Hawks). During the summer of 2006, we met some host mothers at one of the games and decided to host a player the following summer. It was a wonderful experience for our entire family and permanently changed the way I feel about baseball.
Q: How many players have you housed and do you still stay in touch?
A: We have housed 12 players over seven years and have stayed in touch with most of them and their families. We've formed some very special bonds with our "summer sons." They are all great young men. We've attended weddings and shared the joy of seeing them start families. Six of them are currently playing in the minor leagues. In 2013, our last year as host parents, we had LHP Kyle Freeland (Evansville) stay with us. Kyle was drafted in the first round by the Colorado Rockies. His Evansville teammate, SS Eric Stamets, lived with us in 2011 and is playing for the Cleveland Indians.
Q: What other work are you involved in outside of the Cape Cod Baseball League?
A: I work with special education students in the Barnstable school system. It's a very rewarding job. Volunteering is also important to me so I give my time and talents to a few other nonprofits, including Cape Cod Charitable Fun Raisers. It's a really great group that organizes several events throughout the year, such as The Last Gasp and The Spectacle of Trees, that raise money for local charities.
Q: Where are you from?
A: I am from Syracuse, N.Y., but I moved to Massachusetts in 1983. My family and I made Hyannis our home in 2001. I hope my New York friends don't get mad at me for saying this, but I definitely feel like I'm a Cape Codder now.
Q: What is the most important thing you think others should know when learning about the Cape League?
A: I think most people would expect me to speak to the quality of baseball in the Cape League, but I didn't know anything about the game when I first got involved. What strikes me most about the Cape Cod Baseball League is the people, the connections, the possibilities. There are players who are on the cusp of seeing their dreams become reality; there are parents who are seeing the fulfillment of a lifetime of commitment and sacrifice; there are interns who are finding a path to an exciting career in sports. You sense that when you're watching a Cape League game. We are so lucky to be a part of that.
Q: What is your favorite location on Cape Cod?
A: That's a tough one. There are so many beautiful places on the Cape. My family and I love evenings at Sandy Neck, and my dog and I enjoy walking the trails around Barnstable. The artist/photographer in me also likes spending time in and around the salt marshes. The way they change with the seasons is magical. And of course, I love summer evenings at the baseball field.
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From Tampere railway station there is a direct connection to Helsinki-Vantaa Airport with a change of trains in Tikkurila for the I-Train. Tickets for the I-Train can be purchased on the VR website.The I-Train schedule can be found here aikataulut.reittiopas.fi/linjat/en/jP.html.
Please check the accommodation options!


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Apple is reportedly seeking exclusive content for the Apple TV
Taking a page from Netflix and Amazon, Apple may be in search of the next House of Cards or Transparent.
Susie Ochs (Macworld.com) 30 January, 2016 04:57
Netflix has House of Cards, Amazon has Transparent, and maybe in a year or two we'll all be talking about Apple's hot original hit or ingenious reboot of classic '80s sitcom Head of the Class.
According to a report in The Street, Apple's SVP Eddy Cue is taking meetings in Hollywood looking for exclusive content deals for iTunes. Since the long-rumored streaming bundle of channels has reportedly been put on hold, Apple's new focus could be working with creators to make new shows you'll only be able to see on iTunes.
Apple has seen exclusivity work in its favor already: Taylor Swift's 1989 concert film, for example, launched exclusively on Apple Music; iTunes is the only place to get the live iTunes Festival (now Apple Music Festival) sets; and HBO Now launched exclusively on iOS and Apple TV before rolling out to other platforms.
To binge or not to binge
But would exclusive shows make a big difference if customers have to purchase them a la carte? Netflix and Amazon Prime are subscription services, so if an exclusive show lures you in to subscribe, you might keep paying months after you finished streaming its season, because of all the other content that you get along with it. Or maybe subscribers who were thinking of cancelling Netflix will stick around for a few more months because they want to catch the upcoming season of Orange is the New Black. Amazon Prime is another beast altogether since it bundles the streaming video with extra benefits like no-charge two-day shipping and Kindle e-book lending privileges. But in both cases, customers are paying a subscription fee, and the original content is a reason to keep it up.
Apple has a monthly streaming service with Apple Music, complete with an app on the Apple TV, so it could branch out and add these new exclusive shows to that. (Spotify, for example, is adding short-form videos to its music-streaming service.) That would boost Apple Music subscriber numbers as well giving those subscribers an extra reason to buy an Apple TV.
Simply having exclusive shows for purchase in the iTunes Store—where TV shows and seasons are currently only offered for sale, not for rent—might not be as compelling. The iTunes Store has hundreds of shows all competing directly with each other (even House of Cards, if you don't mind waiting), so any new exclusive content would have to be pretty amazing—and brilliantly marketed—if Apple ever hopes to change the culture's catchphrase to "iTunes and chill."
Tags Apple TV
The Channel Roadmap is a bespoke content hub housing strategic priorities from technology vendors for 2022 and beyond, partners can find the guidance on the key technologies and markets to pursue, to help build a blueprint for future success.
Microsoft's wins, fails, and WTF moments of 2021


Wordless Wednesday : Chocolate hands!
Explanation necessary …… go to Jeanette's post 'Granny's chocolate pudding' …. just before going home, Connor asked for MORE chocolate pudding. He sat quietly on his own and unbeknown to all of us he left me with a little piece of artwork !!!
LOL, he was so proud of his artwork!
You should have it laminated.
That is so sweet! And messy! Gosh – I'd forgotten about sticky little fingers!!
Very creative! Such a yummy way to paint!
How precious!! What a creative little artist you have and a great keepsake!
What a hoot! Thanks for sharing!
Loved the pictures at Jeannette's!! He has such a cute smile!! Beautiful art, a bit sticky though I'll bet?


over 1,300 Upstate children every day after school throughout the school year and over 600 all day in the summer.
Children Advocacy Center – The Children's Advocacy Center wants each Spartanburg child to grow up with a sense of dignity and self-worth. That's why it is their mission to help children speak up about abuse and heal from it.
Girl Scouts – Unleashes the G.I.R.L. (Go-getter, Innovator, Risk-Taker, Leader) in every girl, preparing her for a lifetime of leadership. This one-of- a-kind program is time-tested and research-backed and prepares girls to take the lead in their own lives and in the world.
Miracle Hill – Provides food, shelter, and compassion to residents of Spartanburg County. Many men and women have been able to rebuild their lives and become productive members of the community once again.
Thank you to the Spartanburg County Foundation for its guidance throughout the process.
Voting is underway to select the recipient(s). Stay tuned!
Ball4Good organized a fundraiser with the soccer, volleyball, and tennis teams at Spartanburg Day School to purchase winter hats for the Cancer Association of Spartanburg and Cherokee Counties. We were able to purchase $2,500 worth of hats at a discount.
A special donation came from the Cothran triplets, Alex, Will, and Olivia. They donated their birthday money to go towards the purchase of the winter hats. Alex and Will are on the soccer team with our founder, and Olivia is on the volleyball team.
Pictured (from left to right): Ms. Glaydeane Lee (Executive Director of the Cancer Association), Ms. Olivia Cothran, Mr. Alexander Cothran, Mr. Will Cothran, Mr. Adom Appiah (our founder), and Mr. Houston Graves (2018 Tournament Partner).


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Brighton & Hove City Brass
Tweets by @BrightonBrass
You are here: Home Members Horns
The horns provide the warm sound in the middle of the band. Four places make up the horn section, a Flugel Horn (B-flat) and three Tenor Horns (E-flat).
Connie Chadwick - Flugel
Connie joined us in October 2015 initially on the front row cornet section but when we found ourselves short of a flugel player decided a change of seat may be quite challenging. In fact, it was like a duck taking to water as Connie has now settled well and made the change as if second nature.
Jenny Ireland - Solo Horn
Jenny joined the band back in 1988 on cornet having played for her local band since the age of 8. She started on 2nd cornet and worked her way up to the position of 2nd man down for a number of years, even doing a stint on principal. She joined Horsham band in 2000 as 2nd man down and progressed to principal at Hangleton band in 2002.
In 2003 Jenny decided to hang up her cornet after 21 years and take up the tenor horn, taking the position of Solo Horn at Brighton but has also been known to fill spaces on Euphonium, Cornet and Flugel when needed. In November 2014 Jenny very kindly agreed to temporarily move to cover the Solo Cornet line. She is married to Jon Ireland our percussionist.
Jenny Scholes - 1st Horn
Jenny started playing Tenor Horn at the age of 8 through lessons provided in primary school. After moving to Derbyshire when 10 she played for a short time for Ireland Colliery B band before joining the school senior band when she started secondary school. She then played for Darley Dale band for a few years before taking a break while at University. She moved to Brighton in 2001 and joined the band on 2nd Horn. Since then she has worked up to Solo Horn and then moved to Baritone in 2012. As a day job Jenny works for American Express as a Senior Business Analyst.
Jenny Alderton - Second Horn
Biography to follow


text:
Келлог или Ке́ллогг () — английская фамилия и топоним.
 Kellogg's — американская компания, производитель сухих завтраков и продуктов питания быстрого приготовления.
 Келлог, Альберт (1813—1887) — американский ботаник.
 Келлог, Вернон Лайман (1867—1937) — американский энтомолог и эволюционист, президент Энтомологического общества Америки.
 Келлог, Джон Харви (1852—1943) — американский врач-диетолог.
  (1812—1901) — американской изобретатель.
 Келлог, Кит (род. 1944) — американский генерал-лейтенант в отставке, ответственный секретарь Совета по национальной безопасности США.
 Келлог, Клара Луиза (1842—1916) — американская оперная певица.
 Келлог, Кларк (род. 1961) — американский профессиональный баскетболист.
 Келлогг, Марк (1831—1876) — журналист, убитый в битве при Литтл-Бигхорне.
 Келлог, Фрэнк Биллингс (1856—1937) — американский политик, госсекретарь США.
  (1883—1960) — американский радиоинженер, один из изобретателей электродинамического громкоговорителя.
 Келлог, Уильям Кейт (1860—1951) — американский бизнесмен, основатель компании «Kellogg's», брат Джона Харви Келлога.

Топонимы
 Келлогг — город в США.
 Келлог — сельский населённый пункт в Туруханском районе Красноярского края.
 Келлог — река в Ямало-Ненецком автономном округе и Красноярском крае, левый приток Елогуя.

Kellogg

Примечания

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


This month's business meeting of ABC Business Network will take place on Thursday 31st Jan 2019 at Banbridge Enterprise Centre, Scarva Road Industrial Estate, Banbridge, BT32 3QD from 07:30 - 09:00am.
Your Health is Your Wealth. As we begin another year, take some time to consider how your health and fitness impacts on your ability to do your job. We all need to maintain a healthy lifestyle to perform at our best in work and to deal with whatever challenges life throws at us. Matthew McGrath will give us an insight into his work as a Personal Trainer and challenge us to have the right mindset to be fulfilled in our personal and work lives in 2019.
Matthew worked for Tesco for 15years before deciding that it was time to change his career path. He is and always has been interested in mindset, and the importance of looking after all aspects of living. He transitioned to become a personal trainer and loves helping people to just learn to look after themselves. He then began studying and learning more about mindset, completing courses through the Proctor and Gallagher institute in Canada. This led him to write his own course covering all of the things he felt that all other courses were missing.
His 8 week guide "Unlocking your potential - The Process" takes each individual on their own journey of self discovery to ultimately discover that truly, anything is possible. All of his personal training sessions introduce snippets of the course along the way too. Matthew plans to build his brand, "Amplify Fitness and Wellbeing" and help clients to truly understand all aspects of wellbeing, how much it can affect their life. This enables them to take control, amend their focus and improve their overall quality of life.
VirtuAli is owned by Alison Matthews or Ali for short (hence the business name!). Alison graduated from Queens University, Belfast with a degree in Modern Languages (French/German) and later completed a Postgraduate Diploma in European Business Administration. Having worked for 9 years for European Investment Bank (EIB) in Luxembourg as a Senior PA & Project Administrator, she returned home to the village of Moira and launched her own business providing outsourced administrative services to busy professionals.
Alison has excellent organisational and customer service skills and works on many different types of projects. She helps to organise events, streamline processes to increase productivity, organises travel plans, types the minutes at HR disciplinary and grievance case meetings…. and much more!
Alison loves the variety of her roles and the opportunity to help people by bringing new ideas and her experience to the table. Her work makes businesses more efficient and allows busy executives to go home, enjoy their evenings and lead a healthier lifestyle, safe in the knowledge that their admin tasks are under control. If you need someone to take away your admin pain, get in touch with Alison by email to alison@virtuali.uk or give her a call on 07796240677.


Daughters Destiny Ministries, religious organization, listed under "Religious Organizations" category, is located at 301 W Singer St Springfield OH, 45506 and can be reached by 9373238840 phone number. Daughters Destiny Ministries has currently 0 reviews.
Browse all Religious Organizations in Springfield OH. Discover census data for Springfield, OH.


Thank you for shopping at Greenhouse Hemp.
Our products can be returned within 3 days of the original purchase of the product. A new product may be exchanged for another product or returned for a refund.
You are responsible for paying the costs of shipping and for the risk of loss of or damage to the product during shipping, both to and from Greenhouse Hemp.


text:
White, Asian American students face discrimination in college admissions at these major universities, study finds
Research from the Center for Equal opportunity has revealed disparities in the percentage of White and Asian Americans students accepted to colleges and universities.
The study found preferences for students of certain races at seven major colleges and universities across the U.S.
EXCLUSIVE: Christian college administrator calls pro-life students 'antagonizers'
By Alexa Schwerha
Abigail Streetman '23 | Senior Florida Campus Correspondent
Friday, February 19, 2021 6:26 PM
The Center for Equal Opportunity published a study of colleges and universities that allegedly discriminate against White and Asian American applicants. Such institutions include the University of Michigan, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, and Ohio State University.
CEO is a non-profit 501(c)(3) research institute founded in 1995, which sponsors conferences, supports research, and publishes briefs related to the issues of race, ethnicity, and public policy.
"For the sake of campus diversity, many colleges and universities pass over white and Asian American applicants with better academic preparation, favoring blacks and (to a lesser extent) Hispanics," the paper states. "CEO statistical research (logistic regression analyses) showed that underrepresented minorities (URMs) received significant preference over white and Asian American applicants with the same or better academic credentials."
[RELATED: UPenn diversity initiative is 'straightforward neo-segregation,' critic says]
Statistics used for this research involve test scores, in-state residency, grades, gender, and legacy connections. This data showed "large preferences awarded to blacks over whites in undergraduate admissions at the following universities: The University of Virginia; the College of William and Mary; the University of Wisconsin; the University of Michigan; Miami University-Ohio; and Ohio State. Moderate preferences were awarded at the University of Oklahoma."
In Regents of Univ. of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court ruled that the use of racial quotas in the admission process is unconstitutional, but that "affirmative action" is constitutional in certain cases. Justice Harry Blackmun expressed the contradiction of this ruling by stating that "in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some people equally, we must treat them differently."
[RELATED: 5 times colleges segregated for diversity's sake]
Grutter v. Bollinger upheld this ruling.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor delivered the opinion of the court writing that the university had a "compelling interest" in using race.
According to the center's publication, "she observed that the business, military, education, and legal elite all claimed how numerical diversity 'promotes learning outcomes and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals.' These benefits, according to O'Connor, were not theoretical but real."
[RELATED: U Chicago prof faces backlash after questioning diversity hires]
The report notes that "as elite admissions rates dropped, demographic changes in the past half century also meant that the number of Asian Americans applying to and admitted to colleges soared. From the diversity perspective, preferences against Asian Americans would need to be added to the mix. As a result, racial preferences work against Asian American as well as white applicants."
[RELATED: Trinity College will make six new diversity hires each year, implement mandatory 'unconscious bias,' 'microaggression' training]
Althea Nagai, a research fellow at CEO, broke up admissions data from 10 different universities into categories by their state. Harvard, MIT, and the California Institute of Technology are among those listed. Nagai states that CalTech does not use race as a factor in the admissions process and that the percent of Asian American students has been steadily growing there.
[RELATED: Harvard uses sexual assault allegations to push for more diversity initiatives]
However, both MIT and Harvard use race as a benchmark, and according to Nagai's research "there are two distinct patterns. The first period, from 1980 to 1993, shows a sharp increase. Asian American enrollment at Harvard was around 4% in 1980, rising to 21% by 1993, its high point. In the second period, Asian Americans as a percentage of undergraduates dropped to 17% and stayed at roughly the same level for more than 25 years."
"At Harvard, being Asian American was the only statistically negative factor among more than 10 factors considered by the admissions committee," reads the report.
[RELATED: Prof decries diversity efforts as 'performance' of being the 'good type' of White people]
The report also cites a 2013 UCLA study, finding that Asian American students reported "negative cross-racial interactions'' more than any other ethnic group. "51% of Asian American students experienced "negative cross-racial interactions'' compared to about a third of blacks, Hispanics, and multi-racial students, and roughly a quarter of whites."
The study concludes by addressing racial separatism that has occurred as a result of these diversity tactics. According to the National Association of Scholars database, a study of 173 colleges and universities shows that "43% had voluntary segregated dorms for one or more groups, 29% had black residence halls; 21% had Hispanic residence halls; and 11% had residence halls for Asian Americans." It also found that "72% had separate graduation ceremonies. 44% had graduation ceremonies for black students; 38% had separate ceremonies for Hispanics; and 26% had Asian American ceremonies."
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @abbyystreetman
Abigail Streetman '23
Senior Florida Campus Correspondent
Abigail Streetman is a Florida Campus Correspondent with Campus Reform. She is a third-year student at the University of Florida, majoring in biology and minoring in innovation. Abigail is the UF Turning Point USA president, Gainesville Activism Hub president, and a member of College Republicans, Network of Enlightened Women, and Young Americans for Liberty.


text:
//
//  PPQueue.h --> a fork from EDQueue
//  ppqueue
//
//  Created by Daniel Luethi 2015
//  Copyright (c) 2015 All rights reserved.
//

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

typedef NS_ENUM(NSInteger, PPQueueResult) {
    PPQueueResultSuccess = 0,
    PPQueueResultFail,
    PPQueueResultCritical
};

typedef void (^PPQueueCompletionBlock)(PPQueueResult result);

extern NSString *const PPQueueDidStart;
extern NSString *const PPQueueDidStop;
extern NSString *const PPQueueJobDidSucceed;
extern NSString *const PPQueueJobDidFail;
extern NSString *const PPQueueDidDrain;

@protocol PPQueueDelegate;
@interface PPQueue : NSObject

#pragma mark Singleton
///----------------
/// @name Singleton
///----------------

/**
* Returns the shared instance of the receiver class, creating it if necessary.
*
* You shoudn't override this method in your subclasses.
* @return Shared instance of the receiver class.
*/
+ (PPQueue *)sharedInstance;

#pragma mark Properties
///----------------
/// @name Properties
///----------------

/**
* Lets you set a delegate which is called
*/
@property (nonatomic, weak) id<PPQueueDelegate> delegate;

/**
* Number of times a failed job should be retried
*/
@property (nonatomic, readonly) BOOL isRunning;

/**
* Number of times a failed job should be retried
*/
@property (nonatomic) NSUInteger retryLimit;

#pragma mark Methods
///----------------
/// @name Methods
///----------------

/**
* Adds a new job to the queue with priority 0
*
* @param {id} Data
* @param {NSString} Task label
*
* @return {void}
*/
- (void)enqueueWithData:(id)data forTask:(NSString *)task;

/**
* Adds a new job to the queue.
*
* @param {id} Data
* @param {NSString} Task label
* @param {NSUInteger} Priority of job. 0 = highest priority
*
* @return {void}
*/
- (void)enqueueWithData:(id)data forTask:(NSString *)task withPriority:(NSUInteger)priority;

/**
* Starts the queue.
*
* @return {void}
*/
- (void)start;

/**
* Stops the queue.
* @note Jobs that have already started will continue to process even after stop has been called.
*
* @return {void}
*/
- (void)stop;

/**
* Empties the queue.
* @note Jobs that have already started will continue to process even after empty has been called.
*
* @return {void}
*/
- (void)empty;

/**
* Removes all jobs older than the time interval.
*
* @param {NSString} a sqlite time interval (e.g '-1 day' or '-3 months')
*
* @return {void}
*/
- (void)removeOldJobs:(NSString*)timeInterval;

/**
* Returns true if a job exists for this task.
*
* @param {NSString} Task label
*
* @return {Boolean}
*/
- (BOOL)jobExistsForTask:(NSString *)task;

/**
* Returns true if the active job if for this task.
*
* @param {NSString} Task label
*
* @return {Boolean}
*/
- (BOOL)jobIsActiveForTask:(NSString *)task;

/**
* Returns the list of jobs for this
*
* @param {NSString} Task label
*
* @return {NSArray}
*/
- (NSDictionary *)nextJobForTask:(NSString *)task;

@end

/**
* The PPQueueDelegate protocol defines methods that are called to process a job
*/
@protocol PPQueueDelegate <NSObject>

@optional

/**
* Processes a job
*
* @param {PPQueue} the queue
*
* @param {NSDictionary} a dictionary with the job infos
*
* @return returns if the job successed of failed
*/
- (PPQueueResult)queue:(PPQueue *)queue processJob:(NSDictionary *)job;

/**
* Processes a job with a completion block for asynchronous processing
*
* @param {PPQueue} the queue
*
* @param {NSDictionary} a dictionary with the job infos
*
* @param {PPQueueCompletionBlock} a block to pass the result of the job
*/
- (void)queue:(PPQueue *)queue processJob:(NSDictionary *)job completion:(PPQueueCompletionBlock)block;
@end


ethan walker : The definition of hard.
Mammut presents six 'rock classics' -- milestones in the history of sports climbing. And the people who climbed them for the first time, revisiting their own routes accompanied by top climbers from the Mammut Pro Team.
"The world's first 8c+, which could be easily even 9a in my opinion. It is not the most inspiring line, it seems more like a boulder problem with a rope and easier topout, but one must admit that it is of revolutionary difficulty for its time and I believe that it isn't by any means easier than Action Directe, the world's first 9a established a year later..."
Anyway I had been getting myself psyched up for their visit ever since first hearing about the film project and was keen to get involved. It was fingers crossed the weather and conditions would hold out.
After spending a day belaying and getting super inspired by Sean on the route I started to get more fired up to take a look myself. Hubble is a route that has always been, and still is, completely out of this stratosphere for me. I almost felt a little embarrassed tying in to try it. A route of so much reputation and history.
But I figured it'd be fun to just check out the moves and see just exactly how hard it felt.
The answer... Bloody nails. The holds turned out to be much smaller than I imagined and the moves super intense and incredibly powerful. It was a pretty humbling experience but I was really glad to have taken a peek at what truly hard climbing is all about. As well as get a small glimpse at being able to comprehend just what it would take to do a line of this caliber. It is still crazy to think Ben climbed this way back in 1990 and makes you appreciate even more just how good he really was.
Maybe I'll try again in the future, I'd certainly like to, but first I need to get a little stronger... It is a dream route. Maybe not in an aesthetic sense, because on a whole it is nothing much to look at, but because it is HUBBLE.
And it you haven't already then take a look at the latest video in the series featuring Jan Hojer on Action Directe! Some seriously impressive footage and climbing!


text:
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Home · Events · ImagiNation 2018 : Ron Sexsmith
ImagiNation 2018 : Ron Sexsmith
Saturday | 20h30
Ron Sexsmith is an internationally acclaimed, Juno Award-winning recording artist. He spends most of his time writing songs, touring, and making records. Deer Life was mostly written on the road, during long drives and in dressing rooms and hotel rooms.
Host: Jeanette Kelly
7 April 2018 / 20h30
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text:
RVM [Radio.Video.Music] -
SINGING WITH
SINGING LADIES
NEW MUSIC VIDS
60s THROWBACK
SOUL ARTISTS
GUITAR VIRTUOSI
JAZZ LEGENDS
HARD & METAL ROCKERS
E – F – G
H – I – J – K
L – M
N – O – P – Q – R
S – T – U – V – W – X – Y – Z
SOUL etc.
SOUL, RnB, FUNK
VINTAGE CONCERTS
TV OLDIES
Booker T. Jones goes solo on KPLU (2013)
June 28, 2013 – you do not want to miss Booker T. Jones performing one song on KPLU in Seattle
Peter Frampton comes to Seattle (1977)
June 27, 1977 – Peter Frampton performs at the Kingdome in Seattle, WA
Metallica launch a museum in Seattle (2000)
June 23, 2010 – Metallica will perform as part of the launch of the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum at Memorial Stadium in Seattle, WA
Patti Smith sings and reads in Seattle (2000)
June 23, 2000 – Patti Smith will sing and read poetry as part the Experience Music Project concert series held at the Mural Amphitheatre in Seattle, WA
System Of A Down rock Seattle (1998)
June 12, 1998 – System Of A Down will be on stage at Rock Candy in Seattle, WA
Ozzy Osbourne hard rocks Seattle (1992)
June 11, 1992 – Ozzy Osbourne's "No More Tears Tour" stops at the Coliseum in Seattle
Paul McCartney performs with Wings in Seattle (1976)
June 10, 1976 – "Wings Over the World tour" with Paul McCartney who has not toured America since the 1966 Beatles' final tour, stops at Kingdome in Seattle
Valerie June is live on KEXP (2018)
June 3, 2018 – if in Seattle, do not miss on KEXP, Valerie June live at The Little London Plane during the "Upstream Music Festival"
Metallica hard rocks Seattle (1992)
May 27, 1992 – Metallica's "Wherever We May Roam Tour" stops for two nights at Center Coliseum in Seattle, WA
St. Paul & The Broken Bones are live on KEXP (2014)
April 19, 2014 – St. Paul & The Broken Bones with the incredible Paul Janeway on vocals will be live on KEXP, a Seattle radio.
Preservation Hall Jazz Band promotes its new album on KEXP (2013)
March 27, 2013 – Preservation Hall Jazz Band, promoting its newest release 'St. Peter & 57th St', performs live from the KEXP studio in Seattle, WA
Ben Harper tapes a solo show at KEXP (2016)
March 8, 2016 – Ben Harper will play and sing four brand new songs and answer a few questions in the KEXP studios in Seattle
Terence Blanchard is live from KPLU Studios (2014)
March 8, 2014 – do not miss Terence Blanchard live from the KPLU Studios in Seattle
Al Di Meola visits Seattle and plays at Jazz Alley (2011)
February 25, 2011 – Al Di Meola performs at Jazz Alley in Seattle, WA
On TV today, Aaron Neville on KEXP (2013)
February 20, 2013 – you do not want to miss Aaron Neville performing live at the KEXP studio in Seattle
On radio today, Vijay Iyer covers Michael Jackson (2011)
February 8, 2011 – the Vijay Iyer Trio tapes a special show at KPLU studios in Seattle
On radio today, Ladysmith Black Mambazo in Seattle (2016)
February 1, 2016 – South African choral Ladysmith Black Mambazo tapes a special show at KEXP, a public radio in Seattle.
Throwing Muses rock a record shop (1995)
January 24, 1995 – alt rock band Throwing Muses with Kristin Hersh on vocals will perform for some lucky customers at Tower Records in Seattle, WA
On Radio, Arturo Sandoval at KPLU (2012)
January 13, 2012 – Arturo Sandoval will be on air with Mahesh Balasooyria (p), Zane Musa (s), John Belzaguy (b) and Johnny Friday (d) from KPLU studios in Seattle, WA.
Charlie Hunter takes his Trio to Seattle (2017)
December 14, 2017 – guitarist Charlie Hunter plus a drummer and a sax player will be at Tractor Tavern Seattle WA
The RVM "Specials" Top 10
This week In Guitar Virtuosi 13
Hard & Metal Special New Music Videos 15
Hip-Hop & Soul New Music Videos 03
This week In Soul Artists 25
This week In Singing Ladies 27
This week In '70s Throwback' 14
The Allman Brothers Band is ...
The Bee Gees record 'Horizontal,' ...
Underworld electrify London (2010)
Hip-Hop & Soul New ...
German TV tapes the Pretenders ...
The RVM Top Concerts
Barry Manilow re-dedicates the Statue ...
W.A.S.P. hard rock California (1985)
Neil Diamond opens 'America for ...
Gary Moore sits in w/ ...
Sade Adu sings at ...


text:
The pros and cons of newspaper paywalls — a Storify conversation
Having a debate about the merits and/or disadvantages of newspaper paywalls is nothing new — one seems to break out whenever two or more journalists are in a room together — but not all of them involve a former Dow Jones chief executive, a former Wall Street Journal executive, a current Wall Street Journal managing editor, the president of BuzzFeed and the media reporters for Bloomberg and All Things Digital. Since I got involved in one that did on Sunday afternoon, I thought I would Storify it so others could eavesdrop in a digital sense.
The conversation didn't actually solve the question of the merits of paywalls, because it's not the kind of question that has a specific answer — it's more about the tradeoffs involved, and the effects that subscription plans can have on a content business. But there were some interesting viewpoints expressed and some interesting facts debated, such as the news that charging readers hasn't improved the advertising picture at the New York Times (something many paywall advocates argued that it would do). The Storify is here, and I also posted an edited version at GigaOM.
//storify.com/mathewi/the-pros-and-cons-of-paywalls.js[View the story "The pros and cons of paywalls" on Storify]
Wikipedia, Instagram and real-time news
I realize that RSS feeds are kind of passé (sorry, Dave) and so some readers may have missed some of my recent posts over at GigaOM — so I have collected some of them here in case you want to catch up:
"Ruining the social web: How can we avoid the Bieber effect?" — Does every social network eventually become so large and noisy that it turns into a broadcast-style platform instead of something truly social? And is the desire for monetization and revenue part of what drives social platforms to look out for their own interests instead of users?
"What Wikipedia can tell us about the future of news" — Researcher Brian Keegan specializes in analysing the way that information flows through Wikipedia during a breaking news event, and recently compared the way that seven mass shootings — including the incident at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut — were reported on the crowdsourced encyclopedia. He found some interesting patterns that media entities of all kinds might want to pay attention to.
"Who's to blame for the Instagram debacle? Take a look in the mirror" — Instagram has come under fire — as other services based on user-generated content have — for changing its terms of service in a way that suggests it might experiment with advertising. But should that really be a surprise? What else should we expect from a free service?
"Like it or not, real-time crowdsourced news verification is here to stay" — Critics of the kind of real-time verification that National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin practices on Twitter during events like the Sandy Hook shootings say the process introduces too many errors and sows confusion — but the benefits of this approach arguably outweigh the disadvantages.
"Why an Apple-Foursquare partnership would make sense" — According to one report, Apple is considering a partnership with Foursquare that would involve using the location-based service's data inside Apple's maps. That would be a smart move for Apple at a time when its maps have come under heavy fire for a lack of features.
"It's not Twitter — this is just the way the news works now" — The way that inaccurate news reports about a mass shooting in Connecticut filtered out through social media has brought up many of the same criticisms as Hurricane Sandy — that social media isn't an appropriate forum for journalism. But this is simply the way news works now.
Ingram Christmas Letter 2012
Our year started, as it has for the past several years, with a nice fresh snowfall at The Farm — the rural retreat and four-season playground disguised as the home of our friends Marc and Kris, where we snowshoed and hiked and snapped photos of tree branches so weighed down with snow they could barely hold themselves off the ground. Then it was off for some more winter-wonderland style shots at Dave and Jenn's place in the countryside near Kingston, where the ravine behind their house looked like the set of the first Narnia movie. All it needed was Tilda Swinton as the White Witch. And we did the usual Winterlude thing in Ottawa, which meant some great canal-skating and beaver tails and maple taffy.
I spent some time in New York in the spring as well, at a social-media conference at Columbia University, which was a first. I got to wander around the wonderful campus, and I also got the cab driver to stop on my way to the airport so I could snap a shot of the classic Dakota hotel near Central Park, where John Lennon lived (and died). I also spent a few days in San Francisco, which was lovely and sunny — and I got some shots of the Bay bridge and the arrow sculpture on the Embarcadero near the ferry terminal. In March, we headed off to Florida with Dave and Jenn and a couple of their kids and sister-in-law Barb — and Caitlin even came with us to keep Zoe company (Meaghan had to stay at university and study). We spent time beach-walking and heron-spotting, and we even got out to a baseball game in Port St. Lucie. Back over on the Gulf side, we did a canopy walk and saw an alligator or two (we obeyed the sign and did not molest them). We also went bowling for Zoe's 14th birthday, and Becky and I caught an amazing sunset while visiting her aunt and uncle on Siesta Key.
Later that month I was back in New York for a conference, and got to wander along the wonderful High Line park, as well as checking out the World Trade Center memorial for the first time. By coincidence, Caitlin happened to be in New York with some girlfriends from university at the same time, so we had a nice dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant just off Times Square and then we took a ride up to the top of the Empire State building and she stayed over in my room at the Waldorf Astoria. I also got to do one of my favorite things, which is to run through Central Park in the spring.
We also spent a day at Canada's Wonderland, where we rode rollercoasters like the Leviathan (tallest rollercoaster in the world) until I had to lie down. Pretty soon, it was May 24th and we were off to Golden Lake, where we cleaned up the beach and had some amazing sunsets — and then for Meaghan's 19th birthday in June, we went to her favorite tepanyaki restaurant and everyone got to try cooking behind the giant hot plate and doing the acrobatics that the chef does, which Caitlin and Meaghan and Becky and Zoe really enjoyed.
At the Farm, we put on a Great Gatsby-style garden party, which involved everyone either finding the appropriate costume in their grandparents' closet or buying something at the local thrift shop. It was a great success, with champagne and finger sandwiches and croquet on the lawn. I squeezed in another trip to San Francisco for a conference, and then it was time for Zoe's graduation from Grade 8, which went swimmingly and she looked lovely in her coral (salmon? watermelon?) dress.
In July, it was time to head to Golden Lake and open up the summer office of Ingram Inc., where we spent the better part of the next two months working from the deck and taking breaks now and then to swim and kayak and canoe and float around in tubes. Meaghan spent the whole summer there as well, after getting a job as a chambermaid at a local resort, and Zoe helped out at the summer camp down the road. We spent a little time at Go Home Lake near Muskoka helping Marc and Kris rebuild their dock (and I tried a different kind of outdoor office) and then it was back to Golden Lake. We also spent a weekend at Sand Banks provincial park in Picton with Dave and Jenn as well, which meant even more beaches and sunsets.
As an early 50th birthday present, Becky bought me a beautiful 14-foot touring kayak, which quickly became my new best friend — I spent hours paddling around in it, down the river and into various bays, tracking loons and watching sunsets (I even did a conference call in it once). It got so the loons would start hooting and hollering as soon as they saw me coming. We also spent a great weekend with Gord and Carina at their cottage on Georgian Bay, which involved boat trips and picnicking on rocky outcroppings.
Back in Toronto after the end of the summer, Becky and I got to play a day's worth of golf for my birthday, and it was like having the course to ourselves — no one around and beautiful weather (and not a bad game either). We also went out for a special anniversary dinner because it was our 25th this year, so we had a great meal at the Auberge du Pommier, a lovely little restaurant that gave us a special dessert in honour of the event — as it turned out, the restaurant turned 25 this year as well.
After that, it was back to San Francisco for another conference, where I rented a lovely one-bedroom apartment in the Bernal Heights neighbourhood west of the Mission — a rental I found using Airbnb, which is a fantastic service that allows ordinary folks to rent out rooms, or even their entire house. I got to run up Bernal Heights to the park at the top of the hill (which was not easy, let me tell you) and while having breakfast in a local cafe I saw the space shuttle fly over on its last voyage.
Since GigaOM bought another company based in New York in the spring, we decided to have an off-site team-building weekend with the staff from the New York office, so we rented a beautiful house in the Hamptons on Long Island, where a bunch of us ran a 5K as part of the Hampton's Marathon and spent the weekend hanging out and doing team-building things. I also spent some time in New York proper, where I rented another Airbnb apartment in the Flatiron district.
Pretty soon it was Thanksgiving, which we spent at the cottage in Golden Lake, where the colours were spectacular and I got to spend some more time kayaking around the lake and looking at the trees, and watching a couple of incredible sunsets. After that, it was off to Amsterdam, where GigaOM had a conference, and I got to spend a week wandering around the city looking at all the fantastic buildings (many of which seem to be leaning at a fairly dramatic angle) and strolling by canals and museums and other great Amsterdam-type things. And no, I didn't do those other Amsterdam-type things 🙂
I also did a whirlwind one-day and one-night tour of Halifax, where I spoke to a group of journalism students, then I had a night's sleep in Toronto before I had to head to San Francisco again (I know everyone is pretty sympathetic at this point). While Becky spent some time in Ottawa looking after my mom, who was in the hospital for awhile getting some tests done, Zoe and I did some fun Toronto things like spending a day down at the Distillery District, looking at the old buildings and getting some coffee and wandering through shops looking at things we couldn't afford.
The fall also brought more hockey for Zoe, who has become quite the excellent defenceman/person, and in December we got to spend a great weekend at another farm — this one owned by a friend who is involved in the Mesh conference, a beautiful old homestead with a great old barn and a cozy fireplace. December also brought some surgery for my mom, who had to have a faulty aorta repaired and so spent a couple of weeks in hospital in Ottawa, and Becky and I stayed to help her through it (and I got some shots of the old buildings on the experimental farm near the hospital).
The surgery went really well, and my mom is getting stronger every day, and Meaghan is having a great time at the University of Ottawa (where she switched from linguistics to gender studies), and Zoe is getting some fantastic marks in her first year of high school, and Caitlin is working miracles every day on the pediatric intensive care ward at McMaster Hospital. So apart from some serious jet lag and some health scares here and there, we are as good as we could possibly be as 2012 draws to a close. Hope you and yours are well too, and here's to a great 2013!