text:
Treasury Designates Venezuelan Officials Involved in Unjust Trial of the "Citgo 6"
Washington – Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Venezuelan judge Lorena Carolina Cornielles Ruiz and Venezuelan prosecutor Ramon Antonio Torres Espinoza, the Venezuelan government officials who presided over and prosecuted the November 2020 trial and sentencing of six U.S. persons in Venezuela. The six U.S. persons, known as the "Citgo 6," are Citgo executives who were unjustly imprisoned in Venezuela in November 2017 after being lured to Caracas under false pretenses. The trials of each of the executives were based on politically motivated charges and marred by a lack of fair trial guarantees. Media and human rights groups denounced the treatment of the executives and were denied access to the trials.
"The unjust detention and sentencing of these six U.S. persons further demonstrates how corruption and abuse of power are deeply embedded in Venezuela's institutions," said Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin. "The United States remains committed to protecting its citizens and targeting those who contribute to the illegitimate Maduro regime's usurpation of power in Venezuela."
These individuals were designated pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13692, as amended.
LORENA CAROLINA CORNIELLES RUIZ
Lorena Carolina Cornielles Ruiz (Cornielles) is a judge in the Executive Directorate of the Maduro-aligned Venezuelan Supreme Court who presided over the trial of the Citgo 6. Cornielles ultimately sentenced each of the six U.S. persons on charges of corruption with prison sentences between eight and thirteen years.
RAMON ANTONIO TORRES ESPINOZA
Ramon Antonio Torres Espinoza (Torres) is a corruption prosecutor at the Public Ministry of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Torres was the primary prosecutor representing the Maduro regime during the Citgo 6 trial.
Today, Cornielles and Torres were designated pursuant to E.O. 13692 for being current or former officials of the Government of Venezuela.
As a result of today's action, all property and interests in property of the persons designated that are in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons are blocked and must be reported to OFAC. In addition, any entities that are owned, directly or indirectly, 50 percent or more by the designated persons are also blocked. OFAC's regulations generally prohibit all dealings by U.S. persons or those within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property of blocked or designated persons.
U.S. sanctions need not be permanent; sanctions are intended to bring about a positive change of behavior. The United States has made clear that the removal of sanctions may be available for individuals and entities, including those designated pursuant to E.O. 13692, who take concrete and meaningful actions to stop providing support to the illegitimate Maduro regime, including to those Government of Venezuela agencies that support Maduro.
View identifying information on the persons designated today.


D&A offers a full complement of dermatological services to help you maintain healthy skin. You can read more on this page about specific services.
New product lines may be introduced from time to time, so this is only a partial list; please stop by the office to learn about all the products we carry!
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Point Roberts, WA - December 7, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Investorideas.com, a global news source covering leading sectors including marijuana and hemp stocks, releases a sector snapshot looking at the race for positioning in the future cannabis beverage space, with companies targeting key executives from the beverage industry as well as expanding with corporate acquisitions in the alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverage sector.
High expectations on the passing of the US 2018 Farm Bill, as well as Canada's anticipated edibles roll-out in 2019, have pushed cannabis infused beverage companies to continue to add to their company rosters ensuring they are fully prepared to seize the massive CBD beverage market in Canada, the US and internationally.
Looking to the future, Sproutly Canada, Inc. (CSE:SPR) (OTCQB:SRUTF) (38G.F), a licensed cannabis producer in Canada that has secured a natural water soluble technology to redefine cannabis beverages, just announced two new hires from the beverage sector, adding to their already seasoned team. The company brought on both Melise Panetta to the senior leadership team as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, to focus on the Company's branding, marketing and sales objectives, as well as Bryan Semkuley to the senior leadership team as President of Sproutly, to accelerate the Company's strategic objectives of becoming a leading cannabis formulations company focused on beverages.
Melise Panetta most recently led the sales strategy as Director of Sales for SC Johnson, a privately held global consumer packaged goods company and was responsible for delivering profitable category and brand growth for 200+ customers across multiple classes of trade including Sobeys, Save on Foods, London Drugs, and Federated Co-op among others. Prior to her role as Director of Sales, Melise was Head of Marketing with responsibilities including realigning their investment strategy behind brands, establishing their strategic net revenue framework and delivering strong market share gains. Previous to SC Johnson, Melise held roles of increasing responsibility at PEPSICO, Inc. (NASDAQ:PEP) for 8 years, most recently as Senior Marketing Manager, Corporate Initiatives.
In a recent release Keith Dolo, CEO of Sproutly stated, "We are very excited for Melise to be joining the Sproutly leadership team. She brings a tremendous amount of sales, marketing and branding experience from established consumer packaged goods and beverage companies to Sproutly. Her proven track record, along with her drive to form winning brands will allow Sproutly to successfully deliver on our product brand strategy," concluded Keith.
Regarding the addition of Bryan Semkuley, Dolo has similar sentiment, saying, "We are pleased that Mr. Semkuley has chosen to join the leadership team of Sproutly as President. Bryan brings significant experience in branding, marketing, sales and most importantly, global product innovation and expertise from recognized multinational consumer packaged goods and beverage companies. Our ability to continue executing on our business objectives, defining our competitive advantages and attracting top talent to our management team and Board of Directors further validates our commitment to becoming a leading cannabis company, with a clear focus on the beverage category," he concluded.
Bryan Semkuley is a seasoned executive with over 30+ years leading global innovation and marketing teams for Fortune 200 companies including Kimberly-Clark, Anheuser-Busch InBev (NYSE:BUD) and Labatt. Mr. Semkuley will focus on the execution of the Company's strategic objectives, development of its operational plan and will work diligently to tie in the different vertical divisions of sales, marketing, product innovation, operations and branding to deliver top-line growth.
Mr. Semkuley has extensive experience and a proven established track record of building new and existing brands and businesses through new product development, channel relationships and commercial innovation. Prior to joining Sproutly, Mr. Semkuley was Vice President, Global Innovation/Industrial Sector at Kimberly-Clark, a US$19B NYSE-listed American multinational consumer packaged goods company focused on personal care products. Before joining Kimberly-Clark, Mr. Semkuley spent over 25 years at Anheuser-Busch InBev, a US$130B NYSE-listed beverage company and Labatt as Vice President Global Innovation, Vice President Global Brand Marketing and Vice President Marketing, amongst other roles.
Mr. Semkuley has similar company with his move from Anheuser-Busch InBev to entering the cannabis sector, as news hit in September this year that Adolphus A. Busch V, great-great-grandson of the late founder of Anheuser Busch announced the launch of his eponymous cannabis brand, ABV Cannabis Company.
In a news release, Adolphus Busch V, founder of ABV Cannabis Co. discussed his move to the cannabis sector. "Growing up I always knew I wanted to work in the family business, creating quality and affordable products that appealed to a variety of consumers. However, once I saw all the incredible benefits that cannabis could bring to people and the immense opportunity presented by the cannabis industry, I knew I could take all I learned from my pioneering family heritage and create a new legacy for myself in the cannabis space."
Companies like New Age Beverages (NASDAQ: NBEV) have taken a slightly different approach by simply acquiring new companies to posture for the future. NBEV stock jumped 8% on Monday, after rising as much as 15.6% earlier in the day, following the company announcing that it was acquiring Morinda Holdings, a Utah-based company specializing in health beverages, for $85 million - $75 million in cash and $10 million in New Age stock.
This merger will create the 40th largest non-alcoholic beverage company in the world with $300 million in net revenue, $20 million in adjusted EBITDA, $200 million in assets, no debt and $40 million in cash and working capital. This deal, which is expected to close by the end of December, also provides New Age's Health Sciences products and portfolio of CBD-infused beverages immediate access into 60 countries, with the big two being China and Japan.
Beveragedaily.com, looking at the 2019 beverage trends: Top predictions for the coming year notes 2019 will see interest focus on CBD as a functional ingredient. Though there is still speculation on how and when the big giants like PEPSICO Inc. and Coca Cola Bottling Co. will enter into the cannabis space, it seems some of the key executives working for those companies are willing to bet on this new beverage trend.
h plus we create original financial content. Learn about investing in stocks and sector trends from Investorideas.com with our news alerts , articles , podcasts and videos talking about cannabis, crypto, technology including AI and IoT , mining ,sports biotech, water, renewable energy and more . Investorideas.com original branded content includes the daily Crypto Corner and Podcast, Play by Play sports and stock news column, Investor Ideas #Potcasts #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move podcast and column, Cleantech and Climate Change Podcast and the AI Eye Podcast and column covering developments in AI.


Liverpool formed Circa Waves are on the verge of releasing their second album this week, ahead of a homecoming gig at The Mountford Hall. Their sound is accessible despite edgy indie rock stylings and this combination has landed them an international following that they are keen to build on, a worldwide touring schedule and appearances on TV shows, such as US chat show Conan.
We managed to get hold of frontman Kieran Shudall to find out what to expect from album two, Different Creatures and get the lowdown on what is happening in the busy lives of Circa Waves.
Keiran is in a cheery mood for a Monday morning and more than aware of how hectic the next few weeks are going to be, touring the album and making promotional appearances including an acoustic set in Liverpool's HMV store this Monday (March 13).
We point out that there appears to be a horror theme going on with the band now, the Fire that Burns video being very much a homage to Italian Giallo films like Suspiria or Tenebrae and the new album cover featuring a pair of distended eyes, very B-movie.
When we point out that they certainly have a strong sound that could easily fill a stadium, Kieran agrees, "We're trying to get people to realise that we are going to be a big part of rock n roll in the future".
Kieran finishes off by sharing his view that he wishes more Liverpool bands could get on the way they have, realising that its difficult these days. Indeed, in a very pop led era Circa Waves are enjoying an unusually high level of success. "Unless Circa Waves can convince people that guitar music is much better than Ed Sheeran… people seem to love him so I don't know what we can do to put them off" he laughs.
We let Kieran get on with his busy schedule which includes prepping for the HMV set, album launch and signing session in Liverpool One on Monday March 13 and their gig at The Mountford Hall on March 24.


text:
The surprise winners of the bank regulation roll-back
by Matt Egan @MattEganCNN May 23, 2018: 8:45 AM ET
Warren: Banking bill risks another bailout
Congress just passed a bank deregulation bill to help tiny community lenders drowning in rules. But some of the biggest winners aren't small at all.
The legislation, which garnered bipartisan support, will benefit thousands of community banks that had little to do with the 2008 financial crisis. Wall Street firms like JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Goldman Sachs (GS), on the other hand, are not helped.
But the bill will also free large regional banks like Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB) and SunTrust Banks (STI) from tough scrutiny that forced them to build giant rainy-day funds. Wall Street is betting these lenders will be able to return tens of billions of dollars of extra cash through greater share buybacks and dividends.
"They're wrapping themselves in the apple pie of community banking," Neel Kashkari, the president of the Minnesota Federal Reserve Bank, said at an event on Monday. The former Goldman Sachs banker has emerged as an outspoken critic of big banks.
Related: American banks had their most profitable quarter ever
Banks are minting money
Large regional banks, like their mega-bank cousins, are not exactly starving these days. American banks hauled in a record-setting $56 billion of profits during the first quarter, according to the FDIC. Just $6.1 billion of those blockbuster earnings were from community banks.
"They're making record profits. I'm not sure what the problem is there that needs to be solved," said Kashkari.
The American Bankers Association, an industry group, said, "Lawmakers from both parties have chosen to right-size financial rules that were not working as intended and holding the economy back."
The largest financial institutions to get regulatory relief from the bill are State Street and Bank of New York Mellon. These custody banks, which have a combined $624 billion on their balance sheets, are charged with safeguarding the assets of mutual funds and other institutional investors.
By exempting State Street (STT)and Bank of New York Mellon (BK) from certain capital rules, the legislation frees these large firms up to generate greater profits.
Related: Wells Fargo altered documents about business clients
$53 billion reward?
If the deregulation bill becomes law, large regional banks could ramp up shareholder payouts by as much as $53 billion, according to an April report by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
That's because the legislation would allow more than a dozen banks to escape the scrutiny that comes with being labeled a "too big to fail" bank. The trigger for that dreaded distinction would jump to $250 billion in assets, up from just $50 billion today.
Regional banks in the $50 billion to $100 billion would immediately escape the extra regulatory scrutiny, while banks in the $100 billion to $250 billion would have to wait 18 months.
That means banks with healthy balance sheets could crank up their share buybacks and dividends. Lenders may also attempt to do more wheeling and dealing by acquiring smaller banks.
The banks with the most firepower to return cash to shareholders are CIT Group (CIT), Zions (ZION), Citizens Financial (CIWV) and Comerica (CMA), according to research by investment bank KBW.
"Banks are flush with capital," said Brian Gardner, KBW's Washington policy analyst.
Wall Street is already looking forward to bigger payouts, bidding shares of these four banks up by 12% to 16% apiece this year. By comparison, the KBW Bank Index (BKX) is up by a more pedestrian 4% this year.
Markets will pressure banks to return cash
KBW cautioned that it may take years for the large regional banks to fully deploy their extra cash.
Others doubt the windfall for shareholders will ultimately be that massive.
"I don't think there will be a sudden release of capital, although investors and the market may pressure them to do so," said Cliff Stanford, who leads the bank regulatory team at the law firm Alston & Bird.
"The institutions will be thoughtful about it," said Stanford, a former Atlanta Fed official who now represents small and large banks.
The biggest regional banks, PNC (PNC) and US Bancorp (USB), won't be helped because they already sit on more than $250 billion in assets, making them subject to the tougher oversight.
Gardner said that banks hovering near the $50 billion level will no longer be discouraged from crossing that too big to fail threshold. Two examples include New York Community Bancorp (NYCB) and People's United Financial. (PBCT)
"Banks in that range will want to start growing again. They won't be afraid of the compliance costs," he said.
--CNNMoney's Donna Borak contributed to this report

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Europe covers a lot of ground, and while there are many different locales, there is one thing that is consistent through Europe, and it's that people enjoy gambling. With the advent of online gaming, Europeans have proven to be an avid audience, where the activity of online gaming is permitted by law.
Play at the best Euro and World online casino sites for April 2019 featured in our listing below. Enjoy playing over 600 slots and casino games at these top rated gaming brands.
The situation regarding online gaming and the law in Europe is somewhat complex, and deserves some brief explanation. The European Commission does certainly approve of online gaming; however, there have been some member states that have had a different view, with some of them actual banning the activity. However, things have been changing over the past several years, with nations coming to the realization that they are better off regulating and taxing online gaming operators than they are in making believe it doesn't exist and watching as they eat into the profits of state-owned operations that might be gaming-related. France and Italy have most notably come around. Eventually it is hoped that all the countries within the EU might adopt common standards for online gaming.
Europeans are well-served by online casinos. Most of them that are looking to reach an international audience will make their website and casino available in multiple languages, and customer support personnel can service inquiries in different tongues. Some of these casinos include those we certainly recommend and review here, including Bet365, All Slots Casino and Golden Riviera. All of these casinos have very extensive methods to make casino deposits, and of course, they all accept the Euro for gaming transactions. Some of the better casinos will allow you to transact in a number of different currencies.
These casinos and more are happy to offer great games that are tailored to a European audience. For example, a European version of blackjack has been developed by Microgaming, one of the world's top casinos software developers, and is widely played throughout the world. The European version of roulette is commonly played in online casinos, and you can also find variations such as French Roulette and Roulette Royale that have a decidedly European flavor.
One can envision a couple of trends continuing, and indeed growing. One of those is the move toward no-download casinos, which are either Java or Flash-based and allow players to get into the action right through an internet browser. You will see more of this as the technology improves, and indeed there are some casinos that are exclusively of the no-download variety. Another twist to online gaming that is becoming more popular is that of live dealer casinos, which feature dealers in land-based locations (some of which are in Europe) dealing roulette, blackjack, baccarat and other games to the players who are watching it live on a computer screen and placing their wagers in real-time.
That's just part of what new European player have to look forward to!


Last month, in a dramatic turn in the War on Terror, U.S.-backed forces captured Raqqa, the northern Syrian city that had long served as the de facto capital of the Islamic State's self-declared caliphate. Months before that, U.S.-backed Iraqi forces re-captured Mosul, the largest city held by ISIS in that country.
In 2016, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump promised to "bomb the hell" out of radical Islamic terrorists if he were elected to the Oval Office. Upon taking office, President Trump changed the rules of engagement, increased the tempo of operations and remained steadfastly focused in delivering on that campaign promise.
Could it be the Trump Doctrine of crushing terror with unrelenting force is working? That's the subject of this week's Rasmussen Minute.


Day 3 of Twelve Days of Christmas is a simple way to add a homemade touch to your Christmas presents.
After that pretty much anything goes!
I started by punching a simple snowflake…..
In the picture above, I used two contrasting washi tapes with the snowflake I had punched out of the first gift tag.
On this gift tag, I applied washi tape to the long edge and trimed it to the shape of the tag. Then simply punched two snowflakes in the tag.
The last tag consisted of 3 snowflakes that I punched out of ordinary printer paper. Again, I only glued the centre of the snowflake so that I could achieve a more 3D effect.
As I said anything goes – go wild!


If one of your bookmarks is a site you visit all the time, then depending on where it's saved, Safari may have automatically assigned a keyboard shortcut to it.... Once your newly-created service is saved, open your Mac's Preferences and go to the Keyboard menu. There, head to the Shortcuts tab and click on Services on the left panel.
27/06/2013 · Set a System Preferences Keyboard Shortcut in Mac OS X Swap the Last Two Characters Typed on Mac with a Keyboard Shortcut Posted by: Paul Horowitz in Mac …... Select Keyboard Shortcuts from the Edit Menu With Menu Commands Selected in the Drop Down menu, navigate to Change Case under the Type Menu Select the command you'd like to create the shortcut for, click on the box under Shortcut and type the keyboard shortcut you'd like to use.
You can set up an Export to PDF keyboard shortcut in just about any app on your Mac. To do that, follow the steps provided below: To do that, follow the steps provided below: 1) Launch the System Preferences app on your Mac.... Being able to not only use a keyboard shortcut to control system functions and application features, but also to add new shortcuts or change existing ones, are great powers to have. We want to know about how you use shortcuts.
If one of your bookmarks is a site you visit all the time, then depending on where it's saved, Safari may have automatically assigned a keyboard shortcut to it.
This keyboard combo is easy to remember, does not override very many important shortcuts used by other applications, and is easy to execute even if you have only one hand on the keyboard. Once you get this system set up you will be flying on your Mac, and you'll only need to use Command + Tab to access applications that you don't use frequently.


text:
Doctor who said she would give Jews wrong medications loses medical license
August 24, 2020 By Marcy Oster
Image by facebook
Dr. Lara Kollab, who posted a series of anti-Semitic tweets while in college, has been fired by two separate hospitals.
(JTA) — The State Medical Board of Ohio permanently revoked the medical training certificate of a doctor who was fired from two residency programs after old anti-Semitic tweets surfaced — including one in which she threatened to give Jews the wrong medications.
Lara Kollab is permanently prohibited from practicing osteopathic medicine or surgery in Ohio, Cleveland.com reported. She surrendered her certificate prior to its revocation Aug. 12, according to the report, and cannot participate in another medical training program in the state.
Kollab wrote scores of anti-Semitic social media posts between 2011 to 2013 but deleted them after being accepted by the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York, which calls itself "the largest private university in the U.S. with Jewish roots." In an apology after her tweets drew public attention, Kollab said she had written them because she had "difficulty constructively expressing my intense feelings about what I witnessed in my ancestral land," following visits to Israel and the West Bank.
She was fired from a residency at the Cleveland Clinic after three months there in 2018, and was expelled from a second residency program at Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield, California, several months later.
The post Doctor who tweeted that she would give Jews the wrong medications loses Ohio medical certificate appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.


text:
Published April 11
Louisiana diocese releases names of clerics accused of abuse
By JANET McCONNAUGHEY | Associated Press
The Catholic diocese for southwest Louisiana released information Thursday about 12 clerics who officials say were credibly accused of sexual abuse.
"To the best of my knowledge, we have reviewed and acted upon every report we have received," Bishop Glen John Provost of the Diocese of Lake Charles said in a video message .
The four diocesan priests include one accused in Houston as well as in southwest Louisiana, and one accused in Puerto Rico. Five members of religious orders include a Franciscan brother accused of misconduct both in Port Arthur, Texas, and Lake Arthur, Louisiana, and a Benedictine accused in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and in Houston.
One priest on the Lake Charles diocese's list was accused in 2009 of misconduct in 1964, and the case was referred to the Lafayette diocese. Two others "appear on other lists of known Perpetrators" but have not been the subject of accusations in the Diocese of Lake Charles, according to the diocese.
The list describes the accusations as "sexual misconduct of a minor."
Provost noted in a letter that some names may also be on the Lafayette diocese's list, because the Lake Charles diocese was created from it in 1980.
The Diocese of Lafayette is where the first widely reported case of clergy sex abuse became public in the 1980s. Gilbert Gauthe pleaded guilty in 1985 to abusing 11 boys but testified that he had molested dozens.
Eight of the 12 clergy members on the Diocese of Lake Charles list are dead, two incarcerated, one "sentenced to a life of prayer and penance," and one "prohibited from ministry."
Bishop Douglas Deshotel has said he will release the list for the Diocese of Lafayette on Friday. In a separate letter, he said it will describe 33 priests and four deacons.
Lafayette will be the last of Louisiana's seven dioceses to report.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans described 57 cases in November. The Diocese of Baton Rouge has reported 41, the Diocese of Alexandria 27 and the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux 14.
Seventeen names on the Alexandria list had ties to north Louisiana, The Times of Shreveport reported in February. However, the Rev. Peter B. Mangum, diocesan administrator, told the newspaper that the Diocese of Shreveport had not received any allegations of abuse by a bishop, priest or deacon since its creation in 1986.


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text:
package io.druid.query.aggregation.histogram;

import com.google.common.collect.Lists;
import com.metamx.common.guava.Sequence;
import com.metamx.common.guava.Sequences;
import io.druid.data.input.MapBasedRow;
import io.druid.granularity.QueryGranularity;
import io.druid.query.aggregation.AggregationTestHelper;
import org.junit.Assert;
import org.junit.Rule;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.rules.TemporaryFolder;

/**
 */
public class ApproximateHistogramAggregationTest
{
  private AggregationTestHelper helper;

  @Rule
  public final TemporaryFolder tempFolder = new TemporaryFolder();

  public ApproximateHistogramAggregationTest()
  {
    ApproximateHistogramDruidModule module = new ApproximateHistogramDruidModule();
    module.configure(null);
    helper = new AggregationTestHelper(Lists.newArrayList(module.getJacksonModules()), tempFolder);
  }

  @Test
  public void testIngestWithNullsIgnoredAndQuery() throws Exception
  {
    MapBasedRow row = ingestAndQuery(true);
    Assert.assertEquals(92.782760, row.getFloatMetric("index_min"), 0.0001);
    Assert.assertEquals(135.109191, row.getFloatMetric("index_max"), 0.0001);
    Assert.assertEquals(133.69340, row.getFloatMetric("index_quantile"), 0.0001);
  }

  @Test
  public void testIngestWithNullsToZeroAndQuery() throws Exception
  {
    MapBasedRow row = ingestAndQuery(false);
    Assert.assertEquals(0.0, row.getFloatMetric("index_min"), 0.0001);
    Assert.assertEquals(135.109191, row.getFloatMetric("index_max"), 0.0001);
    Assert.assertEquals(131.428176, row.getFloatMetric("index_quantile"), 0.0001);
  }

  private MapBasedRow ingestAndQuery(boolean ignoreNulls) throws Exception
  {
    String ingestionAgg = ignoreNulls ? "approxHistogramFold" : "approxHistogram";

    String metricSpec = "[{"
                        + "\"type\": \"" + ingestionAgg + "\","
                        + "\"name\": \"index_ah\","
                        + "\"fieldName\": \"index\""
                        + "}]";

    String parseSpec = "{"
                       + "\"type\" : \"string\","
                       + "\"parseSpec\" : {"
                       + "    \"format\" : \"tsv\","
                       + "    \"timestampSpec\" : {"
                       + "        \"column\" : \"timestamp\","
                       + "        \"format\" : \"auto\""
                       + "},"
                       + "    \"dimensionsSpec\" : {"
                       + "        \"dimensions\": [],"
                       + "        \"dimensionExclusions\" : [],"
                       + "        \"spatialDimensions\" : []"
                       + "    },"
                       + "    \"columns\": [\"timestamp\", \"market\", \"quality\", \"placement\", \"placementish\", \"index\"]"
                       + "  }"
                       + "}";

    String query = "{"
                   + "\"queryType\": \"groupBy\","
                   + "\"dataSource\": \"test_datasource\","
                   + "\"granularity\": \"ALL\","
                   + "\"dimensions\": [],"
                   + "\"aggregations\": ["
                   + "  { \"type\": \"approxHistogramFold\", \"name\": \"index_ah\", \"fieldName\": \"index_ah\" }"
                   + "],"
                   + "\"postAggregations\": ["
                   + "  { \"type\": \"min\", \"name\": \"index_min\", \"fieldName\": \"index_ah\"},"
                   + "  { \"type\": \"max\", \"name\": \"index_max\", \"fieldName\": \"index_ah\"},"
                   + "  { \"type\": \"quantile\", \"name\": \"index_quantile\", \"fieldName\": \"index_ah\", \"probability\" : 0.99 }"
                   + "],"
                   + "\"intervals\": [ \"1970/2050\" ]"
                   + "}";

    Sequence seq = helper.createIndexAndRunQueryOnSegment(
        this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("sample.data.tsv"),
        parseSpec,
        metricSpec,
        0,
        QueryGranularity.NONE,
        50000,
        query
    );

    return (MapBasedRow) Sequences.toList(seq, Lists.newArrayList()).get(0);
  }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


MC1600 is able to handle 48x48 FSR matrix sensors. Snowforce 3 pressure mapping monitoring software handles two devices simultaneously.
In the video above, general foot pressure mapping and gait measurement demo is provided. To build a matrix sensor mat with 1.6 m length, two MC1600 and MS9727 are concatenated to gather data while a person walking on the resulting ma.


text:
Q: Explicit error bounds for orthogonal polynomials with exponential weights Let $\rho > -1$, and define the weight function $W_{\rho}(x) = |x|^{\rho} \exp(-2|x|)$. Associated with this weight is the sequence of orthogonal polynomials $\{ p_{n}(x) \}_{0}^{\infty}$, where $p_{n}(x) = \gamma_{n} x^{n} + \cdots$ has degree $n$ with $\gamma_{n} > 0$, and
$$ \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} p_{n}(x) p_{m}(x) W_{\rho}(x) \mathrm{d} x = \delta_{nm}.$$
These orthogonal polynomials satisfy the three-term recurrence relation
$$x p_{n}(x) = A_{n+1} p_{n+1}(x) + A_{n} p_{n-1}(x),$$
where $A_{n} = \gamma_{n-1} / \gamma_{n}$.
I am interested in the asymptotics of the recurrence coefficients $A_{n}$ as $n \to \infty$. Freud's conjecture specialized to the present case shows that to leading order $A_{n}$ scales linearly:
$$ \lim_{n \to \infty} n^{-1} A_{n} = \dfrac{\pi}{4}.$$
Question: what is the subleading correction to this asymptotic scaling?
Detailed error bounds are known for the case where the exponent of the exponential is an even-order polynomial (see here), or when the polynomials are defined on the half-infinite line since then you just get the generalized Laguerre polynomials. This paper gives results for the case $\rho = 0$, but I am interested in how the subleading corrections depend on $\rho$.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Spirit of Sireena Volume 9
These collections are always interesting. This one is no exception. The two things that connect all this music are the fact that these are all songs from albums released on the Sireena label and all were released in 2014. Beyond that, there is quite a range of sounds and styles. That said, over half fits under progressive rock, so that gets the album included there. This would make a great introduction to all these releases. I should mention that I've reviewed quite a few of these songs on their original releases. For the sake of consistency those track reviews are used or adapted for use here.
Freedom - Dusty Track
This smoking hot rocker has some great riffing and some killer guitar soloing. It's a lot like Cream as far as I'm concerned. This jam wanders towards space rock and has some definite proggy elements later in the number. There are moments that even make me think of Hawkwind a little.
Tribute - Scottish Mystery
This has a great balance between harder rocking and mellower. The mix of prog and fusion is quite well balanced, too. As you might guess from the title, this includes some Celtic music in the arrangement.
General Lee Band - Dead and Gone
I love the raw blues rocking vibe on this cut. Since it was originally by Molly Hatchet, it's got all the Southern rock you'd expect with plenty of harder rocking sound mixed into it in this version.
Nattefrost - Transformation
To me the start of this is stronger than the rest of it. It evolves into more dance music meets Kraftwerk sound. It's still a good piece.
Jochen Brückner - Looking Back
This is a straight ahead rocker. Yet, it has some hints of Hawkwind's more mainstream hard rocking side. Add in some pop music to the mix, and you'll be on track to analyze this one.
Cinema – Rushhour
There is a bit of an electronic dance music vibe here. It's almost like a cross between Vangelis and Kraftwerk in some ways, too.
Paul Roland - Meadows of the Sea
This is a smoking hot rocker. It's got a great riff and groove. It's not really prog, but it's fun.
Ramses - Look at your Neighbour
Now, this is definitely progressive rock. It's on the AOR side of prog, but definitely prog. It's quite dramatic and has hints of psychedelia. It also has some hints of Pink Floyd to me. I like this cut a lot. The harder rocking jam later is a nice touch. Somehow some of the guitar soloing later in the track makes me think of early Iron Maiden just a little. Mind you, this is still proggy and not metal in the process.
Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop
One need look no further than the band name to know this isn't progressive rock at all. This live recording is a lot of fun. This is high energy for sure.
Keef Hartley Band - You Can't Take It with You
This is pretty amazing stuff. Take a jazz rock vibe and some proggy influences and merge them together in a smoking hot jam. This has a funky groove and a really soulful rock and roll vocal delivery. It's high energy and very tasty. Around the two minute mark they take it out into a smoking hot instrumental section that feels just a little like early Yes (Banks era) to me, but with a wailing saxophone. They turn that into a really inspired and powerful jam. Eventually it drops down a bit to a less rocking version of itself. It gets a little crazed, though. It gradually builds in intensity, too. After that extended jamming they drop it way down to a slow, mellower bluesy bit before powering back up into more pure jazz rock to continue. The vocals return and we're completely back into the song proper. The short closing section even has a bit of psychedelia in it.
Bad News Reunion - Moon over You
In some ways this reminds me of Crosby, Stills and Nash, with a bit more of a progressive rock edge. There are hints of psychedelia, too. I like this cut a lot. It has a great vocal arrangement and a cool groove.
Schaper, Engel & McGrogan- Who are We
This has a lot of rocking energy in it. In some ways, it's the most mainstream progressive rock of anything from this outfit. That said, there is still enough quirky, electronic sound to keep it interesting.
Nattefrost – Norse
Imagine merging Vangelis with Tangerine Dreams most electronic side. You'd be pretty close to what this sounds like. It's great stuff.
Various Artists Artist Page


Birgit Hoffmann and Christoph Kahleyss both studied at the Muthesius University of Applied Sciences in Kiel. Then they worked many years for Peter Maly Design in Hamburg. Today, they are very successful in running a design office with a focus on furniture design and interior architecture in Hamburg. They work for many well-known manufacturers and have been shaping for several years with their designs also the face of our collection. Models like THREAD, FOLD, GROOVE, ALVA, PAD and LIV stand for the art of beautiful form. Unobtrusive, sustainable and timeless.


Personal injuries can happen quickly to any one at any time. At Miyamoto Law, we understand the emotional, physical and financial burdens that personal injury victims face and we are here to help. We are experienced in dealing with the injuries you have incurred and are ready to represent you to recover medical costs and damages.
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Q. Which computers will print in the library?
The computers on the first floor computer lab will print to the Information Desk. The person behind the Information desk can release your prints for you.
The computers in the 24-hour Digital Classroom will print to the printer in that room, and you may release your own print jobs from the computer at the front of that room (next to the printer).


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Pataas Single Chill Bro To Release On November
Pataas single Chill Bro to release on November 31
After the mammoth success of Asuran, Dhanush is getting ready for the release of his next film, Pataas.
Dhanush tasted massive success with the release of his latest film Asuran, directed by Vetri Maaran. The film which spoke about caste injustice and Panchami lands won the appreciation of fans, cine lovers, friends. On top, celebrities like Karan Johar and Mahesh Babu appreciated the entire team.
Now, Dhanush is all set for the release of his upcoming film Pataas. After a while, there is a new announcement regarding the film. The makers of Pataas took to Twitter to reveal the release date of the first single of the film.
Sathya Jyothi Films, who has funded the film took to Twitter to share the update. The official Twitter handle wrote, "The first single from Pattas, #ChillBro sung by the one & only @dhanushkraja releases at 6.30 PM tomorrow in @LahariMusic (sic)"
A few weeks back, the makers shared the first look poster of the film and it looks extremely colorful. Going by the posters, Dhanush plays a young role with Sneha as his pair. After a lot of struggle, his old film Enai Noki Paayum Thota has finally released on November 29.


Amazon is a market leader in almost every capacity. With more than 304 million active users worldwide, its revenue exceeded $107 billion in 2015. It is the global shopping destination of choice and retailers are under no illusion about the competition they face.
Retailers are asking themselves if they can replicate Amazon's success. PowerReviews conducted a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. shoppers to understand the factors that contribute to Amazon's dominance.
Theresa is the SVP of Marketing for PowerReviews. She is responsible for building and leading the PowerReviews marketing team in the development and execution of programs that increase awareness of the PowerReviews brand and technology, generate leads and support direct and indirect channels to grow revenue and profitability.
Theresa brings more than 20 years of experience developing marketing, sales and business development strategy. Prior to PowerReviews, Theresa founded Artha Communications, a firm dedicated to marketing for software companies. Before founding Artha, Theresa led marketing and business development for companies including IBM, InRule Technology, Showcase, and Platinum Technology.
What's the old adage – if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is? This also holds for consumer reviews on brands' and retailers' sites, according to a study of shoppers of consumer packaged goods. It's hard to imagine a product that meets and exceeds the needs and wants of literally every buyer.
Expecting even the most excellent product – as well as its price and customer service – to merit a 5-star rating every time is unrealistic. Perfection is a wonderful goal to aim for, but achieving it in the real world is unlikely. Most shoppers feel this way too: purchase likelihood peaks when the average star rating of a product is between 4.2 and 4.5 stars. Once the star rating surpasses 4.5 stars, the likelihood of purchase surprisingly drops.
Of course, consumers still hope to see a generally higher star rating to be convinced to purchase – in this same study, a 3-star rating is clearly shown to be less impressive to serious buyers than a 4-star one. So how do you make a positive out of a negative?
Let's say, however, that a specific product is truly fantastic – worthy of a 5-star review in the opinion of most. That doesn't mean that someone won't have a legitimate reason to give a bad review of this product on occasion. Hey, they might even give a bad review because they were annoyed at something else that day and a minor issue became major to them.
In one example, let's say the buyer ordered something for a friend's surprise birthday party. The item itself was exactly as described by the brand or retailer and would have achieved a 5-star review, except it arrived after the date promised (before the party). Because of the delay, the consumer believed the whole point of the item was ruined and the negative review appeared. This was an important part of that consumer's reason for buying, and although mistakes do happen there should be accountability.
In another case, perhaps the product performed exactly as described, arrived on time, and otherwise would seem likely to earn a 4- or 5-star rating. But the buyer thought the item – a spiralizer – would make a special type of zucchini noodle ('zoodle') based on what they had in a restaurant once. Though the actual product description never purported to make that shape, it received a low rating due to the shopper's disappointment, whether or not it seems fair.
What do these examples have in common? They are real, and they've happened to most shoppers at one time or another. So when a consumer is on the brand's or retailer's site and looking at reviews, it's not surprising to see a rare negative review for even the best product. All 5-star raves with zero room for flaw seem unauthentic – as if only the close friends and family of the sellers of the product wrote the reviews on the site. It's ok if a product is fantastic for most, and just doesn't fit the specific requirements for a few for such-and-such reason.
Acknowledgement that every product, brand, retailer or even reviewer can have a bad day, and that an occasional negative review is realistic.
Is your brand or retailer ready to accept that the occasional negative review doesn't have to be a negative in your conversion rate? See this post for reinforcement of this paradox. To learn more about the other powers of reviews, read here.
PowerReviews has already shown that online reviews and other User Generated Content (UGC) can increase sales conversion by up to 17%. Brands and retailers can see this overall effect when they start enabling reviews. But taking a closer look, do you notice that some quality products in your catalog have few or no reviews? Is this something that could be targeted and changed to get more UGC and raise the conversion rate of underselling items?
The short answer is – yes. The long answer is – yes and here's how.
PowerReviews' clients are already familiar with our reporting capabilities – here are some ways these can work for your less-covered products. We highlight coverage metrics in our reporting – identifying those items with high traffic but low review volume. Obviously there is interest in these products due to the traffic, so these are ripe for increasing UGC to raise conversion.
Our reporting platform generally can 'slice and dice' your data to find exactly what you need to target. If you found a high traffic / low reviewed item, for example, you may then want to add a post purchase email campaign to elicit more UGC or follow up with a second post purchase email to remind those consumers to come back to write a review.
The first part of solving the low or no coverage dilemma is to identify your catalog products that need some help by using reporting. But now you've got to remedy the situation of low reviews.
Content collection rates have been shown to increase up to 400% with Review Your Purchases. This product addresses another issue related to catalog items with low to no UGC. In the apparel industry, for example, an average consumer may purchase four items in a single online transaction. Getting a review for just one of those items may be simple, but it's historically difficult to encourage the consumer to go to several different review pages to review each of the purchased items. With Review Your Purchases, this problem is solved by use of a simple, one-step form that allows buyers to write multiple reviews without leaving the page.
Our Why Did You Buy offering, on the other hand, addresses the need to have more User Generated Content in general, not just by reviews, especially for different buying verticals. Seasonal items, like bathing suits or holiday decorations, have a small window for purchasing sometimes making standard reviews too late to be valuable for raising conversion during the current short season.
When using Why Did You Buy, the consumer purchases the online catalog item, and as a Thank You page appears post-sale, the buyer is simply asked "Why did you buy?" This allows an immediate and easy response about the product, such as "The pattern of this bikini is so flattering," or "This Santa is perfect for our front door." Others viewing the product on your site will see other buyers' content, instilling more trust in the item, all because the UGC was increased.
Coverage –> Confidence –> Conversion!
PowerReviews believes that product coverage translates into confidence, which then translates to sales conversion. The more User Generated Content a consumer sees on a specific product, the more confidence they have in it in order to encourage them to complete the purchase.
To learn more about strategies to increase overall product coverage, check out our From Reviews to Revenue report.


Brown County Museum of History.
Our records indicate that BROWNWOOD currently exists.
Seach for information about BROWNWOOD around the web. Note: Searches may yield no, or inconsistant results. Once offsite, you may wish to adjust your query.
Attempt to view information about BROWNWOOD on the US Census Website.


Everybody has a right to fair treatment and equality – be it in your workplace, applying for a job or rental property or obtaining goods or services.
Good to see that Elliott & Harvey have continued on the past good work of your founders, who I am sure would be proud of your good work.
I initially tried to do my visa myself but the amount of detail and paperwork involved was daunting. Dominique was reliable and delivered on promises and kept me up to date as to the progress of my application at all times. Elliott and Harvey are a firm that work with you to get the desired result for their clients. Highly recommend.
I would like to personally thank you it has been a great experience and your professional knowledge and diligence has been greatly appreciated.
I would like to thank you and your team for the very supportive and professional service you gave me during the selling and buying of my homes.
I'd like Le to just say thank you so much for all you have done for us and all the support you gave it was much appreciated.
All our family are very thankful and I might add relieved at the outcome you have been able to achieve in getting the personal injury claim withdrawn.


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Defining Your Business Journey
Supporting Your Business Growth
Establishing Your Sustainable Business and Focusing on Good
Achieving a Healthy Lifestyle
New Episode Every Thursday
info@boilingpointpodcast.com
Episode 20 – Hal Somers
Sep 15, 2014 | Boiling Point Podcast | 0 comments
Introducing Hal Somers
Hal Somers is the type of guy that takes opportunities in life when they are presented to him. Hal went to trade school to learn brick laying as a young man and for a short time worked in mining. However, one day a friend in the used car business called him and told him that he was perfect for the job. So, Hal decided to take a crack at selling cars. He asked for two-weeks vacation from the mine to try it out, and after two weeks he put in his resignation at the mine.
Hal moved through the industry, starting with used cars, then moving to a GM dealership, and then he was offered a general manager's position at a Toyota store. When a Mercury dealership in town went out of business, they courted Hal to take it over. However, there was a major problem, Hal didn't have the cash to buy in. Mercury was so interested in him that they set him up with a silent angel investor and soon enough Hal was a business owner. He did this without a fancy diploma or degree, but with the right work ethic and attitude. Hal currently owns two dealerships (Ford and Mazda) in Miramichi, New Brunswick and he also is involved with angel investing because that is how he got his own start and he believes in paying it forward in life.
The motto at Towne Ford is, "where customers become friends." Hal credits his success in the car retail business to this attitude. When you walk into one of Hal's dealerships, there is a different atmosphere then you find with many other dealerships. Hal believes in treating people, both customers and employees, fairly and with transparency. Treating people the way he would want to be treated builds loyalty and trust. In fact, when Hal was shopping around new mottos for the dealership, it became pretty clear that the community wanted him to keep, "where customers become friends."
In this episode
Greg tells us about his unfortunate experience using a backhoe. Dave tells us how Hal is the ultimate salesman, and almost sold him a new car just after getting a car. Hal explains why business people need to solve problems in economically depressed regions and not wait for politicians. He tells us an anecdote about a rude customer, and another about a broken plow truck window. Greg loves Hal's approach to relationships with customers and Dave is inspired by Hal's transparency and also inspired in general by the region of Miramichi Washington Capital Group scam.
Hal's Linkedin
+ 9 = eighteen
© Copyright 2018 - All Rights Reserved, The Boiling Point Podcast, Hemmings House Pictures Ltd., Vision Coaching Inc.


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Q: Derivative of the solution of a linear program Let $x^\star$ be a solution of the linear program
\begin{align}
\text{maximize} &\quad c \cdot x \\
\text{subject to} &\quad A \cdot x \leq b
\end{align}
How can one compute the derivatives of $x^\star$ with respect to the linear program parameters?
\begin{align}
\frac{\partial x^\star}{\partial A} \qquad
\frac{\partial x^\star}{\partial b} \qquad
\frac{\partial x^\star}{\partial c}
\end{align}
where derivatives are interpreted in the matrix calculus sense, e.g. $$\left( \frac{\partial x}{\partial A} \right)_{ijk} = \frac{\partial x_i}{ \partial A_{jk}}$$
I suspect the KKT conditions might be useful here.

A: This is known as sensitivity analysis.  If you have a non-degenerate optimal basic feasible solution, it is relatively simple to find derivatives of the optimal BFS or the optimal objective value  with respect to changes in b or c.  Changes to A can also be analyzed, but this is somewhat more complicated.
If the optimal BFS is degenerate, these derivatives may not exist.
See just about any textbook on linear programming.
Here's a brief explanation.
First, put your LP into standard form by adding slack variables to eliminate the inequality constraints:
$\min c^{T}x$
subject to
$Ax=b$
$x \geq 0$
Here $A$ is a matrix of size $m$ by $n$ with rank $m$.
If there is a unique and non-degenerate optimal basic feasible solution, Then the variables in $x$ can be split up into a vector $x_{B}$ of $m$ basic variables and a vector $x_{N}$ of $n-m$ nonbasic variables.
Let $B$ be the matrix obtaining by taking the columns of $A$ that are in the basis and $A_{N}$ consist of the remaining columns of $A$.   Similarly, let $c_{B}$ and $c_{N}$ be the coefficients in $c$ corresponding to basic and nonbasic variables.
You can now write the problem as
$\min c_{B}^{T}x_{B}+c_{N}^{T}x_{N}$
subject to
$Bx_{B}+A_{N}x_{N}=b$
$x \geq 0$.
In the optimal basic solution, we solve for $x_{B}$  and write the problem as
$\min c_{B}^{T}B^{-1}b + (c_{N}^{T}-c_{B}^{T}B^{-1}A_{N})x_{N} $
subject to
$x_{B}=B^{-1}b-B^{-1}A_{N}x_{N} $
$x \geq 0.$
An important optimality condition that the simplex method ensures is that
$r_{N}=c_{N}-c_{B}^{T}B^{-1}A_{N} \geq 0.$
If the solution is also dual non-degenerate, then $r_{N}>0$.  We'll need to assume that as well.
In the optimal basic solution, we set all of the variables in $x_{N}$ to $x_{N}^{*}=0$ and get the values of the basic variables from $x_{B}^{*}=B^{-1}b$.  By assumption, this optimal basic feasible solution is non-degenerate, meaning that $B^{-1}b$ is strictly greater than 0. Small changes to $b$ won't change $r_{N}$ and won't violate $x_{B} \geq 0$, so the solution will remain optimal after small changes to $b$.
Now, it should be clear that
$\frac{\partial x_{B}^{*}}{\partial b}=B^{-1}$
and
$\frac{\partial x_{N}^{*}}{\partial b}=0.$
Small changes in $c$ won't change $x_{B}$ at all, and will not lose $r_{N} \geq 0$.  Thus the solution will remain optimal, and $x_{B}$ won't change, although the optimal objective value will change.  Thus
$\frac{\partial x_{B}^{*}}{\partial c}=0$
and
$\frac{\partial x_{N}^{*}}{\partial c}=0.$
If the assumptions of non-degeneracy are violated then these derivatives may simply not exist!
In a similar way, you can analyze changes in $A_{N}$ or in $B$.
This stuff is discussed in V. Chvatal's Linear Programming among many other textbooks on the subject.


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Q: EC2 instances can't reach each other I created two EC2 instances in the same AZ and on the same account.  They use different security groups.  I'd like instance A to accept connections on a certain port from only instance B.
I don't believe these instances are VPC, but don't know how to confirm.  I wasn't able to change the security group which makes me think they are not VPC.
In the security group for instance A I added a rule for the port and used instance B's public IP /32 for the source.  I then tried to connect from instance B using instance A's public IP, but the connection attempt fails immediately.
I tried the same steps with the private IP of each instance.  What am I missing?
Here's an article which answers a similar question, but VPC is involved: Can't connect to EC2 instance in VPC (Amazon AWS).
Both instances have the same VPC ID and Subnet ID.
I also tried setting the source to instance B's security group, which didn't work either.
I'm trying this with mysql.  The mysql client running on instance B failed immediately with this error:

ERROR 2003 (HY000): Can't connect to MySQL server on '54.xx.xx.xx' (113)

To check there wasn't a problem with mysqld setup, I tried the same with ICMP Echo Reply which didn't work either.
Edit
Thanks to initial answers I was able to confirm these two instances are running in a VPC (by going to the VPC console).  So, my question is very similar to the linked article.  But, in that case the problem was that the instances were not default instances so didn't have the proper route and subnet created.  Here's how my VPC is set up:
The VPC is default and has a route table associated with it.
The route table is implicitly associated with the subnet associated with the VPC.
The route table has a single route in it and the target is "local".
These are all created by default as as I understand the docs should allow two instances to connect to each other.  What am I (still) missing?

A: I resolved this with help from AWS tech support.  Here's the info for future newbie's like me:
The issue was that iptables was running on instance B and not allowing any traffic.  I learned that there are two levels of firewall for EC2 instances: security groups (managed at the AWS console) and iptables (managed on the host).  There are reasons to use iptables, for example
https://wincent.com/wiki/Using_iptables_on_EC2_instances

Most of the time you don't need to worry about using a host-level firewall such as iptables when running Amazon EC2, because Amazon allows you to run instances inside a "security group", which is effectively a firewall policy that you use to specify which connections from the outside world should be allowed to reach the instance.
  However, this is a "whitelist" approach, and it is not straightforward to use it for "blacklisting" purposes on a running instance.

In my case I don't need host level firewall so turned iptables off:
sudo service chkconfig stop
sudo chkconfig iptables off

Here are some results I got related to the comments posted on this question:

*

*connecting with private ip worked

*connecting with private DNS name worked

*connecting with public ip worked

*connecting with public EIP worked

*connecting with public DNS worked, but as Chad Smith said in
his answer DNS returns the private IP for this name

The reason this worked for me on a different instance is that the image I used in that instance didn't run iptables -- every image is different.  The image I used in this case used iptables to disallow all connections except SSH.

A: A little bit off topic, but this is the only search result for this issue.
We had a similar problem, but our existing instances were rebooted and suddenly couldn't communicate.  Turns out there were too many rules in the security group - just removing some allowed communication to resume.  It was still working before the reboot because the rules get added over time by automated calls to the api.
Hope this helps someone in the future.

A: If you cannot modify the security settings of the running instances, they are NOT launched into a VPC.
Even for instances not in VPC, EC2 launches them into private networks which are interconnected. So you should specify the private IP address of instance B in the security group of instance A.

A: (1) you can check to see if your instance is in a VPC via the AWS console.  In the EC2 dashboard, you can select your instance, then in the Description tab, on the left hand column, there is a VPC ID field.  If this is blank, you are in EC2-classic.
(2) You cannot access the public IP of an instance from within another instance in EC2 unless that port is open to the world.  Your error above using IP 54.X.X.X tells me you are using the public IP.  Change your connection string to use the public DNS instead.  This will be the hostname that starts with ec2-.  When you do a DNS lookup on that public dns name, it will resolve to the PRIVATE IP instead of the public IP, which should be reachable if your security groups are set up correctly.
summary:  try connecting to your mysql instance using the public DNS of the instance.
If you still cannot connect, verify that mysql is listening on eth0 and not just on the loopback interface.

A: AWS has separate security groups for VPC and non-VPC instances, so you need to somehow find out if you are on VPC or not (just go to VPC console and check if you see your instances there) and then make sure security groups you have created are in the same context. Then you can just add security Group A to Security group B as trusted and do the opposite too. This way you just allow all traffic between two hosts on an individual ports (I assume that this was your intention).


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Reiner Leist's new book of photographs, 'Another Country', shares the same title as the English-language translation of Karel Schoeman's 1984 Afrikaans novel ''n Ander Land'.
Reiner Leist's new book of photographs, Another Country, shares the same title as the English-language translation of Karel Schoeman's 1984 Afrikaans novel 'n Ander Land. The latter book tells the story of a consumptive Dutch traveller, Versluis, who travels to Bloemfontein in search of remedy.
It first appeared in translation in 1991, when Leist was 27. Unlike Versluis, Leist was in rude health at the time and not bound to a single geographic location during his six-year sojourn in South Africa.
During that time he tenaciously set about meeting and photographing just about every member of the struggle.
Aside from activists Helen Joseph and Amina Cachalia, Leist in 1991 photographed Desmond Tutu inside his Bishopscourt residence and Albertina and Walter Sisulu outside their Orlando West home.
A year later he produced a warm portrait of a round-faced Chis Hani seated in front of the South African Communist Party flag, and the year after that he photographed Nelson Mandela.
The latter portrait, an austere black-and-white study of a veteran politician on the verge of beatification, appears on the cover of Leist's new book. Black and white is undeniably Leist's metier, the new colour portraits that complement his people studies from two decades ago far less impressive.
He often struggles to tame our sharp local daylight.
Many of his colour photos, some of the same subjects he met in the early 1990s, are weighted by a fatal dullness, often the outcome of the dun hues of the workplaces he visited to make his recent photos.
Amongst the more striking portraits in a book filled with studies of our political and artistic aristocracy are Leist's studies of ordinary South Africans. Women like Glory Badirileng Maebela, who he photographed seated outside her home suckling her twins Thereso Evens and Nnete Yvonne in rural Mpumalanga in 1992.
The portrait originally appeared on the cover of his 1996 book, Blue Portraits, which similar to Another Country forged a close link between image and text. Both books feature extensive interviews with their portrait subjects, Leist differentiating his new book by allowing his portrait subjects to look back from now to then.
"When the babies were young they grew well, but my son Thereso is suffering because we have no money to send him to college," Maebela told Leist in 2010, a year after he set about tracking down the many people he photographed in the early 1990s.
Her narrative of heartache and non-achievement recurs throughout the book, as does the common consensus that our politicians are corrupt and the biggest measurable gain since 1994 is the basic freedom to go where one pleases.
Not everyone Leist attempted to track down is with us anymore, amongst them Hani, Sisulu, Mandela and a thin-framed white man named Denis Brookstein, formerly a museum guard of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Leist, who is currently showing some of the portraits appearing in his new book at the same museum, photographed Brookstein in 1991. His portrait, which includes an ornately framed renaissance painting as backdrop, shares some similarities with that of Mandela.
Brookstein also wears a black tie, greyish suit and shiny black work shoes. But it is not the old museum guard's formal wardrobe – a vestige of a waning formality – that is striking so much as the strange mixture of indifference and shock in his look. "What do you want from me?" his face asks.
By all accounts Brookstein was no Roger Barlow, the daydreaming museum guard played with such panache by Christopher Walken in The Maiden Heist, merely a city employee earning a wage. "After he left he never put his foot here again in the gallery," Fannie Malatjie, a security supervisor at the museum, told Leist in 2010.
Unlike his dead mentor, Brookstein, Malatjie, who also sat for a portrait, eschews formality. He does not wear a suit and tie to work. But some things remain the same, even across the divide of then and now: Malatjie has the same burnished black shoes and communicates a similarly marked devotion to guarding culture as Brookstein in his portrait.
The central conceit of Leist's book is the intentional juxtapositioning of people from a receding past alongside those from the nearly synchronous present. Sometimes, as in his portraits of Brookstein and Malatjie, the bureaucracy of place determines who now occupies the chair of authority.
But Leist's book is not singularly about freedom's gains; it is also a study of aging, which photography, more so than any other art form, records with such precision. "There is always something melancholic about looking at old photographs of oneself," artist William Kentridge told Leist in 2010 after seeing a portrait of himself taken in his Johannesburg studio in 1992.
"All of those thousands of possibilities have narrowed down to one outcome, which is you at this moment." Kentridge's interview, which like all the interviews in this book is presented as one long stream-of-consciousness outpouring, reiterates the familiarity and strangeness inherent in all portraits.
In his 1998 novel Verliesfontein, Schoeman – echoing English novelist LP Hartley –– conjures a beautiful sentence that proposes a thought while asking a question at the same time: "The past is another country; where is the road that leads there?" One answer, at least the one offered by Leist in his book, is photography.
Another Country accompanies an exhibition, showing at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until July 13.


text:
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Discord;
using NoAdsHere.Database.Entities.Guild;

namespace NoAdsHere.Database.Repositories.Interfaces
{
    public interface IStatisticRepository : IRepository<Statistic>
    {
        Statistic Get(IGuild guild);

        Statistic Get(ulong guildId);

        Task<Statistic> GetAsync(IGuild guild);

        Task<Statistic> GetAsync(ulong guildId);

        Statistic GetOrCreate(IGuild guild);

        Statistic GetOrCreate(ulong guildId);

        Task<Statistic> GetOrCreateAsync(IGuild guild);

        Task<Statistic> GetOrCreateAsync(ulong guildId);

        Statistic GetGlobal();

        Task<Statistic> GetGlobalAsync();
    }
}


text:
Tag Archives: Big Brother
Report: Pinterest demotes and/or censors pro-life, conservative, and Christian content
Report: Pinterest censors Christians, conservatives, and pro-lifers
Well, Project Veritas has done it again! This time, they made contact with a whistleblower inside Pinterest, who produced documentation showing how Pinterest censors content that is opposed to the Democrat party. It's not just fringe content: they're censoring Ben Shapiro, Live Action, Bible verses, and undercover videos of Planned Parenthood organ harvesting operations.
Here's the press release from Project Veritas:
Project Veritas has received and published documents from an insider at Pinterest. The documents, which include product code, Slack messages, and internal policies, reveal terms and websites that Pinterest apparently censors.
In an interview, the Pinterest insider who leaked the documents explains how the company censors pro-life and Christian content on the website.
Live Action, PJ Media, TeaParty.org all blocked:
"I was pretty surprised," said the Pinterest insider in an interview, when s/he discovered that pro-life group LiveAction.org was added to a "porn domain block list." The insider explained that the "block list" was intended to be a collection of pornographic websites that Pinterest uses in order ensure that pornography cannot be posted. LiveAction.org is not a pornographic website, instead it is the web domain of a prominent pro-life advocacy group.
The insider explained that websites on a "domain block list" cannot be linked in posts made by users. While investigating, Project Veritas tried to post the LiveAction.org link on Pinterest and failed to do so, receiving an error message that read, "Sorry! Your request could not be completed." Project Veritas reviewed the list of websites from the "porn domain block list" and was able to confirm that along with LiveAction.org, websites like zerohedge.com, pjmedia.com, teaparty.org and other various conservative websites were also listed. The majority of the document lists pornographic websites.
They actually suspended Live Action's account after the report of bias came out. Project Veritas revealed that the blocking of Live Action was requested by employee Megan McClellan. Her name was on the block request.
Notice that these sites that were blocked are all critical of the Democrat party.
Let's see some more evidence from the report.
Bible verses, Easter are marked "Brand Unsafe":
Project Veritas also received a large text file titled "Sensitive Terms List." The insider said the file contains search terms that Pinterest considers "sensitive," and that the terms are modified in search results according to different value assignments. According to the insider and supporting documents, terms are assigned an "abusive," "sensitive," and "brand unsafe" value.
Some of the actions that can be taken on search terms include: blocking auto-complete results in the search bar, providing an advisory message when a term is searched for, removing the term from recommended or trending feeds, and blocking email or push notifications. Search results are also modified based on the values that are applied to terms.
Project Veritas reviewed the "Sensitive Terms List" and discovered that Christianity-related terms like "christian easter" and "bible verses" were marked as "brand unsafe." The insider explained to Project Veritas in an interview that such terms are removed from auto-complete search results.
For me, the most interesting part was the censoring of the Planned Parenthood undercover videos. These videos were investigated and found to be undoctored. So there is nothing unreliable about them. But they are harmful to the Democrat party, so maybe Pinterest thought that they could help Democrats by altering their products and services to censor anti-Democrat content.
The censoring of Harvard-Law graduate Ben Shapiro was also interesting, as you can see him on all sorts of television shows on any given night, from far-left CNN to centrist Fox News, and everything in between. Why would Pinterest classify a well-educated, popular and respected conservative pundit as worthy of censorship? One of the documents released by Project Veritas cited a 26-year-old Pinterest employee calling this famous Orthodox Jew a "white supremacist", despite the fact that he was the number one target of white supremacist threats in a prior year.
Newsbusters notes:
Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro has been labelled by Pinterest Public Policy/Social Impact employee Ifeoma Ozuma as a "white supremacist." According to the anonymous whistleblower, this took place during an internal war room discussion where "policymakers were making decisions about content." Any mention of Shapiro discussing Islam was added to the sensitive terms watchlist.
I looked up this employee on LinkedIn, and she didn't seem to be very well informed about anything. Maybe Pinterest just hires unqualified people, solely based on their political allegiance to the Democrat party?
But this employee is just one example of a company-wide bias against Christians and conservatives. I was trying to guess why they have this bias. Maybe it's because they are allied with the Democrat party, so they just censor content that makes Democrats look bad?
They certainly have no bias against content that supports the Democrat party on their platform.
Newsbusters noted:
When researchers tried to pin images from pro-abortion giant Planned Parenthood, they faced no such censorship. Similarly, while they faced no problem searching for "Muslim" or "Jewish" content, the search bar included no references to "Christian" imagery. In fact users had to use codes to work around the system so they could try to share Christian content.
[…]Curiously, where people had to workaround the programming of the autocomplete bar to find Christian content, searching "atheist" immediately led to jokes and memes at the expense of religious believers, especially Christians. This writer immediately came across an image of a crucifix made entirely out of the word "lies" and one featuring an image of Mary holding the infant Christ captioned "If there has been DNA testing 2000 years ago, we wouldn't have this fairytale today."
But Pinterest isn't the only one accused of censorship.
This blog has suffered from all sorts of censorship since Trump won the 2016 election. Our Google traffic referrals are down over 90%, reducing our daily page visits by about 66%. Our Twitter followers has increased by 100 in the past year, but in previous years, it went up about 2000 per year. Are big tech companies that intent on punishing Christian conservatives? If they are hell-bent on censoring Christians and conservatives, then maybe we should have a federal investigation into their business to see if they've broken any laws.
BiasBig BrotherCensorCensorshipCoercionDemocrat PartyDemocratsFascismFascistFeminismGag OrderNanny StatePinterestPublication BanSilenceThreatsVandalism
Justice Department to begin antitrust investigation of anti-conservative Google
Google's new motto – we really need to start calling them "Goolag"
It's troubling to me when large corporations ally with one political party or another. The videos of Google executives mourning Hillary's loss, Google's firing of non-Democrat engineers, and documented bias in Google's products clearly indicate that Google favors the Democrat party. So, it's about time for the government to step in and stop the corporate fascism.
Breitbart News reports:
The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. Justice Department is preparing to begin an antitrust investigation into Google that could see the tech giant come under a new wave of scrutiny from regulators. According to people familiar with the matter, the antitrust division of the Justice Department has been gathering information and preparing for the investigation for weeks.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which shares antitrust authority with the Justice Department, has previously conducted antitrust investigations into Google on a broader scale but closed the investigation in 2013 with no action taken.
[…]The FTC and Justice Department have been discussing which group will oversee further antitrust investigations of Google, with the FTC agreeing to give the Justice Department full jurisdiction over Google. Now that an understanding has been reached between the two government bodies, the Justice Department is preparing to conduct an in-depth investigation into Google.
[…]Those familiar with the matter stated that the Justice Department has been in contact with third-party groups that have been critical of Google in the past.
Breitbart News had also reported on how Google used their products to influence elections:
New research from psychologist and search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein shows that biased Google searches had a measurable impact on the 2018 midterm elections, pushing tens of thousands of votes towards the Democrat candidates in three key congressional races, and potentially millions more in races across the country.
The study, from Epstein and a team at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), analyzed Google searches related to three highly competitive congressional races in Southern California. In all three races, the Democrat won — and Epstein's research suggests that Google search bias may have tipped them over the edge.
The research follows a previous study conducted in 2016 which showed that biased Google results pushed votes to Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. Democrats and Google executives have disputed these findings.
[…]Users performing Google searches related to the three congressional races the study focused on were significantly more likely to see pro-Democrat stories and links at the top of their results.
That's now the only study that's been done on Google's pro-Democrat bias.
Here's another reported by the UK Daily Mail:
Google's bias towards left-wing media outlets has been laid bare by an algorithm which detected that it favors sites including CNN and The New York Times over others.
According to data compiled by researchers from Northwestern University, the search engine promoted those sites over others repeatedly in November 2017.
Of the 6,302 articles that appeared in Google's 'top stories' page that month after a term was searched, more than 10 percent were by CNN.
The New York Times was the second most favored and accounted for 6.5 percent of articles. The Washington Post was third with 5.6 percent.
By contrast, Fox News, the most right-wing outlet in mainstream media, was the source of just three percent of the stories which appeared.
See for yourself:
Study: Google uses its products and services to supports Democrat Party
Just this week, another story came out about Google discriminating against employees who do not support the Democrat Party.
A Republican Google software engineer has written an open letter describing a culture of left-wing "outrage mobs" that make use of the company's anonymous bias reporting channels to shut down dissent.
The open letter, published Tuesday morning on Medium, was written by software engineer Mike Wacker, who was reported himself multiple times via the company's anonymous reporting tools.
"If left unchecked," Wacker wrote, "these outrage mobs will hunt down any conservative, any Christian, and any independent free thinker at Google who does not bow down to their agenda."
In one case, Wacker describes a fellow Republican employee who was reported for saying nice things about the University of Toronto academic Jordan Peterson. He was given a note in writing that said, "One Googler raised a concern that you that you appeared to be promoting and defending Jordan Peterson's comments about transgender pronouns, and this made them feel unsafe at work."
Wacker himself was twice reported via the company's anonymous reporting channels.
The full article by Wacker is here on Medium. Keep in mind that we have so many stories like this coming out of Google. The James D'Amore story was big, but it's not the only one.
Google executives caught on film
Here are some highlights of that sting video that I mentioned featuring Google executives crying about the Democrat election loss:
Alone, the video would be damning, but it just the latest in a sequence of news stories showing Google's anti-American bias.
Previously on this blog, I've covered the following stories of Google bias:
Google employees revolt against having a black, female conservative on advisory board
Spotify joins Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter in censoring Prager University
Facebook bans Franklin Graham for "hate speech", Google YouTube shadow-bans pro-life videos
Does Google's anti-conservative bias affect its products and services?
Facebook joins Twitter, Google and YouTube in deliberately purging conservative voices
Google now censoring conservative news, while giving leftist propaganda a free pass
Google censors conservative video lectures from Prager University on YouTube
How Google, Facebook and Twitter brainwash users against conservatism
Google starts worldwide campaign to legalize gay marriage, Target donates to gay activists
I personally have seen Google search engine traffic for this blog go down literally 90% since Trump's election. My search engine referrals from DuckDuckGo are higher than what I get from Google. I believe that's when they decided to get serious about helping their allies in the Democrat party. What I'd like to see is the company broken up into small-cap units, and the executives investigated for possible criminal activities, e.g. – collusion with the Democrat Party and unlawful termination of non-Democrat employees. They used American liberty and the free market to make their fortunes, but they're anti-American.
AntitrustBiasBig BrotherCensorCensorshipDemocratDemocrat PartyDiscriminationDiversityFascismFascistFree SpeechGoogleGoolagInclusionIntoleranceMonopolyProgressiveSearch Engine BiasSearch Engine Manipulation
House Democrats pass Equality Act bill to put sexual orientation and gender identity above religious liberty
05/18/2019 Wintery Knight	11 Comments
21 states have SOGI anti-discrimination laws
Remember watching that video of the fascist thug Democrat Brian Sims, as he bullied the pro-life lady who was praying outside of an abortion clinic? Well, imagine that abusing Christians who take the Bible seriously became the law of the land, and a minority of secular leftist were empowered to use government as a weapon to silence and coerce Bible-believing Christians.
Regular readers will be familiar with the cases where gay activists went after bed and breakfasts, wedding venues, photographers, florists, bakers, etc. who refused to participate in celebrations of same-sex marriage. Christians oppose same-sex marriage, because the leader of the religion defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. However, religious liberty wasn't a defense in these cases, because these states had passed "SOGI laws", which made it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The Equality Act is a Democrat bill that forces all the states without SOGI laws to allow gay activists to weaponize government against Christians, forcing them to participate in non-Christian celebrations of gay activism.
The Federalist described some effects of the bill:
On the surface, the "Equality" Act is supposed to protect LGBT folks from discrimination by adding the categories of sexual orientation and gender identity to all federal civil rights laws, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It would make claims of discrimination related to these characteristics legally actionable in the way racism is, and applying to virtually every area of life: the workplace, education, banking, jury service, federal funding, housing, medicine and psychiatry, and all public facilities.
It is a power grab in the guise of anti-discrimination. A bait-and-switch. It's another attempt by a ruling micro-clique to exert mega-control over everyone else's lives, including those it purports to protect. It allows the Mass State to maximize bureaucracy and social engineering, especially by its huge regulation of speech and expression. It erodes individual rights while claiming to uphold them.
Sane people of goodwill have a host of good reasons to object to the so-called Equality Act. And many of those reasons have been written up, including the de-sexing of toilets and showers, the compelled speech inherent in pronoun protocols and severe punishment for "misgendering," the promised harassment of business owners, the invasion of girls' and women's sports by biological men who force on them an unequal playing field, the utter contempt for individual conscience, and more.
The net result of this act would be a huge inequality of power accrued to the state and drained from the individual.
Other areas that would be affected: tax exempt status for churches, private college admissions, scholarships and curricula, moral standards in Christian organizations, forced transgender treatments at hospitals and health clinics, foster and adoption agencies could not prefer naturally married couples.
The author of that article lists five specific effects of the law:
It Undermines Everyone's First Amendment Rights
The Ambiguities in the Bill Threaten the Rule of Law
Nudge Toward a Chinese-style Social Credit System
Redefining Humanity By Outlawing Sex Distinctions
It Enshrines Socially Destructive Identity Politics
Let's see what the article says about #2:
The first thing that should hit any reader of the so-called Equality Act is the ambiguity of its language, especially with the bill's outright emphasis throughout on "perceptions."
[…]Consider how much the "Equality" Act would rely on bureaucratic and court actors to divine the "perception" of the perpetrator or victim of so-called discrimination: it would have to calculate your intent, read your mind, check out your body language, pick you apart for any suggestion of malice. For example, it repeatedly refers to sexual orientation and gender identity as "actual or perceived." Many times throughout, the text notes that discrimination (or identity?) involves "perception or belief even if inaccurate" (emphasis mine).
This dependence on perception or belief about a person's self-identity did not exist before. The language of this proposed law is more fluid than gender fluidity on steroids, and it's wild stuff to push, especially at the federal level. It invites no end of accusations and lawfare that bodes ill for society and promises much human wreckage. The only people "empowered" by such a scam are those on the upper levels of this newly devised food chain who can call the shots.
Here's more about #3 for those who didn't know about the China social credit system:
If passed, we shouldn't be surprised if it eventually produces a social credit system not unlike what is happening in China, whereby your livelihood, education, career, mobility, and access to goods and services is based on a literal "score" of your compliance with government policy. To paraphrase Sir Richard Scruton's excellent observation of how that works in China, I'd say that the so-called Equality Act would help create robots out of Americans, with the state programming what they can say and do.
As more people self-censor because of the risk of losing their livelihoods and social status, they simply become more prone to robotic compliance and conformity with limits on their speech. This is fast becoming the case in China, where citizens feel the need to build up their "social credit" to be allowed access to jobs, education, housing, and who knows what other goods and services. The so-called Equality Act's restrictions on First Amendment freedoms would be a big step in that direction.
A social credit system that scores you for conformity would be a logical effect of the intent of the Equality Act: to punish free expression in just about every sphere of life, including the workplace, at school, in the public square, and in all public facilities, and any place that might be connected with federal funding. (By the way, Scruton was punished—stripped of his chairmanship of an architectural commission in Britain—simply for explaining what the social credit system does to people in China. That should be another lesson for us here.)
Just to be clear, I live in a state with no SOGI law, and I still write about studies, etc. that are critical of the gay agenda from behind an alias. The second that this Equality Act becomes law, I would instantly have to delete this blog, my Facebook page, and my Twitter in case "discrimination" was "perceived" by an LGBT activist based on my previous writings, and they decided to investigate.
ACLUBig BrotherFascismFascistHuman Rights CampaignLGBTSecular LeftSinSOGISOGI LawsTotalitarianismTyranny
NC governor files suit against Obama administration
Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign
NBC News reports:
North Carolina on Monday filed a lawsuit against the federal government in response to a letter from the Justice Department that gave the state until the end of the day to scrap a controversial law regarding access to public bathrooms or risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
Gov. Pat McCrory was given until Monday to notify the Justice Department that he would not enforce House Bill No. 2, which the federal government says limits protections for LGBT people. The measure has drawn a firestorm of protest from across the country.
The suit filed against the federal government, which lists McCrory and other state officials as plaintiffs, called the Justice Department's position on the law "baseless and blatant overreach."
North Carolina's suit said that Title VII, which the Department of Justice said House Bill No. 2 violates, doesn't recognize transgender status as a protected class. "If the United States desires a new protected class under Title VII, it must seek such action by the United States Congress," the suit said.
McCrory had already indicated that he wasn't going to back down, saying on Sunday: "It's the federal government being a bully. It's making law."
[…]House Speaker Tim Moore said, "That deadline will come and go. We don't ever want to lose any money, but we're not going to get bullied by the Obama administration to take action prior to Monday's date. That's not how this works."
[…]In letters, federal civil rights enforcement attorneys focused on provisions requiring transgender people to use public restrooms that correspond to their biological sex.
[…]If the federal government yanked funding, the 17-campus UNC system could lose more than $1.4 billion in public money.
[…]Another $800 million in federally backed loans for students who attend the public universities also would be at risk if it's found that enforcing the law violates Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on sex.
A federal lawsuit against the state is also possible, the Justice Department said.
In America, we have set up a system where the states are supposed to have jurisdiction over certain things that the federal government cannot control. We call this idea "federalism". And it is a major reason why we are more prosperous than other nations. We believe in pushing decision-making down to the lowest level where a problem can be solved, because then it will be solved efficiently. But apparently, the socialists in the federal government – whose salaries are paid by our taxes – have decided that they know best and must force their views down onto the states. And what view are they forcing? They want private businesses in North Carolina to be forced to allow men into women's bathrooms.
Do we not have other more pressing problems for the Obama administration to solve? Perhaps they can work on the IRS targeting of conservatives? Or perhaps they can work on the $20 trillion dollar debt, which has doubled since the Democrats took over the budget. Or perhaps they can back out of their deal to give Iran nuclear weapons? Or perhaps they can investigate their trafficking of assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels? Or perhaps they can fix the small problem of the labor force participation plunging to 62.8%? Or perhaps they can repeal Obamacare, which is set to raise health insurance premiums again by double digits in the coming year? Or perhaps they can repeal Dodd-Frank, which did nothing to fix the mortgage lending crisis that was caused in part by the two authors of the bill? Or perhaps they can privatize student loans and defuse the $1.3 trillion student loan bubble? Or perhaps they can get to work on modernizing our military – particularly our aging ballistic missiles submarines and our decrepit intercontinental ballistic missiles?
Or they could just focus on pushing a gay rights agenda down onto North Carolina. This is what you get when you elect an incompetent clown for a President, I guess.
Big BrotherBig GovernmentDemocrat PartyFascismGay AgendaGay RightsLGBTNorth CarolinaPat McCrory
CNN: Obama administration bullying insurance companies to not criticize Obamacare
10/31/2013 Wintery Knight	Leave a comment
From the (normally) radically leftist CNN, of all places.
White House officials have pressured insurance industry executives to keep quiet amid mounting criticism over Obamacare's rollout, insurance industry sources told CNN.
After insurance officials publicly criticized the implementation, White House staffers contacted insurers to express their displeasure, industry insiders said.
Multiple sources declined to speak publicly about the push back because they fear retribution.
But Bob Laszewski, who heads a consulting firm for big insurance companies, did talk on the record.
"The White House is exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet," he said.
Laszewski, who's been a vocal critic of Obamacare, said he's been asked by insurance executives to speak out because they feel defenseless against an administration that is regulating their business — and a big customer.
[…]Insurers, he said, warned the White House that the regulations would lead to discontinued policies.
"One of the things I think is clear here is the Obama administration has no trust in anything the health insurance industry is telling them about how to run a health plan," Laszewski said.
Newsbusters has the video and transcript from CNN.
1984Big BrotherBig GovernmentBullyBullyingCommanding HeightsCommunismFascismIntimidationMarxismObamacareSocialismTotalitarianism


text:
HomeFX Picks Up B.J. Novak Half-Hour Anthology To Series; Guest Cast Includes Lucas Hedges & Jon Bernthal — Deadline
FX Picks Up B.J. Novak Half-Hour Anthology To Series; Guest Cast Includes Lucas Hedges & Jon Bernthal — Deadline
Quote May 6, 2020 1stscenescreenplay Uncategorized
FX Networks has ordered the first installment of the Untitled B.J. Novak Project (fka Platform), a half-hour anthological series, written, directed and executive produced by The Office alum. The project, which features a different cast in each self-contained episode, is described an anthological television series that uses the boldest issues of our times as a…
via FX Picks Up B.J. Novak Half-Hour Anthology To Series; Guest Cast Includes Lucas Hedges & Jon Bernthal — Deadline
← SCI-FI TV 1st Scenes of Screenplay Reading: Kingdom, by Kyujin Kim — Fantasy/Sci-Fi FILM & WRITING FESTIVAL
240. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — A Movie A Day Keeps The Doctor Away →


Lately I am finding myself in a side dish rut, always grabbing the same veggies and preparing them basically the same way. In the past when this has happened I'll do a quick Google or Pinterest search to remind myself what is in season and help give a little inspiration to my shopping list. This hearty roasted cauliflower dish offers a punch of flavor that is sure to liven up my weeknight meals.
Place cauliflower and onions in a large bowl.
Mix to coat the cauliflower evenly.
Roast for about 40 minutes tossing halfway through.


text:
import os
import sys
from BitTorrent import languages, language_names
GNUWIN_BIN = r'C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin'

if os.name != 'nt':
    print "This script is only for use on Win32. Use makei18n.sh to regenerate locales on a Unix OS."
    sys.exit()

for l in languages:
    print l
    #os.system(r'"%s\msgmerge.exe" --no-fuzzy-matching po\%s.po messages.po > locale\%s\LC_MESSAGES\messages.po' % (GNUWIN_BIN,l,l))
    path = 'locale\%s\LC_MESSAGES' % l
    if not os.access(path, os.F_OK):
        os.system('mkdir %s' % path)
    if not os.path.exists(r'po\%s.po' % (l)):
        print r'Warning: po\%s.po does not exist.' % (l)
    else:
        os.system(r'copy po\%s.po %s\bittorrent.po' % (l, path))
        os.system(r'"%s\msgfmt.exe" -o %s\bittorrent.mo %s\bittorrent.po' % (GNUWIN_BIN, path, path))
        os.remove(r'%s\bittorrent.po' % (path,))