The DIAGO rain cover for pushchairs and buggies offers protection from rain, wind and snow. The window at the front offers many advantages. Your child does not feel caged and you easily reach your child without removing the rain cover. The window also provides ideal air circulation and can be closed with a Vecro fastener when required. The rain cover is free of PVC and flexibilisers and complies with the EN71 regulation. You also might be interested in the DIAGO Pram Covers: Thermo Pram Cover.


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Portraits VII: Tembo, Who is NOT an Elephant
When I started this project in 2013, Tembo was a rambunctious little yearling with a penchant for play. Since then he's gotten quite a lot bigger, but he hasn't really grown up. In fact he's a bit of a spoiled firstborn if you ask me. Last year, at age four, Tembo went through a very rough weaning period as Tenkere rounded the end of her pregnancy with Tambara. He begged his mother constantly for milk and then cried again after taking her nipple to find she'd run dry. As Tenkere encouraged him to travel more on his own, the intensity of his fits increased. He's follow at his mothers heels whining loudly and then when she turned around to pick him up, he'd vehemently refuse by pulling away from her, throwing his body on the ground, and escalating into pure screams. He even put two-year-old Leakey's weaning tantrums to shame (for more details on her crash-diet from weaning, check out my previous blog)!
The birth of his baby brother in 2016 hasn't pushed him any further into acting his age either. Rather than grooming or playing with Tambara, Tembo throws tons of energy into competing with his brother for mom's attention. Luckily, as a part of the O-Family Dynasty he has the adoring eyes of grandmother, Outamba to fall back on. She really dotes on him and seems to prefer playing with Tembo to playing with her own daughters. I've even seen Outamba come running to Tembo's aid when the males get so rough that the mighty Tenkere has fled up a tree.
Despite his tendency toward brattiness, I can't help but love following the little bugger around the forest. It's pretty rare to get bored watching this little guy. Perhaps his maturity hasn't developed but his love of playing all the time no matter what certainly has! Follows of Tembo are nearly always the type where I end up recording 90% of the data on video because he's just skipping from play bout to watching someone groom someone else to another play bout and then there's some aggression that he's watching and on and on and on.
But I can't wrap on Tembo without talking about how much I love his mother, Tenkere. My favorite type of female chimp is the kind like Tenkere, who is as playful as her son and gives aggression back as often as she takes it. She is the archetypal strong and sassy. Over the past two weeks, I've watched her play with any willing partner from her youngest son to the adolescent females to alpha Eslom and even our oldest male, Yogi. The only chimp that laughs louder than her, is Quiver.
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Jillian Rutherford
Watching play behaviour must be so fascinating. Do you think playful adults like Tenkere were playful infants like Tembo, and that Tembo will continue on as a playful adult? From your observations do you see members of certain family lines showing more playfulness than others? If so, do you think that it results more from genetics or the rearing and influence of the mother and older siblings?
Those are great questions… I'm going to write you a whole blog to answer them! Thanks for the inspiration!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Scientists at UCLA have developed a technique for coaxing pluripotent stem cells, which can be grown indefinitely in the lab, into becoming mature T cells capable of killing tumor cells. The method uses artificial thymic organoids, which work by mimicking the environment of the thymus, the organ in which T cells develop from blood stem cells.
T cells are cells of the immune system that fight infections, but also have the potential to eliminate cancer cells. The ability to create them from self-renewing pluripotent stem cells using the UCLA technique could lead to new approaches to cancer immunotherapy and could spur further research on T cell therapies for viral infections such as HIV, and autoimmune diseases, according to the researchers. Among the method's most promising aspects is that it can be combined with gene editing approaches to create a virtually unlimited supply of T cells able to be used across large numbers of patients, without the need to use a patient's own T cells, added the scientists.
The study ("Organoid-Induced Differentiation of Conventional T Cells from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells"), which was published in Cell Stem Cell, was led by senior author Gay Crooks, MD, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and of pediatrics and co-director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.


Alt Resources Limited (ASX:ARS) ("Alt" or "the Company") is pleased to provide shareholders its Activity Report for the Quarter ending 30th September 2018.
During this period, the Company's key focus has continued to be the establishment of a central gold mining hub at the Bottle Creek Mine Site in Western Australia. Of great significance this Quarter was the completion of all conditions to exercise the Option to Purchase the Bottle Creek Gold Project, with the final payment to be made in two tranches of $1.875M in November 2018 and $3M in November 2019.
The final condition of the Option was the release of the Maiden JORC Resource in August, which constituted the first modern resource for the Bottle Creek Project and the first resource estimate undertaken by Alt Resources within its larger Mt Ida Gold Project.
The Mt Ida Gold Project is rapidly evolving into a promising gold hub, with multiple exploration and mining targets throughout the vicinity.


If you would like to be on my mailing list, let me know here. I send out a short occasional email with images of new work and a few words of commentary, or announcements about upcoming book events.
If you would like to see a complete selection of my raku sculpture, and to purchase any, please click on my etsy site here.
I'm available to do special commissions in raku sculpture. I sometimes give workshops on Buddha-making, Zen and the creative arts and other topics.


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Pat Mitchell
Pat Mitchell, who served as President & CEO of the Paley Center from March 2006 to May 2014, has stepped into a new role as Senior Advisor for the Paley Center. Establishing an independent consulting practice, POW!Strategies, Mitchell is leveraging three decades of experience as a media executive, content producer and connector of people and ideas, to focus on media as a force for social change–with a special emphasis on women and media. Ms. Mitchell came to the world of media from academia, moving from a position as a college English instructor to the staff of a weekly news magazine, and in 1972, she became one of the first women to break new ground in television, working for the networks and cable channels as a news reporter and anchor, talk show host, and White House correspondent, producer and executive.
Creating a legacy of award winning work, throughout her television career, in front of and behind the cameras, Mitchell hosted and produced programs, documentaries and series that focused on women, their stories, challenges and accomplishments. In the mid-eighties, she established an independent production company to produce a nationally syndicated series focused entirely on women and their lives, "Woman to Woman". This daytime talk series was the first to be hosted and produced by a woman and became the first television series to be added to the archive of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard University. The series, broadcast in 1983-85, also won the EMMY as the Best Daytime talk series and became a regular feature on NBC's TODAY program from 1985-1990.
In 1992, Mitchell was hired by media entrepreneur and founder of CNN, Ted Turner, to head his original productions division which produced more than 400 hours of documentaries and specials every year, including a ten hour documentary series on The History of Women in America and the award winning twenty-four hour documentary series on the history of the Cold War. Other programs produced under Mitchell's direction have been honored with 37 Emmy's, five Peabody Awards for Excellence in broadcasting and two Academy Award nominations.
Ms. Mitchell was inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame in 2011, and named as one of the Most Powerful Women in Hollywood by Variety. Among her many other industry honors, Mitchell is especially proud to have been recognized by The Women's Media Center with their first annual Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. This award, named the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award, is now given annually to another women honored for advancing women through media. Mitchell was also given the Sandra Day O'Connor Award for Leadership; and was celebrated by the Center for the Advancement of Women for her accomplishments and contributions in the world of communications to create a more equitable society for women. Ms. Mitchell is also one of 12 Americans awarded the prestigious Bodleian Medal from the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.
In addition to her accomplishments both on and off the screen, Ms. Mitchell is also known for her humanitarian efforts and her work as a dedicated member of numerous nonprofit boards. Ms. Mitchell is Chair of the Sundance Institute, a Trustee Emeritus of the Mayo Foundation with a 12 year tenure as a Trustee of the Mayo Clinics, a founding member of Mikhail Gorbachev's global environmental organization, Green Cross International, a board member of Acumen Fund, chair of the Jordan River Foundation US Board and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the International Women's Forum and serves on the board of VDay, a global movement to end violence. She also chairs the Women's Media Center Board and was recently appointed by Congress to a Commission for the establishment of a National Museum of the History of Women in America.
Mitchell also partners with the TED organization to curate and host an annual TEDWomen conference, featuring TEDTalks from women and men sharing ideas, innovations, compelling stories as part of a dynamic global narrative for women and girls.
A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Georgia, with a master's degree in English literature, Ms. Mitchell has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from several colleges and universities and is a much sought after public speaker, advisor and consultant to foundations and corporations on issues of women's empowerment, and leadership development. She and her husband, Scott Seydel, have six children and 12 grandchildren and reside in New York and Atlanta, Georgia.
Ms. Mitchell was appointed to the Commission by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.


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Perfect B&W: onOne Software's Monochrome Solution
George Schaub | Jan 7, 2014 | First Published: Nov 1, 2013
"The initial conversion is on the whole quite good, but of course availing yourself of the many controls is what this program is all about."
There are many roads to black and white, or monochrome, if you prefer, and attaining the look you want can be arduous or easy, depending on the software used and the methods applied.
One such path is onOne Software's Perfect B&W, nestled within their Perfect Photo Suite or available as a stand-alone or plug-in for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture. The advantage of using it within the Suite is that you also get access to the other excellent modules within that program. The advantage of the stand-alone is that you get an amazing array of controls for a rather incredible price. The Suite, by the way, offers onOne's Layers, Mask, Effects, Focus, and Resize programs, all highly regarded, making the options virtually endless. For this review I accessed Perfect B&W from within the Suite.
Here's the overall workspace you get upon opening. The right side panel is for custom work by you, while the left side is where you can choose presets, including your own that you can save and store there. To engage the program, load an image, and then get to work!
Left: The right side panel has many options. Starting at the top, note that I switched the Navigator view to Histogram, which I find quite useful to check for clipping as I work. This part of the panel shows Tone and Color Response sliders, where you can do a good deal of the color to black-and-white conversion work. Right: Moving down the right side panels you get a fairly rudimentary Tone Curve, Glow (a very helpful tool for adding "sparkle" to some images), and film emulation and grain size and amount selections.
All Photos © George Schaub
When you open the Suite you have a workspace that lists the other programs within. Perfect Layers within the Suite comes with an image/file browser that allows you to navigate to any folder that contains images by clicking on the File/Browse option. To begin work, double-click on the image in that browser. You can also use Bridge or similar browsers by selecting then dragging the image into the workspace. Once an image is open you then select B&W from the modules, where the image conversion is immediately made. The initial conversion is on the whole quite good, but of course availing yourself of the many controls is what this program is all about.
The workspace offers a series of familiar controls on the right-hand side (to those who have worked with ACR, B&W Adjustment Layers, Aperture et al.) that allow you to manipulate the base image. I switch the upper right to a Histogram view from the default view to help with clipping avoidance.
Right below that panel you have a full raft of controls, beginning with Tone (Contrast, Brightness, Shadows, and Highlights) and continuing with Color Response (where you convert hues to grayscale tones with sliders or choose filter presets); Tone Curve (a fairly rudimentary curve control); Glow (mostly for portraits or ethereal mood but I used this more than I first thought I might); Film Grain (with sliders and presets based on film types that will not make sense to those who have not shot film, but toggle through and try them to see the effect); Toner (for emulating chemical tone looks; again, toggle through); Vignette and Border, which are fairly self-evident; Sharpening, with numerous selective options such as "protect skin tone"; and Blending, which is in essence a menu of blending modes which will mix the layer you are creating with the original (or background) image in numerous ways.
Left: The last section of the right side panels includes Toning options, Vignetting, Border selections, and Sharpening, which has numerous variations. I suggest trying out a few Sharpening scenarios (I liked High Pass as the most subtle) and working this set of controls with some restraint. Right: Here's a glimpse of just some of the presets available. Click on one and the preview in the workspace is instantaneous. Note the tools on the upper right of the panel. These can be used for local controls within the image, such as contrast, brightness, and masking down from the black and white to the original color selectively. There are also numerous tool modifiers, not shown, in the workspace. This set of tools alone makes for infinite image possibilities, and is one of the real assets of this program.
Note: Those not familiar with the effect of blending modes when working with Layers should just toggle through and see the effects, but do check it out as this is a powerful and useful aspect of the controls here. In effect a blending mode is how you tell the layers to play together.
Saving Sets
That's enough to keep you busy exploring the options for many hours (days?), but the beauty is that you will eventually hit upon a look or style that you want with a few of the options, or sets of options, that nail the feel of the images you aim to create. There are two major pluses here. You can save the mix for use on other images and that set will reside in the left-hand panel for use later. This allows you to produce a consistent look for a portfolio of images, for example. Also, every time you pick an option the image in the workspace immediately responds to the selection and changes to allow you to say yea or nay to what you've picked.
Changes can be subtle or major, but do give yourself time to play with all the options. For this photo of a Vermont church, exposed to capture the highlight texture, I started on the right side (custom) panels and added brightness and dropped contrast, then went to the plus side on the blue response slider and added a bit of Glow. I wanted grain so chose "Tri-X +2 Push" in the Film panel. I then moved to the left side presets and chose Gum Bichromate from the "19th Century" collection.
As you work on the right side panel you create a layer of the effects you have chosen, and this is where I pick my first, though not minor, nit. Regardless of how many changes you make it all goes into one layer. I assume this is probably to simplify matters for those petrified of layers, but I'd at least like to have the option of creating a new layer, and naming it, as I work. As built it's as if you are flattening all the work layers as you go into one layer, rather than creating multilayers that can be modified individually later.
Yes, when you save the image and move it to another program for editing you will have two layers—or more if you start with a preset, which then makes another layer—the background image on one and the work layer in another, but this goes against what I am used to, which is making changes on separate, named layers and then going back through to consider opacity and other options later on. This will bother some folks and perhaps be a relief to others.
Suite Interaction
Which brings us to Suite interaction. If you click on the Layers module in the Suite workspace after you've done your black-and-white work it will take the image over and show you the layers, which you can then do selective work on, and that's a good thing. But once you've done that and want to swap it back into the B&W workspace for perhaps further work, it reprocesses the image and reverts it back to the original, rendering it as if you are moving back to square one.
My advice? Stay within the B&W workspace and go from say fine-tuning (the right workspace) to the presets (the left workspace). Individual layers of both workspaces will then be saved. But once you leave the B&W panel to go elsewhere consider the B&W panel aspect of the work done and finalized. The best course is to do the other options in the Suite first, do a Save As, and then open in the B&W panel.
This aerial shot always struck me as a source for an abstract, fairly high-contrast rendition, and Perfect B&W made it easy work. On the custom panel side I chose the Yellow filter in Color Response, did a Glow with a Multiply blending mode, and then switched over to the presets and chose "Bogart Neutral," three quick steps and it was exactly what I had envisioned.
On the left side of the workspace there are numerous presets to choose from, and these run the gamut from what is dubbed Basic Fundamentals (color contrast filter effects, expanded tonal values) to "19th Century" effects (everything from cyanotypes to ambrotypes) to 20th Century "classic silver," poetically named with such titles as "urban," "gritty," and, my favorite (title at least), "Ansel in the Valley."
Then there's a "21st Century Modern Digital"; "High-Speed Documentary" (with one called "paparazzi," I suppose intended for news and commentary work); "Hint of Color" (kind of a duotone effect, some with "glow"); "Hollywood Portrait" (see George Hurrell); and "True Film," a mix of options that use the same base conversions as the Film Grain options in the right side control panel. Thisis where you'll also see your own mixes, if you've done and saved them with your own title, mentioned earlier.
I have worked this image of an angel wood carving in numerous ways, but I have to say that Perfect B&W helped me attain a new look that really worked for me. I started the foundation work with "ambrotype" in the "19th Century" presets, then moved back to the custom, right side panel and added some brightness, dropped contrast, added Glow, and, of course, upped the Halo slider. To me, it now looks and feels like an old postcard you'd find in an antiquarian stall outside a church.
Note: You can choose a preset and then swing over to the right side for further enhancement or modification, which makes for more options than you can imagine. In all there are enough presets and custom sets to keep even the keenest explorers busy.
You can save the image in a number of formats, including Photoshop (.psd, TIFF, JPEG, and .png) plus something called "Photoshop Large Document" (.psb) which I am told is used whenever a Photoshop doc exceeds 30k x 30k pixels. Photoshop docs will retain layers; JPEG by design flattens them on the Save but saving as a TIFF will flatten as well, not the usual course, and JPEG saves only give you a percentage, not a file size or sense of compression that the percentage represents, but in all every type of save retains the overall look you have created.
Note: If you open the finished work in Photoshop the background image layer is turned off. The rationale behind this, according to the folks at onOne, is that the program makes a copy of the original layer and that is what it applies yours to, and that because the original layer could be set to less than 100 percent opacity, or when using a blending mode, they turn it off so that the preview in each module looks correct. They told me that they are the only company that previews multilayered files correctly inside of plug-ins to honor these settings. So, if you want to get back to your original, simply turn the underlying layer back on. I suggest you do so and make it a practice to do so.
The local selection tools are very handy and make the ability to customize every image even greater. I love the color of these stacked doors but wanted to create a more weathered look. All I needed to do was open the image and let the program make the conversion, and then worked with the color selection brush at a low opacity and painted down to this pastel-like rendition.
Selective Tools
Keep in mind that changes selected in B&W are "global," which means it affects the entire image, but there are some selective control options, a kind of adjustment brush, that I found to be very appealing and very useful. You can modify the brushes by changing the opacity, feathering (pixel width of the blend), and size, as well as fine-tune with a Paint In and Paint Out option (kind of like using black or white foreground color on a neutral gray New Layer/Overlay burn/dodge).
What about working on an image you've already converted and customized in black and white? I thought I'd try a tune-up on this doorway shot. I opened the monochrome file and used the custom panels to drop contrast, open shadows, and increase Glow and Halo. Is it better or worse? It's another take on the image, and I'll certainly be using Perfect B&W to option other looks on images in my monochrome files.
Use these tools to affect local contrast, brightness, and detail, as well as a selective color brush that in essence allows you to cut down to the original color layer, something that will be very popular with those who like to play with the color in black and white or a low saturation look. The brush options are what make this set of tools versatile and for me an essential part of the appeal; working with opacity, for example, really allows for very precise work. I would suggest a tablet and stylus for the best control, but those versatile enough with a mouse are not left out of the fun.
Presets can be a great way to start if you don't want to work with the custom controls right away, and you can mix and match with ease. Sometimes it pays to experiment. This is a preset called "Ingrid Cool" (Bergman I assume) from the Hollywood Portrait presets, applied to the image shown in the workspace illustration. An odd match perhaps, a cathedral interior and a Hollywood Portrait preset, but it worked for me.
Recommendations and Conclusions
Overall, I definitely had fun with the program and as a monochrome fan will enjoy it as part of my palette. I would like to see the ability to do a Save As mid-work, but here you have to Apply the effect prior to having any kind of Save access at all. Even a History panel would be fine. You can back out of a piece of work with Undo, but I like to Save As during work progression.
Is Perfect B&W perfect? Perhaps not, but it certainly gives you enough options to allow you to create monochrome images that might be just perfect for you. And for the price of the individual program, the value can't be beat.
For more information and full specs, contact onOne Software at www.ononesoftware.com.
Perfect Photo Suite 7:
Various versions. All can work as a stand-alone.
Premium Edition (Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture plug-in): $299
Lightroom & Aperture plug-in Edition: $129
Stand-alone: $79
Perfect B&W:
Premium Edition (Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture): $99
Free trials of both programs are available. Check computer specs required on onOne's website to see if it is compatible.
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Central Power celebrate their 20th Anniversary in 2014!
"Now our company has now entered their 20th year, there are now even more challenges for us, and our hundreds of clients and suppliers in today's energy markets. It is now even more important to guide customers through the constantly changing minefield of government legislation, and supplier's initiatives, to ensure we can still provide the best overall deal"


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All of this, AND they have "Chicharito?" Seems unfair!
By Steve DavisApr 5, 2012, 7:15 PM EDT
Well, stick this in your guacamole and give it a good stir:
Mexico now holds every single men's crown available in CONCACAF (the peculiar acronym for North and Central American and Caribbean).
That's never happened before, according to Jonah Freedman, the MLSSoccer.com writer who put the pieces together in his weekly column, pointing a laser light at this thorny little burr in the U.S. Soccer backside.
After clinching the under-23 tournament on Monday, Mexico now holds that one, the Gold Cup (for senior men's teams), the regional under-20 title and the regional under-17 title. Mexico is the world under-17 champion, in fact.
"The challenge is now squarely on the US to respond," Freedman writes. "If American youth teams are losing to their Mexican counterparts, they need to be restocked and re-educated in some way. That's what [Jurgen] Klinsmann is trying to do, according to [Sunil] Gulati. That's why the USSF has overhauled the Development Academy program. It's why Klinsmann is adamant about players getting minutes at the highest level. It's why he wants to re-create the American player from the ground up."
It wasn't so long ago, don't forget, where everything was rosebuds and lollipops on our side of the border – relatively speaking, anyway – while Mexico was pinned to the mat.
Mexico won only once in the border series between 2001 and 2009. (El Tri was 1-7-2 during that span against the United States, a maddening state that had El Tri changing out coaches like a bored kid changes TV channels.)
Plus, Mexico didn't qualify for the 2008 Olympics. It was all quite humbling.
Clearly, the Mexican federation responded. Now it's U.S. Soccer's turn.


A market leading Gas company are now looking to recruit an experienced domestic gas install engineer to join their team on a long term basis. The contract will last at least a year and there will be plenty of overtime and weekend work available.
As a Domestic install Engineer you will travel around an area based on your home location and will be completing anything up to 5 jobs per week. All jobs are pre planned and you are issued with the survey the week before. All Jobs are sent through via a Smart Tablet and the material for the jobs are delivered to site the day before the job is planned for.
We are looking for Gas install engineers with at least 2 years' experience working on similar contracts would be preferable.
– Must be gas safe registered.
– Hold a full driving licence and own your van.


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Why Ryan Garcia Captivates The Public
By: Sean Crose
He's one of the biggest stars in boxing and he's well under 25 years old. He's defeated most of his opponents by knockout, and he has a mouth to go with his power. He has yet to lose a single fight. And, although Ryan Garcia has still to win a major title, the young man appears to be well on his way to great things – provided he can defeat the skilled veteran Luke Campbell Saturday at Dallas' American Airlines Center. There should be no mistake about it, Garcia epitomizes what it is to be a rising star in 2021. Good looking, brash and in possession of a unique ability to captivate attention, Garcia excites because he may well be that rare combination of skills and hype.
Yet the 22-year old's rise hasn't been effortless. One simply doesn't rack up an amateur resume of 215 wins against 15 losses without putting in some serious effort…and one certainly doesn't earn 15 National Gold Medal Championships on good will alone. Even Garcia's professional career to date, a perfect 20-0, with 17 knockouts, hasn't always been a smooth ride. After being trained by his father in the family garage, Garcia understood in 2018 that an upgrade would be needed now that he would be facing steeper and steeper competition. Therefore, both he and his father agreed to let Eddy Reynoso take the lead as head trainer.
Then there was the conflict Garcia had with Golden Boy Promotions, who he had signed with to great fanfare in 2016. As the calendar pushed towards a new decade, Garcia, whose popularity was, to put it mildly, on the rise, felt he deserved more than he indicated Golden Boy wanted to give. Things seemed to be falling apart between the lightweight and the promotional powerhouse in 2019 before the matter was finally settled to everyone's satisfaction.
The moral of the story – that Garcia's willingness to make adjustments and stand firm against the powers that be have nearly as much to do with his rise as his explosive ring performances do – can't be overlooked. Nor can his natural appeal. For Garcia has millions of social media followers and has worked out deals with the likes of Abercrombie & Fitch. All it takes is a single punch, however, or a masterful fight plan to derail the entire Garcia express. The question this first weekend of 2021 is whether or not Campbell will be the one to run Garcia off the tracks.
The post Why Ryan Garcia Captivates The Public appeared first on BoxingInsider.com.
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Selby & Friends was recently dubbed "titans of chamber music"(Adelaide Advertiser) and with a popular national Subscription Season and consistently sold out concerts in Canberra, they are delighted to be moving in 2019 to Llewellyn Hall in special Chamber Music Mode.
Visit the Selby & Friends website for entire season details. Season subscriptions are available only through Selby & Friends. Single tickets for individual concerts are available from Ticketek.
Don't miss "chamber music at its best" (SMH) with a host of brilliant Australian and international guest artists and some of the world's greatest chamber music!


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Laos independence and the October Revolution
Socialism took root across southeast Asia after WW2, bringing hope and freedom to many formerly colonised peoples.
Laos embassy
Friday 5 October 2018
Comrade Sayakane Sisouvong, Laos' ambassador to Britain, spoke movingly of the electrifying role that the October Revolution and Soviet socialism – the first durable workers' republic – had on the colonised peoples of southeast Asia, including the people of Laos.
"Socialist ideology only became influential in our country after WW2. But since then, our country has moved rapidly from a feudal monarchy, through capitalism to socialism.
"In Laos, our people are in control of the state, so it is easy for us to understand and explain the significance of the October Revolution, the benefits of socialism to you," he says.
Comrade Sisouvong spoke movingly of the great price his small country has paid and is still paying for daring to brake the iron ring of imperialist ties and win its own liberation – just as the USSR herself faced a terrible war of imperialist intervention, coming hard on the heels of WW1.
"Building socialism takes a long time. It depends on the material conditions, the time and place you are operating in, and the maturity of the peoples in the countries concerned. Taking the example of Laos, communists led the national-liberation struggle, but the price we have paid for our liberation has not been easy."
The genocidal war that the US waged on Vietnam, was in fact a war waged on the whole of southeast Asia – or 'French Indochina', including the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
All three countries coordinated their struggles and won their independence from French imperialist occupation through an armed struggle. They were then forced to face the Japanese, and then, perhaps most terribly of all, the new imperial tyranny of the USA, which after WW2 arrogated to itself the right to judge the legitimacy of nations' chosen governments, based on their compliance to US world economic and military interests and its ruling imperialist class's anti-communist crusade.
"The United States did not declare war openly on Laos. We are a small country. Although we have a land area similar to the UK, our population is just 3 million. But in their 'secret', undeclared war against our nation, the US dropped some 3 million tons of bombs – one ton for every man, woman and child living in our country.
"That was the respect for human rights that the USA showed our country. That was their independence gift to us."
The USA carpet-bombed Laos using millions of tons of cluster bombs – which have since been universally condemned as an 'unethical' and particularly despicable form of weaponry, disproportionately targeting civilians and children.
Comrade Sisouvong explained to the meeting: "Today there remain more than 80,000,000 unexploded bomblets, unexploded pieces of ordonance (UXO), which act like landmines, spread over one third of the land area of our country, and every year hundreds of Laoation people continue to lose their lives and limbs due to these unexploded American bombs."
Outgoing US president Barack Obama has belatedly 'acknowledged' the 'secret' war on Laos and pledged a derisory $90m towards helping to clear the mines. This is a drop in the ocean, and a fraction of the cost spent by the US devastating the natural and human environment of Laos and southeast Asia.
It is, in reality, an insult added to the devastating injuries inflicted by US imperialism on the Laoation people.
But the People of Laos remain defiant and proud, determined to forge their own destiny, and are able to hold their heads up high and teach the people of the world that even small nations can defy the will of the mightiest and most vindictive imperial power on earth.
As the great Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh said: "Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom!"
Comrade Sisouvong finished his speech with the uplifting words: "Long live the October Revolution. Long life to you all!"
Actually-existing socialism
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Soviet ballet: dancing the classical heritage of humanism
How the communists led the fight against aggressive nationalism and established peace and socialism in the Caucasus.
1 Jan 2020, Lalkar
As the dystopian reality of bourgeois exploitation and 'democracy' hits home, Stalin and communism are viewed with respect and longing.
26 Jul 2019, Proletarian
Dr Josef Skála described the advances made by socialist Czechoslovakia and discussed the challenges of organising the forces for socialist reinstatement.
19 Jun 2019,
This message was sent by an Australian comrade to our party's celebration of the 98th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, held on 7 Nov 2015
1 Dec 2015, Proletarian
Where is LGBT ideology taking us and why does it matter?
What can workers today learn from the experience of the Comintern?
27 Oct 2019, Lalkar
What did the October Revolution do for us? Much more than most workers ever imagine.
7 Nov 2019, Proletarian TV
'We have to strike at the heart of the matter: our country has an economic and political system that makes wars inevitable.'
12 Jan 2020, Proletarian TV
'The fundamental contradiction in the world today is between imperialism and the oppressed countries.'
3 Nov 2019,
Dance historian Christina Kostoula explains how ballet was put into the service of the people in the socialist Soviet Union.
16 Dec 2018, Proletarian TV


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Consumed by Snails – part two
May 4, 2012 May 4, 2012 molethrowerLeave a comment
Returning to Project Snails after four years apart from it is a strange experience. In some ways it feels like returning to one of those other lives we have, in different places with different people, that we occasionally switch between. Time doesn't seem to have passed, and the life I was living without the novel – as recently as two weeks ago – seems like a dream. "What was that about?" asks my novel, and all I can do is smile self-deprecatingly and shrug. "University? You do do the strangest things sometimes, Alex. Heh! Do-do." My novel isn't very mature, you see.
In other ways, though, the passage of time – and, I'd like to think, some small amount of growing up on my part – becomes apparent when I read my past self's writing. Happily, I seem to have gained at least some of the perspective that I hoped four years, and higher learning, would bring. Or academia has stifled my unique voice and snuffed out my creativity, leaving me tragically blind to my earlier genius. Either way, I can see flaws all over Snails.
There are passages that are clearly more about me being "clever" than about the story or the characters. Analogies are stretched to snapping point as past me tries to force in as many tenuous connections as possible between the literal and the metaphorical. Descriptions and dialogue that could comfortably be simple and straightforward are written in strange, roundabout ways just for the sake of it. There are bits where I as the author am the only person who could hope to guess what a character is really thinking. Some of the "emotional" scenes make me cringe, which generally isn't the intended effect. There are blatant continuity errors, including character and place names changing from one chapter/sentence to the next. And there is a bit of unexplained weirdness surrounding certain subplots, which I was laying in there for the potential second novel, but which probably hurts the first novel more than is justified, considering it may well be the only novel.
But despite all this, I can't help feeling there's something there. Over the years I worked on it, characters developed and rebelled against their original one-dimensional selves, the world was infused with a fair amount of detail and history, and the story became intricate and multi-layered, with themes and subplots woven through it just subtly enough not to distract from the core story. All this work, taking place over multiple, evolving plans and drafts of the novel but now compressed into one draft, reminds me of why I should probably have some faith in my past self: there's a lot more of him than there is of me.
The trouble is, as much as I love the characters, the world and the story, the writing just doesn't live up to them.
That's why I'm afraid of this book. It's almost hypnotic. I can see the potential in what I have, but I know it's going to take an insane amount of work to truly realise it. And not just work. It'll take the sort of emotional investment that I haven't made in anything for a long time. I'm going to have to think about parts of it until my brain goes numb, then force myself to un-numb it and carry on thinking. I'm going to have to wake up in the night again, terrified that that character's storyline isn't believable enough, or that this plot point doesn't make sense since I changed that other thing. This stuff isn't optional. Not if I want the novel to be as good as it can possibly be.
I'd forgotten all this. I was in denial for much of my time at university, thinking "These smaller projects are fun, maybe I don't need to go back to my novel". Now I realise how wrong I was. I was always going to have to go back, for better or worse. If I don't, I'll forever be wondering how it would have turned out. Maybe it's still just a 12-year-old's naïve fantasy. But I have to know.
So I'm going to rewrite Project Snails. I'm not going to plunge in straight away, as I'd like to get some of my smaller projects done, or at least further along, before I make it my main focus. But at some point, I feel sure, it's going to consume me again. I just hope it gets all the nutrients it needs from me to grow into something special, and that I'm still vaguely alive when it spits me out.
See, there's one of those overstretched analogies I was talking about! Better make sure I edit my novel better than I edit this blog.
Books, Creativity, Fantasy, Project Snails, Writing
Consumed by Snails – part one
Oh yeah, Project Snails. Heh. Well. Yeah. Hmm.
In order to make this blog post suitably epic, allow me to take you back to my childhood – not the extended childhood I'm living now, but my actual childhood. I was a writer from a very young age, you see… (Wavy visual transition accompanied by harp scales.)
I think the first "novel" I ever wrote was The Thinking Tunnel (it feels weird to italicise that, but my university training demands it), a shameless rip-off of Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree books, which filled my young mind with wonder and with which I was obsessed for several years. This was followed by a book called The Red Water World Mystery, a more traditional fantasy tale starring me as a version of myself who found a passage into a magical world while staying in a caravan park. Then came Super Bubble Mix, two kids' sprawling adventures through space and time, almost certainly inspired by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. These three books were about what you would expect from a child: containing the kind of imaginative ideas that insipid adult minds would automatically reject, but largely derivative, improvisational to the point of utter meaninglessness, and of course very embarrassing to look back on.
By the time I finished Super Bubble Mix, I was about twelve, and beginning to realise my flaws. That's when I started working on Snails. All I knew was that it would be a new fantasy novel, an epic one, with adventures and magic and battles and arduous journeys across hostile terrain. Needless to say, it was quite directionless at first, and I wrote dozens of opening paragraphs, none of them leading anywhere. Eventually I came up with three characters and started them on a journey that seemed to have some momentum.
I wrote about eight lengthy chapters, but the story was still going nowhere. I started again. One unexpected benefit of this false start was that I now felt I knew several of my characters, and had a vague sense of a world that I could build on. Of course, the characters and world evolved dramatically later, but at least I had a starting point. The eight scrapped chapters had acted as a rehearsal – or perhaps more accurately an audition – for a set of five or six characters (though mainly the central three), and they got the parts. I just needed to write them a good story.
Inspiration struck one day at my granny's house in Dundee. An idea for a pivotal moment in the story suddenly occurred to me, and I sat in the chilly guest bedroom for a long while, scribbling down a plot summary onto four sheets of A4 paper. The plot has changed a lot since, but these four pages were the structure that allowed me to begin writing the book properly.
Several years later, I completed a draft. There had been many hiccups along the way, including one detour which took me so far off course that I had to completely scrap a large section of the book and write it again, setting it in an entirely different place with a different set of secondary characters. I then began the process I referred to as The Great Revision. I did several major rewrites, gradually becoming more confident in my work.
In this time the novel became my world, the thing I could pour myself into. Almost every walk, car/train journey or quiet moment was a chance to mull over the story and come up with new ideas about where it could go, how this character would behave, why she might do that. I began treating it as more than another silly fantasy diversion; it became more or less the only way I expressed myself. As such, working on it induced heart-pounding excitement when it was going well and total abject misery when I lost faith in it. For a long time I tried not to put too much of myself into other creative projects, because I was saving it all up for Snails.
Then university came along, and, out of necessity, I stopped thinking about my novel for four years.
Earlier this week, I looked at it properly for the first time since 2008. In the last few days I've been scouring my old computer, doing a little detective work, copying and pasting from several different documents to try and assemble what is, for now, the definitive, up-to-date version of Project Snails. Sure enough, it is a novel, with a beginning, a middle and an end. It has 200,375 words, divided into 81 chapters and covering 345 A4 pages. And it terrifies me.


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Kirklees Council sends a 'park ranger' to a street plagued by anti-social behaviour
Neighbours say they are at the end of their rope
Tony EarnshawLocal Democracy Reporter
Bankfield Court in Mirfield, where elderly residents have been plagued by anti-social behaviour including arson.
Residents of a Mirfield cul-de-sac who have been plagued for months by anti-social behaviour were astonished when Kirklees Council promised "immediate additional support" – and sent a PARK RANGER to take photographs.
One bewildered pensioner said: "He came down expecting to see a hellhole but he said it was immaculate. He was struggling to find anything to take pictures of."
People living on Bankfield Court, Mirfield, have experienced everything from loud music played in the early hours to the road being barricaded with bins, to arson.
Police and other emergency services are regularly called to the street, which is lined with bungalows and flats built for the over 60s.
Many of the occupants, mostly tenants of Kirklees Neighbourhood Housing, are elderly or poorly.
One pensioner tried to calm a man who was "running up and down the road like a crazy person" and was shoved head-first into a wall.
The catalogue of incidents prompted residents to plead for help from Kirklees Council.
Senior councillor Cathy Scott said: "We fully appreciate that the process can be frustrating when neighbours want immediate action, and we share that frustration.
"However, whilst we work to solve this issue in the long-term, we have put immediate additional support in place for local residents to ensure they are safe."
Residents who said they were "in fear of their lives" now say they have heard "nothing at all" from the council. One commented: "Nobody is doing a thing. They really are not. It's beyond belief.
"They can't allow it to go on much longer."
Reacting to the presence of the "park ranger", one pensioner said: "I thought it was really strange.
"He was walking around taking pictures so I asked what he was doing. He told me he was a park ranger.
"The information we got is that the council were hoping to see burned-out cars and rubbish – that we were part of the problem.
"But the park ranger said, 'It's immaculate round here'."
Much of the anti-social behaviour reported to the council and the police is related to one man, a private tenant living on the street. Neighbours say he regularly breaks a 10pm to 7am curfew, which is part of recently imposed bail conditions.
One resident said: "The council can't allow this to go on much longer. Everyone's at the end of their rope."
Out and about in the part of Kirklees where Covid rates have dropped the most and residents are still petrified
On the streets in Kirklees' worst-hit Covid-19 hotspot where masks are ditched and rules are broken
Local councillor Martyn Bolt, who has raised residents' concerns with the council, said the staff member who attended the scene was likely to have been an "environmental ranger".
He added: "But it should not be down to tenants to take action. It should be down to the landlord to resolve problems like these.
"That could be in the form of an injunction."
Kirklees Neighbourhood Housing
Martyn Bolt


There are also many other safety hazards, including no side air bags or child safety locks. Hummers without the diesel option have very poor fuel economy and this is even worse when compared to other similar heavy passenger vehicles. I would also say it has been pretty reliable. We have been the market leader for Vehicle History in the U. The door unlocks have to be hit 3 times in order to unlock all the doors.
Many issues with the traction control coming loose at the rear differential. Very often these cars are rebuilt and sold by deceptive sellers who fail to disclose or even try to hide the salvage information. I would highly encourage anyone even my worst enemy to avoid purchasing one of these like the plague. The ride is very rough, even after replacing the suspension, and all the body mount bushings to the frame. And one of the most common forms of automotive fraud in the second hand car market relates to odometer manipulation. It uses gas like its a Sherman tank.
I would highly encourage anyone even my worst enemy to avoid purchasing one of these like the plague. I really like the rear door opening to the side. This car is an absolute train wreck. An extended warranty might cover the second incident but the vehicle owner has the responsibility of repainting the car after this. The door unlocks have to be hit 3 times in order to unlock all the doors.
This car is an absolute train wreck. It was a used vehicle when we purchased it, so I don't know how it was cared for during the first 40,000 miles but it has only needed minor work and regular maintenance. Another one of my favorite things about the H3 is the small turning radius. We have taken it on several long drives and it is exceptionally comfortable, and for a large vehicle, rides very smooth even with the number of miles it has. The ride is very rough, even after replacing the suspension, and all the body mount bushings to the frame. Many issues with the traction control coming loose at the rear differential.
This car is an absolute train wreck. In 2009 it was announced many buyers were interested in the Hummer brand. Many issues with the traction control coming loose at the rear differential. The car is a pile of junk. After trying to close a deal in January of 2010, the sale collapsed in February of the same year due to many factors. I do think it looks nice from the outside.
We have taken it on several long drives and it is exceptionally comfortable, and for a large vehicle, rides very smooth even with the number of miles it has. The seats are uncomfortable after about 5 min. It eats tires like no vehicle I have owned before. The car is a pile of junk. I'll be the first to admit that I didn't have any standout pros or standout cons, anybody who buys it, buys it simply because it's a Hummer. I just love this vehicle.
A study showed that H2 and H3 drivers received more parking tickets than other vehicle owners. . I really like the rear door opening to the side. There are several types of records included in the report including: The mileage of a vehicle is crucial for it's value. Compared to other vehicles of similar size, it is easy to turn and maneuver into places I didn't think it would! It is very hard to see out of the windows.
The door unlocks have to be hit 3 times in order to unlock all the doors. I think I did a reasonable job in the description category. It eats tires like no vehicle I have owned before. The car is a pile of junk. The oil cooler is manufactured by a Chinese company and can easily rupture even if little or no stress is placed on the vehicle. It is very hard to see out of the windows.
The car is a pile of junk. It eats tires like no vehicle I have owned before. Compared to other vehicles of similar size, it is easy to turn and maneuver into places I didn't think it would! The lights in the dash for the buttons come on and go out whenever they feel like it. I would highly encourage anyone even my worst enemy to avoid purchasing one of these like the plague. It uses gas like its a Sherman tank. The car is a pile of junk. Every year, millions of vehicles in the United States are declared salvage.


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Bestghostwriters.net expands its special team of proofreading and editing professionals
bestghostwriters.net has confirmed it has expanded its special team of editors and proofreaders
Online PR News – 14-August-2014 – London, CA – Chicago, IL 14th August 2014 - bestghostwriters.net has confirmed it has expanded its special team of editors and proofreaders in a move the company says will help meet the massive orders it has received for its ghost writing services. The ghost writer had launched a special team of editors and proofreaders some months back as part of its quality assurance plan and as it seems, the work load has been too much over the past few months.
A statement released by bestghostwriters.net said that recruiting new expert editors is part of this expansion plan. The writer is confident that with an expanded team of proofreaders and editors it will be in a great position to deliver quality writing that meets all the standards of accuracy and quality. The ebook ghost writer is expected to kick off the implementation of this new expansion plan in earnest and this will mark a very important stage in its efforts to increase the productive capacity of its team in the wake of unprecedented rise in customer orders over the past few months.
Demand for professional ghost writing services has continued to grow. The advent of digital books is part of the reason why bestghostwriters.net has seen massive orders over the last few months and with this trend expected to continue, ebook ghost writers are looking forward to a massive opportunity to expand their markets. Bestghostwriters.net also notes that the online ghost writing sector will continue to boast rapid and sustainable growth rates for the coming decade provided this trend continues.
Experts in the market have noted that the expansion of the editing and proofreading team at bestghostwriters.net comes at a very important time especially now that a lot of potential customers are looking for quality ghost writing. The ebook writer observes that the expanded team will be charged with the role of checking each ebook done by its team of writers to make sure that it meets the standards of quality needed.
The provider has also assured its customers that it will continue to explore other ways available at its disposal to expand its team substantially in response to any immediate or long term conditions. The writer has welcomed any potential clients looking for quality ebook writing service to take advantage of this proposed expansion in the coming few months. Please get in touch with bestghostwriters.net through support@bestghostwriters.net for details on how you can work with its team.
About bestghostwriters.net
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Also from Http://www.bestghostwriters.net/
Jenny Stevens
http://www.bestghostwriters.net/
London CA, 32133


In a recent report by WalletHub that compared over 240 cities in the U.S. according to their football fandom, New Orleans ranked 7th overall and 6th among large cities.
The report took into consideration 21 key metrics. Cities were divided by size and into pro football and college football categories. Pittsburgh scored the top position overall for pro football fans, while Clemson scored first in college football.
New Orleans stands out as one of the best places to be a fan in 30 percent of the twelve categories listed under pro football. The Saints's number of NFL Championship wins and the average ticket price for an NFL game at the Superdome are competitive. However, what really makes New Orleans one of the best places to be a football fan are not only the performance of our Saints (5th place) and the enormous capacity of our stadium (6th place) but also the fans themselves, ranking 7th in attendance and 4th in engagement.
While engagement was measured by the number of Twitter followers and Facebook "Likes" in each team's official accounts, per capita, anyone who has been anywhere in New Orleans during a Saints game or viewed a YouTube video of a famous Who Dat Nation celebratory second-line could have guessed that being a football fan in New Orleans is where it's at.
For the full report, including infographics, visit WalletHub, a personal-finance website, at wallethub.com/edu/best-worst-cities-for-football-fans/9691/#methodology.


The Tarpon Springs Gro Group is a hands-on learning experience for adults with disabilities. The curriculum includes plant cultivation, landscaping, and nursery operations.
The Gro Group offers a plant sale Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 am to 1 pm. The Gro Group Garden Center is located at the Tarpon Springs Community Center.
If there is an age requirement, how old must one be to attend?


The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services stated, in the summary, that new final rules will edit the requirements that Long-Term facilities are required to meet in order to participate in Medicaid and Medicare programs. Although skilled nursing facilities are funded by Medicare, personal care homes are not Medicare funded.
In 2019, this rule will be introduced, so the elimination of pre-suit binding arbitration clauses in skilled nursing facilities may not be eliminated for a few more years.
To learn more about the case, read Sachs' article here.


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Asheville Citizen-Times: Asheville Symphony announces 2018-19 season, including Amadeus festival
From the Asheville Citizen Times, August 11, 2018
The Asheville Symphony has announced its 2018-2019 season, which includes a seven-concert Masterworks Series, a New Year's Eve performance that blends beloved classical works with circus arts, a two-player piano recital with Shai Wosner and Orion Weiss and the return of the popular Asheville Amadeus festival.
This will be the symphony's first season under its new music director, Darko Butorac, selected this summer after a 2½ year search.
"This season is all about the new," said Asheville Symphony executive director David Whitehill. "Our new music director is poised and ready to take the orchestra to new heights, with concerts showcasing talented soloists making their Asheville Symphony debuts."
Read the full story at citizen-times.com.


Command is a behavioral design pattern that turns a request into a stand-alone object that contains all information about the request. This transformation lets you parameterize methods with different requests, delay or queue a request's execution, and support undoable operations.
Imagine that you're working on a new text-editor app. Your current task is to create a toolbar with a bunch of buttons for various operations of the editor. You created a very neat Button class that can be used for buttons on the toolbar, as well as for generic buttons in various dialogs.
All buttons of the app are derived from the same class.
While all of these buttons look similar, they're all supposed to do different things. Where would you put the code for the various click handlers of these buttons? The simplest solution is to create tons of subclasses for each place where the button is used. These subclasses would contain the code that would have to be executed on a button click.
Lots of button subclasses. What can go wrong?
Before long, you realize that this approach is deeply flawed. First, you have an enormous number of subclasses, and that would be okay if you weren't risking breaking the code in these subclasses each time you modify the base Button class. Put simply, your GUI code has become awkwardly dependent on the volatile code of the business logic.
Several classes implement the same functionality.
And here's the ugliest part. Some operations, such as copying/pasting text, would need to be invoked from multiple places. For example, a user could click a small "Copy" button on the toolbar, or copy something via the context menu, or just hit Ctrl+C on the keyboard.
Initially, when our app only had the toolbar, it was okay to place the implementation of various operations into the button subclasses. In other words, having the code for copying text inside the CopyButton subclass was fine. But then, when you implement context menus, shortcuts, and other stuff, you have to either duplicate the operation's code in many classes or make menus dependent on buttons, which is an even worse option.
Good software design is often based on the principle of separation of concerns, which usually results in breaking an app into layers. The most common example: a layer for the graphical user interface and another layer for the business logic. The GUI layer is responsible for rendering a beautiful picture on the screen, capturing any input and showing results of what the user and the app are doing. However, when it comes to doing something important, like calculating the trajectory of the moon or composing an annual report, the GUI layer delegates the work to the underlying layer of business logic.
In the code it might look like this: a GUI object calls a method of a business logic object, passing it some arguments. This process is usually described as one object sending another a request.
The GUI objects may access the business logic objects directly.
The Command pattern suggests that GUI objects shouldn't send these requests directly. Instead, you should extract all of the request details, such as the object being called, the name of the method and the list of arguments into a separate command class with a single method that triggers this request.
Command objects serve as links between various GUI and business logic objects. From now on, the GUI object doesn't need to know what business logic object will receive the request and how it'll be processed. The GUI object just triggers the command, which handles all the details.
Accessing the business logic layer via a command.
The next step is to make your commands implement the same interface. Usually it has just a single execution method that takes no parameters. This interface lets you use various commands with the same request sender, without coupling it to concrete classes of commands. As a bonus, now you can switch command objects linked to the sender, effectively changing the sender's behavior at runtime.
You might have noticed one missing piece of the puzzle, which is the request parameters. A GUI object might have supplied the business-layer object with some parameters. Since the command execution method doesn't have any parameters, how would we pass the request details to the receiver? It turns out the command should be either pre-configured with this data, or capable of getting it on its own.
The GUI objects delegate the work to commands.
Let's get back to our text editor. After we apply the Command pattern, we no longer need all those button subclasses to implement various click behaviors. It's enough to put a single field into the base Button class that stores a reference to a command object and make the button execute that command on a click.
You'll implement a bunch of command classes for every possible operation and link them with particular buttons, depending on the buttons' intended behavior.
Other GUI elements, such as menus, shortcuts or entire dialogs, can be implemented in the same way. They'll be linked to a command which gets executed when a user interacts with the GUI element. As you've probably guessed by now, the elements related to the same operations will be linked to the same commands, preventing any code duplication.
As a result, commands become a convenient middle layer that reduces coupling between the GUI and business logic layers. And that's only a fraction of the benefits that the Command pattern can offer!
Making an order in a restaurant.
After a long walk through the city, you get to a nice restaurant and sit at the table by the window. A friendly waiter approaches you and quickly takes your order, writing it down on a piece of paper. The waiter goes to the kitchen and sticks the order on the wall. After a while, the order gets to the chef, who reads it and cooks the meal accordingly. The cook places the meal on a tray along with the order. The waiter discovers the tray, checks the order to make sure everything is as you wanted it, and brings everything to your table.
The paper order serves as a command. It remains in a queue until the chef is ready to serve it. The order contains all the relevant information required to cook the meal. It allows the chef to start cooking right away instead of running around clarifying the order details from you directly.
The Sender class (aka invoker) is responsible for initiating requests. This class must have a field for storing a reference to a command object. The sender triggers that command instead of sending the request directly to the receiver. Note that the sender isn't responsible for creating the command object. Usually, it gets a pre-created command from the client via the constructor.
The Command interface usually declares just a single method for executing the command.
Concrete Commands implement various kinds of requests. A concrete command isn't supposed to perform the work on its own, but rather to pass the call to one of the business logic objects. However, for the sake of simplifying the code, these classes can be merged.
Parameters required to execute a method on a receiving object can be declared as fields in the concrete command. You can make command objects immutable by only allowing the initialization of these fields via the constructor.
The Receiver class contains some business logic. Almost any object may act as a receiver. Most commands only handle the details of how a request is passed to the receiver, while the receiver itself does the actual work.
The Client creates and configures concrete command objects. The client must pass all of the request parameters, including a receiver instance, into the command's constructor. After that, the resulting command may be associated with one or multiple senders.
In this example, the Command pattern helps to track the history of executed operations and makes it possible to revert an operation if needed.
Undoable operations in a text editor.
Commands which result in changing the state of the editor (e.g., cutting and pasting) make a backup copy of the editor's state before executing an operation associated with the command. After a command is executed, it's placed into the command history (a stack of command objects) along with the backup copy of the editor's state at that point. Later, if the user needs to revert an operation, the app can take the most recent command from the history, read the associated backup of the editor's state, and restore it.
The client code (GUI elements, command history, etc.) isn't coupled to concrete command classes because it works with commands via the command interface. This approach lets you introduce new commands into the app without breaking any existing code.
// Make a backup of the editor's state.
// Restore the editor's state.
// concrete commands to provide their own implementations.
// the command changes the editor's state.
// The concrete commands go here.
// doesn't change the editor's state.
// long as the method returns true.
// The undo operation is also a command.
// The global command history is just a stack.
// Push the command to the end of the history array.
// Get the most recent command from the history.
// execution to the editor's methods.
// object and executes it.
// how to undo its own action.
Use the Command pattern when you want to parametrize objects with operations.
The Command pattern can turn a specific method call into a stand-alone object. This change opens up a lot of interesting uses: you can pass commands as method arguments, store them inside other objects, switch linked commands at runtime, etc.
Here's an example: you're developing a GUI component such as a context menu, and you want your users to be able to configure menu items that trigger operations when an end user clicks an item.
Use the Command pattern when you want to queue operations, schedule their execution, or execute them remotely.
As with any other object, a command can be serialized, which means converting it to a string that can be easily written to a file or a database. Later, the string can be restored as the initial command object. Thus, you can delay and schedule command execution. But there's even more! In the same way, you can queue, log or send commands over the network.
Use the Command pattern when you want to implement reversible operations.
Although there are many ways to implement undo/redo, the Command pattern is perhaps the most popular of all.
To be able to revert operations, you need to implement the history of performed operations. The command history is a stack that contains all executed command objects along with related backups of the application's state.
This method has two drawbacks. First, it isn't that easy to save an application's state because some of it can be private. This problem can be mitigated with the Memento pattern.
Second, the state backups may consume quite a lot of RAM. Therefore, sometimes you can resort to an alternative implementation: instead of restoring the past state, the command performs the inverse operation. The reverse operation also has a price: it may turn out to be hard or even impossible to implement.
Declare the command interface with a single execution method.
Start extracting requests into concrete command classes that implement the command interface. Each class must have a set of fields for storing the request arguments along with a reference to the actual receiver object. All these values must be initialized via the command's constructor.
Identify classes that will act as senders. Add the fields for storing commands into these classes. Senders should communicate with their commands only via the command interface. Senders usually don't create command objects on their own, but rather get them from the client code.
Change the senders so they execute the command instead of sending a request to the receiver directly.
Create commands, and associate them with receivers if needed.
Create senders, and associate them with specific commands.
Single Responsibility Principle. You can decouple classes that invoke operations from classes that perform these operations.
Open/Closed Principle. You can introduce new commands into the app without breaking existing client code.
You can implement deferred execution of operations.
You can assemble a set of simple commands into a complex one.
The code may become more complicated since you're introducing a whole new layer between senders and receivers.
Handlers in Chain of Responsibility can be implemented as Commands. In this case, you can execute a lot of different operations over the same context object, represented by a request.
However, there's another approach, where the request itself is a Command object. In this case, you can execute the same operation in a series of different contexts linked into a chain.
You can use Command and Memento together when implementing "undo". In this case, commands are responsible for performing various operations over a target object, while mementos save the state of that object just before a command gets executed.
Prototype can help when you need to save copies of Commands into history.


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Private Tallahatchie prison to house 1,350 federal detainees
by Michelle Liu June 27, 2018 June 6, 2019
The Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility, shown Wednesday, July 21, 2004, in Tutwiler, Miss., was the scene of an uprising from Colorado prisoners one day after a similar riot at a private prison run by the same Tennessee company near Olney Springs, Colo., prison officials said. There were no injuries.
A privately owned prison in Tallahatchie County will soon house up to 1,350 prisoners on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service.
Nashville-based CoreCivic announced earlier this month that it had entered a new, two-year contract with the U.S. Marshals Service beginning June 14 to place detainees in the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility located in Tutwiler.
"The U.S. Marshals Service has experienced an increasing need for detention capacity as its average daily prisoner population has increased throughout the past year," said Damon Hininger, president and CEO of CoreCivic, in a statement.
"Our Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility has the available capacity to accept detainee populations quickly due to our existing staff of experienced, well-trained corrections professionals. We are pleased to provide the Marshals with immediate capacity to assist the agency as it carries out its critical public safety mission."
CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, has owned the facility since 2000. The company is one of the country's two largest correctional firms and the company has prospered in recent years as President Donald Trump has promised a tough-on-crime agenda.
Shares of CoreCivic stock rose 3.5 percent last week on the day Trump signed the executive order ending migrant family separations at the border. Since April, the company, which also donated to the president's inaugural committee, has seen its stock rise 20 percent since April 2.
CoreCivic did not respond to requests for clarification about who would be housed at the prison. A U.S. Marshals Service spokesperson also would not confirm who would be held at the Tallahatchie County facility.
In a recent report by the investment bank SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, analysts said the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy toward migrants crossing the border will also prove profitable for private prison companies like CoreCivic. The subsequent rise in immigrant detainees could allow them to bypass the usual "cumbersome and lengthy public processes" that accompany contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Marketwatch reported June 25.
CoreCivic operates one other prison in Mississippi, the 2,232-bed Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, under a contract with the federal Bureau of Prisons. The federal prison bureau also operates a facility in Yazoo County.
During a 2004 riot at the Tallahatchie prison, inmates lit mattresses, clothing and a portable toilet on fire, leading the private operator to add 25 guards to the facility, the Associated Press reported at the time.
In May 2012, prisoners rioted at the Adams County Correctional Center, taking guards hostage and injuring other inmates, resulting in the death of one correctional officer. Several inmates have since been convicted for their roles in the incident.
In 2013, CoreCivic (then CCA) lost its contract with the state of Mississippi to operate the 1,000-bed Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. The contract was awarded to Utah-based private operator MTC instead, which now remains the only prison contractor for state-owned facilities.
According to the BOP website, the majority of inmates in contract prisons like the Adams County facility are "sentenced criminal aliens who may be deported upon completion of their sentence."
On June 23, prison officials in South Carolina announced that 48 prisoners they characterized as disruptive would be moved to the Tallahatchie County facility, the Associated Press reported.
On a daily basis in 2017, the U.S. Marshals Service held an average of 50,532 prisoners, some 9,095 of which were housed in private facilities. As of that year, the marshals had 13 contracts with privately managed detention facilities.
by Michelle Liu, Mississippi Today

Private Tallahatchie prison to house 1,350 federal detainees

by Michelle Liu, Mississippi Today
June 27, 2018

A privately owned prison in Tallahatchie County will soon house up to 1,350 prisoners on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Nashville-based CoreCivic announced earlier this month that it had entered a new, two-year contract with the U.S. Marshals Service beginning June 14 to place detainees in the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility located in Tutwiler.

"The U.S. Marshals Service has experienced an increasing need for detention capacity as its average daily prisoner population has increased throughout the past year," said Damon Hininger, president and CEO of CoreCivic, in a statement.

"Our Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility has the available capacity to accept detainee populations quickly due to our existing staff of experienced, well-trained corrections professionals. We are pleased to provide the Marshals with immediate capacity to assist the agency as it carries out its critical public safety mission."

CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, has owned the facility since 2000. The company is one of the country's two largest correctional firms and the company has prospered in recent years as President Donald Trump has promised a tough-on-crime agenda.

Shares of CoreCivic stock rose 3.5 percent last week on the day Trump signed the executive order ending migrant family separations at the border. Since April, the company, which also donated to the president's inaugural committee, has seen its stock rise 20 percent since April 2.

CoreCivic did not respond to requests for clarification about who would be housed at the prison. A U.S. Marshals Service spokesperson also would not confirm who would be held at the Tallahatchie County facility.

In a recent report by the investment bank SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, analysts said the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy toward migrants crossing the border will also prove profitable for private prison companies like CoreCivic. The subsequent rise in immigrant detainees could allow them to bypass the usual "cumbersome and lengthy public processes" that accompany contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Marketwatch reported June 25.

CoreCivic operates one other prison in Mississippi, the 2,232-bed Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, under a contract with the federal Bureau of Prisons. The federal prison bureau also operates a facility in Yazoo County.

During a 2004 riot at the Tallahatchie prison, inmates lit mattresses, clothing and a portable toilet on fire, leading the private operator to add 25 guards to the facility, the Associated Press reported at the time.

In May 2012, prisoners rioted at the Adams County Correctional Center, taking guards hostage and injuring other inmates, resulting in the death of one correctional officer. Several inmates have since been convicted for their roles in the incident.

In 2013, CoreCivic (then CCA) lost its contract with the state of Mississippi to operate the 1,000-bed Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. The contract was awarded to Utah-based private operator MTC instead, which now remains the only prison contractor for state-owned facilities.

According to the BOP website, the majority of inmates in contract prisons like the Adams County facility are "sentenced criminal aliens who may be deported upon completion of their sentence."

On June 23, prison officials in South Carolina announced that 48 prisoners they characterized as disruptive would be moved to the Tallahatchie County facility, the Associated Press reported.

On a daily basis in 2017, the U.S. Marshals Service held an average of 50,532 prisoners, some 9,095 of which were housed in private facilities. As of that year, the marshals had 13 contracts with privately managed detention facilities.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Michelle Liu was a 2018 corps member for Report for America, a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms. She covered criminal justice issues across the state from June 2018 until May 2020. Prior to joining the Mississippi Today team, her work appeared in the New Haven Independent.
More by Michelle Liu


text:
Different Strokes 1998 American erotic drama film
Different Strokes (also titled Different Strokes: The Story of Jack and Jill...and Jill) is a 1998 erotic drama film about a love triangle involving a...
Different Strokes (also titled Different Strokes: The Story of Jack and Jill...and Jill) is a 1998 erotic drama film about a love triangle involving a young couple and another woman. Written and directed by Michael Paul Girard, the film stars Dana Plato, Landon Hall and Bentley Mitchum. The film's title is an allusion to Plato's fame from the TV series, Diff'rent Strokes. It was Plato's first film appearance since 1992, and would be her second to last film before her death in 1999.
Nathan Rabin gave the film a harsh review, stating, "The shamelessly titled Different Strokes (...) lacks anything resembling even community-theater-level acting", concluding the film "is notable mainly for its aggressive lack of shame. From its title to its threadbare plot to its community-access-level production values, the film reeks of crass exploitation."
Delta of Venus 1995 American erotic drama film
Hotel Desire (2011) | German erotic drama film | 18+
There's Something About Mary 1998 Film | Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller
Full Free Erotic Horror Movie - Bound 2015 American drama (erotic thriller film)
Therese and Isabelle 1968 American romantic erotic drama film
The Muthers (2004) Erotic Movie Action, Film Drama english
Goddess || Indian Lesbian Short Film || LGBT Drama Film in Hindi with Eng Sub
Drama korean erotic movie lezbiyenler +18 erotik film izle +18
I Like to Play Games 1995 American erotic drama film
Full Drama Romantic Brizilianb erotic film EU 1987


The timing seemed to be far too precise to be coincidental. After diplomatic negotiations that required a conversation between the French foreign minister and Secretary of State Colin Powell and a visit from France's Washington ambassador to the U.S. deputy national security adviser, arrangements were finally made for President Bush to receive a phone call from French President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday. It was their first conversation in more than two months. The White House described the chat as "businesslike."
Speaking of business, France's major business federation, the Movement of French Enterprise (Medef), also addressed the bilateral relationship the very same day, declaring that Americans displeased with French obstructionism "must keep products and services of our enterprises outside their quarrel." In other words, despite being appalled by M. Chirac's unrelenting efforts to protect Saddam Hussein from the consequences of his behavior, Medef insists that American consumers must continue to buy French products. To their credit, many Americans disagree, and have unilaterally exercised their right to boycott French goods. They have done so to such an extent that France's principal business federation has literally begged them to stop.
A quick review of U.S.-French trade and the French economy confirms why Medef is so alarmed at the growing American consumer boycott. Had it not been for France's $10 billion per year trade surplus with the United States over the past three years (compared to a U.S. trade surplus of $2 billion 10 years earlier), the weak and rapidly deteriorating French economy would be much weaker today and would have deteriorated even more rapidly in recent years.
U.S. travel expenditures in France and passenger fares averaged nearly $5 billion in 2000 and 2001, but American tourism in France is now down 20 percent. French wines are disappearing from retailers' floors, while the No. 1 U.S. importer of French wines reports orders down 10 percent over the past two months.
Appropriately, the American consumer boycott movement germinated without the encouragement of the White House, whose free-trade credentials remain much stronger than France's, by the way. As hardy advocates of free trade ourselves, we welcome the absence of U.S. governmental interference, while heartily endorsing the newfound preferences of American consumers for non-French wines and non-French vacation destinations. As for the growing inventories of French perfumes, perhaps local marketers can devise an ad campaign to expand demand from Frenchmen who could use a squirt or two.
A number of importers of French goods have reported losses of $500,000 and more already. One female French importer has tried reason, saying that we will lose American jobs. She has a point, but if she cared, those products and jobs would've alreay been in the States to begin with. She took a gamble, as import/export often can be, and she's taking a pretty big hit. 50% losses in two months is a big hit, isn't it? I hate to see people outta work, but this has gone beyond governments to control. The American people are about half mad over what the French have done and said.
Canada has taken a similar hit to their export trade with the US. and tourism as well.


Does this house look familiar?
Last time I was here the skies were blue, the sedum was blooming and the bare spots were filled with aeoniums, sound familiar? Now the sky is PNW grey and the tenders have all been lifted for the winter.
Here! I ended my last post about this garden saying I hoped to be invited back to see how his porch greenhouse turned out, and here I am. Look at all those happy plants!
Dale, the homeowner, contacted Cyclone Canvas (they custom design exterior boat covers, car covers, and equipment covers for marine, residential, and commercial applications) to create these zippered panels which fit over a metal framework he built himself. Since they are zippered he can open them up on warm days in the spring.
The plants are very happy inside and the light is wonderful (if you page up you can see the ceiling is a translucent material).
In this shot you can see a bit of the metal frame and how the panels are connected.
The poinsettia add a festive holiday touch!
Dale asked if I knew why this happens on Cycads, the yellowing of blades in random spots. Anyone know?
Just as I started to ask if he ever broke off bits of the plants when digging and repotting we moved outside, beyond the patio enclosure, to a second space built over a planting bed off the back of the garage. Here is where the broken pieces go, to root and grow into new plants.
From the opposite side, as you can see several go right into the ground.
That red banana must have been fun to move!
The fountain is new since my last visit, a Craigslist find.
It's the perfect size for this pond, which will be filled with water-loving plants come spring.
Finally I had to share these little guys, don't you just love them?
Thanks Dale, for inviting me back to see your garden in the winter. And kudos to you and Cyclone Canvas for creating such a fabulous home for your plants over the winter months.
That's a great way to enclose plants in the winter. Poor agave, at least there is a spare. I have noticed that the variegated ones are less tolerant of cold even in our more hospitable and drier climate.
Interestingly, I just visited with a gardener in my neighborhood who had similar roll up sides made for her porch. I think the guy she used makes them for restaurants. Love this idea.
I can imagine setting out in that enclosed space on a sunny day would be just about heaven!
That setup is fabulous! I love how the plastic is even color-coordinated with the house. I deliberately left a handful of little tender succulents out as well. They have a major case of the uglies now.
The color was so well chosen it just all blends, the exact opposite of the ubiquitous blue tarp.
That set up is amazing and such a clever solution. Here a lot of people wrap their tenders with straw or bubble wrap end fleece.
I've seen a lot of straw used here too, to protect the pseudo-stems on bananas usually. This way, to be able to enjoy your plants all winter, what a treat.
Wow, that is the most esthetically pleasing solution I've ever seen. I wonder how much it cost?
You know I believe he mentioned a figure (which I honestly can't remember) but I do recall thinking that it sounded very reasonable for the quality and quantity they did.
okay then. that's doing it right. impressive. love the follow up.
Maybe off the back of your new digs?
Loved the follow up, thank you!
You're very welcome thank you for stopping by!
Once again, I'm struck by the amount of work you face up that way getting ready for winter - and then again, for spring! I feel downright lazy by comparison.
He says just simple space heaters.
As always, this garden is a treat to see but yowsa, the cool covering is the bee's knees! Thanks for sharing Dale's great garden!
The bee's knees...you always make me smile Peter.
Good set up and blends in with the house almost seamlessly. Merry Christmas to you and Andrew!
The neighbors certainly are lucky to have such an aesthetically pleasing solution to look at all winter!