text:
Posts Tagged 'philosophy'
Picnicking in the Ruins
Posted in Film Reviews, tagged 1970s, Alexander Kaidanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Andrei Tarkovsky, drama, Nikolai Grinko, Ooh those Russians!, philosophy, SF, Stalker on April 29, 2019| Leave a Comment »
My good friend and occasional presence on the blog, Olinka, is keen to hang onto her Russian identity as far as possible, trying to speak the language and enjoy her culture whenever she can. Although Russian is one of my languages (just about), I haven't seen that many films made in it, which she seemed vaguely disappointed by when I mentioned that Mirror was one of the few Soviet-era movies I'd watched.
Perhaps as a result, a few weeks later she dropped me a line telling me about a new website she'd found hosting a large number of Russian-language films for streaming. 'You should watch сталкер,' she said.
'You what?'
'They have сталкер on the site. We were talking about it the other week.'
'I don't even know how you're pronouncing that. Stop talking in Cyrillic, please.'
'Oh, all right. They have Stalker. You know, the Tarkovsky film.'
This was of some interest to me, because I have been aware for some time of the fact that the USSR produced a number of noteworthy science fiction films. SF is, as you will be aware if you come here regularly, one of my few genuine passions, and this did feel like a real gap in my experience. I've seen Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, of course, but then that's not a particular achievement as it's one of the very few Soviet SF films to have any kind of profile in the west. One of the others, as you may have gathered, is Stalker, likewise made by Tarkovsky a few years later (1979, to be exact). I remember the first time it was shown on British TV, nearly ten years later – in the middle of the night, pretty much, with a somewhat ambivalent write-up in the TV listings – 'Either a cryptic SF parable or three men mucking about on some waste ground for two and a half hours, you decide,' was about the gist of it.
Certainly, Stalker does not resemble the kind of SF film routinely being made in the west at the tail end of the 1970s. Freely adapted by the Strugatsky brothers from their own novel Roadside Picnic, the film is set at some point in the future, in an unspecified nation – probably not Russia, given one of the characters refers to it as a 'small nation'. This kind of detail is not really important anyway. Soon we meet the protagonist, the stalker of the title (Alexander Kaidanovsky), who lives in fairly primitive circumstances, and not especially happily, with his wife (Alisa Friendlich) and child. He is about to embark on a dangerous and illegal undertaking, not for the first time, and she is not exactly happy. But he is insistent, for reasons which are not immediately apparent.
His clients are likewise left nameless: they are a writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and a scientist (Nikolai Grinko). The stalker is to lead them into the Zone, a quarantined area kept under military guard. Years earlier, a meteorite (or something else from deep space…) fell in this region, ever since which it has been sealed off and uninhabited. The story goes that somewhere in the Zone is a room containing some agency which grants the deepest desires of anyone entering it, and the stalker has been paid to take the writer and the scientist to this place…
The early sequences of Stalker are (perhaps intentionally) misleading – long, slow scenes of the stalker getting out of bed and quarrelling with his wife, before talking to the others. Tarkovsky reportedly said he wanted the opening of the film to be even slower and duller so that 'people who walked into the wrong theatre' had plenty of time to leave before the film properly got going (inasmuch as Stalker ever gets going, as it is traditionally understood). That said, these scenes are followed by the trio penetrating the security around the Zone, dodging armed guards and other security measures, and for a moment it almost seems like the film is going to be conventional.
But of course it isn't. Entry into the Zone provides one moment of profound cinematic shock, as the toxic sepia of the opening scenes is replaced by beautiful, natural colour, and also marks the film adopting the mode it will maintain for most of the rest of its duration: the three men travelling through the Zone towards the room, looking at the landscape around them while discussing where they are and their reasons for being there.
As you can probably tell, this is another of those SF films which doesn't really resemble SF for the vast majority of its length: particularly to a viewer who has come to primarily associate SF with films in the action-adventure idiom. There is not much action-adventure here, no laser guns, no spaceships, no robots or aliens – the alien influences of the Zone are left unseen, perceived only by the stalker. Until the closing moments of the film, I was half-expecting this to function wholly as a kind of psychological study of the stalker's fractured mind, with the curious properties of the Zone a figment of his imagination. But it seems not: there is something strange at the heart of the Zone, the question being what this anomaly is.
As has been said so often that it has practically become a truism, SF films do not exist to predict the future, but more to comment on the present. Nevertheless, films do occasionally come along which feel almost eerie in their prescience: for instance, there's Starship Troopers, which is one of the best commentaries of the aftermath of September 11th 2001 ever made, even though it was produced in 1996. And there's a sense in which Stalker feels inextricably connected to the Chernobyl disaster, even though it preceded those events by six or seven years. The Zone of the film has the feeling of a post-industrial, post-apocalyptic waste, for all that its colours are more natural than those of the wider world. Detritus of modern society is everywhere – syringes are particularly prominent – although there are signs of nature reclaiming the area. It is perhaps worth mentioning that many people have suggested that Stalker was in fact filmed on a dumping ground for chemical waste, and that this was a contributing factor in Tarkovsky's own premature death; worth mentioning, too, that guides who lead visitors into the real-life exclusion zone around the Chernobyl reactor refer to themselves as stalkers.
There is something profoundly bleak and dismal about the Zone in the film, although quite what it represents is left as ambiguous as much of the rest of Stalker. That the film is intended to be symbolic is established early on, with the switch from sepia to full colour and the fact that none of the characters are named. The writer is hoping the room will give him inspiration, while the scientist is hoping that understanding the room and the Zone will bring him acclaim and respect from his peers (or so he initially claims, anyway). Or, as some have suggested, the two characters represent the artistic and the scientific perspectives on life, neither of which proves fully compatible with the reality of the Zone. What, then of the stalker himself?
It seems to me that this is ultimately a film about spirituality and faith, which is a very audacious choice of theme for a Soviet film and may explain why Stalker is quite as oblique as it is. The others have to place their faith in the stalker, who himself seems to have an almost religious devotion to the room and what it represents: hope, perhaps, an escape from the material squalor of the world. Only those who have suffered can truly appreciate the room, he suggests, while those approaching it with impure motives will be punished. It's not even as if this interpretation of the film is buried particularly deeply: one poster for the film features a moment where one of the characters affects to wear a crown of thorns.
In the end, though, for all that not very much happens compared to more conventional films, Stalker is so dense in terms of its dialogue, themes and philosophy that it's entirely possible there are other interpretations with greater validity. It is not the kind of film you can watch once and then move on from – 'remember, when you watch Stalker, Stalker also watches you,' was Olinka's final word on the film, indicating a Tarkovsky-ish talent for suggestive obliqueness. Possibly the clues are all there in the closing scenes of the film, which are strikingly different in style – one character makes a lengthy, casual speech to the camera, there is a sudden display of superhuman faculties from a relatively minor character described as a 'Zone mutant'. This is a film to be absorbed and reflected upon rather than watched in the conventional sense. Like the Zone, it resolutely keeps its secrets and demands a leap of faith from those who would approach it. Whether Stalker sufficiently rewards the experience of attempting to decipher it is probably up to the individual viewer, but it is a striking, unforgettable experience nevertheless.
Posted in Idle musings, Politics, tagged philosophy, pie, ranting on December 15, 2014| 10 Comments »
A restaurant, early November 2014:
'Ah, m'sieur, I see you have finished. Was everything to your satisfaction?'
'Um, well, no, not really…'
'I am most sorry to hear that. What was the problem?'
'Well, you know me, you know how much I love the Special Famous Pie. I've been eating it for decades, after all…'
'Mmm-hmmm?'
'Well – I couldn't help noticing – you've changed some of the apple in the Special Famous Pie to blackberries.'
'Well, as I am sure m'sieur knows, the recipe for Special Famous Pie is constantly evolving…'
'Oh, sure, I know. Watching it evolve and become more sophisticated down the years is part of the pleasure, and I know that the way you change the kind of apple you use for the main filling is an essential part of what makes it Special Famous Pie.'
'And so what is the problem…?'
'Well, Special Famous Pie is apple pie. If you start putting different fillings in it's not really the same pie, is it?'
'Well, sir, I have to say that the new pie is very popular with many people. You may have seen a number of recent blog posts with names like Why Special Famous Pie Could and Should Be Made With Blackberries. I should say that we are probably going to change all the apple to blackberries in the not too distant future. '
'You are? Why in God's name would you do that?'
'Oh, I'm sorry, sir, I'd no idea you were that type of person.'
'What type of person?'
'The type who is prejudiced against blackberries.'
'I'm not prejudiced against blackberries, I just don't want them in an apple pie. I want apple in my apple pie.'
'Yes, m'sieur, but it's not called apple pie. It's called Special Famous Pie. It doesn't have to have apples in it, don't you see?'
'You've been making Special Famous Pie for over fifty years, and it's always, always had apples in it. You can't suddenly change the heart of the recipe and claim it's the same thing.'
'Well, m'sieur, you must recall that Special Famous Pie was invented many years ago, when we lived in an apple-dominated culture, and blackberries have for a long time been under-represented in restaurants…'
'So make more blackberry desserts. It doesn't mean you have to put blackberries in the apple pie. It is possible to have both, you know.'
'Ah yes, but making our Special Famous apple pie using blackberries will be an important statement of principle.'
'Which principle would that be?'
'That apples and blackberries are equally good.'
'No, the statement you're making is that apples and blackberries are identical, which they are plainly not to anyone with taste buds and a brain. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but they are fundamentally different things.'
'M'sieur, it's very important to have more blackberries in restaurants.'
'And I'm not arguing with you, but as well as Special Famous Pie you make a lot of other bland and rather dreary apple dishes – you invent a new one every couple of years. Why not stop making those and try making a new blackberry dish instead?'
'Well, those dishes are not as popular or important as the Special Famous Pie. Also, making an apple dish with blackberries sends an important message that the two of them are of equal importance.'
'I think it's sending the message that you're wilfully trying to ignore the fact that apples and blackberries are two different things. Also that there's something wrong with apple pie that can only be fixed by making it with blackberries. Which isn't really much of a fix at all as you're no longer making apple pie in any meaningful sense.'
'M'sieur, we are not changing anything. It will have the same name, it will be cooked in the same oven, most of the same ingredients will be same, it will still be a delicious fruit-based dessert -'
'Yes, but it was conceived as an apple pie, it became popular as an apple pie, it has five decades of accreted history and traditions as an apple pie, and making it without apple basically means you are making a different pie!!!'
'The new style Special Famous Pie is going to be a delicious pie, sir.'
'Yes, I'm sure it will be very popular with people who have it as an article of faith that there is no actual difference between different kinds of fruit. And I suppose there's even a chance that it will be a good pie. But it won't actually be Special Famous Pie, because that's made with apple. That's an essential part of the character.'
'The character, sir?'
'The character of the pie, I mean. What you're talking about is a new pie with a completely different character. I can't believe you're doing this. You wouldn't do this to any other dish.'
'Well, that's what makes Special Famous Pie so special, sir, that we can do this to it. No other pie has both a tradition of regularly changing its recipe and is so non-specific about its ingredients.'
'You mean that because it isn't specifically called Special Famous Apple Pie, the apple which is the main ingredient is somehow dispensable? That's nonsense. You have no idea about what makes Special Famous Pie work.'
'Well, perhaps, but we are in charge of it and we can do what we like. In the end it is only a pie, after all.'
'Maybe so, but it's still a pie I love and it makes me very angry to see it mucked about with this way. If there is no place for traditional Special Famous Pie with apples in it I'd rather you just stopped making it entirely than carried on with this slightly absurd travesty of a pie.'
'Well, m'sieur, look at it this way: if the new style pie fails we can always go back to making the old pie. I expect we will alternate between apple and blackberry fillings anyway, in future.'
'But – but – you're still making two different kinds of pie and pretending they're the same one. You're still ignoring how the world actually works. Apples and blackberries are two different things.'
'I'm sorry, sir, I will have to ask you to keep that kind of opinion to yourself in a public restaurant from now on.'
'From now on? You actually think I'm going to carry on eating here?'
'Well, m'sieur, you said yourself you have been eating and enjoying Special Famous Pie for decades, so of course you will carry on eating it, no matter what we do to it…'
'No! No! Have you been listening to me? It's not the same pie any more, no matter what anyone says. I'm damned if I'm going to eat blackberry pie and pretend it's sort-of-like-apple just because you tell me there's no difference. If I can't get proper Special Famous Pie, I'll take my custom elsewhere, thank you very much.'
'Ah well. We will see you again, when we change back to apple for a bit.'
'I think you presume too much of my loyalty. This whole situation makes me very, very angry. Can I speak to the head chef, please?'
'Alas, m'sieur, Mr Moffat is out to lunch.'
'No kidding.'
Being and Time (Lords)
Posted in Book Reviews, tagged Courtland Lewis, Doctor Who and Philosophy, Paula Smithka, philosophy on June 15, 2014| 2 Comments »
As even the most cursory look around this blog will reveal, I have a lot of time for Doctor Who. I also have a lot of time for philosophy, having spent four years studying it (at least in theory). The suggestion to the effect that science fiction is the storytelling of philosophy seems to make a lot of sense to me, but as a fan of both I would say that, wouldn't I? (I suppose, by the way, this might mean I have to review my default 'Doctor Who is more fantasy than SF' position.)
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of Doctor Who and Philosophy, edited by Courtland Lewis and Paula Smithka, in my local bookshop. So many learned tomes about the series have come out in the last few years that it's easy to lose track of them, which is the only excuse I can offer. This, by the way, is – I kid you not – is #55 in the Popular Culture and Philosophy series, ranging from the distinctly intriguing (Philip K Dick and Philosophy) to the wild-horses-couldn't-drag-me-near-it (SpongeBob SquarePants and Philosophy).
In terms of space-time co-ordinates, Doctor Who and Philosophy emanates from the North American zone at some point in 2010: Matt Smith is referenced, but not in detail. This is more of a general look at the Who/philosophy intersection, rather than particular analysis of individual stories. The question, I suppose, that one might want to ask is this: do the essays in this book try to use philosophy to establish a deeper understanding of Doctor Who, or do they use examples from Doctor Who to illustrate some key philosophical problems?
The latter is probably more useful for a general audience, and perhaps easier for the writers, too, but how many members of the general audience are likely to pick up a book entitled Doctor Who and Philosophy in the first place? Anyway, it's what the majority of the contributors here have chosen to do. Just flicking through this book one comes across arresting line after arresting line – 'If John Stuart Mill had designed the Cybermen…', 'the Master, as a personification of the Will, becomes fully part of our phenomenal world', and 'Is the Doctor rigid or non-rigid?' (as an old school fan, I naturally think he is permanently non-rigid). Some of the Doctor Who references are, well, just plain wrong – one contributor claims Colin Baker appeared in The Invasion of Time, another gets Serial B from 1963 mixed up with Serial NNN from 1972, though given the historic confusion over what B is called this is understandable – which suggests that the writers here are better versed in philosophy than in the series.
The essays themselves are a really mixed bunch, and run the gamut from metaphysics and ontology, through ethics and aesthetics, to a little bit of cultural theory. I have to say that the actual quality of the essays is a little variable too. One problem is that several people choose to cover the same ground. The thematic organisation of the book thus results in the reader being confronted with four essentially very similar essays straight off the bat – all of them deal with the knotty problem of what constitutes personal identity, most of them drawing on the same arguments from Locke and so on, with particular reference to the issue of what exactly it is that makes the first and the twelfth Doctors the same person. Any one of these, alone, would cover the topic very satisfactorily – encountering the same ideas over and over again is really just a bit of a slog.
Past this, though, there is some good stuff on the philosophical definition of specieshood, also causality and the philosophy of mathematics, even if some of the Doctor Who references feel a little laboured. A lengthy run of articles on the Doctor's ethics (often compared with those of the Master) proves surprisingly heavy-going, but then again as these make frequent reference to Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche perhaps one shouldn't be too surprised. A piece on the morality underpinning the 'choice' of the Doctor and Rose to part company just comes across as an attempt to provide a fig-leaf for some serious 'shipping – it didn't make me reappraise their relationship, but it did bring home just how shonkily written much of Army of Ghosts/Doomsday is. Another attempts to explain why the Angels are the most horrific Doctor Who monster, which is rather begging the question, but rather than the obvious answer (Blink is simply a very well-directed and brilliantly written episode) opts for a laborious trek through notions of personhood and coercion. Robin Bunce's analysis of the Daleks as antagonists is good, but limited to their first, uncharacteristic appearance, while Deborah Pless' look at the series as a post-imperial cultural artefact starts promisingly, until startling quotes like 'the companions prior to [Romana] had largely been attractive but stupid women', 'the Doctor became the hero of every man, and Romana that of every woman [in Britain]' leads one to suspect that this essay has been submitted not just from the USA, but some parallel dimension where Williams-era Doctor Who has a considerably greater cachet.
So it's a mixed bag all told. Some of the essays are genuinely interesting and thought-provoking, others are just hard work. A tiny minority caused a bit of teeth-gritting and grumbling, but then the same could be said for many recent episodes of the TV show. Open-minded Doctor Who fans should find something to enjoy here, though whether that's enough to justify the purchase I couldn't honestly say.
Less Perversion, More Ideas
Posted in Film Reviews, tagged 2013, metacinema, philosophy, Slavoj Zizek, Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology on October 11, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Different films are pitched towards different audiences, obviously; and some audiences are narrower than others. Presently bothering the cinema-going audience are early runners from the 'we'd quite like to win an award' constituency pitching for a sophisticated mainstream audience, various genre movies gunning for their usual crowds, and a few holdovers from the summer season which nobody has much faith in, and which will be very grateful for the custom of anyone who bothers to turn up.
And then there are films which are so super-specialised in their demographic that any cinema release they get is basically an advertising stunt to generate publicity for the fact they are simultaneously available on-line. This kind of tactic apparently worked quite well for A Field in England earlier this year (a film I was sorry to miss) and no doubt it will also pay some sort of dividend for its latest adopter, Sophie Fiennes' A Pervert's Guide to Ideology.
Hello to everyone who's been googling 'perversion' and has ended up here in a terrible search-engine-related mishap. This page is probably not for you, but thanks for stopping by anyway. Fiennes' movie is short on perverts but long on ideology; in fact, it's really about nothing else.
This is not your traditional narrative movie. Nor is it really a documentary in the way the term is generally understood. It is essentially an illustrated lecture by the Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst and Marxist Slavoj Zizek, concerning the nature of ideology and its place in our lives. The illustrations take the form of excerpts from various movies, some obscure, others exceedingly well-known.
For instance, proceedings kick off with Zizek concerning himself with John Carpenter's They Live, an inarguably subversive Hollywood movie about the conceptual underpinnings and power structures of modern life – we don't get to see all of the famous six-minute fist fight which occurs midway through the film, but enough to get a flavour of it. Given They Live's central conceit – that it's impossible to recognise an illusion if it comprises the whole of your frame of reference – it's easy to see its relevance to the topic.
However, from here Zizek heads off into the heart of The Sound of Music and particularly the Mother Superior's song 'Climb Every Mountain', which for him is essentially about the institutional facilitation of sexual hedonism by the Catholic Church. (And I thought it was just about the uselessness of holding sing-songs as a method of fending off a fascist takeover.)
And so on, and so on – this is quite a long piece covering a lot of territory, and the films co-opted into it range from Jaws to The Fall of Moscow (a piece of Stalinist propaganda from 1949 I'd honestly never heard of). Most of the movie is made up of clips, although there are occasional excursions into news footage, and numerous appearances by Zizek himself. These are artfully done so he appears to be speaking from the set of whichever film he's currently discussing (they never quite go the whole hog and Forrest Gump him into an actual clip), and this extends to matching the cinematography, and so on, too: for The Sound of Music section he's in the Mother Superior's study, dressed, rather implausibly, as a priest, For Triumph of the Will he's in black and white on Hitler's plane. Taste prevails, thankfully, when it comes to the section discussing The Last Temptation of Christ.
Zizek's English isn't quite perfect but it is extremely functional and his ideas are complex and challenging. If he has a central hypothesis he wants to communicate, then I'm not entirely sure what it is – though I must stress that this is more due to the sheer complexity of his arguments than the slightly stilted, heavily-accented nature of his speech, not to mention the fact that I saw this film while feeling a bit sleepy.
In general his thesis is more about the nature of ideology as a concept than the specifics of individual ideological systems – he seems to be arguing that they are all pretty much of a muchness anyway. His thoughts are clearly informed by his own Marxist beliefs and his psychoanalytical expertise – ideology is a set of values and strictures we feel compelled to adhere to, due to either fear of or respect for an entity he refers to as the Big Other, although whether this represents God, or public opinion, or tradition obviously varies between different systems of belief.
Different films are obviously the products of different ideologies and it's interesting that Zizek can look at two films as superficially different as The Fall of Moscow and Titanic and see such fundamental similarities between them. (Zizek's take on Titanic, by the way, is that it's a classic fable concerning the socio-cultural exploitation of the proletariat by a moribund bourgeoisie, and that rather than destroying the central romantic relationship, the collision with the iceberg actually brings about its apotheosis. Well, duh.) In the end, it's the individual moments of incisive, unorthodox analysis like this that I remember from the film, rather than its overall theme.
This is intellectual meat served pretty rare and the words 'this film isn't for everyone' never had a more appropriate subject. Quite what Sophie Fiennes' role in the project was, beyond making sure the backgrounds of Zizek's contributions match whatever film he's supposed to be appearing in, I'm not quite sure, because this comes across very much as a one-man show and vehicle for Slavoj Zizek and his ideas. It's really stretching a point to call this a film – even calling it a meta-film, a film about films, is questionable. Whatever it is, it's a piece of work about the philosophical and political foundations of how we view society and the world, and what we can learn about these things from watching movies. If you're interested in philosophy and the cinema, then this is a film for you. If neither of the foregoing apply, run a mile. But I rather enjoyed it.


This is a remix of just the bottom of RayGunProject BoogieBomb. This bottom is stripped for everything, leaving just the Arduino Nano and the LED's. It also features a slot for JST plug so it can be powered from a PSU.
I also left the code if you want to only use LED and not speaker and such. In the top of the code, change to how many LED your bomb is using.


text:
Kan. City Adds 10 Fire Trucks
June 25, 2014 • by Staff
Photo courtesy of City of Wichita
The Wichita Fire Department in Kansas recently put into service 10 new fire apparatus, nine new Pierce fire engines and a new ladder truck, at the city's 22 fire stations.
The new fire trucks replace an aging fleet. According to The Wichita Eagle, the engines were purchased for about $6.5 million through the city's 10-year capital improvement program.
The department utilizes a replacement plan based on age, mileage, and repair cost when determining how often replacement apparatus will be purchased.
"The acquisition of the new apparatus will help insure the emergency services in our community remains at a high level," Fire Chief Ronald Blackwell said in a release.
Read more about Fire Equipment Emergency Response Vehicles
The Postal Service expects to award contract(s) for production of its new delivery vehicles this summer.
Md. County Gets 25 New Fire Engines
Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Services in Maryland has a new fleet of 25 fire engines with smaller frames that can more easily maneuver through heavy traffic.
Ga. County Acquires Military Surplus Truck for Fire Use
Morgan County, Ga., Fire and Rescue has received a federal surplus military truck and generator worth $132,000 for just $200.
Dublin Expands CNG Snowplow Fleet
The City of Dublin, Ohio, has added four more snowplows to its fleet that run on compressed natural gas (CNG), with grant funding from the state.
Neb. Municipality Adds 7 New Fire Engines, Ending Apparatus Crisis
The City of Lincoln, Neb., has added seven new fire engines for $3.5 million. They replace aged units that have high mileage and need frequent repair.
San Diego Fire Rescue Debuts $20M Night-Flying Helicopter
The San Diego Fire-Rescue has added an S-70i Firehawk helicopter to its fleet, capable of flying at night and carrying and dropping 1,000 gallons of water in a single load.
W.V. City Adds 2 Pumper Trucks
The City of Charleston purchased two Pierce Arrow XT pumpers through a NASPO cooperative contract.
Fla. Fire Dept. Orders 4 Fire Suppression Helicopters
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue has signed a contract for four Leonardo AW139 Intermediate twin engine helicopters, which will be used for fire suppression, emergency medical services, and search and rescue.
California Will Stop Purchasing Vehicles From FCA, GM, Toyota
Beginning Jan. 1, 2020, California state agencies will only be able to purchase vehicles from OEMs that recognize the state's ability to set its own emission standards.
Acela Truck Company Adds GSA Listing
Acela Truck Company recently announced that its line of Monterra extreme-duty, high-mobility trucks has been approved by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Paul Newton Jr., a lawyer in Gulfport, Mississippi, sued Popeye's after he required emergency surgery to remove a chunk of fried chicken from his throat last November. He claims the fast-food restaurant was negligent and caused his near fatal accident because it didn't include a plastic knife along with the "spork" in his drive-through order.
Like "Learn to eat!", maybe?
"I continue to believe that the facts demonstrate an unsafe condition to the public that could easily be solved by the responsible parties at very little cost. I am hopeful that my filing of the court proceeding results in such remedial actions," Newton said.
Have you ever tried to cut chicken with a plastic knife? The next suit would argue that it's negligent to not to give out metal knives with chicken breasts. Then someone would cut themselves with the new knives, leading to another lawsuit. Or something.
Some lawyers are unable to process the concept that sometimes, people are responsible for their misfortunes. Companies have to pay to defend lawsuits like this one, or settle it. Then you and I have to pay more, or people lose their jobs, or both.
This is one area, incidentally, where the internet and social media improve society. Really bad lawsuits get nationwide attention, attaching a real cost to abuse of process. True, lawyers get unfairly criticized too, because there is a lot laymen don't know. Still, on balance it is a good thing that lawyers inclined to file suits like this one have to think twice.
I would settle for nothing less than a spork..
I guess "too much choking the chicken" for that lawyer. Somehow I think he got distracted and pigged out.
"Some lawyers are unable to process the concept that sometimes, people are responsible for their misfortunes." Just lawyers? I'd say at least fully half the American populous suffer from the same malady.
Is this worse or better than the guy eating the inedible thistle of the artichoke?
I say better, because THAT guy was a DOCTOR.
I had forgotten about that idiot. I agree: he was worse.
I was just reading of a lady and law firm suing Carnival Cruise Lines because she got hurt when her luggage tipped over and hit her. Her claim is that Carnival did not provide adequate personnel to handle her luggage for her (ie she had to move the luggage herself).


text:
Shell pledges long-term commitment to North Sea oil
Oil and gas production will continue in the North Sea for decades, the chairman of Shell UK has forecast.
Ed Daniels wants to set something straight. "There's a misperception that oil majors, Shell included, are not particularly interested in the North Sea," says the chairman of Shell UK. Photo: Ralph Hodgson
By Andrew Cave: 5 August 2013
Ed Daniels says in an interview in The Daily Telegraph that the UK arm of Royal Dutch Shell, will continue to have a major presence in North Sea production, despite suggestions by commentators that the larger companies will wind down their activities, leaving the area's mature oil and gas fields to niche specialist players and sovereign wealth funds.
"There's a misperception that oil majors, Shell included, are not particularly interested in the North Sea," Mr Daniels said. "Actually, that's just not true. We at Shell are a big North Sea producer today, representing 14pc of UK oil.
"We're investing £2bn a year in the North Sea, either in new developments or refurbishment of existing activities to re-life them for the next 10 and 20 years. We see that there is a material presence for Shell in the North Sea for years to come. I think the North Sea as a province has decades of activity."
His comments came as new research showed that 40pc of companies in the North Sea produce no oil. According to a study by advisory firm Hannon Westwood, of the 131 companies operating in the area, 55 have no reserves. The North Sea is set to produce just 1.5m barrels a day this year, a record low. At its peak, it produced 4.5m barrels annually.
However, Mr Daniels said Shell is making investments that are "20-plus years in duration". To encourage investment, he stressed that the UK needs a stable tax regime. "The 2011 raid on taxes was a real disappointment and very destabilising for long-term investments in the North Sea," he said. "I do believe that the Government has remedied that."
He also raised concerns about the Government's immigration policy, saying it was vital that universities are able to bring in talented students from overseas so companies can hire sufficiently skilled graduates.
"It does touch a little on the well rehearsed debate on immigration. For us it's about making sure the universities are allowed to bring in the students to bolster capability around innovation," he said. "We've made our views on that clear to the Government."
Ed Daniels: 'We see a presence for Shell in the North Sea for years to come'
Shell UK chairman urges stable tax regime as he worries about the UK economy, eurozone and bringing overseas staff to Britain
Ed Daniels wants to set something straight. "There's a misperception that oil majors, Shell included, are not particularly interested in the North Sea," says the chairman of Shell UK.
"Actually, that's just not true. We at Shell are a big North Sea producer today, representing 14pc of UK oil.
"We're investing £2bn a year in the North Sea, either in new developments or refurbishment of existing activities to re-life them for the next 10 and 20 years.
"We see that there is a material presence for Shell in the North Sea for the years to come. I think the North Sea as a province has decades of activity."
There's a proviso, of course. Oil and gas is a long-term business and the £10bn tax grab in the 2011 Budget led to warnings that the North Sea oil industry would reappraise investment decisions.
Last September, Chancellor George Osborne sweetened the pill with tax breaks to encourage investment in older oil and gas fields. However, Daniels wants to make clear the rules of engagement on the issue.
"We're making investments today that are 20-plus years in duration," he says. "For us to have the certainty that those investments are going to pay out for our shareholders, we need a stability in the tax regime and the 2011 raid on taxes was a real disappointment and very destabilising for long-term investments in the North Sea.
"I do believe that the Government has remedied that. There's the brownfield allowance and allowances around high-pressure and high-temperature fields, so the Government is putting the measures in place.
"When you're investing for such a long period of time, if you don't have the confidence in the stability of a taxation regime, it just becomes impossible for you to make those long-term commitments, which are absolutely critical for the vibrant investment we all want in the North Sea. We've made that absolutely crystal-clear to the Government."
Has Shell UK and its Anglo-Dutch parent Royal Dutch Shell threatened to take British jobs and investment elsewhere if it doesn't get enough UK Government support?
Daniels smoothes that question away with a line about threatening people not being a great negotiating strategy, or a good way to deal with one of the group's most important stakeholders.
Shell does hold a great deal of negotiating power, however, being one of the largest corporation taxpayers, as well as a significant collector of VAT, petroleum revenue tax in the North Sea and fuel duty.
Shell has other troubles right now. Last week, Royal Dutch Shell unveiled a 60pc drop in second-quarter profits to $2.4bn (£1.66bn) due to a $2.1bn write-down in the value of its shale oil and gas assets in North America and deteriorating security in Nigeria.
In May, investigators from the European Commission came calling at Daniels' London office as part of as an inquiry into allegations of price-rigging in the oil market.
He was away at the time and is not keen to talk about it, stating only that Shell is co-operating fully with the investigation. Shell's outgoing chief executive, Peter Voser, has said Shell has "nothing to hide".
Daniels is more interested in chatting about other challenges of Shell's UK business, which employs 6,500 workers, processes 35pc of the UK's gas and includes the headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell's downstream, treasury and global trading businesses. Globally, Royal Dutch Shell employs 92,000 people.
He's concerned about the UK economy. "It's fragile," he says. "I'm pleased to see positive signs. We're seeing a little bit more in terms of business confidence but I don't think it takes much to knock it. There isn't a robustness yet to the recovery."
Europe clearly also remains problematic and Daniels admits that Shell is "troubled by how flat some of the really big European economies are". "The eurozone has come out the intensive care phase," he says, "but you couldn't accuse it of being healthy."
Then there are the difficulties that Britain's immigration policies bring to importing skills and experience from overseas.
Daniels says part of the answer to UK oil and gas industry skill shortages is keeping schoolchildren, particularly girls, engaged in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and to encourage them to progress to degree level.
However, he adds: "The ability of universities and companies to bring in talent from around the world is important.
"It does touch a little on the well-rehearsed debate on immigration. For us it's about making sure the universities are allowed to bring in the students, the PhDs and the researchers to bolster capability around innovation.
"It's about enterprise and companies being able to bring in the right talent, if they can't find it locally, to be able to progress innovations. We've made our views on that clear to the Government. Getting the talented 10-year experienced chemical engineer is just very tough at the moment.
"In the oil industry, we have a huge bulge of retirements coming up and it is going to be a challenge in terms of how we recruit sufficient talent to meet the challenges of keeping the lights on, driving the world's energy system, addressing climate change and decarbonising the economy."
Daniels cites Shell's support of renewable energy projects, including its "Shell Springboard" awards scheme to encourage entrepreneurs in low-carbon energy technology. This year's winner was Vantage Power, a firm developing diesel-electric hybrid technology that can be retro-fitted to double-decker buses.
"There are very significant energy challenges facing the planet," says Daniels, "with projected growth of the global population from 7bn to 9bn by 2050 meaning that the world energy supply is going to have to double by then. At the same time, we have this enormous challenge around carbon change.
"There are 1m people employed in the UK in small and medium-size enterprises around low carbon technologies, which is as big as the financial sector.
"In the UK, the low-carbon technology economy is a £120bn market and globally it's a £4 trillion market by 2015. "Our research shows that these SMEs are twice as likely as other SMEs to have export customers.
Green technology is one of the sectors the Government is trusting to power Britain's growth. Does Daniels think it can meet this target? Daniels admits that bank funding for SMEs remains a "challenge".
"The Government is working on that through various schemes to try to unblock funding for SMEs," he says. Small businesses will be hoping Shell's continuing muscle in the UK economy can help produce some tangible improvements.
Ed Daniels CV
Job chairman of Shell UK.
Education masters degree in chemical engineering from Imperial College, London.
Career joined Shell in 1988 and has worked for the company in London, Singapore and the US.
Other roles Shell executive vice-president of global solutions downstream, board member of the Institution of Chemical Engineers and member of the CBI President's Committee.
Family married with three daughters.
Posted in: Daily Telegraph, Gas, Oil, Royal Dutch Shell Plc.
Tagged: North Sea Oil · Oil · Royal Dutch Shell Plc
← Ireland Digs Deep For Economic Recovery
Fracking By EOG, Shell Caused Damaging Tremors, Suit Says →
0 Comments on "Shell pledges long-term commitment to North Sea oil"


text:
July 28, 2013 by Dmitry Gorenburg
Eastern command exercises completed
A week ago, the Russian military completed the largest spot check exercise it has conducted since 1991. The MOD has put out some information on the scale and units involved. The slides were helpfully reproduced by Ruslan Pukhov in his blog. They are done in the usual Russian style — it's all about how many planes flew, how many tons of equipment were moved, etc. Nevertheless, there are some interesting tidbits. Here are some highlights.
The exercise involved 160,000 personnel from all three military branches. Ground forces from all four Eastern district armies and the 41st army of the Central district were involved, including 9 infantry brigades, the 18th artillery division (based in the Southern Kurils), a tank brigade, 2 air assault brigades, a naval infantry brigade, 5 signal brigades, 2 artillery brigades, 2 rocket brigades, 1 MRLS brigade, 2 air defense brigades, 2 NBC defense brigades, 4 logistics brigades, and 2 equipment storage bases. 12,000 vehicles were activated.
The air force activated 130 aircraft and helicopters from four commands (Long Range Aviation, Military-Transport Aviation, 2nd Air and Air Defense Forces Command — Yekaterinburg, 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command — Khabarovsk). The specific air force units involved were the 6952nd LRA Base from Amur Oblast, the 6955th MTA Base from Tver, the 6980th aviation base from Chelyabinsk, and the 6983rd aviation base from Primorskii Krai.
Naval participation included 70 ships from the 36th surface ship division, 165th surface ship brigade, 10th and 25th submarine divisions, 19th submarine brigade, 100th assault ship brigade, 114th coastal defense ship brigade, and the 520th independent coastal missile-artillery brigade.
One infantry brigade arrived by sea, while 30 transport aircraft moved 8,500 personnel over 167 flights. 1000 reservists were involved, from Primorsky Krai. 45 field control centers were activated, most at the brigade level. 8 UAVs completed 22 flights. One of the 12 long range aviation planes failed to complete (or maybe to start?) its flight.
The overall assessment of these exercises from the military has been largely positive, though some areas did come in for criticism. Yuri Borisov noted that 3-4% of vehicles broke down during the exercise, either because of errors made by the operators or because the equipment was old. This is not ideal, but is certainly a better statistic than in the bad old days a decade ago. Shoigu criticized the state of the communications system, noting that military communications are only 18% effective. It's not clear what that number actually means, but it's clearly not good. Marksmanship also came in for criticism, in part because of a lack of practice. He was pleased with military transportation, highlighting in particular that railroad transportation functioned at almost double the allotted rate of travel (1000km/day vs 600km/day). He also noted that changes may be made to the structure of the air force, primarily by dividing up the air bases that were created a few years ago and and re-opening some of the military airports closed by Serdyukov.
UPDATE: Aleksei Nikolskii wrote to say that Shoigu's statement on the communications systems being 18% effective referred to R&D efforts on C2 systems not producing results, rather than the systems' effectiveness during the exercise itself. He also notes that the actual number of troops involved was much lower. For each infantry brigade, only battalion-size tactical groups were mobilized, for other brigades, composite detachments were formed to represent each brigade. About 15,000 troops were moved by rail and aircraft (8,200 of these by air). Cooperation across military branches was problematic, with the naval infantry unit getting an unsatisfactory rating. The problems with firing accuracy were mostly among conscripts, who also were responsible for the lion's share of technical problems with equipment.
Posted in Russian military reform	| Tagged exercises, Far Eastern Military District, Ruslan Pukhov, Sergei Shoigu, Yuri Borisov | 5 Comments
MVMS-2013 naval salon prompts more reflections on the future of the Russian navy
There have been a number of interesting articles written on the future of the Russian Navy in conjunction with the naval salon in St. Petersburg earlier this month. I'll try to summarize the interesting points without repeating material found in my earlier articles on this topic.
The most recent bit of news is that the Russian navy is planning to order an additional three Talwar class (project 11356) frigates, on top of the six already in the works. The idea is that these are relatively capable ships that can be built and outfitted very quickly (at a rate of one per year for the construction). Three are currently under construction and according to the most recent reports, two more are to be laid down this year. These are well armed ships, comparable to the Sovremennyi class destroyers in armament, though more versatile. Whereas the original plan had been to deploy all six to the Black Sea Fleet, the current plan is to station the first three there while the next three would go to the Baltic Fleet. As Prokhor Tebin points out, this makes absolutely no sense. The Baltic Fleet should be the Russian Navy's lowest priority, focused primarily on testing new ships and training. Both the BSF and the Pacific Fleet are in much greater need of new ships of this type. But that sort of thing can be changed once the ships are actually ready for commissioning. The truly significant news is that three more such ships will be built in the near future and, unlike the more complicated Admiral Gorshkov class frigates, are likely to be put to use quite quickly.
Ilya Kramnik had an interesting summary of plans for the future that adds some information and analysis to what I've already discussed. He mentions plans for a new attack submarine that is expected to become the mainstay of the fleet for the next several decades. This will be a smaller and cheaper submarine than the Yasen class. It will combine the usual missions of protecting Russian and tracking foreign SSBNs. In other words, if we thinking of the Yasen as the Russian Seawolf, then this new class will be the Virginia. Plans call for 20 such submarines to be built by the end of the 2020s, with construction of the first sub to start in the next 5-7 years.
So if all the submarine plans are carried out, by 2030 the Russian Navy will get a total of 35-36 new nuclear submarines, including 8 Boreis, 7-8 Yasens, and up to 20 of the new class. The total cost would be 1.5 trillion rubles at current prices, not including expenses for modernizing existing submarines. Personally, I think this is overly ambitious. Even if we assume that the design process will proceed without delays and construction and construction does start in 2018 or thereabouts, I highly doubt that the Russian shipbuilding industry is capable of building 20 new submarines in 10-12 years. I realize that the submarine-building sector is the healthiest part of the industry, but there is just no record even in the industry's Soviet history of building two nuclear submarines of the same type per year. Even one would be ambitious, given recent history. I suppose it would be possible if the Amur shipyard was pressed into service, though my understanding is that it is not building submarines any more. Even if it were, it would take a lot to get that shipyard up to speed.
In addition to the new destroyer that we discussed last week, new plans for surface ships include a littoral combat ship. The design of the LCS has not been finalized and fairly non-traditional options such as a catamaran or trimaran are supposedly on the table. Industry representatives want to build 1-2 ships of the two best designs to test their capabilities and then select one for serial production. 35-40 such ships could be built for all four fleets, at a total cost of 250-280 billion rubles. Such pace of construction would be made possible by using multiple shipyards, including those in St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Komsomolsk-na-Amure, Zelenodolsk and possible Krasnoe Sormovo.
Discussions are still under way about the design of a potential new aircraft carrier. Photos of a model that represents current thinking show a classical design, equipped with a ski jump and a catapult, and with an estimated length of 320 meters and 80,000 tons displacement. While discussions continue, the Admiral Kuznetsov will remain in service. Its modernization, originally scheduled to begin in 2012 will be postponed until the second half of this decade.
The main problem with all these plans is the continued weakness of the shipbuilding sector. In a separate article, Kramnik mentions the complexity of new equipment, including radars, control systems, hydroacoustics, and weapons. He notes that this has led to delays in construction of the Admiral Gorshkov class frigates and the Yasen class submarines, among others. (I would also add the Lada class diesel submarines to this list.) There are also complications resulting from the merger of many disparate plants, in varying condition and with different ways of doing business, into the United Shipbuilding Corporation. This has resulted in various problems with finances and personnel that presently can only be resolved through "manual control."
Igor Zakharov, the vice president of United Shipbuilding Corporation, argues that the way to solve the sector's problems is to give the chief designer of any major shipbuilding project both personal responsibility before the client and the right to ensure that sub-contractors fulfill their obligations on time. He doesn't spell out what mechanisms would be used to ensure the latter, but he does call for the introduction of arbitration mechanisms to resolve conflicts between industry and the MOD over issues such as pricing.
He also notes that Russian shipbuilding needs to adapt to the modern world, where hulls can last 50 years or more while electronics and armaments become outdated much more quickly. This requires ships to be built in a way that allows for easy modernization and replacement of weapons and equipment. Soviet ships, by contrast, did not consider the possibility of such updates, making their modernization in the new environment very costly and time consuming. New capital ships will be built in small series. Furthermore, rapid advances in electronics will require that even these series be divided into sub-series that will maintain unity of ship design while updating electronics and weaponry. Some systems and weapons can be used across ship classes. We are already seeing elements of these ideas in systems such as the multipurpose shipboard firing system (УКСК) and in the modular construction of the latest classes of Russian corvettes and frigates.
These are good ideas. The problem is the extent to which they are stymied by the conglomerate nature of United Shipbuilding and by the difficulty its personnel and business structures face in adapting to the new way of doing business. Over time, I imagine the shipbuilding industry will improve. But time is needed, while the navy is providing the industry with somewhat unrealistic timetables for the construction of new ships. The result will be more delays, though probably not as bad as in the recent past.
Posted in Russian military reform, Russian Navy	| Tagged Igor Zakharov, Ilya Kramnik, MVMS-2013, Prokhor Tebin, Russian Navy, Talwar frigate, United Shipbuilding Corporation | 7 Comments
Alternative designs for the new Russian destroyer
Just a quick note today. My friend and colleague Ilya Kramnik plots out four alternative designs for the new Russian destroyer currently in the works.
1) 7500-9000 tons, ~160 meters long, gas turbine CODAG propulsion, top speed of >30 knots
Equipped with 1x1x130mm gun, 2 CIWS complexes, 32 universal shipboard firing complexes (Kalibr/Oniks) and 64 Redut shipboard missiles, 2 Paket-NK anti-submarine torpedo systems, 2 helicopters
2) 9500-11500 tons, ~190 meters long, gas turbine CODAG propulsion, top speed of approximately 30 knots
Equipped with 1x2x130mm guns, 4 CIWS complexes, 48 universal shipboard firing complexes (Kalibr/Oniks) and 80 Redut shipboard missiles, 2 Paket-NK anti-submarine torpedo systems, 2 helicopters
3) 12,500-14,700 tons, ~200 meters long, either gas turbine CODAG or nuclear propulsion, top speed of approximately 30 knots
All four versions would have the Sigma-E combat management system and Poliment active phased array radar. The largest of these options is pretty close to a cruiser, I suppose.
Posted in Russian Navy	| Tagged destroyers, Ilya Kramnik | 16 Comments
July 8, 2013 by Dmitry Gorenburg
Russian MOD activity plan for 2013-2020 published
The Russian Ministry of Defense recently published its activity plan for the rest of the decade. Everyone who can read Russian should go look at the handy summary in table form. There's a lot of information there. I'll try to pick out some of the highlights here.
The first section covers personnel. Here we find out concrete plans for the number of contract soldiers per year. The numbers are as follows: 2013: 241,000; 2014: 295,000; 2015: 350,000; 2016: 400,000; 2017 and thereafter: 425,000. I assume each figure is for the end of the year specified, though this is not clearly indicated. Contract soldiers are broken out into several categories. Submariners and paratroopers are to be fully staffed this year; Sergeants, combat units, special purpose brigades, and naval infantry in 2014; reconnaissance and artillery specialists in the Airborne Troops in 2015; various types of technical personnel in 2016, and positions tied to using complex and expensive weapons and equipment in 2017. Perhaps equally interesting are the goals for 2013 for those areas not fully staffed. Here we have sergeants and positions tied to using complex and expensive weapons and equipment at 75%, combat units and special purpose brigades at 60%, naval infantry at 40%, technical positions at 30%, and reconnaissance and artillery specialists in the Airborne Troops at 25%. Furthermore, there's yet another official admission that many military billets remain unfilled, with an announced target for filling all billets of 82% by the end of 2013 and 95-100% by the end of 2014.
The second section deal with modernization of armaments. Here it's probably easiest to just reproduce the table, with the labels translated.
submarines 47% 47% 51% 53% 59% 63% 67% 71%
surface ships 41% 42% 44% 47% 54% 59% 65% 71%
airplanes 23% 30% 37% 45% 55% 59% 67% 71%
helicopters 39% 54% 63% 71% 76% 79% 81% 85%
ground forces missile systems 27% 64%* 64% 82% 100% 100% 100% 100%
artillery 51% 52% 53% 55% 59% 67% 73% 79%
armored vehicles 20% 25% 37% 44% 56% 67% 75% 82%
multipurpose automobiles 40% 44% 48% 52% 56% 60% 65% 72%
Overall modernization 19% 26% 30% 41% 48% 59% 64% 70- 100%
* This is almost certainly a typo and should read 46%, given the overall progression of 18-19% improvement per year in ground forces missile systems.
The plan also has some information that sheds light on the extent to which existing weapons and equipment are in working order. Targets for 2013 by branch of the military are 65% for ground forces, 55% for the air force, and 56% for the navy. These can be taken as the highest bound of equipment in working order at the present time. The goal for 2020 is to reach 80-85% for each branch. There are target dates for the start of serial production of various major platforms. New tanks and armored vehicles are to enter production by the end of 2015, new aircraft (unclear which type, but probably the T-50), air defense systems and corvettes by 2016 and the new destroyer by 2018.
There's also a whole section on new infrastructure, that indicates plans to improve residential facilities at 100 military bases per year in 2014-2016 and 50 per year thereafter. There are more specific plans listed, including for construction of cafeterias, parks, and sports halls. The plan calls for the construction of three new ranges in 2013-14 and the modernization of over 200 existing ranges by 2017.
The plan includes a very interesting section on improvements in control systems, with plans for the establishment of a national defense control center by December 2014, combat control center at branch headquarters in 2015, at military district headquarters in 2016, and at the unit (i.e. brigade or division) level in 2017.
Military education plans for 2013 include 70 students at the General Staff academy, 790 at the service academies, and 15,680 at the various military institutes and schools. Five new presidential cadet schools are to be established by 2016.
Military preparedness is also expected to increase, with the number of at-sea days per year for naval crews set to more than double — from 60 in 2013 to 125 in 2019 (after reaching 100 in 2016). Annual flight hours for air force pilots are also set to increase, though at a slower rate, from 100 in 2013 to 125 in 2020 for tactical aviation, from 110 in 2013 to 150 in 2018 for military transport aviation, from 70 in 2013 to 130 in 2020 in army aviation, and from 70 in 2013 to 120 in 2020 for naval aviation. Tank drivers are to go from 250km per year in 2013 to 500 in 2017, while armored vehicle drivers drive 350km this year and 1000 by 2017. The number of annual parachute jumps for airborne troops are to double, from 6 in 2013 to 12 in 2020. And modern uniforms are to be provided to all soldiers by 2016.
There's also a section that details progress to be made on solving the housing question. The final 33,400 apartments for retired officers on the waiting list since before January 2012 are to be handed out this year. Another 19,800 apartments will be provided by the end of 2014 to those who joined the waiting list after that date. Starting in 2014, the plan is to provide one time payments to retiring officers in lieu of actual apartments. As for providing members of the active military with housing, progress is expected to be slower, with 100% fulfillment of the plan not reached until 2018.
I don't think all of these targets in various fields will be met on time. But more importantly, the MOD has produced a public document that creates a set of metrics and expectations for progress over the next seven years. This is something that experts and Russian society can use to see how well the MOD is doing for years to come. It should serve this purpose much better than previous vague statements along the lines of "70 percent modern armaments by 2020" or "we will solve the housing problem by year X." At the same time, there will inevitably be pressure on MOD officials to fudge the numbers down the road to make sure the activity plan appears to be on track, regardless of the actual circumstances. Only time will tell whether this tendency will overwhelm the potential value of honest record keeping and public accounting for keeping the military reform process on track.
Posted in Russian military reform	| Tagged military housing, MOD activity plan, modernization | 6 Comments
Russian military shipbuilding: an update (part 2)
(Based on a report in Moscow Defense Brief. For a discussion of submarines and surface combat ships, see part 1)
Auxiliary ships
The Russian Navy is getting a number of new support ships in the near future. These include three Project 23120 9000 ton ocean-going logistics ships, the first of which was laid down at Severnaya Verf in November 2012. The ships are similar to civilian offshore hydrocarbon exploration ships and are to be delivered at a rate of one a year in 2014-16. The navy is also expecting to receive six Project 20180 support and weapons transport ships. Two of the ships are currently under construction, with delivery expected in 2014 and 2016. The ships, being built at the Zvezdochka shipyard, are modified versions of the Zvezdochka salvage tug commissioned in 2010. The Igor Belousov (project 21300S) large submarine rescue ship, which was laid down in December 2005 in response to the Kursk disaster, was finally launched in October 2012 after a long delay caused by the failure of a Russian design bureau to provide a deepwater diving complex for the ship. In the end, the navy has settled on a British design that is being built in Russia. The ship is due to be commissioned in 2014, with another three ships of this type likely to be ordered in the near future. In addition, the navy has ordered a large number of harbor support ships and tugboats, with around 80 expected to enter service by 2016.
Russian shipyards continue to have a thriving export business. The biggest customers in 2012 were India, Vietnam and Algeria. Vietnam has ordered six Improved Kilo class (project 06361) submarines from the Admiralty Shipyards. The first two submarines of this order were launched in 2012, while subs three and four were laid down last year. The first sub is expected to be delivered this year. The Vietnamese navy took delivery of two Svetlyak class (project 10412) patrol boats in October 2012. It also ordered two modified Gepard class (project 11661E) frigates, to be delivered in 2016 and 2017. These are in addition to two similar frigates delivered in 2011. Both ships are to be built in Zelenodolsk. Vietnam is also building, under license, a series of ten Tarantul V class (project 12418) corvettes, with the first two ships expected to be commissioned this year.
Contracts with the Algerian navy are for modernization of existing ships, rather than the construction of new ones. These include the mid-life overhaul of a Kilo class (project 877EKM) submarine at the Admiralty Shipyards, which was completed in July 2012, and the ongoing modernization of a Koni class (project 1159TM) frigate and Nanuchka II class (project 1234EM) corvette at Severnaya Verf. Further surface ship modernization orders are expected once the current pair are finished.
India remains the most important foreign military customer for Russian shipyards. In 2012, the Indian navy inducted the INS Chakra, an improved Akula class nuclear-powered attack submarine that was leased to India for a ten-year period. There is some speculation that a second submarine of the same type may be leased to India in the future. Yantar shipyard completed a second series of Talwar class (project 11356) frigates for the the Indian navy, with two ships delivered in 2012 and a third in June 2013. Negotiations are currently under way for another set of three frigates to be built. In January 2013, the Zvezdochka shipyard completed the mid-life overhaul of a Kilo class (project 877EKM) submarine for the Indian navy. This was the fifth Indian diesel submarine to be modernized at this plant. Finally, the long-term effort to modernize the former Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier for the Indian navy, which was due to be handed over in 2012, hit another snag because of problems with the main power plant, causing at least a one year delay in the project.
Based on Boltenkov's summary and my own past research, it seems to me that the Russian shipbuilding industry has improved in recent years but remains in relatively poor shape overall. Yantar Shipyard in particular has been reported to be in fairly poor shape due to a lack of investment. On the other hand, the Severnaya Verf, Sevmash, and Zvezdochka shipyards are in relatively good condition. Russian shipyards are good at building ships that they have been building for some time, such as the Talwar (modified Krivak) class frigates and improved Kilo class submarines. The implementation of new designs, on the other hand, has led to numerous problems and delays regardless of the type of ship and the shipyard building it. The construction of Admiral Gorshkov class frigates, Lada class submarines, and Admiral Gren amphibious ships have all been affected by construction delays and other problems. Construction of nuclear-powered submarines is proceeding, but at a much slower pace than hoped for by the Ministry of Defense. Frequent changes in requirements have resulted in a number of ship classes that have been cancelled after only one or two ships, which will have a negative impact on maintenance. Finally, the goal of renewing the Russian navy's fleet of larger surface combat ships still seems a long way off, with a design for a new class of destroyers still several years away from completion.
Posted in Russian Navy	| Tagged CAST, Russian Navy, Severnaia Verf, Sevmash, shipbuilding | 4 Comments


text:
package ej.demo.ui.widget.style;

/**
 * The font family used in the stylesheet.
 */
public interface FontFamilies {

	/**
	 * The picto font family.
	 */
	String PICTO = "picto"; //$NON-NLS-1$

	/**
	 * The roboto font family.
	 */
	String ROBOTO = "roboto"; //$NON-NLS-1$
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Joseph Majdalani, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the H. H. Arnold Chair of Excellence in Advanced Propulsion at the University of Tennessee Space Institute, was honored at the annual award luncheon hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Tennessee Section. The luncheon was held on May 29, 2013 at the Arnold Lakeside Center.
Majdalani received the AIAA Tennessee Section Special Award for mentoring and developing students capable of producing highly regarded scientific papers in very difficult areas of fluid mechanics pioneered by Majdalani. He is internationally known for remarkable scientific and academic productivity in the aeronautical and applied mathematical sciences and for his active participation in AIAA sponsored conferences. Majdalani's graduate student mentorship has been consistent for many years.
Because of Majdalani's devotion to graduate student success, his group at the UT Space Institute has received eight regional and national awards in the past four years. Majdalani has also been the recipient of the national Abe M. Zarem Educator Award for his demonstrated effectiveness in mentoring graduate students. Majdalani's most notable team accomplishments in the past four years consist of winning two national awards and seven-out-of-seven 'best papers' at the Annual Southeastern Conference of the AIAA. Five of Majdalani's students have received in an orderly succession the Outstanding GRA Award for the years 2007-2011.


Please share some recipes with fresh methi leaves as this is the season to have. Rest of the year we..
I have no idea about this folklore on Christmas. All we have known about Christmas is only about San..
88.06 m is the highest record in the Men`s javelin throw at the 2018 Asian Games that has set a new ..
Harmful effects of Diet! I`ve never come across this concept. Diet is all about healthy eating and s..
Jr NTR made his debut when he was 10 years old with the film `Brahmarshi Vishwamitra` which was dire..
Hey Piyush how far is Bangladesh from Dawki?..
Yes. Autobiographies are truly an inspiration. They teach us about life through real life experience..
What is the first film that was shot in the RK Studios?..
What if it becomes pink? What does this mean?..
Coonoor is the quiet and secluded Hill Station known for production of Nilgiri tea. It is a perfect ..
Pilar got its name from the patroness of the monastery - Our Lady of Pilar, a devotion that began in..
The word Khecheopalri is originally known as `Kha-Chot-Palri` which means the heaven of Padmasambhav..
With so many achievements of Medals in the Asian Games 2018, we can hope that our nation will shine ..
Radiologist is a person who specializes in diagnosing any injury through the use of medical techniqu..
I would like to know more about Rajat Nayar. Can anybody please help?..
Hearing loss can be genetic or caused by damage to the ear. But there are also some diseases that ca..
All you need is to observe few things. If you had a negative event happened recently or a lot of sad..
Hey Shruti, check this out: www.indianetzone.com/54/bonderam_festival.htm..
In Gujarat, you can easily take note of the ecstatic festive spirit not only on the Uttarayan day, b..
Bhayanak Maut is Metal band from Mumbai formed in November 2003. Bhayanak Maut created a signature m..
First of all, it should be cleared that it`s not the boys who take care of their parent. Their wife ..
Where in India is Horse Riding practiced?..
Shankar waterfall is the main attraction of this place. Trekking beneath to this is difficult and st..
Can anybody tell me what type of Health issues is Saif Ali Khan facing? Recently I read an article w..
How many times did Sanjay Dutt get married? Why weren`t his marriages shown in the movie?..
Is it safe to do yoga during pregnancy..
Sara Ali Khan, Sharmila Tagore`s grand-daughter, Amrita Singh and Saif Ali Khan`s daughter is ready ..
Can we expect Trishala Dutt, daughter of Sanjay Dutt in the Bollywood?..
A wedding ring is worn on the fourth finger of the left hand. This is because the vein in this finge..
How to take care of hair from the chlorine water of swimming pool?..
Self massage requires a lot of effort. I would prefer to get a massage from someone else, rather giv..
Doesn`t this lace embroidery have a name?..
Can anybody say about the qualification of the Kapoor sisters?..
Heat rashes resolve on its own when the skin cools. Just avoid any type of ointments that moistens t..
The village life of India showcases a completely different world where one can lost in the aroma of ..
Why do people get confused with these two different terms? Are their symptoms same?..
What is Terracotta? Can you please brief me?..
The technique used in fencing is generally more subtle and relies to a greater extent on fine motor ..
But that`s a College. Which is the oldest University of India?..


text:
Hatikvah: Conceptions, Receptions and Reflections
Author: Edwin Seroussi
If you have ever searched for Hatikvah online, you were surely exposed to a barrage of factual and fictional information that, in the Internet Age, circulates virally in diverse variants, dosages and combinations ad nauseam.[c1] These writings and their indiscriminating viral spread tell us more about the speculators and reproducers of these stories than they do about the song's actual historical past. Untangling these stories behind the story of Hatikvah is the core of this essay. For Hatikvah both is and is not what you think. It does not derive from Smetana nor from a Sephardic prayer. And an early Zionist pioneer did not compose it spontaneously. Nor did it become the national anthem of the State of Israel until very recently.
«A Special Kind of Antisemitism»: On Russian Nationalism and Jewish Music
Author: James Loeffler
In 1958, on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, the composer Solomon Rosowsky published a short memoir, in which he recalled a joke from his student days a half century earlier: "Why are there so many Jewish students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory? Because it is the only school in the Russian Empire with a quota for non-Jewish students."Rosowsky's joke was pure hyperbole. But it stemmed from a strange fact. On the eve of World War I, over 50% of the St. Petersburg Conservatory student body, or roughly 1200 students, were Jewish. This was at a time when Jews formed roughly four percent of the total Russian imperial population and stringent admissions quotas limited the total official Jewish student percentage in other Russian university-level educational institutions to 7.3 percent (about 2500 students). The statistical disparity effectively meant that nearly one in every three Jewish university-level students in the late Russian Empire was a musician at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. While the rest of the Russian educational world strenuously denied Jews entry, Russia's greatest musical academy welcomed them with open arms.


text:
Western Carpathians
mountains, Europe
Alternate titles: Carpaƫii Occidentali
Assorted References
subdivision of Carpathian Mountains
In Carpathian Mountains: Physiography of the Carpathian Mountains
…have been divided into the Western and the Eastern Carpathians, the latter also called—probably more accurately—the Southeastern Carpathians. There are marked differences between these parts. The Western Carpathians show a clearly marked zoning in geologic structure and relief forms, and the highest elevations occur in the central part of this…
physiography of
In Europe: Elevations
…feet [2,655 metres]) in the Western Carpathians, and Mount Moldoveanu (8,346 feet [2,544 metres]) in the Transylvanian Alps. Above all, in southern Europe—Austria and Switzerland included—level, low-lying land is scarce, and mountain, plateau, and hill landforms dominate.
In Romania: Relief
The Western Carpathians extend for about 220 miles (350 km) between the Danube and Someș rivers. Unlike the other divisions of the Carpathians, they do not form a continuous range but rather a cluster of massifs around a north-south axis. Separating the massifs is a series…


text:
Mount Athos: Part One
May 11, 2019 | Abbot's Notebook
Dear Friends in Christ,
Recently I received some welcome news about the Catholic grade school I attended in Portland, Oregon, dedicated to Saint Charles Borromeo. Located on the corner of 42nd and Emerson Streets, right next to the parish church of the same name, both the church and the school were constructed around the time I was born, the early 1950s, and into the mid-1960s. Saint Charles Parish is over one hundred years old, begun in 1914 and at its current location since 1950. I was in the school from the fall of 1959 until the spring of 1967.
Those who have followed my musings over the past several years likely realize the importance of my eight years of Catholic education at Saint Charles School, under the tutelage of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, as well as some lay teachers. Even so, I was very happy to exit the school after the eighth grade, at the age of fifteen, and move on in the fall of 1967 to a public high school. At the time, I would have preferred to attend North Catholic High School, where one of my cousins, whom I admired very much, had studied, but my family couldn't afford the several hundred dollars for tuition, let alone books, that the school charged. Yes, it is laughable now, but dead serious back in the summer of 1967, between finishing grade school and entering high school, when funds were not plentiful in my family. Furthermore, North Catholic High was quite a distance from where I lived, so getting there and back each day would have been an added expense.
James Madison High School, in whose district my family lived, thus became the default high school by necessity, and in fact I very much enjoyed the two years I spent there. Only two years? That is the topic of another essay, of course. Though some miles from my home, I usually walked or rode a bus to school. Madison High had good art and drama departments, and I immensely enjoyed participating in both. Classes were not too demanding, since Catholic education had placed me ahead of what was being offered at the high school. As a result, I had time for art and drama.
The drama department at Madison was under the direction of a rather well-known teacher, Melba Day Sparks. She put on very professional plays during her many years at Madison High. I even aspired to become a professional artist and/or actor at some moments during those high school years. The "art scene" of Los Angeles and Hollywood itself wasn't all that far away, just a several hours drive south of Portland on Interstate 5 or Highway 101, but alas, it was not meant to be. Even having family friends in Anaheim, near Los Angeles, whom our family visited every summer, wasn't enough to have me eventually live or work there.
Back to Saint Charles Grade School, though, where I was instructed for eight years, from 1959 to 1967, where reading, writing, English grammar, spelling, mathematics, science, and of course, religion, were all given pride of place. In fact, it was obvious that belief in God and Catholic practice was at the heart of all we did at Saint Charles. The Sisters and laywomen who taught us always seemed to have that foremost in mind. Regular Mass attendance, receiving the Sacraments of First Confession and First Holy Communion, at the end of first grade, as well as the Sacrament of Confirmation, at the end of seventh grade, were part and parcel of our general education and formation.
During those grade school years I was nearly always present, attentive and generally grateful for what I was being given. I did have friends who enjoyed skipping school, which I also did on occasion, escaping to the one and only mall in town, the Lloyd Center, but not on a regular basis. Saint Charles School was where I was expected to be, except on Saturdays and Sundays, of course, and at vacation time. Since school was only a few blocks from home, I was able, beginning around the sixth grade, to go home for the hour-long lunch break and recess period, Monday through Friday. Recess seemed to me a waste of time, so I was better engaged at home, though probably watching something completely useless on TV, until I had to scurry back to school on my bike at 12:45 or so, for the 1:00 pm continuation of classes.
I was sorry to learn that my grade school, which opened in 1950, finally closed its doors in 1986. Changing demographics, the closing of the Portland Air Force Base and other factors, such as no more Sisters to teach there, made the school closing necessary. The parish retained the school building, used it some and leased several of the dozen or so classrooms, but was definitely not utilized to its full potential. The sprawling but single-storied L-shaped building, constructed mostly of cinderblock, was and is nearly fireproof, built to last, and fortunately never fell into disrepair over the past thirty-three years of near-vacancy.
I was very pleased to learn this spring that De La Salle North Catholic High School, a college preparatory school for underserved students in Portland, had recently signed a fifty-year lease of the former Saint Charles Grade School. The new campus of De La Salle will accommodate around three-hundred fifty students and plans are to begin using the Saint Charles property in the fall of 2021.
The current principal of De La Salle North Catholic, Tim Joy, has expressed happiness that the students will be able to attend Mass together in the parish church, which is attached to the school building. De La Salle High is currently housed in a former public elementary school building, owned by Portland Public Schools. Paying an increasingly high monthly rent eventually caused De La Salle school leaders to look for another location, considering more than forty possible sites, before settling on the Saint Charles plant.
Part of the attraction of the Saint Charles campus was what Principal Tim Joy calls, "an intuitive reverence" about the place. Could the Holy Child Sisters and we students of so many decades ago, have contributed to that accolade? I can only hope so! The gym and auditorium at the present De La Salle campus can't compare with Saint Charles, according to De La Sales' principal, so having better space for assembly and a church on campus is a real plus for the school's leaders and students.
Another draw to the new location is the nearness of Saint Charles to downtown Portland, just a few miles away. The students of De La Salle typically spend one day a week working for local employers, often at a business establishment in the downtown area. Bus service can take people fairly quickly to the city's center, though I suppose that many (most?) of the De La Salle students have their own cars.
The move to the Saint Charles property means that De La Salle High School will be the first new Catholic high school campus in more than fifty years in the city of Portland. A capital campaign is underway to raise funds for the needed renovations and additions to the Saint Charles school building.
How do the parishioners of my home parish of Saint Charles take to the idea of students, albeit older, returning to the old school? The pastoral administrator of the parish, Leif Kehrwald, is quoted as saying that the parish community will offer a warm welcome to the new students and staff, and that they look forward to the merging of the parish and school communities.
Saint Charles Borromeo Parish will maintain its operations and parish offices in part of the school building, as well as their Saint Vincent de Paul Food Bank. The present parish priest, Father Elwin Schwab, sees real benefits to the two entities working side by side and says he is looking forward to the venture.
About 73% of De La Salle Catholic students are Afro-American or Latino, and many come from low-income families. Statistics also show that 95% of the students who stay four years graduate and enter college. That is impressive and I applaud all who are making my former school, dormant for many decades, come back to life. "That in all things God may be glorified," Saint Benedict says in his sixth-century Rule for Monasteries. And De La Salle principal, Tim Joy, says, "What we are doing is at the heart of the Gospel." To which I reply, "Amen."
(For this essay, I am indebted to an online article from the "Catholic Sentinel" of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon, which appeared on March 12, 2019, by Katie Scott, entitled, "De La Salle North Catholic High School to Relocate to Saint Charles Parish.")
Abbot Christian Leisy, OSB
Abbot's Notes & News
Fr. Christian's Page
Summer Greetings from the Monastery! July 15, 2019
Happy Solemnity of our Holy Father Saint Benedict, July 11, 2019. May He Intercede For Us All. July 11, 2019
On Schedule, Our Cholla Cactus are in Bloom for Solemnity of Saint Benedict on July 11th July 9, 2019
15th Sunday of Ordinary Time—Cycle C—2019 July 9, 2019
50/50 Raffle Winners July 7, 2019
Summer Newsletter July 6, 2019
Mount Athos: Part One July 5, 2019
Independence Day Prayers and Greetings from the Monks. July 4, 2019


The Funeral is a big shoot-out scene available once you complete Conflicted Loyalties. Pick-up Jackie at the police precinct to start the mission. Head for the marked clothing shop for the funeral and then drive to the cemetery.
Once you have control over Wei, kill the enemies and fight your way out, flanking the enemy grenadier. Take his weapon (an Assault Rifle with a Grenade Launcher)and sweep the area clear to the parking lot.


This product has potent lotion which delivers 5% Benzoyl Peroxide deep within the follicles where acne starts to significantly reduce acne-causing bacteria. Formulated with 5% Benzoyl Peroxide, this product quickly and efficiently clears acne blemishes while preventing the formation of future breakouts. Its creamy texture works without drying the skin, leaving it perfectly prepped for step three of your system. Packaged with a lid for safe traveling, an attachable pump and a pump cover.
SoluZyl Technology™ delivers medication deep within your pores where acne starts. Helps to clear acne quickly while minimizing dryness.
Enjoy clear, beautiful skin with Obagi CLENZIderm MD Therapeutic Lotion BPO 5%. This treatment lotion fights existing blemishes while preventing future breakouts from occurring. Ideal for normal to dry skin types, this product has a creamy, lightweight texture that leaves your skin feeling hydrated and healthy. With regular use, this benzoyl peroxide lotion will fight blemishes and breakouts to give you a healthy and clear complexion. Improve the look of your acne-prone skin with help from this top-rated product.
Obagi CLENZIderm MD Therapeutic Lotion BPO 5% uses potent active ingredients to help you achieve a fresh face. This lotion contains 5% benzoyl peroxide, one of the most effective ingredients available to treat acne breakouts. Instead of simply fighting blemishes on the surface of your skin, this exfoliating ingredient reaches deep down into pores to kill acne-causing bacteria and stop breakouts where they start. This Obagi skin care formula also has squalane, an emollient derived from olives, to hydrate skin and prevent dry patches. Use this acne solution every day to transform your complexion.
Use once a day or as directed by your physician. Clean the skin thoroughly before applying. Pump product 1 time onto fingertip and apply evenly to entire face, avoiding the eyes, nose and mouth. Allow Therapeutic Lotion to absorb completely before applying subsequent treatment item in the regimen.
Because excessive drying of the skin may occur, start with 1 application per day. If bothersome dryness of peeling occurs, reduce application to every other day. If going outside, use a sunscreen: Allow Obagi CLENZIderm M.D.™ Therapeutic Lotion to dry, then follow directions in the sunscreen labeling.
Stop use and ask a doctor if: condition worsens symptoms last for more than 7 days or clear up and occur again within a few days.
Do not use on: deep or puncture wounds animal bites serious burns Children under 6 months: ask a doctor.


text:
Q: Improve the quality of the google account image after login using google account in flutter When I get the image of the login user using his google account the quality of the image that i get it from his google account has bad quality.
so How can improve the quality of the image that i get it from user google account ?
I get the image of the user login using google account like this :
 final GoogleSignInAuthentication googleSignInAuthentication =
            await googleSignInAccount.authentication;

        final token = googleSignInAuthentication;
// her i use this statement to take the google account image :
              userImageUrl = googleSignInAccount.photoUrl

A: Try the below code
userImageUrl = googleSignInAccount.photoUrl.replaceAll("s96-c", "s192-c");

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Children may avoid brushing teeth for various reasons. If you are unsure of the reason behind the avoidance behaviour, chatting to your therapist can help with identifying the problem and working on a solution. Some children don't like the taste of toothpaste or are unable to tolerate the feel of the toothbrush inside their mouth, the smell of the toothpaste or the sound of the brushing. Brushing teeth maybe causing them discomfort and/or stress.
Try some of these strategies and chat to your occupational therapist.
If your child finds brushing teeth stressful or becomes anxious, try a calming bath first or brushing teeth whilst sitting in the bath.
Some children respond well to motivators such as singing a song, brushing their teeth with their parents or siblings or having a musical toothbrush.
Try using an electric toothbrush, some children enjoy the sensation from the vibration or find it easier and less effort to brush with an electric toothbrush.
Using auditory or visual cues could help with timing or counting how long it takes to brush teeth.
If your child is a sensory seeker (chat to your therapist to work this one out)…then a vibrating toothbrush or moving whilst brushing may be of benefit.
Try a variety of toothpastes; your child may not be able to tolerate the strong mint flavours.
Try different positions if your child has difficulty relaxing and becomes anxious. Sitting in a beanbag or using a weighted lap blanket whilst sitting may help to keep them calm during brushing.
If your child displays significant avoidance behaviours to brushing teeth then you may need to work slowly towards getting the toothbrush near the lips and mouths. It is important to chat to an occupational therapist about these particular strategies as some children who are typically "sensory defensive" will require slow progression to brushing teeth and need additional support to achieving successful brushing.