text:
Early Warning Signs of Fascism
From a display in the United States Holocaust Museum.
"...and Justice For All"?
Trump Supporters
Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage
With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network
Carole Cadwalladr
Sunday 26 February 2017 04.00 EST Last modified on Sunday 26 February 2017 04.03 EST
Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world's press before him and told them they were liars. "The press, honestly, is out of control," he said. "The public doesn't believe you any more." CNN was described as "very fake news… story after story is bad". The BBC was "another beauty".
That night I did two things. First, I typed "Trump" in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn't how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of "Go Donald!!!!", and "You show 'em!!!" There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the "FAKE news MSM liars!"
Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I've been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled "mainstream media is…" And there it was. Google's autocomplete suggestions: "mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished". Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying
I click Google's first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: "The Mainstream media are dead." They're dead, I learn, because they – we, I – "cannot be trusted". How had it, an obscure site I'd never heard of, dominated Google's search algorithm on the topic? In the "About us" tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is "America's media watchdog", an organisation that claims an "unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture".
Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding – more than $10m in the past decade – from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump's single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign.
It's money he's made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called "revolutionary" breakthroughs in language processing – a science that went on to be key in developing today's AI – and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.
One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees' money, is the most successful in the world – generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns – all Republican – and another $50m to non-profits – all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.
Donald Trump's presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man's plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump's campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting "liberal bias" is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.
It was $10m of Mercer's money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It's bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It's the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.
Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had "to take back the culture". And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK's forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front "in our current cultural and political war". France and Germany are next.
A determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends
But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer's name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in "election management strategies" and "messaging and information operations", refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as "psyops" – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people's emotions.)
Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I'd read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer's money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.
Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google's search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites "strangling" the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.
On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people's deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a "propaganda machine".
A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica "is a US company based in the US. It hasn't worked in British politics."
Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU's affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farage's trip to Trump Tower – the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.
Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. "That's the one I took," he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the "bad boys of Brexit" – a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU's co-founder.
Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people's Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica's and SCL's employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU's launch event.
Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook 'like', he said, was their most "potent weapon". "Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring."
Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's chief strategist, is an associate of Robert Mercer. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
It sounds creepy, I say.
"It is creepy! It's really creepy! It's why I'm not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, 'Oh my God!' What's scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school."
They hadn't "employed" Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. "They were happy to help."
"Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, 'Here's this company we think may be useful to you.' What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn't you?" Behind Trump's campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were "the same people. It's the same family."
There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than £7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? It's certainly a question worth asking.
In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters' data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioner's Office said: "Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed."
Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University's Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.
These Facebook profiles – especially people's "likes" – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre's lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone's personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. "Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves," says Kosinski.
But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the university's model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centre's director? "Certainly not from us," he says. "We have very strict rules around this."
A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesn't know where Kogan's data came from. "The evidence was contrary. I reported it." An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. "But then Kogan said he'd signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldn't continue [answering questions]."
Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the university's inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.
Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage is a friend of the Mercers. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images
"The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It's what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It's how you brainwash someone. It's incredibly dangerous.
"It's no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don't know it's happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs."
Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, "driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities". But in many ways, it's what Cambridge Analytica's parent company does that raises even more questions.
Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it's SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.
SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher's image, says Briant, and the company had been "making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it's all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left."
In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump's administration. "It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it's the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear," says Briant.
It's the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. "How is it going to be used?" he says. "Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don't understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them."
There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.
Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can't see, and that is working on us in ways we can't understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? "Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It's totally covert. And people don't realise what is going on."
Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You don't have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the military's or SCL's playbook.
But then there's increasing evidence that our public arenas – the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news – are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. It's a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: "information warfare troops".
Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute's computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated "bots" – accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump – many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection – Russian bots, organised by who? – attacking Paul Nuttall.
You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it
"Politics is war," said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.
There's nothing accidental about Trump's behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. "That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. There's feedback going on constantly. That's what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it's all about how can you use these trending words."
Wigmore met with Trump's team right at the start of the Leave campaign. "And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence."
Who did?
"Jared Kushner and Jason Miller."
Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. "It's all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally."
Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called "cognitive warfare". Though there are many others: "recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism," explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. "Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives," says one US state department white paper. "Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms."
Yet another details the power of a "cognitive casualty" – a "moral shock" that "has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking". Something like immigration, perhaps. Or "fake news". Or as it has now become: "FAKE news!!!!"
How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like "liberal media bias", like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the "failing New York Times!" what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon's media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.
Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercer's money. Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. "The modern economics of the newsroom don't support big investigative reporting staffs," Bannon told Forbes magazine. "You wouldn't get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We're working as a support function."
Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.
In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how the GAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google can't find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI's president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.
This, Bannon explained, is how you "weaponise" the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton's cash did. Like Hillary's emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. "Strategic drowning" of other messages.
This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldn't take Bill Clinton down because "they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber".
As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there's a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it's Mercer's millions or other factors, Jonathan Albright's map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.
Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? "There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. It's clearly being led by money and politics."
There's been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but it's Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.
Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. Nick Patterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. "There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar."
Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC
He describes Mercer as "very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that he's a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things."
He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. "We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that."
Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how it's been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the "blackest box in finance".
Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he's done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. "Society is driven by emotions, which it's always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions."
The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. "We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes we've had – sudden huge drops in stock prices – indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race."
The other people interested in Bollen's work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollen's research shows how it's possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?
"It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that."
THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute's Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? "There's not a smoking gun," says Howard. "There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence."
"Look at this," he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. "This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he's a consensus."
And that requires money?
"That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what's legitimate. You are creating truth."
You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.
One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of "sleeper" bots they've found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.
Like zombies?
"Like zombies."
Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. "You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm."
This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought – using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.
We're not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become "FAKE news!!!" But we're almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. "World War III will be a guerrilla information war," it says. "With no divisions between military and civilian participation."
By that definition we're already there.
Additional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye
• Carole Cadwalladr will be hosting a discussion on technology's disruption of democracy at the bluedot festival, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 7-9 July
Grandmother Regina Brave: From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock
Oceti Sakowin: Standing Rock Closes Camp
Standing Rock Rising
9 mins ·
This afternoon I was asked to take a photo of the Sacred Fire right before the final prayer walk, where nearly 100 Water Protectors peacefully, and prayerfully stepped back on to the reservations they have been confined to for over a century. For those of you not aware, the Sacred Fire has always been off limits for media, as it contains the spirits. I was honored to be asked to do this.
I am trying my best to explain the emotions that went through my heart today. Anger, fear, excitement, but mostly pain. Pain to see so many people so close to mother earth oppressed by this country for money, greed, and the overall fact the United States does not want to admit it stole this land from Native Americans. America's dirty little secret.
We spent the last 2 days planning on how we as media could work together to keep this camp safe. Originally, I planned to remain until the end. After being asked to document the sacred fire, and participate in the prayer walk, my mind changed. Once I crossed the river with the tribes, my heart told me it was my time to go. As much as I wanted to turn around and step back over that bridge, I knew I wouldn't be doing the right thing. I could feel something bad would happen to me. I then walked all the way to Cheyenne River camp. I sat for a bit, cried a bit more, and thought about all the emotions I had just gone through. There were many.
Looking back on the nearly 6 months of being here in solidarity, there have been many ups and downs. Small victories, and small defeats. I have had hypothermia, gone nights without sleeping bags, slept in an emergency shelter for a month while trying to assist with the shelter, had rubber bullets wiz past my head, tasted tear gas, had electronics sabotaged, "dapl'd", items stolen, friendships lost, and a few times questioned about my intentions based off the color of my skin. Through all that, I know I still had it much easier than many. Most even. So many have sacrificed so much to be here. They have given up homes, lost marriages, lost jobs, lost children, and so many more. All to defend mother earth and human rights. Looking back, I know I am nothing more than a man, and I have received so much inspiration through watching the strength of our Native American brothers and sister.
Today was not a loss. Today was a win. Standing Rock awoken the sleeping giant of humankind. The knowledge that people can band together, and make a statement of unity, prayer, love, and compassion. This is just the beginning of a greater whole. I believe we can change the world. We have already proven the world can hear our calls.
I am still trying to process everything, and maybe this post doesn't make sense, but I knew it was my time to go. I followed that intuition, and followed my heart over that bridge. I cried more today than I ever have in my life. I was honored to see my heart open so much from my time here.
So many people have banded together, but for me, my focus has always been getting the media out. I've been very humbled to be able to work beside the Oceti Sakowin Camp media team, and try to represent the camp in a good way. The last few nights of media meetings worked. I felt that independent media, alongside veterans, medics and most of all the prayers of the Water Protectors kept the camp in peace, and no major conflicts took place today. I am still in awe over the dedication of all those media that took the stand on the front lines of 1806 today, and helped the police back away from camp. I am eternally grateful to work alongside so many dedicated and true journalists, using their abilities to document the reality of this world.
This is not about journalism tho. This is about taking a stand for 500 years of oppression for our Indigenous brothers and sisters. This is about honoring treaties. This is about native children abductions. This is about man camps destroying native families. This is about protecting the earth from corporate rape for profit. This is about being HUMAN. This is about love, and compassion, and understanding, and empathy, and prayer.
This is about leaving this world knowing you stood on the right side of history.
Today I walked away from the Oceti Sacred Fire for the last time, but all of us have left with the fire in our hearts. That fire will never burn out. It is embedded and engrained in our souls, blood, sweat, tears forever.
WE ARE FOREVER BURNING
WE ARE FOREVER STANDING
THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.
THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING.
MNI WICONI.
-Redhawk
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Stop the Pruitt Appointment to the EPA!
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Massive Oil Spill In Yellowstone River Contaminates Drinking Water
Saturday January 30th, 2017:
This was not reported in mainstream media.... so is it to be considered an "Alternative Fact"?
http://alternativemediasyndicate.com/2017/01/30/massive-oil-spill-yellowstone-river-contaminates-drinking-water/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=FB_Biz_Part&utm_medium=FB
Crude oil poured from a ruptured pipeline into the icy Yellowstone River in Montana.
A ruptured oil pipeline leaked up to 40,000 gallons of crude into the Yellowstone River in Montana last Saturday, contaminating the drinking water for the nearby town of Glendive.
Saturday's spill adds to a history of pipeline malfunctions—in 2011, the Exxon Silvertip Pipeline spilled 63,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River two and a half hours outside of Yellowstone National Park. This newest disaster comes less than two weeks after the Senate voted 63–32 to advance the bill that would approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would cross over 1,700 bodies of water in addition to the now oil-slicked Yellowstone River.
While state and local officials won't say how long they expect the cleanup to last, Glendive Mayor Jerry Jimison predicts it will be a while.
Jimison said the river's ice can linger until as late as mid-March. Until all the ice is gone, he said, "I don't think [the response team] is going to have much success in cleaning up."
The town of Glendive began detecting the contaminant benzene in its drinking water on Monday, two days after the spill. According to Elizabeth Douglass, also reporting for Inside Climate News, the pipeline has had a history of trouble, including weak welds made in the 1950s. The segment under the river had been replaced in the 1960s or 1970s, Douglass reports, but Bridger Pipeline, which owns the pipeline, doesn't know how or with what type of pipe it was replaced.
Montana's government website urges residents "not to use the water for culinary purposes." The EPA has confirmed Jimison's assessment of the cleanup process, stating that identifying and collecting the oil "has been challenging due to extensive ice cover in the river at and below the spill location."
Posted by Auntie_Nanuuq at 9:54 AM
...and Now For a Little Bit of Levity
DAPL & Bismarck ND
Refugee Solution
Don't like refugees? Stop bombing their countries.
In his third week in office, Donald Trump is calling for war with Iran.
We explain why Israel and Saudi Arabia are lobbying the US to bomb Iran (which will only create more refugees and has nothing to do with nuclear weapons): http://bit.ly/2l18XvX — withMoeen Ali, Adel Khatib, Robert Martin and 17 others.
The Original Trump Haters
Dakota Access Pipeline Approved a Week After Co-Owner's Pipeline Spilled 600,000 Gallons of Oil in Texas
https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/02/09/dakota-access-pipeline-approved-enbridge-spill-texas
By Steve Horn • Thursday, February 9, 2017 - 18:19
On January 30, 600,000 gallons (14,285 barrels) of oil spewed out of Enbridge's Seaway Pipeline in Blue Ridge, Texas, the second spill since the pipeline opened for business in mid-2016.
Seaway is half owned by Enbridge and serves as the final leg of a pipeline system DeSmog has called the "Keystone XL Clone," which carries mostly tar sands extracted from Alberta, Canada, across the U.S. at a rate of 400,000 barrels per day down to the Gulf of Mexico. Enbridge is an equity co-owner of the Dakota Access pipeline, which received its final permit needed from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on February 7 to construct the pipeline across the Missouri River and construction has resumed.
The alignment of Native American tribes, environmentalists, and others involved in the fight against Dakota Access have called themselves "water protectors," rather than "activists," out of concern that a pipeline spill could contaminate their drinking water source, the Missouri River.
"Just Spewing"
Brittany Clayton, who works at a nearby gas station in Blue Ridge, which is 50 miles from Dallas, Texas, was close to the scene of the spill when it occurred.
"You could just smell this oil smell. A customer walks in and says 'nobody smoke.' You could see it just spewing," Clayton told KDFW-TV, the local Fox News affiliate in the area. "It was just super huge. It was like a big cloud. The fire marshal said, 'This is like a danger zone. You guys have to evacuate immediately.' I was totally freaked out. I kept texting the boss man."
Enbridge and co-owner Enterprise Products Partners said in press release that the spill had been contained and it resumed service on February 5.
"The incident … resulted in no fire or injuries and the pipeline has been shut down and isolated," the companies said. "Seaway has mobilized personnel and equipment to the site and is working closely with emergency responders, law enforcement and regulatory authorities to conduct clean-up operations and develop a plan to resume operations as quickly and safely as possible."
GET WEEKLY NEWS UPDATES
Government Reaction
According to KDFW, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) intend to do water and environmental testing in the coming days. TxDOT also told the local National Public Radio affiliate, KETR-FM, that it would take "several weeks" to complete a full cleanup.
"It remains too early in the investigation to know where final blame lies for the accident," wrote KETR, also noting that "it is also too early to tell how much the cleanup and loss of product will cost."
TxDOT referred DeSmog to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) for details on the spill, cleanup, and related issues. We have reached out to TCEQ and will update the article as details come in and have also filed open records requests to learn more about the spill.
Chris Havey, Lieutenant Sheriff for the Collin County Sheriff's Office, confirmed with DeSmog that a spill investigation is ongoing under the umbrella of the EPA and the Texas Railroad Commission, which is the state's oil and gas regulatory agency.
"The Sheriff's office is not conducting any parallel investigation," said Havey. "As to whether or not the line has been shut off/capped, it's my understanding that within an hour after the line ruptured it was successfully shut off."
Neither the EPA Region 6 Office nor the Texas Railroad Commission responded to a request for comment. EPA, though, has been ordered not to speak to media by President Donald Trump's White House until the agency has a new administrator, likely nominee Scott Pruitt, and senior-level staff in place.
As momentum and tensions alike mount surrounding oil and gas pipeline projects around the country, this oil spill is a reminder of the risks and consequences that come with them.
Blue Ridge pipeline spill affecting flow of oil nationally - KXII
www.kxii.com/.../BREAKING-Ruptured-pipeline-near-Blue-Ridge-spews-oil--412209...
Cleanup underway for Seaway pipeline leak in Blue Ridge, Texas - BNN
www.bnn.ca/.../cleanup-underway-for-seaway-pipeline-leak-in-blue-ridge-texas~104...
Environmental Risk: Ruptured Blue Ridge, TX Pipeline Spews Oil ...
countercurrentnews.com/.../environmental-risk-ruptured-blue-ridge-tx-pipeline-spews...
Oil pipeline shut after spill near Blue Ridge, Texas- report | Reuters
www.reuters.com/article/us-pipeline-spill-idUSKBN15F04Z
Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war...
Grandmother Regina Brave: From Wounded Knee to Sta...
Massive Oil Spill In Yellowstone River Contaminate...
Dakota Access Pipeline Approved a Week After Co-Ow...
Don't Join The Military: Opinion


Jill Zarin Reflects on Bobby's Cancer Setback: "This Has Been a Horrible Year"
The #RHONY alum gets real about supporting her husband through his health journey.
Jill Zarin and Bobby Zarin have certainly faced their fair share of ups and downs during his ongoing battle with cancer. Several months after The Real Housewives of New York City alum confirmed that her husband's cancer had returned last November, she's now reflecting on the latest stretch in their journey.
"How cute is my Bobby??? This has been quite frankly a horrible year and to see you best friend and love of my life suffer hurts me more than anything I have ever experienced," she wrote on Instagram. "We will come thru this but one day at a time."
Jill then used the moment to remind her followers that they can help those who are suffering from the disease by participating in her upcoming 5th Annual Luxury Luncheon benefiting Thyroid Cancer Research, set to take place later this month.
Jill Zarin Confirms Her Husband Bobby Is Looking "Hot" and Feeling "Like the Good Old Days"
"We are so lucky to have such incredible Doctors around the globe and #itog to work together and help Bobby," she wrote. "I hope we raise as much $$ as we can on July 29 to help Bobby and other patients with #thyroidcancer #radioactiverefractory find a way to take #radioactiveiodine."


Sculley helmed Apple through a turbulent decade between 1983 and 1993, attempting to take on IBM in the PC business and launching products that confused the market—the most notable of which was the Apple Newton. The first handheld personal digital assistant (PDA) device was a massive flop, but one that Sculley said was simply ahead of its time.
Quartz: One of the big themes of your book is that the time is ripe now to come up with these great moonshot businesses. Why now?
Sculley: I always focus on the derivative effects of technology, not just on the technologies themselves. So we have right now cloud computing growing exponentially—both in terms of performance and its ability to reduce the cost of storage—and being adopted in industry after industry.
We have Big Data analytics, which used to be structured data, but now we're into unstructured data, which means we can track millions of different attributes for each individual—that was never even conceivable a few years ago.
We're in the era of mobility. Mobility is everything today—it used to be an adjunct to what people did, and now it's central to what everyone does.
And we are just at the beginning of the internet of things, and the estimates are anywhere from a 20 to 50 billion connected devices by the early 2020s. So all of those things are interesting, cool technologies, but the more insightful observation is that the derivative effects of these technologies is the power shift that it's caused: People that used to look to large, entrenched, incumbent organizations are now realizing that they can find the opinions of customers and see what people really like.
That's causing a power shift to customers in control. It helps explain companies that become giant success stories that spend hardly any money on advertising or marketing but have scaled to incredible size. Facebook Messenger—there's almost a billion users and they don't even advertise. Same thing with Google, with Amazon. It all goes to this power shift from incumbent organizations to customers in control. And it's going to continue to happen—we're just in the early days.
Will there come a time when anyone can disrupt any industry?
I wouldn't say anyone—the barriers to entry are low, but the reality is, you can go to Silicon Valley and see far more talented people with far more ideas than you see successful companies. There are many other issues that determine whether someone's going to be able to turn a cool idea, even if they're very talented, into a successful company.
But the time for transformational change has never been better. If you think about healthcare, for example, we all know in the US that it's completely unsustainable in terms of the cost to be able to provide the services to the people who are covered, not to mention wanting to add more people who don't have insurance. And you get no clue in terms of how to rethink delivering healthcare services by paying any attention to the politicians or the lobbyists.
Disruptive innovation is going to take place by taking the derivative effects of those same technologies I just talked about and rethinking every part of the healthcare ecosystem. I'm involved with several different companies that are working in various ways to do that. And it's not just my companies—it's many, many new companies that are being formed and working on things that are part of this $3 trillion health spend.
Fintech is another example—what's going on with how the whole banking system is being deconstructed and then reconstructed into more lightly regulated fintech companies. London is becoming the international center for many of these fintech companies. Manufacturing would be another perfect example; the industrial internet (which GE is really focused on); smart cities—this is not a one-off phenomenon like an Uber or Airbnb, which are everybody's examples of how the world is changing. It's going to happen in industry after industry, all over the world, and it's already happening now.
When you see companies like Airbnb and Uber that have transformed the markets they're in, it seems like a lot of people in Silicon Valley rush to copy their model—an Uber for X. Do you think this will have an affect on the disruption you see coming?
Copycats probably won't succeed. But that doesn't mean that this isn't a very good time to do this. Look at the courier services that have been developed—there are probably far more initiatives with courier services that are going to survive.
But there's always been more people trying to build transformational companies when they see some role model examples of huge success. Uber and Airbnb are perfect examples of the power shift to customers in control, but that doesn't mean you just have to build copycats of Airbnb and Uber.
That seems to have been the case when you were brought in at Apple, and at other large tech companies, like Google, which brought in Eric Schmidt as CEO. In recent years, that trend seems to have shifted to the COO role—think Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. Do you think the role of the professional CEO will continue to exist in tech, or are we shifting away from that?
Well, I have a huge respect for what Sheryl Sandberg has done at Facebook. I believe that that's a better way to think of bringing in a professional manager than the way that I or others were brought in 30 years ago.
The longer you can keep a founder in the role of being the leader of the company, the better. But we learn from experiences. When I came to Apple, it was in the very early days of Silicon Valley as we know it, and I was the first person to come from an entirely different industry—of big-brand marketing—to Silicon Valley.
We learned along the way. I like the model much better of if you're going to bring in a professional manager as the COO and try to keep the founder in the leadership position for as long as you can.
I think we've learned a lot in 30 years.
And perceptions can definitely shift in a period like that. Rather like how we think of the Newton! It's been given a bit of a bad rap, especially given that what you were thinking in the 1990s—where technology was going, and that everything was going to be mobile. You seem to have been proven right. Apple has tablet-shaped computers—even with styluses now! Will we end up having similar thoughts about current Apple products, like the Apple Watch?
I think that the Apple watch will become better and better over time, for the reason that sensors will get better and better over time. Our ability to use machine learning to take the data that's captured on different kinds of sensors—and be able to do things with it that are increasingly more useful—will become more likely over time. The hardest thing in technology isn't figuring out what will happen, it's trying to figure out when it will happen, and who should be doing what when it happens.
When we were developing Newton, we were betting that what would come next would be handheld computers that would have entirely new interfaces—we were using a stylus and gestures, and a touchscreen—and we believed that there were a lot of things that had to be created before something like that could be realized.
So we helped co-develop what became the ARM processor, which is now in 8 billion smartphones and other mobile devices today.
Newton actually was the first to do personal digital assistant software, which is what Cortana and Siri and Amazon are all doing today. We were the first to do object-oriented programming on a handheld device, we were the first to come up with a microprocessor—the ARM—that enabled you to do object-oriented programming like you had on the Macintosh, but on a handheld device.
But we were way ahead of our time. And I wasn't an engineer, so it was harder for me to appreciate how difficult some of these things could be commercialized. The first iPhone came out in 2007. If you go back and look at "Knowledge Navigator" from 1987, it looks remarkably like a tablet computer today. To anyone who sees the "Knowledge Navigator" today and wasn't around in the 1980s, it looks pretty ordinary, but it was considered outrageous when we showed it.
That's just the reality of being in hi-tech: You take risks, sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong. In the case of the things we were doing, I guess we were too far ahead of our time for a practical standpoint, but it eventually happened.
Do you see any parallels in the way that Tim Cook is running Apple now to the way you did?
Tim Cook is a superb executive. He's probably the best executive in the world at running a business on Apple's scale, keeping true to the vision that Steve Jobs had, recruiting and retaining excellent talent. And Tim's done a terrific job in a crisis, as he did recently with the FBI trying to get a backdoor into the iPhone.
I have nothing but huge respect for what Tim Cook is doing at Apple.
Do you think the future of Apple is sound? Do you see the same kind of excitement that's pervaded product launches in recent years continuing?
I think that Apple's in a different stage today than it's ever been before. It's got a huge responsibility to an incredibly large user population that loves Apple's products, that expects Apple not necessarily to be the first at what they do, but they expect Apple to be the best.
They've lived up to that with the iPhone in particular. I happen to be a big fan of the iPad Pro—I think it's one of the best products Apple's ever introduced. It isn't probably as successful as some people had hoped, but in terms of the quality of the product, I use it all the time. To me, it's a spectacular product, but it hasn't turned out to be a blockbuster.
Do you think Apple will be in a position to have any of these moonshot moments again?
I couldn't speculate. I'm not at Apple and haven't been involved in it for several decades. I'm a big Apple fan, but I have no insider perspective. And I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.
I'm much more interested in the things I'm involved with, which is disruption in healthcare, in fintech. I co-founded Theta Interactive—we're now up to 1,000 employees and we're the largest independent cloud marketing company in the US, if not the world.
Between healthcare and fintech—and the other ventures you're working on—what excites you most about the future of technology?
I learned something when I showed up at Apple, I was a veteran of 10 years of the cola wars. In that case, Pepsi had won. We'd gone from a fairly small regional soft drink brand when I became marketing VP in 1970 to becoming the largest-selling consumer packaged goods in the United States.
I thought business was all about competition and winning. And then I remembered one time I was in the Macintosh lab with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs late at night, and Bill and Steve are talking about their 'noble cause' to empower knowledge workers with tools for the mind that would make the individual incredibly productive, and they would change the world one person at a time.
I said to myself, "I've never heard anything like this." A noble cause. It was an entirely new way of thinking about business; we'd never talked about noble causes when I was in the soft drink industry. We talked about market share. So that insight that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had about a noble cause—and remember, most of the time they were arguing with each other, but the one thing they never argued about was the importance of this noble cause to change the world—and so that's what really motivates me today.
That's why I'm interested in disruptive innovation in what seems to be an unsustainable healthcare system in the US. It has everything to do with having a noble cause to completely rethink point-of-care, point-of-sale, particularly around the most expensive part of the health system, which is the 5% of the population who are chronic care patients who represent over 50% of the healthcare spend.
Do think there are any countries that could serve as a model for the US healthcare system?
There are some good role models. You can go to India for a cataract operation in one of these very modern, extremely qualified hospitals that do nothing but cataract operations, and it costs $50 per operation.
France has figured out how to build their medical system so it focuses on outcomes as opposed to procedures, the way we're organized in the US. They're able to deliver high-quality healthcare for about half the cost of what we do in the US.
Singapore has healthcare for about half the cost per capita of what we have in the US.
From these few pocket examples it is possible to completely rethink the way we deliver healthcare, particularly to the most expensive patients. Part of it is getting people to focus on behavioral health. If you can get people to modify their behavior, you can save billions and billions of dollars in the healthcare system in the United States.
Imagine if you could get everybody to lose 20 lbs., you could dramatically lower the cost of healthcare in the United States by many, many billions of dollars. So maybe that's not realistic, but it is realistic that we can begin to shift the incentives to the providers, the hospitals, to focus on what are called bundled services (and population health) and focusing on wellness, not just treating people for a sick event.
Those are going to become the role models for how we disrupt healthcare on a much larger scale over the next several years. It isn't like we have to speculate whether these things will work—these things do work—the real questions is how do you build them to scale?


During the pursuit at the Junior world Championships biathlon in Brezno-Osrblie Ukrainian Kateryna Bech has won a gold award. Thus it has established a unique achievement for Ukraine.
Despite the fact that the Ukrainian is started first (before she won the sprint), Catherine beh almost at the start lost their advantage. And later during the first shooting he had made a blunder. But it managed to change during the second shooting. Thus in leaders there was not only Catherine beh, but another Ukrainian Anna Krivonos, who also shot clean.
On the third firing line Bech newly made one mistake. Much worse things went in Kryvonos – two shots miss.
But beh was able to hold the lead. And has confirmed the attack on victory when I shot clean for the fourth firing line. It helped, because in the last round, her lead over the German by Hannah Kesinger was only fifteen seconds. But to finish Ukrainka their advantage only increased.
Catherine Bech won and became twice world champion among juniors. The first in the history of the Ukrainian biathlon. German Hannah Kubinger finished only second. The third was the representative of France Sophie Sova.
As for the rest of Ukrainians, but Anna Krivonos, earning two racks four penalty, she fell back in the second dozen. So she finished only 17th. Valeriya Dmitrenko and Anna Kovalenko, finished close to each other, in the 29th and 35th positions.
In the overall standings of the Junior IBU Cup Catherine beh came in second place, reducing the distance from the leader, the Germans Hannah Kubinger, to 33 points. In addition, at the world Championships Katia scored the most points among all athletes in the three races, and, according to the new rules of the IBU, receives their personal quota for the final adult stage of the world Cup which will be held in late March in the Norwegian Holmenkollen.


text:
Common expression of an unusual CD45 isoform on T cells from patients with large granular lymphocyte leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome
Jack J.H. Bleesing, John Edward Janik, Thomas A. Fleisher
Patients with T-cell large granular lymphocyte (T-LGL) leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome (ALPS) share many features, including autoimmunity and an expansion of (cytotoxic) T cells, which in ALPS patients express an unusual (B220) isoform of CD45, corresponding to an altered O-glycosylation profile. Here we showed that T-LGL leukaemia cells also expressed this B220 isoform. We hypothesize that B220+ T cells constitute proliferating T cells that have become competent to undergo apoptosis, but that constitutive (ALPS) or functional (T-LGL) defects prevent this process. Altered O-glycosylation of the extracellular domains of CD45 may have consequences for this tyrosine phosphatase as a regulator of cell proliferation and survival.
British Journal of Haematology
Autoimmune Lymphoproliferative Syndrome
Large Granular Lymphocytic Leukemia
CD45 isoforms
T-LGL leukaemia
Bleesing, J. J. H., Janik, J. E., & Fleisher, T. A. (2003). Common expression of an unusual CD45 isoform on T cells from patients with large granular lymphocyte leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome. British Journal of Haematology, 120(1), 93-96. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2141.2003.04034.x
Common expression of an unusual CD45 isoform on T cells from patients with large granular lymphocyte leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome. / Bleesing, Jack J.H.; Janik, John Edward; Fleisher, Thomas A.
In: British Journal of Haematology, Vol. 120, No. 1, 16.01.2003, p. 93-96.
Bleesing, JJH, Janik, JE & Fleisher, TA 2003, 'Common expression of an unusual CD45 isoform on T cells from patients with large granular lymphocyte leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome', British Journal of Haematology, vol. 120, no. 1, pp. 93-96. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2141.2003.04034.x
Bleesing JJH, Janik JE, Fleisher TA. Common expression of an unusual CD45 isoform on T cells from patients with large granular lymphocyte leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome. British Journal of Haematology. 2003 Jan 16;120(1):93-96. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2141.2003.04034.x
Bleesing, Jack J.H. ; Janik, John Edward ; Fleisher, Thomas A. / Common expression of an unusual CD45 isoform on T cells from patients with large granular lymphocyte leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome. In: British Journal of Haematology. 2003 ; Vol. 120, No. 1. pp. 93-96.
@article{3e5df63fd9ec48cdbf1dadc7c3d5fc67,
title = "Common expression of an unusual CD45 isoform on T cells from patients with large granular lymphocyte leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome",
abstract = "Patients with T-cell large granular lymphocyte (T-LGL) leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome (ALPS) share many features, including autoimmunity and an expansion of (cytotoxic) T cells, which in ALPS patients express an unusual (B220) isoform of CD45, corresponding to an altered O-glycosylation profile. Here we showed that T-LGL leukaemia cells also expressed this B220 isoform. We hypothesize that B220+ T cells constitute proliferating T cells that have become competent to undergo apoptosis, but that constitutive (ALPS) or functional (T-LGL) defects prevent this process. Altered O-glycosylation of the extracellular domains of CD45 may have consequences for this tyrosine phosphatase as a regulator of cell proliferation and survival.",
keywords = "Apoptosis, Autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome, CD45 isoforms, Glycosylation, T-LGL leukaemia",
author = "Bleesing, {Jack J.H.} and Janik, {John Edward} and Fleisher, {Thomas A.}",
journal = "British Journal of Haematology",
T1 - Common expression of an unusual CD45 isoform on T cells from patients with large granular lymphocyte leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome
AU - Bleesing, Jack J.H.
AU - Janik, John Edward
AU - Fleisher, Thomas A.
N2 - Patients with T-cell large granular lymphocyte (T-LGL) leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome (ALPS) share many features, including autoimmunity and an expansion of (cytotoxic) T cells, which in ALPS patients express an unusual (B220) isoform of CD45, corresponding to an altered O-glycosylation profile. Here we showed that T-LGL leukaemia cells also expressed this B220 isoform. We hypothesize that B220+ T cells constitute proliferating T cells that have become competent to undergo apoptosis, but that constitutive (ALPS) or functional (T-LGL) defects prevent this process. Altered O-glycosylation of the extracellular domains of CD45 may have consequences for this tyrosine phosphatase as a regulator of cell proliferation and survival.
AB - Patients with T-cell large granular lymphocyte (T-LGL) leukaemia and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome (ALPS) share many features, including autoimmunity and an expansion of (cytotoxic) T cells, which in ALPS patients express an unusual (B220) isoform of CD45, corresponding to an altered O-glycosylation profile. Here we showed that T-LGL leukaemia cells also expressed this B220 isoform. We hypothesize that B220+ T cells constitute proliferating T cells that have become competent to undergo apoptosis, but that constitutive (ALPS) or functional (T-LGL) defects prevent this process. Altered O-glycosylation of the extracellular domains of CD45 may have consequences for this tyrosine phosphatase as a regulator of cell proliferation and survival.
KW - Autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome
KW - CD45 isoforms
KW - Glycosylation
KW - T-LGL leukaemia
JO - British Journal of Haematology
JF - British Journal of Haematology

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: can't set data to the variable when i parse json I am currently trying to set data I get from parsing my json to a variable in my ViewController from RawDataCategory file, which decodes json.
Here is how I call a static method in CategoryViewController
class CategoryViewController: UIViewController {

    @IBOutlet weak var tableView: UITableView!

    var categoryProducts: [Datum]? // this is the variable i want with data i get

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()

        tableView.dataSource = self
        tableView.delegate = self

        Datum.fetchProducts { (categoryProductsFromJSON) -> () in   // here i call a static function.. i will paste the code below

            self.categoryProducts = categoryProductsFromJSON  //here i set value

            print(self.categoryProducts?[0].name) // if i try to print the value in the scope i can access it. and it shows with no problem
        }

            print(categoryProducts?[0].name)  //here is the problem. when i get out of the scope it return nil.

    }
}

I can access the variable in the scope but somehow when i try to call it outside it prints nil.
Here is the static function (method) i call to get decoded json:

    static func fetchProducts(_ completionHandler: @escaping ([Datum]) -> ()) {

        guard let url = URL(string: "http://localhost:8888/dayhandan/public/api/v1/category/1") else { return }

        let session = URLSession(configuration: .default)

        let task  =  session.dataTask(with: url, completionHandler: { (data, response, error) -> Void in

            if error != nil {
                print("error")
                return
            }

            do {
                print("no error so far")
                guard let data = data else { return }

                let rawData = try JSONDecoder().decode(CategoryRawData.self, from: data)

                DispatchQueue.main.async(execute: { () -> Void in
                    completionHandler(rawData.data ?? [])
                })

            } catch let err {
                print(err)
            }
        })
        task.resume()
    }

I don't get any errors while i decode json. In fact I can pass it to my ViewContoller. There are no errors overall. categoryProducts just becomes nil when i call it outside the scope.
Is this a good way to use decoded data. if it is can someone help me to solve the issue. or can someone point at a good way to use decoded data. Thanks for your time

A: You should only try to use the result of fetchProducts in the completion handler because the completion handler will be executed at some point in the future. Anything outside of the completion handler will be executed immediately.
Reload your tableView from within the completion handler:
Datum.fetchProducts { (categoryProductsFromJSON) -> () in
    self.categoryProducts = categoryProductsFromJSON
    DispatchQueue.main.async {
        self.tableView.reloadData()
    }
}

Then you should have some logic to populate the tableView:
extension CategoryViewController: UITableViewDataSource {

    func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, numberOfRowsInSection section: Int) -> Int {
        return categoryProducts?.count ?? 0
    }

    func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
        // something like this
        guard let category = categoryProducts?[indexPath.row] else { return UITableViewCell() }
        let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCell(withIdentifier: "cell")
        cell.titleLabel?.text = category.title
        return cell
    }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Justin Hertz's Full Length Album
My attempt to give the world a reason to dance. Or hum, smile, laugh, or just to breathe. Any of those will do.
Justin Hertz
Last updated March 1, 2015
Minneapolis, MN Indie Rock
pledged of $500 goal
You will receive a digital download of the full album. Hot dang!
Estimated delivery Aug 2013
A CD (physical copy) of the full album and a digital download. For those who like it "old school". Free shipping.
Ships to Only United States
A limited edition T-shirt (design TBD), and a digital download of the full album. I can tell you'll look good in that shirt. Free shipping.
A limited edition T-shirt (design TBD), a CD (physical copy) of the full album, and a digital download. The trifecta! Free shipping.
You will receive an exclusive American Apparel Zip Up - Style F497 ($48 retail value) (design TBD) and a digital download of the full album. Zippity do da! Free Shipping.
Over the hill, in a good way! You will receive an exclusive American Apparel Zip Up - Style F497 ($48 retail value) (design TBD), a limited edition T-shirt (design TBD), a CD (physical copy) of the album, and a digital download. Free Shipping.
The Motherload Part I. You will receive an exclusive American Apparel Zip Up - Style F497 ($48 retail value) (design TBD), a limited edition T-shirt (design TBD), a CD (physical copy) of the full album and a digital download. As a special tribute to you, your name will appear on the album's webpage under the "Best Kickin' Fans" section. Free Shipping.
Family fun pack! 4 limited edition T-shirts (design TBD), 4 CDs (physical copies) of the full album and 4 digital downloads. Whoa, what a deal. Free shipping.
Twice the fun! You will receive 2 exclusive American Apparel Zip Ups - Style F497 ($96 retail value) (design TBD), 2 limited edition T-shirts (design TBD), 2 CDs (physical copies) of the full album and 2 digital downloads. Free Shipping.
The Motherload Part II. You will receive 2 exclusive American Apparel Zip Ups - Style F497 ($96 retail value) (design TBD), 2 limited edition T-shirts (design TBD), 2 CDs (physical copies) of the full album and 2 digital downloads. As a special tribute to you, your name along with another name of your choice (or your name twice) will appear on the album's webpage under the "Best Kickin' Fans" section. Free Shipping.
Jun 10, 2013 - Aug 9, 2013 (60 days)


Has this ever happened to you? You've traveled, you took a lot of luggage and so haven't been able to enjoy the last day of your trip because the suitcases weighed a lot? Because that's exactly what happens to me many times when I'm traveling. The last time this happened to me was when I was traveling to Japan, and, of course, Japan is a place you want to enjoy right until the last moment. So this time I wondered wouldn't it be nice if there was some way I could take care of my suitcases while I enjoy my last day of travel without worrying about carrying my luggage. It was at that point I searched on the Internet and found Hi5 company.
Hi5 takes care of your luggage from your accommodation to let you enjoy that last day of travel, commonly not enjoyed because of your luggage burden. This company provides luggage pickup service from 23 Tokyo wards and luggage dropoff at Haneda International Airport. In principle it may look like that all of this would be very difficult to do, messy, it may take a while and even be expensive, but it is not like that at all! The truth is that it is a fairly easy, simple process that takes little time and is not expensive at all.
The first step to a luggage-free worry-free last day of travel is using one of these apps to contact Hi5: "Wechat" or "LINE" (there is a QR code and ID available at website to make the process more accessible). After that, the company will ask for some details from you, and will offer you a quote. Thirdly, you should book their luggage service before 6pm the day before you require them to pick the suitcases up. You should keep in mind that Hi5 will pick up the suitcases from your accommodation, so you will not even need to move from your place. And finally, you can pick up your luggage between 8pm and 11pm at Haneda Airport the departure day, (or Narita for an extra fee). Of course, if you need to pick your luggage up sooner or later, Hi5 is open to discuss the details and they will always try to accommodate you.
But… what about the price and the payment?
Regarding the prices, customers are allowed to store up to 5 suitcases. The first one costs ¥2000 (around $17,58 and 15,24€) and each extra suitcase costs ¥1500 (around $13,19 and 11,43€). The payment method it is as simple as you can use PayPal. For those who do not know PayPal or know it but do not trust payments online, allow me to share with you that PayPal is a simple and safe online payment method used all over the world and in more and more stores every day. First, you have to create an account and securely link your bank account and/or your credit card; after that, you just need your e-mail and your password to make your luggage reservation! Now is not the time to go into details about PayPal, but it is known they take the security of your money very seriously so it's very secure!
This time I spent two weeks in Japan, but it was not until the third-to-last day that I decided to look for this kind of service. When I found Hi5, I read the information on the website carefully, I contacted them using LINE and the communication was very fast, easy and fluent. Before I realized, they were picking up my luggage at my hotel and I could enjoy the last day of my trip with no luggage in Japan! Thanks to Hi5 I was able to enjoy Nikko on my last day of travel, World Heritage place and one of the most important Buddhist locations in the country.
If you are history lover, you definitely should visit Taiyuin-byo, which is the mausoleum of Iemitsu, grandchildren of Ieyasu, Shogun of clan Tokugawa. This sanctuary is built inside a forest of Japanese cedars trees, where a beautiful setting is made in combination with Niomon gate, its guardians and corridors with dozens of lanterns donated by the daimyo (clan lord). Near to this place, there are more temple sightseeing sports, such as Futarasan and Toshogu (Ieyasu mausoleum). By the way, if you want a funny picture, when you are visiting Toshogu, I suggest you go to the Shinyosha and see the wooden sculpture of the three wise monkeys (known as the monkeys that can not hear, speak or see).
After spending some time here, I bought some bento and went to Shinkyo bridge, the sacred red bridge of Nikko.
I sat in a spot close to the bridge where I could appreciate the view, something that I highly recommend because the contrast between the intense red color of the bridge with the forest green, the sky blue and the murmur of the river is really a gift for the senses, good way to end a trip, don't you think?
Satisfied with my lunch and last morning of sightseeing, I made my way to the airport. Once at the airport I followed the signs to the Domestic Terminal shuttle bus stop. It was well signposted and east to find, no problems there.
I headed to the pickup point near the Koban (police box) situated outside the shuttle bus stop. I looked for the Hi5 logo on the car and found it a short walk down from shuttle bus. Ms Tanabe confirmed my details and handed over my luggage with a smile. Success!
Now off to my final destination, I hope to be back again soon!
Throughout my last day in Japan it was very strange for me not to carry my luggage with me and several times I thought "I have to go for my luggage" or "where have I left my suitcases?", but then, suddenly I remembered that I had used Hi5 services so I would not have to worry and be able to enjoy my last day of travel peacefully just as I was doing at that moment. This time I went to Nikko but without heavy luggage, but if I wanted to go mountain climbing on the final day I could climb the highest mountain in Japan, Mt. Fuji or go skiing in Yuzawa. Or in Autumn, I could enjoy autumn leaves and hot springs in Hakone or Atami! So many possibilities!
I am happy not to have missed a day of travel, not having to carry the heavy luggage all day, not to have finished as tired as usual and, above all, I am very happy to have found and hired the Hi5 services.


If you're looking for fast, healthy vegetarian food in trendy surroundings, head to Tibits in Heddon Street. There's a choice of hot dishes and salads to eat in or take away. Everything's charged by weight; just help yourself to what you fancy and take it to the counter to be weighed.


Rep. Jim Hall, R-Los Alamos, Sandoval and Santa Fe counties speaks with Superintendent Dr. Manuel Medrano and Vice Chair Randy Cordova while attending the Gallina School Board Meeting on June 19. Courtesy photo.
Rep. Jim Hall attended the Gallina School Board meeting Tuesday and visited with a number of the board members as well as members of the audience.
"Having been on the Los Alamos Public Schools Board, it was interesting to draw parallels and distinctions between our respective board meetings," Hall said.
He described typical similarities such as approval of minutes and the 2012-2013 budget, calendars for the upcoming year, and discussion of vacancies.
Some items were quite different, he said. For example, many of their requests for proposals only get one response — not many vendors willing to come all the way to Gallina, Hall said.
A local resident, Gene McCracken, discussed a potential Youth Conservation Core grant that he was working on to provide summer employement for their young people.
"I was impressed by everyone's commitment to kids and education," Hall said. "Superintendent Dr. Manuel Medrano's reports were crisp and to the point. The atmosphere was positive, people worked with each other, and the administrators, although few by Los Alamos standards, were engaged and competent."
First, they will be providing laptops to their high school students who will receive and turn in all their assignments electronically.
Second, Board Member Emily Vigil taught Hall's borther Jon Hall in Gallina in 1974.
Third, an increasing problem is that bears moved from Albuquerque neighborhoods are being dumped only a mile or two from Gallina. One bear ended up in a local backyard with a four-year-old child who shortly came into the house to tell his mommy about the "big dog" eating all of their dog's food.
"We'll have to talk to Game and Fish about moving the rogue bears many more miles into the forest before releasing them." Hall said.
Editor's note: Rep. Jim Hall is running against Democrat Stephanie Garcia Richard for House District 43.


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Many of us know that making physical health a priority enhances mental well being. When exercise is discussed, the word "endorphin" is often mentioned. Endorphins are hormones released during exercise that can cause positive feelings in the body and reduce pain. A myriad of research shows that exercise on its own can reduce stress and anxiety, improve sleep, and even reduce symptoms of depression.
The big problem when people are depressed is that they often feel immobilized and unmotivated to take part in healthy habits and routines. I often hear patients say that it's overwhelming to even think about healthy norms. I always stress the importance of taking one step at a time. If we focus on the big picture too much, we forget that the little details and small steps matter just as much.
It starts with having a plan. When patients express an interest in returning to exercise and eating right, we talk about each of the little steps they can take, such as short walks and runs, and taking classes at the local gym and eating whole foods. As my patients proceed with TMS treatments they do a little more each week. I've seen our patients do incredible things like getting scuba certified, running more and more miles each week, making time to go to exercise classes, and riding bikes. It doesn't happen overnight….it's one step at a time. All we have to do is start planning and stick to the small goals that we make for each day!
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Q: PHP returning PDOException 'could not find driver' when trying to connect do SQLite3 I'm trying to connect a SQLite Database using PDO, but i am getting this error:

Uncaught exception 'PDOException' with message 'could not find driver'

In my code:
$db = new PDO('sqlite:remedios.sqlite');

Also, the command PDO::getAvailableDrivers() lists only mysql.
I am using a Ubuntu 14.04
But the problem is that I already installed pdo_sqlite (installed with apt-get sqlite3 php5-sqlite).
I also checked it on:

*

*My phpinfo() shows sqlite3 (phpinfo is here: PHPInfo)

*I have extension=pdo_sqlite.so in my PHP configuration file in   /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/20-pdo_sqlite.ini (phpinfo lists this file in "Additional .ini files parsed")

*I have pdo_sqlite.so in folder /usr/lib/php5/20121212

*Already tried to reinstall sqlite3, php5, php5-sqlite

Edit
Configurations files below:
20-pdo_sqlite.ini
; configuration for php SQLite module
; priority=20
extension=pdo_sqlite.so

20-sqlite3.ini
; configuration for php SQLite module
; priority=20
extension=sqlite3.so

Edit2
Find this error on apache error.log
PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php5/20121212/pdo_sqlite.so' - /usr/lib/php5/20121212/pdo_sqlite.so: undefined symbol: sqlite3_column_table_name in Unknown on line 0
[Fri Nov 13 00:03:42.704671 2015] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 1938] AH00163: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.5.9-1ubuntu4.14 OpenSSL/1.0.1f configured -- resuming normal operations
[Fri Nov 13 00:03:42.704702 2015] [core:notice] [pid 1938] AH00094: Command line: '/usr/sbin/apache2'

A: You are missing the SQLite client library, I think the package is libsqlite3-0 on Ubuntu:
apt-get install libsqlite3-0
restart Apache after that.
UPDATE - we figured it out in the chat with the help of ldconfig -p | grep sqlite. It found a stale installation of libsqlite3 in /usr/local/lib that was conflicting with the one that Apache was using. Removing the conflicting installation, and re-installing sqlite3 packages solved the problem.

A: I've had similar problem and I think it is important to give another elaborate answer on this. The root of the problem was that I built my own newest version of sqlite from sources (repo for Ubuntu 16.04 is outdated) without SQLITE_ENABLE_COLUMN_METADATA definition. It worked before I restarted the machine. Probably it's the previous version was running or something like that, because after a reboot I've got the trouble.
http://source.online.free.fr/Linux_HowToCompileSQLite.html

The SQLitePass library uses specific SQLite functions to retrieve schema information on an SQL statement.
These functions are :
    sqlite3_column_database_name
    sqlite3_column_database_name16
    sqlite3_column_table_name
    sqlite3_column_table_name16
    sqlite3_column_origin_name
    sqlite3_column_origin_name16
    sqlite3_table_column_metadata

Unfortunately, they are not always available in the precompiled library available on the SQLite webpage or in the sqlite package dedicated to your Linux distribution.
In order to get these functions in our sqlite3.so library, we need to compile the SQLite source code with the [SQLITE_ENABLE_COLUMN_METADATA] compiler directive.

That's why less +G /var/log/php_errors.log output had the line

PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/20151012/pdo_sqlite.so' - /usr/lib/php/20151012/pdo_sqlite.so: undefined symbol: sqlite3_column_table_name in Unknown on line 0

although the pdo_sqlite was present in phpinfo(); output all the time.
To solve the problem I did follow the compilation instructions by the link above: open sqlite3.c in the sources and after the lines
#define SQLITE_CORE 1
#define SQLITE_AMALGAMATION 1
#ifndef SQLITE_PRIVATE
# define SQLITE_PRIVATE static
#endif

add
#define SQLITE_ENABLE_COLUMN_METADATA

then run
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make check
make: Nothing to be done for 'check'.
$ sudo make install
$ sudo service apache2 restart

and now sqlite is working again.

A: type this:
sudo apt-get install php5-sqlite


[eng] Theoretical calculations based on pseudo-potentials were used to determine the structures of the complexes formed between Cu2+ ion and 2-(8-quinolinoxy)propionic acid (LR-74), which is a potent inhibitor of non-enzymatic glycation reactions. The most stable among such complexes consist of one atom of copper and two molecules of inhibitor, [Cu(LR-74)2], and possess a distorted octahedral geometry. In the complex containing a single molecule of inhibitor, the square planar form, [Cu(LR-74)(H2O)]+, is slightly more stable than the octahedral form, [Cu(LR-74)(H2O)3]+, in solution. All octahedral complexes exhibit strong Jahn<br>Teller distortion that results in substantially increased axial distances.