Trump administration to ease restrictions on military drone exports–what does it mean?
For some time now, military advisors to President Trump have been floating the idea that the exportation of military drones should be stepped up in order to keep the United States "in the game", so to speak. Obviously, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are part of a growth industry, with drones of all shapes and sizes being produced and sold to people all over the world.
Under Obama, lethal drone exports were strictly limited in accordance with what is perhaps best characterized as a policy of American Exceptionalism: Do as we say, not as we do. The technology has been spreading nonetheless all over the globe, with both China and Israel as major players ready and willing to furnish drones to countries not on Obama's very short list of trustworthy customers. The Obama administration approach was to operate with a presumption against the exportation of lethal drones, but governments seeking this technology no longer need the United States to acquire it. To suppose that lethal drones would not eventually be hovering all over the globe, with or without the blessing of the executive branch of the US government, was shortsighted, to put it mildly. The dangerous precedent was set by the US government itself for the use of drones in wars on "battlefields" paradoxically "outside areas of active hostilities", and now we can expect to see the true globalization of remote-control killing, across all borders, as lethal creep seeps into the protocol of governments large and small, democratic and monarchic alike.
One of the figures promoting the expansion of drone exports has been, predictably, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who, like so many other influential advisors to the president, has financial incentives for seeing to it that this facet of US military industry flourish. Initial indications suggest that the exports will be primarily of surveillance, not weaponized drones, but it is the very nature of a drone to be modular, so lethal delivery systems can be snapped on facilely by the customer. Needless to say, there will be no way to control how these machines are deployed by the end user, and at some point, the thin edge of the wedge will become the thickest, with untrammeled exports of fully weaponized drones as the norm–the argument being, again, that "if we don't provide the lethal add-on, some other country will." No one sells guns without ammunition and it seems predictable that drones will be regularly produced and shipped prêt-à-tuer in the not-too-distant future, given that the weaponized drone has already been successfully marketed as a tool of "smart war" in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Former US president Barack Obama and former UK prime minister David Cameron intentionally and premeditatedly hunted down and killed their own compatriots in acts of summary execution without indictment, much less trial. What reason can there be for believing that other political leaders will not also follow suit? If two of the most stable democratic governments on the planet have opted to substitute assassination for judicial process, why would the leaders of nondemocratic nations not take this as a license to kill anyone whom they perceive to be threats?
People who see lethal drones as a growth industry are right: the market potential has only just begun. Who knew that Western democracies would revert to pre-Magna Carta times in their desperation to stem the tide of terrorism? That the use of this tactic, the summary execution without trial of suspects, along with whoever happens to be at their side, has failed spectacularly is evidenced by the very fact that the Global War on Terror (GWOT) continues to expand as terrorists proliferate and move to new places, sometimes seeking refuge in the West–which is of course the safest place for them to hide out at this point in history. Certainly jihadists concerned to retaliate to lethal drones hovering above their own neighborhoods in homelands in the Middle East have prudential reasons to pitch a tent somewhere else.
The move to increase drone exports undoubtedly appeals to Trump, not because he himself is in cahoots with the lethal drone industry (at least not to my knowledge), but because he proudly proclaims that his primary mission is to Make America Great Again. Being first and foremost a businessman, Trump naturally measures "greatness" in economic terms. This explains why he has been exporting military weapons and technologies in a dizzying flurry all over the world, especially to the Middle East, but also to Southeast Asia. President Obama had set new records for military exports to Saudi Arabia but Trump, never to be outshined by Obama, has taken weapons exports to a whole new level.
It is possible that Trump's unabashed quest to out-do Obama on all fronts is a motivating factor in his increased use of lethal drones, the proliferation of hunt and kill missions, and also the decision to ramp up all military exports, including drones. I am inclined, however, to interpret all of this as following from Trump's monolithic desire to make America economically great again. The more of these "tools" which are expended, whether in military missions abroad or in exports to other governments, the more there will be a perceived need to produce even more of them, using American capital and American labor. Greater production of weapons by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the many other American firms whose wealth derives from the sale of implements of mass homicide will mean more profits. It seems safe to say that Trump does care more about the nation's economic well-being than the fact that the number one US export has become, sad to say: death. But Trump's heartfelt desire to revive the US steel industry and, ultimately the US economy, is merely aided by his massive increases in weapons exports. The end justifies the means. Let the missiles fall where they may.
The way was paved for Trump's increase in military drone exports by the resplendent success on the part of the previous administration in normalizing assassination and, remarkably, convincing people to believe that drone operators may in fact commit what would obviously be war crimes, if perpetrated by uniformed soldiers on the ground. For drones are used to kill suspects without providing them with the opportunity to surrender, even when they are unarmed and not threatening anyone with death, least of all the drone operator incinerating the target. As much as Trump detractors would like to blame the current president for the marked increase in drone-perpetrated carnage to come, the formidable feat of normalizing assassination was accomplished not by Donald Trump, but by Barack Obama. This was a landmark, paradigm-shifting, even revolutionary, rebranding of assassination as targeted killing, said to constitute perfectly legitimate warfare.
No one should be surprised that, like US politicians, foreign leaders find lethal drone technology to be highly seductive. Targeted killing has proven easy to sell. More and more leaders will likely follow the US example, by insisting that lethal drones save the lives of compatriots, and obviate the need to sacrifice soldiers. But unscrupulous politicians and the leaders of nations where democracy has yet to take hold can use the very same rationalizations for killing suspects as did their mentors: political dissidents will be denounced as intrinsically evil terrorists and therefore fair game for summary execution.
The myopia of the Obama administration in normalizing assassination without thinking through what were sure to be the ultimate consequences of insisting that the executive branch of a government has the right, in national self-defense, to execute suspects where and when it pleases, will emerge clearly in the years to come. For now, it seems safe to say that "strike first, suppress questions later" will characterize the approach to dissidents by more and more political leaders, all over the globe, thanks to the nearly boundless potential for profits in the death industry. The use of lethal drones to assassinate suspects will be limited only by the imaginations of politicians as they decide, behind closed doors, who does and who does not deserve to be extinguished by remote control.
Eye in the Sky (2015) is the first feature-length film about drone warfare to have received a decent amount of mainstream attention. This no doubt has something to do with the high-caliber cast, including lead roles by Helen Mirren as Colonel Katherine Powell, and Alan Rickman as Lieutenant General Frank Benson. Big names imply big budgets. But there's another reason why this movie, directed by Gavin Hood, has been discussed more than National Bird (2016), Good Kill (2015), Drone (2014), Drones (2013), Unmanned: America's Drone Wars (2013), or Dirty Wars (2013).
None of these films is entertaining. Eye in the Sky, like some of the others in this growing genre, presents itself as a work of historical fiction, grounded in what is supposed to be a realistic portrayal of the contemporary practice of drone warfare against persons suspected of association with radical jihadist groups. But rather than condemning the remote-control killers, as the other films unequivocally do, Eye in the Sky portrays the protagonists wrestling with the complexities of morality before launching missiles and then congratulating one another on their success.
The "evil enemy" here, in Nairobi, Kenya, is Al Shabaab, and the fate of one of their cells is the subject of lengthy and sophistic "just war" debate among the drone warriors. A contingent of US and British military and civilian officials communicate with one another from different parts of the world over Skype-like video feed, and after arguing over the course of the workday, they ultimately decide to execute the suspects, who appear to be preparing to carry out a suicide attack in the proximate future or, as the drone warriors would say, "imminently".
One of the suspects is a US citizen, recently recruited from Minnesota, and two are British nationals. The white woman, Susan Danford—nom de guerre Ayesha Al Hady—has been tracked by Colonel Powell for a remarkable six years. Powell is keen to kill Danford, even after having summarized her life's story as that of a person who came from a troubled household, married a terrorist, and was converted to the jihadist cause as a result of her vulnerability.
The mission is supposed to culminate in capture, not killing, but when the group of suspects convenes at a house where a suicide vest is being assembled and a video message filmed, the military officials immediately call for a missile strike, to the initial protests of the civilian political officials in attendance, who insist that they are there to witness a capture, not a targeted assassination.
The rest of the film is essentially an extended consideration of a version of what professional analytic philosophers call "The Trolley Problem," a thought experiment wherein people are persuaded that they must kill some people in order to save others. Such hypothetical scenarios—like the proverbial ticking bomb, which is said by some to illustrate the necessity of torture under certain circumstances—involve an eerie desire on the part of some thinkers to persuade others to condone what, left to their own devices, they would never have agreed to do. As David Swanson has correctly observed, there is no known case in reality of drone warriors who kill a person and his entourage as they strap a suicide vest onto the martyr's chest. That is why singling out this wildly implausible and entirely hypothetical scenario as representative of drone warfare in general is a consummate expression of pro-military propaganda.
Eye in the Sky attempts to portray the dilemmas involved in drone warfare but ultimately serves to promote the drone warriors' all-too-sophistic modes of reasoning. Rather than ask deep and important questions such as how Al-Shabaab became such a powerful force in, first, Somalia and, later, places such as Kenya, the film allows the viewer steeped in New York Times headlines touting "Six Suspected Militants Slain" to float along blissfully in his or her state of ignorance regarding what precisely the US and British governments have been doing in the Middle East for the past sixteen years.
It is abundantly clear from the very fact that new recruits from the United States and Britain—indeed, the very targets of the mission in this story—have been primarily either troubled youths or persons outraged at the Western devastation of the Middle East, and now Africa. Yet the film blithely allows the viewer to persist in puzzlement over the perennial question: Why do they hate us?
Both Colonel Powell and General Benson consider Susan Danford's allegiance with Al-Shabaab to be, essentially, a capital offense. They don't bother with niceties such as the fact that capital punishment has been outlawed in the United Kingdom. Instead, the military personnel seek refuge in and parrot the simpleminded terms of just war theory which they learned in first-year ethics class at the military academy.
The missile strike is said to be a military necessity, proportional, and a last resort. It has furthermore been authorized by the legitimate authority, aka the US president, to whom the British continue to defer, even after the scathing Chilcot report in which Prime Minister Tony Blair was taken to task for embroiling Britain in the ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq. As though none of that ever happened, when President Barack Obama normalized the targeted assassination of anyone in any place on the planet where radical jihadist terrorists are said by some anonymous analyst to reside, Prime Minister David Cameron, too, followed suit. In August 2015, he authorized missile strikes from drones against British nationals in Syria, despite the Parliament's having voted down his call for war in 2013.
Perhaps Cameron was impressed by Barack Obama and drone killing czar John Brennan's oft-flaunted fluency in just war rhetoric. Unfortunately, in Eye in the Sky, the sophomoric facility of the assassins with the terms of just war theory may, too, be taken as evidence to ignorant viewers that these people in uniform know what they are talking about and should be trusted with the delicate decision of where, when, and why to summarily execute human beings who have not been charged with crimes, much less permitted to stand trial.
The question how a missile strike in a country not at war can be conceived of as a military necessity is altogether ignored in this film, as though it were already a settled matter. Someone in the US government (President Obama under the advisement of John Brennan, former president and CEO of The Analysis Corporation, the business of which is terrorist targeting analysis) decreed that the entire world was a battlefield, and this opened up every place and other governments to the delusive casuistry of just war theorists, including their most strident advocates for war, the self-styled "humanitarian hawks".
No matter that in this case there are no military soldiers from either the United States or Britain on the ground to be harmed. No matter that their collaborators are local spies who do in fact commit acts of treachery against their compatriots and are indeed brutally executed when this is discovered. Despite the complete absence of any of the aspects of a war which might warrant a missile strike as a military necessity—above all, that soldiers on the ground will otherwise die—the itchy trigger drone warriors point to their version of the dreaded Trolley Problem and a false and misleading application of utilitarianism to convince the naysayers that they must approve the launch of a missile in order to avert an even worse tragedy.
The military personnel are more persuasive than the sole civilian dissenter, and no one seems to be bothered in the least by questions of strategy. The word 'blowback' is never even mentioned in this film. But judging by the growth of ISIS and Al-Shabaab over the past decade, and the testimony of suicide bombers such as Humam Al-Balawi (the Jordanian doctor who blew up a group of CIA personnel at Camp Chapman in 2009—in direct retaliation to US missile strikes on Pakistan), the tactic of drone assassination can reasonably be expected to cause the ranks of jihadists to continue to swell. No one denies that during the occupation of Iraq, an effective recruiting tactic of factional groups was to point to the civilians harmed by the Western infidels as confirmation that they were indeed the evil enemy. Knowing all of this, it does not seem unfair to ask: Is "military necessity" now conceived by the remote-control killers as whatever will ensure the continuation of a war?
In Eye in the Sky, the drone warriors are more than willing to risk the life of a little girl who has set up a table where she is selling loaves of bread because, they say, if they do not act immediately then perhaps eighty little children just like her will be killed instead. No mention is made of the psychological trauma suffered by the people who do not die in drone strikes, but witness what has transpired. (When was the last time one of your neighbors' houses was cratered by a Hellfire missile?) Instead, the collateral damage estimate (CDE) so conscientiously calculated by a hapless soldier pressured by Colonel Powell to produce an estimated likelihood of the girl's death at less than 50% altogether ignores the 100% probability that she and everyone in the neighborhood will be terrorized.
But even focusing solely on the likely lethality of the strike, the drone warriors in Eye in the Sky display what is in reality a lethal lack of imagination, an utter failure to conceive of counter measures such as warning the people in nearby markets and public places of the impending danger. That is because, in the minds of the drone warriors, if one terrorist attack is thwarted, then another will surely be carried out later on down the line. By this mode of reasoning, they have arrived at the depressing and nihilistic conclusion that they must kill all of the suspects. What would be the point of doing anything else?
Recruits from Western societies, young people such as Junaid Hussain, Reyaad Khan, and Ruhul Amin, are assumed to be beyond the reach of reason, despite the glaring fact that their recent conversion to the jihadist cause itself reveals that they have changed their view before and could, in principle, change it again. Nonetheless, the drone warriors persist in their worship of death as the be-all and end-all of foreign policy. They are literally trapped in the lethality box, because they cannot conceive of any other way of dealing with factional terrorism than by killing people. When obviously innocent persons are destroyed, maimed, terrorized and left bereft by Western missiles, these acts of so-called military necessity end by galvanizing support for the Anti-Western jihadist cause, both near the strike site and in lands far away.
Realistically, what self-respecting father would not wish to avenge the death of his young child at the hands of the murderous drone warriors who are so despicable as to kill without risking any danger to themselves? Instead of thinking through the likely implications of what they are doing, the drone warriors persist in invoking delusive just war rhetoric to promote what they want to do: kill the evil enemy. But the use of lethal drones in what has been successfully marketed to taxpayers as "smart war", eliminates soldierly risk only by transferring it to civilians on the ground. No matter that new recruits continue to flock to the jihadist cause, seems to be the thinking of our great military minds, missiles are in ample supply.
It is a depressing view of humanity indeed which sees homicide as the solution to conflict when in fact it is its primary cause. But the delusion of the drone assassins is even worse than the corruption of criminal contract killers because they emetically congratulate each other, as in this film, for pushing buttons to eliminate their fellow human beings from the face of the earth, as though this were some kind of accomplishment, rather than the worst of all possible crimes.
New recruits such as Susan Danford will never stop arising from the ashes of drone strike sites until the drone strikes have come to a halt. Indulging in a false and Manichean division of people into black and white categories of good and evil, the killers corrupt more and more young people to collaborate with them, both informants and drone operators. Those who perform well in their jobs rise in the ranks to become the commanders of future killers, until at last the entire society is filled with people who upon watching a film such as Eye in the Sky end by sympathizing not with the victims but with those who destroyed them.
Focused as they will be upon this simpleminded "Trolley Problem" portrayal of drone warfare, Western viewers will likely miss altogether the obscene hegemonic presumptions of the killers who use beetle- and bird-sized drones to penetrate the private homes of people in order to stop them from wreaking havoc in countries where there are no US or British soldiers on the ground to harm. To pretend that all of this killing is for the benefit of the locals is delusional to the point of insanity.
If serial Western military interventions had not destroyed country after country across the Middle East, beginning with Iraq in 1991, then there would be no "evil enemy" to confront in the first place. To continue to ignore the words of jihadists themselves when they rail against the savage butchery of millions of Muslim people by the US military and its poodles is but the most flagrant expression of this smug hegemony. No, I am afraid, they do not hate us for our freedom.
In Eye in the Sky, anyone who opposes the use of military weapons against people living in their own civil society thousands of miles away is painted as a coward and a fool, as though there were some sort of moral obligation to launch missiles to save a hypothetical group of eighty people. The very same killers do not feel any obligation whatsoever to provide food, shelter, and potable water to the people living in such societies, even when the $70K cost of a single missile could be repurposed to save many more than eighty lives, in addition to winning over "hearts and minds".
Here is the ugly truth shining through the willingness to kill but not to save lives in nonhomicidal ways: Peace does not pay. The drone killing machine is the latest and most lucrative instantiation of the military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics complex. That Westerners continue to be taken in by this hoax is tragic for the people of Africa and the Middle East mercilessly terrorized (when they are not maimed or incinerated) while the killers gloat over what they take to be their moral courage.
Near the end of the film, Lieutenant Colonel Benson sanctimoniously admonishes the sole remaining dissenter among the witnesses to the mission, which she has denounced as "disgraceful". He smugly retorts to her suggestion that he is a coward: "Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war." But the cost of the remote-control elimination of persons suspected of complicity in terrorism is not merely the tragic loss of human life. It is the destruction of such killers' souls and the concomitant creation of even more killers who feel the need to retaliate in turn. It is the fact that they have rolled back all of the moral progress in procedural justice made by human societies since the 1215 Magna Carta. It is the fact that their dogged insistence on perpetuating and spreading this practice to the darkest and least democratic corners of the planet represents a categorical denial of human rights.
BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed. Drone Warfare: From Soldiering to Assassination?
In this 17-minute discussion, BBC Radio 4 host Laurie Taylor interviews Laurie Calhoun and David Galbreath about issues raised in We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age. Topics covered include the dawning of the Drone Age on November 3, 2002; its relation to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; the international principles of justice being ignored and subverted as a result of this easy-to-use and seemingly low-risk technology; the effects on civilians; whether drone strikes are more about counterterrorism or foreign policy by other means; and the psychological effect of drone strikes on drone operators themselves.
The study ended up taking four years longer than the projected two years, and it cost more than £10 million to carry out. The conclusions have been widely affirmed as damning of Tony Blair, the prime minister who chose to ally the United Kingdom with the United States in its invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.
–The war was not a last resort. The UK joined the war effort before peaceful options had been exhausted.
For the most part, the six year, £10 million+ study basically concluded what millions of antiwar protesters had no difficulty recognizing back in 2002.
One topic which has not been addressed by any of the many commentators on the Chilcot Report—at least not to my knowledge—is whether it does not also mandate a reconsideration of the treatment of Britain's allegedly treasonous enemies, young men who have turned against the UK government as a direct result of its complicity in the destruction of the country of Iraq, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings, and the harm to millions more, many of whom were forced to flee their homeland as a result of the postwar violence and insecurity.
I am interested specifically in the cases of three young British nationals, Ruhul Amin, Reyaad Khan, and Junaid Hussein, all of whom were incinerated by lethal drone while living in Syria, to which they fled in order to join the ISIS effort. The reason why the stories of these young men, denounced by the UK government as "evil terrorists" and threats to national security, trouble me is because they were deliberately destroyed by their own government without ever having stood trial or even been indicted for their alleged crimes.
Two of the targets, Ruhul Amin and Reyaad Khan, were taken out on August 21, 2015, by missiles fired from drones by the RAF under the authorization of then-Prime Minister David Cameron. The third target, Junaid Hussein, was eliminated on August 25, 2015, by a US drone with the help of British intelligence. (Other persons were killed in a previous strike aiming for him.) All in all, August 2015 was a precedent-setting month for Britain, a nation in which capital punishment has been outlawed and which was not officially at war in Syria, where these British nationals were hunted down and killed.
Two of the three alleged enemies of the state were 21 years of age at the time of their death; the third was 26 years old. They all died in late 2015, which implies that two of the targets were 9 years old when the UK government joined the ill-advised war on Iraq; the third was 14 years old. This means that they were children or young adolescents at the time of the invasion of Iraq. Their entire worldview was obviously affected by the war on Iraq, for they later decided to team up with whoever was fighting those responsible.
In other words, if Britain had not joined forces with the United States, which would have made it very, very difficult for the war to proceed, as there would not have been a "coalition of the willing" but only a rogue aggressor state, then in all likelihood Iraq would not have been destroyed, and the group which came to be known as ISIS would not have grown and spread from Iraq to Syria.
These are all counterfactual conditionals, of course. My point is only that if ISIS never came to be in its present form, because the people of Iraq were not subjected to oppression and lawless aggression—night raids, summary executions, detentions and torture—then the British drone strike targets destroyed with the blessing of David Cameron could not and would not have joined forces with the group now known as ISIS.
I therefore find that, in addition to being responsible for all of the death and destruction in Iraq, Tony Blair bears responsibility not only for the deaths of Ruhul Amin, Reyaad Khan, and Junaid Hussain, but also for Prime Minister David Cameron's summary execution without trial of these men. In saying this, I do not mean to absolve Cameron for his mistake, for he himself identified his victims as enemies of the state and arguably violated both British and international law by assassinating them. Cameron should never have followed US President Obama's misguided precedent in summarily executing without trial his fellow citizens.
However, Tony Blair is equally culpable, in my view, for having contributed to this return to a medieval, pre-Magna Carta framework of justice being perpetrated by unjust warriors as necessary only because of their own prior crimes and the existence of a sophisticated modern technology, the unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV), without which none of these deaths would have occurred (see: We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age).
It is tragic that so many young Muslim men are being annihilated for reacting violently to what they correctly identify to have been atrocious crimes committed in a misguided war (see: Chilcot Report). The state warriors and the factional terrorists sadly all embrace the same confused premise: that conflict can be resolved by obliterating anyone who disagrees. Ruhul Amin, Reyaad Khan and Junaid Hussain are graphic illustrations of how young people are being molded into jihadists by their witness of state-perpetrated war crimes, and their heartfelt desire to stop them.
On July 8, 2016, a robot was used for the very first time to blow up a criminal suspect in the United States. Five Dallas city policemen had been slain, and several others injured. The perpetrator, Micah Xavier Johnson, was involved in a conversation with the police for a while, but when he began shooting again, the decision was taken to blow him up. The opportunity was there, the bomb-disposal robot was already in the possession of the police, and who could complain, given what this particular suspect had already done?
The robot used to blow up Micah Johnson was not a lethal drone, but it may as well have been. One might wonder how the police devised the idea of using a bomb-disposal robot to blow up a human being, but certainly the US drone program offers plenty of examples of the use of remote-control technology to incinerate, rather than capture, terrorist suspects.
US citizens have grown accustomed to their government killing people abroad, but the decision to kill by remote control in the homeland was extraordinary in that no attempt was made to incapacitate the suspect instead. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that policemen in dangerous scenarios often opt to shoot to kill, aiming for the heart or head, not the suspect's foot or hand. However, it is not the role of the police to execute but to take into custody suspects so that their guilt can be determined by a jury of peers and, if convicted, an appropriate penalty applied.
Despite the grisly nature of what was done to Micah Johnson, many commentators have insisted that the police chief made the right call in deciding to blow the man up. But was this in fact his call to make? The precedent set by this action would seem to be yet another step down an ever-more lethal continuum rendered considerably more so by the current US president, Barack Obama, whose policy it is to kill rather than capture suspected terrorists located abroad.
The US administration continues to claim that in all of its thousands of targeted killings, capture has been infeasible and the premeditated, intentional acts of homicide have been necessary in national self-defense, all part of the Global War on Terror. Obama's authority to kill suspects anywhere he chooses to do so—both inside and outside areas of active hostilities—is said to derive from the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) conferred by the US congress upon President George W. Bush about fifteen years ago.
As technology has become more and more sophisticated, it is highly ironic that the restraints on killing wrought over millennia, and the great advances in institutions of justice, beginning with the 1215 Magna Carta, have been forgotten or set aside. The suspects killed in the Global War on Terror by lethal drone are presumed guilty until proven innocent, but they are denied the right to demonstrate their innocence. They are denied even the right to surrender and usually have no idea that they are about to be killed. They are simply eliminated from the face of the earth at the behest of the US president's henchmen at a time of their choosing, as the "opportunity" arises.
The blowing up of Micah Johnson by the police was triply ironic. Not only was he trained as a sniper by the US military, but the young African American was apparently protesting against police brutality against black men in the homeland. Johnson's desire to "kill white people" arose out of anger at the police killings of a series of black men brought to the attention of the public by the Black Lives Matter movement over the past few years. But the response of the police to Johnson's obviously misguided mission to target policemen was to ratchet up the brutality against black men yet another notch.
Rather than being riddled with bullets, the body of Micah Johnson, a black man, was blown up in a manner befitting a condemned building, not a human being. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that shooting to kill unarmed persons is somehow less objectionable, but only that the degree of sheer violence is much greater and the denial of the victim's personhood highlighted by the use of a bomb to eliminate him.
After the use of a robotic device to obliterate the suspect, several Dallas officials made public statements to the effect that there was no other way to neutralize the threat posed by Micah Johnson. I can think of several. How about bombing the place where he was located with tear gas? SWAT teams certainly have gas masks in their arsenal of equipment, so the place could have been literally fumigated with gas using the same robot to deliver not explosives but agents of lachrymation. Or how about bombing the place with a gaseous form of sedative to knock him out so that the place could be secured and accessed by a team who would then be able to take the man into custody?
In this regard, the case of Micah Johnson bears comparison to that of Osama bin Laden, who was also executed when in fact he might have been shot with tranquilizer plugs rather than bullets. His unconscious body could have been lifted out of Abbottabad just as his corpse was, but the decision was taken by Obama to kill him instead. Bin Laden was widely reviled as the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and if not the architect, he was at the very least their inspiration, given his enthusiastic exhortations that Al Qaeda members wage jihad against the United States in retaliation to what he regarded as inexcusable war crimes, especially in the 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath in Iraq.
The execution of Bin Laden and Micah Johnson are similar in another, even more significant, way. Both acts of killing look like exceptions, which took place in extraordinary circumstances. However, as precedents, both can be seen to set in motion a series of future actions modeled on them, because the exception swiftly transforms into the rule once initial inhibitions against intentional, premeditated homicide have fallen by the wayside. Under Obama's greatly expanded drone program, which began in January 2009, shortly after the new president assumed his office, assassination of suspects has been rebranded as "targeted killing" and carried out primarily through the use of Hellfire missiles delivered by Predator drones.
The drone program and the execution of Bin Laden were mutually reinforcing. If lower-level "foot soldiers" whose names are not even known may be eliminated by drone, then why wouldn't Bin Laden be fair game for elimination as well? Both the drone program and the execution of Bin Laden served to inform a further escalation of lethality when US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was executed in Yemen by his own government.
Was Al-Awlaki anything like Bin Laden? Of course not. But Al-Awlaki was mythologized as an execrable bogeyman in the mainstream media to the point where most Americans came to believe that he was morally equivalent to Bin Laden. To this day, most people have no idea that Al-Awlaki spoke out against the crimes of 9/11. He was a voice of moderation at the time, calmly counseling the government not to make the mistake of acting in ways which could easily be misconstrued as waging a war on Islam.
That was precisely what the US government proceeded to do. They invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, despite the fact that most of the perpetrators of 9/11 hailed from Saudi Arabia, the government of which was given a free pass. Rather than focusing on those ultimately responsible for 9/11, the US government set out to harass Muslims such as Anwar al-Awlaki to such an extent, using both the FBI and foreign governments (in his case, President Saleh of Yemen), that in some cases the targeted suspects transmogrified into self-avowed enemies.
Was Anwar Al-Awlaki an operational terrorist, or was he a propagandist and cheerleader of sorts for jihad? Whatever source of inspiration some of the apprehended perpetrators of terrorist plots may have drawn from Al-Awlaki's sermons, the fact remains that they and they alone chose to carry out violent acts. The evidence supposedly convicting Al-Awlaki of the capital crimes allegedly justifying his summary execution without trial continues to be withheld on grounds of State Secrets Privilege under a pretext of national security.
Exceptions quickly transform into rules when more and more agents agree to follow suit. Case in point: only a few years after Obama's 2011 decision to execute Al-Awlaki by lethal drone, then-UK Prime Minister David Cameron chose in 2015 to eliminate two British nationals located in Syria using lethal drones. Now, apparently, this is what the US government and its allies do. Find people, even fellow citizens, who appear to be up to no good, and if they are located in a Third World country or war zone, then it's supposed to be perfectly fine to execute them without trial. Just make sure that you use a missile so that you can call it an "act of war".
In the case of Micah Johnson, the Dallas cop killer who was blown up by a robotic device operated by remote control, people may say that he obviously deserved to die and the police had no intention of risking the lives of any more of their comrades. But there were other "suspects" identified at the time of the crime as well, who might also have been blown up using robots, were they available, and had those suspects been located.
One fellow's face was spammed all over Twitter. It turned out that he was not involved. What if some vigilante had taken him out, under the assumption that he needed to be neutralized? What if the angry Dallas police force had located that suspect and blown him up for the very reason that he adamantly denied having done anything wrong? He would have become the homeland analogue to collateral damage, now that the weapons of war are being used by law enforcement.
The risk aversion of war makers steadily increased over the course of only a couple of decades to the point where sacrificing the lives of civilians on the ground "outside areas of active hostilities" has come to be considered perfectly acceptable among US leaders. These are places where deadly missiles are being directed toward suspected terrorists even though they are not threatening anyone with death at the time when they are killed, and least of all US citizens. Indeed, the targets are usually unarmed, located as they are "outside areas of active hostilities".
Given how the drone program inclined administrators toward killing rather than capturing Bin Laden, and given how the killing of Bin Laden then inclined administrators to kill even US citizen suspects by lethal drone, I predict a similar lethal turn in law enforcement in the homeland in the aftermath of the obliteration of Micah Johnson by remote control. It does not matter that his case was exceptional. The case of Bin Laden was exceptional, too.
The same risk aversion seen among the "light footprint" war makers led by Obama will begin to infect police departments all over the United States as the commanders of men in blue become less and less willing to allow them to die, even when the risk of killing innocent bystanders will obviously increase. It is of course rational to attempt to protect soldiers and policemen. But is it not finally time to reconsider the infinite price in innocent life being paid in the quest to kill allegedly evil people, whose importance is given higher priority than anything else? Is this focus on death to the exclusion of all other considerations not the ultimate expression of nihilism?
What is most remarkable of all about the myopic, glaucomic, and amnesiac paradigm of lethal centrism is that given the never-ending series of mass killings being perpetrated all over the place—in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, Orlando, Nice, Dallas, Baton Route, Munich—we now have ample evidence that this single-minded focus on lethality is not keeping people in the West safe.
As a matter of fact, "Kill don't capture" and "Strike first, suppress questions later", the Obama administration's signature policy, serves as an incredibly destructive example to lone wolf killers, would-be jihadists, and angry activists alike who emulate governments when they decide to take up arms and perpetrate mass homicide as a way of expressing their grievances.
What's Conspicuously Missing from the Big Bad Brexit Debate Drama?
My informal survey yesterday of a random sample of the good people of the village of Burnham, Buckinghamshire, and my short random exit poll survey this morning both revealed a strong outpouring of support for Brexit. None of the people with whom I spoke struck me as racists, and most did not even mention the topic of immigration, though all signs point to immigration as one of the most important factors in voters' decision-making on this historic day. Yes, for the first time in more than forty years, the British people are being permitted to weigh in on the wisdom of their country's membership in the European Union.
One of the most interesting things I noticed in chatting with these people was that they often began revealing their preference for "Leave" in a hesitant, hushed voice. Once they realized that I was not a Remain Shamer, some of them began pouring out their many concerns. I spoke with a nurse whose retirement was postponed for four years by the EU. I spoke with a woman with small children who had noticed that the National Health Service (NHS) had become difficult to access. Of course, the Tories are certainly in part to blame for that, but it does not help, she lamented, that there is so much competition for the already scarce social resources.
A couple of people were angry about Prime Minister David Cameron's doom-and-gloom "the sky will fall if we leave!" narrative. One person expressed offense at President Obama's threat to the effect that Britain will go to "the end of the queue" for trade if they leave the EU. I got the distinct impression that Brits do not generally believe that Britain will suffer any long-term damage from leaving the EU, though they are aware that there will be bumps initially, whatever the outcome of the EU referendum ends up being.
It seems obvious to most people that lots of nations are not members of the EU, as Britain was not before, and they are doing quite well. Many people (not only the people with whom I spoke, but elsewhere on the internet) have expressed consternation about the topic of trade, not knowing whom to believe. The bankers? The EU technocrats and political elites? Why in the world should it be more difficult for Britain to trade freely than to navigate the volumes of regulations pumped out by the EU? How could it be more difficult for small businesses to not have to comply with the edicts of Eurocrats before selling their products and services abroad?
Of course, it is entirely possible that many people are really concerned above all about immigration but wish to avoid being associated with racists and far-right extremist groups. Some crazy person assassinated MP Jo Cox last week, and there was an immediate poll effect: Remain got a big boost, as did the markets. This happened because people were moved by emotions to conclude that Brexit advocates must be crazy people. Obviously, that's a non sequitur of gargantuan proportion, but good luck explaining that to emotion-driven voters. Particularly in this debate, where scare tactics, fear-mongering, and appeals to emotion are everywhere on display.
One thing is clear: no one with whom I spoke understands how the admission of an ever-lengthening list of new member nations is supposed to strengthen the European Union—which everyone on both sides of the debate appears to agree is a sinking ship. If all of the new members are worse off economically than the United Kingdom, then how can the new members possibly contribute to plugging the hole in the hull?
This just seems like common sense to many people: How many Brits want to move to Croatia or Albania? I am guessing that the number is rather small. And so there is bound to be real concern among the British people about the projected increase in their population in the coming years. Some of these people may have racist fears, but the numbers alone are enough to cause one to pause.
Moreover, the more member nations there are in the European Union, the less important becomes any single country's voice, including that of Britain. Each time the EU grows larger, each member state (aside from the new inductees) automatically has less, not more, power.
I am well aware that some advocates of Brexit are far-right racists, but others simply abhor bureaucratic, democratically unaccountable hegemons. One wouldn't know it from scanning the acrimonious ugliness poured out by self-styled "liberals" on Twitter and Facebook, but there are some pretty solid progressive arguments for Brexit.
My own honest puzzlement about this entire dispute is over the issue of immigration, but not in the way in which anyone else appears to be worried. To be perfectly frank, I have never understood how granting preferential status to fellow Europeans (most of whom are, I believe, Caucasians) is somehow less racist than treating all outsiders equally. This is a serious puzzle for me. Please step forward in the comments section to disabuse me of my misconceptions here, but how is it supposed to be less racist to permit unskilled Europeans to move freely throughout the European Union but not, say, Africans or Muslims from the Middle East?
Everyone seems to grasp intuitively that this poster is abhorrent. But no one, as far as I have seen, is discussing how this picture was made possible. The truth is that the above picture of a mass of homeless human beings came about only because of fierce military intervention in the Middle East, with the United States as the primary perpetrator, but other Western nations, including the United Kingdom, also bombing Muslim nations on a regular basis, thereby catalyzing the exodus of large numbers of people, who quite naturally wish to preserve their own lives, as any rational person in their situation would.
President Obama dropped more than 23,000 bombs on Muslim-majority nations in 2015 alone. Some were delivered by drones; others by manned combat aircraft. Either way, that's a lot of bombs, and that's a lot of "death from the sky," to quote his speech at Hiroshima. Under Obama's leadership, the United States is fighting wars and providing homicidal weapons to rebels in at least seven different countries in the Middle East alone.
Small wonder that the populations of those lands have been leaving in a steady stream—or tsunami, as the case may be. What else can they do? Too bad they can't come to the United States, because that is where all of those people belong, given the reason for their displacement. Only when the people of the United States begin to suffer the consequences of their government's military intervention abroad will they finally be motivated to call a halt to the mass homicide committed in their name.


(508) 207-7155Transform your mind, body and life.
I'd argue that the most important piece of the body composition transformation process (i.e., losing fat and/or gaining muscle) is getting your body to use the hormone insulin more efficiently. 'Improved insulin sensitivity' should be the #1 goal on your wish list.
Insulin is the most anabolic, anti-catabolic hormone in the body. It improves amino acid uptake by muscle tissue, which in turn initiates protein synthesis. It also prevents amino acids (from food or muscle) from being oxidized as a reserve fuel source.
On the flipside, it also can be the most lipolytic (fat storing) hormone in the body, shuttling fatty acids and glucose to fat cells to be stored as body fat.
If you have poor insulin sensitivity you must produce a lot more of it when you eat a meal. This increases the workload on the pancreas and can further desensitize insulin receptors even (making you even less sensitive), which can both lead to diabetes.
From a body composition point of view, having to produce more insulin to do the job (because you are desensitized) makes losing fat significantly harder. As long as insulin is high, your body is in storage mode and energy mobilization is less efficient. This means that the longer insulin stays elevated, the harder it is to lose fat.
Poor insulin sensitivity, especially in the muscles, can also make it much harder to gain muscle mass. Insulin resistant muscle cells cannot absorb amino acids and glucose as efficiently, and these are important building blocks for muscle gain.
For carbohydrate intake, I look at it as a seesaw approach. On one side, you have a person's relative insulin resistance, on the other side, their suggested carbohydrate intake.
If someone's insulin resistance level is high, then his/her carbohydrate intake should be low. If someone's insulin resistance level is low (and insulin sensitivity is high), then his/her carbohydrate intake should be high. If it's in the middle, carbohydrates should be moderate and targeted.
> 25% body fat: You're likely so insulin resistant that any carbohydrates you eat will be stored in adipose tissue. Low-carb diets would be the best. Think Paleo, Ketogenic, Atkins, or Poliquin's "run, fly, swim, green and grows in the ground" approach.
12-25% body fat: Stick with the "earn your carbs" theme. If you're consistently strength training, reintroduce carbs back into your diet. Start slowly, perhaps 0.5-1.0g/lb of lean body mass. Timing also matters – spread carbohydrate intake over periods where insulin sensitivity is at its highest (around your workout and/or early morning).
< 10% body fat: In addition to peri-workout nutrition and early morning, good carb sources should be a consistent part of the diet for this demographic.
Condemning all carbs as evil and cutting them across the board, regardless of the type or individual metabolic situation, isn't the way to approach this. If pure starch really were the cause of insulin resistance and obesity, the Japanese (with all the rice and noodles they eat) would be the fattest, most diabetic people on Earth.
Although the traditional Japanese diet is high in carbohydrate/starch, it's low in fructose/sugar, and that's the true anthropological lesson. It is abnormally high amounts of fructose that's causing widespread insulin resistance in America, not necessarily the generic carbohydrate.
Cut out high fructose corn syrup, fructose sweeteners, sugar, fruit juice, fruit smoothies, and dried fruit. 1-2 pieces of whole fruit a day is allowable. Use fructose-free, gluten-free starch (rice and potatoes) as your primary carbohydrate sources.
Trans fats are horrendous for overall health. In the physique context, trans fats have been shown to inhibit glucose disposal, promote insulin resistance, and induce abdominal obesity.
Cut out anything with trans fats or (partially) hydrogenated oils on the label.
I'll be addressing this point in more detail in the next newsletter. For now, here are some practical applications for improving insulin resistance: Increase intake of Omega-3 fatty acids through wild fish, grass-fed beef, and/or supplement with a good fish or kill oil. Decrease your consumption of high Omega-6 vegetable oils such as corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, and fried foods.
Apple cider vinegar and cinnamon are food compounds that has shown to exhibit positive nutrient partitioning effects. Numerous studies have shown it to improve the metabolic action of insulin resistance by increasing glucose uptake by the cells and enhancing the insulin-signaling pathway in muscle.
Add cinnamon to your daily drinks (i.e., milk, coffee, tea) and consume at least 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar.
Determine your body fat percentage and look at the daily carb recommendations for your range (detailed below).
Cut out high fructose corn syrup, fructose sweeteners, sugar, fruit juice, fruit smoothies, and dried fruit. 1-2 pieces of whole fruit a day is allowable.
Use fructose-free, gluten-free starch (e.g., taro, potatoes, quinoa, etc.) as your primary carbohydrate sources.
Increase intake of Omega-3 fatty acids through wild fish, grass-fed beef, and/or supplement with a good fish or kill oil.
Eliminate your consumption of high Omega-6 vegetable oils such as corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, and fried foods.
Add cinnamon to your food/drinks (i.e., protein shakes, coffee, tea) and consume at least 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar daily.
"Tony is great at what he does and is able to coach you through your limiting beliefs and assist you through…" – Janelle C.
Excellent trainer for whatever goals you want to accomplish.


March 24, 2016 Mike Cline Jr.
This time on the show Cline complains about his case of toxic shock syndrome that's been bothering him. This leads to a gender bending edition of Ask Mark. Later the guys talk about Bird versus Jordon McDonalds's commercials, being "open minded", holistic treatments, sugar in food and teaching people how to do stuff. Plus, the guys discuss the future of the podcast and the world!


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Shows » Triple-duty Garden - with Joanna Buehler
Triple-duty Garden - with Joanna Buehler
This rain garden is for the birds!
© Chris Peterson	View Large
What can one person do when large-scale human development replaces nearby natural habitat? Seattle-area lakeside resident Joanna Buehler spoke out for clean water and the needs of wildlife. As she watched parking lots and buildings replace wetlands and woods, she created a rain garden where storm-water runoff nourishes grasses, sedges, and many other species of wetland plants. And the birds are thriving!
Triple-Duty Garden: An Interview with Joanna Buehler
By Chris Peterson
[Calls of Barn Swallows]
What can one person do when large-scale human development replaces nearby natural habitat? Seattle-area lakeside resident, Joanna Buehler, spoke out for clean water and the needs of wildlife. As she watched parking lots and buildings replace wetlands and woods, she created a rain garden where street drains emptied storm-water runoff onto her property.
Here's Joanna: [chatter of Black-capped Chickadees behind]
"Basically, in the '80s more than three quarters of this watershed was in forest and farm and now we're scarcely over a quarter left, so that has enormous implications for water quality… The first goal was to make it good for the salmon and the water quality. I wanted to be able to filter all the pollutants and the sediment coming off the plat before it got into the Lake. The second goal is that it would be wildlife friendly. And the third goal was that it would be beautiful…I wanted to have a 'wildlife backyard.' That became my passion."
She put in grasses and sedges and plants that thrive in a wetland.
"We also put in this Indian Umbrella plant. In the spring it sends up these stems with pink flowers on the top and then these leaves grow up and they look like inverted umbrellas, and in the summer if you get water in them – they become bird baths and I can't tell you how often I will see these little birds, chickadees…in these big leaves and they'll splash around in there…"
[Black-capped Chickadees calling and fluttering of wings]
"That's for me, that's why I love to garden. It gives me my humanity back."
You can see photos at birdnote.org. [Calls of Barn Swallows]
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Black-capped Chickadees chattering [117803] S.R. Pantel; calls of Barn Swallows [105655] recorded by G.A. Keller.
© 2013 Tune In to Nature.org November 2013 Narrator: Mary McCann
ID# garden-10-2013-11-16 garden-10 Marantz V Tracks 311, 314, 315, 317
Listen to another BirdNote show featuring Joanna's wildlife-friendly landscape
There's more on the BirdNote blog!
Black-capped Chickadee - More at All About Birds
Black-Capped Chickadee - HD Mini-Documentary
How to Identify Birds by Songs : The Song & Calls of the Black-Capped Chickadee
backyard sanctuary, environmental champion, gardening, Pacific Northwest, Seattle

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


All I'd need is a nickel for each time I've been asked a techie question at work. "How do I…..?" or "Can you fix…..?" are among the more common questions asked each day. Sometimes I can explain how I know something and other times it's pure dumb luck that I've run into something close and know how to do it whatever "it" might be! Some days I am fixing networked printers and other days I'm troubleshooting software and formatting issues or even Windows proper. It depends on my day as to what I'm asked to fix.
Tagged geek, KEEP, notebook, Tech.


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The games are on in Fitchburg State's game room
By Samantha McManus
Are you a commuter looking for somewhere to hang out between classes? Or are you a resident student just looking for something to do? The Hammond Campus Center Game Room might be the place for you! The Game Room is located at the end of the hallway that leads down to the Commuter Café in the Hammond Building. It is open from noon to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and noon to 5 p.m. on Friday. It has a variety of games to play including billiards, air hockey, ping pong, and darts. There are also three Xbox's and one Wii with a wide selection of games for both.
The Game Room is absolutely free and has become a popular spot for residents and commuters alike. In January, the Game Room received over 500 visitors. Campus organizations can also use the Game Room to hold events at no cost; fill out a reservation form in the Office of Student Development. The Game Room sponsors a number of events of its own every month! For example, March 8 there is an air hockey tournament at 7 p.m.
Hammond Building
Celebrities Don't Owe Us Their Identities: Kit Connor Comes Out on Twitter
Smile Film Review
Don't Hug me I'm Scared is Back with a New TV Show
Yet Another Descent into the Mind of a Serial Killer: Netflix's 'The Jeffrey Dahmer Story'
See How They Run Film Review
Return to Middle-earth in The Rings of Power


text:
<!DOCTYPE html>

		<title>Intuit Boot Camp Demonstrations</title>
		<link href='libs/bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css' rel="stylesheet">
		<link href='libs/bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css' rel="stylesheet">
		<link href='css/site.css' rel="stylesheet">

Here is some text!

			Search: <input type="text" id="user-search"><button id="do-search">Search!</button>

Search Term:

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					Results here...
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Il distretto di Edineț è uno dei 32 distretti della Moldavia, il capoluogo è la città di Edineț.

Società

Evoluzione demografica
In base ai dati del censimento, la popolazione è così divisa dal punto di vista etnico:

Geografia antropica

Suddivisioni amministrative
Il distretto è formato da 2 città e 30 comuni

Città
 Edineț
 Cupcini

Comuni
 Alexeevca
 Bleșteni
 Brătușeni
 Brînzeni
 Bădragii Noi
 Bădragii Vechi
 Burlănești
 Cepeleuți
 Chetroșica Nouă
 Corpaci
 Constantinovca
 Cuconeștii Noi
 Fetești
 Gașpar
 Goleni
 Gordinești
 Hancăuți
 Hincăuți
 Hlinaia
 Lopatnic
 Parcova
 Rotunda
 Ruseni
 Stolniceni
 Șofrîncani
 Terebna
 Tîrnova
 Trinca
 Viișoara
 Zăbriceni

Note

Altri progetti

Collegamenti esterni

Edinet

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The National Fire Protection Code 211 recommends an annual safety inspection of all chimney systems.
We service every Pellet Stove/Insert we carry. Pellet Stoves should be properly cleaned ….
Purchasing a home is one of the biggest financial commitments that many of us will make in our lifetimes….
Chimney Caps offer three important things; Rain Protection, Animal Protection, and Spark Protection….


text:
Q: How to make a diamond shape with the Polygon in pygames graphics library I can't figure out how the polygon function orders the points and the docs aren't helping so I can't make the required Diamond Shape.

A: Imagine you would plot the points in a coordinate system on a sheet of paper and immediately connect them with a line one after the other. So the first point would be connected to the second, the second to the third, etc., and the last to the first. Finally, the resulting shape is filled with the desired color.
import pygame as pg

pg.init()
screen = pg.display.set_mode((640, 480))
clock = pg.time.Clock()
BG_COLOR = pg.Color('gray12')
BLUE = pg.Color('dodgerblue')
points = [(200, 200), (250, 250), (200, 300), (150, 250)]

done = False
while not done:
    for event in pg.event.get():
        if event.type == pg.QUIT:
            done = True

    screen.fill(BG_COLOR)
    pg.draw.polygon(screen, BLUE, points)
    pg.display.flip()
    clock.tick(60)

A: Pygame.draw.polygon is a function which you can use to connect several points together and draw them as a shape.
This gives flexibility in the shapes you can draw. If the shape you have in mind does not have a function somewhere in pygame.draw or pygame.gfxdraw, then you can create it yourself using this function.
Let's take the diamond you want to draw as an example.
First of all, you may be able to just draw a square and rotate it around it's center 45°,
but since you want to draw it using the polygon function ( which is probably neater ), here is an example of that below
NOTE: The points used for this are calculated as follows:

*

*First of all define a width and a height:
diamondWidth = 80
diamondHeight = 100

*Point 1 and 3 (top and bottom point of the diamond):
Point 1 can be any point on the screen. You can think of this as the position of the diamond, if you like.
I want the diamond to be at the center, so I'll define it as follows:
pos1 = (screenWidth/2, screenHeight/2 - diamondHeight/2)

As for Point 3, it is the bottom point of the diamond. This means it has the same X, but a greater y value (specifically, larger than Point 1's y value by diamondHeight). That should be easy
pos3 = (pos1[0], pos1[1]+diamondHeight)

*Point 2 and 4 (left and right points of the diamond):
Either one of Point 2 and 4 has to be the right, the other has to be the left point of the diamond. Let's say Point 2 is the left point. It can then be defined as follows:
pos2 = (pos1[0] - diamondWidth/2, pos1[1] + diamondHeight/2)

Point 4 will simply be the other side, which means it has the same Y value but is either lesser or greater then Point 2's Y value by diamondWidth. In my case, since Point 2 is the point to the left, and Point 4 is more to the right, so Point 4 will be greater than Point 2 by diamondWidth.
pos4 = (pos2[0]+diamondWidth, pos2[1])

Now that we defined the points of the diamond, we can use the pygame.draw.polygon function to connect them and draw the shape.

Side note
You mention you're confused about the function, so here is an overview of the parameters:

*

*Surface: The screen, image, or whatever other pygame.Surface instance to draw the shape on. In most cases this will be the screen you define at the top of your code.

*color: The color used to draw the polygon. For simpleness, this is an rgb value. rgba values (add transparency / translucency) can take effect if the pygame.Surface instance you passed in the first parameter received a pygame.SRCALPHA flag, like this:
pygame.Surface((width, height), pygame.SRCALPHA)

*pointlist: A list (maybe tuple) of points to connect. These are in the order they are connected in. I.E: The first point in the list is connected to the second, the second to the third, the third to the fourth, and so on.
Also the last point is connected to the first in order to complete the shape (other wise it would be an open shape, it's last side not connected)

*width: The final (optional) argument. Sometimes not passed, as it
defaults to 0.

*

*If the value is 0: The shape is filled with the color parameter    passed before.

*If the shape > 0: Only an outline of the shape is drawn, and the shape is not filled in. The thickness of the line is the the value
you pass.
I hope that clears things up. Please follow up for any queries

So here is an example of using the polygon function. I only included the main loop and some of the setup to shorten the length of this. If you remove the comments and some of the setup code (probably replace it with your own), then this becomes a very short and simple program:
import pygame
from pygame.locals import *

screenWidth = 600
screenHeight = 600

pygame.init()
window = pygame.display.set_mode((screenWidth, screenHeight))
pygame.display.set_caption("Diamond")

clock = pygame.time.Clock()
MAXFPS = 30

# define the diamond points as described above
diamondWidth = 80
diamondHeight = 100

pos1 = (screenWidth/2, screenHeight/2 - diamondHeight/2)
pos2 = (pos1[0] - diamondWidth/2, pos1[1] + diamondHeight/2)
pos3 = (pos1[0], pos1[1]+diamondHeight)
pos4 = (pos2[0]+diamondWidth, pos2[1])

# points for the first diamond
points = [pos1, pos2, pos3, pos4]

# points for the second diamond, which are exactly like the first except their
# Y value is incremented over the original points so it does not appear over
# it, but rather to it's left
secondPoints = [(p[0]+diamondWidth+10, p[1]) for p in points]

stop = False
while not stop:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == QUIT:
            stop = True

    window.fill((255, 255, 255))

    # DRAWING THE DIAMOND:
    # Here is where we connect all the points in the [points] array, and
    # draw them as a shape with a certain color (used cian because it's
    # a diamond-dy color lol)

    # Draw filled diamond
    pygame.draw.polygon(window, (0, 255, 255), points, 0)

    # Draw empty diamond with lines of thickness 4
    pygame.draw.polygon(window, (0, 255, 255), secondPoints , 4)

    pygame.display.flip()
    clock.tick(MAXFPS)

pygame.quit()

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Whether you have taken the Test Masters Full Length Classroom Course for the ACT or you are new to Test Masters, Test Masters Private Tutoring is an excellent option to prepare for the ACT. Tutoring is available 7 days a week in four different formats in person at our main office, in person in your home, online, or by telephone. Each session is scheduled for a minimum of two hours in the specific subject areas you would like to work on. We have 20 years of experience in preparing students for the ACT, and our tutors draw upon our extensive test preparation resources to provide individualized instruction to fit each student's needs. To schedule a session or to inquire further about private tutoring, please call our office at (281) 276-7777 or 1-800-910-EXAM.
Need more than a few hours of tutoring? The Testmasters ACT Private 1-on-1 Course offers an ideal option for busy students looking for individual instruction and a flexible schedule. The Testmasters ACT Private 1-on-1 Course is identical to the Test Masters Full Length Classroom Course in its material, but the 1-on-1 Course allows students to create their own class schedule, choose the location of their course, and work exclusively one on one with a tutor. Our knowledgeable staff is available to work with you to create a program that fits both your instructional and scheduling needs. For more information on a Testmasters ACT Private 1-on-1 Course in your area, select your Test, City, and State.
How do I register for ACT Tutoring?
You can register for ACT private tutoring options by calling our office at (281) 276-7777 or 1-800-910-EXAM.
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Closed for restoration on our last visit, this bastion is part of the ramparts that protect the medina from the crashing Atlantic waves. The town's main woodworking souq is on the narrow street underneath.
This 18th-century building near Place Moulay Hassan has an important library (closed to visitors) containing some manuscripts donated by Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah.
Daily auctions of fresh fish take place in the market hall just outside the port gates.
Fresh fish is available here, but is better purchased down at the port.


Creating Cards with Fellowship Ministry meets the third Wednesday of each month to make "thinking of you cards" for members of our church and patients at Florida Hospital New Smyrna and Oceanview.
A break at lunch to chat is a time to foster fellowship among group members.
We will enjoy our time together and share our love by brightening a moment in someone's life.
Bring a lunch and a drink. No experience necessary.


text:
WWE News: Bray Wyatt Wishes His Match With Brock Lesnar Was At WrestleMania
Jon Fisher
WWE Roadblock is on Saturday and a high-profile match was announced last week on WWE Smackdown. Bray Wyatt will take on Brock Lesnar at the WWE Network special. It wasn't supposed to take place this Saturday, as of the original report. The Eater of Worlds was originally intended to take on Lesnar at WrestleMania, but like every year, plans always change from day-to-day during this season.
Now that Wyatt is taking on Lesnar, there's a big problem with how the WWE did that. WWE officials never fully promoted their match, and both men weren't happy about not wrestling each other at WrestleMania. Lesnar's WrestleMania plans changed, and that didn't make the Beast Incarnate happy. According to reports, Lesnar wanted his booking to remain stagnant this year.
(Image via WWE)
It's the second time in a row that Lesnar's booking changed for WrestleMania. Last year, Seth Rollins wasn't supposed to cash in his Money in the Bank briefcase and win the WWE World Heavyweight championship. That job was intended for Reigns. Unfortunately, WWE officials changed their minds after seeing how the fans reacted to Reigns on top of the WWE Universe.
Even though the WWE has promoted WWE Roadblock well enough to create awareness of the event, only the Dean Ambrose/Triple H match feels special. Meanwhile, Wyatt and Lesnar are two, top performers who deserve the main event scene. Lesnar never came out and said this, as it was a backstage report. On the other hand, Bray Wyatt spoke out and said he wished his match with Brock Lesnar was at WrestleMania.
"Of course I'd rather do it at WrestleMania. Then again, you don't know what I'm gonna do at WrestleMania. It's still an open-ended game for me. Like I said, to beat Brock Lesnar right before WrestleMania, you should be owed some kind of spot, some kind of high place – you know, I view myself as a high place player – I'm a serious player in this game and I intend to keep that."
Hopefully, Wyatt knows what he will do at Wrestlemania, instead of the fans guessing that he may do something adequate. At this time, Wyatt has no plans for the big event. Even the rumors of Braun Strowman doing something has fizzled out since the initial reports came out.
Before Wyatt's match at WrestleMania was demoted to WWE Roadblock, Strowman was rumored to have a monster push after the Grandaddy of Them All.
"While Lesnar vs. Ambrose taking place at WrestleMania indicates the Bray Wyatt vs. Lesnar feud was nixed, we've heard that it may still happen. Some were very high on the idea of Lesnar feuding with The Wyatt Family for an extended program. Wyatt reportedly pushed hard for the singles match against Lesnar at WrestleMania and it was said Lesnar preferred that as well. Now we know the match will happen at Roadblock instead."
Also in the report was the rumor that Strowman and Lesnar were still planned for SummerSlam. Even though their momentum has slowed down a good bit, that doesn't mean the Wyatts are going to the mid-card forever. In fact, there's a reason why Wyatt closed the show with a small staredown with Triple H. Wyatt pointed at the WWE belt and went on his merry way.
Many WWE fans took to Twitter to explain why they think he should be in the main event. Wyatt hasn't fought for the title, not even once. And if he did, there was no way he was the favorite in that match. That should change and after Lesnar wins at WWE Roadblock, the WWE should really prioritize how they book him from now on.
And if he did, there was no way he was the favorite in that match. That should change and after Lesnar wins at WWE Roadblock, the WWE should really prioritize how they book him from now on. When they do, hopefully it's not too late.
[Image via wwe.com]


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Beijing 2008 - Olympic Games Review FunnyGames, August 4, 2008
Beijing 2008 is as much a mini-game collection as Mario Party. Any of the dozens of events may test your skills as a button-masher, Simon Says expert, or rolling motion professional. It may sound or look like a game that was made for the everyman but was really made for one man (or woman): the kind that doesn't mind a little excruciating nonsense.
Take running and swimming, for example. As expected, you'll have to jam on the A and B buttons (alternately) to make your athlete run. When swimming, you can jam on various buttons and exhaust your thumbs or fingers to no end, or spin both analog sticks toward or away from each other. That sums up your entire racing experience, minus the shoulder buttons which must be tapped to turn while swimming and must be held to start the race.
Chances are you have played a game like this before. The button-altering gameplay became a frequently copied commodity after Sega's Olympic titles popularized it in the 90s. If it was fun the last time you experienced it, you are probably looking forward to having it here. But there are a couple of problems to consider before diving into the pool.
First there's repetition. Before winning a race, the game can be a pain...>>
Beautiful Katamari Reviewed FunnyGames, October 29, 2007
Who the heck would have thought a game where you just roll a ball around picking up stuff would be such a gigantic success? Well, the Katamari Damacy series has become a favorite. It is a fun and easy to pick up game, is colorful, has awesome music and, best of all, comes at a budget price.
Really, Beautiful Katamari plays a lot like the other games in the series. Though, to be honest, I found some things harder to control with the 360 thumbsticks being at different horizontal planes on the controller. Being offset like that made it harder (at least for me) to do things like the dash and quick turns. Even if you're very used to the PS2 version, though, it won't be too hideously hard to shift over to the 360 controller for this one...
Read full review at: www.atomicgamer.com
Fight your way through the bionic enemy bugz, get the new weapons, collect the bonuses and you will be the hero of the d...
Operation Slaps
You have all played this game before, but now you can play it online!
Come and play the classic game of battleships


At less than £1.00 per head, this comforting supper is sure to be a hit with all the family.
Crush the garlic cloves. Cut the red onions into wedges. Dice the sweet potatoes into 2cm cubes. Cook the rice. Roughly chop the fresh coriander.
2 Put the sweet potato in a small roasting tin, drizzle with two-thirds of the olive oil and season.
3 Roast for 25 minutes, stirring halfway through. Move on to the next step while you wait.
4 Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a large pan. Add the onion, season, then fry over a medium heat for 5 minutes.
5 Stir in the garlic and spices, turn the heat to low and cook for 2 minutes more.
6 Add the lentils and water. Bring to the boil, cover with a lid and simmer for 15 minutes until the lentils are tender.
7 Serve the dahl with the sweet potato and rice, sprinkled with coriander.
Very tasty! I roasted some of the onion in with the sweet potato.
Adding a knob of butter, vegetable stock and a tsp of Garam Masala makes a huge difference. Very very tasty!
Delicious, quick and nutritious. I added a handful of spinach leaves to the lentil mixture at the end and I also increased the amount of lentils and stock then did without the rice.


ST. LOUIS (AP) Never has a 94 mile-per-hour fastball to the ribs felt so good for Yadier Molina as it did Monday night.
Molina started and ended a five-run rally in the ninth inning as the St. Louis Cardinals stunned the Cincinnati Reds 5-4. He was hit by a pitch from Ross Ohlendorf with the bases loaded to drive home the winning run. Instead of wincing, Molina pumped his fist and slid into first base.
Molina singled to start the inning against Reds closer Tony Cingrani. Matt Carpenter drove in two runs with a single, Stephen Piscotty singled home another and Matt Holliday walked to load the bases before Cingrani (2-4) was lifted for Ohlendorf, who walked Brandon Moss to tie it before hitting Molina.
The comeback erased what had been a night of offensive futility for St. Louis through the first eight innings, as the Cardinals entered the last inning 0 for 11 with runners in scoring position.
Seth Maness (2-2) pitched a perfect ninth to earn the win.
Cardinals starter Michael Wacha struggled to settle in as seven of the first 12 batters he faced reached base. Zack Cozart's double eluded the outstretched glove of Holliday in left field and went off the wall to give the Reds a 2-0 lead in the second. Cozart, who had two hits, scored when Joey Votto followed with a triple.
The rally spoiled what had the makings of Cody Reed's first major league win. Reed's six scoreless innings dropped the Reds starters' ERA to 2.84 over the last 11 games.
Billy Hamilton led off the game for the Reds with a single and stole second and third. He is 17 for 19 in stolen base attempts against Molina, a perennial gold glove catcher, and the 17 stolen bases are the most by any baserunner against Molina.
Molina walked in the fourth inning to extend his streak of reaching base safely to 21 games. It is the longest streak by a Cardinals catcher since Gene Tenace reached in 35 straight between the 1981 and 1982 seasons.
Reds: RHP Alfredo Simon (right trapezius) and RHP A.J. Morris (strained right shoulder) began rehab assignments at Triple-A Louisville on Sunday. Simon gave up a run in an inning and Morris gave up three runs in 2/3 of an inning.
Cardinals: LHP Tyler Lyons (knee) saw a specialist in Chicago, but no update was available.
Reds: LHP Brandon Finnegan (7-8, 4.45 ERA) is coming off a two-hit, six-inning shutout of St. Louis in a 7-0 win last week. His current 12-inning scoreless streak is the longest of his career.
Cardinals: RHP Mike Leake (8-9, 4.80 ERA) will look for better results against his former team after allowing seven runs his last time out in Cincinnati. In two career starts against the Reds, he is 0-1 with a 10.32 ERA.


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Foxconn reportedly scaling back plans for Wisconsin display factory
Ben Lovejoy
- May. 23rd 2018 6:25 am PT
@benlovejoy
When iPhone assembler Foxconn announced that it was building a new display plant in Wisconsin, there was much celebrating over the $10B investment. But it now seems that the company may be planning to scale back the plant …
The original plan had been to manufacture large LCD panels for televisions and monitors. But with increasing competition from China in that market, supply chain sources say that Foxconn is aiming to cut costs by aiming instead for smaller displays. The report appears in the Nikkei Asian Review.
Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn Technology Group, is considering producing small to medium-size displays for Apple, carmakers and others to lower initial costs at its $10 billion factory in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, people familiar with the matter said.
"Previously, Foxconn planned to build a 10.5th-generation display manufacturing factory, which is more suitable for large-sized displays," supply chain sources told Nikkei. "But later they figured out that it might be more feasible and efficient to build a sixth-generation display plant or an 8.5th-generation factory from which they could move some equipment from Asia."
Panels produced by these types of plants would be more suitable for devices ranging in size from smartwatches to tablets and laptops, though an 8.5-generation plant could also make some monitors and TVs.
Supply chain sources are backed by a display industry analyst.
Eric Chiou, an analyst at market research group WitsView, said he also understood that Foxconn was "very likely to turn to small-to-medium display manufacturing for their Wisconsin project."
"It's a reasonable turn. And it could lower the initial cost substantially and generate returns faster," Chiou said.
One interesting prospect in focusing on smaller displays is that Foxconn could conceivably move on to OLED panels and bid for American-made iPhone screens.
Construction on the planned plant is set to begin next month, almost a year after it was first announced. The state of Wisconsin has agreed $3B in subsidies, which would cost around $231,000 per job.
Photo: Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:
Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He's known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!
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By Michael E. Uslan
The true story of a man who grew up loving comic books and made it his life's mission to see Batman brought to the silver screen in a way that truly reflected the dark, gritty roots of the character…
Michael Uslan was born and raised in New Jersey, America, where he developed a life-long passion for comic books and the characters who populated them. When the 1960s television version of Batman was released he was horrified at the campy, slapstick way that the Dark Knight was portrayed and the way this version inserted itself into the popular consciousness. His journey to bring the 'real' Batman to the big screen would lead him eventually to the Tim Burton films and on to the Christopher Nolan interpretation that is due to complete its three film arc in 2012.
Uslan's autobiography is an endearing love letter to the comics that have shaped his life. As the story of a boy captivated by comics unfolds one is swept away to a time when 10¢ could buy you the latest adventures of Batman or Superman, when there was no X-Box, Playstation, Facebook or YouTube, and Wednesday (new comic book day) meant excitement, adventure and suspense. Uslan's genuine enthusiasm and passion is clear in his writing and makes for compelling reading. It is also clear from his memoirs that he has had an extraordinary career and fully embodies the notion of 'do what you love'. From teaching the first accredited course on comic books, to working at DC Comics and finally bringing Batman to the big screen, Uslan has lived every comic lover's dream.
The Boy Who Loved Batman is a fascinating window into the history of comics from someone who was actually present for a large portion of it. Uslan attended the first ever comic convention in New York, he bought many first issues as they were released, and picked up older seminal works in the genre for next to nothing at markets or through mailorder. Some of the titles he paid a few cents for are worth hundreds of thousands of US dollars today. He lived through the period of fear and paranoia when Dr Frederic Wertham's persecution of comics whipped society into a fever of condemnation and disapproval. Even more interestingly, he lived in a time before blockbuster comic book film adaptations and the rise of the graphic novel as a respected mainstream medium. Michael Uslan truly was there through the birth of the comic industry as we know it today and rubbed shoulders with many of the giants of the genre. His story charts the evolution of not only comics but also comics fandom.
I found The Boy Who Loved Batman an engaging read as well as an educational one. Uslan reveals a personal side to many pioneers in the comic book world who modern fans know only as legends in their own lifetimes. His personal journey to realise his dream of bringing The Batman to cinema audiences is defined by dedication, perseverance and good humour.
Verdict: For anyone with an interest in comics history or collecting The Boy Who Loved Batman is a must read. 8/10
Bernice Watson
Abrams & Chronicle Books, out now


Join us on Thursday, December 6, for a scavenger hunt that takes guests throughout Olde Towne! Participants will be given a keepsake mug before the event for hot cider and lite refreshments that will be provided along the way.
Join us for this Holiday crowd favorite! This is a great opportunity to visit all your favorite Olde Towne merchants and see what's new in store this holiday season! This year's event will take place Thursday, December 6 from beginning at 6:30pm. Stroll along the brick streets and sample ciders and treats at every store. From 8:00-9:00pm we'll be at the Olde Towne Depot for more snacks and Santa may stop by to pull for door prizes!
Tickets are $20 in advance or $25 on the day of the event. Call the Main Street office at 601.924.5472 for more information.


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Tag Archives: Duquesne University
Éamon de Valera's October 1919 visit to Pittsburgh
This post fits two ongoing series: "American Reporting of Irish Independence" and "Pittsburgh Irish." Check out my earlier stories from each link. MH
De Valera in 1919
Éamon de Valera had been touring America for three months when reports of his upcoming stop in Pittsburgh appeared in the city's newspapers. The Sept. 18 Post-Gazette announced a Sept. 26 visit, but the next day told readers "no date has been set." On Sept. 28, the newspaper reported the Irish leader would arrive in the city on Oct. 3.
The Daily Post announced the itinerary:
Upon his arrival Friday evening he will be escorted to the William Penn Hotel by prominent friends of Irish freedom. After dinner he will attend a meeting of representatives of the Irish American societies of Western Pennsylvania in the ballroom … Admission to this meeting will be by card. On Saturday he will attend exercises at Duquesne University, where he will have conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws. On Saturday evening he will address two meetings, on at the Syria Mosque and the other at Memorial hall. … While de Valera is speaking in one hall the meeting in the other will be addressed by either Frank P. Walsh, former chairman of the war labor board and now chairman of the American commission on Irish independence, or by Harry J. Boland, secretary of the Sinn Fein organization in Ireland.1
This event would cap more than a year of large, passionate public meetings in the city focused on Irish independence. In May 1918, Pittsburgh's Irish community protested British military conscription in Ireland, six months before the end of the Great War. In December 1918, they rallied again to support Ireland's cause at the post-war Paris peace conference. In June 1919, a "record-breaking crowd" of 5,000 gathered for a "non-denominational self-determination mass meeting where speakers discussed the claims of Ireland to conduct its own affairs without interference."2
The same edition of the Daily Post that published de Valera's Pittsburgh itinerary also reported on "Ulster Day" in the city, a seventh anniversary commemoration of the Ulster Covenant against home rule in Ireland. North of Ireland Protestants opposed this milder form of political autonomy before the war; now they disparaged the independent government sought by de Valera and the republican Sinn Féin party.
The Ulster Society of Pittsburgh gathered at the Smithfield Street Methodist Episcopal Church, where Rev. E. M. McFadden preached on the history of "Ulsterites in Ireland." It is unclear from newspaper accounts whether McFadden mentioned de Valera's upcoming visit, only that he orated about how the spirit of prior generations of Ulstermen "finds a parallel in the accentuating motives that dominate the minds of their descendants in their continuation of the fight today."3
Two month earlier, McFadden organized a resolution inviting unionist leader Sir Edward Carson to the United States to "offset the propaganda for Irish independence."4 In December, McFadden traveled to New York City to meet the visiting delegation of Protestant clergy, sans Carson, from Ulster.5
Secular opposition to de Valera also mounted the week of his Pittsburgh visit. In Harrisburg, 200 miles to the east, the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Legion passed a resolution that declared New York City-born de Valera "was an American and should have served in the army of navy and that he should not be accepted or recognized by any city of the United States." The patriotic veterans organization, chartered by Congress a month earlier, adopted the motion to considerable cheering, despite attempts to speak against it.6
De Valera reached Pittsburgh's Union Station about 8 p.m. Oct. 3, more than an hour late. Such evening arrivals were by design, "so as to facilitate demonstrations" that working people could not attend during the day.7 Boland and Walsh accompanied de Valera, as advanced, and they were cheered by a crowd of about 5,000. Two columns of uniformed veterans and cadets flanked the path to 100 waiting automobiles, but "it was almost impossible for police to clear a passageway" for the motorcade to make the half-mile trip to the William Penn Hotel.8
In two speeches the following evening, de Valera compared Ireland to the 13 American colonies.
We ask but one thing for ourselves–freedom. We have no fight with Great Britain on other subjects. Let us govern ourselves as we see fit, have some say in the making of laws which we must obey, and Ireland will rise among the great nations of the world, a credit to the land that gave us freedom.9
The Daily Post reported that de Valera was "warmly greeted by thousands of Irish sympathizers" who lined up for blocks an hour before the speech and filled the overflow hall. Their "wildly enthusiastic demonstrations testif[ied] to the popularity of the cause."10 The newspaper reports do not mention any counter protests.
The Irish Press, a Philadelphia weekly with direct ties to the Sinn Féin government in Ireland, devoted its Oct. 9 issue to de Valera's two-day visit to that city prior to his Pittsburgh stop. The Pittsburgh coverage appeared a week later and emphasized the two halls needed to accommodate "the great crowd … overwhelmed with joy, many standing on their seats and all cheering and applauding several minutes" upon his arrival.11
Undated photo of the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh. The building opened in 1916, three years before de Valera's visit. It was demolished in 1991.
The nationalist weekly also reported the comments of Alexander P. Moore, publisher of the Pittsburgh Leader newspaper and one of the event co-chairmen. Unsurprisingly, the city's other dailies were silent about the comments of the rival publisher. Moore downplayed the religious divide in Ireland.
"I am a living denial of the statement that the Irish cause is a religious question," he said. "I am the son of an Ulster Protestant whose father was driven out of Ireland because he fought for Irish freedom."12
Return Visits
Before his Pittsburgh speeches, De Valera made a brief visit to Duquesne University, but he was unable to attend the announced ceremony due to a schedule "misunderstanding."13 He returned to Pittsburgh eight months later to give an address and accept the honorary degree from the Catholic college.14
This second visit came shortly after de Valera's failure to convince the U.S. Republican Party to adopt a pro-Irish plank at its national convention in Chicago, and before a similar effort fell short at the Democratic convention in San Francisco. Animosity deepened between factions of Irish America. Some U.S. newspapers reported de Valera had "outstayed his welcome in the United States" and was about to leave America.15 In Pittsburgh, de Valera told reporters: "I will not leave this county until I am definitely recalled by the Irish parliament or deported."16 He remained in America until December 1920.
De Valera's reception at the Catholic university was warmed by a special connection to Ireland:
The University thus honours him not merely in consideration of this scholarship, which is widely acknowledged, not merely out of sympathy with the cause which he represents, but also as a tribute to one who has attained eminence and has been associated both as pupil and teacher with a sister college, namely, Blackrock College in Dublin.17
De Valera returned to Pittsburgh in March 1930, then an out-of-power leader of the opposition Fianna Fáil political party and chancellor of the National University of Ireland. He was in the United States to raise money for a newspaper venture, The Irish Press, which a year later would begin to publish in Dublin. The same-name Philadelphia paper that reported his 1919 U.S. visit ceased publication in 1922.
De Valera's 1920 and 1930 trips to Pittsburgh didn't generate nearly as much excitement or press coverage as in October 1919. The 1930 visit came within a decade of the war-ending treaty that created the 26-county Irish Free State, shy of the republic de Valera and his supporters had sought in 1919. Six counties in Ulster were partitioned as Northern Ireland and remained part of Great Britain. A bloody civil war divided the Irish in the south.
"Irish Americans became utterly disillusioned" by the two-year civil war and "enthusiasm for the nationalist movement in Ireland dissipated.18 In America, as in Ireland, many would blame de Valera for the division that lingered for decades to come.
In addition to cited newspapers, these books also were consulted:
Dolan, James P., The Irish Americans: A History. Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2008.
Hannigan, Dave, De Valera in America: The Rebel President and the Making of Irish Independence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010.
McCartan, Patrick, With De Valera In America. Brentano, New York, 1932.
McCullagh, David, De Valera, Rise 1882-1932. Gill Books, New York, 2017.
O'Doherty, Katherine, Assignment America: De Valera's Mission to the United States. De Tanko Publishers, New York, 1957.
O'Neil, Gerard F., Pittsburgh Irish: Erin on the Three Rivers. The History Press, Charleston, S.C., 2015.
This entry was posted in History, Irish America, Irish War of Independence, Journalism, Politics, Religion and tagged Duquesne University, Eamon De Valera, pittsburgh, The Irish Press on October 1, 2019 by admin.


There is no reason to have to sacrifice picture quality with your RV's television. You can still get clear pictures and even HD signals while you are away from home. When choosing a TV for your RV, you may have to consider certain things that aren't applicable to a stationary TV in your house. The one for your motorhome should stand up to the stress of travel, including such aspects as road conditions or changing temperatures. Jensen has several sizes of LED TVs that are designed for this type of use. They are similar to other LCD televisions, except they use LEDs to backlight the screen, rather than fluorescent lights.
Ranging from 19" to 32", these flat screen TVs can pick up HD signals and produce high quality images in 1080p. The HDMI input allows you to connect other devices, such as Blu-ray players. The casing is made to handle vibrations, such as those found on bumpy roads. The 16:9 aspect ratio is the standard used for HD capable televisions. These TVs can be adapted to mount on a wall or stand on a table. Like other Jensen products, they are tested to ensure that changing travel conditions won't damage or disrupt performance.
Whether you want your TV on the wall or on a table, Jensen has accessories available for that as well. Table stands come in two sizes, depending on the dimensions of your television. Once the TV is locked in place on the stand, it can be situated wherever you want. This gives you more options in choosing a location than mounting it to a wall. If you prefer the stability of a wall mount, they are available in fixed or hinged versions. Hinged wall mounts will give you the ability to position your TV in the optimum direction, where as a fixed wall mount is ideal if the TV does not have to be moved.
Jensen LED 12VDC Television, 28"
Jensen Table Top TV Stand - 26" - 32"


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Contact Welsh Athletics
Welsh team Burgos selection up for grabs at Cardiff
By Rob Sage
Welsh Athletics will use the Cardiff Cross Challenge to make it's selections for Cross de Atapuerca, Burgos – 11th November 2018.
The Cross de Atapuerca International is classified as an International Overseas Fixture. Up to four senior men and up to four senior women will be selected based on performance at the Cardiff XC event, taking place on the 13th October 2018. Automatic selection will be awarded to the top Welsh finisher in both the Senior men's and women's race, and the top two Welsh U20 finishers in the men's and women's U20 races. Full selection policy available from Welsh Athletics.
The Cross de Ataperca attracts high class international fields each year.
British Cross Challenge Series
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