text:
American Caliban: On P.T. Anderson's "The Master"
By Jacob Mikanowski
THE FIRST TIME we see Freddie Quell, the dipsomaniac drifter sex-fiend cult-devotee hero of Paul Thomas Anderson's new film The Master, he's peering out over the bow of a ship. All we see of him are his eyes and forehead, shadowed by the brim of a combat helmet. It's just a flash. We don't know what he's looking at or what he's about to face, whether he's about to land on an enemy shoreline or go off on leave, just that its wartime in the Pacific. But whatever happens to Freddie in the war certainly leaves a mark. The next time we see him he's on a beach and clearly strung out, chopping coconuts with a machete like he has a mind to lop off his own hand. He celebrates V-J day by drinking ethanol out of torpedo engines. While the other sailors wrestle, Freddie simulates sex with a woman sculpted out of sand and masturbates into the surf. Back home, he flunks out of an early version of PTSD screening by claiming every Rorschach blot he's shown is either a cock or a pussy or a cock going into a pussy. At this point we start to wonder, why are we following this creep around? Wasn't this supposed to be a movie about Scientology?
The Master is P.T. Anderson's sixth film. Over the past 16 years, he's put together a body of work that has made him stand out as one of a handful of bona fide American auteurs — directors with a discernible vision, a recognizable visual style, and a commitment to the medium as an art form. Beginning with Hard Eight in 1996, he's made a suite of films in an array of genres and moods: a perfectly executed noir short story, a sprawling Altmanesque group portrait, a haphazard (and to my mind, somewhat curdled) paean to chance, a slim, darkly funny novella, and a return to the DeMille-Griffith fire and brimstone epic. All of them are held together by a fascination with a place (Southern California) and certain types of character (obsessed loners, orphaned children, surrogate fathers). Of all of these, The Master is his strangest and most elusive work. Hard Eight and Punch Drunk Love were genre pieces, however off-kilter. Boogie Nights is an exquisite ensemble piece, but it's hardly mysterious. Magnolia and There Will Be Blood were driven by clear, if sometimes overly schematic, clashes. The Master is harder to characterize. It's a play on film history, an unresolved love story, a statement about conformity and rebellion. Above all it's a struggle between two characters and two epochs, a duet in which nothing resolves or comes to a conclusion. It's as wide-open and complex a masterpiece, and as ambiguous and puzzling a film as has appeared in America since David Lynch's Mulholland Drive or Todd Haynes's Safe.
Freddie is what sticks with you as you leave the theater. He's like Robert De Niro's characters in Mean Streets and Raging Bull — as long as he's on screen you can't relax because something might happen to him, or he might do something terrible to someone else. You feel like you've gotten too close to his mania and his tics and you want to push him out. If you've ever been crazy, or known someone who is, you also recognize the terrible energy, like black electricity, which threatens to consume him and which he works so hard to deaden and contain. But even as Freddie is the most surprising and indelible thing about the film, the question remains: What is he doing here?
The answer has something to do with Freddie's deep unease, the way he seems at odds and out-of-joint with his surroundings and the times. With his painfully hunched shoulders and a battered, deeply-lined face, he looks like an evolutionary throwback, an australopithecine John Garfield dropped off on the savannahs of a new continent. As played by Joaquin Phoenix, Freddie has the demeanor of a wounded animal. Tight spaces make him uncomfortable. Time and again, Anderson frames him in enclosures — a chicken wire shack, a ship's hold — that make him visibly unhinged. Behind bars in actual prison, Freddie is a complete maniac. When he speaks he keeps his lips pressed together, talking out of the corner of his mouth like a stroke victim. And the damage extends to what he says: he's barely able to articulate a thought or access a memory. Though a creature of appetite, with a constant need for sex and drink, he doesn't have much success with women. He's a wizard with booze, however — a moonshine alchemist who can synthesize rotgut out of whatever happens to be at hand, whether it's paint thinner or Lysol. It's this talent that ultimately wins him a place in a provisional community aboard the Master's yacht.
Early in the movie there's a striking interlude when he's working as a department store photographer. His suit looks like it may, at any second, strangle him. His job is to take stiff, formal portraits of ordinary American families. They're the visual equivalent of the new Levittowns springing up all over the country. In a beautiful, fluid sequence, scored to Ella Fitzgerald's rendition of "Get Thee Behind Me Satan," he seduces (or is he seduced by?) an in-store model, but he passes out when they go to dinner. The following day, he assaults a fat businessman who's come to have his picture taken. Next, he turns up in a California cabbage field, a migrant farm worker. Before long, he accidentally poisons the patriarch of a laborer family and has to take off, running through the plowed fields pursued by a vengeful mob. On the run, he ends up at the North Bay docks. An exquisite gliding shot captures Freddie shambling in the foreground while a group of well-dressed revelers dance on the deck in the background. He stows away, passes out, and has his flask stolen. The next morning begins his involvement with The Cause.
From this moment, The Master becomes the story of the relationship between these two vastly different men. It's a story of initiation and servitude, and it's a strange kind of love story, a wary dance between two figures who clearly stand for more than themselves. Lancaster Dodd, the self-styled master of the title, is a pompous charmer in charge of his own religion, called, prosaically enough, The Cause. It's a small-time cult with big-money donors, which promises its adherents a cure for all mental handicaps and certain forms of leukemia, as well as an end to nuclear war. Dodd has an enormous sense of his own importance. In his own words, he's "a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher … but above all I am a man." He's a genial charlatan and a barely restrained bully, but he's also an immensely charismatic, frivolous, joyful presence. Dodd is a drinker and a gadabout, a blowhard and a fraud, a giddy charlatan and a theater ham. More than once, he leads his disciples in a satyr dance, and he draws Freddie to him with a giddy wedding toast about taming dragons until they roll over.
If Phoenix's Freddie descends from the early performances of DeNiro and Brando, Philip Seymour Hoffman's Dodd is Orson Welles, especially the self-consciously theatrical show-off of the later years, the man behind the curtain from Mr. Arkadin and the bogus magician of F is for Fake. You get the sense that if he didn't hold the keys to the last 60 trillion years of human spiritual existence, Dodd would have been a brilliant magician, as Welles was during the war years, when he was staging magic shows for the troops with Marlene Dietrich for an assistant, sawing Rita Hayworth in half every night while dreaming of running for president. And remember that, with the radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, Welles created, however briefly, his own moment of extraterrestrial awe and terror. But Anderson doesn't just call up Welles the magician; The Master also draws on the noir Welles, the Welles of impossible and dangerous desires. Sly references to Lady From Shanghai tumble throughout the film. There's the initial stowaway sequence and the voyage on the Alethea from San Francisco to New York, the exact reverse of the course taken by Welles's Michael O'Hara in Lady. Then there's the backstory with Freddie's would-be child bride, whom he leaves to be an oiler on a merchant marine cruise to Shanghai. And finally, there's the song. In their final meeting, just as he is about to banish Freddie for good, Dodd sings him, "I'd like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China," in a low, steady voice, as if it were a lullaby or a plea. It's a shocking moment, at once comic, absurd, and tragically sexy — one of the sexiest things I've seen on screen in years. For these two, Shanghai is a ways off from Welles's "wickedest city in the world." It's their territory ahead, the dream space of their imaginary, infinitely displaced union.
Of course, on a more direct level, Dodd's character and appearance are clearly modeled on L. Ron Hubbard, down to the self-description as a theoretical physicist. His movement, The Cause, strongly resembles the early version of Scientology, the one that became an overnight sensation thanks to the success of Dianetics. With some scrambling and compression of chronology, many of the events of Hubbard's life are in The Master as well — the sojourn on the boat, the refuge with wealthy patrons, the embezzlement, the party congress in Phoenix, the retreat to England are all based on fact, with the exception that the real story of Hubbard's rise was much weirder and more sordid, featuring multiple divorces, a kidnapping, fraud charges, conspiracy theories, and a cabal of well heeled Southern California necromancers.
So what draws Dodd to Freddie and Freddie to Dodd? They have a strange sort of partnership. Dodd has his processing techniques and Freddie has his secret varnish-cocktail recipe. Literally and figuratively, they spend the movie drinking each other's moonshine. More than that, an obvious erotic current runs between the two, especially from Dodd to Freddie. They wrestle and lock eyes. In his own life, Dodd is clearly under the thumb (and sexually, the hand) of his wife Peggy, played by the superb — if underused — Amy Adams, a fanatical believer in the movement and a jealous guardian of her husband's prestige. Maybe as recompense, Dodd enjoys having someone to dominate on his own. At times Freddie's his disciple, at others, something closer to a slave. He's also a science project, a lump of proletarian clay on which to test Dodd's theories. For much of the middle portion of the film, Dodd treats Freddie like a savage pet, and seems to relish having such an animal at his command. He's the violent id to his silken superego. He calls him "naughty boy" and "dog," but at the same time clearly relishes the violence Freddie is willing to do in his name.
But the attraction between Freddie and Dodd has less to do with violence and control than with therapy, and with secrets. In return for his devotion, Dodd is able to give Freddie some kind of relief, which isn't that far from pain. The army's psychotherapy bounces off Freddie completely, but Dodd manages to open him up. In the movie's most powerful scene, Dodd casually offers him a session of "informal processing" below decks. He forces Freddie to keep his eyes open without blinking, while answering a series of questions that go to the root of his shame and fear, his history of incest, alcoholism, family insanity. As he answers, the veins pop out of his face, a scene accompanied by extreme, almost sexual exertion. His past flows out of him, like a boil that's been lanced. It's a scene of incredible intensity, like watching a real life exorcism or someone speaking in tongues. But however effective this treatment is in the short term, it doesn't last, and at a deeper level Freddie never really succumbs to the appeal of The Cause.
It's a bold choice on Anderson's part to portray The Cause as sympathetically as he does. Dodd's technique is a mix of past-life regression and behavioral modification. It offers its adherents a chance to recall their time in the womb and to dream of past lives. Part of the Master's mystique is his perfect recollection of his previous incarnation, and his ability to induce a similar recall in others. For older rich women (like Helen Sullivan, played by Laura Dern), this has the appeal of playacting, travelling into other selves, pretending to be a knight or a slave. But The Cause isn't only about play. It's also meant to domesticate darker impulses. Like Scientology, it's a sort of combination of the other two great American-born religions — Mormonism and Alcoholics Anonymous. Like Mormonism, it is rooted in an ancient mystery and the promise of revealed truth. (Dodd keeps his scriptures buried in the desert. When he takes Freddie with him to dig them up there's a great moment where he pauses for a moment at the entrance of the cave with a gun in his hand — as if they might be ambushed by enlightenment-seeking desperadoes.) Like Alcoholics Anonymous, it is a form of therapy and spiritual discipline (or at least discipline). Like both, it offers a path toward getting well and fitting in. (That's American religion. Cults are another matter, since everywhere they tend to be about sexual control, an insight which seems to be conveyed in a vision of Dodd's party in which all the women are nude.)
Part of this works on Freddie. When Dodd screens him, the effect is like a thunderbolt. But the rest of it fails. Freddie never grasps the intricacies of the doctrine and never joins the others in fantasies of past lives. There's an anguished scene in which he walks from wall to window, over and over again for what feels like an eternity, while being prodded to imagine them as portals to somewhere else. As with the Rorschach test and the sand woman, he reveals the scope and limits of his imagination: mimicking sex with the window instead of playing Dodd's game, the scene of training comes close to being torture. It put me in mind of a scene from François Truffaut's neglected The Wild Child, in which a feral boy is trained by an enlightened doctor, in tiny increments, to speak and understand symbols. Freddie's resistance goes beyond merely not believing. He seems to resist the very idea of abstract thought.
The rest of the program has to do with learning to control impulsive behavior, disciplining the mind, acquiring the ability to speak clearly and forcefully and to withstand scrutiny. And in this, Freddy fails completely. Drawn into the center of The Cause's impromptu family, he remains an unbridled force. When Dodd and Quell are arrested (Dodd for embezzlement, Quell for attacking the police officers who came to arrest him) they are held in separate cells, side by side. Freddie goes on a self-destructive rampage, slamming his head into the bunks and stomping a toilet into pieces. Meanwhile, Dodd coolly stands in the corner, insisting, "I'm the only one who likes you." Freddie, desperate, screams: "It's all bullshit … you're making it all up … say one thing that's true," in reply. Framed this way, side by side in their separate cells, the contrast between the two men is at its starkest. But its meaning remains ambiguous. It can be read in a couple of ways, as the opposition between spirit and nature, man and animal, or even (as several critics have suggested) between styles of acting, with Freddy as an exemplar of the method school and Dodd squarely in the older theatrical tradition.
Another way to think about the contrast between the two is in terms of historical eras and genres. There's something about Freddie that keeps him from fitting in to the postwar world. When he arrives back from the war, Freddie outwardly resembles many of the noir figures that populated postwar films: Frank Chambers, the drifter who rolls off a hay truck into Lana Turner's lap at the start of The Postman Only Rings Twice; Orson Welles as Michael O'Hara, climbing on board a rich man's yacht in The Lady From Shanghai; Tom Neal, the gutter musician antihero of pulpier-than-thou Detour. Freddie, too, is disconnected in the new America, at loose, looking for trouble. But he lives in a different moral universe from these men. He doesn't have any of the noir heroes' sardonic self-regard or their fatalism. In the great postwar noirs, the hero chooses his fate. O'Hara's motto is "When I start out to make a fool of myself, there's very little can stop me." Freddie is a creature of instinct, a Pavlovian mass of skittering neural tissue, incapable of either Welles's wryness or Robert Mitchum's inner distance. Puss crazy as he is, amour fou isn't exactly on his horizon either, and until the end it's an open question whether he's capable of consummating a relationship at all.
(That final scene of Freddie having sex is fascinating in its own right. In the middle of it, Freddie pauses to ask his lover the questions from Dodd's processing session. It's as if he's flipping the script and finally getting the upper hand on his master, while consummating the relationship at the same time. According to IMDB, the girl he picks up is named Wynn Manchester — in the theater, I could have sworn her name was Lancaster.)
Really, the more you look at him, the more Freddie seems to belong to an earlier era, to the pre-war world of Hoovervilles, tramp cottages, migrant workers. When he's working on the cabbage plantation by Salinas, he's right in the heart of Steinbeck country. He meets a man there who reminds him of his father, a gnarled farm worker with a long beard, who looks like he stepped out of a Dorothea Lange photograph. When he's on the run from migrant camp, he could be an escapee from a chain gang in Sullivan's Travels. This is a half-wild America, still wide open, the country as it was before the rise of subdivisions and psychometrics. At the same time, Freddie is a portrait of the men of Anderson's father's generation. Anderson's own father served in the Pacific theater, and he has said that afterwards he "was restless his whole life." The identification between the two is strengthened when you notice that Freddie comes from Lynn, Massachusetts, Anderson's father's hometown.
There Will Be Blood was set during the closing of the frontier. The 1950 of The Master is a similar moment, when another kind of freedom was on its way out. Freddie is just another drifter, but he also stands in for a whole lost continent of unchecked American freedom and wartime trauma, a country without surveillance in which you could rise from nowhere or bug out and vanish. It's a country that in 1950 was in the process of vanishing, and Scientology, or The Cause, was helping it on its way. Dodd's movement was the heir to two hundred years of religious revivalism and spiritual exploration, reaching back to the Shakers and Seventh Day Dunkers and forward to Esalen and the Unification Church (for a glimpse of this world, nothing can top Paul Johnson's The Kingdom of Matthias, in which a very Hubbard-like New York carpenter suddenly leaves his trade to preach the transmigration of souls and practice free love).
But The Cause also belongs to its moment. It's a pseudoscience tailored to address both mounting fears about atomic energy and to benefit from the rising popularity of psychoanalysis. In its theology, The Cause is a mystical system dedicated to the idea of the eternal return in which time passed in trillion year cycles. In its practice, however, it is a sophisticated technology of the self, dedicated towards fostering integration "within a group, a society, a family." In Anderson's world, The Cause is the future, and poor, drunk, feral Freddie is the past.
In their final meeting, Dodd asks Freddie if he has found a way to live without a master, and if he does to "be sure to let the rest of us know, for you would be the first in the history of the world." This is Freddie's predicament: living without any master or law means living like an animal, but succumbing totally to his hypnotism and mind tricks means giving up your soul, and as Isaiah Berlin once pointed out, submission can be its own kind of freedom, especially when the alternative is rootlessness and oblivion. But Anderson doesn't rest there. The relationship between Dodd and Freddie extends beyond that of a master and a disciple or a master and a slave into something deeper, a bond based less on domination than on mutual intoxication. They're fascinated by each other's way of living in the world, and for a while, that fascination develops into a kind of understanding. Fundamentally, The Master is a story of love between unequals, taking place at a pivotal moment when American culture and history shifted irrevocably. It's a version of the oldest American story, the fraught love between the civilized and the savage, the story that runs back from Sal and Dean in On The Road and Queequeg and Ishmael on the Pequod, or back to Robinson Crusoe and Friday. Ultimately, it goes back to that ur-parable of American colonization, Shakespeare's Tempest. Freddie and Dodd are like Caliban and Prospero; the animal-man and his wizard master. Could that be why Freddie, earth spirit, begins and ends the movie having sex with the sandcastle woman, and why Dodd is forever plotting against his enemies from the prow of a boat?
I don't mean to suggest The Tempest as a skeleton key for the whole film. I think it's present, buried deep in the background. The movie certainly helps make sense of the play. Once you see Prospero as Dodd you realize what an ass he must have been, padding around his island in his magic robe making speeches and shouting at all the natives for not loving him enough. Like The Master, The Tempest takes place after a moment of forcible colonization. It's a story of domestication and enslavement, and of indoctrination through language. What's not remarked on often enough is that it's also a buried love story. Their relationship began like Dodd's and Freddie's: each had something to offer the other. Prospero was once a newcomer to the island, and a hounded political refugee at that. Caliban remembers those days "When thou camest first / Thou strokedst me and madest much of me," he reminds his master. Prospero taught him, too, "How / To name the bigger light, and how the less, / That burn by day and night." Prospero taught Caliban language and gave him affection, while Caliban showed Prospero how to live in the wild — what to eat, what to drink. In that half-remembered past, there was an openness between them: they were still more like father and son than master and slave.
In the end, Freddie ends up shunted aside, just as Caliban was, but with The Cause there are oceans of time in which to make up for present crimes. From the moment they meet, Dodd insists that he has met Freddie in a past life. At the end he finally reveals where and when that was: they worked the pigeon post together during a siege in the Franco-Prussian War, sending dozens of balloons into the air and only losing a few. It's a lovely, goofy dream of camaraderie. But after Freddie asks, finally and pathetically, if they can be friends in a future life, Dodd tells him that if he leaves they will be mortal enemies for the next million years. The film closes with him back on the beach, nestled against the sandcastle woman from the first scenes; but the movie's real ending comes before, when Freddie and Dodd are racing a motorcycle in the Arizona desert. Dodd tells Freddie to choose a point in the distance and race towards it as fast as he can. The disciple rushes off, slipping his bonds and vanishing in the American distance, leaving a trail of possible futures behind him like eddies in a ship's wake.
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text:
package br.com.dlbca.hibernate.memcached.region;

import java.util.Properties;

import org.hibernate.cache.CacheException;
import org.hibernate.cache.spi.CacheDataDescription;
import org.hibernate.cache.spi.EntityRegion;
import org.hibernate.cache.spi.access.AccessType;
import org.hibernate.cache.spi.access.EntityRegionAccessStrategy;
import org.hibernate.cfg.Settings;

import br.com.dlbca.hibernate.memcached.MemcachedCache;
import br.com.dlbca.hibernate.memcached.strategy.NonStrictReadWriteMemcachedEntityRegionAccessStrategy;
import br.com.dlbca.hibernate.memcached.strategy.ReadOnlyMemcachedEntityRegionAccessStrategy;
import br.com.dlbca.hibernate.memcached.strategy.ReadWriteMemcachedEntityRegionAccessStrategy;

public class MemcachedEntityRegion extends MemcachedTransactionalRegion implements EntityRegion {

	public MemcachedEntityRegion(MemcachedCache cache, Settings settings, CacheDataDescription metadata, Properties properties) {
		super(cache, settings, metadata, properties);
	}

	public EntityRegionAccessStrategy buildAccessStrategy(AccessType accessType) throws CacheException {
		if(AccessType.READ_ONLY.equals(accessType)) {
			return new ReadOnlyMemcachedEntityRegionAccessStrategy(this, settings);
		} else if(AccessType.READ_WRITE.equals(accessType)) {
			return new ReadWriteMemcachedEntityRegionAccessStrategy(this, settings);
		} else if(AccessType.NONSTRICT_READ_WRITE.equals(accessType)) {
			return new NonStrictReadWriteMemcachedEntityRegionAccessStrategy(this, settings);
		} else if(AccessType.TRANSACTIONAL.equals(accessType)) {
			throw new CacheException("Transactional access is not supported by Memcached region factory");
		} else {
			throw new IllegalArgumentException("Unknown access strategy type - " + accessType);
		}
	}

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Eight Reasons to Empower Girls in Schools
Equity & Diversity Opinion
By Lyn Mikel Brown — October 11, 2016 4 min read
Lyn Mikel Brown
Lyn Mikel Brown is a professor of education and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine. She is the author of Powered by Girl: A Field Guide for Supporting Youth Activists (Beacon Press, 2016).
If ever there was a time to unpack the complexities of gender and power with K-12 students—girls in particular—this is it. In the past few months, public attention in the United States has moved seamlessly from sexist commentary in the Olympic Games, to a major news-channel executive's resignation over sexual-harassment allegations, to a presidential campaign that offers up daily helpings of misogyny. Clearly, the way educators prepare girls to be leaders isn't enough if those girls land a seat at a table with the likes of former Fox News CEO and chairman Roger Ailes. They need more from us than cheerleading and talk of grit. They need encouragement to think critically about the world around them, the opportunities available to them, and the struggles and exclusion they may face.
As a professor of education who has worked for decades to empower girls of all ages, I co-founded three "girl fueled" activist organizations: Hardy Girls Healthy Women, based in Waterville, Maine, and the online sites SPARK Movement and Powered By Girl. This work has left me no doubt that K-12 girls benefit enormously from opportunities to make their environments more just and caring places.
I work with elementary school girls who map their schools for safe and unsafe spaces; middle school girls who protest dress codes; and high school girls who advocate for gender-neutral bathrooms. Schools benefit in many ways from visible student engagement, but whether or not such activism yields tangible results, simply participating has a powerful and positive impact on students. Here are eight reasons why educators should help engage girls in activism:
1. Activism moves girls from passive consumers to active citizens. Media and marketers sell girls a pop-culture version of power in which their primary project is to fix themselves. Inherent in activism is the challenge to look beneath the surface of outside messages and no longer accept them at face value. Girls who question the justifications of media and policies laced with sexism, racism, and homophobia are psychologically healthier.
2. Activism invites girls to voice their thoughts and feelings. Plugging girls into prefabricated civic-engagement programs and encouraging them to succeed on someone else's terms fails to give them what they need most: practice developing and voicing their own solutions to problems, trusting their own perspectives, and experiencing what it means to stay true to themselves even as they risk dissent.
Participating in girl-led activism helps to create a school climate where gender diversity is visible and valued."
3. Activism makes schools safer for all girls. Participating in girl-led activism helps to create a school climate where gender diversity is visible and valued. When more girls challenge qualities traditionally associated with girlhood (such as compliance) with assertiveness and agency, they make schools safer for all girls to do the same. When more girls publicly say what they think, it opens up space for others—especially for those who, because of race and social class, are more likely to be discounted or disciplined for outspokenness or resistance.
4. Activism affirms the power of diversity. Effective change requires a coalition of people from different backgrounds, experiences, and skills who share passion for a common cause. Girls engaged in activist work see how differences in social class, race and ethnicity, disability, and gender expression alter their individual experiences with sexism. They come to recognize how, together, they can create more effective and inclusive solutions.
5. Activism helps girls negotiate a "culture of power." To advocate for change successfully, girls must think about how their school system operates and who has the power to make change. When girls are aware of existing networks of power, it enables them to communicate effectively and makes space for their opinions in school and beyond.
6. Activism invites belonging and creates trusting relationships. Engaging in activism gives girls a sense of community and brings them together for a shared cause. This can help dissolve what is often a culture of distrust between girls, as well as subsequent bullying. Activism decreases girls' feelings of alienation by offering them connections that help counter all the justified reasons they can feel numb, angry, alienated, and powerless.
7. Activism is an important form of supplementary education. Activist work can offer students on the margins educational opportunities that are often readily available to more-privileged students. Students can identify a problem they care about and study it deeply, brainstorm solutions, and engage in student-led discussions and exploration of solutions.
8. Activism is the most effective form of leadership training. Through activist work, girls learn to lead by actually leading and fully participating in what matters from the ground up. There are opportunities to think critically, speak up, and take risks—all leadership skills. They aren't learning skills to take advantage of some future possibility, but rather practicing leadership in the present tense.
Supporting student activism is not easy work. It disrupts assumptions of how students—especially girl students—should behave. It asks adults to see youths as experts on their own experience and to recognize the value of student-generated solutions.
But the best way to start integrating youth activism into classrooms is the simplest: an honest conversation about what students experience as unfair in school or society and open conversations about possible solutions. Above all, our job as educators is to help our students see and remove obstacles to their freedom. We must encourage them to play an active role in shaping their education and their future.
Gender Girls
A version of this article appeared in the October 12, 2016 edition of Education Week as A Field Guide to Girl Empowerment
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Back in September, the first trailer for Marvel's next movie showed its eponymous hero Captain Marvel randomly punching a sweet old woman in the face.
This was probably jarring for anyone not intimately familiar with the lesser-known Marvel hero. And, in the new trailer for Captain Marvel, it opens with a pretty thorough explanation about why this happened.
To be clear, this isn't just some badass grandma ninja, this is one of those Skrulls, which are an alien race of shapeshifters that are at war with the Kree. In this new film, Danvers arrives back on Earth, where she's having memories of her mysterious past. Danvers is half Kree. And as Annette Bening's character explains, the Kree Starforce found Danvers and re-made her into one of them.


Atlus and Sega teased last month that Shin Megami Tensei: Liberation Dx2 has a big date coming, and it is with none other than Bayonetta, who is set to make her Shin Megami Tensei debut on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2019.
While the Bayonetta crossover event starts on February 14, 2019, Shin Megami Tensei: Liberation Dx2 began a special 7-day login event as a countdown.
Players had until February 14 to meet its Countdown Rewards Campaign by interacting on social media, but the goal of 20,000 has already been met so players will receive Bayonetta when the event kicks off.
Like Bayonetta, Jeanne is also an Umbra Witch and a survivor of the witch hunts that occurred 500 years ago. With abilities and skills similar to Bayonetta, she is adept at performing Wicked Weaves and summoning the Infernal Demon Gomorrah, making her a worthy rival.
A powerful Angel, tasked with vanquishing the enemies of Paradiso. With its superior combat abilities and stopping power, it has faced off against Bayonetta many times in the past.
Shin Megami Tensei: Liberation Dx2 is available on iOS and Android.
Read more stories about Android & Bayonetta & Dx2 Shin Megami Tensei: Liberation & iPhone & Sega & Shin Megami Tensei Liberation Dx2 on Siliconera.


theConsultant.eu - Does the EU Withdrawal Agreement "take back control"?
Home » Thinking » Taking back control?
Does the EU Withdrawal Agreement really "take back control"?
Taking back control or slavery?
Here's one of those much derided experts, Professor Jonathan Portes, senior fellow at The UK in a Changing Europe, with a definitive reading of Mrs May's Withdrawal Agreement.
The UK in a Changing Europe, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and based at King's College London, is an invaluable source of academically rigorous research and opinion on Brexit and wider European issues.


Welcome to The Railroad Commissary on-line locomotive builder's plate catalog.
We offer a collection of railroad collectables that have been carefully selected for authenticity. Our interest is railroad relics - unless the items actually came from a railway, we don't stock them.
1924 - can be seen pages 76-77 and 124-125 of Colin Garratt's book The Last of Steam).
16" / Burnham, Williams & Co. cast brass "manhole cover"
(this is the left side plate.  The right side plate had equal but opposite holes - as seen in photo.
A classic, Southern, cabbage-stack, log hauler.
Florida State Archives has several photos of it.  See: A-S Lumber #101 for an example.
BPE-163 & BPE-164   23701    9-1957      GP9    nice / no paint left         $120.00 / ea.
Lima Locomotive Works / Lima-Hamilton Corp.
Seaboard Coast Line  (SCL)  #??
Shipping - Shipping is $12.00 per order - insurance included (to US addresses), ($15.00 to Canada up to 1 kg, $26 up to 2 kg, $36 uo to 4 kg, $56 over 4 kg), more elsewhere, depending on cost). Your quantity discount will be in the shipping - buy several pieces and we pay anything over the basic rate. Orders over $1000 shipping is free within North America, 50% actual cost worldwide. To avoid delay please order by stock number, when shown.
Visa and M/C, Zelle,Paypal, as well as checks and money orders, accepted.
Trade / Sell - Perhaps you would like to suggest a trade ? Unlike an Old World vegetable grocer, we do not care to haggle over the price of each piece, but if you think that you could suggest a trade, or other "deal," that would be mutually beneficial, we will be happy to hear you out. Maybe you have a piece that doesn't exactly fit with your collection, and we have a piece that does - maybe a deal could be found. Please recall though, that this is a commercial enterprise, so we would find no advantage in a trade for pieces of like value. Of course, we are always buying - from whole collections to single pieces.
last updated 4-6-19 All images and copy on this web site are subject to full copyright protection.


By 10 April 1917, when the Battle of Arras had been in progress for one day, Australian soldiers left to attack the German lines at Bullecourt. A second offensive was launched on 3 May. The statue of the Digger is a tribute to the 10,000 Australian soldiers who fell during these operations.


It's Simple To Learn About Furniture Shopping With This Article So it's replace the piece of furniture in your house rrmprove the style. The problem is that you have no idea of how to begin. Well, you've got arrive at the right spot then. The following article can have for your requirements every one of the tips you'll need while searching for furniture to suit your needs home. You need to try searching for furnishings which can be for sale by the reputable store. This is because well-known stores have a tendency to offer warranties on his or her furniture. If something fails in a specific length of time, they're going to replace the pieces. Smaller stores aren't usually capable of afford these kind of warranties.


No more tickets will be sold.
Our annual Community Iftar and Fellowship Graduation Celebration dinner celebrates the Islamic month of Ramadan, honors the graduates of our young professionals fellowship program, and provides everyone in attendance the opportunity to connect with Muslims, Jews, and Angelenos of all backgrounds committed to creating change.
Join us for this remarkable dinner held in one of LA's most beautiful synagogues as we celebrate the incredible work of our NewGround change-makers who just completed our flagship young professionals program.
Our Community Iftar Co-chairs are Brie Loskota, Edina Lekovic, and Rabbi Susan Goldberg.
*No tickets will be sold at the door on June 25th. Event is sold out.
*Please note that registration begins at 6:30 PM and dinner will be served at 8:09 PM based on the time of sunset, which is when Muslims break fast (Iftar).
*Please bring your e-ticket as a print out and/or on your mobile device.
*Parking: No parking available inside Wilshire Blvd Temple; see options below.
Open Air Parking Lot ACROSS from Wilshire Blvd. Temple ($5) Located on the South side of Wilshire Blvd.


text:
The Trial of Bob Higgins continues at the Salisbury Crown Court.
Home » Blog » The Trial of Bob Higgins continues at the Salisbury Crown Court.
The trial of Bob Higgins is continuing at the Salisbury Crown Court. Higgins is facing 50 charges of indecent assault against 24 victims.
The assaults are alleged to have "predominantly taken place within the football community." The Court has heard how young players had to "grin and bear" the abuse and how they had "no choice other than to accept the abuse."
The abuse is alleged to have taken place at Higgins' home, in his car, on ferries going to competitions and on training camps.
One victim has given evidence how Higgins would give massages to the boys. "You would lie face down on the floor and he would get the soapy water out. You would be naked, head to toe and he would massage you from top to bottom. He would touch you everywhere. He massaged everything: your buttocks, inner thighs. We all sort of grinned and beared it. It's like being in the army. If you are told to run through a wall you do it."
Another victim has described to the Court how he was abused by Higgins in Higgins' home. He told the Court how Higgins' wife would go to bed early leaving you alone with Higgins.
"One time I stayed there and I was so scared of being alone with him I ran from the dinner table and vomited in the sink. From that day I've had a phobia of eating at other people's houses. It terrified me so much at the time."
In Court Higgins has been described as a
"predatory paedophile who used his supreme power to allegedly carry out a campaign of sexual abuse against schoolboy footballers for more than 25 years."
Higgins denies the charges and the trial continues.
Jordans Solicitors represent victims who have suffered abuse whilst participating in sporting activities and are representing victims of abuse by Bob Higgins. Where a person abuses their position of trust and commits an act of assault a claim may be possible. We would encourage anyone affected to report their allegations to the Police and contact Jordans to pursue a civil claim We can be contacted free on 033 0300 1103 or you can request a call back.
Former Victim has Spoken about his Abuse by the Church
Ex-vicar Guilty of 1970's Indecent Assault
Historic Abuse at May Lodge Children's Home in the 1970s
All Party Parliamentary Group Report Reveals Victims of Abuse Afraid to Seek Justice.


text:
Albert Rusnák (born 7 July 1994) is a Slovak professional footballer who plays as a winger for Major League Soccer club Seattle Sounders FC and the Slovakia national team.

Career

Manchester City
Rusnák played youth football in Slovakia for MFK Košice from a very young age, before signing for Manchester City in July 2010, where he joined the club's reserve side.

Loan to Oldham Athletic
After three years of youth and reserve-team football, he signed for Football League One side Oldham Athletic on loan. Rusnák made his first senior appearance as a 63rd-minute substitute for Jonson Clarke-Harris in a league game against Tranmere Rovers on 31 August 2013, in a match that they lost 0–1 at Boundary Park. His first start came three days later, in a 4–1 away Football League Trophy win over Shrewsbury Town. On 17 September, Rusnák's loan was cut short and he returned to City after Rusnak reported refused to play in a reserve team match against Port Vale.

Loan to Birmingham City
On 21 January 2014, Rusnák joined Football League Championship (second-tier) club Birmingham City on a month's youth loan. He went straight into the starting eleven for the FA Cup fourth round defeat to Swansea City the following Saturday. On 18 February 2014, Rusnák extended his loan spell until the conclusion of the 2013–14 season.

Loan to SC Cambuur
On 25 July 2014, Rusnák moved to Dutch Eredivisie club SC Cambuur on loan until January. He became a key part of the team, scoring in a 3–0 win over local rivals FC Groningen and having his loan extended until the end of the season. Earlier in the season, in another local derby at SC Heerenveen, he gave the ball away from kick-off, resulting in a penalty being awarded after nine seconds, but Cambuur fought back for a 2–2 draw.

FC Groningen
With his Manchester City contract due to expire in the summer of 2015, Rusnák moved on a three-year contract to Groningen on 18 December 2014. On 3 May 2015, he scored both goals in the KNVB Cup final as they defeated reigning champions PEC Zwolle to win their first major trophy and qualify for the UEFA Europa League.

Real Salt Lake
On 6 January 2017, Rusnák joined Real Salt Lake of Major League Soccer in time for the 2017 season.  The terms of the move were undisclosed. He wore the number 11 shirt last worn by Javier Morales. He finished his debut MLS season with 14 assists, good for fourth-best in the league. Rusnák then hit the 10-goal mark in both his second and third seasons with RSL.

Rusnák's contract with Salt Lake expired following the 2021 season, and he officially announced he would not return to the club on 8 January 2022.

Seattle Sounders FC

On 13 January 2022, Rusnák signed with Seattle Sounders FC as the club's third Designated Player. He helped the team win the 2022 CONCACAF Champions League, scoring in the first leg of the semifinals against New York City FC. Rusnák played mainly as a defensive midfielder in tandem with various partners due to injuries to Obed Vargas and João Paulo. The Sounders ended the season by missing the MLS Cup Playoffs—a first in franchise history.

International career
Being able to represent the Czech Republic due to being born there, nonetheless Rusnák made his debut for Slovakia on 15 November 2016, in the last friendly fixture for the year, against Austria, in a goal-less tie in Vienna, coming on as a substitute in the 46th minute for Jakub Holúbek.

In 2017, he kept receiving invitations to all fixtures, except for matches against Uganda and Sweden in Abu Dhabi, where league players were selected. In that year he made appearances in five of six qualifying matches for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, even earning a spot in the starting 11 in the last match in the group stage against Malta, where he also assisted Ondrej Duda's goal.

Rusnák scored his first international goal in his ninth cap, with a right-foot shot, in the 42nd minute of the first international match of 2018, a semi-final fixture against UAE, at the 2018 King's Cup. He was assisted by a pass from Patrik Hrošovský.

Personal life
Rusnák's father, also called Albert Rusnák, is himself a former professional footballer and manager who became a scout at Manchester City in 2010, taking his son to the club.

Style of play
Rusnák struggled while playing in the Football League, due to the style of play rewarding taller and physically stronger players. His manager at Cambuur, Henk de Jong, noted how his style of play being better suited for a playmaker role rather than his position on the wing in England.

Honours
FC Groningen
KNVB Cup: 2014–15

Seattle Sounders FC
CONCACAF Champions League: 2022

Slovakia
King's Cup: 2018

Career statistics

Club

International goals
Scores and results list Slovakia's goal tally first.

References

External links

1994 births
Living people
People from Vyškov
Slovak footballers
Slovakia under-21 international footballers
Slovakia international footballers
Slovak expatriate footballers
Association football midfielders
Manchester City F.C. players
Oldham Athletic A.F.C. players
Birmingham City F.C. players
Eredivisie players
SC Cambuur players
FC Groningen players
Real Salt Lake players
Seattle Sounders FC players
English Football League players
Major League Soccer players
Designated Players (MLS)
Expatriate footballers in England
Expatriate footballers in the Netherlands
Expatriate soccer players in the United States
Slovak expatriate sportspeople in England
Slovak expatriate sportspeople in the Netherlands
Slovak expatriate sportspeople in the United States
Sportspeople from the South Moravian Region

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Certain to provide hours of entertainment and a fun-filled way to learn about the art, this sticker book features the work of Renaissance master Hieronymus Bosch and his delightful world of real and fantastical animals, plants, and fruits.
Bosch's elaborate paintings have always been hugely popular and are well known for their use of fantastic imagery. Bosch's best-known painting remains the Garden of Earthly Delights triptych that can be seen at the Prado Museum in Madrid. His landscapes depicting humans, animals, and fabulous creatures are sure to appeal to children and encourage imaginative creative play with the stickers included in this book. This sticker book introduces children to amazing landscapes, fantastic fruits and flowers, and fabulous animals which Bosch painted more than 500 years ago. It will inspire young readers to create their own maginative works of art.


text:
All Games Coming In 2023 From Xbox Developer Direct
On Wednesday, Xbox held an exhibition called Developer Direct where the devs of five games to be released in 2023 were able to talk directly to the audience about their games through a pre-recorded event – think Nintendo Direct but less trailers and more at talk The result was a fairly interesting demonstration where we got to hear from the creators themselves what they felt about the games they were working on.
Of course, while hearing from the devs was a nice part of the show, what everyone was really interested in watching was to find out what Xbox had planned for everyone in 2023. While the games weren't all but one on the list actually. surprise we can still say that the event left us expecting a big year for Xbox in 2023. Especially because we know that they have even more titles on the way that have not been shown yet.
Minecraft Legends – April 18
The event was the result of Minecraft legendsan RTS Minecraft game that sounds weird until you start listening to them talk about it, then it becomes clear that no franchise needed an RTS more than Minecraft. Think about it. What's the point of RTS games? Collect resources, build bases, and destroy opposing forces by getting better at collecting resources and building bases. The only non-Minecraft what was in there was the Player vs Player element of it and basically what it is Minecraft legends putting. It should be out in April and I'm much more excited about this now than I was before the exhibition.
Forza Motorsport – 2023
It was probably the biggest disappointment of the day Game Forza Motorsport. There was nothing wrong with the game itself! It looks great, sounds great, and is likely to be yet another great entry in the Game Forza Motorsport franchise. Disappointingly, it was the only game shown that didn't get an official release date, and it may even be delayed beyond the expected spring release that was originally announced. He is Game Forza Motorsport so we know it's going to be a great game, but it was the odd game out among a series of release dates to be excited about.
Hi-Fi Rush – 25 January (Today)
Well, this was a pleasant surprise! Usually when a brand new game is announced the best you can hope for is a same year release date. Instead, Hi-Fi Rush it was announced and shown to an increasingly excited crowd before we were blindsided by the announcement that it was ready to go and released shortly after the presentation ended. So if you go to the Microsoft Store or GamePass right now the game is available for purchase or download. Now that's how you make an entrance.
Go to Tina Elder Online – June 20
It's hard to believe that this is the same franchise that was quickly ignored by many when they were released and moved on to better games. Give credit to the developers ZeniMax Online Studios, they stayed strong and created an MMO that has had many fans coming back to it over the years. For fans of the series, a major expansion was announced during the presentation and there was a new class and story for fans to jump into. For those of us who have never played before, this may be the catalyst we need to jump into the series this June.
Redfall – 2 May
Redhead, the vampire FPS game from Arkane Studios has been a point of intrigue since it was first announced. He struggled to capture the interest of fans though through most of his followers, and maybe the devs noticed that because the game was delayed side by side Constellation back in May. As it happened, this May will be the time for redemption when the game will hopefully be released. The game's multiplayer features have a lot of potential, and the gameplay we saw today may be what finally gets people excited for a AAA title.
Tagged2023 gaming previewedgehomepagesportxbox
The rescuers are looking for Julian Sands on Mt. Baldy
Tesla reports record revenue; Nevada truck expansion confirms
Canada : dans une course aux séalies, Cole Caufield declares qu'il jouerait
Basketball: Kansas is struggling with the No. 1 seed. 1 in the NCAA Tournament bracket projection
Jamahal Hill is the new UFC Light Heavyweight Champion
Why Gojira & Mastodon's 2023 Co-Headline Tour Should Be On Every Metalhead's Radar
New test could detect Alzheimer's disease 3.5 years before clinical diagnosis — ScienceDaily
DINKs, Double Income Without Kids, TikTok in Country


In a very little amount of time. That test was so easy, I was done in no time. The repair is a cinch. I should be finished in no time at all.
very quickly. (Compare this with in less than no time.) I'll be there in no time. It won't take long. I'll be finished in no time at all.
so soon or so quickly that it is surprising: The kids will be leaving home in no time. ♢ She started learning Chinese last year and in less than no time she could hold a conversation in it. ♢ The meal was ready in next to no time.


Edwin Antequera is not a good name for a champeta urbana star. This genre needs cred – and for that, you need a good stage name. Take, for example, one of the best-known champeta stars: Twister El Rey. Twister the King. He's got a name that is making a bold declaration. And as Israel Gómez Monterrosa has declared himself the monarch of champeta, Edwin Antequera has declared himself the democratic leader of the genre, going by Mr Black "El Presidente del Género." I don't think any of these people went through the proper channels to earn their positions. One of ten children, Antequera says he was the only dark-skinned one in the family, which is why they called him Mr Black.
The internet doesn't have a lot of information about Mr Black. No Wikipedia page, no discography, nothing. Which was really unfortunate, because I really want to know when he made this track "Braulio el templao." It has a very old-school champeta sound – very pure and simple and instrumental – with lyrics that are more traditional for the genre as well. It sings of the neighborhood kid who changed from a chicken to a rat (rat being thief) and becoming the person everyone fears now. Based on mathing out this newspaper article, I would think the song came out around the start of his career in the early 2000s.
Warning about the next video: contains at least five very scantily-clad women. It'll make sense as you read about the song.
Regardless how traditional his beginnings, by 2013, Mr Black was full champeta urbana. His song "El Serrucho," which remains a popular party song today, is full of the computer-generated sounds typical of the newer wave. However, it also has an accordion…not typical for champeta, but a move to fuse a bit of vallenato in there.
The song is full of play-on-word double-entendres.
Also just to keep in mind as you continue reading, serrucho literally means a saw, like the tool used to cut wood.
This makes sense following the verse about nailing Chagua's girlfriend ('s bed?).
Also, the video gives the illusion that serrucho is a dance with your arms, but other sources on the internet tell me it's really a humpy grind.
Let's flash back to his early days again.
Once again, a much purer Caribbean sound, and an actual story being told. In these old champetas, there's not even a repeated chorus. That would ruin the flow of the story.
I'll leave you with Mr Black's latest, just uploaded to YouTube 2 days ago. You definitely hear the digitized sound – including his voice – and a lot more repetition. He loves repeating syllables in a break-down these days. The content of this one is just about making a party for the world, getting the whole world up and dancing (more or less).
So what do you think? Old Mr Black or new?


text:
Q: Do an additional "WHERE" evaluation based on an "IF" I have this stored procedure:
SELECT * FROM eventos
WHERE YEAR(eventos.date) = :year
AND MONTH(eventos.date) = :month

And I have this another one:
SELECT * FROM eventos
WHERE YEAR(eventos.date) = :year
AND MONTH(eventos.date) = :month
AND DAY(eventos.date) = :day

Question:
Is there any way to implement this logic?
SELECT * FROM eventos
WHERE YEAR(eventos.date) = :year
AND MONTH(eventos.date) = :month
AND IF(:day != NULL, WHERE DAY(eventos.date) = :day, '')

So instead of 2 stored procedures that do almost the same, I have only this one.

A: You don't need the second WHERE, just put the expression there.
Also, you can't compare with NULL using = or !=. You have to use IS NULL or IS NOT NULL
AND IF(:day IS NOT NULL, DAY(eventos).date = :day, 1)

You can also use a logical expression:
AND (:day IS NULL OR DAY(eventos.date) = :day)

A: You can just use an OR here:
SELECT * FROM eventos
WHERE YEAR(eventos.date) = :year
AND MONTH(eventos.date) = :month
AND (DAY(eventos.date) = :day OR :day IS NULL)

You can also use COALESCE():
SELECT * FROM eventos
WHERE YEAR(eventos.date) = :year
AND MONTH(eventos.date) = :month
AND COALESCE(:day, DAY(eventos.date)) = DAY(eventos.date)

A: Try next:
SELECT *
FROM eventos
WHERE
    YEAR(eventos.date) = :year
    AND MONTH(eventos.date) = :month
    AND (:day IS NULL OR DAY(eventos.date) = :day);

or:
SELECT *
FROM eventos
WHERE
    YEAR(eventos.date) = :year
    AND MONTH(eventos.date) = :month
    AND DAY(eventos.date) = IFNULL(:day, DAY(eventos.date));

A: Yes, you can combine them:
SELECT * FROM eventos
WHERE YEAR(eventos.date) = :year
AND MONTH(eventos.date) = :month
AND (:date IS NULL OR DAY(eventos.date) = :date)

Yours SP has other problem to worry about:
Since you are using functions (YEAR, MONTH or DAY)  on the date column, mysql will not be able to do index seek on the column if you have an index;

A: Basically, you can do this with a OR condition:
SELECT * FROM eventos
WHERE
    YEAR(eventos.date) = :year
    AND MONTH(eventos.date) = :month
    AND (:day is NULL OR DAY(eventos.date) = :day)

But I would futhermore suggest that you write this query differently. Splitting the date into parts with date functions like you do is inefficient, because it prevents the query to benefit an index on the date column. Instead, you want to do explicit date comparison with the half-open strategy.
Ideally, you should generate proper date parameters in your application (in format yyyy-mm-dd) and pass them to the query as follows:
WHERE eventos.date >= :start_date and eventos.date < :end_date

If that's not possible, then you can generate date boundaries on the fly using string concatenation and date arithemtics:
WHERE
    eventos.date >= concat_ws('-', :year, :month, coalesce(:day, 1))
    and eventos.date < case
        when :day is null then concat_ws('-', :year, :month, 1) + interval 1 month
        else concat_ws('-', :year, :month, :day) + interval 1 day
    end

A: Based on all the answers
Tried with "IS NULL", but it seems that, even when I don't pass the day parameter, it's an empty string value (''), nut a NULL value.
So, this:
AND (day = '' OR DAY(eventos.date) = day);

Worked.
I didn't see the MySQL logic at the start. Thank you all.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
God Root Announce New Album, "Salt And Rot"
Philadelphia avant-garde sludge shamans GOD ROOT announce their second offering, Salt And Rot, due July 11th. Salt And Rot will be released digitally with Horror Pain Gore Death Productions and limited, hand screen-printed compact discs will be available through the band.
"We hope this record helps people escape", bassist/vocalist Ross Bradley explains about the creation of Salt And Rot. "That's what we wrote it for and we paid a lot of attention to how it moves from track to track and what kind of journey it takes a listener on. Thematically the record deals with the frailty of human life and of ego and the dogmas we've tried to build for ourselves. It's about facing one's mortality and letting go of what you can't control, destroying those oppressive forces trying to control and manipulate you and becoming self-reliant outside of these systems".
Recorded throughout 2017 with Neil Cote and Richard Bukowski at Groundwork Sound in Somerville, NJ, GOD ROOT spared no expense to create their own brand of primitive and tribalistic sludge, and doomed cinematic soundscapes found on Salt and Rot. GOD ROOT also welcomed friends and family into the studio to participate in their "Let Go" project. "We put a call out to our friends and family to contribute something they wanted to "Let go" of. We recorded their voices/read their writings. Some of these were personal stories and some were phrases or names that meant something to them. We processed them into our track "From Hounds to Silent Skies" in a way that maintains their respective privacy. It was really harrowing and humbling to have these people we love be as vulnerable and open and honest as they were" Bradley explains.
GOD ROOT will perform along side WEEDEATER, BLACK WIZARD, SERIAL HAWK on June 12th in Philadelphia, PA for their record release show where they will have limited, hand-numbered and screenprinted versions of Salt And Rot.
GOD ROOT will team up with New Jersey power sludge band SUNROT to embark on a tour in support of Salt And Rot, which begins on August 3rd in Brooklyn, NY. The tour will take them extensively throughout the east coast and midwest and then return to them Philadelphia, PA on August 19th.
Pre-order for Salt And Rot is available now.
1. Reclamation
2. From Hounds to Silent Skies
3. The Peak is Our Threshold
4. Conscious Disease
Recording and mixing: Neil Cote and Richard Bukowski at Groundwork Sound in Somerville, NJ
Mastering: Mike Cervantes at The Foxboro
Artwork: Illustration and layouts by Fred Grabosky at FTG Illustrations, additional art provided by Mary-Rose Runk
Promotional Video by: God Root
Physical Pre-order: https://godroot.bandcamp.com
Digital Pre-order: https://hpgd.bandcamp.com/album/salt-and-rot
YouTube: https://youtu.be/GSqZehSzzw0
GOD ROOT
Fred Grabosky- Drums/Vocals
Ross Bradley- Bass/Vocals
Joe Hughes- Guitar/Vocals
Keith Riecke- Guitar
Jordan Stiff- Guitar/Electronics
Bandcamp: https://godroot.bandcamp.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/godrootband
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/godrootband
6/12 Philadelphia, PA Record Release
with WEEDEATER, BLACK WIZARD, SERIAL HAWK
Salt And Rot Tour
8/03 Brooklyn, NY
8/04 Providence, RI
8/05 Kingston, NY
8/06 Syracuse, NY
8/07 Ithaca, NY
8/08 Rochester, NY
8/09 Buffalo, NY
8/10 Cleveland, OH
8/11 Detroit, MI
8/12 Kalamazoo, MI
8/13 Milwaukee, WI
8/14 Chicago, IL
8/15 Indianapolis, IN
8/16 Lexington, KY
8/17 Pittsburgh, PA
8/18 Washington, DC
8/19 Philadelphia, PA
All dates with SUNROT
For more information contact Shannon at Perfect World Productions
inaperfectworldproductions@gmail.com


Can they really refuse your care?
Three words you'll find liberally salted throughout EMS run reports and medical charts, used to describe a patient who is lucid and aware of his surroundings, and capable of making informed decisions about his care. Three words so ubiquitous that they've become jargon; accepted nomenclature used without a second thought in thousands of reports every day.
They're also three words that can get you successfully sued, particularly when your patient has refused care.
Keep in mind that when you're documenting a refusal, you're writing a report not for other medical professionals familiar with your jargon, but for twelve people who didn't know how to avoid jury duty. Any semi-competent attorney can shred a statement like "awake, alert and oriented," and in so doing, make you look like an ignorant or lazy provider in the process.
What most EMTs fail to realize is that the shorthand "AAOx4" is a conclusion. A lawyer would phrase it as a conclusion based upon facts not in evidence, and if you didn't include those facts in your documentation, the jury doesn't get to hear them.
A better, more legally defensible, approach would be to document the questions and answers used to determine present mental capacity, and let the jury draw its own conclusion. If they need help drawing that conclusion, that's your attorney's job, and his argument can be made from those statements documented right there in your report.
There are numerous scientifically validated tests out there to determine present mental capacity. The most common, the Folstein mini-mental exam, is a 30-point questionnaire designed to test for cognitive impairment. The exam itself and scoring system is copyrighted, but its elements can be easily adapted for EMS use.
Determination of present mental capacity hinges on three elements: memory, orientation and cognitive ability. A few simple mental exercises, and documentation of the patient's answers, can do far more to demonstrate the patient's capacity to refuse care than simply concluding AAOx4.
Begin by asking the patient to memorize a short sequence of words or phrases — "Horse, apple, car, television," — and telling them they will be asked to recall those phrases later in the exam.
When asked if she knew where she was, patient correctly stated that she was in her living room at 1234 Anywhere Lane. When asked for her demographic information, patient was able to correctly state her name, birth date and social security number without hesitation. When asked for the time, patient stated that she did not know, but looked at her watch for reference, and stated the correct time. When asked if she remembered what had happened, patient states she does not remember the event itself, but states that her family told her she had fainted. When asked to identify the family member who told her this, patient correctly pointed to her granddaughter, and said, "Mary." On further questioning, patient was able to identify and name her children and grandchildren, both those present in the room and those not.
When asked if patient could calculate the value of three quarters, two dimes, two nickels and six pennies, patient correctly stated, "One dollar and eleven cents."
When asked to count backwards from 100 by sevens, patient was able to reach 51 without error, and was told by EMTs that was sufficient.
When asked to recall a series of words provided five minutes earlier — "horse, apple, car, television" — patient was able to correctly recall the words, but repeated them out of sequence.
The results of these simple tests may yield proof of sufficient present mental capacity. A perfect score isn't essential, but keep in mind that the more correct answers you can document, the more weight your refusal will carry.
Remember that documenting present mental capacity is only half the job. You still have to document that the patient was aware of the potential consequences of the refusal, and how you made him aware of those consequences. If this seems like a great deal of extra work for a simple refusal of care, remember that refusals rank second only to ambulance accidents in frequency of litigation against EMS providers.
It's fairly easy to justify taking a sick person to the hospital. Justifying why you left them at home requires a lot more effort.


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Carolinas' Rip Current Danger Evident
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Leanna Lamatrice and her family typically didn't pay much attention to the warnings about rip currents off North Carolina's Outer Banks.
It was a mindset that began in childhood, when her family would spend two weeks every summer in Hatteras village, and carried into adulthood. "And then it happened," said Lamatrice.
In the summer of 2016, a rip current pulled her husband and son further from shore. Fortunately, a bystander threw them a boogie board, and the two got to shore safely. But her then 10-year-old son was terrified of the water after that.
When the family of four from Powell, Ohio, returned in 2017, they took rip current training offered by the Hatteras Island Rescue Squad each Monday morning beginning with the traditional start and end of the summer vacation season, Memorial Day through Labor Day. The training, combined with the rip current forecast that the rescue squad posts daily on its Facebook page, worked for her son.
When the rip current threat was moderate, "he was much more willing to go in the water," Lamatrice said.
The classes are one of several ways that beachgoers can learn about rip currents , which are narrow channels of water that can move as fast as 8 feet a second and occur at any beach with breaking waves, including the Great Lakes. They're deceptive because they appear as a break in the waves, making them seem like a safe place to play.
At least 25 people were rescued from rip currents off the Carolinas' coast in one day in June; at least two deaths have been attributed to rip currents in North Carolina this month. The most recent death was of a Virginia man who bystanders said was trying to save his daughters from a rip current.
The first rule for swimmers caught in a rip current: stay calm. Experts recommend that people caught in a rip current should swim parallel to the shore until they're out of its pull. The U.S. Lifesaving Association estimates rip currents account for more than 80 percent of rescues performed by surf beach lifeguards.
"No matter what happens, the victim has the best chance of recovering if they can avoid overexertion, and panic often drives that," said Spencer Rogers, a specialist in coastal processes for North Carolina Sea Grant .
To help someone caught in a rip current, experts recommend throwing a flotation device such as a boogie board or an empty cooler to the victim before jumping in the water. If you must jump in, take the flotation device with you.
The rescue squad began the training last year and offers it again in 2018. The classes are held in Buxton on Monday mornings in hopes of catching as many tourists as possible at the start of their vacation weeks since they typically check in on weekends, said Jack Scarborough, the island's rescue squad chief.
Hatteras Island is part of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore , where the National Park Service places rip current warning signs at parking and beach walkover areas.
The National Weather Service in Wilmington has kept track of deaths by natural disasters in North Carolina and South Carolina for 17 years. The figures collected by Steve Pfaff, warning coordination meteorologist, show that between 2000 and 2017, rip currents have killed more people in the two states (123) than flooding (52), lightning (44) or tornadoes (34).
Rescuers said they understand the pull to try to swim out and rescue someone. But a safer response is to throw a flotation device such as a boogie board or an empty cooler to the person caught in the rip current before jumping in the water. Or take a flotation device with you if you must rescue someone.
"Hold onto it and float," Rogers said. "Sooner or later, you can work your way out of it."


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"Caught Red Handed": The Latest On Efforts To Privatize The VA
A few weeks ago, the Washington Monthly published a story by investigative reporter Alicia Mundy that challenged the whole narrative about 2014 VA "scandal," the one in which dozens of veterans were said to have died as a result of lengthy wait times to see VA doctors. In fact, Mundy shows, the department's inspector general, after an exhaustive review of patient records, could not say with any confidence that even one veteran had suffered that fate. There were certainly problems at some VA facilities; the wait list numbers were definitely being gamed by VA personnel who, like Charlie Chaplin's factory worker, struggled to keep up with unmeetable performance metrics. The "death wait" allegations, however, turn out to be bogus–cooked up by a Koch brothers-funded group, Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), working with Hill Republicans, in order to panic Washington lawmakers into passing legislation in 2014 to outsource VA care to private sector providers.
In reaction to our story, the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs Jeff Miller (R-Tea Party) wrote an intemperate letter attacking the story's key findings as "completely false," allegations we rather easily countered. Then Miller appeared before the commission his legislation mandated and made a damned fool of himself. Then a faction of the conservatives on the commission were outed for writing up a secret draft of the commission's recommendations–in which they call for full privatization of the VA—in possible violation of the Sunshine and Federal Advisory Committee Acts.
The latest news on this is that leaders of eight prominent veterans' groups, including the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, sent a letter to the commission chair slamming the secret draft and expressing their united opposition to privatizing the VA. This is an important development. As Mundy explains in her piece, a big reason the privatization push has gotten as far as it has is that the traditional veterans groups allowed themselves to be sidelined politically by CVA. Now, finally, those groups are fighting back. And while they don't have seats on the commission, they do have 5 million members.
So far, this story has gotten virtually no mainstream press coverage–in part, no doubt, because it contradicts the "scandal at the VA" narrative that the press itself originally reported. But I don't think this hesitancy will last long–the story's way too juicy. Independent research mandated by that 2014 legislation not only undermines claims about dozens of veterans dying because of wait times, but also shows that the VA provides the same or better quality care than does the private sector. Yet here you have commission members, many of whom represent corporate medical centers that stand to gain billions of dollars in revenue from outsourcing VA care, caught red handed crafting secret recommendations to outsource VA care at the expense of quality care for veterans.
If I had to bet on who's going to win this policy war, I wouldn't, at this point, put my money on the outsourcers.
By: Paul Glastris, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 7, 2016
April 8, 2016 Posted by raemd95 | Republicans, Veterans, Veterans Administration | American Legion, Concerned Veterans of America, Conservatives, Death Wait, Jeff Miller, media, Privatization of VA Health Care, Sunshine and Federal Advisory Committee Act, VA Scandal, Veterans Of Foreign Wars | 1 Comment
"The Day Of Reckoning Is Nigh": The Democratic Race Has Now Devolved Into Nastiness
The Democratic nominee for president will be running against a political novice who is widely despised, or a senator so unpopular that only two of his colleagues support him, or a governor far too moderate for his party's hard-line base, or someone else chosen at a bitterly contested convention. For Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, what could possibly go wrong?
Plenty. Begin with the fact that the Clinton-Sanders race has devolved into gratuitous and self-destructive nastiness.
The rhetorical hissing and spitting escalated Wednesday when Sanders charged that Clinton — a former senator, secretary of state and first lady — is not "qualified" to be president. It was a ridiculous thing to say. One thing it's impossible to claim about Clinton is that she lacks an adequate résumé.
When challenged on the statement, Sanders resorted to the she-hit-me-first defense: "She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am, quote-unquote, not qualified to be president." The problem is that Clinton never said such a thing. In fact, when pressed repeatedly by "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough on the question, Clinton touted herself as the better choice but refused to say that Sanders is unqualified. (I should note that I often appear on Scarborough's show.)
Clinton did, in that interview, echo her standard critique of Sanders, which is that his proposals are pie in the sky. She drew attention to his recent meeting with the editorial board of the New York Daily News in which he was asked for details of his plan to break up the big banks. His less-than-complete answers, Clinton said, show that "what he has been saying about the core issue in his whole campaign doesn't seem to be rooted in an understanding of either the law or the practical ways you get something done."
Ouch. Sanders wasn't that bad at the Daily News. And frankly, his questioners seemed more confused about some aspects of financial regulation than Sanders did.
On Thursday, Sanders was still hopping mad. At an appearance in Philadelphia, he told reporters that "if Secretary Clinton thinks that I just come from the small state of Vermont, that we're not used to this, well, we'll get used to it fast. I'm not going to get beaten up. I'm not going to get lied about. We will fight back."
Clinton clearly wanted to be seen as taking the high road. "I don't know why he's saying that, but I will take Bernie Sanders over Ted Cruz or Donald Trump any time," she said.
Does that ring a bell? Does anyone else recall those early debates in which both candidates pledged to forswear personal attacks and stick to the issues? We're now at the point that it takes days of bitter squabbling before the campaigns can even agree on a time and place for their next debate. It will be in Brooklyn — Sanders's birthplace and the site of Clinton's campaign headquarters — on April 14. One assumes the gloves will be off.
It is no mystery why this once-polite contest has become so testy: What may be the day of reckoning is nigh.
Clinton's lead in delegates is now big enough that Sanders practically has to run the table in the remaining states. He needs decisive wins, starting with the April 19 primary in New York. Conversely, Clinton can effectively put the nomination out of Sanders's reach with a big victory in the state that elected her to the U.S. Senate.
The Clinton campaign's view is that Sanders is already so far behind that he'll never catch up; they should know, because that's the position Clinton was in vs. Barack Obama in 2008. It is time, the Clintonistas believe, for Sanders to think about dropping out in the interest of party unity.
I have argued that Sanders has every right to stay in and that his many supporters in states yet to vote should have the chance to express their preference. But if it's not time for Sanders to pull out, it's also not time for him to scorch the earth in a way that damages Clinton's prospects in November should she win the nomination.
Democrats begin general election campaigns with a big structural Electoral College advantage. But they forfeit this edge if progressive voters elect to stay home. The party cannot afford to have Sanders supporters — if their candidate loses — licking their wounds and nursing their grievances.
It ought to be hard for the eventual Democratic nominee to lose. More Clinton-Sanders nastiness just might do the trick.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 7, 2016
April 8, 2016 Posted by raemd95 | Bernie Sanders, Democratic Presidential Primaries, Hillary Clinton | Joe Scarborough, New York Daily News, Party Unity, Presidential Qualifications, Progressives, Republicans, Sanders Supporters | 1 Comment
"What Are You Waiting For, Democrats?": Voter ID Laws Are Having Their Intended Effect. It's Time To Do Something
The biggest news out of the Wisconsin primary isn't about the horse race, which is largely unchanged. It's about the election itself—about how the voting happened. As soon as polls opened in urban centers like Madison and Milwaukee, there were reports of long, almost intolerable waits. Students at universities around the state faced hourslong lines to cast a ballot. Others waited just as long for a chance to change their registration.
The proximate cause of these long lines in urban, student-heavy areas is the state's new voter identification law backed by the Republican legislature and Gov. Scott Walker. It implements strict new requirements for valid identification that excludes most student IDs (in response, some Wisconsin schools have begun issuing separate identification cards for students to vote) and requires voters without official identification to go through a cumbersome process even if they've voted in the past. Writing for the Nation, Ari Berman describes elderly, longtime voters who were blocked from the polls for want of the right papers. "Others blocked from the polls include a man born in a concentration camp in Germany who lost his birth certificate in a fire; a woman who lost use of her hands but could not use her daughter as power of attorney at the DMV; and a 90-year-old veteran of Iwo Jima who could not vote with his veterans ID."
But this was more than predictable—it was the point. "I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate the Democrats have ever put up," said one Wisconsin Republican congressman, Rep. Glenn Grothman. "And now we have photo ID and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well."
If the urgency of the issue wasn't obvious, Grothman made it plain. Voter ID laws in Wisconsin and beyond are a direct attack on democracy, an attempt to rig the game by blocking whole groups of Americans from the polls. In what appears to be a strong cycle for their party, Democrats should take what happened in Wisconsin as a siren for action. Restoring democracy and protecting it from these attacks should be at the center of the party's agenda.
The burden of voter ID laws falls hardest on the marginal members of society, who are predominately nonwhite, elderly, or both. In Wisconsin, 9 percent of registered voters (300,000 people) lack government-issued identification and fall disproportionately under those groups. And while Wisconsin provides voter ID at no cost through its Department of Motor Vehicles, the dirty secret is that this is a difficult and cumbersome process given the extremely limited hours for DMV offices. (Just 31 of Wisconsin's 92 DMVs hold normal business hours and most are open just twice a week.) And worse, as Berman notes, Republican legislators in the state made no provision for voter education. They also shut down the state board that monitors elections.
Wisconsin isn't the only place where voting has been hampered by voter identification laws. In Arizona, a similarly strict law—compounded by a Republican-led drive to close voting precincts in heavily populated areas—brought long waits for people who wanted to cast a ballot. As many as 20,000 Americans weren't able to vote, many of them Latino.
Three years ago, the Supreme Court struck down the "preclearance" provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of discrimination to get the federal government's permission before making any changes in how they run elections. Since then, Republican legislatures like those in Wisconsin and Arizona have adopted draconian identification laws that stand as meaningful barriers to the right to vote. They act as de facto poll taxes, forcing voters to spend time and money in order to exercise their constitutional rights. Thirty-three states will require voters to show identification at the polls this November, and the likely outcome will be long lines and complications for countless voters.
Beyond the sort of educational measures that Wisconsin didn't bother with, it's too late to do anything this year about the spread of voter ID and other barriers. But this should be a wake-up call for Democrats. Unless there's pushback, these restrictions will become part of the firmament of our elections, effectively disenfranchising those on the margins of American life. For Democrats now and in the future, reversing those laws—and enhancing voter access—has to be a priority. On the national level, both Clinton and Bernie Sanders should tout their plans to restore the Voting Rights Act and build more voter protections. Below that, prospective Democratic governors and state lawmakers should place voter access at the top of their agendas, a first item for incoming administrations. Everything, from automatic registration and mail-in balloting to ending felon disenfranchisement, should be on the table.
This isn't just the right thing to do; it's the smart thing to do. If Democrats believe that they benefit from more voters and larger electorates, then they would do well to mimic the Republican approach, but in reverse: Use their power to tilt the playing field toward more access, more participation, and more democracy.
By: Jamelle Bouie, Slate, April 6, 2016
April 8, 2016 Posted by raemd95 | Democracy, Discrimination, Voter ID | Arizona, Democrats, Glenn Grothman, Non White Voters, Republicans, Scott Walker, SCOTUS, Voting Rights Act, Wisconsin | 3 Comments
"Gun Debate Reclaims Center Stage In Democratic Race": Granting Gun Manufacturers Immunity From Lawsuits
The bulk of the attention surrounding Bernie Sanders' interview with the New York Daily News this week focused on the senator struggling at times with policy details. In response to a variety of questions, the Vermont independent gave responses such as, "It's something I have not studied"; "I don't know the answer to that"; and "I haven't thought about it a whole lot."
But another area of contention surrounds a subject Sanders understands perfectly well.
Towards the end of the interview, the Daily News editors noted, "There's a case currently waiting to be ruled on in Connecticut. The victims of the Sandy Hook massacre are looking to have the right to sue for damages the manufacturers of the weapons. Do you think that that is something that should be expanded?" Sanders, seeking clarification, said, "Do I think the victims of a crime with a gun should be able to sue the manufacturer, is that your question?"
Told that it was the question, he replied, "No, I don't."
As Politico reported, this isn't sitting well with some of the lawsuit's Democratic supporters.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy and Gov. Dannel Malloy attacked Bernie Sanders on Tuesday for stating that shooting victims should not be able to sue gun manufacturers, an issue that has dogged the Vermont senator throughout his presidential run.
"I don't know why our party would nominate someone that's squishy on the issue of guns, this is a very personal issue for those of us that represent Sandy Hook," Murphy, who is a supporter of Hillary Clinton, said in an interview with POLITICO. "The idea that Sandy Hook families should be completely barred from court is really backwards and unfair."
Keep in mind that Connecticut's Democratic presidential primary is April 26, just a week after New York's. The state's governor and both of its U.S. senators have already formally endorsed Clinton.
It's important to note that, in Monday's interview, Sanders elaborated on his perspective on this issue. After expressing his opposition to lawsuits targeting gun manufacturers, the senator circled back to add some specificity to his position: "In the same sense that if you're a gun dealer and you sell me a gun and I go out and I kill him [gestures to someone in room]…. Do I think that that gun dealer should be sued for selling me a legal product that he misused? [Shakes head no.] But I do believe that gun manufacturers and gun dealers should be able to be sued when they should know that guns are going into the hands of wrong people. So if somebody walks in and says, 'I'd like 10,000 rounds of ammunition,' you know, well, you might be suspicious about that. So I think there are grounds for those suits, but not if you sell me a legal product."
In other words, the senator's position has some nuance, even if it's one of the few issues in which Sanders faces criticism from the left.
Complicating matters further, Paul Waldman explained yesterday that Sanders' previous approach to the issue points to some relevant shifts.
It gets complicated because of Sanders' past opposition to gun laws. He opposed the Brady Law, and supported the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), a 2005 law that granted gun manufacturers and sellers sweeping immunity from all kinds of lawsuits (Clinton voted against it). He has justified that vote by saying that he wouldn't want to see "mom and pop" gun stores sued when a gun they sell gets used in a crime, but the truth is that the bill went way beyond that. […]
And here's what's really strange: Sanders continues to defend his vote for the PLCAA, even though he recently signed on as a co-sponsor to a bill that would repeal it.
The result is a picture that's a little murky. As the Democratic race continues, it's an issue that appears ripe for a real, substantive debate.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 7, 2016
April 8, 2016 Posted by raemd95 | Bernie Sanders, Gun Manufacturers, Mass Shootings, Sandy Hook | Brady Bill, Chris Murphy, Daniel Malloy, Democrats, Gun Dealers, Hillary Clinton, Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act | Leave a comment
"Scarier Than His Friend Ted Cruz": Why Right-Wingers Want Sen. Mike Lee On SCOTUS
The Republican battle to make Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland go away, and the efforts to pin down GOP presidential candidates on pre-vetted lists of potential Supremes, have all led to increased speculation about the next justice. At present, there's a major boom among conservatives for Senator Mike Lee of Utah.
Today the Washington Post's James Hohmann offers a rundown on all the reasons Lee is enjoying this attention. For one thing, the Utah senator has long been considered Ted Cruz's best friend in the upper chamber, so if Cruz is elected, it's a bit of a no-brainer if Lee wants a robe. For another, Lee would probably have an easier time getting confirmed by his colleagues in the clubby Senate than some law professor or circuit-court judge, and might even avoid a Democratic filibuster (assuming Republicans haven't already killed the SCOTUS filibuster via the "nuclear option").
But one of the two most important reasons for the Lee boom is buried pretty far down in the story:
Lee is just 44. That means he could squeeze four or more decades out of a lifetime appointment.
Yep. If nominated next year for the Scalia seat, Lee would be the youngest nominee since Clarence Thomas, who has now been on the Court for nearly a quarter of a century, with many years of extremism probably still ahead of him. Before Thomas, you have to go all the way back to Bill Richardson's favorite justice, Whizzer White, in 1962, to find a nominee as young as Lee would be. As you may have noticed, life expectancy has been going up for Americans in recent decades. For conservatives seeking a permanent grip on the Court and on constitutional law, someone Lee's age is money.
But the second reason Lee would be significant is only hinted at by Hohmann in the praise lavished on the solon by the Heritage Foundation and longtime right-wing legal thinker Senator Jeff Sessions (the two most likely sources for SCOTUS advice for Donald Trump, as it happens). Lee's not just any old "constitutional conservative"; he's a leading exponent of what is called the Lochner school of constitutional theory, named after the early-twentieth-century decision that was the basis for SCOTUS invalidation of New Deal legislation until the threat of court-packing and a strategic flip-flop resolved what had become a major constitutional crisis.
Lee has, on occasion, suggested that child labor laws, Social Security, and Medicare are unconstitutional, because they breach the eternal limits on federal power sketched out by the Founders. Like most Lochnerians, he views the constitution and the courts as designed to keep democratic majorities from stepping on the God-given personal and property rights of individuals and corporations alike. So it's no surprise he's been a bitter critic of the deferential view towards Congress expressed by Chief Justice Roberts in the decision that saved Obamacare.
In effect, Mike Lee could become a more influential successor to Clarence Thomas — after overlapping with Thomas on the Court for a decade or two. If Democratic senators have a problem with that possibility, they might want to begin making noises about it so that at least the supposition that Lee is pretty easily confirmable may be called into question.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, April 7, 2016
April 8, 2016 Posted by raemd95 | Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, U. S. Supreme Court Nominees | Clarence Thomas, GOP Presidential Candidates, Jeff Sessions, Lochner Constitutional Theory, Merrick Garland, New Deal, Republicans | 1 Comment


< Should You Enable Persistent Shopping Carts?
Quality content is the single most important factor in your search rankings, but a host of other aspects of web design, development, and performance play into how you appear in the SERPS. Speed is one of them, and it is critical because it so heavily impacts the user experience. One technique you can use is minifying HTML. This allows you to speed up your load times, reduce page size, and reduce network delays.
What does it mean to "minify" HTML? It basically removes whitespace, comments, and other non-essential elements. At the same time, it does not interfere with the content structure. The result is cleaner, speedier sites. The BBC, for instance, has a hefty site of 77,054 bytes. When it is minified, though, it drops 55,324 bytes, a 28.2 percent reduction. For a site that is so heavy on content and media, this is a tremendous difference.
These minifiers offer a quick and easy solution to minifying your HTML code. When you can compress and cut out the excess weight, you can offer a lean, mean site for Google to index and for visitors to enjoy.
← Should You Enable Persistent Shopping Carts?


Preheat a large skillet or pot to medium-high.
Pour frozen spinach with a small amount of boiling water (about 1 tbsp per nugget).
Heat while stirring regularly and break nuggets apart with a utensil. Cover and let simmer for 3 - 4 minutes.
Pour spinash in a microwaveable dish with a small amount of water (about 2 tbsp) and cook on high power.


Kimchi Jjigae is often found boiling on the stove in a Korean household, and it's super easy to cook! The kimchi adds a powerful kick to the broth and keeps us feeling warm from the inside out, making it top of our list for winter.
Cut and slice the kimchi and meat into small bite sized pieces. The kimchi juice will be used later on.
In an earthenware pot, cook the meat and the kimchi together over medium high heat, this is so that the kimchi can soften up and the meat pre cooks for about 10 mins.
Chop the small onion, spring onion and sliced the tofu.
Pour in the anchovy broth and let it boil for about 5 minutes.
Add 2 cups of water and the kimchi juice saved earlier.
Add in the previously chopped onion, spring and stir with a wooden spoon before placing sliced tofu neatly on top.
Add the sesame oil, salt, sugar and gochujang and mix. Turn the heat down to medium and cook for about 15 mins.


CSRM have just released a new discussion paper on the social aspects of mine closure through their Social Aspects of Mine Closure Consortium.
The Gemstones and Sustainable Development Knowledge Hub – a project launched in 2017 by the University of Delaware, The University of Queensland and the University of Lausanne research mentioned in Vogue Australia.
A giant library filled with different types of rocks from north-west Queensland has been set up in Mount Isa, in an attempt to revolutionise mining exploration.
The University of Queensland with UQ Business School, Executive Education and the Sustainable Minerals Institute are partnering for the 2018 Mining Leaders Program. Applications are still open.
Can we measure a contribution of mining to the SDGs?
Kathryn Sturman addressed a Roundtable Discussion on Extractives and the SDGs: Partnerships to progress the goals hosted by Cardno, the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network in Melbourne on 10 April 2018.
Dr Grant Ballantyne is the recipient of the 2017 Minerals Engineering International Young Person's Award which was presented at the MEI Comminution '18 Conference in Cape Town. This award is bestowed upon an outstanding candidate under the age of 35.
The research is expected to deliver innovative and feasible technology and methodology to rehabilitate tailings - the most costly and challenging domains at mine sites and refineries, in order to significantly improve economic and ecological sustainability of mining and minerals industries in Australia and overseas.
SMI-CMLR's Antony van der Ent and colleagues discuss the different techniques, based on X-rays, used for probing the internal distribution and chemical form of different elements in plants.